chrissoria/us-places

US Places

One row for the country and for each state, territory, county, city, named unincorporated community and legislative district, with what is known of it as a whole: what it is part of, how many people live there and how old they are, how big, dense and urban it is, how rich and how unequal, where its flag and seal can be seen, which body governs it, and how much of its lawmaking is in the other datasets published here.

It is meant as the one place to read what a place is from. Every table has the same key, place_id, the Census Bureau's code.

42,475 places: the United States, the 50 states, the District of Columbia and five territories, 3,144 counties, 19,478 incorporated cities, towns, villages and boroughs, 12,528 unincorporated communities, and 7,268 districts: 437 of Congress, 1,958 of the states' upper houses and 4,873 of their lower houses. The states are the fullest rows; what each level has is in the table under "What each level has".

The boundaries table has the outline of every one of them, and maps/ has each state and each county drawn from those outlines as a grid of squares.

Tables

places (the default)

Column
place_id	The Census Bureau's code: two digits for a state (06), five for a county (06073), seven for a city (0666000). The country is 00. A district has the Bureau's full code, which says whose lines it is drawn on: 5001900US0652 is California's 52nd as drawn for the 119th Congress.
kind	nation, state, district (the District of Columbia), territory, county, city, or community: settled land in no city, which the Census Bureau names and draws a line round (a "census designated place"). It has no government but the county's. A district is a congressional district, a state senate district or a state house district (the lower house, whatever the state calls it).
parent_id	The place it is part of: a city's or community's county, a county's state, a state's country. A city in several counties is given the one most of its people live in. A district's is its state.
district, district_session	For a district, its number or name alone (52, At Large, 4th Middlesex), and what its lines were drawn for: 119th Congress, or 2024 legislative session.
body_id	For a district, the body it elects a member to, if that body is in bodies.
representative, representative_party, representative_id, representative_since	For a congressional district, who sits for it now: their name, party, Biographical Directory id, and the day their unbroken service began. Empty for a vacant seat.
senators	For a state, its senators now, as a list: each one's id, name, party and since.
name, census_name	The name people use (San Diego) and the Bureau's (San Diego city).
government	For a city, what the Bureau's name calls it: city, town, village, borough.
state, state_name	Postal code and name.
county_id, county_name	For a city, the county most of its people live in.
counties	For a city in more than one county, all of them, the most populous part first.
population, population_year	The Bureau's latest estimate, and its year. The country's is that of the states and the District, without the territories. A community's and a district's are the American Community Survey's count over the five years ending in population_year.
population_2020	The 2020 census count, as the estimates take it for their base.
land_sq_mi, water_sq_mi, latitude, longitude	From the Bureau's gazetteer; the point is one inside the place. A state's areas are its counties' added up.
seat	A county's seat, or a state's or territory's capital.
joined_union, union_order	For a state, the year it joined the Union and its place in the order of joining.
density_per_sq_mi	People to a square mile of land.
water_share	The share of its area that is water.
urban_population_share	The share of its people the 2020 census counted as living in urban areas.
rural_urban_code, rural_urban_label	For a county, the Department of Agriculture's 2023 code from 1 (in a metropolitan area of a million or more) to 9 (rural, and not beside one), with its meaning. For a state, the average of its counties' codes, each weighed by its people.
age_under_1 … age_80_plus	The share of people of each age: under 1, 1 to 4, 5 to 12, 13 to 17, 18 to 24, 25 to 34, 35 to 44, 45 to 54, 55 to 64, 65 to 74, 75 to 79, and 80 or more. age_year is the year. Below the state, the four bands under 18 are empty: the survey does not count them apart.
age_under_18	The share under 18, which every level has.
white_share, black_share, asian_share, hispanic_share, other_race_share	The share of people in each of five groups that add to the whole: Hispanic or Latino people of any race, and everyone else by race (White, Black, Asian, and other: American Indian or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, some other race, and two or more races). From the American Community Survey's table B03002, pooled over race_years.
median_household_income, gini_index, median_home_value	From the American Community Survey, pooled over income_years. The Gini index runs from 0 (everyone has the same income) to 1 (one household has it all). Home value is what owners say their homes are worth, not sale prices.
gdp_per_capita, gdp_year	Gross domestic product in the dollars of that year, divided by the people there that year.
violent_crime_rate, property_crime_rate, homicide_rate	Offences known to the police for each 100,000 people, in crime_year.
vote_republican_2024, vote_democrat_2024, vote_independent_2024, vote_libertarian_2024, vote_green_2024, vote_other_2024	The share of the votes for president in 2024 that went to each party's nominee: Trump, Harris, Oliver and Stein, on whatever line of the ballot. "Independent" is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West together, who ran without a party's nomination. The six add up to 1. The year is in the name, and a later election will add columns of its own.
votes_cast_2024	Every vote cast for anyone for president. Ballots that chose no one are left out.
flag_url, seal_url	The flag and seal as files on Wikimedia Commons. The address leads to the image.
website	The official site.
wikidata	The place's item on Wikidata, where the four columns above come from.
n_records	Ordinances, resolutions and other items on record for it in the datasets here.
n_ordinances, n_resolutions	Of those, how many are each.
n_bills	For a state, measures of its legislature on record.
n_meetings, n_votes	Meetings of its governing body on record, and members' votes.
records_from, records_to	The earliest and latest dates among them.
datasets	The datasets that hold them.
world_url	Its page in Capitol World, if it has one.

