ACS Data Users Group

I am needing to get the demographics for a small fire district located just outside Kansas City. It's a small district- all volunteer Fire District but the boundary lines cross over into the edge of 2 neighboring towns. Ideally, if there was a way to pull the data by identifying the street names would be the most accurate. Anyone have any suggestions on how to go about this? There are probably about 1,200 households in the district.

Thank you.

I'm assuming that your fire district was NOT drawn as a collection of census blocks or some other type of census geography (e.g., tracts or block groups). Is there a GIS file from which a map of the fire district can be created? This would be an ESR-style shapefile or some other typeof GIS file (e.g., KML). That could be a starting point for what you want to do. Is there some other file identifying boundaries of the fire district? With either of these types of inputs it is possible to identify census geography that approximates your fire district.

Great questions. The district was formed back in 1983 and it kind of zigs and zags. I am not aware of any files like that for the district. I have requested a file of all the registered voters in the district and am working on getting a list of the properties in the district from the asessor's office. Below is a map but nobody knows who created this but I suspect someone just went out to googlemaps and drew it w/out any sort of GIS guidance.

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I agree with Doug's suggestion. The most precise way to do this would be using GIS and an overlay process to get a list of block groups that are within the boundary. There are GIS-compatible ACS files that you could then use to directly aggregate the data, or you could use GIS to create a list of block groups and then use data.census.gov to get the data.

However, if it's an area where you "just" have the street names, or if you don't have access to GIS tools, data.census.gov has a map selection tool that you could use to select all of the block groups within the area. (If the fire district doesn't quite align with block group boundaries you may need to make some assumptions about which overlapping ones are "in" or "out.")

There's a video tutorial for the map selection tool here: https://www.census.gov/data/academy/data-gems/2021/how-to-create-and-customize-a-map.html

Thank you. I will take a look at that tutorial.

I wanted to let you know this has been helpful. The key though actually came from being able to get some maps (courtesy of the MO University that has published the census tract and voting district with block #'s published online. So, then, I went back to the data.census.gov and started pulling by block #'s. It's quite tedious, but fortunately, this isn't a large area.

Looks like I'm going to have to wait a few more weeks for the population data I would like to be published from the 2020 census. Because I had to go back to 2010 census data to get a more detailed breakdown of the demographics. If anyone is familiar enough w/the table names- would you have any suggestions on 1 or more table names for me?

Here is the kind of info that would be helpful

Age ranges, not just below or above 18 (I believe the majority are near or past retirement age)

# of households

# of people per household or average is ok

Those are the main data points right now. Thank you.