Measuring accessibility to urban facilities for East Austin neighborhoods

Despite the close proximity to downtown, East Austin is one of the more underprivileged and under-developed communities in the city of Austin, Texas. A lack of access exacerbates the lack of resources of the poor. It is essential to identify the current accessibility of urban facilities for East Austin’s residents in order to understand how the location of key support services serves to maintain East Austin’s underprivileged and under-developed status. The objectives of this study are 1) to evaluate the accessibility of residents in East Austin neighborhoods to urban facilities using spatial data analysis in geographical information systems (GIS), 2) to compare accessibility in East Austin with other Austin communities, including West Austin and North Austin, and, finally, this study will allow me to measure whether the more underprivileged populations of East Austin do indeed have equal access to urban facilities and, if not, to identify which neighborhoods in East Austin offer the best access. In shortly, I can see that many public owned facilities, such as Sports and Recreational, Educational, Health, and some of Community Service facilities are relatively dispersed in poor neighborhoods in the City of Austin. It should be noted that public authorities have made deliberate choices to distribute facilities in poorer neighborhoods.