July 20, 2021 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
So we should have a lot about the data. And I just talking about why it's important from a government perspective, it's all about the money off it's it's really is. That's a huge thing for us. It brings in a ton of federal funding. And I will say, this is sort of Raleigh specific. So that figure of $1,600 per over 10 years, that could look different. If you are in a different city, it just depends. You know, it depends on your population and tempo of other factors that I do not fully understand. But what I can tell you is when people are not counted on the census, we lose a lot of money and I'll, I'll show you on the next slide a little bit about why that's important. So a lot of how census data sort of impacts us, and I'm going to talk about how we use it for equity purposes in our planning, but mostly we also need to get in front of it and make sure that people are answering the census.
So when they answer it, it helps us understand what the needs are for all of these various programs. And if folks are familiar with WIC, that's called women infants and children. It's a program that helps provide food to folks that may need a little extra help there. It provides a ton of funding for transit and transportation, emergency preparedness, community development, block grants are basically funding to non-profits your homeless service providers, to all these things that are sort of working in the background that you may not know about. The census is driving, how the money gets there. So it's huge. It is tremendously important that every 10 years we get everybody counted because y'all saw that figure earlier for losing $1,600 per person that can add up very, very quickly. So that was, this is part of why we love the census and find it incredibly important is that it, it determines where the money is going.
So the city, and it helps us provide for our residents. I wanted to show you a little more broadly, like what we do with the census data as a city and as a planning department. And then I'll have some specific examples of follow this up through, but just a big piece. And you fought with Lacy data. It helps us understand the communities that we plan for. It helps us measure if we're doing a project that requires outreach and we reaching the right people to our demographics say that the area is mostly young people. And all our survey respondents are much older that probably tells us that maybe we're not hitting the mark helps us tailor our communications plans with things like, you know, if I need to reach out to a community where there are a lot of Mandarin speakers, perhaps that would tell me that I need to be translating my information to Mandarin.
And if I don't know that, you know, don't know how to reach them. So, and then also, and I'm going to show you this a little bit more. It helps me with segregation and economic conditions. And I think what's, I was really blown away by all the math leads you showed, because it really helps us see sort of what the condition is and where it is. And I think as, or sorry, in municipal government and in planning, that's really how we can start to address the need when we know what it is and where it is. So I'm going to take this down real quick and just show y'all this map. So I'm, I'm just going to orient you to what this is. And some folks might be familiar. And I realized perhaps some of this is tools that could be used through census data, but this map is updated by the university of Virginia.
It's called the racial dot map. And this was one of my early introductions to the sort of the power of census data and geography. And I thought this might be of interest to folks. So anybody can check out this website. It has the entire geography, the entire United States will say the caveat. It's still 2010 census data. So just know that, but I'm, I'm showing a Raleigh example because that's, you know, that's where I work in the community that we plan for and what to show you all is. So, you know, there's silver, that's a freeway. So it's kind of maybe a big boundary of the city. The city is bigger than that, but there's still has the freeway. Then when you see all these little dots, those are people and one.is an approximation. So one dot represents 10 people. But what I really want you to notice a difference in the colors.
So blue is, is white folks. And then our green and black folks, orange is Hispanic and then red is Asian. And if you can see that there's some pretty, there is a pattern emerging, as you look at it, you can kind of see, okay, there's a lot of white folks clustered up north, huh? It seems like a lot of the black folks are sort of in the Western and Southern sides of the city. And then, you know, there's a big, there's a mosque over here. So perhaps that is part of why we see a large concentration of our Asian population and just wanted to show us because it really helps us understand. Is there a pattern here are folks of certain races living in different parts of the city. And then this may go step beyond census data, but we want to try to understand why is that?
And if are these people over in north Raleigh getting the same services as south Raleigh, is everyone getting equal access to goods and services? Or do we have some segregation issues going on here? And that's the, you know, it's just an important issue for planning departments to tackle. So just wanted to show that I'm happy to share the link that's I guess, maintained by the university of Virginia and it's, you can look at the entire United States, but just my Raleigh specific example was one I wanted to pull up. So then getting a little more Raleigh specific. I wanted to show an example of how we use census data pretty reasonably recently, hopefully reasonably too. So what I'm showing you, this is just a map that has various census blocks on it. And I'll explain why I'm showing you this, because I know this is kind of meaningless without any context.
So this little, this is Raleigh, this little white area is a collection of neighborhoods that the planning department is doing a study on. And so before we began the study, which we conduct studies to understand needs and to address them typically it's around traffic and housing. And we, we don't have to get into too much detail on that, but just know this area that you see in white is a reflection of neighborhoods that we are doing a planning study for. So what we did before we begin any of the planning work was we looked at the census tracks and you know, this is always a little bit of a challenge because census tracks and neighborhoods don't always line up perfectly. So what we do with our best approximation. So, you know, you can kind of see here, the census tracks 5, 4, 5 block group one, that's like the bulk of the area that we are studying, but then we also needed to capture all these other little areas.
So just wanted to show this to say, we have sort of our best approximation of the data, but there will always be some census tracks that maybe are pulling in some neighborhoods that aren't necessarily relevant to what you're doing. So if it's the best approximation you can get at the block group level is typically what we use. So here's an example of, you know, planning study. We started out here and then I'm going to show y'all a little bit more about how we use it. So what I'm showing you right now is we also conduct surveys, accompanying these planning studies often we'll ask, and we ask many more questions on this, but I'm focusing in on this part because this is the census data that we can pull out to compare and see how we're doing. So we conducted a survey and what you can see here, actually, we can put services to a very familiar with, we just asked, what is your racial identity?
