Menu Changes and New Housing Indicators

If you take a look at the Housing and Economy menus today, you might notice some changes. We moved some things around to help keep the menus organized, and to make room for a few new indicators (and  future indicators to come).

Housing

Starting in the Housing menu, you may notice the disappearance of “Home Heating Fuel Type”. Have no fear, gas junkies, we’ve moved this from the “Additional Housing Data” section to the new submenu “Housing Quality” under Residential Buildings:

You’ll notice two new indicators there as well – plumbing facilities and kitchen facilities. These indicators from the ACS show the number and percent of housing units that have or lack complete plumbing or kitchen facilities. The plumbing data in particular is interesting, showing more of a lack in housing in rural areas:

In addition to moving the home heating data into the more appropriate “Residential Buildings” section, this frees up some space in the second column for some exciting new data which you’ll hear about soon.

Economy

The Economy menu has always been a little tricky, partly because it has similar data coming from different sources. Previously, we had separate sections for the Census’s County Business Patterns (CBP) and BLS’s Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), which both provide industry sub-sector data:

You can read about the differences between them here, but the short version is CBP has zip-code level estimates, and QCEW has wage data. To make it more straightforward, we’ve condensed that all into a single section, and clarified the assets of each dataset:

And by condensing that section, we were able to add the data on Broadband Internet Access, an important economic resource, to the Economy menu. It also continues to appear in the Quality of Life menu. You could make a good argument that it also belongs in the Housing and Education menus, but we had to draw the line somewhere.

This led to a little rearranging of other datasets in the Economy menu (Employment now tops the second column), but it shouldn’t be difficult to find what you’re looking for.