Brittany Hot Houston Hoods

Brittany’s Hot Houston Neighborhoods

Problem Statement:

For my project, I wanted to compare Houston neighborhoods and see if the ones deemed the best are and why. I also wanted to pi-point areas that will yield the best return on investment in the future.

Anyone purchasing a home wants to do so, keeping in mind current market fluctuations, environmental factors — looking at you COVID, and anything else that may affect the value of your home. My goal with the project is to assist home seekers looking in and near Houston, TX, in navigating the Houston housing market and making the best decision for themselves.

Introduction:

To gain the best understanding of each neighborhood, I divided my project into sections. This made it easier to do a coherent project, with each step supporting the next.

I began my project by establishing what are the “best” neighborhoods according to public opinion. Since Houston, TX is an expansive city; I had to determine how large an area I wanted to include. Once the areas I want to examine are established, I look at the crime data in each neighborhood. This data can also be used against the “best neighborhoods” to see how they compare. I then look at the number of area “venues” as a criterion for knowing what the most desirable neighborhoods are. This assumes that people want to be in an area with many amenities. Finally, taking crime, venues, school districts, and land value into consideration, we build a linear regression model that we use to see what areas are undervalued.

Data:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston

https://www.niche.com/places-to-live/search/best-neighborhoods/m/houston-metro-area/

https://www.houstoniamag.com/home-and-real-estate/2018/02/top-neighborhoods-houston-2018

https://www.frankelbuildinggroup.com/blog/best-neighborhoods-houston/

https://www.getbellhops.com/blog/what-are-the-best-neighborhoods-in-houston/

https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/homes/slideshow/The-Houston-neighborhoods-I-wish-I-lived-in-206279.php

https://www.homesnacks.net/best-neighborhoods-in-houston-tx-128155/

https://www.greatamericancountry.com/places/local-life/great-neighborhoods-in-houstonhttps://www.houstonproperties.com/houston-neighborhoods/montrose/real-estate-market

Welcome to Houston, Texas Y’all! — Cleaning and defining search area:

Houston, Texas, is a vast city. It is the largest city in total land area, according to Wikipedia. One of the complexities of this project was defining exactly what area codes to use because Houston has no formal zoning. The closest thing you have for determining the part of Houston that is more city versus the more suburban parts is the inner and outer loops. In our case, we are looking for neighborhoods that are more within the city boundaries, which one would think would be the Inner Loop area. However, there is the added issue of Houston having “island cities,” which are cities with their own municipalities and governments. In this case, selecting zip codes by “inner loop” did not select everything within the desired boundaries. To solve this problem, I first downloaded every Houston zip code from the Houston Association of Realtors and then filtered the data by Houston’s main county, Harris. I then used the latitude and longitude of the far ends of the borders I wanted to filter out any other zip codes that were not needed.

Before:

After:

Once the parameters of our target zip codes are solidified, I researched and found the top Houston top neighborhoods according to the public and online web sources.

1. West University (The Best)
2. Montrose
3. Memorial
4. Heights
5. Midtown
6. River Oaks
7. Bellaire
8. Museum District

The neighborhoods listed above are considered to be the best due to safety, family-friendliness, and proximity to restaurants, shopping, and other amenities. These neighborhoods also are some of the priciest in the entire Houston area with homes in West University costing an average of 1 million dollars and homes in Montrose homes costing nearly $ 600,000. Although Houston’s housing market is not as expensive as some other cities such as Chicago, purchasing a house in one of the neighborhoods listed above can be very costly.

Primetime Crime: Data and Data Cleaning

Using pandas, I downloaded Houston crime statistics from the Houston Police Department. I filtered the data frame by zip code and normalized the numbers to make sure they were all of the same data type, in this case, integers. I then used pandas to create another data frame that contained the population count for each zipcode from the Harris County Appraisal District. Using a left join statement on zip code, I merged the police data frame with my main zipcode data frame I created earlier for my target neighborhoods. I then used left join again to merge in the population data. Once I had all of the information together, I divided the crime count by the population to get the crime per capita for each neighborhood/zip code. Sorting by crime count, the safest neighborhoods are.

1. West University
2. Spring Branch
3. Pecan Park (Inner Loop)
4. Memorial
5. Magnolia Park/East End (Inner Loop)
6. Golf Crest
7. Gulfon
8. Garden Oaks
9. Hilshire Village

Of the top neighborhoods listed, only West University and Memorial make the top 10 of our safest zip codes.

I wanted to have a visual representation of where the safest zip codes are located to see if anything interested popped up. Using the latitude and longitude of each zip code, I created a map using folium. I also expanded the data to include the top 30 zip codes to have more data points on my map.

