Embedded Files
Background
Background
The Phoenix is a nationwide nonprofit organization that aims to provide a free, active community for sober individuals. In many of the nation's largest cities, The Phoenix organizes events that offer sober people safe spaces wherein they can build meaningful connections with others who share similar goals.
This project currently supports The Phoenix's Houston, TX chapter. It aims to provide local leadership with a spatial tool that allows for the partitioning of Areas of Responsibility (named "Districts") to local volunteers. The assignment of events to said volunteers given the district they are assigned to. I currently manage all GIS data for this project, and the following shows the goals and processes used to create the current product.
Goals
Goals
Divide the Houston Metro Area into "Districts" based on the concentration of events and location of volunteers
Generate lists of intersecting Zip Codes for each District to be assigned to volunteers
Host data in a web-based application to minimize ArcGIS Licensing costs
Methods
Methods
I. Creating District Geometry
I. Creating District Geometry
City of Houston Boundaries Features
Boundaries for Counties and Zip Code Tabulation Areas were taken from the City of Houston's online GIS portal. These polygon FeatureClasses were used to compose the boundaries of the districts and to calculate the Zip Codes which said districts intersected.
The creation of district areas followed the guidelines provided by The Phoenix's Regional Volunteer Manager for the Houston area:
Districts not in Harris County should take the shape of the county itself
Districts within Harris County should follow the general rough regions of Northeast Harris County, Northwest Harris County, Inner Loop, Southeast Harris County, and South, North, Northeast and West Houston
Geometry from these layers was used to construct the features of the Districts class, following the provided outlines for districts.
II. Defining and Populating District Attributes
II. Defining and Populating District Attributes
As part of the outline of the project, a list of intersecting zip codes needed to be attributed and tied to each district boundary. To achieve this, I created a new field within the "Districts" polygon and populated it using a basic ArcGIS Arcade expression.
The expression completes a -150-foot buffer and then performs an intersection of said buffered area. The -150-foot buffer is necessary as the Counties and ZCTA polygon layers collected do not perfectly align, leaving some small regions of overlap between the zip code and county areas, which overpopulate the field when a buffer is not included in calculation. This list is then concatenated and listed as a string in the final Zip Code field.
The result is a field that is populated with a concatenated list of associated intersecting zip codes for each district.
Arcade expression used to calculate Zip_Codes field
Result of field calculation expression
III. WebMap Creation
III. WebMap Creation
All layers were created in a single ArcGIS Pro Project and are currently viewable online via an ArcGIS ExperienceBuilder project. The data was posted online for ease of monitoring by regional leadership and volunteers for The Phoenix and to minimize spending on ArcGIS Pro licenses. The site displays the webmap as well as the attribute tables of each layer (including the zip codes field).
Webmap interface
Results
Results
Upon its completion, these datasets and their associated WebMap were used by leadership in the Houston chapter of the Phoenix to easily and effectively demarcate areas of responsibility for regional volunteers, while also providing a text-based list of known regions for volunteers to have jurisdiction over. This has also streamlined the process of assigning events for regional leaders to ensure full and equal coverage of events by volunteers in the Houston area, allowing for The Phoenix to more fully realize its goals of creating an everpresent community to support those in recovery.
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