NYC Neighborhood Opportunity Index

Overview

Built a neighborhood ranking model using public NYC + Census data to help compare areas on affordability, safety, and transit access.

Problem

Choosing where to live, recruit, or launch a small business in NYC involves tradeoffs: rent vs. safety vs. commute time. I wanted a single, transparent scoring framework that compares neighborhoods consistently and makes the tradeoffs easy to see.

Data

• NYC Open Data (public safety / incidents; neighborhood boundaries where applicable)
• Transit access (subway station locations / proximity measures)
• Census / ACS-style indicators (income, rent/affordability proxies)

Approach

1. Cleaning: standardized neighborhood names, handled missing values, removed duplicates.
2. Feature engineering: created metrics for affordability, safety, and transit access.
3. Scoring model: normalized metrics and combined them into an overall "Opportunity Score."
4. Outputs: produced a ranked table and visual summaries for quick comparison.

Results

• Created a repeatable scoring pipeline that can be updated as new public data is released.
• Generated a ranked view that highlights neighborhoods that are strong on transit + affordability tradeoffs.
• Packaged results in a format that can feed a dashboard (map + filters) as a next step.

What I'd do next

• Add interactive map filtering (by borough, budget range, commute threshold).
• Validate scoring weights with sensitivity testing (how rankings change when weights change).
• Add a "commute-to" feature: optimize for travel time to Midtown / FiDi / specific address.

Links

• GitHub repo
• Dashboard / demo (coming soon)