Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Data Platform Housing topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Census webinar demonstrates how to find and visualize housing data on data.census.gov
Summary
U.S. Census Bureau trainers walked users through using table DP04, address-to-tract lookup, mapping and chart tools on data.census.gov, and explained export options (Excel, ZIP) and where to find more detailed tables for manufactured homes and ownership status.
Faith Whittington, a host at the U.S. Census Bureau, opened a webinar demonstrating how to find housing data on data.census.gov and introduced presenter Tyson Weister of the Census Bureau’s Center for Enterprise Dissemination.
Weister said data.census.gov is the bureau’s primary platform for accessing decennial census, American Community Survey (ACS) and selected economic data. He demonstrated using table DP04 to retrieve housing characteristics for Allen County, Indiana, showing occupancy (93.4% occupied, 6.6% vacant), housing‑type shares (72.1% single‑family detached), bedroom counts (42% three‑bedroom units), and tenure (158,955 occupied units; 69.8% owner‑occupied, 30.2% renter‑occupied).
"If you're a lover of house data, you could consider table DP04 your best friend on data.census.gov," Weister said, urging attendees to use the single search bar or advanced filters to locate tables and geographies.
Weister emphasized that ACS estimates come from a sample and are homeowner‑reported for items such as home value; he cited a median home value of $249,100 for Allen County and walked through selected monthly owner costs (median with mortgage $1,434; without mortgage $559). He also demonstrated the address‑search feature, showing how an address (example used: 400 Broad Street, Seattle) produces an address card with linked geographies and a census‑tract filter; he noted table B25077 reported a median owner‑occupied value of about $540,300 for Census Tract 71.01.
The presenter showed mapping and chart tools that use the same underlying table rows as data tables. Using ACS five‑year profiles and DP04, he mapped owner‑occupied percent across metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas and demonstrated charting options (bar and column charts) with the ability to display margins of error. He pointed out darker map shading indicates higher homeownership rates and noted that college towns tended to show lower homeownership shares.
For saving results, Weister walked through the Excel download (presentation‑ready file with source and data tabs) and the ZIP export (machine‑readable flat files including geo IDs for GIS or other software). He highlighted additional Census housing datasets, including the American Housing Survey (AHS), the building permits survey, and the survey of construction, and referred participants to dataset links and technical documentation.
The session closed with links to help pages, email contacts for data and training requests (census.data@census.gov; sed.cedsci.outreach@census.gov; census.askdata@census.gov) and invitations to workshops and usability testing.
