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Interesting reports or articles published

ALA Tech Report on Using Census Data for Research

I have written a new report that’s just been released: US Census Data: Concepts and Applications for Supporting Research, was published as the May / June 2022 issue of the American Library Association’s Library and Technology Reports. It’s available for purchase digitally or in hard copy from the ALA from now through next year. It will also be available via EBSCOhost as full text, sometime this month. One year from now, the online version will transition to become a free and open publication available via the tech report archives.

The report was designed to be a concise primer (about 30 pages) for librarians who want to be knowledgeable with assisting researchers and students with finding, accessing, and using public summary census data, or who want to apply it to their own work as administrators or LIS researchers. But I also wrote it in such a way that it’s relevant for anyone who is interested in learning more about the census. In some respects it’s a good distillation of my “greatest hits”, drawing on work from my book, technical census-related blog posts, and earlier research that used census data to study the distribution of public libraries in the United States.

Chapter Outline

Introduction
Roles of the Census: in American society, the open data landscape, and library settings
Census Concepts: geography, subject categories, tables and universes
Datasets: decennial census, American Community Survey, Population Estimates, Business Establishments
Accessing Data: data.census.gov, API with python, reports and data summaries
GIS, historical research, and microdata: covers these topics plus the Current Population Survey
The Census in Library Applications: overview of the LIS literature on site selection analysis and studying library access and user populations

I’m pleased with how it turned out, and in particular I hope that it will be used by MLIS students in data services and government information courses.

Although… I must express my displeasure with the ALA. The editorial team for the Library Technology Reports was solid. But once I finished the final reviews of the copy edits, I was put on the spot to write a short article for the American Libraries magazine, primarily to promote the report. This was not part of the contract, and I was given little direction and a month at a busy time of the school year to turn it around. I submitted a draft and never heard about it again – until I saw it in the magazine last week. They cut and revised it to focus on a narrow aspect of the census that was not the original premise, and they introduced errors to boot! As a writer I have never had an experience where I haven’t been given the opportunity to review revisions. It’s thoroughly unprofessional, and makes it difficult to defend the traditional editorial process as somehow being more accurate or thorough compared to the web posting and tweeting masses. They were apologetic, and are posting corrections. I was reluctant to contribute to the magazine to begin with, as I have a low opinion of it and think it’s deteriorated in recent years, but that’s a topic for a different discussion.

Stepping off the soapbox… I’ll be attending the ALA annual conference in DC later this month, to participate on a panel that will discuss the 2020 census, and to reconnect with some old colleagues. So if you want to talk about the census, you can buy me some coffee (or beer) and check out the report.

A final research and publication related note – the map that appears at the top of my post on the distribution of US public libraries from several years back has also made it into print. It appears on page 173 of The Argument Toolbox by K.J. Peters, published by Broadview Press. It was selected as an example of using visuals for communicating research findings, making compelling arguments in academic writing, and citing underlying sources to establish credibility. I’m browsing through the complimentary copy I received and it looks excellent. If you’re an academic librarian or a writing center professional and are looking for core research method guides, I would recommend checking it out.

New York’s Population and Migration Trends in the 2010s

The Weissman Center for International Business at Baruch College just published my paper, “New York’s Population and Migration Trends in the 2010s“, as part of their Occasional Paper Series. In the paper I study population trends over the last ten years for both New York City (NYC) and the greater New York Metropolitan Area (NYMA) using annual population estimates from the Census Bureau (vintage 2019), county to county migration data (2011-2018) from the IRS SOI, and the American Community Survey (2014-2018). I compare NYC to the nine counties that are home to the largest cities in the US (cities with population greater than 1 million) and the NYMA to the 13 largest metro areas (population over 4 million) to provide some context. I conclude with a brief discussion of the potential impact of COVID-19 on both the 2020 census count and future population growth. Most of the analysis was conducted using Python and Pandas in Jupyter Notebooks available on my GitHub. I discussed my method for creating rank change grids, which appear in the paper’s appendix and illustrate how the sources and destinations for migrants change each year, in my previous post.

Terminology

Natural increase: the difference between births and deaths
Domestic migration: moves between two points within the United States
Foreign migration: moves between the United States and a US territory or foreign country
Net migration: the difference between in-migration and out-migration (measured separately for domestic and foreign)
NYC: the five counties / boroughs that comprise New York City
NYMA: the New York Metropolitan Area as defined by the Office of Management and Budget in Sept 2018, consists of 10 counties in NY State (including the 5 NYC counties), 12 in New Jersey, and one in Pennsylvania

Map of the New York Metropolitan Area — The New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA Metropolitan Area

