Aim

This project maps the proportion of people with West Indian ancestry in Brooklyn, New York. Data frames, histograms, and ggplots were used.

library(tidyverse)
library(tidycensus)
library(sf)
library(scales)
library(viridis)
library(RColorBrewer)
library(plotly)

Methods

Borough boundaries are represented with a shapefile that was downloaded from NYC Open Data.

Census tract boundaries and data are from the 2016-2020 5-year American Community, accessed with the tidyverse R package. Census data includes:

The proportion of people with West Indian ancestry for each census tract was calculated and the census tracts with no residents (NA) were removed.

boros <- st_read("Borough Boundaries.geojson")

nabes <- st_read("nynta2020_23c/nynta2020.shp")

raw_ancestry <- get_acs(geography = "tract", 
                        variables = c(ancestry_pop = "B04006_001",
                                      west_indian = "B04006_094"), 
                        state='NY',
                        county = 'Kings',
                        geometry = T, 
                        year = 2020,
                        output = "wide")

west_indian <- raw_ancestry |> 
  mutate(pct_west_indian = west_indianE/ancestry_popE) |>
filter(ancestry_popE > 0)

Results

west_indian_ancestry_map <- ggplot() +
  geom_sf(data = west_indian, 
          mapping = aes(fill = pct_west_indian,
                        text = paste0(NAME, ":",
                                      "<br>Percent West Indian ancestry: ",
                                      scales::percent(pct_west_indian, accuracy = 1))), 
  color = "transparent") + 
  theme_void() +
  scale_fill_distiller(breaks=c(0, .2, .4, .6, .8, 1),
                       direction = 1,
                       na.value = "#fafafa",
                       name="Percent West Indian Ancestry (%)",
                       labels=percent_format(accuracy = 1L)) +
  labs(
    title = "Brooklyn, West Indian Ancestry by Census Tract",
    caption = "Source: American Community Survey, 2016-20"
  ) + 
  geom_sf(data = nabes |> filter(BoroName == "Brooklyn"), 
          color = "gray", fill = NA, lwd = 0.25) + 
  geom_sf(data = boros |> filter(boro_name == "Brooklyn"), 
          color = "black", fill = NA, lwd = .5)

ggplotly(west_indian_ancestry_map, tooltip = "text")

As we can see from the map above, the highest percentage of West Indian ancestry reported in Brooklyn occurs in the following neighborhoods: Canarsie, East Flatbush, and Flatlands. All three of these areas are considered to be in the Southeastern part of Brooklyn, NY. The highest percentage of ancestry is just about ~64% and it occurs in Canarsie.