I am trying to get a list of all ~11 million 2010 census blocks' internal points (latitudes and longitudes assigned by the census to be used as approximate locations for each block). I can't for the life of me find these anywhere without downloading the entire polygon geodatabase! I finally broke down and downloaded that, but at ~6 petabytes, I don't have the storage to unzip and work with the file. Does anyone know of a source for internal points ONLY before I whip something up to download and process each geodatabase by state or county?
10
-
Why do you think such a dataset exists?– fgreggSep 26, 2016 at 16:43
-
1fgregg, I should have mentioned that flat files with basic information including internal points are distributed for lots of census geometries as "Gazetteer Files". The Census website does not link to a Gazetteer file for census blocks, but in the past I have found third party websites, such as NHGIS and Social Explorer, that distribute data not easily retrieved directly from the Census.– loganSep 26, 2016 at 17:04
-
are these sometimes referred to as crosswalks?– albertSep 26, 2016 at 17:33
-
pretty sure i found it, but its not 11 million records. where/why do you think its 11 million?– albertSep 26, 2016 at 17:43
-
Thanks, Albert. I got 11.155 million from the wikipedia article on census blocks (that includes PR). I looked through the crosswalk/relationship file descriptions and didn't see columns for internal points. What have you found?– loganSep 26, 2016 at 21:24
|
Show 5 more comments
1 Answer
the intptlon and intptlat fields of the census bureau's summary files contain the center of every census block nationwide. there's some pretty straightforward R code to download and import these files here:
-
1Thank you! I didn't expect the SF1 file to have geographic information and this is smaller/faster than downloading Tiger files.– loganSep 27, 2016 at 21:46