NDVI and High-Foreclosure Pixels

Michael Minn - 30 July 2014

The animations below isolate the the top 20 pixels with exceptionally high foreclosure lawn area.

All those pixels are in exurban areas.

When no restriction is placed on parcel size, most of those high-lawn-area pixels reflect foreclosure of extremely large parcels that cover the bulk of one or more pixels. Therefore a single foreclosure causes a sudden and dramatic jump in foreclosed lawn area, even though referring to those massive properties as lawns is, literally, a bit of a stretch.

When the parcels used for calculating foreclosed lawn area are limited to 10K sq meters or lower, this starts to include a number of what may be troubled exurban developments.

From the animations, there do not appear to be any parcels that drop from consistently high NDVI (managed landscape) prior to foreclosure to low NDVI during foreclosure, which would be indicative of neglect due to vacancy. There are a number of pixels that have consistently high NDVI, but those are pixels that appear to contain adjacent agricultural fields.

The gray line is mean NDVI for the entire area.