
Census to launch API for demographic, economic app builders next month - apievangelist
http://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2012/06/census-launching-api-demographic-economic-app-builders-next-month/56065/
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nkron
I recently spent a bunch of time looking for a basic list of cities &
populations for my latest personal project (list of sales tax rates per city:
<http://www.sale-tax.com>) so I'm glad to hear there might be another option.
I tried their fact finder website site
([http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtm...](http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml))
but it is really difficult to navigate and they cap the number of rows you can
download at a time.

If anyone else is looking for this kind of data, the 2000 census places file
at <http://www.census.gov/geo/www/gazetteer/places2k.html> is pretty good but
has a lot of Census Designated Places (CDPs) which might not line up exactly
with towns/villages. I eventually settled on using the data at
<http://www.geonames.org>. Geonames has a bunch of data but isn't perfect -
I've seen misspellings and places without population data. It's not to hard to
edit the data on their site though.

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sunspeck
Or right now, if you're impatient:

<http://www.census.gov/developers/>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4076253>

