Anyone know what the PCI flag in the ACS geography file stands for?
It's either "Y" or blank. There are 524 lines in the new ACS (2022 1-year) geo file that have PCI = Y.
I suspect it designates either principal cities of CBSAs, or geo components of states and larger areas that are within principal cities of CBSAs. Can anyone confirm this?
PCI = Metropolitan/Micropolitan Principal City IndicatorThis info, along with some other important summary file documentation, is in the (suboptimally out-of-the-way) "Notes on Data, Geography and Variable…
PCI in the ACS geography file stands for Principal City of CBSA. It is a flag that indicates whether a geographic area is a principal city of a Core Based Statistical Area (CBSA). CBSAs are geographic areas that contain at least one urban core of 50,000 or more people, plus the surrounding counties that are economically and socially integrated with the core.
The PCI flag is typically used to identify the largest and most economically important cities in a CBSA. It is also used to define certain metropolitan areas, such as the Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to calculate unemployment rates.
There are 524 lines in the new ACS (2022 1-year) geo file that have PCI = Y. These are all of the principal cities of CBSAs in the United States.