And, you know, people can identify. So you can see in the columns, what folks identified as, and then I know this isn't the prettiest little box over here, but I pulled out the demographic comparison to our study area, and this is using census data. So what I do with this information and what we as planners often do is look at, are we reaching the folks that we need to be reaching? And I think this is a resounding no. So we are continuing to use the census data at our disposal to continue to figure out how we can reach the people that we are not reaching, because we know who they are. We have a general idea of where they are, how to reach them as a whole other ballgame and not for today's conversation. But I just want to show this example. This is often how we will use sub-state as to kind of check and balance ourselves, you know, are reaching the right people.
We're missing some folks, what do we need to do? And then I wanted to show just a little broader of an example of how the city uses data. So outside of the planning department, we maintain something called the data book. This is updated every year by my colleagues who are whizzes with the census. And they, I just, I show a couple examples. So this is generally data that we look at as a city to kind of get an understanding of like, how are the job looking? What's our, how are we comparing to other places? And folks might be wondering what that R dash D Katz average means. And that is, that's a new element for us. We are trying to look at things through a bit more of a racial equity lens, and that stands for racially or ethnically concentrated areas of poverty. That is a definition given to us by HUD, the department of housing and urban development and government.
We love acronyms. So it's another acronym. But what that is telling you is it's the number of families in poverty that are families in poverty that are greater than or equal to 40% of the overall poverty rate. And I know I said that really fast, but it essentially, it is telling us that there are areas where there are folks that are minorities that are living below the poverty line. And there's a large enough collection of them. That's generally an indicator that perhaps there's some type of equity issue going on. So that's why we look at this data is to see, is there something here going on that looks a myth that the planning department or the city could look to resolve or resources that we need to be applying to particular areas of town to make sure people are getting what they need. And then the next couple of ones, I'm just going to pull up some other examples of things we look at.
So, you know, we also look at age distribution and I think from a planning perspective, it's helpful for us to get a sense of like, where is the age of our city at like, do we have a lot of young folks that might mean that you'd be planning for sufficient number of schools and sort of things that would meet the needs of your younger population? And you can see, I guess we are pretty young city, city of Raleigh. You know, we got a lot of folks in the 24 to 34 range. And then the last one I want to show you, I think Lacey also it shows this is we can get some really interesting information about how folks are getting to work. And then, you know, as planning department, what we would do as a slot at the time is understand, okay, a lot of folks are driving to work by themselves.
Maybe we need to figure out what is stopping them from using the bus, or what can we do to encourage biking, to feel safer, or, you know, any other things sort of get folks out of their cars and just generally Boulevard. So just wanted to show a couple of examples of data that we pull regularly from the census that we, the city and the planning department use it for our planning efforts. And then we also share this data out with some of the regional planning bodies that do look at things like, do we need to be planning our city to get bigger because we know the population is getting bigger and how are we going to accommodate those folks? So all of this sort of fits fits into that shoot. That is sorry. I'll go ahead of myself. And I believe that was my last slide. I wanted to keep it sort of short and sweet, but I'm happy to answer any questions or just curious what y'all think if folks have reactions or, and just thank you for letting me speak to you about how we use census data today. I will stop sharing the screen.
Thank you, Sarah. That was great. I think you could also be sharing all day too, about all the things that you're doing in Raleigh. We appreciate you sharing with us. So we saved some time. We've got about 15 minutes left for question answer. If we have some, and that voice heard above that you heard earlier was our check evangelist, Kristen Williams. And she's gonna share any questions that we might have. We do have some more questions and Lacy so far, they are for you. Let's say we have to do this. All right. So somebody was following along with the tools you were showing. And they said that when they chose some municipalities for their region, that consumer spending came up as not available, what causes that? So there will be different geographies. I would say, I don't know what municipality that would have been specifically, but it depends on if the data is published. I thought we had the consumer spending data produced for every single geography that's built within the system. But let me, can I share my screen again really quickly? Any objections going once? Yep. Okay.
So back under, if you go back to business builder under explore data and then data tools and apps, one of the things that's most awesome about this tool is there's a lot of supporting detail supporting information around it too. So there are webinars there also help and FAQ's and instructional flyers. I don't, I'm a little confused on the Minnesota municipality part just because it might not be built in here at all. And that might be where you guys are running into. Oh, I just realized I'm not actually sharing my screen. There we go. You might be running into issues just because of geography is not available through the, through the, through the specific app. But these instructional flyers and overviews will give you information about every single thing that is available and by what geography. So when you'll run into that issue at different places, with different geographies and different data points, these can help you walk you through it. And there's a lot of webinars here listed as well.
Thank you. What we'll know for ya. Yeah. We've got a couple more for you. And then Sarah, I got one for you, Lisa, you mentioned in your presentation that there are data about diversity of business ownership, where can, where can they find? Sure. So I'm going to send my, my email address. Some of these, these are awesome questions. We can go on a long time about this. So we have, we have five or six data sources that have information about who owns the business. One, the one that is built in here, and one of our main ones is like the economic census definitely has information there. And so does the annual business survey. So all of those are available through data.census.gov. It's a super straightforward what page. And it's actually an easy navigational tool to, sorry, I'm losing my voice again. But data.census.gov will have information from those economic surveys that will have that data as well.
