Wk6_Urban Planning

This week's activity involved answering "where" for the potential home purchase for a professor and doctor moving to Alachua County and working at the University of Florida and North Florida Regional Medical Center. Criteria was based on closeness to both work places, a neighborhood with a high percentage of people ranging in ages from 40 - 49, and a neighborhood with high home values.

The first map is a base map providing an overview of the area with cities, roads, public lands, and their places of employment. The next map used numerous spatial analysis tools to refine the criteria and produce information for distance from places of employment in bands of approximately 3 miles, and predominate areas of age and home value with graduated color schemes. Data was downloaded from the US Census Bureau and joined to a Census Tract layer for median home values. The third map used information from the four maps above to create a weighted overlay using Model Builder based on importance. The first overlay gave each of the four criteria equal importance of 25%. The second model gave weight to close distance from work. Each produced areas of importance using graduated color scheme.

The lab was straight forward and very helpful in the details and repetitiveness of steps. In the step to export median home values the data in the attribute table that had been joined would not show up in the new layer. I repeated it numerous times and it finally showed up. I don't know why it finally showed up or why it didn't in the first place. This is one of those steps I've used numerous times through the months and it is always quick and easy. Therefore my presentations are very basic in the interest of time. Living in GIS world "101" was so much nicer!