[acs-r] Best Practices Question for the acs.R Package

[Ezra Haber Glenn]

The package is not able to necessarily download all tracts for a city,
but it can download all of them for a county -- what is known as
"Summary Level 140."  (Try ?geo.set for info on which combinations of
state, county, tract, place, etc. are available.)

Seattle is in King County, so the following will include all the
tracts there -- which are all of Seattle, plus some extras:

> king.county=geo.make(state="Wash", county="King", tract="*")
 
The following will the download total population for each tract in
this geo.set (Table B01003, which only has one column, Total
Population):

> king.pop=acs.fetch(endyear=2014, geography=king.county, table.number="B01003")

Then this will tell you the names of all those tracts:

> geography(king.pop) 

Alternatively, you can go to Factfinder to find the list of all the
tracts within the city: see
<https://ask.census.gov/faq.php?id=5000&faqId=1605> for how to do
this.  Once you have that list, you could use it to create your own
Seattle only geo.set of tracts, or use it to trim down the one
downloaded above.

--Ezra

At Wed, 30 Mar 2016 16:46:49 +0000, Tiernan Martin wrote:
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> Hi all –
> 
> I'm wondering if there is a recommended way to use the acr.R package to gather census data
> for a given city at a given scale of analysis.
> 
> The above phrasing may be a bit confusing, so here's a practical example: if I want to
> collect census tract data (doesn't matter which table at this point) for the city of
> Seattle, how can I use the acs.R package to get a list of all the census tracts within the
> city limits?
> 
> Thanks in advance for your help,
> 
> Tiernan Martin
> 
> 
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--
Ezra Haber Glenn, AICP
Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Ave., Room 7-337
Cambridge, MA 02139
eglenn at mit.edu 
http://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/ezra-glenn | http://eglenn.scripts.mit.edu/citystate/
617.253.2024 (w)
617.721.7131 (c)