Web Dashboard: Housing Prices In Michigan

Tools: ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Dashboards, R

Main Question: "What Percentage of income are residents of Michigan spending on rental housing?"

The goal with this ESRI Dashboard was to visualize the proportion of income the residents of Michigan are spending on rent. It allows the viewer to quickly see regions where rent is more expensive in relative and absolute terms, and a general sense of income distributions across the state. 

I wanted to create a straightforward presentation of the data that would dynamically update with the display limits or when a user selects a specific county. I made sure the key metric of Percent Income Spent on Rent was centered and the largest text on the screen.

This project involved map and layer controls in AGOL, dynamic dashboard displays with action filters, and using RStudio (tidycensus and dplyr packages) to obtain census/demographic data for the state, filter, and calculate new columns to configure the data for this map.

Possible Improvements: I think dynamic text color on the % income metric would add more visual clarity to the main messaging of the map - There would be obvious implications of a big red "30%" rather than just static white text. Also, I chose proportional symbology just to experiment with a different style, but I'm not totally convinced it's a better choice over a choropleth map or variations in color. Maybe combining the proportional symbols with the yellow-to-red color ramp or an opacity ramp could help as well.

Credit: United States Census Bureau