

Show HN: StatisticalAtlas.com: demographic charts and maps down to the city block - jacobn
http://statisticalatlas.com/place/California/San-Francisco/Race-and-Ethnicity

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jrd79
I'm one of the developers. This site is all about making public data about
places more accessible. We have pages all the way from the national level all
the way down to individual city blocks, and everything in between.

The data itself is mostly demographics: age, sex, race & ethnicity, income,
employment, and education. We separate by entity and by topic and each page
has sections for the stats within the entity, comparisons of child entities,
and comparisons of the entity with peer entities.

Everything is extensively cross-linked, both in the maps, and in navigational
lists.

The data came primarily from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey,
and the 2010 Census.

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gajomi
This is really great. I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was
information available about household income at the "tract" level. I had
searched some months ago for a data set that exposed high resolution
income/poverty statistics at this resolution for Chicago, but could never find
much beyond neighborhoods, or as anonymized sets. But I wasn't until now aware
of the firehouse that is
[http://factfinder.census.gov/](http://factfinder.census.gov/).

I assume the lack of an API for automating calls to your wonderfully
structured data is to comply with the TOS of the census.gov site. Or is this
for some other reason?

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jrd79
Thanks. We may build an API at some point, but it is not to do with the TOS.
The raw data is so big (and we use memory mapped files, not a DB) that it is a
pain from an infrastructure perspective to have available on a web box.

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jacobolus
Is this data from the 2010 census, or is this updated to reflect 2015
estimates? (Is the number of 0–4 or 25–29 year olds listed the number that
there were in 2010, etc.)

It would be nice if next to each chart (or at least somewhere on each page)
there were a more explicit description of the precise data source.

Is there any way in this tool to explore past demographic data, e.g. from 2000
or 1980?

~~~
jrd79
The about page talks a bit about the sources. Everything comes from the latest
5-year American Community Survey (ACS), which is part of the Census Bureau's
data collection. Data from that survey is in some sense an average over the
years of the survey. They use that wide a window to get the error bars down on
the various metrics.

The exception is the city block level data. The ACS does not publish on the
block level, so we fall back on the 2010 census. This is why the individual
blocks have way less data.

No, we don't have past data.

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nhofmeister
Enjoyed looking at the stats for Boulder, CO, both as an interested resident
and because of the range of useful displays. Cool site!

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chitza
Umm... I can't seem to find Romania. It would have been nice to mention "U.S.
only"

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taksintik
Fantastic resource. I could easly spend hours browsing.

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hackthisaccount
How are you guys funding the development of this? Grants? Seems like something
the govt should be providing.

~~~
jrd79
Self funding. Yes, the government should provide something like this directly,
but they are not very good at building web sites that are easy to use.

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dieg0
awesome work, thanks for this. Where do you get the city block and
neighborhoods shapes from?

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jacobn
Neighborhood shapes are from Zillow (link in the site footer on pages with
neighborhoods), the city block shapes come from the Census. They have
shapefiles for all their geographical entities (state, county, tract, block
group, block)

(I'm one of the devs)

~~~
dieg0
Right! I missed that Zillow reference... very cool to see they provide that
data for free. We are working on a project that will be using open street maps
and will also have heavy loads of data, we have geo spacial data on Arc
Shapefiles but we are not sure yet on how to work with that yet, do you have
any tips on that?

~~~
jrd79
We ended up using some random C library to parse the shapefiles into an easier
to read text format of our own design, and then pulling them into packed
binary files with an external index that we memory map in the code to maximize
the speed. The system is all extremely custom and is highly optimized for
write-once/read-many. Making even a tiny change to a single polygon means a
full refresh that takes hours to complete.

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etep
Can't find Palo Alto...

~~~
jrd79
[http://statisticalatlas.com/place/California/Palo-
Alto/Age-a...](http://statisticalatlas.com/place/California/Palo-Alto/Age-and-
Sex)

