USpopcenters

USpopcenters contains data on the centers of population (also known as “centroids”) of census areas in the United States.

Centers of population are according to the 2020, 2010, and 2000 decennial censuses. They are given via longitude and latitude coordinates and are available at the level of state, county, tract, and block group. The mean and median centers of population of the entire US according to the 2020 and 2010 censuses are also included in this package.

All these data are available in this package in the form of tibbles. Each year/geography combination has its own data set, and each data set also includes a column with each area’s total population. The tibbles are indexed by GEOID/FIPS code, and some of the state-level and county-level tables also contain state and county names.

All applicable tables contain data from the fifty states and the District of Columbia. Non-state island territories’ data has inconsistent availability from dataset to dataset. See each tibble’s documentation page to see what each one actually contains.

This package was created primarily because the US Census Bureau has not made these data available via API. They were downloaded manually from the Census Bureau website at https://www.census.gov/geographies/reference-files/time-series/geo/centers-population.html.

Installation

You can install the released version of USpopcenters from CRAN with:

install.packages("USpopcenters")

And the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("NikKrieger/USpopcenters")

Example

County-level centers of population from the 2010 US census:

library(USpopcenters)
county2010
#> # A tibble: 3,221 × 7
#>    STATEFP COUNTYFP COUNAME  STNAME  POPULATION LATITUDE LONGITUDE
#>    <chr>   <chr>    <chr>    <chr>        <int>    <dbl>     <dbl>
#>  1 01      001      Autauga  Alabama      54571     32.5     -86.5
#>  2 01      003      Baldwin  Alabama     182265     30.5     -87.8
#>  3 01      005      Barbour  Alabama      27457     31.8     -85.3
#>  4 01      007      Bibb     Alabama      22915     33.0     -87.1
#>  5 01      009      Blount   Alabama      57322     34.0     -86.6
#>  6 01      011      Bullock  Alabama      10914     32.1     -85.7
#>  7 01      013      Butler   Alabama      20947     31.8     -86.7
#>  8 01      015      Calhoun  Alabama     118572     33.7     -85.8
#>  9 01      017      Chambers Alabama      34215     32.9     -85.3
#> 10 01      019      Cherokee Alabama      25989     34.2     -85.6
#> # ℹ 3,211 more rows

US census data terms of service

https://www.census.gov/data/developers/about/terms-of-service.html