San Diego Planning Database

This project collects, processes and publishes datasets with information linked to tracts, communities and cities in San Diego County. The core of the project is the Census Planning Database, with modifications to restrict the data to San Diego County and and make it easier to link in other datasets.

The Goals of this project are to:

Develop a broad collection of data and maps with important indicators about the San Diego region.
Train volunteers, journalists and nonprofit staff in using the datasets to answer questions.

Datasets

The data for this project is stored in the planning-project group in our data repository.

San Diego Planning Database The San Diego County version of the Census Planning Database
Cities, Communities and Tracts Geographic boundaries and link files for cities, communities and tracts in San Diego County.
California Healthy Places Index Tract level data and index scores for a wide variety of social measures.

These datasets are organized around geographic index files, files that link a code for a region to a regio identifier and the geometry for the region. For instance, the tracts file has one record per tract in the county, and for each tract includes:

A Geoid that identifies the tract, like ‘14000US06073017813’
The name of the tract, such as ‘Census Tract 100.14’
The geographic shape for the tract, for mapping in GIS applications.

There are index files for tracts, cities and communities in San Diego County. There is also a link file that links cities and communities to tracts and zip codes.

Additional data, such as census demographics or crime counts, are aggregated to the greographic region, and given the same geoids as in the index files, allowing users to easily link a data file to an index file. THen users can either report statistics for the regions, or create thematic maps.

Future Datasets and Indicators

There are several indicator projects in San Diego that need help finding and processing data, including the Healthy Food Access working group of the San Diego Food System Alliance and the San Diego Promise Zone. Both projects have indicataor lists:

Using The Database

The easiest way to get started exploring the database is to use QGIS to make maps. See our Getting Started Tutorial for QGIS for detailed instructions.

More advanced analysis can be done with Jupyter and Pandas. See the Getting Started Notebook for details about loading and using the datasets in Jupyter.

Future Work

Planned work for this project primarily involves adding new datasets that can be linked to the indexes, such as crime counts, wakability scores, health metrics, trasportation statistics, or anything else that local datausers need.

For a complete list of work that is being planned or executed, refer to our issues list. and projects board

How to Join the Project

To join the project you can:

Attend some of our regular meeting, which are announced on Meetup.com
Submit an issue, or work on an issue
Contribute analysis by forking the repo and making a pull request.