With a crime rate of 40 per one thousand residents, Philadelphia has one of the highest crime rates in America. At the same time, excellent education resources like University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, and Temple University etc. attract more and more students to come to Philadelphia from all over the world. Many students have such question before they move in, "Where are the dangerous areas near the campus?" People assume that communities with more low-income households have more violent crimes. They would rather to pay high monthly rent to live in apartments away from where crime occurred more frequently. But is it possible to find places in Philadelphia that are both affordable and safe?
In this project, we target on students, especially international students, who are new to Philadelphia, as well as young people, who move in Philly for job opportunities. We aim to visualize maps of the most recent crimes, median monthly rent, and percentage of buildings built after 2000 by block groups to help users generate a shared understanding of their surroundings to eschew palces with more frequency of crimes, and find comfortable and affordable housing.
Based on the factors above, we take the number of crimes in block groups, the percentage of new houses (the number of houses built after 2000 divided by the total number of buildings in the community), the median rent and the median age in the community with different weight aggregation, and finally got an Optimal Choice Matrix suitable for living. We weight the number of crime incidents as 50%, the percentage of new houses and the median rent are both at 20%, and the median age of the final residents is considered as 10%. Looking at the last map "Find Good Apartment Score by Block Group", the higher the score (closer to five points), the darker the color.
In sum, neighborhoods near the University City, and the South of Central City generally scored well, as did some areas in South Philadelphia, Northeast Philadelphia. According to this map, we can give our users some basic reference to find a good apartment in Philadelphia.