Zip & Link

Zip & Link analyzes the relationship between essential services and housing affordability across neighborhoods in Chicago. The project explores how accessibility to key services—such as healthcare, public education, public transport, grocery stores, and parks—affects median property prices and other economic indicators. The project involves web scraping, bulk data downloads, data cleaning and preprocessing, and an analysis framework to generate an Accessibility Index for each ZIP code. This index is meant to help users understand the impact of essential services on housing affordability and highlight areas that require better urban planning. Our initial hypothesis was that the housing prices were positively correlated with the Accessibility Index and in order to test and better visualize this, we developed 3 key visualizations on Dash: a choropleth map, a scatterplot and horizontal bar plots to compare 2 specific zip codes. Interestingly, we found that the converse of our hypothesis was true.