Weekly Data Story
Age is nothing but a number. From a building stock perspective, age provides interesting construction insights about Baltimore’s residential building stock. As any city, the building stock was constructed over a period of time which implies that similar materials would be used for specific periods. Foremost, certain materials used in the construction of any of type of buildings are more prone to capturing heat which can lead to making the urban heat island effect more pronounced. If the urban heat effect is more pronounced, then heat vulnerability should increase for that specific area, if certain mitigation initiatives are not taken.
Let’s take a look at the maps and video. On the left side, we have Baltimore’s UHI and the right side a Tetris looking building stock age map. (Gold/Yellow newer buildings while Orange older buildings). We also included a video using Kepler’s excellent 3D animated tools (Sorry, sadly, we both like House music and Ryan nicely tossed it into the background).
The main takeaway from the spatial analysis are the following things:
1. A larger percent of the older buildings are in the lower center and western parts of the city
2. It appears the urban heat island effect “seems” to overlay over the older building areas
3. Older building areas seem to be correlated to certain building types
Authors: Ryan Kmetz & Jose Pillich
