Office of Planning and Research Analyzes Student and Faculty Residence Locations in Determining How Best to Use Campus Facilities to Address Space Shortages

Pamela Brown and Russ Acker of the Office of Planning and Research, with the support of Vice Chancellor Dennis Hengstler, have both jumped into GIS with both feet and are conducting impressive analyses that are helping their department deal with very difficult issues. Pamela and Russ have both completed the first three GIS short courses and have launched their department into the forefront of using GIS to support administrative activities. Using US Census Tiger data, they matched the addresses of students and faculty, separately, and overlaid that information with both zip codes and census blocks. For some of their purposes, the zip codes were found to be too big and the census blocks too small. They are now applying the data to census tracts and hope to have found the perfect size to group their data in a meaningful way. They also have used city boundaries successfully for some of their analyses such as demonstrating trends in the distance that students are living from the campus over time. As shown in Figure 1, contrary to what one might have thought, more students are living closer to the campus than ten years ago and those who are living some distance from the campus are generally clustered along BART routes. This seems to indicate that even with the increases in rents in and around Berkeley, the cost of transportation (both in terms of money and time) outweigh the higher rents for most students. Pamela and Russ are continuing their work and we will be able to highlight more of their successes in the next issue.

GISC staff that have assisted Pamela and Russ include: Dana Benson, Anders Flodmark and Katherine Mortimer