CENSUS TRACTS

One possible way of at least partially fulfilling the project assignment is to determine if a particular city has a negative rent gradient, and/or income gradient, and/or density gradient. I will describe here how to download census tract data in order to test the theory of negative rent gradients. It’s only an example of what you can do, the census website is rich in material that you can draw upon for this assignment.

1. Go to the website http://www.census.gov/main/www/cen2000.html and then click on the link to American Fact Finder, and then under the heading of Data Sets, click the link to 2000 Census Summary File 3. On that page, you should see on the right-hand a side a link to “Custom Tables”, which you should click.

2. Under Select Geographic Type, pick “Census Tract”. (Census tracts are basically large neighborhoods that the Census uses to divide up metropolitan areas.) The page will reform. Pick the appropriate state(s), and then after the page forms again, pick the appropriate county or counties.

3. It will then give you a list of tracts. You might as select them all. Then click on “Add” and then “Next”

Note the option to “Map it”. You will probably need to come back to this page determine the distance of your tracts from the CBD by downloading one or more maps of the MSA that give the location of the tracts.


4. You will then be taken to a new page to select which variables you want to download. If you are examining rent gradients a likely choice will be “Median Contract Rent” which is variable H56. If that’s what you want, select it.

5. . Now plot out, using software or just you and your graph paper, the relationship between distance to the CBD and the Median Gross Rent.

6. It is customary to try and control for the quality of units. Units get bigger, and nicer as income rises and you get farther away from the CBD. Therefore you might wish to use Rent per Room instead of Rent, as the dependent variable. So you might download the average number of rooms or something like that at the same time that you download the rent data.