Depave Jamaica, Queens

This map shows where Jamaica, Queens carries the most non-essential pavement, and which neighborhoods stand to benefit most from removing it. It is a screening tool for turning heat-trapping, runoff-generating asphalt back into living ground.

Data tier 1 of 4 — Planimetric + hydraulic New York City supplies the richest inputs in the index: expert-labeled 6-inch land cover, DoITT planimetric roadbed, sidewalk, and parking polygons for the core/non-core split, and a calibrated 2-D hydraulic stormwater flood model. This is the highest-reliability tier, the closest any viewer comes to site-level screening. Tiers reflect input-data availability, not effort. Scores are relative within each city, so the tiers and the numbers are not comparable across cities, and reliability decreases from Tier 1 to Tier 4.

Why depaving matters

Pavement drives up summer temperatures and concentrates stormwater runoff during heavy rain. It also displaces the tree canopy that would otherwise cool streets and soak up rain. Some pavement is essential: roads, public sidewalks, and rail carry the movement a city depends on. Plenty of it is surplus, like parking aprons, vacant-lot hardscape, and oversized commercial back lots. The work begins by finding where that surplus sits and which tracts carry the greatest environmental burden.

How we identify pavement

Jamaica is one of the original DepaveNYC study areas, so the analysis can lean on the city's own high-resolution data instead of inferring pavement from aerial imagery. We start with the NYC Land Cover 2017 map, an expert-labeled 6-inch raster that sorts the ground into eight classes. Three of those classes are pavement: roads, other impervious surfaces, and railroads. We turn those pixels into polygons across the study area.

To separate optional pavement from essential pavement, we overlay each polygon on the city's DoITT planimetric roadbed, sidewalk, and parking layers, then join it to the MapPLUTO tax-lot map for land use and building class. Roads, public right-of-way sidewalks, railroads, and transportation parcels are core pavement. Parking lots, vacant-lot pavement, interior private sidewalks, parking-coded parcels, and excess commercial or industrial hardscape are non-core and become depave candidates. Parking is treated as non-core.

How we identify priority areas

For each of the study area's 47 census tracts we compute four need scores, each normalized to a 0–1 scale:

Heat: the NYC DOHMH Heat Vulnerability Index. See the caveat below on how this is currently assigned to tracts.
Stormwater flood risk: tract coverage from the NYC DEP Stormwater Flood Maps, a published 2-D stormwater flood model, weighted across its extreme, moderate, and limited rainfall scenarios (0.5 / 0.3 / 0.2).
Canopy deficit: one minus the share of the tract covered by tree canopy, read from the same land-cover map.
Pavement burden: mapped pavement area divided by tract area.

We average the four scores into a single composite and flag the top quartile (tracts at or above the 75th percentile) as priority tracts. We then overlay those priority tracts with the New York State Disadvantaged Communities (DAC) designation and a Census-derived environmental-justice layer (EJNYC) to show where environmental need and historical disinvestment coincide.

Headline findings (approximate, latest pipeline run)

About 1,655 acres of pavement across the study area, of which roughly 940 acres (57%) are non-core and therefore candidates for depaving. Jamaica runs non-core-heavy, with a lot of parking and private hardscape.
12 of 47 tracts (about 26%) flagged as priority on the composite needs score.
All 47 of 47 tracts are CEJST/DAC-designated disadvantaged communities, so every priority tract is also a DAC tract. Because every tract qualifies, the DAC overlay does not single out tracts within this study area.

Key caveats

Pre-screening only. This tool scopes where to look first. Choosing specific parcels is a separate step that requires ground-truthing, utility checks, ownership review, and community input.
The heat score is a placeholder. The Heat Vulnerability Index is published by ZIP-code area (ZCTA) with no tract geometry, and the current pipeline does not yet perform a true ZCTA-to-tract spatial join. Tract heat values are spread around the study-area average using a fixed random seed, so the heat dimension does not reflect real tract-level heat. We are treating it as a placeholder until a proper crosswalk is in place.
Pavement burden counts all pavement. The pavement-need score uses total mapped pavement per tract, core and non-core together, rather than non-core pavement alone.
Disadvantaged-community designation is saturated here. Every tract in the study area is a DAC, so that overlay confirms the area is disadvantaged but cannot rank tracts against each other.
Small sample size. 47 tracts is a small denominator for min-max normalization and quartile cuts. A single outlier can move scores. Read the results as relative rankings at the tract scale.

For the full technical methodology, including data sources, classification rules, and known limitations, see the detailed methodology.