Items were chosen where it was possible to get a close correspondence of the item definition across the two censuses. Thus, for example, we did not attempt to present a distribution table of family or household income values, since the intervals used for the two decades were different and inflation would have distorted them even if they had been left the same. Unlike the Basic Tables reports, the format of the reports for these two media will be identical. The variable label is shown in the left most column. The denominator for the PCT calculations are the values reported in the first line of the table except for tables T2 and T3, where the denominator is total population.
Negative values indicate a decrease in the value of the variable over the decade.
The former usually measures the change in a count, while the latter measures the change in that count as a percentage of its universe. What this tells you is that while the city was losing black population in absolute terms, the percentage of the population that was black actually increased by almost 2 percentage points. As noted in the Notes at the bottom of each page, income, average housing value and median rent figures for 1980 have all been adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Price Index inflation factors cited. This appendix will not appear on web versions of the reports. The important thing to keep in mind here is that there may be cases where the same geographic code does not pertain to the same geographic area over time.