Estimating neighborhood-level population characteristics from parcel data

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates how ancillary geographic data – in particular, information on land or assessor parcels – might be used to improve estimates for small area populations and population characteristics. It seeks to determine whether parcel land use codes can be used to reliably replicate population and housing distributions within small (subcounty) areas and whether other parcel attributes – in addition to land use – exhibit any explanatory power in replicating population and housing characteristics within these same places. The basis for this paper was Professor Barbara Buttenfield’s service on the Census Scientific Advisory Committee, in which her working group explored the utility of administrative source data as an alternative or complement to federal survey data. This analysis highlights some of the benefits and complications of the incorporation of parcel data into geodemographic estimation, and the findings demonstrate that such a use is problematic but encouraging.

KEYWORDS:

• Parcel
• neighborhood
• population
• estimation
• cadastral
• small-area

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available in the Github UofLKSDC/CAGIS2022 repository available at https://zenodo.org/badge/latestdoi/515252659. Elements of these data were derived from the following resources available in the public domain: National Historical Geographic Information System [https://www.nhgis.org].