Open Visualization Data Explorer: Home Ownership

Height: % Home ownership
Color: %Change between decades

...about the visualization

Over the past 90 years, as Americans have bought and sold homes, various regions of the U.S. have experienced varying rates of growth of home ownership. You would expect to find a general trend towards increasing home ownership, but would the trend be the same in all states? Would some parts of the previous century show significantly different changes in the rate of home ownership than other parts?

The home ownsership data set

Clearly ownership increased in Alabama from 1900 to 1990, but with any significant number of states you can't glean useful information by examining the numbers.

 Home Ownership
state 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990
AL 34.4 35.1 35.0 34.2 33.6 49.4 59.7 66.7 70.1 70.5
AZ 57.5 49.2 42.8 44.8 47.9 56.4 63.9 65.3 68.3 64.2
AR 47.7 46.6 45.1 40.1 39.7 54.5 61.4 66.7 70.5 69.6
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...about the visual program

The elevation of individual states represents the rate of home ownership in the state. The color of each state represents the change in the rate of home ownership from the previous time period.

This Data Explorer visualization uses a Sequencer to produce an animation. Each frame in the animation shows data corresponding to a interval in time. Data Explorer takes 5 - 10 seconds to create each frame. Then the assembled frames are presented quickly in order to create the impression of motion.

...about the conversion to web page

In the Mode menu, select Sequence. You'll see the frames appear slowly as Data Explorer computes each one. When the Execution indicator turns black, Data Explorer has finished executing and the animation begins. Terminate it at any time by changing the Mode selector. You can also change the behavior of the animation by selecting Faster, Slower, Loop, or Palindrome.