The blue spots are the top zip codes that are safest,

Overall, there are no real distinct patterns, but some things of notice are:

1. The number of spots inside the loop is about the same as outside the loop, whereas I would have assumed that there would have been bluer outside the loop.
2. Many of the dots are on or near major highways and roads, which in contrast to what I would consider safe neighborhoods. This might be due to Houston being a commuter city, so it is more desirable to be closer to the major highways.
3. In the inner loop, there is clearly an area that has no dots whatsoever. These are zip codes 77021, 77004, 77023. But this brings up something quite unusual, parts of 77023 are safe, and those parts are to the right of the highway. This makes a case for using latitude and longitude to analyze areas instead of generalizing areas. This also may indicate that 77023 might be an up and coming neighborhood.

Yo! What are we doing tonight? Houston, TX Venue data.

Using the Foursquare API I was able to retrieve the venue data for every neighborhood in my data frame using their latitude and longitude coordinates. I was able to get the venue and venue location, which I sorted using .groupby and .sort_values. Looking at the pure venue count alone, area code 77010 — Downtown far exceeds the rest. This makes sense since that is one of the few walkable areas in Houston.

In order, areas with the most amenities are as follows:

Downtown

Greenway Plaza

Midtown

Memorial

River Oaks

Montrose

Briar Meadow

River Oaks

Northside

Garden Oaks

Heights

What is interesting is that the downtown area is not in our top 30 safest zip codes but has many amenities, which makes it ideal for people who want always to have something to do within walking distance. Carry mace. Many of the areas that were pegged as being great places to live have many venues. The Heights are considered very walkable, so it is surprising two areas I have no familiarity with are above it (Briar Meadows and Garden Oaks). Our numbers are not by per capita, which may skew the numbers, but our results do match our initial list of “best areas” according to public opinion. Considering the Heights as a good indicator of what people deem an area with many amenities. We can further examine the zipcodes below it to see if anything of interest is seen:

Uptown

Gulfton

Meyerland/Braeswood

Greenway plaza

Astrodome

Fifth ward/ East End

Garden Villas

I would like to take this time to summarize the information we have so far.

Best Neighborhoods, according to public opinion(top 8):

1. West University (The Best)
2. Montrose
3. Memorial
4. Heights
5. Midtown
6. River Oaks
7. Bellaire
8. Museum District

Safest, according to the Houston Police Department Data (top 8):

1. West University
2. Spring Branch
3. Pecan Park Inner loop
4. Memorial
5. Magnolia Park/East End (Inner Loop)
6. Golf Crest
7. Gulfon
8. Garden Oaks

Most venues, according to Foursquare(top 8):

Downtown

Greenway Plaza

Midtown

Memorial

River Oaks

Montrose

Briar Meadow

Northside

Overall we can say, based on the data available so far, the top neighborhoods are:

1. West University
2. Memorial
3. Montrose
4. River Oaks
5. Heights
6. Greenway Plaza

Let’s use Machine Learning!!! (Linear Regression)

Taking all of the data we have available, we can extend our search further using Linear regression to take all of the data gathered further. Using data from the Harris County Appraisal District, I can create a data frame that includes school district, and value to give us a model that provides us with a data frame that overall tells us what areas/neighborhoods are over/under/at value. The Y-predict is the assumed value based on our testing, and the Y-value is the actual value. In this final case, I want to

know what the undervalued areas (the Y_predict is larger than the Y_test) are.

The results of the Linear Regression model are as follows:

Conclusion:

When comparing the data in its entirety, the majority of the popular neighborhoods are at the top, although the safer areas tend to have fewer venues. Analyzing data in a city like Houston is complicated by the vastness of each region, the existence of super neighborhoods, and island cities. Using zip codes for finding data allows for more accurate pinpointing, but using neighborhood aliases is easier to do just because it casts a broader net. To get a more accurate result from the results, I would have liked to take the zip code area into account when analyzing venue data. I would have examined the types of venues in each area to see if that plays a factor in determining what makes a neighborhood “good.” I would also rework my linear regression model to see how to get it not to overfit. In sum, although some areas can be improved upon, by using zip codes, latitude, and longitude for my project, I was able to gather data with more accuracy and certainty than other studies that only use neighborhood aliases. The results listed do not include zip code because people typically use neighborhood names when looking for a home.

The results of my findings are as follows:

Undervalued:

1. Briar Meadows
2. Northside
3. Garden Oaks
4. Garden Villas

Overvalued:

1. Downtown
2. Greenway Plaza
3. Astrodome
4. Gulfton

Great places to live (P.S: These are also the highest cost, so keep that in mind):

1. West University
2. Memorial
3. Montrose
4. Heights

Thank you for your time and happy house hunting!