Housing Unit Density

HUDen is a raster of housing-unit density measured in housing units per square kilometer. The HUDen raster was generated using population and housing-unit count and data from the U.S. Census Bureau, building footprint data from Microsoft, and land cover data from LANDFIRE. Generate the HUDen raster from the building points. We first converted the building points to a 30-m raster where the raster value is the sum of the housing-units-per-centroid attribute of all building centroids within each raster grid cell. We then generated a smoothed density raster using a three-step process: 1) calculate a 200-m radius moving-window sum of the 30-m housing-unit count raster; 2) calculate a 200-m radius moving- window sum of habitable land cover (in sq km), where habitable land cover is all land covers except open water and permanent-snow/ice; and 3) divide the smoothed housing-unit count raster by the smoothed habitable land cover raster to generate housing unit density in housing units/sq km. To produce the final integer version of the HUDen raster, we set values less than 0.1 HU/sq km to zero, values between 0.1 and 1.5 to a value of 1 HU/sq km, and rounded all other values to the nearest integer.