Highlights

Population growth in both NYC and the NYMA was driven by positive net foreign migration and natural increase, which offset negative net domestic migration.
Population growth for both NYC and the NYMA was strong over the first half of the decade, but population growth slowed as domestic out-migration increased from 2011 to 2017.
NYC and the NYMA began experiencing population loss from 2017 forward, as both foreign migration and natural increase began to decelerate. Declines in foreign migration are part of a national trend; between 2016 and 2019 net foreign migration for the US fell by 43% (from 1.05 million to 595 thousand).
The city and metro’s experience fit within national trends. Most of the top counties in the US that are home to the largest cities and many of the largest metropolitan areas experienced slower population growth over the decade. In addition to NYC, three counties: Cook (Chicago), Los Angeles, and Santa Clara (San Jose) experienced actual population loss towards the decade’s end. The New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago metro areas also had declining populations by the latter half of the decade.
Most of NYC’s domestic out-migrants moved to suburban counties within the NYMA (representing 38% of outflows and 44% of net out-migration), and to Los Angeles County, Philadelphia County, and counties in Florida. Out-migrants from the NYMA moved to other large metros across the country, as well as smaller, neighboring metros like Poughkeepsie NY, Fairfield CT, and Trenton NJ. Metro Miami and Philadelphia were the largest sources of both in-migrants and out-migrants.
NYC and the NYMA lack any significant relationships with other counties and metro areas where they are net receivers of domestic migrants, receiving more migrants from those places than they send to those places.
NYC and the NYMA are similar to the cities and metros of Los Angeles and Chicago, in that they rely on high levels foreign migration and natural increase to offset high levels of negative domestic migration, and have few substantive relationships where they are net receivers of domestic migrants. Academic research suggests that the absolute largest cities and metros behave this way; attracting both low and high skilled foreign migrants while redistributing middle and working class domestic migrants to suburban areas and smaller metros. This pattern of positive foreign migration offsetting negative domestic migration has characterized population trends in NYC for many decades.
During the 2010s, most of the City and Metro’s foreign migrants came from Latin America and Asia. Compared to the US as a whole, NYC and the NYMA have slightly higher levels of Latin American and European migrants and slightly lower levels of Asian and African migrants.
Given the Census Bureau’s usual residency concept and the overlap in the onset the of COVID-19 pandemic lock down with the 2020 Census, in theory the pandemic should not alter how most New Yorkers identify their usual residence as of April 1, 2020. In practice, the pandemic has been highly disruptive to the census-taking process, which raises the risk of an under count.
The impact of COVID-19 on future domestic migration is difficult to gauge. Many of the pandemic destinations cited in recent cell phone (NYT and WSJ) and mail forwarding (NYT) studies mirror the destinations that New Yorkers have moved to between 2011 and 2018. Foreign migration will undoubtedly decline in the immediate future given pandemic disruptions, border closures, and restrictive immigration policies. The number of COVID-19 deaths will certainly push down natural increase for 2020.

An Overview of Census Datasets and Census API Examples

This month’s post is a bit shorter, as I have just two announcements I wanted to share about some resources I’ve created.

First, I’ve written a short technical paper that’s just been published as part of the Weissman Center of International Business’ Occasional Papers Series. Exploring US Census Datsets: A Summary of Surveys and Sources provides an overview of several different datasets (decennial census, American Community Survey, Population Estimates Program, and County Business Patterns) and sources for accessing data. The paper illustrates basic themes that are part of all my census-related talks: the census isn’t just the thing that happens every ten years but is an ecosystem of datasets updated on an on-going basis, and there are many sources for accessing data which are suitable for different purposes and designed for users with varying levels of technical skill. In some respects this paper is a super-abridged version of my book, designed to serve as an introduction and brief reference.

Second, I’ve created a series of introductory notebooks on GitHub that illustrate how to use the Census Bureau’s API with Python and Jupyter Notebooks. I designed these for a demonstration I gave at NYU’s Love Data Week back on Feb 10 (the slides for the talk are also available in the repo). I structured the talk around three examples. Example A demonstrates the basics of how the API works along with some best practices, such as defining your variables at the top and progressively building links to retrieve data. It also illustrates the utility of using these technologies in concert, as you can pull data into your script and process and visualize it in one go. I also demonstrate how to retrieve lists of census variables and their corresponding metadata, which isn’t something that’s widely documented. Example B is a variation of A, extended by adding an API key and storing data in a file immediately after retrieval. Example C introduces more complexity, reading variables in from files and looping through lists of geographies to make multiple API calls.

Since I’ve written a few posts on the census API recently, I went back and added an api tag to group them together, so you can access them via a single link.

Define census API variables, build links, and retrieve data

Recent Migration Trends for New York City and Metro

The Baruch GIS lab crew just published a paper: New Yorkers on the Move: Recent Migration Trends for the City and Metro Area. The paper (no. 15 Feb 2018) is part of the Weissman Center for International Business Occasional Paper Series, which focuses on New York City’s role in the international and domestic economy.

