| Title Finding Home Where do we see ourselves in 5 years? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Author Rachael Weight Rider American River College, Geography 350: Data Acquisition in GIS; Fall 2006 Contact Information: rachael.rider@gmail.com | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Abstract Can you find a place to call home based on purely digital sources? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Introduction It is a good idea to make the best of every situation and, because it seems that my husband and I are destined to live in Davis for much longer than originally anticipated, the best thing to do is to make it as pleasant an experience as possible. I intend to facilitate this by identifying the ideal place for us to live given our particular limitations and desires. However, in order to make this project genuinely useful to us, I will also research whether or not we can find a similarly agreeable living situation in an alternate city to which we might move if the benefit of moving outweighs the cost (financial and otherwise). Potential alternate cities are Seattle (WA), Indianapolis (IN), Lexington (KY), Savannah (GA), San Diego (CA), and Portland (OR). This research will allow us to more intelligently (and seriously) consider moving or more easily accept our life in Davis for the long haul. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Background My husband and I have lived in Davis since we both arrived as undergraduate transfers in the summer of 2000. We both, understandably, assumed that after we graduated it would only be a matter of time before we left Davis to start our "grown-up" lives. Then we met each other and he started graduate school. Then I graduated but he was still in school.Then he graduated but I started school again at the only junior college in the state that offers a GIS degree... HERE. Then we got engaged and couldn't think about moving until after the wedding. Before I could graduate I was offered an ideal internship at UCDavis. To encapsulate, the gods seemed to be conspiring (in the nicest possible ways) to keep us from moving away from Davis. Like some sort of tractor beam, the town of Davis and the Sacramento area keep us from leaving time and time again. But, as my graduation date in May draws near, freedom seems to be on the horizon. This freedom, though, means that we will have to stop whining about Davis and actually decide if we really want to leave or if, deep down, we could be happy staying and starting a family in Davis. This research is an attempt to put that decision into the correct perspective. How much will it cost to live within the radius that we want to live? How available is housing within this radius? How much green space is there close by within which our dog can freak out? Is there a residence that would be close enough to everything we need that would eliminate the current need to buy a second car? And beyond the confines of Davis, is there another city where we could have all the things that we need? His family lives in Kentucky and my family lives in Southern California; living within a distance of either family is a consideration but if the perfect situation was presented to us we'd have a hard decision to make; does the value of raising children around their family outweigh the downside of living in a place like Los Angeles? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Or at least that was the scope of the project when I originally thought of it. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| It has since evolved into simply finding whatGIS data is available online for several cities across the country. The original project in its entireity would have taken a team of people to complete and, since I don't have those kind of resources, I had to scale the project back considerably. When I've started to get frustrated over my lack of progress, I've had to remind myself that finding out what kind of data is readily available to the lay house hunter is a good first step towards the analysis that I originally proposed; the data I collect says something about its city but a lack of data also says something about the city and must be considered in addition to data and analysis. A lack of data is a normal result in scientific experiments. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Methods Originally my plan was to create a list of 6 cities that have been discussed at length by myself and my husband and collect enough data to put the topic to rest once and for all. So I started out looking for online data for each city and, if it was available, downloading it, and if it wasn't available, contacting the person to whom the various government websites pointed me to. I checked the downloaded data for corruption and started maps in ArcMap for each city. I wanted to include in each map a sample from each separate peice of information that I found about the city. Very quickly they became very messy and didn't really seem to say a lot about what it would be like to live there. And then I received my first e-mail response to my data requests. A very nice man from Seattle Public Utilities / IT Division sent me some very polite e-mails explaining that I could have all the data I wanted for about $140. I decided that my personal limits were purely monetary - I am completely unwilling to buy data for this project. My options at that point seemed to be to either make some shapefiles myself (which would be either useless or take me the rest of the year) or use the limited information that I had already collected which provided me with Tiger data and the contours of the Washington coastline but didn't provide me with a lot of relevant information. So, I reconsidered my list of cities, eliminating Seattle, and also my master plan to find a place to live. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Results This table holds the most usefull data I was able to find. Bask in the information waves. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Figures and Maps | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Analysis The down side Too ambitious! Too easily distracted! My new ulcer! The Up side I learned a lot about the cities I learned about my weaknesses I have a new hobby | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Conclusions Well, despite all of my dilligence compiling shapefiles, creating hillshades and generally wasting time in ArcMap, the most usefull information came from the US Census bureau, city government, and real estate agents in about 5 seconds; it's not very usefull to have realistic topography of a place when what you want to know is "Will I be able to find a job?" and "Do they have a decent Hippie grocer in town?"Every city seems to have its downsides and, despite a lack of online activism in the midwest, everyone (basically) likes dogs so it won't really be a problem wherever we move. Also, I am a un-baptised liberal from California with lots of tattoos and gay, bi-racial, and ultra-feminist relatives - if I move away from the west coast, it is likely that I'll have other problems that'll make bike riding the least of my problems. I was not able to find a calculator that can magically estimate the value of "Things to Do" vs. the cost of living. As soon as I do, I'll let everyone who lives in San Francisco know where it is. Besides, there are things to do everywhere and the most interesting are the things that came from extreme boredom so there are arguments for and against outside entertainment stimulation. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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References Kentucky Division of Geographic Information. Last Updated: 07/24/2006. Commonwealth of Kentucky. Fall 2006 . SANDAG. San Diego Association of Governments. Fall 2006. Oregon Geospatial Clearinghouse. Oregon State Government. Fall 2006. American Fact Finder. Editor. Last updated: 05/24/2006. U.S. Census Bureau. Fall 2006. CAAGIS. Purdue University. Fall 2006. USDA:NRCS:Geospatial Data Gateway. Version 3.0. U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. Fall 2006. DNR GIS Data. Washington State Department of Natural Resources. Fall 2006. Indiana Spatial Data Services. 2006. Indiana University. Fall 2006. KGS GIS Data. Last Updated: 01/13/2005. University of Kentucky. Fall 2006 . Georgia GIS Data Clearinghouse. Georgia State Government. Fall 2006. California Spatial Information Library. California State Government. Fall 2006. LUPIN: California Land Use Planning Information Network. Editor. Last updated: 11/17/2003. California Environmental Resources Evaluation System. Fall 2006. USGS Center for Spatial Analysis Technologies: Georgia Environmental Resources Digital Data Atlas. Purdue University. Fall 2006. Others available upon request. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||