Hello Albert, it’s a good and a rather prickly question. You're not the first to ask; it’s a logical leap to make. After a rather extensive review and testing, Esri has backed away from the idea of substituting the ACS data for the late P.L. data. After participating with several groups, most containing an abundance of legal representation, each group found the ACS lacking and didn’t provide an adequate substitute. The errors and the fact that the data represents an average over 60-months and the size sampling problems offered a substantial margin of error. The recently released state figures and apportionment validated the wide error margin. All that said, we have experimented with a process of apportioning the Esri Demographics data from the Block-Group level to the Block-Level. This dataset is not without its problems, but we were happy about the outcome.
Inserting this dataset does require the enterprise version of the Esri Redistricting solution; as a University, this is available to you. This will require that Esri install the solution and make the additional install of the datasets, but the solution itself is at University pricing.
If this helps you, please feel free to connect with Scott or me. Our emails follow. Esri Redistricting | Software for Redistricting Process
Scott Ferguson <sferguson@esri.com>; Richard Leadbeater <RLeadbeater@esri.com>
