Cost of Living in the USA

Jing Gao Yang He

Sohini Roychaudhury Shalvi Shrivastava

Comparative Cost of Living is the USA

Cost of living is the amount of money ,required to maintain a certain standard of living

Cost of living includes expenses such as housing, grocery, amusement ,health care etc.

Cost of living is often used to compare the expenses between two cities

For graduate students ,specially for international students cost of living of a city or state is an deciding factor to select the target university.

We have used five different cost living indices to compare relative cost of living for different cities in the USA.

These indices are relative to New York City (NYC).For NYC each indices should be 100.

Is this the State for you?

The BOOM towns and GHOST towns

Data Source

We have collected cost of living index 2015 data for USA from the below site :

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings.jsp

This tabular data set provides cost of living data for more than 80 cities from different states of the USA on the basis of following categories :◦ Overall Cost of Living Index◦ Rent Index◦ Groceries Index◦ Restaurant Price Index◦ Local Purchasing Power Index

Data Source

Challenges Faced

Extracting and cleaning data in tableau usable format

Aligning strategic objective of the data and presenting in a visually captivating ,clear and precise way so that audience can understand and get their queries clarified in an interactive manner.

Findings and Analysis Using the collected data, we developed an interactive dashboard that will answer the intended queries.

User can compare cost of living indices of cities in a state or cities in multiple states on the basis of five different categories.

User can have an quick visual understanding on how different expense categories are contributing to the overall cost of living of a city.

Findings and Analysis Housing Index Range :

The data shows the range of housing index is significantly high (20 - 100).

Median -> 35

For approximately 80% of the cities Housing Index ranges between 21-50.

But in few cities - Washington D.C, Seattle, Boston, Jersey City ,San Jose ,San Francisco and New York City –housing index is above 70 which is contributing to the overall high cost of living of for those cities and for that of the corresponding states.

Findings and Analysis Purchasing Power Index Range :

Interesting fact :

Though for other categories ,most of the cities indices are less than 100, purchasing power index for more than 80 % of the cities are greater than 100.

Explanation:

Local purchasing power indicates the relative potentiality in buying goods and services in a specific city for the average salary in that city.

An average salaried inhabitant of a city ,that has local purchasing power 50 can afford to buy 50 % less typical goods and services than New York City residents with an average salary.

So the data implies that mostly people residing in other cities than NYC could buy more goods and services with an average salary than a person residing in NYC.

Data Visualization