Presented by City of Austin

The City of Austin Office of Innovation has developed the Neighborhood Prosperity Dashboard (NPD), a decision support tool for policymakers, City staff, and community members. The NPD helps decision makers assess the prosperity of residents and businesses in Austin at the neighborhood and citywide levels. The NPD incorporates an index of more than 30 measures across five categories: economic, health, education, civic engagement, and social justice. The tool allows decision makers to look at neighborhood-level data across categories, and over time.

The NPD index model is inspired by the National Urban League’s ‘State of Black America’ report which looks at gaps in the experience between black and white Americans at a national level, and highlights the United States’ racialized history and enduring disparities. This is important to the Innovation Office’s work because in 2015 Austin was deemed the most economically segregated U.S. city, and this segregation is drawn on racial lines. Our index includes additional categories with documented disparities based on race.

NPD index scores are calculated using a weighted average method with data collected from publicly available sources including the American Community Survey (ACS), CDC PLACES, and others. The project includes census tract-level data for the entire Austin MSA region. The data is cleaned and scaled against the highest valued neighborhood to create neighborhood scores. Measures are then combined using a weighted average method.

The NPD pulls ACS data with an in-house tool that uses the Census public API. We also use data sources from the City of Austin’s Open Data Portal, and others that City departments provide. The tool performs specific functions for each dataset to produce the final combined dataset. After data preprocessing and feature selection, we import the dataset to Tableau to create visuals that support stakeholders making data-informed policy decisions.

We are currently expanding the NPD with historical trend and scenario modeling analysis using ACS and similar data sources. These analyses will act as indicators of changes in prosperity in neighborhoods across the Austin MSA.