Census Summary File 1

Summary File 1 from the US Census presents counts and information [age, sex, race, Hispanic/Latino origin, household relationship, whether residence is owned or rented] collected from all people and housing units.

There are two ways to get the 2010 Census data:

• Shapefiles with demographic data at https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger-data.html.  Make sure you check down on the page to get the Shapefiles instead of the Geodatabases.  All the files are national (some are huge), and you pick the geographic level you want.  This will be much easier than the second option. 
  • The download includes an Excel metadata file, with the names of the fields and a description.
  • You will want to rename the fields to something more meaningful.
  • You can subset the large shapefiles, Filtering on the Geoid field, whose first two digits are the State FIPS code, and first five are the state/county FIPS code.
• Use new American FactFinder web site at http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/searchresults.xhtml?refresh=t .  If you get the data here, you will have to Join the database to a file with the geometry.

Last revision 8/10/2014