The richest county in America has a median household income nearly five times the poorest. Here's the full top and bottom of the list, and what the geography shows.
The decade-long census cycle isn't tradition, it's a constitutional rule. Here's the apportionment reason behind it, the history, and why ten years is the interval where fairness and feasibility meet.
Phoenix added more than 650,000 residents since 1990 and is closing in on 1.7 million, which makes it the fastest-growing large city in the country. Before you join them, the Census data has a few things to tell you about incomes, housing, and the heat that the brochures leave out.
In the most affordable mid-size city in the country, the typical home costs about 2.3 times the typical household income. In the most expensive metros that multiple runs past ten. Here are the real cities where a normal salary still buys a house, and what the Census data says about each one.
The most racially diverse cities in the country are not the famous big ones. They are mid-sized suburbs and satellite cities near Seattle, San Francisco, and New York, where no single racial group comes close to a majority and the odds that two random residents share a background are almost a coin flip.
The wealthiest county in the country sits in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, where the median household earns more than $181,000 a year. The rest of the top of the list clusters in three places: the DC commuter belt, the San Francisco Bay Area, and a short list of outliers built around one big employer.
In the most educated residential city in the country, more than nine of every ten adults hold a bachelor's degree, roughly triple the national rate. The places where that is true form a tight pattern: wealthy suburbs of New York, Boston, Dallas, and the Bay Area, plus a few college towns where almost everyone is a student or a professor.
The United States as a whole has become steadily more diverse since 2000. But a handful of individual cities have moved in the opposite direction, becoming less diverse rather than more. The mechanism is almost always the same: gentrification...
Most credible projections point to the same answer: Texas will surpass California as the most populous state in the United States around 2045 to 2050. The gap between the two states is large today, roughly 9 million people, but it has been closing steadily for two decades, and...
The Black middle class in America is growing, and it is growing in specific places. The story of where traces a clear pattern: a sustained migration toward Southern metros, a movement from cities into suburbs, and the emergence of a handful of regions that have become national centers of Black...
The Dallas-Fort Worth metro is on track to pass Chicago as the third-largest metropolitan area in the United States, and most projections put the crossover in...
The short answer is everyone. The US Census is designed to count every single person living in the United States - regardless of age, citizenship status, immigration status, race, or income. But the full answer involves some important distinctions about who counts where, which groups are historically undercounted, and a current political debate about whether that "everyone" rule should change for the 2030 Census...
The US Census exists because the Constitution requires it. Article I, Section 2 mandates an "actual Enumeration" of the population every ten years, and the original reason was simple: to divide political power fairly among the states. But the census has grown into something...
Filling out the census is not optional, at least on paper. Federal law requires every US resident to participate in the decennial Census, and there are penalties on the books for refusal. But the practical reality of what actually happens if you don't respond is a lot more nuanced than the legal language suggests...
The United States has been getting more racially and ethnically diverse with every Census count for decades. But not all groups are growing at the same pace, and the answer to which group is growing fastest depends on whether you measure by percentage growth rate or by raw numbers added. Both ways of looking at it tell an interesting story...
A census is an official count of an entire population. The word comes from Latin - specifically from censere, meaning "to assess" or "to estimate." According to...
Nashville has been one of the most talked-about relocation destinations in America for the past decade. The no-income-tax pitch, the music culture, the relative affordability compared to coastal cities - it all adds up to a compelling story. But the Census data tells a more complicated version of that story, one that includes a poverty rate that stays stubbornly above...
Three Texas cities rank in the top five wealthiest cities in the entire country by median household income. That is not a typo. Southlake, University Park, and West University Place all hit the ACS ceiling of $250,001 and land at positions three, four, and five on the national list, trailing only two small California communities. For a state whose identity is...
Most tracts are unremarkable in the statistical sense - middle of the distribution on income, density, poverty, home values. But the ones at the extremes tell stories that city-level or county-level data can never surface. A tract with 44,000 residents. A neighborhood where the median home value exceeds $2 million. A block where 0% of residents live in poverty. These places exist...
Most people choose a neighborhood the same way: they drive around, look at Zillow, maybe check a school rating site, and go with their gut. That process is fine for getting a general feel, but it leaves out a category of information that can matter enormously over a ten or twenty year homeownership horizon. Census data tells you not just what a neighborhood is today, but what direction it's been moving and how fast, and those are the two questions that a Saturday afternoon drive can't answer...
