2019 Annual Affordability Report 

Affordability Ratio (AR) Interactive Map

The Affordability Ratio (AR) describes the impact an essential service bill has on a household budget. AR represents the percent of income that is spent on each type of essential utility service after housing plus other essential utility services. 

Interactive Map Navigation Instructions

Move your cursor to the top left corner of the map to make the command bar visible. The commands to search, zoom, and reset to the default view are shown. By clicking the arrow at the bottom of the command menu, you can show options to pan across the map or select a certain area. Hovering your cursor over an area will show the geographic information and metric scores associated with each area. The tabs at the top of the map allow you to select the different industries. Each industry is mapped to a different geography as described in the 2019 Annual Affordability Report.

The picture of affordability will look different for a household with lower income compared to a household at median income. The dropdown menu on the right allows you to switch between maps of 20th percentile income (households that have lower income than only 20 percent of households in the surrounding area) and 50th percentile (median) income. Several of the industries also have the ability to toggle between Commission-regulated and non-regulated providers. By default, only Commission-regulated providers are shown.

By default, the map is scaled from 0 to 100%, where more affordable areas (closer to 0%) are shown in green and less affordable areas (closer to 100%) in red. The slider on the right can be used to change the color scaling of the map, so that the maximum-colored value is less than 100%. This does not change any of the affordability values, only the map’s color scheme. As most of the values are clustered toward the lower and middle of the distribution, changing the color scheme can give a more representative picture of affordability.