A Graphical Retrospective of 2019 Police Reports In the Historic Bon Air Neighborhood

The following are some graphs from police reports in the Bon Air Neighborhood for the Bon Air Neighborhood based on data posted by the Louisville Metro Police Department at https://data.louisvilleky.gov/dataset/crime-reports/resource/6d81fdf8-27e7-41ac-9ae4-1bfd8730f002   

As usual it includes the police reports within the boundaries of the historical Bon Air Neighborhood as defined:
1) Bardstown Road on the West  
2) Hikes Lane on the South
3) Furman Blvd on the East and

4) Taylorsville Rd and the Watterson Expressway on the North. 

It is a Microsoft Excel file that required manipulation and sorting.  Three relevant variables were created for month, zone and day of week.  All of the missing person reports for 2300 Goldsmith Lane were removed.  The edited Excel CSV file was then loaded into JASP, which is an open source statistical package.  This analysis does include events that happen on the edge of the neighborhood.

Not all of the results were practical to show.  There were 625 police reports.  There were too many different types of crime reports to show and too many different streets to show graphically. If requested,  I will be happy to create something with the software . . . if it is possible.

It was obvious that the 40218 portion had more of the crime reports. The next obvious result is that the Bon Air zone had the most reports.

August was the month with the most police reports in 2019. 

Monday was the day of the week with the most reports. 

Here is a list of where the police reports were at by premise or type of property.  You can draw inferences where the different reports were made. 

It is hoped that 2020 is a safer year in the Bon Air Neighborhood with fewer police reports.  The Bon Air Neighborhood Neighborhood Association is very much in support of neighborhood watches, especially in light of expected Metro Government budget cuts that will likely affect LMPD.  The more we engage in crime prevention, the more we allow Louisville's Finest to attend to higher priority situations. 

I hope that you can come to BANA's next general membership meeting on Monday, March 9, 2020 at 6:30 pm at Buechel Park Baptist Church. 

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Bon Air Housing Values: Values by Zone

This is the fourth in a series of posts about housing values in the historic Bon Air Neighborhood.as defined by the following boundaries: Furman Blvd on the east, Hikes Lane on the south, Bardstown Road on the East, and the Watterson Expressway/Taylorsville Rd on the North.

The database for this research was created from the Jefferson County Property Valuation Administrator (PVA) website and the Lojic.org website.  Both have similar data, but the PVA site could be pasted into an Excel file. The database was compiled between February 2019 and December 2019. The information was subject to some change based on property sales and re-evaluations.

The statistical software that is being used for the analysis is JASP which is an open source program created by the University of Amsterdam.

The data set was adjusted one more time from last week to eliminate an apartment house did not get removed last week.

To cut to the chase,(and as illustrated in the box plot diagram)  housing values tend to be higher in the Bon Air Estates zone with a higher median (middle value) price of $141,800. It has a standard deviation of 28571, which means the majority of the values run between  and  113117 and 170259.

The Bon Air zone had the next highest median price with $135,000. It had a wider standard deviation of 30215 which means the majority of values run between $109656 and $170086.

The Highgate Springs zone has the lowest median price with $132,540.  The standard deviation was 26069 which means the values mainly ran between $108092 and $160230.

Nerd alert here for a moment.  The mode is the most repeating value in a set of data.  The mode in both Bon Air and Bon Air Estates is lower than the median (middle point of rank order) and mean (mathematical average). 

However, the most recurring value for Highgate Springs ($155,000) is way higher than the both the mean ($134161) and the median ($132,540).    Why is this? 

Maybe we should do one more thing here and create another chart called a "histogram" to look at how the values are spread out.

Here they are . . .

So, with these charts, we have to talk again about "skewness," which means distortion, but what pulls the numbers in a direction.

The Highgate Springs numbers are almost normally distributed but have a positive skewness (skewness value of 0.405), which could answer for why the mean and median are lower than than the mode. In real terms there are more higher house values that skew the center of values.  Nerd moment over.

To finish the skewness thoughts, the Bon Air numbers are positively skewed by a number of very high value houses.  The Bon Air Estates housing values are actually negatively skewed by a few lower values. 

Overall, the values reflect the diversity in housing stock.  Even though it was excluded from this data set, the oldest house in existence is the Bray Mansion (now the Bashford Manor Bed and Breakfast), followed by one of he original Hikes homes, and a few other older farm houses built prior to the development of the 1950's.   From 1952 to approximately 1957, a number of different developers built different models of houses at different price points for a number of different customer bases. 

While not perfectly homogeneous, the Bon Air Estates zone is the most consistent in having houses with larger square footage and basements. This reflects the higher median value.

