How the Neighborhood Areas are Defined
IndyVitals measures the health and stability of 99 communities in Marion County, Indiana.
Each of the 99 communities were created by grouping individual neighborhoods and subdivisions into larger geographies called "neighborhood areas." These were defined by the City of Indianapolis in order to:
- Have distinct geographic areas for statistical reporting purposes,
- Encourage better coordination of public and private initiatives in those areas through a common set of indicators in order to align diverse planning partners toward a common goal, and
- Better organize municipal government using common "building blocks" of neighborhood geographies.
The geographies are bigger than individual neighborhoods because many data sources are simply not available for small geographies. Also, there are nearly 500 self-defined neighborhood associations across Marion County registered with the City’s Registered Community Organization system, many with overlapping boundaries. Grouping neighborhoods together also allows for a more manageable number and eliminates the challenge of overlapping boundaries that would obscure our goal of telling a consistent story through data.
When drawing the boundaries, the City of Indianapolis gave consideration to historical maps; excluded city and included town boundaries; parcel and land use development patterns; major barriers like rivers, railroads, and interstates; and self-defined boundaries of community organizations. Boundaries follow parcel borders or street center lines.
How the Data are Calculated
The data for IndyVitals comes from multiple data sources, with the SAVI Community Information System (www.savi.org) being the primary source. Multiple methods are used to calculate data for the neighborhood boundaries:
- When possible, address-level data are used to obtain an exact count or value of the item being measured.
- For other data, the statistics were obtained by assigning census tracts and parcel boundaries to approximate each neighborhood boundary.
- When counts are used (e.g., population), the block boundaries are used to approximate the neighborhood boundary.
See "About the Data" for more details about the methodology used to prepare the data for IndyVitals.
SAVI Community Profiles
The SAVI community profile link provides access to additional data about the neighborhood on www.savi.org. Because of the varying methods used to calculate statistics for the neighborhoods in IndyVitals, the statistics reported in the community profile might not match exactly with the statistics reported in IndyVitals for a given neighborhood.
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