Recently, someone posted a map of the cost of living for states in the US. The issue was that the state level is way too high to look at that. I decided to do it at the county level.
First I had to find a data source for the cost of living at the county level. I found this site, which seems to have good county level data. I wrote a script to scrape that data, and then had a csv with the cost of living and fips code for every county.
For plotting I followed this R tutorial. It was easy enough to follow/adapt, but I noticed the result looked odd. It was much more random than I would have expected, and some spot checking confirmed the plot was wrong. It took me quite a while to figure out there were a few counties that are out of order in the maps package. This still doesn't make sense as I used a match command so they should all be matched up. Either way, I finally got an R script that plotted the data correctly.
The code and data are up on github.
