The Historical Settlement Data Compilation for the United States (HISDAC-US) contains historical gridded settlement layers derived from property records compiled in the Zillow Transaction and Assessment Dataset (ZTRAX). HISDAC-US describes the built environment of most of the conterminous United States back to 1810 at fine temporal (5 years) and spatial (250 m) granularity using different settlement measures. These measures currently include the number of built-up property records (BUPR), built-up property locations (BUPL), and the built-up intensity (BUI), i.e., the sum of gross indoor area of all built-up properties in a grid cell in a given year. We also extracted for each grid cell the first built-up year (FBUY), which is the earliest construction year on record. For larger analytical units, such as counties, we derived the built-up area (BUA), or the number of grid cells overlapping with one or more built-up properties in a given year. HISDAC-US can be used as a new means of understanding the speed, spread, and nature of urbanization in the United States from 1810 to 2015. Some key publications from this project:

Uhl, J.H., Leyk, S., McShane, C.M., Braswell, A.E., Connor, D.S., & Balk, D. 2021. Fine-grained, spatiotemporal datasets measuring 200 years of land development in the United States, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 13, 119–153, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-119-2021.

Uhl, J.H., Connor, D.S., Leyk, S., & Braswell, A.E. 2021. A century of decoupling size and structure of urban spaces in the United States. Commun Earth Environ 2, 20. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-020-00082-7

Leyk S., Uhl J.H., Connor D.S., Braswell A.E., Mietkiewicz N., Balch J.K. & Gutmann M. 2020. Two Centuries of Settlement and Urban Development in the United States, Science Advances 6 : eaba2937, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aba2937

Connor D., Clement K., Cunningham A., Gutmann M. and Leyk S. 2020: How Entrenched is the Spatial Structure of Neighborhood Inequality? Evidence from the Integration of Census and Housing data for Denver from 1940 to 2016. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110(4): 1022-1039, https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2019.1667218

Zoraghein H. and Leyk S. 2019: Data-Enriched Interpolation for Temporally Consistent Population Compositions. GIScience & Remote Sensing 56(3):430-461, https://doi.org/10.1080/15481603.2018.1509463

Leyk S. and Uhl J.H. 2018: HISDAC-US, Historical Settlement Data Compilation for the Conterminous United States Over 200 Years. Nature Scientific Data 5:180175, https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2018.175

We acknowledge access to the Zillow Transaction and Assessment Dataset (ZTRAX) through a data use agreement between the University of Colorado Boulder and Zillow Group Inc. More information on accessing the data can be found at http://zillow.com/ztrax. The results and opinions are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the position of Zillow Group.
Funding for this work was provided through the Humans, Disasters, and the Built Environment program of the National Science Foundation, Award Number 1924670 to the University of Colorado Boulder, the Institute of Behavioral Science, Earth Lab, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, and the Innovative Seed Grant program at the University of Colorado Boulder as well as the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Numbers R21 HD098717 01A1 and P2CHD066613.