5-Yr PUMA Geography

Thanks for the quick response. Looks like I will have to hand check each label as I suspect the shape files contain the same issue.

In New York the names are very long.  My guess is they edited the PUMAs, but did not edit all of the names.  PUMAs now are almost always a set of tracts.  In the distant past they were created by Summary Level 80 which was tract split by place, but that summary level has been abandoned and is no longer used to report data.  Originally the PUMAs were not developed for mapping, and were not necessarily contiguous, in fact one PUMA in Will County Illinois was in as many as 50 parts.  Once the ACS was started and they were used for mapping they imposed stricter rules.  They are still created in cooperation with the state governments..

Andy

PUMA boundaries and names are defined by the states, specifically the SDCs. I don't think the names go through any kind of review, although I could be wrong about that.

At MCDC, we don't put much stock in PUMA names, either -- they're a convenience, but just aren't that relevant. PUMAs weren't even named until the 2010 census.

Before the advent of the ACS, PUMAs were mostly used for data analysis with no spatial reference.  They started in the 1990 Census.  Once the ACS was launched and the 65000 Threshold was adopted for release of the one year data, the PUMAs became the most deetailed complete coverage of the US that could be rleased.  P:laces are not a complete coverage, and only about 800 of 3200 counties are larger than 65K.  So they had defined PUMAs and decided to use them to Map the ACS, since they are larger tnan 100k and cover the entire country ( there are somewher around 2200 of them).  At that point how messy some of there were became apparent.  They had no names until 2010 ones, which were released in 2012.

Thanks Andrew, I'm already aware of this history. 

Here in Missouri, MCDC retrospectively gave names to the 2000 PUMAs for our state only.