Tag: census

Determining dwelling unit count at an address using 1950 Census records

March 11, 2023 / / 0 Comments

It’s possible to use 1950 U.S. Census records to establish a number of historic dwelling units at a building in Chicago for the purposes of the city generating a “zoning certificate”. That’s a recognition of the number of legal dwelling units especially useful when that number of dwelling units is greater than the current zoning code allows. They’re required to be generated (i.e. requested from the city’s planning department) during the sale of a small-scale residential property.

This Chicago zoning certificate was generated the “normal” way (which I don’t know how to describe), while this blog post is about digging up evidence in case the normal way doesn’t affirm the number of dwelling units you want it to affirm.

However, based on a recent experience of a client of mine, the zoning certificate – while supposedly valid for one year – is subject to dispute later! Finding Census records showing the same or more dwelling units in a given building has helped re-establish the validity of the number of units stated in a zoning certificate.

It will take you some time to research Census records! (I would budget at least one hour. There is a painstaking process to find the webpage that has the enumeration (counting) sheets for the address you want, and it will take some time to sift through those sheets (and you may have to look at multiple pages for the same address).

Here are the steps involved

  1. Find the enumeration district (ED).
  2. Review that ED’s set of sheets in the National Archives 1950 Census website.
  3. Page through and read every sheet until the address is found.

Tip: I recommend doing this, especially step 3, on a computer with the largest screen possible as it’s easier to view the scanned Census sheets that way.

1. Find the enumeration district

The New York Public Library has a great tutorial on their blog, and I recommend you start by reading section #2, “Generate an ED number”.

Once you locate the ED (following the instructions in “Generate an ED number”) I would say stop reading the NYPL blog post.

Alternatively, for Chicago address lookups, you can browse these maps of the enumeration districts and then search for those ED numbers directly on the National Archives website.

2. Review that ED’s set of sheets

The instructions will advise you to use Steve Morse’s third-party Unified Census ED Finder (which is the most useful part of this process). The ED Finder has a wizard asking you to select state, county, city, and street name and cross street. It will then produce a set of one or more ED numbers under the heading, “1950 ED numbers corresponding to your location”.

A screenshot of the ED Finder “wizard”.

Tip: ED Finder will likely show you multiple ED numbers; you may need to look at all of them to find an address. I think this happens because the link between each enumeration district and a city’s streets is imprecise

Click each ED number, which opens a new tab in the ED Finder website with links to three different image viewers. These are databases where scans of microfilm are shown online. One of them, NARA, is public – that’s the National Archives & Records Administration. I recommend that one as it’s free and doesn’t require an account.

3. Read each enumeration sheet

Once you arrive on the NARA website click on the “Population Schedules” to reveal the enumeration sheets. Start paging and reading!

Tip: Street names are written vertically on the left edge of the page.

A screenshot of the 1950 Census database and website of NARA. It’s necessary to click the “population schedules” button to display the enumeration sheets.

The NARA viewer isn’t the best – it doesn’t allow you to make it full-screen; I was constantly having to zoom in to read the street names and house numbers.

A screenshot of a 1950 Census enumeration sheet with two annotations.

How Chicagoans commute map: An interview with the cartographer

January 24, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Chicago Commute Map by Transitized

A screenshot of the map showing Lakeview and the Brown, Red, Purple and Purple Line Express stations.

Shaun Jacobsen blogs at Transitized.com and yesterday published the How Chicagoans Commute map. I emailed him to get some more insight on why he made it, how, and what insights it tells about Chicago and transit. The map color-symbolizes census tracts based on the simple majority commuting transportation mode.

What got you started on it?

It was your post about the Census data and breaking it down by ZIP code to show people how many homes have cars. I’ve used that method a few times. The method of looking up each case each time it came up took too long, so this kind of puts it in one place.

What story did you want to tell?

I wanted to demonstrate that many households in the city don’t have any cars at all, and these residents need to be planned for as well. What I really liked was how the north side transit lines stuck out. Those clearly have an impact on how people commute, but I wonder what the cause is. Are the Red and Brown Lines really good lines (in people’s opinions) so they take them, or are people deciding to live closer to the lines because they want to use it (because they work downtown, for example)?

