Urban Wire What's the Story in Your Region? MetroTrends announces new Data Dashboard, Maps, and Download Tool
Graham MacDonald
Display Date

Created to help researchers, reporters, and residents understand how their local areas are changing, the new MetroTrends Data Dashboard transforms complex datasets into easily accessible, interactive charts and maps. Data are available on the local level, with comparisons to the United States as a whole.

The highlights:

  • Local unemployment trends.
  • Trends in employment by sector (private vs. government) and subsector. Maps of jobs by location. Trends in subsector employment and salary.
  • Housing price trends.
  • Trends in loan activity by loan type, loan amount, and borrower’s race and income.
  • The latest demographic and migration data. Maps of income, age, race, and education level.
  • Trends in property and violent crime.

What can we discover by examining the Washington, DC, metro region? The DC metro area gained 31,300 jobs between November 2011 and November 2012, driven primarily by education and health services, which gained 11,400 jobs. Over the past decade, the private sector in DC has experienced much greater job growth than the nation as a whole. Growth in professional and business services occupations, hardly impeded by the Great Recession, makes up most of DC’s private-sector job expansion.

Unemployment in the District has fallen to 5.1 percent, 2.5 percentage points lower than unemployment in the country as a whole. Housing prices have fallen slightly, but this decline is smaller than in most other metro areas. New residents from outside the metro region continue to move to DC. And crime has been decreasing faster than the rate for the entire United States.

Most occupations in the DC metro area pay higher salaries than similar occupations elsewhere. Compared with the nation as a whole, DC has about twice the average share of households making $100,000 or more. The District is also home to a higher share of African-American and Asian-American residents, adults with college degrees, and young professionals and middle-aged adults.

The MetroTrends team hopes that the Data Dashboard provides convenient, data-driven context and research assistance for exploring your metro area. All data used in the charts and maps are available for download via a link next to each dashboard subsection. For more technical users, custom downloads and the full metro datasets can be downloaded through our new Data Download Tool or through our additional data repository. We have also grouped all the dot density maps in one location to make comparison easy.

Body

Tune in and subscribe today.

The Urban Institute podcast, Evidence in Action, inspires changemakers to lead with evidence and act with equity. Cohosted by Urban President Sarah Rosen Wartell and Executive Vice President Kimberlyn Leary, every episode features in-depth discussions with experts and leaders on topics ranging from how to advance equity, to designing innovative solutions that achieve community impact, to what it means to practice evidence-based leadership.

LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE TODAY

Tags Employment and income data Crime and justice analytics Tracking the economy Credit availability Unemployment and unemployment insurance
Policy Centers Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center