Our Focus
Spark InSites’ area of expertise is the market of Louisiana and, specifically, of the greater New Orleans area, where we are based. Since we live, work, and play here, we understand the dynamics and the behind-the-scenes workings of our city. We know these neighborhoods and we love them.
There are many schools of thought about how neighborhoods should be defined. Unlike City or State boundaries which are legal jurisdictions, neighborhoods are crisscrossed with a variety of political, civic, cultural and socially conceived boundaries. Although the City Planning Commission drafted a map of New Orleans Neighborhoods that is frequently utilized for data and analysis purposes, most folks will identify the “heart” of the neighborhood when asked to identify a neighborhood,– such as a prominent intersection, or a landmark--but get fuzzy on the exact boundaries where the neighborhood starts and ends. Others associate well-known places, like a church or a school, along with the surrounding community to define a larger culturally or socially cohesive geographic area. These subjective definitions of New Orleans neighborhoods can differ significantly from the boundaries represented by the City Planning Commission map of neighborhoods. Another concept of neighborhood boundaries that surfaces in the minds of long time New Orleanians is that of the civic boundaries of the Ward system used for voting. The various and different perceptions and options for conceiving of New Orleans neighborhoods can lead to a complicated map of overlapping City Council districts, neighborhood association jurisdictions, census tracts and police precincts!
While acknowledging that neighborhoods rarely have sharp edges, boundaries must be drawn and neighborhoods defined for the purposes of data analysis, the cornerstone of Spark InSites services. The City Planning Commission defined 73 New Orleans neighborhoods in the 1970s (shown below) which continue to provide a generally recognized baseline for neighborhood boundaries. Spark InSites started with these neighborhoods and applied our own methodology to form what we call Neighborhood Market Areas (NMAs)--representing similar or homogonous real estate markets. The process of defining NMAs is not an exact science. Boulevards are often viewed as unifying NMAs, while major divisions like I-10 tend to divide NMAs. The CPC-defined neighborhood boundaries were maintained intact whenever possible and were grouped logically, instead. Proposed NMAs then were superimposed by zip codes, census tracts, census blockgroups, political districts, satellite image and transportation corridors in order to ensure that they’re delineated in the most logical/efficient manner for purposes of data analyses. These geographic areas--which Spark InSites has defined as NMA’s--form the foundation of our market analyses borders.
