Week 8.5 (Spring Break): Gulf County Land Ownership

For the spring break week we could do this as an optional lab. It was largely about using raw data and joining tables: we had to join a land parcel file that had no associated data to a tax roll table that included ownership data. After that we were to calculate the acreage for each parcel and sort the data table to find the four largest landowners, which are shown on the accompanying map.
This was a fascinating lab for me because 1) Gulf County is the county I was assigned in week 5, 2) as is clear from the map, a very small number of landowners own nearly all of the county, and 3) it's clear from the map, in which I left the boundaries of each parcel clearly marked, that the great majority of the county was divided up in a very systematic way - it looks as though the division is in approximately 640-acre sections. I don't know whether the division was for the purposes of development (my first thought) or farming (my second, after I saw the land parcel size) but it was very striking. It reminded me immediately of Carl Hiaasen's terrific novels about rapacious developers and other lowlifes in Florida - not that I know anything about the specifics of this county. It also reminded me of how helpful a map can be in making sense of a complicated table, or at least in highlighting some of the table's more interesting features.
The lab itself was quite straightforward. I think the map is a bit more crowded than I hoped, but I wanted the county itself to be as large as possible while still fitting in the legend. I included public land (the crosshatched part) to show how that was a large chunk of the remaining large-landowner parcels. The St. Joseph acreage also includes the entries listed as "The St Joe Company", since that had the same two contact people and the same address as "St. Joseph Land Development Company". I didn't combine the entries for TIITF with those for TIITF/GFWFC because it wasn't clear to me that they were the same thing.