Findings

We analyzed recent population trends (2010 to 2016) in New York City and the greater metropolitan area using the US Census Bureau’s Population Estimates to study components of population change (births, deaths, domestic and international migration) and the IRS Statistics of Income division’s county to county migration data to study domestic migration flows.

Here are the main findings:

The population of New York City and the New York Metropolitan Area increased significantly between 2010 and 2016, but annually growth has slowed due to greater domestic out-migration.
Compared to other large US cities and metro areas, New York’s population growth depends heavily on foreign immigration and natural increase (the difference between births and deaths) to offset losses from domestic out-migration.
Between 2011 and 2015 the city had few relationships where it was a net receiver of migrants (receiving more migrants than it sends) from other large counties. The New York metro area had no net-receiver relationships with any major metropolitan area.
The city was a net sender (sending more migrants than it received) to all of its surrounding suburban counties and to a number of large urban counties across the US. The metro area was a net sender to metropolitan areas throughout the country.

For the domestic migration portion of the analysis we were interested in seeing the net flows between places. For example, the NYC metro area sends migrants to and receives migrants from the Miami metro. What is the net balance between the two – who receives more versus who sends more?

The answer is: the NYC metro is a net sender to most of the major metropolitan areas in the country, and has no significant net receiver relationships with any other major metropolitan area. For example, for the period from 2011 to 2015 the NYC metro’s largest net sender relationship was with the Miami metro. About 88,000 people left the NYC metro for metro Miami while 58,000 people moved in the opposite direction, resulting in a net gain of 30,000 people for Miami (or in other words, a net loss of 30k people for NYC). The chart below shows the top twenty metros where the NYC metro had a deficit in migration (sending more migrants to these areas than it received). A map of net out-migration from the NYC metro to other metros appears at the top of this post. In contrast, NYC’s largest net receiver relationship (where the NYC metro received more migrants than it sent) was with Ithaca, New York, which lost a mere 300 people to the NYC metro.

All of our summary data is available here.

Process

For the IRS data we used the county to county migration SQLite database that Janine meticulously constructed over the course of the last year, which is freely available on the Baruch Geoportal. Anastasia employed her Python and Pandas wizardry to create Jupyter notebooks that we used for doing our analysis and generating our charts, all of which are available on github. I used an alternate approach with Python and the SQLite and prettytable modules to generate estimates independently of Anastasia, so we could compare the two and verify our numbers (we were aggregating migration flows across years and geographies from several tables, and calculating net flows between places).

One of our goals for this project was to use modern tools and avoid the clunky use of email. With the Jupyter notebooks, git and github for storing and syncing our work, and ShareLaTeX for writing the paper, we avoided using email for constantly exchanging revised versions of scripts and papers. Ultimately I had to use latex2rtf to convert the paper to a word processing format that the publisher could use. This post helped me figure out which bibliography packages to choose (in order for latex2rtf to interpret citations and references, you need to use the older natbib & bibtex combo and not biblatex & biber).

If you are doing similar research, Zillow has an excellent post that dicusses the merits of the different datasets. There are also good case studies on Washington DC and Philadelphia that employ the same datasets.

Article on the History of the US Census

I’ve been cranking away on my census book these past few months. I’m almost finished revising the preface and chapter 1 to submit as part of the book proposal review process, and a rough draft of chapter 2 is also complete.

I wrote a short piece on the history of the US census while I was doing background research last fall. It was recently published in Metropolitics, which is an on-line academic journal that specializes in short pieces on cities, urban politics, and urban economics. The journal was originally created in Paris as Metropolitiques, and a separate English-language version with a New York-based editorial board was created more recently. Each version is published independently and a select number of articles are translated from one version and published in the other, giving it a unique international flair in terms of content and contributors. A new article in the English version is published every Tuesday.

I wrote the piece as a lead-in to the 2020 census, which we’re starting to hear more about in the news. After spending a decade of research on creating new and improved categories for the race question, the OMB and White House decided not to accept the Bureau’s proposal and thus we’re keeping the same categories from 2010 and 2000. Meanwhile, the Justice Department is lobbying for a adding a citizenship question, which already appears in the American Community Survey and has not appeared in the short form of the decennial census since 1950. Read the article and follow the links to the references to see what the repercussions could be. The questions and categories must be finalized by March 31st…

Average Distance to Public Libraries in the US

A few months ago I had a new article published in LISR, but given the absurd restrictions of academic journal publishing I’m not allowed to publicly post the article, and have to wait 12 months before sharing my post-print copy. It is available via your local library if they have a subscription to the Science Direct database (you can also email me to request a copy). .

