DECLINEOn the morning of September 19, 1977, workers at the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Campbell Works showed up for their shifts and were told the plant was closing. More than 5,000 people lost their jobs that day. Locals called it Black Monday, and the name stuck because what happened next made clear it wasn't just a plant closure. It was the beginning of a decades-long collapse that would cut the city's population by more than half and leave behind one of the most striking examples of urban decline in American history...
MAY 20, 2026 · 6 MIN
METHODSThe Census Bureau divides the entire United States into 84,000 small statistical neighborhoods called census tracts. Each one covers roughly 1,200 to 8,000 residents, which is close enough to a real neighborhood that the data actually tells you something meaningful about a specific place, not just a city average that smooths over everything interesting. CensusEasy indexes all of them, and we built two tools specifically for people who want to explore the country at that level...
MAY 19, 2026 · 6 MIN
GENERALMost 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...
MAY 18, 2026 · 6 MIN
BOOMTOWNSRetirement location decisions come down to three things for most people: how far their money goes, what the weather feels like day to day, and whether the place actually works for someone who isn't commuting to an office anymore. The Census data makes it possible to look...
MAY 17, 2026 · 6 MIN
BOOMTOWNSEvery year researchers and city planners study the same question: which American cities are actually growing, and what is driving them? The answer keeps pointing to the same regions. The Sun Belt, the Mountain West, and a handful of mid-sized metros with strong job markets and enough land to build on. The cities...
MAY 16, 2026 · 6 MIN
METHODSHi, I'm Paul and I've spent years building web platforms around public data, and Census data kept coming up as the most interesting and most underserved category out there. The data itself is remarkable: every city, every ZIP code, every census tract in the country, with population, income, housing, education, and dozens of other metrics going back more than thirty years...
MAY 15, 2026 · 6 MIN
BOOMTOWNSBozeman, Montana has a population of around 60,000 people. It sits at 4,800 feet in the Gallatin Valley, surrounded by mountains, about an hour from the nearest major airport. For most of its history it was a college town with cheap rents and modest wages, the kind of place people left for bigger opportunities...
MAY 15, 2026 · 6 MIN
BOOMTOWNSIn 1990, Frisco was a small farming town north of Dallas with about 6,500 people. Thirty years later it had 200,000. By 2024 it was closing in on 235,000, and the city is still building. No city in modern American history has sustained that kind of growth for that long...
MAY 12, 2026 · 14 MIN
