2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

Progress in Data and Technology 89
tions in individual-level analysis. To incubate more examples of using an
IDS with a neighborhood lens to inform local policy, in 2013 the Annie E.
Casey Foundation funded several local organizations in an NNIP cross-site
project to support such projects (Hendey, Coulton, and Kingsley 2013).
The growth of IDSs over the past few years suggests that these systems
will continue to expand, both in number and variety of uses.
Proprietary Data
The availability of proprietary small-area data increased concurrent
with the rise in federal data releases. Commercial firms, universities, or
nonprofits own the rights to these data and sell or share the data with
restrictions on access and/or redistribution. These products are generally
created to serve the analytic needs of other commercial enterprises, such
as evaluating a business location or identifying a likely area to market
goods and services. Proprietary data expand the information available for
neighborhood indicators, but they can present difficulties for community
groups and even researchers to access and use. Cost and license restrictions
against redistribution are the two obvious barriers, but not the only
ones. Firms selling products have few incentives to reveal the detailed
methodology they use for computation and estimation. Sales people may
exaggerate the quality or coverage of their proprietary datasets, and users
do not often have the budgets to purchase and evaluate comparable products.
Despite these limitations, commercial data products have proved
useful in some instances for understanding neighborhood change and
informing local policy and programs. A few proprietary data products on
people, businesses, and property that are relevant to community planning
and public policy are described below.
Companies often repackage or add value to public federal data and
publish them in usable forms. For example, the Urban Institute partnered
with GeoLytics, Inc. in the early 2000s to create the Neighborhood Change
Database. Funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Neighborhood
Change Database updated the Urban Institute’s Underclass Database
from the 1980s. The Neighborhood Change Database has several
features that make it easier for researchers to study neighbor hoods over
time. First, using a publicly documented methodology, it weights the
data from the 1970 to 1990 Decennial Censuses to represent census tract
boundaries as of 2000. Second, it relieves users from having to look
up which tables and cells to add together by creating a set of standard