NYC Tobacco Retailer Location Density per Borough

Note: This is a Hard Level program that you can use to further your Python knowledge by first learning how the base program works, and then extending the program with your own additions.

This repository contains some analysis on publicly available NYC data relating to Tobacco Retailer location density per borough.

I conducted this research and analysis for a few reasons:

1. To highlight a concern relating to NYC Public Health.

2. To educate people on the importance of this data.

3. To teach people about Data Science.

While analyzing some publicly available data from the NYC government, I uncovered the fact that Tobacco Retailers are the second largest small business industry in NYC. Holding a market share of 11%, they represent around 5,029 small businesses throughout the five boroughs of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island.

After conducting some further analysis on the data, I determined the density of Tobacco Retailers per square-mile for each borough:

• Manhattan: 69 Tobacco Retailers per square-mile

• Bronx: 27 Tobacco Retailers per square-mile

• Brooklyn: 22 Tobacco Retailers per square-mile

• Queens: 13 Tobacco Retailers per square-mile

• Staten Island: 5 Tobacco Retailers per square-mile

The above data is visualized below:

Note: I have removed the Longitude and Latitude coordinates of the retailer locations from the visualization for privacy reasons.

The current NYC community district caps on Tobacco Retailer licenses per borough are visualized below:

Key Takeaways From This Data

• There are far too many Tobacco Retailers in NYC, and the current community district caps are already too high.
• Community district caps on Tobacco Retailer licenses in NYC should be drastically reduced.
• All Tobacco license caps are at capacity, with zero available slots for new licenses, but I believe the current total capped alotment is still too high.
• There is a discrepancy in how NYC records and categorizes licensed Tobacco Retailers because after confirming my count with NYC's count of 5,029 (NYC's Active Tobacco Retailer Licenses Dataset confirming this number), their licensing caps dataset shows a total license cap of 5,322 available licenses. Even worse, that same dataset shows a total of 6,885 total active tobacco retailer licenses, compared to 5,029 total active licenses in their legally operating business dataset. This discrepancy is not explained anywhere in any of their datasets.
• In-order to encourage healthier lifestyle choices of its residents, the NYC government should restrict any further Tobacco Retailer licenses.
• Further analysis is needed to uncover why certain boroughs like Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx have high densities, whereas Queens and Staten Island have much lower densities.
• Further analysis is needed to determine if there are any correlations between NYC resident health data and Tobacco Retailer densities.
• Further analysis is needed to determine any possible economic effects on the NYC economy relating to limiting and/or reducing Tobacco Retailer licenses.