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Hi, I am Alexandra Barker.
During my many interactions with data users,
I have learned about how challenging it can
be to access data for neighborhoods.
The Census Bureau does not publish data for neighborhoods.
Neighborhoods are not official boundaries, and still, many organizations provide services
to neighborhoods and need to access this data.
Well, the good news is that you can use data.census.gov
to create a neighborhood area or service area
using tracts and access data from the Census and the American Community Survey for these areas.
Let me show you how.
For this demonstration, I want to use an example
of a data inquiry that I received from an organization in Boston.
They wanted to learn “what was the median household income for the area they served
in the downtown Boston area”.
But they were not sure which tracts make up their area.
In order to help them, this is how we went about using data.census.gov.
The first thing I said is, let's go with a geography that you're familiar with, and it's
common to your area.
And now we know it’s the City of Boston.
The City of Boston is a larger container of their neighborhood.
So let's look for Boston
city,
Massachusetts,
let's look for median household income.
Once I had searched for the geography and the topic,
I can move from all to maps.
Right away, the map will pop up for you,
the issue we have here is we still do not see the tracts for Boston.
So we're going to have to take care of that.
But first, let's look for the tables on the left side pane.
I'm just going to click on income in the past twelve months right now;
that way,
we can get already some data on this map.
As you can see, we have changed here to data variable
based on the income the past of 12 months table.
Next, we need to select a new geography; as you can see shows places here, you can click
on the drop-down menu and right away select census tracts.
Census tracts right here and your map will change to visualize the tracts in the area.
There are a lot of tracts in this video.
This is why I recommend that you do this exercise using the mapping feature to start.
For this, let's zoom in into Boston so we can find our exact neighborhood.
This is the downtown area,
the city hall Boston is right in this area,
and this is the service area for our organization.
One thing is very important to do is to zoom in to each tract and look at the streets that make up the tract.
This will help you determine if this tract is part of your service area or not.
Once you have determined that,
you can start selecting.
So just click on the select tool
on the left side
and then drag the mouse on top of the area that you want to select.
You'll notice that sometimes you may select extra tracts that you don't need
or may leave out some tracts that you really need.
In this case, I need tract 702.
So I can just click on and then click on select
but let's say that I don't need tract 9817.
I can click on that tract and then click deselect.
Now that I have my service here the way I want, I can start looking for data.
Why this map is great, and no data is available,
because, for the tract level,
the Census Bureau does not publish one-year estimates from the American Community Survey.
One year estimates are only available for areas with 65,000 people more,
and the tract population will be no more than 8,000 people per tract, optimum size 4,000 people.
So we need to make sure we change that so we can start looking at data.
Using the drop-down menu, make sure to change your 5-year estimates table.
Whether it’s 2018, 17, or 16, the year of your preference, just click on 5-year estimates.
And you see now that your map of tracts will show some data.
Now that I don't need to select anything else in my map,
I'm going to click on the select tool again just to stop using it.
It's important so you can move around in your map
and do some other things on this page.
So now, let's look at the specific data that I'm looking for in this case for the grant
for this organization they needed, medium household income.
So drop down the data variable menu
and look for households,
medium income.
Once you click on it, the entire map will adjust as well as the legend to show the medium
household income by tract.
So we also show them how to look at the table for the same data by clicking on the table feature.
In this table, they could see different ranges of income as well as medium income, mean income
for households and families for each tract
that was part of our selection area.
If you want to toggle between tables and maps, let’s just click maps again
and one thing I really like to recommend to organizations looking at tract level data, it's to be sure
to take note of each tract that makes up your neighborhood or your service area once you are in this map.
Have it saved in a note because next time you're in the system, you don't need to recreate this map.
All you have to do is start your search by going to the main page on data.census.gov
clicking on advanced search, and when you go to select geographies now.
You can go straight to tracts, select your state in this case, we're going to go to Massachusetts,
and Boston's in Suffolk County,
and then you can look at individual tracts.
So if you know the tracts that you're looking for,
now you have a list with you. You can select them individually and go straight into the data.
You don't need to do the selection on the map again, so it's very helpful to know that.
This feature is for sure very useful for anyone looking to access data for service area.
For more videos like this, visit census.gov/academy and subscribe.
Thank you
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