VITA Mapping Project

Repository Purpose

This repository will contain all data used for the VITA mapping project. It also contains Jupyter Notebooks that cover cleaning and prepping.

Maps are on Tableau Public:

• VITA sites
• Counties with MyFreeTaxes e-filed returns
• VITA sites vs counties where MyFreeTaxes returns were filed
• VITA sites vs income eligibility

Running Jupyter Notebooks

Census API key

First, set up your Census API key. We use the API key by saving it to a .env file.

Save the .env-sample file to .env.

mv .env-sample .env

Then replace the text <YOUR API KEY HERE> in .env-sample with the API key you just got from the Census.

Python & Jupyter setup

You'll need python 3 and Jupyter installed. You'll probably also want git.

With homebrew:

brew install python jupyter
brew install git #optional

Then install the necessary python libraries:

pip install python-dotenv
pip install pandas
pip install geopandas Fiona folium Shapely rtree
pip install census

Running the code

To run the jupyter notebooks, you'll need to download the repo. Either do that through git:

git clone https://github.com/rcackerman/vita-mapping.git

or download the zip file and unpack it.

Then you'll start jupyter notebook:

jupyter notebook

You should be ready to run!

Repo organization

The repo is split into 2 workflows, based mainly on which map the data are being used for. First, for VITA Sites vs eligibility, we use the files:

• 1. get ACS data.ipynb* and
• VITA sites matched to county.ipynb.

This will create two files, ./data/output/acs_household_income_county.csv and vita_sites_by_county.csv.

The other workflow is for VITA sites vs MFT use:

1. 1. get ACS data.ipynb*
2. 2. MFT Processing.ipynb
3. 3. Merging MFT to ACS relational file.ipynb
4. 4. MFT at the county level.ipynb
5. and VITA + MFT.ipynb

This will create the file ./data/output/mft_vita_merged.csv.

* You only need to run this file once, even if you're rebuilding both maps.

Data sources used

• 2019 county shapefiles: https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/time-series/geo/cartographic-boundary.2019.html
• 2019 ACS detailed datasets: https://www.census.gov/data/developers/data-sets/acs-5year.2019.html
  • Specifically, "Household Income in the Past 12 Months (In 2020 Inflation-Adjusted Dollars)" (group B19001) 5 year estimate data tables at the county summary level.
• 2022 VITA sites from the IRS, obtained via Code for America's scraper. Nb. that we have only included sites where the archived flag is false.
• 2019 MyFreeTaxes data, provided by United Way Worldwide. This data is not public, as it contains personally-identifiable information. A version without columns including PII is included in this repo: ./data/mft_returns_2019.csv.

Data sources for further work

While doing this project, we also found income tax return data from the IRS, including VITA returns.