Download All Census Tracts for a State

Douglas White 7 months ago

Is it no longer possible to download all census tracts for a state at once from data.census.gov?

I thought the first box that use to come up was:
All Census Tracts within Florida?

Now it's just giving me a list of counties and making me go into each county to select all their Census Tracts.

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Adam Bickford 7 months ago +1

Hey Doug,

Let's talk about this. The ACS tables Summary files are a way to generate this data.

https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/data/summary-file.html

They have the standard summary levels…
Caleb Hopler 6 months ago +1

Hi all,

When I go to advanced search in data.census.gov, I do see the option to select all Census tracts in a state, such as for Arizona or Florida. I took a screenshot below. Can you describe your steps…

Parents

vengroff 6 months ago

If you have access to a Python environment, this is easy to do programatically. First

pip install censusdis

and then you can run code like the following:

import censusdis.data as ced
from censusdis.datasets import ACS5
from censusdis import states

# The variable I want to download.
VARIABLE_MEDIAN_INCOME = "B19013_001E"

# This is the call to download the data we want:
df_co_tracts = ced.download(
    # Data set and vintage.
    dataset=ACS5,
    vintage=2022,
    
    # The variables to download. Adding 'NAME' can
    # be useful for debugging and sanity checking
    # the results.
    download_variables=['NAME', VARIABLE_MEDIAN_INCOME],
    
    # Geographies we want data for: all tracts in all
    # counties in Colorado
    state=states.CO,
    county='*',
    tract='*'
)

This will get the data you want into a pandas data frame. From there you can save it to a file, analyze it, or whatever else you like. Choose a different data set, vintage, and/or variables as needed for your application.

For more details, see github.com/.../censusdis

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