US Population/Housing Data?

Question

I'm looking for population and housing data for the USA at the city-wide level. The 2010 Census page has this information available:

http://www.census.gov/2010census/popmap/ipmtext.php?fl=06:0667000#

But it's only for that year and it has a rather complicate format for automate the task. For the case of population density information is available in CSV format (http://www.census.gov/2010census/data/) but only at a state wise level.

Does anyone know of another source for higher resolutions of this data?

Answer 1

The Census API is pretty good and should have what you're looking for. If you want only recent data, you can use the ACS to get 2014 data. If you want more historical data, the 1990, 2000, and 2010 are all exposed via the API.

Answer 2

If you are interested in using shapefile data and have access to QGIS or ArcGIS, this geodatabase contains geographic, demographic, and economic data for Places or "Cities" from the 2010 to 2014 ACS (The most current data as of December 1st, 2016). Be sure to find your variables of interest through the Metadata/Data Dictionary (although in your case, the variables you are interested in are probably B01001e1 for Total Population and B25001e1 for Total Housing Units.

Another avenue if you aren't comfortable with that is to use NHGIS.org for your information by Place (aka City). Registration is free and it is built to be more streamlined than the U.S. Census Bureau.

Answer 3

If you use R, tidycensus package is a downright amazing.

In this blog post I have a minimal use-case example.