The Highgate Springs zone has more diversity in housing stock than Bon Air Estates, but less than Bon Air.  There are blocks with what could be called tract or identical houses.  Some of these blocks are of higher value that include being brick houses with basements.  There are a number of blocks that are the the California Ranch (or kit houses) and the US Steel prefabricated houses (basic three-bedroom ranch houses on concrete slabs).

The Bon Air zone has the most diverse tracts with a variety of house models and values.  The higher valued houses skew the overall numbers. 

As I have written this post, I have had good memories from my time in J.Allen Whitt's class at the  University of Louisville learning SPSS and regression analysis.  Dr Whitt was also one of my dissertation advisers.  I have gratitude for his tutelage in understanding statistics and writing up research.   










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Bon Air Housing Values: A Second Look at Overall Values With Better Software

This is the third in a series of a look at housing values in the Bon Air Neighborhood as defined by the following boundaries: Furman Blvd on the east, Hikes Lane on the south, Bardstown Road on the East, and the Watterson Expressway/Taylorsville Rd on the North.

I confess that as I have written this post, it is the kind of stuff that is more egghead and boring and I hope that I do not sound too much like that weird guy you hated because he was actually excited about statistics class and he wrecked the bell curve.

The database for this research was created from the Jefferson County Property Valuation Administrator (PVA) website and the Lojic.org website.  Both have similar data, but the PVA site could be pasted into an Excel file. The database was compiled between February 2019 and December 2019. The information was subject to some change based on property sales and re-evaluations.

The statistical software that is being used for the analysis is JASP which is an open source program created by the University of Amsterdam.

The dataset was adjusted to eliminate non-housing properties that reduced the data set from 1995 cases (used in the last post) down to 1975 cases (or properties with houses on them).

An initial run of descriptive statistics was run with the following results:

Statistical Table with Min and Max

Descriptive Statistics
		VALUE
Valid		1975
Missing		13
Mean		138316.319
Median		135000.000
Mode		155000.000
Std. Deviation		30185.350
Skewness		1.555
Std. Error of Skewness		0.055
Kurtosis		11.110
Std. Error of Kurtosis		0.110
Range		468400.000
Minimum		2110.000
Maximum		470510.000
25th percentile		118650.000
50th percentile		135000.000
75th percentile		153900.000

The most valuable numbers out of this table are the Mean (average) and Median (middle point of the numbers).  For Bon Air as a whole the mean or average home value was $138,216.  The Median was 135,000.  This initially would say that matters are an even deal, however, when you look at graphics--especially the bar graph at the beginning of this post, it is very skewed or distorted. to the higher values with a value of 1.555 (should be 1 or less).

The skewness makes some sense when you see a range of $470510 (distance between highest and lowest number.  The maximum home value was $470510 and the lowest privately held property is $2110.  The highest valued property is a bed and breakfast and the lowest value is a piece of that triangle/cemetery at Bon Air and Goldsmith Lane (that one crooked part).

 So, an adjustment was made by taking out the highest and lowest properties and re-running the analysis. Here are the results

Adjusted Descriptive Statistics

Descriptive Statistics
		VALUE
Valid		1973
Missing		13
Mean		138216.984
Median		135000.000
Mode		155000.000
Std. Deviation		29098.145
Skewness		1.045
Std. Error of Skewness		0.055
Kurtosis		4.487
Std. Error of Kurtosis		0.110
Range		315620.000
Minimum		5000.000
Maximum		320620.000
Sum		2.727e +8

Cutting out the highest and lowest value did fix the skewness or distortion and it was significant that the mean (average) median (middle) values stayed virtually the same. Of course the range was shortened down to $315,620 with a high value of $320,620 and a vacant property value of $5000.

At this point that silly term "standard deviation" might be of some value.  It is a group of numbers that cluster around the average or mean.   Before adjustment the standard deviation was  $30,185.  After adjustment the standard deviation was $29,098.  It changed less than $1000.  Before I lose anyone else, let's look at a graph called a "Box Plot."

The box plot is valuable in illustrating the standard deviation in this case. It shows the majority of the housing values cluster between approximately $130,000 and $170,000.  That is the middle of the pack.  If we were to be precise, the central tendency of the housing values in the neighborhood are between $149,549 and $120451. The cluster appears to be just bigger than the standard deviation. There are a few outliers that still skew the data but not as much.

The next planned post in this series will be about the values of houses in the different zones.  It might explain some of the overall housing values.

We in the Bon Air Neighborhood Association are about doing things that improve our housing values and that includes our current arts development initiative.  We hope that you will join us as a member if you are not already one.  Our next meeting is tomorrow, Monday February 10, 2020 at 6:30 pm in the Bon Air Library on the "Boulevard."

Bon Air Crime Analysis for January 2020. Reports were up.

