The final project for this class is going to be centered around the cost of commuting compared with the cost of rents. Commuting data is connected to census zones called “Transportation Analysis Zones”, or TAZ. There are super districts, which are fairly large zones (in black in the map below) and there are districts (in grey). For this assignment I connected Craigslist rental data which I have been working with all semester to the TAZ zones, for analysis later. The rental data I have is in red below.
I also plotted the rental data by rent price, capping the observations at $10,000 per month, as only 1% of rents were higher. Here the larger, darker circles are high cost rentals, while the smaller, lighter, and yellow circles indicate lower rents. (Though it is important to note that most rents in the Bay Area cluster around $2,000 to $2,500, which is considered expensive in nearly any other region in the country. These rents are also from 2014 and rents have increased since.) This map allows you to immediately assess the geography of (non) affordability in the Bay.
Finally, here is a similar map but instead of the price of the house I color coded by bedrooms (yellow indicates smaller units, while bluer circles indicate larger units). These last two graphs together show which areas have high rents regardless of the size of the units (i.e. central San Francisco) versus areas in the outer East Bay which have low rents and large units.