Best Neighborhood

December 10th, 2022 by Michelle Star

Project Brief

Goal: Identify the “best” Pittsburgh neighborhood for kids using public amenity data.
Why: Support family-friendly planning and highlight community assets.
Scope: Compare neighborhoods by access to three kid-centric amenities: pools, courts/rinks, playgrounds.
Data: WPRDC open datasets and city neighborhood boundaries.
Method: Count amenities; score pools by total capacity with a 15–1 points scheme; sum into one final score.
Outcome: Squirrel Hill South ranks first. Runners-up include Brookline and Highland Park.

Big Ideas in Computing and Information FINAL PROJECT

Overview

We define the “best” Pittsburgh neighborhood by kid-centered funness. Using WPRDC datasets, we compare three public amenities:

  • pools
  • courts/rinks
  • playgrounds

Metric

  • Courts/rinks and playgrounds: rank by raw counts per neighborhood.
  • Pools: rank by total capacity per neighborhood. Convert the top 15 to points: 15 for 1st, 14 for 2nd, …, 1 for 15th.
  • Final score: pools points + playground count + courts/rinks count.

Data

Following data was opensourced from Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center

  • Basketball/Tennis Court & Rinks data set
  • Pools data set
  • Playgrounds data set
  • Neighborhoods shapefile: Neighborhoods/Neighborhoods_.shp

Base map preview:

Python Libraries Used

pandas, geopandas, matplotlib, shapely

Results

Courts and Rinks

We tally facilities per neighborhood and rank.

Facility locations over the neighborhood map:

Top 5 (courts/rinks):

  1. Squirrel Hill South (26)
  2. Highland Park (20)
  3. Hazelwood (10)
  4. Beltzhoover (9)
  5. Brookline (9)

Pools

We count pools, then emphasize capacity to reflect usable water area.

Counts:

Capacity (Liters):

Capacity → points (In order to give these large numbers a more useful value, I gave each of the top 15 a score that we can use to choose the final funnest neighborhood.The 1st place got a score of 15, 2nd got 14, 3rd got 13, and so on until the 15th place.)

Pool locations:

Top 5 (capacity):

  1. Bedford Dwellings (538,000 L)
  2. Brookline (417,657 L)
  3. Mount Washington (356,000 L)
  4. Bloomfield (335,000 L)
  5. South Side Flats (312,800 L)

Playgrounds

Counts per neighborhood and map.

Top 5 (playgrounds):

  1. Squirrel Hill South (8)
  2. Beechview (5)
  3. South Side Slopes (5)
  4. Highland Park (4)
  5. Sheraden (4)

Combined Score

We union neighborhoods across datasets, then compute: final_score = pool_points + playground_count + courts_rinks_count

Stacked comparison for the top 15:

All facilities on one map Key: courts/rinks = purple, pools = blue, playgrounds = salmon.

Winner

Squirrel Hill South — 8 playgrounds, 26 courts/rinks, and a moderate pool presence.
Runners-up: Brookline, Highland Park, Allegheny Center, Mount Washington.