Is New York Distributing Its Public Plazas Equally?

The NYC Plaza Program has set some lofty goals for the creation of new public spaces in the city. Writing in the Placemeter blog, Natalie Kunstadter took on the challenge of determining if the program is meeting one of its stated goals, by providing access to the new public plazas to households with low and moderate incomes. Using census data and location data for the new plazas provided by the city, Kunstadter's geospatial analysis looked at the proximity of target households to the plazas.

The Plaza Program wants to ensure that all New Yorkers are within a 10-minute walk of green space, so I analyzed the area within a 10-minute walk of each of the project sites. A quick internet search told me that a standard conversion for this walk was 800 meters, so I created an 800-meter buffer around each plaza. I then did a spatial join between the new polygons and the census/income polygons to find the average of the median household income that fell within a 10-minute walk of each plaza.

Kunstadter's analysis, detailed both in map and histogram form, found that approximately 54 percent of the new plazas were situated in areas that served low-income residents, meaning the program was achieving its stated goal for equal access. However she does seem room for improvement in the model, including giving weight to the population density in each tract. Better data analysis could potentially aid the program in placing future plazas in areas that need them.

[The article was updated with the correct spelling of the author's name.]