Infrastructure update

Suvidha Bandi, the department’s senior planner, said the ACS data was important to their work on Houston’s Livable Places project, an initiative that works to update parts of the city’s development codes to improve walkability, affordability and equity in key neighbourhoods. Bandi says good data sources are key to gleaning demographic trends, tracking changes in household size and understanding housing types in the city.

“We specifically used ACS data projections to understand population growth, age group composition and changing needs to convince the [Livable Places Action] Committee as needs change.

She added that reliable data to assess what future conditions might look like allows the department to make informed decisions about regulations that will affect potential developments two or three decades from now. “No one can see the future exactly, but the projections certainly help.”

Public transport and walking

Senior planner Muxian Fang depends on ACS data to determine which streets to designate as pedestrian places and transit-oriented development streets.

“The census data has played an important role in helping us promote walking and multimodal transportation in the city. Census data on population density and car ownership give us strong support in the street designation process. »

Neighborhood data

The planning department compiles and aggregates the most recent estimates from the American Community Survey by city council district and super neighborhood, geographically designated areas where stakeholders work together to meet the needs of their communities. This information is available on the Department’s website in the form of tables, graphs and maps.

“Periodically, the planning department receives specific requests from council members’ offices, the mayor’s office and other city departments for a given target area,” said Bala Balachandran, the department’s chief demographer.

Compare Houston

The Department also produces a report called “How We Compare,” which puts Houston’s statistics side-by-side with the ten most populous cities in the United States. “How We Compare” reports are categorized by demographics, social, economic and housing and used by the media. and the general public.

Learn more about ACS

Used by professionals in the public and private sectors, the ACS provides detailed information on 40 different data points such as a person’s ancestry, the language they speak at home, their level of education, whether they served in the military, how far they commute to work, if they have health insurance, how they heat their home, or if they have access to a personal vehicle. The Census Bureau collects these data points monthly from a strategically selected sample of U.S. residents, and then uses statistics to apply the results to different geographies and populations across the country.

This latest version of the ACS is the 5-year estimate, a 60-month average of survey responses adjusted to correct for errors, and a lower than normal response rate. The Census Bureau received fewer survey form responses than at any time in the past two decades, a reduction attributed to the pandemic.

For this release, the census also used a new method of withholding information about survey respondents called differential confidentiality. Despite the delay, the information provided by ACS is critical to many functions within the City of Houston government.