A place with no records here has nothing in the last nine columns. That says nothing has been collected, not that the place has passed nothing.

What each level has

	State	County	City	Community	District
People, area, density, water share	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
Income, inequality, home value	yes	yes	most	most	yes
Urban share, rural-urban code	yes	yes	no	no	no
GDP for each person	yes	yes	no	no	no
Age bands from 18 up, and under 18 as one	yes	yes	most	most	yes
Age bands under 18	yes	no	no	no	no
Who sits for it in Congress	senators	no	no	no	representative
Crime	yes	no	no	no	no
Vote for president	yes	no	no	no	no
Flag, seal, site	yes	some	some	no	no

bodies

One row per body that makes law for a place and has records here: Congress, a state's legislature, a county's board, a city's council.

Column
body_id	A short name of its own: sd-council.
place_id, place, place_kind, state	The place it governs.
name, body, short	"San Diego City Council", "City Council", "the Council".
room, member_title, seat_title	Where it meets, what a member is called, and what a seat is called: "Council Chambers", "Councilmember", "District".
timezone	The time zone its meeting times are in.
site, site_url	Its own site, and what to call it.
since	How far back the record of its meetings goes, in words.
datasets	The datasets with its records.
world, world_url	Its room in Capitol World, if it has one.
chamber_file	For a board or council with a room, the file the room is drawn from.
map	Where its place is on Capitol World's map of the country.

world/bodies.json in this repository is the same list as a file, which Capitol World reads to know which places have a room.

boundaries

One row per place, with its outline. Every state, territory, county, city, community and district in places has one; the country does not.

Column
place_id, kind	As in places.
geometry	The outline as well-known binary: a polygon, or a multipolygon for a place of several pieces. Longitude and latitude, in the North American Datum of 1983. The file is GeoParquet, so GeoPandas, DuckDB and QGIS read the column as shapes.
west, south, east, north	The box round it.
middle_longitude, middle_latitude	The middle of its area. For a place of an odd shape this can lie outside it.
pieces, points	How many separate pieces it has, and how many points its outline.

The outlines are the Census Bureau's cartographic boundary files at 1:500,000: simplified for drawing, and cut back to the shoreline. They are not survey lines, and should not be used to say which side of a street is in a city.

maps

Not a table: files made from boundaries and places, which Capitol World draws its maps from. Each is a grid of squares 150 along its longer side, written as runs along its rows (which shape, then how many squares).

• maps/states/CA.json: a state, each square one of its counties. ids and names list the counties in the order the grid numbers them from 1; 0 is outside the state. capital is where the capitol stands, in squares.
• maps/congress/CA.json: the state again on the same grid as its county map, each square one of its congressional districts. short is each district's number, and people, income and home its population, median household income and median home value.
• maps/counties/CA.json.gz: every county of a state, by its code. In each, a square is a city, a named community, or the land in neither, which comes last as <county>-u. kinds says which each is, and seat where the county's government sits.

index

Not a table either: the same rows as places, cut up small for Capitol World to read. index/US.json has the country, the states and the territories; index/CA.json.gz has every county, city, community and congressional district of one state. Each lists its columns once and then each place's values in that order, by place_id.

ages

For the country and each state, people by single year of age (0 to 84, and 85 for 85 and over), so that other age bands can be made than the twelve above.

datasets

One row per body and dataset that has records of it: the dataset, what its rows are, and the same counts and dates for that dataset alone.