But you can always email me. I'll put that in the chat here in a minute. Once I pull it back up and ask me those specific questions. Perfect. Thank you. And for everybody, you know, tuning in, we will put all these links for the census and the stuff that Sarah showed. We will put that on this page with the recording so you can revisit and get those links at any time. Perfect. Another question about the census tools. What's the best tool used in transportation, demand management models, who that is specific and good question. We don't actually have one of the things that we don't have a lot of information on. So there might be a better source. So we ask people what they're doing currently. Like, what are you? So we don't ask them what they wish they could do. That is a major data myth.
And we just don't, we don't have, we don't collect that information. We ask people what they're doing, not what they want to do or anything like that. So we don't have information on what people would like to be doing. You're going to have to, if you're going to be using our data, it's going to have to be how people commute to work. And that would definitely be the best. The best source would be the American community survey, which is just a massive survey that we do ongoing all the time it's released annually or that on the map tool, which is where you can get the information that we have in combination with the partnerships with the state. So either the American community survey or on the map. Wonderful. Thank you. Next up, Sarah, I have a question for you about Raleigh's data book for the city of Raleigh's date of birth. How often is that updated and what is the scale that the data drills down into?
Sure. So I can answer the first one very quickly. And the second one, I might need you to come back to me, but it's updated annually. And the scale is, do you want to ask if I could ask a clarifying question that if that's referring to you as block data or track data, that might be helpful. Generally, we were looking at it city wide, but I, I'm not sure if that's answering your question. I want to make sure I do
Chris, if you are out there and you have a clarifying question, leave that for me in the chat and we'll, we'll get that taken care of for you. Thanks, Sarah. I'll also mention that we'll probably do some follow up with some of these question and answers later. So if you guys think of more things, we'll do that, we'll share all the links as Kristen said. I just want to thank everyone for the wonderful questions and thank you, Lacey and Sarah for your presentation. We appreciate you sharing your time and wisdom today. And one more thing for everybody listening, anyone who's interested in learning more about our public equity mapping feature, that overlays socioeconomic information with your purchase event data, you can email us@engagementatpublicinput.com to get more information. Kristen, were there any more questions? Give me one second. Here I am just verifying. Yes. There is a question that came in nice there. This is for you. Are there any other specific examples of how the census can be used for equity in planning?
That's a good question. The only other thing that comes to mind immediately is looking at change over time. And I was actually really excited to see those tools that Lacey showed us, because I think if we are looking at change over time, in terms of things like racially concentrated areas of poverty, if those are getting smaller and you're looking at it in the right geography, that's probably an indicator. Things are getting better or the people are just getting pushed further away. But I think change outside of the sort of depressing answer, I think change over time is really something the census would help us understand because typically when we're looking at plans, we're sort of looking at a 10 and 20 year horizon. So we know that addressing social issues that are going to change overnight, but if we're sort of looking at it over like, oh, he's getting better over a 10-year period or a 20 year period, but that can be really helpful to keep guiding our work.
Thank you. The questions that keep coming. So there's another, and I'm just going to throw this to the group. What is the best way to identify if there's a racial equity issue in an area? So specifically what census factors should we be looking at? So I'll, I'll jump in there with two, two sources. So most obvious answer is the decennial census and it's probably the best one depending on when you're looking at it. So the good news is, you know, it's easy giving this presentation right now because so soon you're going to have all this information from the decennial census and the decennial census does have really good race and ethnicity data. One of the things I didn't mention earlier, but I think it's, we do a better job of collecting it. Recently we ask what is your race? And that is one question that stands alone.
And then we ask, what is your Hispanic, are you of Hispanic origin or not as a separate question. So we, we get a lot of, we get a lot more information there. Those are both on the Centennial census. We will release that down to the block level. So that's definitely gonna be your best source. And then the one thing I would just mention is make sure, you know, definitely what those data points mean. They're fairly easy definitions, but they're not necessarily what you would think of. We, you can be as many races as you, as you feel you are when you respond to our surveys. So the numbers won't add up to a hundred, so just make sure you know exactly what you're looking at, but the decennial census data, at least for the foreseeable future would, would definitely be the best source there. If you are looking to combine that information with something else, say poverty or income for an area to look at and disparities, there I'd go with the American community survey just because that's released every year and that will have the population information, the race information, and then any income or industry or that's where you'd have a lot of it.
And piggyback on that and say using all of that data, the data points we're typically pulling our gosh, I'm, I'm sorry if I don't get this name quite right with the data table, but disability, if folks identified as having a disability, median, household income owner-occupied and renter occupied households folks where English is a second language vehicle availability and then poverty status, there is a table that specifically is data for poverty status, or I'd also say recipients for food stamps. I believe the census has some great data on that. So those are really helpful indicators of need.
Perfect. Thank you. And we have another says, we work a lot with equity related to water and wastewater utilities where their service boundaries do not align with places or quote unquote places or MSA boundaries, any advice on how to overlay economic data with these utility boundaries. So the economic data, assuming you mean like household economic information. So the good news is we, we published that down to the block group level. So what Sarah was talking about with what they're using as a block read level, that's a really good place to start. And it it's a very small neighborhood. So block group data is usually we aim to have between 1200 and 800 human beings within a block group when we create them. So you should be able to get close within that. So if you can kind of bring in your own, you know, start with your own boundaries of what those those are, and then bring in block groups and you can aggravate American community survey data within those. I can happily walk you through that. We also have people that do focus. We have geographers who can, can help make those containers for you for lack of a better term. But yeah, when you're looking at ACS data, you can go all the way down to the block group level and avoid some of those problems where, you know, when you're looking at a whole city or a whole county, it's really too big.
