Use 2020 Decennial Census population

[dholstius]

Summary

This is meant to be a place to document and discuss technical or conceptual issues related to the use of 2020 Decennial Census population counts.

Notes

• The P1 and P2 tables (i.e., counts by race/ethnicity) were released in August-September 2021.
• You can get at them via http://data.census.gov.
• If you prefer to work with the FTP-hosted, legacy-format files, scroll down on the above page, and you'll find Legacy Format Support Materials, including some import scripts.
• The set of 2020 Census tracts is not identical to the set of 2010 tracts. So you'll likely want to download 2020 tract geometries too.
  • Some tracts were split, for example, due to reaching sizes larger than the target of ~4k residents.
  • Same goes for blockgroups and blocks.
  • There are official 2010 → 2020 crosswalks available, at least for tracts.

[dholstius]

Happy New Year @bujinb. Would you be the right assignee on the UW team for this issue/goal? Anyone else? cc @stephenreid65

[bujinb]

@dholstius @yuzhou-wang and I are the assignees.