This is an analysis for January, 2020 based on data posted by the Louisville Metro Police Department at https://data.louisvilleky.gov/dataset/crime-reports/resource/6d81fdf8-27e7-41ac-9ae4-1bfd8730f002 

It is a Microsoft Excel file that requires just a touch of manipulation and sorting and beginning this year it was loaded into JASP, which is an open source statistical package.  This analysis does include events that happen on the edge of the neighborhood.  



I am still getting familiar with the JASP package and while it can tabulate things more readily and produce some nice tables and graphics, the nature of this analysis is still rudimentary.

Overall there were 51 reports in the neighborhood.  This is up from 26 reports in December

Crime Reports by Zip Code

Binomial Test
Variable		Level		Counts		Total		Proportion		p
ZIP_CODE		40218		30		51		0.588		0.262
		40220		21		51		0.412		0.262
Note.  Proportions tested against value: 0.5. Type of Crime Reports in Bon Air, January 2020 Binomial Test Variable Level Counts Total Proportion p CRIME_TYPE ASSAULT 7 51 0.137 < .001 BURGLARY 4 51 0.078 < .001 DRUGS/ALCOHOL VIOLATIONS 3 51 0.059 < .001 FRAUD 4 51 0.078 < .001 MOTOR VEHICLE THEFT 4 51 0.078 < .001 OTHER 17 51 0.333 0.024 THEFT/LARCENY 7 51 0.137 < .001 VANDALISM 2 51 0.039 < .001 VEHICLE BREAK-IN/THEFT 3 51 0.059 < .001 Note.  Proportions tested against value: 0.5. This is a chart of type of crimes per zip code.  Types of Crimes by Zip Code Contingency Tables ZIP_CODE CRIME_TYPE 40218 40220 Total ASSAULT 1 6 7 BURGLARY 3 1 4 DRUGS/ALCOHOL VIOLATIONS 3 0 3 FRAUD 1 3 4 MOTOR VEHICLE THEFT 2 2 4 OTHER 13 4 17 THEFT/LARCENY 4 3 7 VANDALISM 1 1 2 VEHICLE BREAK-IN/THEFT 2 1 3 Total 30 21 51 The other category mostly included 13 missing person reports. Eleven of those were at Boys and Girls Haven.  Again my heart goes out to the staff at Boys and Girls Haven, because the reality of adolescents in residential care is that they often lack a sense of gratitude for a place to stay, but then again they also have trauma and reactive-attachment issues that make it difficult for them to stay in one place. The rest of the "other category was either  related to domestic violence or some other crime.   Regarding the assault reports, six of them were in the apartments on Masemure (just south of  Seneca High School).  The other was in the 2800 block of Hikes Lane (at the intersection of Goldsmith and Hikes).  The motor vehicle thefts happened on the 3500 block of Lisbon Lane, the 3100 block of Radiance, the 2800 block of Dell Brooke, and in the parking lot of a hotel at 3300 Bardstown Road. The Burglaries happened in two locations: a business at 2200 Goldsmith Lane, what appears to be a church on Hikes Lane and a home on Hendon Rd. The thefts/larcenies  were spread out across the neighborhood. No particular pattern seemed worth reporting.  The drug/alcohol violations were all along the west end of the neighborhood. Two of the charges were a day apart at a hotel at 3300 Bardstown Rd. The other report was at the intersection of Hikes Lane and Buechel Bypass. Otherwise, it is a good thing that many of you have doorbell cameras.  They are great deterrents to crime.  The Bon Air Neighborhood Association is still supporting residents who want to organize block watches.  We would be happy to discuss it more at our next meeting at the Bon Air Library on Febuary 10, 2020 at 6:30 pm.

  

Yes, we are sticking letters in your doors, and yes, if you are going to have your front door open, clothes are indicated.

So the name of the street will remain nameless, but it was a great afternoon to walk Bon Air Streets and put membership letters in door.

Our goal is to get the message out that we are here and we want you to play a part.  Febuary 2, 2020, Ground Hog Day . . . and Super Bowl Sunday was a fantastic day to deliver the message.

It was not without some hazards.  If you have a door bell camera, yes it was me in my Iowa State sweatshirt walking on some streets.   If you were in your living room with your front door open I was going to give you my spiel. There was one exception . . . the man with his front door open in front of what was probably the Super Bowl pre-game show.  He was in a recliner and was covered with a blanket. 

I said I hi.

He said, "I'm not wearing clothes.'

I said, "I'll leave this in the door so you can come and get when you are wearing clothes."

That aside, I hope that if you saw the letter. You will give it some thoughts and come to the next Bon Air Neighborhood Association meeting, in the Bon Air Library on Monday, February 10, 2020 at 6:30 pm.

Oh yes . . . thankfully I forgot which house the guy was in . . .awkward.