And if we break it down each Census Tracts price per square foot, we see a similar pattern.

Again, while being skewed by the availability of data, aggregating the apartment listing to census tracts shows a different pattern than individual apartment listings. Here, the data show that the most expensive census tracts are actually in Marin County or in the South Peninsula around Silicon Valley. This data should be normalized to prevent larger area census tracts from dominating the visualization.

First the rent prices of individual listings…

And now, the rent per square foot for the same group of listings…

Although limited to apartments that were being advertised on Craigslist at the time, this map shows a distinct patter of the most expensive apartments being located in the Northeast quadrant of the San Francisco Peninsula, with some higher-end outliers popping up in Marin and the East Bay.

Understanding the demographics of a neighborhood is key to managing the future influx of residents from outside sources. For Oakland, that movement may be coming from San Francisco as residents are pushed out by higher rents or the lack of available housing. The map above details the median age groups of each Oakland blockgroup, informing the viewer of the neighborhoods that are more or less accommodating of their age group. For example, older residents tend to locate in the northwestern portion of the city, closer to the hills, while younger residents are in the southeast portion of the city.  Future investigation could test whether this distribution is correlated with availability of jobs or real estate values and rents.

Source: United States Census Data, 2010

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