Citation and Abstract

Regional variations in average distance to public libraries in the United States
F. Donnelly
Library & Information Science Research
Volume 37, Issue 4, October 2015, Pages 280–289
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2015.11.008

Abstract

“There are substantive regional variations in public library accessibility in the United States, which is a concern considering the civic and educational roles that libraries play in communities. Average population-weighted distances and the total population living within one mile segments of the nearest public library were calculated at a regional level for metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas, and at a state level. The findings demonstrate significant regional variations in accessibility that have been persistent over time and cannot be explained by simple population distribution measures alone. Distances to the nearest public library are higher in the South compared to other regions, with statistically significant clusters of states with lower accessibility than average. The national average population-weighted distance to the nearest public library is 2.1 miles. While this supports the use of a two-mile buffer employed in many LIS studies to measure library service areas, the degree of variation that exists between regions and states suggests that local measures should be applied to local areas.”

Purpose

I’m not going to repeat all the findings, but will provide some context.

As a follow-up to my earlier work, I was interested in trying an alternate approach for measuring public library spatial equity. I previously used the standard container approach – draw a buffer at some fixed distance around a library and count whether people are in or out, and as an approximation for individuals I used population centroids for census tracts. In my second approach, I used straight-line distance measurements from census block groups (smaller than tracts) to the nearest public library so I could compare average distances for regions and states; I also summed populations for these areas by calculating the percentage of people that lived within one-mile rings of the nearest library. I weighted the distances by population, to account for the fact that census areas vary in population size (tracts and block groups are designed to fall within an ideal population range – for block groups it’s between 600 and 3000 people).

Despite the difference in approach, the outcome was similar. Using the earlier approach (census tract centroids that fell within a library buffer that varied from 1 to 3 miles based on urban or rural setting), two-thirds of Americans fell within a “library service area”, which means that they lived within a reasonable distance to a library based on standard practices in LIS research. Using the latest approach (using block group centroids and measuring the distance to the nearest library) two-thirds of Americans lived within two miles of a public library – the average population weighted distance was 2.1 miles. Both studies illustrate that there is a great deal of variation by geographic region – people in the South consistently lived further away from public libraries compared to the national average, while people in the Northeast lived closer. Spatial Autocorrelation (LISA) revealed a cluster of states in the South with high distances and a cluster in the Northeast with low distances.

The idea in doing this research was not to model actual travel behavior to measure accessibility. People in rural areas may be accustomed to traveling greater distances, public transportation can be a factor, people may not visit the library that’s close to their home for several reasons, measuring distance along a network is more precise than Euclidean distance, etc. The point is that libraries are a public good that provide tangible benefits to communities. People that live in close proximity to a public library are more likely to reap the benefits that it provides relative to those living further away. Communities that have libraries will benefit more than communities that don’t. The distance measurements serve as a basic metric for evaluating spatial equity. So, if someone lives more than six miles away from a library that does not mean that they don’t have access; it does means they are less likely to utilize it or realize it’s benefits compared to someone who lives a mile or two away.

Data

I used the 2010 Census at the block group level, and obtained the location of public libraries from the 2010 IMLS. I improved the latter by geocoding libraries that did not have address-level coordinates, so that I had street matches for 95% of the 16,720 libraries in the dataset. The tables that I’m providing here were not published in the original article, but were tacked on as supplementary material in appendices. I wanted to share them so others could incorporate them into local studies. In most LIS research the prevailing approach for measuring library service areas is to use a buffer of 1 to 2 miles for all locations. Given the variation between states, if you wanted to use the state-average for library planning in your own state you can consider using these figures.

To provide some context, the image below shows public libraries (red stars) in relation to census block group centroids (white circles) for northern Delaware (primarily suburban) and surrounding areas (mix of suburban and rural). The line drawn between the Swedesboro and Woodstown libraries in New Jersey is 5-miles in length. I used QGIS and Spatialite for most of the work, along with Python for processing the data and Geoda for the spatial autocorrelation.

The three tables I’m posting here are for states: one counts the 2010 Census population within one to six mile rings of the nearest public library, the second is the percentage of the total state population that falls within that ring, and the third is a summary table that calculates the mean and population-weighted distance to the nearest library by state. One set of tables is formatted text (for printing or just looking up numbers) while the other set are CSV files that you can use in a spreadsheet. I’ve included a metadata record with some methodological info, but you can read the full details in the article.

All tables in TXT and CSV format

In the article itself I tabulated and examined data at a broader, regional level (Northeast, Midwest, South, and West), and also broke it down into metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas for the regions. Naturally people that live in non-metropolitan areas lived further away, but the same regional patterns existed: more people in the South in both metro and non-metro areas lived further away compared to their counterparts in other parts of the country. This weekend I stumbled across this article in the Washington Post about troubles in the Deep South, and was struck by how these maps mirrored the low library accessibility maps in my past two articles.

At These Coordinates

Dispatches from the Geospatial Data World