What's New - December 2002

Site of the Month: Lewis Mumford Center

Our site of the month for December is the Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research, State University of New York at Albany.  As its name suggests, the center focuses on generating comparative information on the nation's metropolitan areas.  It's mined Census 2000 for a wealth of information, particularly on issues related to segregation and the status of minorities.  You'll find data for the entire population, for children, for specific groups, like the Hispanic population, Asians, and school segregation.   It also has particularly interesting data showing  how homeownership varies from one racial/ethnic group to another, for metropolitan regions, and for the central city and the suburbs. The center also has computed dissimilarity indices and exposure indices for metropolitan areas that indicate the degrees of segregation and isolation of particular racial and ethnic groups.  

The data are all laid out in an easy-to-navigate form.  You can view data and rankings for states and metropolitan areas, manipulate sortable lists, and download data sets.  This site is a great example of how to add value to Census data in a way that is transparent to the user and allows you to do your own analysis.  Go straight to their data index page, which is located at:  
http://mumford1.dyndns.org/cen2000/data.html

New Links Added

This month's new links focus on demography.  Census 2000 is yielding a wealth of new insights on who lives where, and how the face of America is changing, with the aging of the boomer generation, a new wave of international migration, increasing ethnic diversity, and changing patterns of residential location.  In addition to our site of the month, the Lewis Mumford Center, you'll find these resources helpful.

Social Science Data Analysis Network
The Social Science Data Analysis Network (SSDAN) is a university-based organization that creates demographic media, such as user guides, web sites, and hands-on classroom computer materials that make U.S. census data accessible to policymakers, educators, the media, and informed citizens.  
http://www.ssdan.net/

William H. Frey's Demography Page
William H. Frey, a demographer at the University of Michigan has created a very useful page for finding population change and migration data from the 2000 Census.  You navigate through a series of drop-down lists to select data for regions, states or metropolitan areas on total population change, ethnic profiles, and the size and change in population of various ethnic groups.  
http://www.frey-demographer.org/usdata.html

Federation American Immigration Reform (FAIR)
International Immigration by State, Metropolitan Area, and County
foreign-born population, recent immigrant settlement (by nationality in major settlement locations), and the share of population change due to immigration since 1990.
http://www.fairus.org/html/research.html

Racial and Ethnic Segregation
Segregation by race and ethnicity in US Metropolitan Areas, 2000.
Dissimilarity index and exposure index for metropolitan areas.
http://www.censusscope.org/segregation.html

Voter Registration and Turnout

Last month's mid-term elections changed control of the US Senate, and installed new occupants in Governor's mansions around the country.  At EconData.Net, we're interested to see how patterns of voter participation varied among different parts of the nation.  The Federal Election Commission obligingly provides a great historical record of voter registration and turnout data going back to 1960.  You'll find this, and a wealth of other information about voting, at their website:  http://www.fec.gov/pages/electpg.htm

Gasoline Prices

As Americans get on the road for the holidays, popular attention frequently turns to the price of gasoline.  You can find extensive up-to-date data on gas prices across the nation by visiting the American Automobile Association's Daily Fuel Gauge Report.  The site allows you to quickly compare current prices in all 50 states, select a single state and drill-down to different metropolitan areas, and see a year-to-date chart of fuel price trends for that state. Check this before you go over the river and through the woods: http://www.fuelgaugereport.com/sbsavg.asp

Hunger & Poverty

During the holiday season, our thoughts turn to the needs of the less fortunate.  If you're interested in getting a state-by-state picture of hunger in the US, an excellent source of information is the Center on Hunger and Poverty at Brandeis University.  Its recent report, Hunger and Food Insecurity in the Fifty States:  1998-2000, computes the rates of food insecurity and hunger in each state.  Overall, it reports that more than 10 percent of US households are food insecure and that about 3 percent experience hunger.  You'll find a state-by-state tabulation of estimates in a short PDF report, available at: http://www.centeronhunger.org/pdf/statedata98-00.pdf

Happy holidays from EconData.Net!