maps

Map of maps

On Friday a colleague showed me an interesting chart, a map of maps. I believe the original was made in Tableau, but I decided to spin one up in R. I tweeted out the picture: A map of maps, showing the correlation between state house price growth rates You see pretty strong spatial correlation, with some interesting exceptions. Florida correlated with AZ, NV pic.twitter.com/9hzwZLkb41 — šŸ“ˆ Len Kiefer šŸ“Š (@lenkiefer) March 6, 2020 In this post I will supply the R code to make one.

Location Quotient Map

I have been thinking about how the recent volatility could impact the economy. If travel and tourism contract due to fears of a pandemic, the impact will differ in markets around the United States. One way to think about this is to compute the Location Quotient, or the percentage of the employment in an area that is in the leisure and hospitality industry. Conside the graphic below: This map shows areas (states and core based statistical areas) color-coded by their location quotient.

Real House Price Trends

Let us take a look at house price trends in the United States and across states and metro areas. Earlier this week I tweeted out a few charts on housing market trends. In most of the middle part of the country over the past 44 years there has been little growth in real (inflation-adjusted) house prices. In coastal states, a very different story. pic.twitter.com/PLbiNftha3 — šŸ“ˆ Len Kiefer šŸ“Š (@lenkiefer) July 10, 2019 In this post weā€™ll analyze real house prices since 1975, and per usual use R to wrangle data and make plots.

U.S. housing supply and demand

In this post I want review some trends in U.S. housing supply and demand. Specifically I want to look at county level trends in population, housing supply (the total number of housing units) and house prices. Weā€™ll uncover some interesting trends. Per usual we will make our graphics with R. Preparing the data required several steps that I will outline in a follow up post. For now weā€™ll just proceed with the data Iā€™ve put together.

State employment dataviz

Today was JOLTS Tuesday, when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics releases updated data from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. I was talking about it earlier today, but before we get into thatā€¦ If you care about dataviz check this out I saw this on Twitter today via Jon Schwabish. Link to a handy dataviz cheatsheet outlining Jonā€™s core dataviz principles. Prints out nicely on pdf. Back to the JOLTS.

What's up? VSUP, that's what's up.

IN THIS POST WE SHALL EXPLORE VALUE-SUPRESSING UNCERTAINTY PALETTES. One of my favorite new sites is xenographics that gives examples of and links to ā€œweird, but (sometimes) useful chartsā€. The examples xenographics gives are undoubtedly interesting and might help inspire you if youā€™re looking for something new. One new (to me) graphic was something called Value-Suppressing Uncertainty Palettes (VSUP). See this research paper (pdf). VSUPs ā€œallocate larger ranges of a visual channel when uncertainty is low, and smaller ranges when uncertainty is highā€.

Bivariate tilegridmaps with R

I HAVE BEEN EXPERIMENTING WITH A NEW WAY TO VISUALIZE DATA, a bivariate tilegridmap. When I get around to rolling out my tidyPowerPoint workflow weā€™re going to want something other than bars and lines to fill it up. A graph like this might be a fun option. Weā€™ll build one, but first, just let me show you one I tweeted earlier today: bivariate #tilegridmap map anyone? pic.twitter.com/y3G5XExzoN — šŸ“ˆ Len Kiefer šŸ“Š (@lenkiefer) October 11, 2017 In this post, letā€™s go over how to make this plot with R.

More map visualizations

IN THIS POST I’M JUST GOING TO share a few data visualizations I’ve been working on today. For most, no code, but these build off my previous posts here and here so you can check there for hints and I’ll post some more examples with code later. Population maps This one shows the evolution of population by county without the distribution plots I included last time. We discussed these data in our last post.

U.S. county population: 1790-2010

SOMETIMES YOU ACTUALLY LEARN SOMETHING from social media. Today on Twitter I happened across this Tweet via @kyle_e_walker: Seems somebody posted estimates of the U.S. population by county (defined by 2010 county definitions) going back to 1790. This is a perfect dataset to practice my mapping with R. The data are conveniently available via the University of Minnesota. The data come in a nice spreadsheet that we can easily import into R and manipulate.

Maps, mortgages and me

IN THIS POST I WANT TO DOCUMENT some R code I’ve recently been working on combining maps and distribution plots. As I discussed earlier lots of interesting data will be released in the fall and I want to be ready for it. Some of these snippets can be recycled when the new data is available. Maps One area of data visualization with R I haven’t explored much is mapping. Part of this reason is because I’ve had other tools to use, but usually it’s because I’m in a hurry.

Population growth, housing supply, and house prices

EARLIER THIS WEEK THE U.S. CENSUS BUREAU released dataon population and housing units for counties across the U.S. in 2015. These data reveal important trends in population growth, and help shed light on recent house price trends. Housing unit growth One key factor driving housing market dynamics is the expansion of housing supply (or lack thereof). The updated estimates from Census allow us to see which areas have added the most housing units and how that relates to population and house price trends.