Hi.
My name is David Kraiker. I am a
Geographer and a Data Dissemination Specialist at the United States Census Bureau.
So we are going to take a deeper dive into the concept of county subdivisions so that
we get a better feeling for one of these
legal geographies. And so what we will do is go to this website, which is called "data
.census.gov,"
and this is one of our primary portals for people to find
data
from the American Community Survey and a few other surveys as well. So,
I will come over here,
under the main window here, to "advanced search."
I will go to "geographies," and then further -- this is list of all the ways we present geographies,
and I will come down here and hopefully I can find it.
Here it is,
"county subdivision,"
and then I will come down here
to "New York State"
and it offers me all these different counties,
so I say "Albany County," and I say all the
county subdivisions within Albany County,
and then I will select one other county.
I know that they're next to each other,
Schenectady County, and I say all the subdivisions within Schenectady County.
And then down here at the lower right, I say "search,"
and then this is trying to offer me some data, but I really want to just show you the map first.
So I click on the map
and it zooms into this area of New York State
and we see two counties.
Schenectady County, let me zoom in just a little bit, is up here on the left,
upper part, and then Albany County down here.
But as we move in, if you can see this, what really is happening here
is that in New York State we have something called "towns" and these towns are
sort of like mini-counties, right, and
in parts of the country they're called "townships," but in New York and New England, they are called "towns,"
and they are also known at the Census Bureau as "minor civil divisions,"
MCDs.
This, as county subdivisions, it's a comingling here,
so you have the city, like city of Albany.
Up here, for example, we have Watervliet city.
We have over here Schenectady city right here. And you can almost even tell what are the towns versus the cities by their shape, so the cities have these sort of meandering-looking shapes to them, whereas, the towns have something more like a surveyed-looking boundary here. But a county subdivision at the Census Bureau is a way of giving you the information and
it is sort of a commingling so that you get wall-to-wall data.
If I went over here on the left and I clicked on "age and sex," it will show me a data table,
give me the map first, but then I go to the table and I can now go across and I can see
all the age and race and sex and things of this sort of populations living there.
And this is Albany city, and as I move to the right, we will see other information.
For example, right here we have Berne town in Albany County, and so it goes across and
across like that, and this is just another way of retrieving data.
If you went looking for the county subdivisions in many of the southern and western states,
what you would probably get would be the incorporated places, and in most states, those are just
called "cities," and you will get the census county division, which is actually a statistical
entity.
It is not legal.
So this is just another way for you to think about the data, another tool for you to use
to look and to figure out, you know, how the Census Bureau classifies different things.