This compilation includes five historical datasets that are part of the University of Pittsburgh Library collection. The datasets were transcribed from The Pittsburgh Neighborhood Atlas, published in 1977. The atlas was prepared by the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Alliance. The information provides an insight into the neighborhoods conditions and the direction in which they were moving at the time of preparation. Much of the material describing neighborhood characteristics came from figures compiled for smaller areas: voting districts or census blocks. The five datasets in this collection provide data about overall neighborhood satisfaction and satisfaction with public services, based on a city-wide citizen survey. Also included are statistics about public assistance, the crime rate and the changes in real estate and mortgage loans transactions.

This dataset recreates three releases (2015, 2020, and 2022) of The Neighborhood Atlas team’s Area Deprivation Index (ADI) using standardized components. The ADI is a measure that aims to quantify the socioeconomic conditions of census block groups (sometimes used to approximate neighborhoods), originally based on 1990 census tract data and factor loadings. The Neighborhood Atlas team at the University of Wisconsin adapted the ADI to block groups and more recent data, imputing missing data using tract- and county-level data.However, unlike the original index construction method, The Neighborhood Atlas team did not adjust (standardize) individual components before combining them into an overall score. This approach resulted in individual index components measured in dollars, such as income and home value, being overly influential in the final score. This dataset corrects for that by standardizing these components before aggregating, offering a more multi-dimensional view of socioeconomic conditions. The standardized ADI dataset provides continuous rankings for block groups nationwide and decile rankings for block groups within each state.

I grouped the 2013 United States Area Deprivation Index (https://www.neighborhoodatlas.medicine.wisc.edu) by deciles and plotted the distribution by decile by state. Each state can be seen to have its own socioeconomic profile, ranging from balanced (Illinois) to skewed toward high deprivation (Mississippi), low deprivation (Massachusetts), or moderate levels (Idaho). These graphs are more informative than a single summary measure. They also served as an exercise in R programming - the code used to generate these graphs is included here.