About Civic Data Atlas
Civic Data Atlas brings comprehensive demographic data to the two geographies that structure city life: city council districts, where people are represented in city government, and neighborhoods, where they live and identify.
City Council Districts
Most cities only compute the population and racial composition of city council districts after once-a-decade redistricting. Civic Data Atlas offers a more detailed portrait of who lives in each district, covering demographics, immigration, language, income, employment, housing, education, transportation, technology, and health.
Local district data serves many uses. It can help elected officials better understand their constituents and advocate for their interests. It can help candidates tailor their appeals to the area they hope to represent. It can help advocacy groups ground their arguments in data. And it can help journalists and researchers bring local context to public reporting on how policies affect specific communities.
Detailed demographic information for states and congressional districts is easy to find. The Census Bureau publishes it through My Congressional District and data.census.gov, and third-party sites like Data USA, Census Reporter, and the Congressional District Health Dashboard make it more accessible. Comprehensive data on city council districts is not readily available anywhere else.
This discrepancy is not because local district data is unimportant; it reflects how Census data is published. The Census Bureau publishes ready-made tabulations for states, congressional districts, and state legislative districts, so profiles for those geographies can simply copy published Census tables. No equivalent tables exist for local political districts. Producing them requires collecting local district geographic boundaries, aggregating data from smaller Census geographies, and addressing imperfect boundary overlap. We also use a variety of additional non-Census data sources about local residents. Our approach is detailed on the Methodology page.
Neighborhoods
Neighborhoods are the unit of geography city residents use to describe where they live. While city council districts are drawn for political rather than social boundaries and change every ten years, neighborhoods are stable units of analysis with more natural boundaries. If someone wants to understand the area they live in, they don’t want to look for their home census tract or block group (the pre-defined geographies the Census Bureau publishes)—they want to understand their neighborhood.
While neighborhoods have little formal role in the political process in most cities, they are important for a wide variety of audiences. Community organizations, service providers, and funders serve specific neighborhoods. Local reporters cover neighborhoods. Residents evaluating a school, a development, or a move ask about neighborhoods.
Just like city council district data, city neighborhood data isn’t pre-computed by the Census Bureau. While some cities have some data available at the neighborhood level, no city source matches the breadth of detail, presentation, and comparison tools at Civic Data Atlas.
Who created Civic Data Atlas?
Jack Landry is the founder and research lead of Civic Data Atlas. Before creating Civic Data Atlas, Jack worked on economics research at the University of Chicago and then as a lead researcher at the Jain Family Institute, where his work focused on tax policy, public benefits, and microsimulation. His experience computing city council district statistics for policy projects helped inspire Civic Data Atlas.
Contact & Feedback
Please reach out with questions, suggestions, data requests, or help interpreting Civic Data Atlas estimates. If you spot an error, want to request another city’s data, have data you’d like to see added for an existing city, or have other ideas for improving the site, please email contact@civicdataatlas.org.
We would also love to hear how Civic Data Atlas is being used in the wild. Whether you’ve used the estimates for internal planning or advocacy, or have published a report or story, please email us to let us know.