Join Census Tract to both Prison Boundary file and Brownfields file

[lindsaypoirier]

A precursor to national proximity analysis will be to ensure we have a census tract field in both the prison boundary shape file and the brownfields file. To do this, we will need to write a function that performs a spatial join based on the census tract polygon that a point (either the prison centroid or the brownfields point) is within.

Here's a nice blog that describes how to do such a spatial join : https://mattherman.info/blog/point-in-poly/

The trick is that census tracts are currently in 50+ separate shape files (separated by state). If anyone could do this join and then re-upload the files, it would be a huge help.

[gregory-bauer]

Currently do spatial analysis for the DoD and have > 10 years experience with various R libraries as well. Only caveat here is that this is for a class (Open source software) and I have never contributed to repositories using GitHub (this is the intent of the assignment). Nevertheless, I think I can help...

[shapironick]

Please do take a crack at it!

Here is how to make a pull request in case you're not familiar https://help.github.com/en/github/collaborating-with-issues-and-pull-requests/creating-a-pull-request Code for the app is here https://github.com/Carceral-Ecologies/Carceral-Proximity-Analysis/tree/master/proximity-app

Thank you! Let us know if you need any further guidance.

[lindsaypoirier]

This spatial join has been completed and there are new files in the repo:

• an R script to perform the join
• the prison boundaries file with census tracts
• the brownfields file with census tracts

All of the code is commented if anyone wants to take a look.
Next week, I'd like to do some verification on the output file to make sure that things are lining up appropriate.

[lindsaypoirier]

Verification check:

• Open the two datasets in this repo (prisons_with_census_tracts.csv and brownfields_with_census_tracts.csv)
• Select at least two brownfields from each state and two prisons from each state
• Copy and paste their addresses into https://geocoding.geo.census.gov/geocoder/locations/addressbatch?form
• Check their census tracts
• Record outputs in a spreadsheet with name, address according to dataset, census tract according to dataset, census tract according to census

Alternatively, you can create a batch file and upload to the same site.