Thank you for that. And it looks like we have answered all the questions in the queue for the viewers. If you have any other questions, be sure to leave them. And, and we'll definitely do a up here on the meeting site. Okay. Well, I think that's it for today. I wanted to just tell everyone out in the audience, thanks for all the good work you're doing in that community. Like I said, we'll be following up on the session as well as with a recording. And if there's nothing else, everybody have a wonderful rest of your week. Thanks for the opportunity.
Hello, welcome. And thank you all for joining us this afternoon. My name is Tricia Thomas, and I'm a member of the public input team. And we're so excited to be hosting this session today with our guest speakers, Lacey Loston and Sarah Ellis. But before we begin, I have a little bit of housekeeping here. This session will be recorded. We'll be doing Q and a after the presentation. So if you have questions, put them in the comment box and don't forget to check out all the resources we have on the project page.
Okay. Looking wrong buttons. Our first speaker is Lacey Loftin, who is the data dissemination specialist, and currently leads the census Bureau's national webinars series. Today. Lacey will be sharing practical ways to access and use census data and planning. Following that we have Sarah Ellis, who is a senior planner at the city of Raleigh in North Carolina. She has a master's in urban planning and policy and has been at the city of Raleigh for three years. During her presentations, there will be sharing information about issues and opportunities impacting government and how senses can play a role. So Sarah or Lacey getting you mixed up late. All right. Are you ready? I'll stop sharing. Thank you guys so much for having me. I'm Sarah. I'm very jealous of that shirt in the picture. I don't have that shirt. It's funny. I had all these serfs from 2010 and they finally wore out, which they probably should have worn out like five years ago, but I hung onto them and we didn't have as many in 2020.
So it wasn't quite as fun. I'm very jealous of your cert. Thank you guys so much for having me, we a lot going on at the census bureau. I don't think that will come as a surprise to any of you, but we have a lot of stuff that we're looking forward to sharing when the 2020 census comes out and we've also been working on products and tools that will make it easier for people to navigate the data we currently have. And when we released the 2020 census data. So this is the perfect group for me to be talking to. Thank you guys so much for, including me. I'm going to share two major tools today, but first I want to step back a little bit. I know that there are a lot of questions about everything since it's related. Not only do we have the decennial census, which is really our big shebang, every 10 years, we also have 130 surveys going on all the time surveys and censuses of businesses and people and housing.
We look at fish and wildlife and we really do a lot of different data collection and publish it in different ways. So I'm going to walk you through a couple of options here, but please stop me anytime. I want to make sure that I'm addressing the, you know, the needs of the group. And if you guys have any questions, please feel free to put them in the chat and I'll try to make sure we adjust that way, as you all know, and I'm sure many of you are involved in the 20 10, 20 20 operations. I will finally stop saying 2010, right around 2030. I think we are working on releasing that data. So we had our first major release a couple of months ago, just a basic apportionment data. How many congressional seats were going to be allotted to each state, our big, big, big releases coming in September.
That's when we'll be releasing data down to the block level for redistricting, for federal funding of these like $750 billion a year are based on the numbers that we release for getting money back into communities. So that's at the end of September and that's going to be, you will not miss this. This will be like very, very public thing. And I know that a lot of you actually helped us in a lot of ways with the 2020 census. I want to thank you for that. I know specifically that regional planning organizations across the country helped up with our participants statistical areas program, which helped us redefine all of the geographies that we're going to list that we're going to release for the 2020 census. So thank you so much for that effort. I really hope it pays off and that you're able to see what you want to in the data that we release based on what your community's needs were.
The 2020 census is the biggest show in town. And definitely the one that gets the most publicity. It really only has five data points that come with it. The decennial census is amazing at telling you where human beings are living and sleeping, but it doesn't give you a whole lot of other information about how they're living. So we can tell you, you know, age, sex, race, Hispanic origin, and then do people rent or own wherever they're living. That's really all the data that's gonna come out for the 2020 census, incredibly important, incredibly useful, and down to a very small level. So it literally goes down to a block level. For those of you who do not know what a census block is. Luckily the census bureau is not super creative with our geography terms. So it is normally it's just a block. You go walk the dog around the block.
It's the smallest area that you can walk on. Some type of feature that you can see. So railroads, roads, and most common streams, rivers, things like that. So that data, those five points will be released down to the block level, which is tiny. And then we are going to be, but I'll talk some more about some of the other data we have that will supplement the data that we released for the decennial census. Any questions on that? All right, I'm going to share my screen now and walk you through some of the tools that we have that were really created specifically for planning departments and chambers of commerce. And I think they're really cool. We've, we've gotten much more human friendly over the last decade. The internet was like a really big deal for us. Having a webpage helped us a lot with disseminating information, and we've got some really cool tools that pull in data from a lot of different sources.
I know some of you have probably dealt with in the past. I know I did like if you wanted a piece of, you know, one data point from this survey, you had to go here to get it. If you wanted something from the decennial census, you had to go here and it was really a test in perseverance to pull all this data together. And then you kind of had to do your own math, create your own products. And within the last five or six years, we've done a lot more work of producing tools that will do all of this work for you. So I'm going to walk through two of the main tools that we have that were specifically created for the people on this webinar. Stop me at any time with questions and we'll go from there. This is our website. I'm hoping it's not brand new or shocking to anyone.
