Building footprint-derived landscape metrics for the identification of informal subdivisions and manufactured home communities: A pilot application in Hidalgo County, Texas

Informal subdivisions and manufactured home communities make up a substantial share of the United States’ housing stock but receive relatively little attention in the scholarly literature. The time-intensive nature of identifying these often-invisible communities through the analysis of satellite imagery and property records limits their systematic study. What research does exist on these communities suggests that they are often exposed to concentrated forms of economic, social, and environmental vulnerability. This paper uses big data to develop building footprint-derived landscape metrics capable of identifying and distinguishing between informal subdivisions and manufactured home communities based on their morphology. We use a data set of building footprints developed by Microsoft and released publicly in 2018 to measure the size, type, orientation, placement, and uniformity of housing in more than 2000 residential neighborhoods Hidalgo County, Texas, where more than 1000 informal subdivisions have been documented by prior research. Support vector machines (SVMs) and cross-validation are used to test the ability of these metrics to distinguish between three neighborhood types: informal subdivisions, manufactured housing communities, and formal subdivisions (or traditionally planned neighborhoods). Our models can accurately classify these three types of community approximately 91 % of the time. We then examine whether there is evidence to support the further disaggregation of these types of neighborhood, as is the case in both policy and scholarship. Our analysis of the morphology of these communities points to little evidence for the current distinction in state and federal law between pre- and post-1990 informal subdivisions; we do, however, find evidence for the need to distinguish between manufactured home communities with distinct tenure arrangements: namely, land-lease communities that we call manufactured home parks and land-owner communities that we call manufactured home subdivisions. We conclude by offering new research directions made possible by this novel identification method.