GIS 335 Final Project - Suitable Land-Area for a Real Estate Client

Introduction
This investigation will be focused on Eau Claire County in Wisconsin.  A client recently consulted with me and would like to look at potential areas in Eau Claire County to build a house.  The client wants to buy land, but he is very selective with the land and required specific criteria that must be met before he decides which land to buy in Eau Claire County.  The client stated that he does not want to live within 5 miles of a railroad, and 2 miles of a county highway due to sensitive hearing.  Furthermore, the client has stated he is a devout atheist and does not want to be within 2 miles of any church within Eau Claire County.  Any land that does not fall in these uninhabitable areas is suitable land to the client.  This project will determine what areas in Eau Claire Count meet all the criteria of the client for suitable living.  This specific project is important or future realty because, while it’s highly unlikely that other clients seeking realtor services will look for the same exact criteria of this specific client, similar methods could be used to find suitable land for other clients in real life.  ArcGIS is an extremely valuable tool which has potential to be used in several academic disciplines and industries in the real world.  This project provides substantial evidence that use of ArcGIS could actually be used by realtors as a spatial analysis tool.

Data Sources

To assist in answering this spatial question, the following feature classes were used for this project:

“Esri2013.DBO.rail100k_usadata,” “Esri201.DBO.highways_usadata,” and “Esri2013.DBO.gchurch_usadata.”  Rail100k_usadata is a polyline shapefile made by Esri 2013.  Highways_usadata is a polyline shapefile made by Esri 2013.  Gchurch_usadata is a point shapefile created by Esri 2013. 

There are some concerns with this data and the primary data concern during this project is that some of the data is not as recent as preferred.  The Esri data is only three years old, but there could be potential problems and new features that now exist.  For example, new churches could have been built since 2013. If time constraints were not given for this project, seeking out more recent data would be a priority for project accuracy. 

Methods

A flowchart of the methods used for this lab is displayed above.  Layers are displayed in blue, spatial tools are displayed in yellow, and the resulting output classes from using those spatial tools are displayed in green. 

The first step was to add the states and counties layer from the USA geodatabase in our mgisdata folder.  The next step was to select Eau Claire county using SQL and create a separate layer from that selection.  Then a blank File geodatabase was created in the lab 4 folder to store all the data for this project.  Data was then browsed from the Esri data that the server provided.  After all the Esri feature classes were dragged onto the data view, the clip tool was used to clip all those features of interest. 

To solve the problems of the client, a 5-mile buffer was made around all railroads within Eau Claire County.  Then, another 2-mile buffer was made around all churches and county highways within Eau Claire County.  All three buffers that were created were also dissolved to remove the lines between the polygons that were created from the aforementioned buffers. The union tool was then used to join all 3 buffers to determine all unsuitable land and to make it look more aesthetically pleasing.  Finally, to find the suitable area of the client, the resulting layers were all erased from the county layer.  The leftover area was created into a layer called “suitable area.”  The query (1), clip (3), buffer (3), dissolve (3), union (1), and erase (1) tools were all used for this project.

Results

The final map below is displaying suitable land displayed in green and unsuitable land displayed in a grey colored “100-year flood overlay” which was selected for clarity purposes.  The map also shows county highways in red, county railroads in yellow, and all county churches with a black-cross symbol.  Much of the county land-area is deemed unsuitable because of the City of Eau Claire in the NW part of the county which contains several churches, surrounding county highways, and county railroads that run through the city.  There are plenty of “pockets” of suitable land south of the City of Eau Claire, but these pockets still are in between and surrounded by churches (in spite of being far enough away from the 5 and 2 mile buffers).   The most desirable land-area appears to be in the eastern part of the county, just northeast of the town of Fall Creek and Highway 12 as there are churches sparsely located and a large portion of land without any railroads or highways. 

Evaluation

This study is part of an introductory GIS class and therefore has a limited scope and area of interest. Being asked to repeat the project with less time restraints would allow the option to pursue additional recent data. Also, it would be interesting to use the spatial layers to develop a zoned map where the further an area is from the unsuitable land, the more ideal it is for the client. That type of zoned map would likely require additional tools such as the multiple ring buffer, which was not used in this project.

This project was very valuable and skills were definitely developed in spatial analysis, which is the core part of GIS 335.   This project allowed GIS users to construct a complex methodology to solve a hypothetical problem. The methodology which was employed for this project could easily be applied to similar real-world problems and therefore, this project was very important in growing critical thinking skills.

Sources

 Esri ArcGIS content team (10th edition, 2010-06-30), rail100k_usadata, Provided on geography database, 12/15/1

Esri ArcGIS content team (10th edition, 2010-06-30), Esri2013.DBO.gchurch_usadata, Provided on geography database, 5/13/2016

Esri ArcGIS content team (10th edition, 2010-06-30), ESRI2013.DBOhighways_usadata, Provided on geography database, 5/13/2016