A couple of things, just to point out, we have really improved this search feature. So if you're looking for specific type of data, one of the things that can be the hardest is figuring out where to start. So if you are looking for information by zip code, or if you were looking for educational attainment, you can type in, and this is actually, it's pretty, it's what works pretty well. You can type in just kind of an overview and it'll give you a whole bunch of the pages that are most commonly actually accessed and used for somebody with the same type of search as you have. And it's gotten really good in the last few years. So there's a search bar, explore data. We are one of the main places I want to point you to here is data tool and apps under our explore data tab, all of our tools that census.gov with, you know, the new release of the 2020 census, we've moved some of our web tools.
And so if you ever can't find something like be bookmarked, a tool or something you really love, unfortunately, at least it's happening to me a lot. Those, those URLs are changing, but everything is here. Every data tool that we have is lifted under explore data and then data tools and apps. So if you can't find it, if we changed the website on you just to mess with you, this is where you can come. Look, this is also a great place to come after we have this conversation, but the tools I'm going to walk through are here as well. One more place I want to point out is our newsroom, where to go, here we go. The media newsroom, this is where and you sign up. It'll it'll have, if you haven't already signed up for our releases and updates, please do this is where you'll find out when data's released.
We'll have a lot of infographics. Every time we release data, we have a lot of accompanying information, a lot of companies, visualizations and products with it. So if you haven't already signed up, this is the place to do it. And this is also where you can go back and check back. So if you missed an email, but you're looking for kind of a latest and greatest that we've released, this is a good place to come find it. Okay. The first tool I'm going to walk through is my favorite Milsons to all of our other data tools, but this is census business builder. It was created by a colleague of mine who is just absolutely brilliant at pulling together what people need. And it was created to originally, it was for people that were looking to start or to grow a business, but we realized very quickly that it has a lot of other applications that the data that was produced your head, a lot of other applications.
So we specifically created a second version that is for regional planning, commissions, or chambers of commerce and what this tool does. And I'm going to walk you through it. Is it not only has a really cool mapping feature. It also pulls data from five or six of our sentences. No, it's up to more accelerate. Now, since this isn't surveyed and we also use some outside data from Esri. So we pull in information about consumer spending from private sector and then a bunch of our different surveys. What's also really cool about this. And it's the only tool that does. This is it lets you build your own geography. So I know a lot of times, if you are looking at multiple counties in an area, you'll have to go pull data for each county and like sit there with your Tia and fully Tia 83. I'm probably dating myself here, calculators and spend forever going through it.
This will create your own geography and do all the math for you. So it's something I use a lot because it just makes my life a lot easier, but I think it will be great for you. So from our homepage, from business builders, homepage, it's census.gov, well navigate to it right here, data tools and apps. It's right here. Since this business builder, you can also use any search engine to find this, just make sure you put census business builder. If you just put business builder, you'll get to some pay websites that can even look a little similar. But back to our main landing page from census business builder, this is the version that was made specifically for people starting or growing a business. It's really similar. The only difference that makes you choose an industry, which is great. So if you are looking to say, understand drywall, be drywall economy in an area, you can use this version.
The regional analyst edition, which is right here is one where you get, it gives you an overview of the economy and an overview of the humans and the population and the housing. So we're going to do this one today. The question I get the most calls on after a webinar is how do you actually get to this? This is actually a hyperlink. We just made it a little confusing just for fun, because we, I guess wanted to, the other thing I love about this tool is you don't have to remember a lot. This is something you can do in your sleep almost. So I'm going to I'm in just outside of Austin, Texas right now. And you can type in either your city. We just added <inaudible> to this tool, I think two weeks ago, which is really great. I think, especially for this group. So we have that as an option as well.
You can use a county, a city or town or zip code as well. If you want to find out all your options, if you happen to be looking at an area where you're sitting at the time, you can also click on find my location, which is how I'm going to start off doing this. So here is where I live in case anybody wants to know exactly where I am all the time. I'm probably one of the few people in the country who knows license is tracked by heart. And then they changed it on me, this decennial. So that's going to be a whole new adjustment for me, but you can hear your options. You've got the Metro area. If you happen to be in one, obviously everyone's going to hopefully in a state, I don't know how you'd escape that here's your county. We also have information by zip code and the cities and tracks as well.
I'm going to look at the county level. And the reason I'm going to do that is a lot of the economic data we have is only available at the county level or the MSA. So while this has really cool mapping features tells you a lot about human beings, living in census tracks or cities, or even zip codes, when you want, if you want that economic data to really understand it kind of need to stay above the county level. You'll find out when you get there, if it's available or not, but you just simply click on that. It's pretty straightforward and pretty easy. And it takes you to this pretty map. And it's like a pretty map. It looks very non-government. So it's always a nice, it's always a nice step. Let me zoom out just a little bit here.
Okay. So here's Travis county. We're in central Texas. The, this overlay is going to give you basic information about whichever geography you've chosen. Keep an eye up here when you're going through this, it'll tell you which geography you actually have. A lot of times I'll click around on the map and think I'm looking at a geography that I've moved on from. So this will always tell you where you are. Here's some basic information population. We haven't selected another one here, but it'll tell you change over time. So how has the area grown over the past 10 years used to be just over a million. And now we're up to 1.2 to six and I'm thinking that's growing quickly too. So that's going to be updated, but the next decennial census, it gives you average income percent high school degree homeownership, and number of employer establishment.