Where it comes from

• People and counties: the Census Bureau's Population Estimates, vintage
  2024. The island territories' are from their 2020 census. A community's people are the American Community Survey's count for 2020 to 2024, since the estimates do not cover it.
• Ages: the same estimates, by single year of age, which the Bureau makes for states. Below the state, the American Community Survey's table B01001 for 2020 to 2024.
• Members of Congress: the congress-members dataset, as it stood when this was built.
• Area and position: the Census Bureau's 2024 gazetteer files.
• Income, inequality and home value: American Community Survey, five-year tables B19013, B19083 and B25077 for 2020 to 2024.
• Urban share: the 2020 census's urban and rural counts.
• Rural-urban code: the Economic Research Service's 2023 Rural-Urban Continuum Codes.
• GDP: the Bureau of Economic Analysis's tables SAGDP1 and CAGDP1.
• Crime: the FBI's estimated crimes by state, from its Crime Data Explorer.
• Districts: the Census Bureau's 2024 gazetteer files for the districts of the 119th Congress and of each legislature's 2024 session, and the American Community Survey for 2020 to 2024, which counts people on those same lines.
• Outlines: the Census Bureau's 2024 cartographic boundary files for states, counties, places and districts.
• Vote for president: the MIT Election Data and Science Lab's U.S. President 1976–2024, which is each state's certified returns. The country's is the states' and the District's added up.
• Flags, seals, sites and county seats: Wikidata, matched by the Census code. Where Wikidata has several, the first is kept.
• Bodies: listed by hand in bodies.json.
• Records: counted from the datasets named in datasets.

What to know

• A district is a set of lines, and lines are redrawn. A row is the district as drawn for the Congress or session in district_session, and every figure on it is for those lines. When a state redraws, the new district is a new row under a new code, even if it keeps the number.
• The delegate districts of the four island territories are not here; each is the whole territory. The District of Columbia's eight wards are listed as its "state senate districts", as the Bureau lists them. Nebraska has one house, so no lower-house districts.
• A legislature's districts have their outlines and figures but are not drawn in maps/, and their rows do not say who sits for them.
• The vote for president is not known by district. The House's own returns by district are published by the MIT lab but not read here yet.
• A territory is one row. Its municipalities, districts and villages are not here yet. Puerto Rico has a yearly estimate and the survey's figures; the four island territories have their 2020 census count and little else.
• Where a city and its county have merged (Nashville, Indianapolis, Louisville), the city here is the part in no smaller city, which the Bureau calls the "balance".
• Cities are the Census Bureau's incorporated places. The towns of New York and New England and the townships of Pennsylvania and the Midwest are governments too, but the Bureau counts them as divisions of a county, and they are not here yet.
• Most places have no flag on record: about 1,000 have one and about 950 a seal. That is what Wikidata holds, not a count of the flags that exist. New York City is among those with none recorded against its code.
• There is no measure of green space yet. Water share is here because the Census Bureau measures it; tree cover and parkland need a land-cover map laid over each place's outline.
• The survey's figures for a small place rest on few households and can be far off. The Bureau publishes a margin of error with each, which is not kept here.
• GDP is missing for the cities of Virginia that the Bureau of Economic Analysis combines with a neighbouring county, and the urban share for Connecticut's planning regions, which replaced its counties after 2020.
• Crime is the FBI's estimate for the state. A state's figure can be compared with its own in other years more safely than with another state's.
• The vote for president is by state only. The same lab publishes it by county; that file is not read here yet. No one publishes it by city: it would have to be added up from precincts.
• A party's share is its nominee's. A state where the nominee was not on the ballot shows the write-in votes for them, if the state reported those, and otherwise nothing: the Green share is 0 in a few states for that reason.
• Flag and seal images are other people's files. Check the file's page on Wikimedia Commons for its licence before using one.
• The counts say what has been collected, and collections differ. One city's dataset goes back to 1905 and another's covers five years.

How it is made

build_places.py and, for the outlines and maps, build_boundaries.py in cat-pol-datasets. The Census Bureau's figures are in the public domain and Wikidata's are CC0; this compilation is released under CC0.