| Staff: Ed
Greetings! Morgan Grove with the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) introduced us via email awhile back. I am working with the BES project on doing some land use modeling for the Baltimore region (we are currently focused on Balt City, County, Carroll and Harford counties). A major focus of ours is to develop dynamical statistical and simulation models of land use and infrastructure changes over time to better understand the relationships between land use change, infrastructure provision and household and firm location decisions. Towards this end, we are interested in gathering historical spatial data on these and other variables. We have put together a 100 year evolution of residential land use for this region based on MD PropertyView data and are currently doing analysis with this. We are interested in also collecting historical data on major road improvements (e.g., new roads as well as widening, highway interchanges, etc), sewer and water extensions, land use policies and firm location (including commercial and industrial development) over as long a time as possible (e.g., going back to the early 1900?s would be great!). Ideally we would be able to link these data in a GIS so that we can represent changes across space and time. So for example, with respect to roads, we would like to put together a gis database that identifies the location of each major road segment (e.g., segments of all interstates and state roads), its year of construction, and the year(s) in which any other major improvements occurred (widening etc). We are looking for similarly spatially explicit data on public sewer and water lines with data on the year each segment was put in. With respect to firm location, we have had some success with collecting historical data on employment location for the Balt region at the MCD level (from 1964 onward) from the Balt Regional Council of Governments. Also there is some information from the MDProperty View data on commercial development over time, but it does not appear to be reliably filled in. We would love to have more complete data on commercial, office and industrial firms at sub-county locations over time (e.g., by census block group or tract or perhaps even by address). Lastly, we are interested in historical land use zoning and other local or state land use regulations that are spatially delineated.
I am wondering what kind of data the Maryland State Archives might have in these regards for the Baltimore metro area (and particularly, for our 3 county + city study region)? And/or if you have suggestions on where to look/whom to contact for digging up these data?
I know this is a lot of information and potentially complicated data collection, so if it?s easier to talk as opposed to email regarding this, I?d be happy to set up a time to chat on the phone at your convenience. I am copying Morgan Grove as well as Ron McChesney, who is working to compile data for the project.
Thanks very much
Elena
Elena Irwin
Associate Professor
Dept of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics
Ohio State University
2120 Fyffe Rd
Columbus, OH 43210
ph: 614-292-6449/ fx: 614-292-0078/ email: irwin.78@osu.edu |
