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• Sophie Wagner says:

  March 6, 2023 at 10:51 am

  Hi! I was wondering how you went about creating this map and if you had any other tips — I’m a researcher at Columbia Med and trying to utilize residential/population density in a research project. If you have any time, please reach out to me! Thanks so much.

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  • Andy says:

    March 6, 2023 at 2:19 pm

    I would recommend using R and the tidycenus library for getting and processing the Census data. That is the easier and most flexible way to work with Census data, especially if you need to process a lot of it.

    https://walker-data.com/census-r/

    To get the raster population density as a tiff file to read into your GIS program to make the 3D, you could use tidycensus, terra, sf:

    
library(tidyverse)
library(tidycensus)
library(raster)
library(sf)

    # get tract level population from 2020 census
    pop <- get_decennial(year = 2020, geography = 'tract', variables = 'P1_001N', state='ny', geometry = T) pop <- pop %>% st_transform(26918)

    # create a blank raster based on the shape of nys
r <- rast(pop, nrows=10000, ncols=10000) # calculate population density then covert vector to a raster pop %>%
mutate(density = value / (st_area(.) %>% units::set_units('mi^2'))) %>%
rasterize(r, field='density') %>% writeRaster('/tmp/output.tif', overwrite=T)


    I used QGIS to do the 3D rendering.

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