[acs-r] block group poverty measures ACS tables

[Corrales, Mark]

For the 5-year summary file only, ACS table C17002 has poverty information by block group, and that is the one I have found most useful in our work (http://www2.epa.gov/ejscreen). In fact if you need nationwide block group estimates from that table, we posted those here for the 2008-2012 dataset: 
ftp://newftp.epa.gov//EJSCREEN/ACS2008-2012_Race_Ethnicity_subgroup_counts_and_percents_by_block_group.zip 
Percent poor would be calculated as (C17002.002 + C17002.003) / C17002.001

One of these four is probably what you want:

C17002	Ratio Of Income To Poverty Level In The Past 12 Months
B17010	Poverty Status In The Past 12 Months Of Families By Family Type By Presence Of Related Children Under 18 Years By Age Of Related Children
B17017	Poverty Status In The Past 12 Months By Household Type By Age Of Householder
B17021	Poverty Status Of Individuals In The Past 12 Months By Living Arrangement

For a quick look at which tables have the word poverty in their title, you could do this:
require(acs)
y=acs.lookup(table.name  = "Poverty")
z=unique(y at results[,c('table.number', 'table.name')])
sapply(z, function(x) substr(x,1,60))

But to see which ones are available at block group resolution, you could check here, for the 20135 dataset, for example:
http://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/summary_file/2013/documentation/tech_docs/ACS_2013_SF_5YR_Appendices.xls 



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Mark A. Corrales
Office of Policy, Office of the Administrator, US EPA
1200 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington DC 20460

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Message: 1
Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2015 09:33:38 -0700
From: Chris Cambron <ccambron at uw.edu>
Subject: [acs-r] Block group level poverty measures?
To: acs-r at mit.edu
Message-ID:
        <CAHNWBy0d_qDzrHFUqujaeRnVgQNmz=y2OPpidKmvde8VcpmN7g at mail.gmail.com>
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Hi,
I've been attempting to pull data on poverty measures through the ACS
package (vars: B17001_001, B17001_002). These don't seem to be available at
the block group level (tract comes through fine). They appear to be
published though in other places. Any thoughts on why this might be?
Thanks!

*Chris Cambron, MSW, MPP*
Doctoral Student
Social Development Research Group
School of Social Work   |  University of Washington
ccambron at uw.edu  |  www.sdrg.org
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