ACS Block Groups

Anonymous User

I've asked about this in the past but can Esri look at creating block group level ACS data in living atlas? ACS tracts are not very useful in rural Counties, when a tract is essentially most of one of our Township governments. Trying to do any useful analysis with tracts is not worthwhile. Esri is probably more equipped to provide this level of data in the living atlas. Otherwise I have to spend a ton of time joining tables and shapefiles from Census and deciphering field names to create a couple layers.

Anonymous User

Nathan, 

Thanks for writing. We chose to stop at the tract level for the 104 layers we publish because the margins of error tend to increase significantly when looking at the block group level. For many tables, the number of suppressed values also increases at the block group level. A subject like "age by race by gender" may be much more challenging to work with than simpler topics, such as total population.

We'd like to learn more about how you use block group ACS data. Can you share which  table(s) you use, how you map the data, how you summarize it, or otherwise use it? Do you use the margins of error in your work? Why or why not?

If you prefer to email about it, I am at jherries at esri dot com, and Diana Lavery is dlavery at esri dot com.

Thanks,  Jim Herries and Diana Lavery, from the ArcGIS Living Atlas team