There are many tools out there for handling census data. Unfortunately, I can't find what I need.
I am looking at a 3 county area in my state and need to find census data from ALL census years. The trickiest thing so far has been finding tools that include data from before 1990.
Ideally, but not absolutely nessecary, I'd like to find a tool that will let me create my own variables. I.e. income of richest %1 of households in a grouping of census tracks.
The reason for this question is that my organization is working on an economic history of our region and would like to compare different industries to population trends.
In usa.gov, the search: "free gis data" gets 50 hits, free GIS downloads (no double quotes) gets 99, "downloading gis" gets 37, etc. Usa.gov is tricky – using truncation seems not to work consistently. Download* gis gets 100, but sometimes the asterisk causes zero hits. Compare usa.gov with Web searches using site:gov. Google gets 343 hits for "free gis" download* site:gov , and 4 hits for "free gis" "environmental justice" site:gov. To get data from colleges and universities, try searches like: "free gis" "environmental justice" site:edu (23 hits). Although usa.gov includes a lot of state government sites, it is good to try searching for each state. For example, gis "environmental justice" site:mn.us gets about 62 pages, plus some duplicates. In www.state.mn.us the search, +"environmental justice" +gis gets 123 hits in the past 2 years alone. The phrase "free gis data" in www.state.mn.us "advanced search" gets 13 hits. Better yet, in the left hand index column of www.state.mn.us "Natural Resources" page, they have a link to interactive maps and GeoGateway
Looking for free or relatively low cost GIS mapping resources and data sets that could be used for mapping a range of social, economic and environmental justice indicators and other demographic trends in the United States. We're looking to produce both national and selected maps. The target list of states to highlight include Washington, Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois, Florida, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Mississippi, Georgia and North Carolina. Thanks always to Radical Reference, for this great service and the spirit in which it is provided.
