Week 7: American FactFinder

American FactFinder: (https://factfinder.census.gov/)

NOTE:  The subsections for each bulleted step below tell you how to perform the task.
  • Visit AFF >> Advanced Search >> SHOW ME ALL
  • Filter to Congressional District
    1. Click Geographies on left-hand side of screen
    2. Select “Congressional District” from the dialog dropdown
    3. Select “All Congressional Districts (115th Congress…)” >> Hit “Add to Your Selections” button
    4. Hit the CLOSE button in the upper-right to close the Select Geographies dialog
  • Filter to Real Estate Taxes
    1. Click Topics on left-hand side of screen
    2. Expand the Housing >> Financial Characteristic >> Select Real Estate Taxes
    3. Close the Select Topics dialog
  • Open the “Mortgage Status by Aggregate Real Estate Taxes Paid (Dollars) table
    1. Tick the box next to the first table B25090
    2. Select the Download link shown above the list of tables
  • Move the compressed file to your workspace and extract
  • Download the 115th Congress boundary shapefile (“…20m.zip”)
    1. https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/cbf/cbf_cds.html
    2. Save the 2017 version of the 20m congressional district boundaries (Right-Click >> Save As >> …)
  • Move the compressed file to your workspace and extract

Process data and import to file geodatabase

  • Open the ACS_15_1YR_B25090_with_ann.csv in Excel and fix the field names
    • First row field names and no strange characters or spaces
    • Create a text field based on the GEO.id field whose values are
      • 4-digits long (Alabama values show as 101, not 0101 – you want it to show 0101)
    • Remaining rows must be data

JOIN:

Your join will be based on a text field containing the state FIPS + Congressional district identifyer.  It will be four characters long…

Import Congressional district boundaries into file geodatabase.

  • Force the GEOID to be imported as a text type

Create a text field in the boundary data set (“mygeoid”) >> Use the Field Calculator to populate this new field with: [GEOID]

This join is only available in this ArcGIS project.  Make it permanent by saving it out to the FGDB as a new feature class.