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How to use Census Business Builder to plan Opportunity Zone investments
Summary
The webinar demonstrated using Census Business Builder to combine consumer spending variables and ACS demographics, create custom regions from eligible tracts, and run reports to aggregate data for investment decisions.
Brian Berman walked attendees through the Census Business Builder (CBB) interface and suggested practical variable choices for investors and economic developers, including consumer expenditures and ACS demographic measures.
He showed how to select a primary variable (for example, consumer expenditure on entertainment) and a secondary ACS variable (such as median household income) to visualize disposable income proxies across tracts. He demonstrated creating a custom region by selecting eligible tracts (shapes) and saving that region for reporting. "I love report function," Berman said, describing how CBB aggregates ACS and spending data for combined tract regions and produces downloadable reports useful for proposals or presentations.
Berman recommended training on CBB and noted the tool includes multiple economic surveys and some Bureau of Labor Statistics data; he encouraged attendees to use the free Census Business Builder trainings and to contact the local data dissemination specialists for more help.
