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Land Economics Semester Project
Northgate District Analysis

Project Description:

The class was split into groups of 4/5 people. We were asked by the professor and analysts for the City of College Station to take raw data and use it to tell a story about 5 different topics for a specific location: demographics, property taxes, crime, tax revenue, and tax/non-taxable properties. We were allowed to pull additional information from other reliable resources if we wanted.

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Skills Used/Learned:

  • Technical Skills: SQL, Excel, PowerPoint, Tableau

  • Soft Skills: Teamwork, communication, perseverance, technical troubleshooting, problem-solving, critical thinking

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Data provided:

  • Brazos county CAD information (BCAD)

  • Crime information (crime type, date, location, resolution, etc.)

  • Property information (property type, value, tax information, etc.)

  • List of BCAD codes for reference

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Additional data gathered:

  • Demographic information (education level, age, race) for the location based on the 2010 and 2020 US census info

  • Texas A&M University population information (pulled from TAMU website)

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My contribution:

I was extremely excited about this project because I thought it would be a great opportunity to analyze some data, tell a story with visualizations, and get valuable feedback from individuals who did data analysis everyday. Since I was so excited, I took a leading role for the project. When I was reviewing the raw data, which was provided in excel format across different files, I realized it was going to be very difficult to extract any valuable information from the file. I decided to throw the excel documents into a basic (non-relational) database, so I could use SQL to pull relevant information from different sources, eventually building data sets for each topic mentioned above. I then shared what data I had pulled with my teammates and coordinated with them on who would do each topic.

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Data I extracted for the team to pick and choose from:

  • The number of properties built each year from 1935 to 2018

  • The number of each property type

  • The total number of individual CAD Listings for the area

  • The average number of acres and average number of square feet for each property type

  • The average number of acres and average number of square feet for build year

  • Summary of property type and taxable/non-taxable status

  • Average revenue per land acre for each property type (Year = 2021)

  • The number of each police case type for each street in the area of interest

  • The average time to close each police case type for each street in the area of interest

  • Demographics for 2010 and 2020

    • Total population

    • population of one race (white)

    • population of one race (African American)

    • population of one race (Asian)

    • population of one race (Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islanders)

    • Population of one race (Other)

    • Population of two or more races

  • Texas A&M Enrollment per year 2010-2021

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Contributions Continued:

I decided to take the demographic slide because I thought it would be interesting to see how demographics changed as the university population changed over time. I then created the slide below: 

Group 3 - AGEC 422 Northgate Statistics (Final).png

Conclusions gathered regarding demographics:

Northgate Population and Housing Units

  • According to the census data College Station grew by 30.8% between 2010 and 2020 and as for the Northgate district, the population has increased by 147 percent in that same time frame.

  • This is due to the increased number of housing units that have been built in this time, which has increased by nearly 200%.

Northgate Population by Race

  • I would not expect the distribution across races to change much with the increase in population since the area is geared towards students. You would only see a drastic change in the breakdown of race in the Northgate district, if the distribution of races among students at Texas A&M changed drastically.

  • The majority of those who filled out the census identified themselves as 1 race and you can see that the distribution among races was, in general, pretty consistent between 2010 and 2020.

Texas A&M Enrollment by Year

  • Since 2010, Texas A&M Enrollment has increased by almost 50% from around 50,000 students to now nearly 75,000 students.

  • I believe This increase could be the main driving force for the jump in your housing units in the Northgate district.

  • Texas A&M will continue to expand in the coming years. I believe if we did this analysis in another 10 years we would see more of the Northgate district being developed with apartments to support the demand for housing.

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Overall thoughts on project:

I really enjoyed the project. I think it gave me the opportunity to practice using unorganized/unclean data to extract an interesting and useful story. It gave me a chance to use SQL to extract data across different original sources that were related. I also had the opportunity to extract data from the Census website, which was a little challenging to understand at first, but after extracting the wrong data a few times, I finally got the data I was looking for, which added an additional layer or useful information to my analysis. This project was my very first experience with data analytics and helped me to discover a field I am extremely interested in. I would love to eventually have a career that harnesses data to learn and improve business processes. 

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