In every census between 1940 and 2000, millions of American households received a “long form”, which contained scores of questions on a wide range of demographic, socioeconomic and housing topics.
Following the 2000 Census, the long form was, in effect, split off from the census and turned into the American Community Survey. The rationale was simple: because our nation changes so rapidly, our communities needed this kind of information on a much more frequent basis − annually, rather than once a decade − in order to make informed decisions about where to build roads, construct schools and locate emergency services. And businesses sought these key data much more often than once every 10 years too for the purposes of site selection and marketing.
Yesterday, the Census Bureau released results from the annual ACS, which cover 2010. The information was collected from almost 2 million housing unit interviews across the country.
The survey offers statistics on more than 40 subjects, such as income, health insurance coverage, commuting to work, educational attainment, language spoken at home, ancestry, selected monthly homeowner costs, the foreign-born population, occupation, and military veterans. The numbers are available for not only the nation as a whole and all of our states and congressional districts, but also for counties and cities with total populations of more than 65,000. Statistics for smaller areas will be available later in the year.
Dig deep into this goldmine of numbers and here are a few of the nuggets you will find: