When a City Isn’t a City: Aggregating Data From the Picture of Subsidized Households to the Municipal Scale for Research Purposes

Will B. Payne
Lauren E. Nolan
Eric Seymour
Rutgers University

The authors have developed a primarily automated process to take the “city”-level dataset from the Picture of Subsidized Households (PSH), which corresponds to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Populated Place Areas, and reassemble it at the scale of a state’s municipalities. Municipalities are the relevant scale of governance for many critical issues that have outsize local and regional impacts on housing affordability and residential segregation, like zoning and rent control. This article and accompanying R code (https://github.com/willbpayne/NJSOARH/) outlines the reasons that transforming the spatial scale of PSH data may be necessary, and the steps the authors took to synthesize it into the county subdivision level in New Jersey. This effort was done to allow U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) data users to adapt this process to their needs and better understand the correspondence between municipal-level policies and housing goals and outcomes.