WASHINGTON, D.C., September 17, 2002—With little more than a PC and a single, new CD-ROM, it is now possible to analyze how the nation's neighborhoods have changed since 1970, greatly enhancing public understanding of the problems and opportunities confronting America's communities. Using this new capacity, the nonpartisan Urban Institute, for instance, already is examining population shifts and black/white integration in city neighborhoods.
The Neighborhood Change Database (NCDB), developed by the Urban Institute and GeoLytics, Inc. a private firm specializing in demographic and geographic data products, combines for the first time tract-level data from the 1970-2000 decennial censuses. The easy-to-use database is the only source of data with variables and tract boundaries consistently defined across census years.
With populations typically ranging from 2,500 to 8,000, census tracts approximate neighborhoods in that they usually capture a group of residents with similar population characteristics, economic status, and living conditions. Tracts can be used by themselves as units of analysis, or as building blocks to create larger neighborhood areas.
Variety of Uses
The NCDB can advance knowledge about neighborhood change in a number of ways and for a variety of purposes. For instance, with the NCDB, it is now possible to assess changes in the concentration of poverty, along with measures of family risk, such as single-parent families and unemployment. The NCDB also can be used to study patterns of racial and ethnic segregation, as a source of data for neighborhood report cards, to identify areas for delivery of social, police, transportation and other services, and to target health and social welfare programs.
Ease of Use
The NCDB is designed to be easy to use by a variety of audiences, including policymakers, the press, community organizations, and researchers. Data can be harvested using the menu-driven, user-friendly mapping and analysis software included on the same CD-ROM, or extracted for use in external database, mapping, and analysis packages.
Revolutionary Aspects
The NCDB is revolutionary on a number of fronts. Its highly efficient technology lowers barriers to accessing and using census tract data. It offers one of the few sources for tract-level data from 1970 and 1980, which are no longer obtainable from the Census Bureau. Its uniformly defined data elements and its remapping of earlier data to a standardized set of census tract boundaries from 2000 overcome the historical challenges posed by inconsistent data definitions and the reconfiguration of tracts as populations changed.
Evolution of NCDB
The NCDB builds on an earlier Urban Institute research tool—the Under Class Data Base (UDB)—created in the late 1980s. The UDB originally contained tract-level social, demographic, economic, and housing data from the 1980 census. It was later expanded to include 1970 and 1990 data.
The new tool unites data from the UDB with new information from Census 2000. A standard set of 2,800 indicators is provided for each of the 65,232 census tracts in the United States. Both the earlier national data file and the new NCDB were developed with support from the Rockefeller Foundation.
GeoLytics applied its proprietary weighting tables for 1970, 1980, and 1990 to carefully convert past census data to 2000 tract boundaries; and, more broadly, transformed earlier versions of the software, making it much more user friendly and technically superior and adding, for instance, proprietary data compression and mapping technology.
Short Form and Long Form Releases
The NCDB will have two separate releases. The current Short Form Release includes basic population and housing characteristics from the short form questions answered by all households in the decennial censuses. The NCDB Long Form Release (scheduled for 2003) will include responses to detailed questions, asked of about one of every six households, regarding population, household, and housing characteristics, such as income, poverty status, education, employment, housing costs, and immigration.
Purchasing Information
To find out how to purchase the NCDB, visit GeoLytics' Web site: www.geolytics.com. The NCDB is being been offered at a substantially reduced price to 1,000 community-based organizations nominated by the National Community Building Network, the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Forthcoming Research Information
With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Urban Institute is preparing Neighborhood Change in Urban America, a series of research papers using the NCDB. These papers will be available over the coming year on the Institute's web site at www.urban.org/nnip.
For more information, please contact the Urban Institute Office of Public Affairs at (202) 261-5709 or paffairs@ui.urban.org.
The Urban Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan policy research and education organization that examines the social, economic, and governance problems facing the nation.
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