Blockwalking for "unregistered voters" in Harris County

Time is getting tight: October 9 is the deadline to register to vote ahead of the 2018 election. So despite the fact that its creation was a feat of patience and persistence and coding creativity, I shan't waste too much time introducing the content. 

This specific dataset covers those 198,256 single family homes in Harris County that do not have a registered voter at the address (according to public records, as of 8/23/18). You can download the zipped XLS here.

The addresses are listed by precinct. The addresses are separated out by state Senate district, and the crosswalk on the top tab will help you figure out which tab(s) you'll need for your purposes. These are the column headers and their definitions.

• precinct: Precinct where the address is located (there are 1012 in the county). I highly recommend the interactive map of precincts that I found while perusing the Harris County Voter Registrar website. See image below, or at the URL. 
• site_addr: The site's address: number, street, and unit number (sometimes).
• city,zip, streetName: Hopefully self-explanatory.
• propType: single family homes, as our team identified by various fields associated with the account in the Harris County Appraiser District database(s).
• saleDate: Date of the most recent sale of the property.
• ownerOccupied: Educated guess about whether the owner of the property lives at the address. Basically, whether the "mail-to" address on the HCAD file matches the location of the property site.
• RVhere: Is there a Registered Voter here? As of 8/23/18.
• hcad_account: HCAD account number (public record, from HCAD).
• tx_house: Texas legislative district associated with the precinct, as of 2018.
• tx_senate: Texas senate district associated with the precinct, as of 2018.
• us_house: US Congressional district associated with the precinct, as of 2018.

In closing, two helpful tips and two caveats:

• This file is too big for Google Sheets, so don't take it personally if you are having trouble opening it! Once you click the link above, click the "download" icon towards the top right of the screen and save it to your own computer. Then you should be able to unzip the file using your computer's already-installed software... and then open the XLSX using Excel or any other software (Apple has the "Numbers" program, or you could try "LibreOffice" if you're going the open-source route).
• YouTube has great tutorials for Excel users if you need more information about how to manipulate this file once it's been downloaded locally and unzipped.
• From my perspective, the act of voter registration is a non-partisan activity... so I have no problem putting this information on a public-facing page. If our political 'opponents' (whatever that even means these days) want to get folks registered too, I can't argue with that. 
• Finally, a quick reminder that it is a criminal offense to use voter registration information in connection with advertising or promoting commercial products or services. (See Tex. Elec. Code Ann. §18.009.) So while this is not voter registration information, please be responsible users of voter-related information data obtained from HCAD and HCTAX and VoteTexas.

Happy Canvassing and VDVR-ing!

Interactive precinct map, which I found thru the HCTax Assessor's website

This work (including the XLS) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

ACS, SABINS: Wrangling census data for school-level analysis

[Post in progress] Your nerd giggle of the day: My phone keeps auto-correcting ACS (the American Community Survey) to ACA (the Affordable Care Act). It has also been correcting TTFN (ta-ta for now!) to TANF (Temporary Aid for Needy Families, or, the federal grant that provides public assistance or "welfare"). I find this really amusing.

Continuing the project from earlier  - one step forward, two steps back, more forward.

Looking for resources on graphics for another project, I found the choropleth package.

Alas, while it DOES do zip codes, this package does not go all the way down to the block or even block group level data.

Nested Census geographies (from census.gov)

BUT! This lead me to the acs package, from Ezra Haber Glenn outta MIT. And although the documentation only discusses up thru ACS 5-year 2011, the Census API now goes up through 2012. Yay! Could have saved me a bunch of time in pulling the raw data itself.... Alas. Now to install. Walking through the tutorial (essentially) and pulling the necessary code for the county, by block or block group. [Use pretty R to make the R snippets look pretty]

% related to links to look at later - http://gadm.org/ 

Childfind: Data and the 4YO children in Nashville (Part 1)

Well, this is going to be complicated.  

As I wrote at the outset of this project, one of the policy/planning questions that needs to be addressed is how many four-year-old children live in Davidson County? Generating a smart estimate has turned out to be more complex than I anticipated initially.

In short, no wonder nobody has tackled this process before!

Turns out, isn't really the responsibility of any one particular government entity to track children in this age cohort. Or, rather, lots of entities track some of these kiddos, but nobody tracks all of them. So I need to bring the relevant data together and build the model myself.

Initially, my plan was to (a) fit kindergarten enrollment numbers, by year and by school cluster, and then (b) use that model as a proxy for the number of five-year-old children who would have been eligible for four-year-old (universal, voluntary) pre-K had it been in place in the previous year. From this figure I could determine trend lines for PK need, and predict/forecast  But as I discovered, there are some characteristics of the data itself that will necessitate adjustments to the plan.

School Geography is a Cluster...

Before you scold me for the pun implied above, you need to know that MNPS is organized into twelve geographically delineated units called "clusters" -- a zoned high school, and its feeder elementary and middle schools. You can access the (updated as needed) cluster maps on the district website, but here is how the clusters were organized in AY1314(1):

Each of the clusters can include zoned and charter schools alike. If you open it in another window, you can zoom in, etc. The colors alone should give you a sense of how these clusters are jumbled across the county.

Summer research for MNPS: Early Childhood Policy!

Well, graduation has come and gone, and it's time to put my MPP to work. I'm grateful that I decided to spend so much time while at Peabody to data handling, analysis, program evaluation experience. Grateful, too, for the practicum placement and ongoing volunteer work with Martha O'Bryan Center, which has really demanded that I understand the complexities (and boundaries) of high-quality, useful evaluation and data work. But now I get to build my own projects: from nebulous start, and planning out each step, tracking down the data I need for each piece of the project... through the analysis of data, making judicious decisions about how to handle demographic trends, all the way to writing findings/recommendations and reporting out -- presumably to the superintendent, if not also to the mayor's office and the folks at PRI who are at the table.

So I'm excited to get started. It is a delight to spend this summer working on such concrete policy questions. In particular, I get to spend time and mental energy on the planning and strategy that will inform expanding access to pre-kindergarten for four-year-olds in Davidson County! On Monday morning, I spent a wonderful five minutes in the front lobby watching a four-year-old and her (very slightly) older sister run around and quiz each other about colors, and it was just fantastic to know that I get to be part of a process to serve these lil' ones.

There are already new initiatives under way for the expansion of PK4 in Nashville: the early learning centers at Ross, Bordeaux, and Casa Azafrán, as the district announced and as The Tennessean reported in February, in May, and just earlier this week. Certainly the upcoming initiatives are the main focus for  the director of early learning innovation, but my role will mostly be future-focused... as in, not primarily aimed at phase one year one but informing the strategy for smart decisions in later years and/or phases.