PUMA number 77777 in Louisiana

USA
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Hi IPUMS team!

First of all, thank you so much for the support you provide for the research community. This forum has helped me a ton with my research.

I am trying to so spatial analysis with the PUMA shapefiles that I downloaded from here. I use the 2000 PUMAs with 2010 TIGER boundaries, 2010 PUMA-2010 boundaries and 2020.

However, when I checked if I have all the PUMAs that I have in my microdata in my shape file collection, I realized that one PUMA is missing its shape file. It is just this one, 77777, in state 22. Can you tell me what’s going on here?

For your reference, my dataset is a data set spanning years from 2009 to 2020. Therefore, it should have all 00,10,20 PUMAs in the PUMA column. Therefore, in theory, the combined shapefile, ‘all_PUMAs’, should exhaust the unique PUMA identifier I made by pasting state and PUMA codes, which is called ‘ST_PUMA.’

Thanks again for ALL your help!

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Hurricane Katrina!

I should have read the description for the PUMA variable! Thanks anyway!

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I’m glad you figured it out! In case others on the forum have the same question, here is a brief explanation:

In the 2006-2011 ACS, persons living in Louisiana PUMAs 01801, 01802, and 01905 were all coded as living in Louisiana PUMA 77777. Due to the effects of Hurricane Katrina, the original three PUMAs no longer had sufficient population to be separately identified. However, the three original PUMAs (01801, 01802, and 01905) are still in the PUMA shapefiles. You can relabel those three PUMAs as 77777 in your shapefile to match your microdata file.