Capstone Project — The Battle of Neighborhood
Tags: Population Change, Migration, Texas, Analysis Houston, Real Estate Investments

In Search Of A City

This study focuses towards the growth of the state and the city in United States. This will lead to the possibility of making an investment. Incase if you are a Real estate Investor and you want to make an educated investment decision. Beforehand , you must understand the demography of that place, population information, its growth, Cost of living or real estate.

Populations are never static, they grow or decline because of various reasons- births, deaths or migration. In this study, we will learn about where the Millennials are migrating to, we will learn about the population and its growth and other attributes. We will implement Top down approach for the analysis in the given order:

shortlist the top 3 states and compare them on the cost of living parameters

shortlist Top five cities in the selected on the basis of avg. real estate list price

Analyze the selected city based on Avg. Real estate List Price

Study the city based on other demographic details

Plot the city and segment the neighborhoods

Data Exploratory method has been adopted to understand the data.

You can use this report as a tool to devise a strategy for making an investment or, expand a business and or if it’s a fresh start up in the selected city. Hence the name is “In search of a city”.

Change in population for last decade

In this stage, we will study change in population for last decade for states within the United States. In this data National Ranking has been listed by the US Census Bureau. I have downloaded the data and read it through read_csv() in pandas.

After sorting, indexing and filtering the top rows , top 3 states were displayed.

Comparison of California versus Texas — Cost of Living

Data shares the insight on the cost of living in California versus Texas. This data provides you the visibility that Texas is a good option over the California for making an investment.

I captured some data for you about the real estate’s average list price for top 5 cities mentioned below on the basis of Real estate Pricing.

This analysis shows that Houston is on the lower side on the scale of Average Real estate Price. Hence can be considered as a city that you were looking for in terms of making an investment.

Analysis on Houston city

Uploaded the data that shows the avg list price of Houston city’s real estate based upon its location coordinates and postal codes. I used statistical functions to find out min, max and median list price of the Real estate. The maximum average list price is 1990714 dollars, and the minimum is 136509 dollars. The median range is 291772. This data gives you an estimate of the real estate properties as per the postal codes based on data provided for Houston.

Analysis by Postal code and other attributes

In the next steps we will analyze the attributes like population, growth , age , Income per household as per the postal code of Houston City- which in return give us the information and insight about the neighborhoods.

As per the analysis done above, the average Income Household of the city is 45000 dollars and it also shows the postal codes where the income household is above 100000 dollars as per the data provided.

Analysis about the millennials moving to Houston

In this analysis, the median age group will be reflected to show the age distribution in city- Houston. I grouped the age together and using the count method I plotted the below graph:

The above analysis shows the median age group in Houston is around 32 and the maximum population is in the age bracket of (27–34), and this age group is generally called as Millenials.

Millennials are playing an increasingly important role in local economics — as companies look for young talent in areas such as software development, cybersecurity, marketing and finance. It’s a generation that is inclined to move more. This can put the Houston area one of the markets for millennial homebuyers.

Plot the map of Houston

I used Geocoder Python package, and Nominatim- (a geocoding software for Open Street Maps ). You know that Geopy can only make requests to Nominatim and using Nominatim. We need to establish a connection to APIs by setting up the geocoder. I imported the geocoder and initiated it .

The result above shows the name of the county which in this case is Harris County.

Since you know that Markers are the items used for marking a location on a map and Folium gives a folium.Marker() class for plotting markers on a map. Hence, the Houston map with the latitude and longitude markers describing the geography is displayed as below and when you click on the marker it will display the avg. list price of the real estate.

Houston Neighborhood Analysis Using FOUR Square API

Using Foursquare API, I generated the URL , using which I defined the locations and venues based upon the categories . In the next step , I explored the neighborhoods where you can find the most common venues . Almost 63 unique categories of the venues were returned. Further we analyzed each neighborhood and found some most common venues as per the neighborhood like Hotels, Burger Joint, Theater Concert hall, coffee shops, parks etc

I used k-means to cluster the neighborhood into 5 clusters. Merged tables to add latitude/longitude for each neighborhood and then plotted the map:

Results

National Ranking of states for Change in population(2010–2019)- 1. California 2. Texas 3. Florida

Comparison of Cost of living (Texas versus California)- Texas is a good option over the California

Top five cities in Texas- Austin, Midland, San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston.

Analyze the city based on Avg Real estate List Price- Houston was on the lower side on the scale of Avg. List Price

Study the city based on other demographic details-

Age distribution-(27–34)

Income per Household-Max- 200000 and avg Income per household is 45000

Plot the city and segment the neighborhoods-The common venues in the neighborhoods are Hotels, Burger Joint, Theater Concert hall, coffee shops, parks etc.

Conclusions

This study was based upon a conclusion about a “city” and its neighborhood for the possibility of making an investment. We concluded that the Texas is one of the fastest growing states and Houston is among the top cities and is on the lower range of Avg Real estate price.

We learned that the avg Income per household is around 45000 dollars. The range of the listed real estate price in city Houston is( max- 1990714 dollars , minimum — 136509 and the median range is 291772).

Millennials are attracting to Texas and the age distribution of age group in Houston is(27–34).This is one of the factors for economic growth. This can put the Houston area one of the markets for millennial homebuyers.

We plotted the map of Houston and imposed the postal codes on that with the real estate price. This will provide you the insight on the geography of city — Houston.

In this case the concert halls and Performing arts venue comes under the 3rd and 4th category of most common venues. Let’s assume that you have to open a Yoga center/Dance Academy , you will choose a location where you get the population of similar interests. This information can be drawn from the analysis of the neighborhoods. For Example, Harris County, in Houston can be such examples of the locations.

References:

https://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/dallas-tx/los-angeles-ca/65000

https://www.afire.org/summit/migrating-trends/ https://www.mpamag.com/commercial/how-migration-patterns-are-helping-cre-developers-238246.aspx 3. https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/houston-tx-population 4. https://www.businessinsider.com/texas-cities-everyone-is-moving-to-2019-11 6. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/popest/2010s-state-total.html 7. https://www.wikipedia.org

Tools:

8. https://www.google.com 9. https://www.stackoverflow.com