So this will just give you a really high level overview of that county. What's awesome about this tool. And again, not it's something that's really new is if you want to look at another county or another geography, all you have to do is click on it. So most of our tools, you have to go back and start from the beginning and know what you're looking for. This tool is awesome because it lets you just click around. So if you are looking for an area that has more population or less population or any of the other variables, we'll talk about soon, you can just click on it. This overview will change the reports that we can create here. And I'll walk you through. Those two will change according to whatever you clicked on on the map. And so will all this basic information here is where you can pick all of your variables.
You can populate the map with one of the big things I want to emphasize here is every single data option that I'll show you on these drop down menus will automatically be in this report. That you're, if you, once we create a report to the reports, awesome, I'm going to walk you through that. It's a fabulous tool is creates a really nice PDF. It's free. It's publicly available. You just come here and make it. So while we're going to have to decide how we want to populate the map and what variables we want to use, every single data point that we have an option to populate the map with will be on the report no matter what. So you don't have to choose like all of these options for the report. Let's so the blue highlight is Williamson county. Let's say that you want to do an overview of several counties in an area. Super simple to do from here, you click on edit region. Okay.
Get super simple. Okay. They're done editing. So we have, this is Travis county just to the north. We have a suburban area, Williamson county. I will click on this and it will pop up and say Williamson county, which is great too, because especially if you're looking at like census tracks, you will not know the number of the census tracks. And it'll tell you what it is. And then you can just click add to my region when you do that, it should show up over here, keep an eye on it to make sure it does. I've definitely thought I added something and didn't so, and let's add one more just to the south. We have Hayes county, I'll add it to my region.
And then you click on done editing. So a couple of notes here, the red outline is your region. So whatever you've built and the blue outline is, you know, the currently selected geography. If you want to create a report for just Hayes county, the one that's highlighted here in blue, you will click on create report. If you want to create a report for the entire region, which theoretically, if you're building a region, that's what she wants. It's what you want to build for you. Click on create region report. Again, this is the place a lot of people get hung up, bill. Thank you. Just make sure you're paying attention to which report you have here. And we'll come back to that. I'm going to show you just really quickly, how we can change the map. Before we go walk through the report. There is a lot of different information here.
So it's a little overwhelming. I'm not gonna spend a whole lot of time on it, cause it's super simple. You guys can do this on your own. This is not something you need to be droning on about forever, but this is where you can change your variables. It always default to just total population, which at least in my opinion is kind of the most boring data point we have. Right? And you kind of know where population is usually, but under demographic characteristics, we have most of the main data points from the American community survey. So those of you who are familiar with the American community survey here are the big high points. Total population. We have male and female children under five. My five-year-old loves that one. And you can also look at people that are under 18, over 18 people who can drink. And then people on between the ages of 25 and 64, this is our main educational bracket.
And then 65 and older. We also have information about race and percentage of people that are Hispanic or not under socioeconomic characteristics for humans. We have income. I want to point this out too. So we ask all of these consumer and resident points are household surveys. So a little, sometimes we can get a little confusing on our economic terms, but this would be the economic situation for our household. So you have income, educational attainment, disability information, healthcare, how do people get to work? So if you want to see how people are commuting to work every day, we have that available too. And then we have percent foreign, born percent speaking, Spanish, and a couple of other languages here under housing characteristics. These are pretty basic, but they're really useful. I know for planning and long-term purposes, we have, you know what, just how many housing units are there total in an area who owns them, what's the vacancy rate.
And then some basic information about how those, the housing structure is. So for someone's broadband internet subscription, it's pretty new one for us. And then, you know, average house value. Just remember for this one, we're asking people what they believe, their health, what they believe, what they think their house is more. So this is actually the data point that we have that sometimes most differs from other data sources. And they're, they're great sources. It's just a different methodology. So when you, when you look at this, sometimes it confuses people for an area to remember, we're asking people like, what do you think your health is worth? Everyone has a neighbor who thinks that they're the only million dollar house in the neighborhood. And then everyone has the neighbor who moved in in 1940 and thinks it's still worth the same amount that it was then.
So just remember that when you're looking through here, we have annual business information. Again, I'm not gonna spend a whole lot of time going through this, but we also have quarterly. So if you're looking at especially how the pandemic has changed super quickly and rapidly, this is where you can get that information workforce information. How many people started a new job? How many people were hired, how many people were laid off and it's by industry as well, building permits. This is just the total number of building permits. So a lot of times, especially if you're looking at a specific industry, just remember that this is for all buildings that are permitted by a local government, depending on what that agency is, their consumer spending. This is the information we get from Esri. This is based on credit card information. So it's where you spend, it's where you live, it's attached to where you live.
So if you go out to a restaurant in a different state or you're traveling for business, it'll, it'll be counted where your household is just something to remember, but this is really awesome information. You'll be shocked at what your neighbors are doing. And then my variables, this is where you can bring in your own data. And what's awesome. I'll go back and show you. We have a really good step-by-step guide for a lot of this. So if you have information that we don't, that we don't provide here or that we don't have at all, and you have your own datasets, like utility hookups, things along those lines, you can bring it in and you can map it and it can be added to these reports as well. So it's a really, it's a really nice feature. Okay. I'm going to pause there for a second. Before I go to the report. Does anyone have any questions? I think we're good to go. We're going to try, I'm going to try to speak slower. We've only got about 10 more minutes then I wanted to make sure. And I think this is being recorded too. Maybe so will, if not, I can send out some of these links. Okay. So for the report, I'm going to look at the region report here.
