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Anthony Neighborhood Living Quality

This is an Immersive Learning Project supported by Ball State Build Better Neighborhoods, Muncie Action Plan, and Anthony-Northside Neighborhood Association and conducted by students in GEOG 437: Advance Remote Sensing in Spring 2021 under the guidance of Dr. Jason Yang. The goal of this project is to map the quality-of-life for Muncie neighborhoods, and specifically to map the living quality for the Anthony-Northside neighborhood this semester, using GIS and remote sensing techniques.

Four general categories of living quality indicators were evaluated for each house in the neighborhood and fifteen maps were created in this project: one map for Home Insulation; two maps for Home value and Lot size; one map for Lot Greenness, ten maps for its adjacency to community amenities, and one Overall Living Quality Index map.

Home Insulation for each house was evaluated from a thermal infrared image collected by students using a FLIR One thermal camera. Home value and Lot size was obtained from online sources Zillow.com. Lot Greenness was assessed based the greenness percentage in each lot, which was derived from the USA NAIP NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) imagery. Proximity to community amenities including Clinics, Schools, Libraries, Restaurants, USPS Mailboxes, Bus Stops, Parks, Bike Trails, Recreations, and Fire Stations were analyzed using Network Analysis in ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Online. The values of all indicators were scaled to categories of 1 to 5, with 1 being the lowest living quality and 5 being the highest. The Overall Living Quality Index was obtained by averaging all fourteen living quality indicators.