Dear all,
I am searching for housing data on the tract level or city district level in the long run. The best case would be data on housing units by the number of rooms at the city district level from 1900 to today for capital cities. Does anyone have any suggestions on where I could find this specific kind of data?
Thanks in advance,
Ria
You can find Census data tables summarizing the number of housing units by number of rooms on the tract level from 1960-onwards on IPUMS NHGIS. You can go back further to find tables with the total population and total number of housing units by tract from 1940-onwards (data on housing units for New York City tracts are also available for 1910 and 1920). For new IPUMS NHGIS users, we recommend reviewing the video tutorials in the user guide as well as the FAQ page to better understand the tools available in the Data Finder.
Changing administrative boundaries however make this type of long run analysis very challenging. Census tracts only appear beginning in 1910 for a select number of cities (eight in 1910 and 1920, 18 in 1930, and 60 in 1940) and these boundaries have significantly changed over time with tracts breaking up into smaller units as the population has increased and become more urban. To address this, IPUMS NHGIS provides tract level time series tables that use target-density weighting to interpolate Census block characteristics in order to provide tract level summary statistics standardized to 2010 tract boundaries. However, these tables are only available from 1990-2020. You might try to create your own crosswalk to extend your analysis back to 1940 using IPUMS GIS shapefiles of census tracts. These files can be added to an extract using the data finder tool. Aside from tract level data, IPUMS NHGIS does not have any decennial census summary data on levels below the county prior to 1970.