Think we're going to look at original report. Okay, here we go. So this is a great landscape PDF, but the first page will tell you what you're looking at, which is awesome. Because a lot of times I will forget what I chose. So your region is comprised of these three counties and what's nice is it walks through like what my customers need, what businesses like mine are in consumer spending. So especially if you're sending this to someone else or handing this off to a colleague or some other organization, you don't have to do all of the write-up of what's in here. It's already done for you. And then we'll just, these are going to be the data points that we had the option to populate the map with. So first up I just scrolled, sorry, got a little carried away there. We have consumers and residents.
These are the options you had. You can change these bars, charts, and graphs to any of these different data points. So if you specifically want to look at the percent of children under the age of five and how that's changed over time, the number of children under the age of five and this area is decreasing. So it used to be 7.1. And now it's 6.4. When you either download this or print, this, these numbers will be right at the top of the bar chart. So you don't have to write them down though. The system will do that for you. And then here's my region compared to Texas. So it'll pull, it'll look at the next largest geography above whatever your region was built of here's information on socioeconomic characteristics. So if you want to look at the percentage of people living in poverty for this region, you can see the change over time.
So good news here. It used to be 14.8%. Now we're looking at 10.6. You can also look at how this region compares to the rest of Texas or whatever geography you'd happen to be in. So it's 10.6 and in Texas it's 14.7. Again, you can choose whatever's relevant to you. Here's housing characteristics, same type of thing. Let's look at vacancy rates and how that's changed over time. It feels like right now in that there's not a vacancy anywhere, but holding steady basically for the last 10 years. But this region has a much lower vacancy rates than the rest of Texas.
We have business summaries. Remember if you choose a smaller geography than a county, there, there won't be as much information here, but that's okay. It just depends on what what's most important to you for your analysis. Here's information about employer businesses and this one business revenue. Not sure exactly why this one didn't populate. I apparently did something that I didn't mean to here. We have non-employed businesses as well. So you can look changes over time between employer, not employer areas, here's workforce information and how that's changed over time. And this is really up to date information. We, we keep, well, all of this is updated as soon as there's a data release, I should have mentioned that this it's static. So for every single one of these, as soon as there's a new data release, it will be built into this product. We have quarterly business building permits. So this is the one that gets a little confusing. Sometimes business comparisons.
You can look at different industries within an area and a lot of information about people that work there and the individual businesses as well, not individual businesses, but the businesses as well. Here's key ratios. We basically did division for you. We decided to do the, the extra work and here's employer businesses and last but not least consumer spending. So here's how you can find out how much your neighbors are drinking. You can also find out what people are spending on educational attainment and things like that, which is going to change really rapidly with the pandemic as we continue to release this information. So it's a nice tie in, this has not come from census Bureau's own surveys, but it's a really great way to understand, hopefully with the combination of all of this, you can see how an area's changing. Are there a lot of buildings going up?
Are there a lot of people moving to the area with educational attainment? What is the change? And then also how people are spending their money, which can tell you a lot about what they need or currently are using as resources. Any questions about this before I jump over to our, on the map tool, I have a quick question. Those of download data. How does that come through? Are they tables, PDF? I have a couple of different versions. You have a couple of different options, so you can do a CSB. You can use an Excel as well. And then there's a, there's a PDF that turns out really nicely. They're all pretty clean documents. Usually from this. You'll want to just make a PDF. If you are looking for more in depth data from somewhere else, we have some other tools that might be more useful, but you do have the option of all three, anything else? Okay. Only once.
Okay, perfect. I do have a question. Oh, okay. Yeah. So the question we have here is, is the as re census GIS information available to the public it's recent. So I assume you mean the data that's in that, the last part of that report. So yes it is. If it's available through our website as <inaudible> does also have a lot of other products that are, that are not available through us, that that are, I don't know exactly what the different structures there are, but all of this information that I just showed you is free and available to the public, through our tweets. I don't know if they have other ways of disseminating that as well. Yeah. You and we have one more specifically about this section. The question is once you create the report, does it state whether the data is for the household versus the individual?
It does. And good question. And I usually remember to mention that one of the things that's awesome about these reports is at least for me, because I've been doing this almost 20 years, but I still forget every single page has information about what the sources so includes total population from the American communities, five-year estimates. And then there is also a link at the bottom of each. So you can, if you happen to know what that means, great. If you want to know more about the methodology, you can click on the methodology tab and it'll tell you exactly. It'll tell you a lot more than you probably wanted to know about how we collected this data and who it comes from. And every single page has that each data source does.
Okay. Anything else? Yeah. You're okay. If we're rolling in the questions, is there utility spending category here under consumer expenditures? Look, they just updated this. Like I said, two weeks ago, let's find out really quickly. I think there is at least information on here we go. Household services. Here's your options for that housekeeping. And then we've got home improvement utilities. It's not broken down, but there is a information about basic utilities here. There's a lot here. I, I know that we honestly, we could spend hours and hours on just this, but what's nice. It's a quick and easy tool. You guys check it out. And then if you have any questions about what some of this means, you can always email me after the fact, but it looks like we at least have some basic information there.
