HI in 2024 tract Shapefile

NHGIS
1

Hi. I’m using the tigerline shapefile to map the tract data onto other regions. The 2024 tract shapefile has HI…in a different place. I recognize that maybe this is a projection thing or something. But when I look at 2022 (in QGIS), HI is where I expect it, off the west coast of the continental US. In the 2024 file it is not in the same spot. Does anyone know if that’s an error or if I need to do something extra to get it where I expect? The 2024 tracts in the shapefile now do not overlap with the shapefiles I have for congressional and state legislative districts in HI. So I can’t do the data mapping I need there.

Thanks!

2

I’ve confirmed that the 2024 NHGIS shapefile for census tracts does (unfortunately!) completely omit Hawaii.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention! We aim to publish a corrected, complete shapefile very soon.

In the meantime, the 2023 tract shapefile should suffice for many applications. It includes Hawaii and likely has few substantial discrepencies from the 2024 tracts there. (There were no documented changes in the definitions of Hawaii census tracts between 2023 and 2024, but the Census Bureau nonetheless occasionally makes adjustments in the representations of tract boundaries and coastlines in the TIGER/Line files, which are the source of NHGIS files.)

Alternatively, you could obtain the 2024 NHGIS shapefile for block groups and dissolve the block groups by census tract, which would produce polygons that are effectively identical to the 2024 Hawaii tract polygons that we’ll publish.

Update: We’ve also confirmed that no other 2024 shapefiles have this issue. It is limited to the tract shapefile.

3

Thanks! I managed to paste just HI from 2022 (which I had around) into 2024 and then use that for my application. If you think of it, can you post here when you publish the corrected file? Then I will replace my hacked together version with the correct one.

Thanks for the prompt reply!

Adam

4

Yes, we’ll aim to post again here when we’ve released the complete file.

5

Update: We’ve corrected the NHGIS 2024 tract shapefile to include Hawaii.