Bid rent curves are a useful way to visualize the degree to which a city adheres to a monocentric model. I calculated bid-rent curves for the 100 largest Core-based statistical areas in the United States using American Community Survey data. A key consideration when calculating bid-rent curves is determining the center of a given CBSA. Following the advice in this article, I used city center definitions from Wilson et al. (2012), who based their definition on the address of each city’s city hall. I pulled all tracts in a given CBSA using tidycensus, filtered to those within a given radius from the city center, and then calculated the distance from the city center using tract centroids. To determine rent price, I used the median price of a one-bedroom apartment from the ACS.

You can view bid rent curve visualizations for every US city here.

R/top_cbsas_bid_rent_curves.Rmd is the main calculations file.

R/functions.R contains the get_bid_rent_data function which calculates bid rent values for a single metro area.

R/boston_demo was an initial pass at calculating bid rent curves for a particular city. I generalized the methods I used here in the above two files.