Thank you. Should we stick? No problem. Should we stick to this or do like a quick walkthrough of one more and then we can jump to questions after does that sound good? The good news is this next tool I'm going to show is another one. That's super intuitive. So I want you to basically know the website and you can figure this out on your own. I'm really not necessary. Very much of this. I just want to make sure that they're highlighted on the map is a really cool tool that we used. Another partnership that we did with, we have with every single state in the country. It took us a while to get there, but we use census data from a bunch of different sources and combine it with unemployment insurance information for each state or state equivalent. So we combine this information to have some really cool, well, I'll just show you.
You can do this by a bunch of different geographies too. I'm going to show a zip code. I always use my parents' old zip code. Cause my parents used to complain about the traffic all the time and I kind of made fun of him for it. And then I pulled up their zip code on this area and realized how many people were coming into their zip code every single day. So 7, 8, 7, 5 9 is a zip code just north of Austin, Texas. You can click, you know, you can type in if it's a city, if it's a state, whatever it is here, it'll come up with all of the options that fit that. So if you're using something like Jeffersonville or Jacksonville, there will be a lot of them be more specific. If you're looking at zip codes, it won't be so there's only 1 7, 8, 7, 5, 9.
It shows you where it is, which is probably not all that exciting, but to perform an analysis on this selection area, you click on that button and then there's five main choices. So first you do an analysis of, do you want to look at people who work in 7, 8, 7, 5 9? Or do you want to look at people who live in 7, 8, 7, 5, 9, then you'll have several options of how to look at that analysis. I'll just do one of them and then I'll, I'll shut up and let you guys move on. But again, this is such an easy tool. It's super intuitive. As soon as you get into it yourself and are looking at your own area. If you have any questions, let me know. But again, it's so straightforward. I think you guys are going to be fine on your own. Let's look at people that look at the work for this area, yours, you can do an area profile that just talks about different segments of the workforce, but it gets really detailed. You can compare this to another area. You can look at distance and direction that people are going or coming from to work here. You can look at destination. So if you chose home, you can look at where people are going and you can just do inflow and outflow as well. So let's start with, let's just do two. I'll do two quick and easy distance and direction. Click on go.
Okay. So while this is populating, so people in this zip code, you can look just really quickly, which direction people are going and how far they're going those directions. So if you're going north, there's a much bigger chance that you're going greater than 50 miles. If you're going, you know, Northeast or Northwest, here's your options here. If you're going south, you're usually going closer. And this is because this is just north of Austin. So this group is probably going to Austin. If you're going north, you might be going to Waco or Dallas who knows. And that information is available. It's just not in this chart. It is here and you can look at other directions as well to perform an analysis. Again, you just click back on the little red dot I'll show you one more. Let's look at inflow and outflow. And again, you can do this for census tracks.
You can do this for zip codes, counties, all sorts of different geography that we have available. Look at this. So we have every single day, and this is where my parents were, right? Which is just so frustrating. 48,000 people were coming into the zip code every day, apparently driving my mother crazy because getting to the grocery store became her worst nightmare and only 16,000 were leaving. So you've got a huge population coming in here. It kind of became a business, but it kind of became a hotspot for businesses. Even though I made fun of my parents for thinking. So it turns out they were right and about 2000 stay in the area. So you can really see who's coming in. Who's going out. Who's there to do an analysis on what the industries are for people who both work and live there and you can see what direction people are going or coming from.
There's also a lot of information. Again, really simple to look through yourself, but educational attainment industry age. So you can look at where older populations are going to work or younger populations are going to work with educational attainment are there too. There's a lot of cross sections. They're okay with that. I'm already two minutes over. I will wait until the question and answer section and be quiet for a while. You've all earned it. So thank you for putting up with me and with that, I will turn it back over to you guys. Thank you. No, that was wonderful. We appreciate it. I have a feeling we could probably talk a whole hour about all of these. I've I've seen me do it. Yeah, I've done it, but it's probably better for everyone else. That is not that way. So thank you guys. Okay. Okay. We're going to transition over to Sarah and I'll just remind everyone, if you have questions, go ahead and keep putting them in the comment box and we'll try to get to them after her presentation. Sarah, you want to share your screen?
Sure. Yeah. Hello everyone. My name is Sarah Ellis. I'm a planner with the city of Raleigh planning department and we see that's a tough act to follow. I learned a lot from your presentation. I learned that there are some ways that we, the city can be using the census data a little more powerfully than we been. So I thank you. I'm going to do my best to be as helpful. So what I wanted to share with folks is just a little bit of background on sort of the census from the getting the data side. So we, the city and I, this might be true for a lot of municipal governments. We serve a few roles. One of the roles that we serve is every 10 years, we do assist with the counting of folks. So I don't know if folks do a little bit of background, but I always like showing this slide, but just sounding offensive.
It happens and April 1st, every 10 years. So it's sort of easy to remember when it is, and I'm sorry. I noticed this, the next sentence begins on April 1st, 2020. I know we all know that they had passed. The city of Raleigh was pretty involved in this. So we were part of called complete count committee. And that is a group of local governments, universities, non-profits childcare providers, basically anyone that has a relationship to their community and an interest in seeing them get counted. And we, we work together and try to make sure that everyone was counted in the last census. So that's why we often show those folks. I just want to get a little bit of a background. I also just really liked the photo on the right. That was it's an, a numerator back in the fifties integrating folks. So that asking them all
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