Last updated on November 17, 2021

These are the sample datasets we used on the Spatial Equity Data Tool. These represent the kinds of datasets users can upload to our tool at each geographic level of analysis (national, state, county, and city). For suggestions of where to find more data, please see our frequently asked questions. For each file, we list in parentheses next to the name the year the data were last updated or the year range the data cover.

National:

• Electric vehicle charging stations (2021): These data were downloaded from the US Department of Energy Alternative Fuels Data Center on October 12, 2021.

• Public libraries (2019): These data come from the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ Public Libraries Survey for fiscal year 2019. We downloaded the CSV data file from the Public Libraries Survey website on October 12, 2021. We perform some data cleaning on the service hours variable (HOURS), which is used for weighting in the tool. We first replace the data code for closed outlets (-3) with 0, as we assume closed outlets offer zero service hours per year. We also replace the code for missing data (-1) with the average number of service hours per year across all libraries. The script for this data cleaning can be found in the tool’s GitHub repo

State:

• Substance use and mental health facilities in Washington (2021): These data were exported from the US Department of Health and Human Services Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator on September 22, 2021. We first searched “Washington, USA” in the search bar and then clicked the Download button in the search result panel. Note that this exports the results for the entire US, which we then filter to only the results for Washington using the State column in the tool’s advanced options.

• Low-Income Housing Tax Credit projects in Alabama (2019): These data were exported from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Low-Income Housing Tax Credit project database on October 12, 2021. On the database interface, we selected the Latitude and Longitude column as well as the Total Units and Low-Income Units columns (the latter two are selected by default) and then selected Alabama as a single state in the dropdown menu. We did not change the default options on the refine your query page and then selected Retrieve Project Data at the bottom of the page to download the CSV file. Some rows in the data have missing values for the low-income units column (LI_UNITS) which we use for weighting in the tool. We impute these missing values with the total units value (N_UNITS) if that is not missing and the average number of low-income units across all projects if total units is also missing. The script for this data cleaning can be found in the tool’s GitHub repo.

County:

• Playgrounds in Miami-Dade County, FL (2020): These data were pulled from Miami-Dade County’s Open Data Hub on September 22, 2021, by selecting the download icon, and then downloading the CSV file from the download pane. Note this is a dataset of all park facilities, which we restrict to park facilities with playgrounds by filtering to rows where the TOTLOT variable equals 1.

• Polling places in Bucks County, PA (2021): These data were pulled from the Bucks County Maps and Open Data Portal on September 17, 2021, by selecting the download icon and then downloading the CSV file from the download pane.

City:

• Wi-Fi hot spots in New York, NY (2020): These data were pulled from [NYC's open data portal] (https://data.cityofnewyork.us/City-Government/NYC-Wi-Fi-Hotspot-Location...) on September 23, 2020 by following Export > Download > CSV .

• 311 calls in New Orleans, LA (2012–18): These data were pulled from New Orleans' open data portal on September 23, 2020. To generate this data, we used a custom Socrata API endpoint URL (https://data.nola.gov/resource/3iz8-nghx.csv?$limit=500000)/ We used the custom endpoint as the regular data export options return date strings in non ECMAScript format and which does not work with the date filters on the tool. Our custom URL is based on the Socrata CSV download URL, with a user added limit parameter to get all the rows in one call. To learn more about this dataset and the Socrata API, please see: https://dev.socrata.com/foundry/data.nola.gov/3iz8-nghx

• Bike share stations in Minneapolis, MN (2021): These data were downloaded from the Minneapolis Nice Ride System Data page on October 1, 2021. Their data on station locations were only available as a JSON so we wrote a short script to convert that JSON into a CSV that was compatible with our tool. That script can be found in the tool's Github repo.

You can check out our tool, technical appendix, and FAQs here: https://apps.urban.org/features/equity-data-tool/index.html#