ACS Data Users Group

Hello everybody!

I am trying to quantify housing tenure by income by race by county. I already downloaded S2503 (tenure by income by county for all counties in California); however, my professor asked us to show the analysis including race. I.e., we need to be able to show the % of white, black, etc., for different income brackets that are renters or owners.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to merge these datasets (which tables should I download?) to be able to show the analysis he requested? Is it possible?

I appreciate your support!!!!

Welcome Juan!

B25003A through B25003I are the race-iterations of the main owner vs. renter table (B25003). Some notes:

• Decide for yourself if B25003A vs. B25003H are best for your needs (white vs. non-Hispanic white). The other race groups don't have these two table options. (For example, B25003B includes both Hispanic and non-Hispanic Black or African American, etc.)
• The race here is of the "householder" - a person in whose name the unit is leased/bought/mortgaged/etc. and who answers the form as "person 1." Interracial households can be a coinflip as to which table they show up in.

As far as tenure by income, the simplest table is B25118.

I am not aware of a table for housing tenure by income by race. You might have to go to PUMS for this.

Best of luck on your project.

-Diana

Juan:

Diana's recommendations are totally spot-on / correct. A county level tabulation on households by owner/renter tenure by race/ethnicity of householder by household income level, is just not (directly) available from the ACS.

I would recommend using iPUMS to obtain your data (ACS 2015-2019, 5 years PUMS). You could re-code race/ethnicity of householder into black/non-hispanic, white/non-hispanic, hispanic (any race), etc, and recode household income levels to whatever income groups make sense.

Geography in PUMS is tricky. The iPUMS people have done an amazing job: you can obtain PUMS data for LARGE counties (100,000+) population where the PUMAs nest within counties. So, you can get county-level PUMS estimates for the 34 largest counties in California. The other 24 counties in California are grouped together in what I call 7 super-counties (e.g., Mendocino + Lake Counties; Monterey + San Benito Counties.)

iPUMS is an amazing, wonderful resource. I wish it was around when I started my career 40 years ago!!

Yes I did something like this here for zip code and for income I just grabbed household income by race to see if the effect was different in higher-income Black areas (not really) -- zip code is not an optimal geography but some of my examples in suburban Chicago were defined by zip code as was the federal housing price index so it worked out well https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2018/10/16/owning-real-estate-has-not-panned-out-for-many-african-americans

I imagine if this is an assignment, your professor probably has a dataset in mind for you to use so I would check with them. However, you can find that data in HUD's CHAS tables (www.huduser.gov/.../cp.html). The CHAS tables are based on the ACS but created specifically for housing grants and evaluations.