The reason I decided to post the map on Thursday was because while I was writing the story about a proposed development in Uptown and I wanted  information on how many people had cars around that development. As the map shows, almost all of Uptown is transit-commuting, and a lot of us don’t even own any cars.

What data and tools did you use?

I first used the Chicago Data Portal to grab the census tract boundaries. Then I grabbed all of the census data for B08141 (“means of transportation to work by number of vehicles available”) and DP04 (“selected housing characteristics”) for each tract and combined it using the tract ID and Excel’s VLOOKUP formula.

Read the rest of this interview on Web Map Academy.

How many cars are in Rogers Park?

November 10, 2013 / / 4 Comments

There are a gazillion cars in Rogers Park, and there’s no place to park them. That’s the declaration you would gather if you listen to “Lakefront Car Tower” (a parking garage) proponents, including the 49th ward alderman, Joe Moore.

The parking problem is so bad in Rogers Park that a parking garage at Sherwin Avenue and Sheridan Road that would provide less than 100 overnight parking spaces to the public was actually sent from Asphaltia, the god of car parks. It’s so bad that “[m]any car owners find themselves stuck in their home at night” – yes, the alderman really published that on his website – because they find a parking space on Friday night and can’t move the car until Monday morning. The horror of using your feet, pedals, the bus, the train, car sharing, paratransit, or a Segway!

(I’d love to get into parking pricing policy now, but I’ll just leave you with this: of course there is going to be a demand problem when the supply of publicly-owned on-street parking costs $0 per year.)

This post is actually a tutorial on how to use United States Census data to find how many cars are in the neighborhood of Rogers Park, not a laugh about Asphaltia’s teachings.

Let’s begin! Continue reading

Expanding data collection to include other modes

October 31, 2011 / / 0 Comments

I think the Census Bureau should start collecting “journey to work” data on trips made by electric or gas-powered standing scooters as well as Segways. And that we need to start organizing vehicle crashes by this category.

Saw this electric scooter locked up outside the Active Transportation Alliance headquarters a couple weeks ago, 9 W Hubbard Street. 

Alderman Laurino should start work on “leveling the playing field” between texting while driving with texting while biking to include a ban on texting while Segwaying. Seen at 2030 S Archer. 

Policy insight for Monday, August 1, 2011

August 3, 2011 / / 0 Comments

This isn’t refined. These are just my notes that I speak from. I may not have spoke about everything written here and I may not have written here everything I spoke about. This is for Moving Design. 

There was report of cyclist crashing on the Tuff Curb at the on-street bike parking facility in Wicker Park.

Installing the Tuff Curb

experimental projects need reviews. I don’t mean projects that are considered experiments, I mean projects that are new to the people who designed it, and new to the people who will be using it.

we need good data collection.

Did the Kinzie bike lane cause congestion? So what if it did?
We would need data points that were collected using well-known methods, and probably at different times of the day and week. And we’d have to be sure to count cyclists, too.
Then 3, 6, or 12 months later, we’d have to do it again.

What was the change?
Is that a change that meets our goals?

Back to the cyclist crashing on tuff curb, what is the city’s plan to monitor the use (or disuse) of the facility? How will the city collect data on something like this?

Census – not gonna happen in 2020
American Community Survey – 5-year estimates (with data gathered annually) will replace decennial Census.

“Here are a few Streetsblog posts about Census and NYC DOT’s bike counts, and the problems with each. The first post has some stuff about what could be done to improve on them:” (Ben Fried, Editor in Chief, Streetsblog NYC)

http://www.streetsblog.org/2010/04/27/how-many-new-yorkers-bike-each-day/
http://www.streetsblog.org/2010/10/01/did-nyc-bike-commuting-decrease-in-2009-thats-what-the-census-says/
http://www.streetsblog.org/2011/04/13/actually-if-you-build-it-they-will-bike/

Read more policy insights from Steven Vance.