Exploring Household Data in Oregon

By Natalie Vogel

Using skills I’ve learned in my classes at UO, I put together a sample of the data handling work I can do in R. Here I’ve used US Census Data from the tidycensus package to explore and visualize home values and household income across counties in Oregon. While this might not provide the most in-depth analysis, it is informative and fun to look at!

Let’s have a look at home values

Here’s a simple table:

county	min	mean	median	max
Clackamas County	62800	449940.7	426700	909000
Columbia County	218100	277590.9	275900	362200
Marion County	48700	270969.2	261200	483500
Multnomah County	192900	455706.2	425950	1033500
Washington County	221900	419618.3	406100	769700
Yamhill County	230000	333815.8	291100	545500

And now a density plot - what is the distribution of home values in Oregon?

Let’s zoom in on my home territory: Multnomah County, OR

I created this spatial plot to visualize the median household income across different parts of the county:

Now, let’s look at where all the Salt & Straw ice cream shops in Multnomah County are located:

There are 3 Salt & Straw locations in Multnomah county alone, and they’re all pretty close together! If you look closely, you can see that they’re all located in areas that are on the green/yellow side of the color spectrum i.e. where median household income is upward of $100,000.