Concept: Measures of Neighbourhoods

Introduction

The following document details the measurement of Winnipeg neighbourhoods on several physical variables. ArcView was used to locate amenities etc. in order to assign them to the 12 Community Areas (CA's) , 23 Neighbourhood Clusters (NC's) - formerly known as Neighbourhood Resource Network areas (NRNs) and 72 Community Centre Areas (CCA's).


• Note: Two NRNs (East St. Paul - NRN 7D and West St. Paul- NRN 8C) are not included in this database because much of our data is restricted to the city of Winnipeg.
  • This will affect the measures for the 12 CA's (CA 8 - Seven Oaks; and CA7 - River East).
    
  • These restrictions were also applied to the collection of program information, and if these two additional areas are to be included or analyses are to be done at the CA level, some modification of the present files or notation of this restriction of the data may be necessary.

1. Schools

All of the schools in the city of Winnipeg were geocoded using ArcView and assigned to the various geographic areas.


• School addresses were acquired from Sherlock's 7th edition.

2. Places of Worship

All of the churches, synagogues, etc, in the city were geocoded and assigned to the various geographic areas.


• Addresses were acquired form Sherlock's 7th edition.

3. Community Centres

All of the community centres in the city were geocoded and assigned to the various geographic areas.


• Addresses were taken from the General Council of Winnipeg Community Centres (GCWCC) Website at: ( http://www.gcwcc.mb.ca/community.cfm ).

4. Parks

The location of green spaces throughout the city were imported into ArcView and the distance from the centroid of each of the postal codes in the city to the nearest edge of a green space was computed.


• If this variable is to be aggregated, it is important to weight the distance to the nearest green space by the population of the postal code. Otherwise, a few people living far from the nearest park could skew the measure if calculated at the CCA, NRN, or CA.
  
  
• Process followed for CPHI project :
  • In SAS, the pop99 database was summarized by postal code to provide the number of people living in each postal code.
    
  • This file was then imported into MS Access. A query eliminated all people residing in postal codes not included in the ArcView file, and also joined in one table the distances and the populations for each postal code in one file.
    
  • This file was then exported and brought into SAS and CA's, NRN's, and CCA's were assigned.
    
  • The average distance to green space for each CA and NRN was then calculated, with each case (i.e., postal code) weighted by the number of people residing in the postal code.
    • Weighting each postal code by the number of people residing therein eliminates any bias that might be introduced if all postal codes were treated equally.
      
    • Postal codes lying on the edge of the city are on average a greater distance from green space, but also tend to have very small populations.

5. Housing

The City of Winnipeg published a report on housing in March of 2000, called the Neighbourhood Designation Report (The Executive Summary is available at url=http://winnipeg.ca/ppd/pdf_files/hous_imp2.pdf ). This report included data on many aspects of housing that are not included in the census.


• effective age of residential dwellings (not actual age) 2000
  
• maintenance and occupancy orders 1999
  
• demolitions 1993-1998
  
• rooming houses 1999
  
• building permits 1998
  
• median selling price 1999
  
• rentals (non-owner-occupied residential dwellings, side by sides, duplex, triplex, and apartment converted dwellings with a maximum of 4 units; apartment blocks, agricultural and government dwellings are not included) 1999
  
• placards (i.e., closures and unsafe dwellings - full or partial, cellars not included) 1999


• These variables were provided at the neighbourhood level (228 neighbourhoods in Winnipeg). The Neighbourhoods were assigned to NRN's and CA's and the variables were summed for the neighbourhoods.
  
• For CCA's, ArcView was used to assign each neighbourhood to a CCA. In cases where they were not exclusive, they were assigned to the CCA that occupied the greatest area of the particular neighbourhood.
  
• Principal component analyses were then conducted to determine whether the various measures diverged in their estimate of the geographic areas, or provided similar accounts of the geographic areas. For the NRN's and CA's, all measures provided essentially the same estimates of the areas, except for "building permits", which differed considerably.
  
• A single Housing score was then assigned for the NRN's and CA's, along with the number of building permits issued. For CCA's all variables comprised the first principal component except for "building permits" and "median selling value."

6. Crime

The Winnipeg Police Department provided us with crime statistics for 1999 and 2000. For this project, the statistics for 1999 were used.


• All crimes were reported at the EA level. A file for assigning CA's and NRN's from EA's was included in the file.
  
• A SAS® format was created to map EA's directly to CCA's and to assign crimes and calls for service to CCA's.
  
• The component scores were used for all further analyses.