Irvine at 50: The changing landscape of housing, commuting, and amenities June, 2022 Nearby amenities by neighborhoods While computing the average number of retail shops or the average amount of parkland nearby is informative, the average obscures what is going on in specific neighborhoods. Therefore, in the next analyses we did the following: 1) we divided all blocks in Orange County into 10 bins with an equal number of blocks in each bin, sorted from the largest to fewest number of the amenity of interest (retail or food establishments or employees, or parkland); 2) we assessed which bin each Irvine block fell into.29 In Figure 5.3 (panel A) we see that most Irvine blocks tend to have a relatively high amount of parkland within 1-mile. The two bars on the left side of this panel show the percentage of blocks that have the least amount of parkland within 1-mile (they are the first decile). The blue bar shows that about 10% of blocks in the rest of the county are in the first decile with the least amount of nearby parkland. Indeed, we would expect there to be 10% of blocks in each of these categories—so if Irvine has more than 10%, this is evidence of Irvine having many blocks with this amount of parkland. In fact, about 13% of Irvine blocks are in this category (the red bar), a little more than expected. So, perhaps surprisingly, about 13% of Irvine residents have quite little parkland within 1 mile. However, the story changes when looking at the remainder of the distribution. Moving to the next two bars, we see that only 1.2% of Irvine blocks (the red bar) are in this second decile (a category with the second least amount of parkland nearby). Irvine also has very few blocks in the 3rd through 6th deciles. Instead, Irvine has far more blocks than expected by random chance in the 8th and 9th deciles (24% and 35%). Irvine is only underrepresented in the highest decile, as there may be very large parks in the rest of the county that are near some locations. Nonetheless, nearly 80% of Irvine blocks are in the top 4 deciles for nearby parkland. Although we just showed that Irvine residents on average have more parkland within 1-mile of them than do residents in the rest of the county, we next ask whether this differs for renters and homeowners. In panel B of Figure 5.3, we see that although there are a set of Irvine blocks with renters that have very little parkland nearby (the bars on the left-hand side of this figure), most renters have a high amount of parkland nearby. On the left side of this figure we see that 20% of Irvine renters are in the first decile, and therefore have very little parkland nearby. However, a very high percentage (75%) of Irvine renters is in the top 4 deciles for parkland nearby. Thus, Irvine renters are not relatively deprived of nearby parkland, as is common in much of the rest of the county (given the small percentage of renters in the top two deciles for the rest of the county). In panel C of Figure 5.3 we show the same information for homeowners. We see that only a small percentage of Irvine homeowners have very little parkland nearby (the left side of the figure), whereas over 80% are in the top 4 deciles (the right side of the figure).
29 These analyses were also all weighted by the population in the focal block. For the analyses assessing owners and renters separately, the analyses are weighted by the number of owners, or the number of renters.
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