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In the New York Times article “Racial Patterns Are Found in Recent School Budget Elections,” Sam Roberts explores the connections between race and age patterns and school budget decisions.  He found that:

Budgets tended to fare worse in districts with a large number of white voters and a large number of nonwhite students. And in the four districts in the state where the majority of registered voters are white and nonwhite students make up the majority of the school population, the budgets were defeated.

After analyzing the budget vote results for the NYT, Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge explained that:

In New York, it appears that white voters in districts with large numbers of minorities, and minority voters themselves, often voted against school spending increases…This very well might undercut educational opportunities for such minorities, while depressing property values in districts with a substantial share of minorities. It may increase the statewide gap between blacks and whites in both school performance and wealth.

Click here to read the whole article.

Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge appeared on WNYC’s the Brian Lehrer Show for the wrap up of the show’s Census series.

You can listen to the entire segment here or on the show page.  (Beveridge joins the conversation at minute 30.)

The Brian Lehrer Show has been using Social Explorer maps to engage WNYC listeners in their Anecdotal Census project.  Check out all of their census coverage here.

Muslims and mosques are much in the news with the current controversy over a proposed mosque near the World Trade Center site, as well as protests against mosques around the nation.

With all this attention on them, who are American Muslims?  Counting congregations and adherents can be difficult.  The US Census Bureau doesn’t track religion data–in fact, unlike in other countries, it is barred from asking.  Social Explorer gives you access to the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) data from 1980 to 2000.  Based on the Religious Congregations and Membership Study (RCMS), this is the most complete census available on religion in the United States.

According to the 2000 ARDA survey, New York City had 86 Muslim congregations and 167,259 adherents.  Nationwide, there were 1,209 congregations and 1,559,294 adherents.  You can explore where Muslims are in the New York City area and around the nation on this map.

Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge wrote about the process of counting Muslims and other religious groups for GothamGazette.com.

Since Muslims, whatever their number, are a small part of the United States population they are hard to count. They are also hard to define. Considering just adults, what does one need to do to be counted as a Muslim? Go to a mosque? Pray several times per day? Observe Ramadan? Have made a pilgrimage to Mecca? Eat Halal foods? Those trying to count Jews face similar problems. One definition of Jewish, for instance, is “Feeling you should go to High Holiday services.” By such a definition apparently, it is enough to either go to the services or to feel guilty about not going.

In this article, he also parses the different methods (and problems with them) used by researchers to count Muslims.  Click here to read the entire article.

A recent court ruling struck down Proposition 8, and now gays and lesbians can legally marry.  How many people might this affect?  Social Explorer can help you find out.

Since 2000, the Census has counted the number of unmarried partners, including same-sex unmarried partners, which can be an indicator of the number of people who might take the opportunity to get hitched in light of the recent court decision.

In 2000, 594,391 residents of the US identified as being in same-sex unmarried couples.  That number increased to 700,266–one in seven of which live in California, according to the 2006-08 American Community Survey.

Click the map to explore where unmarried same-sex partners live in California and around the nation.

Italy’s La Repubblica Television recently interviewed Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge about demographic changes in Harlem.  We hope that our Italian fans and admirers will enjoy this news story:

Born in Chile, adopted at six months and raised in upstate New York by Italian parents, Snooki bloomed at the Jersey Shore last summer and is now taking over South Beach in season two of MTV’s The Jersey Shore.

From the top of her pouf to the bottom of her tanned toes, we know a lot about Nicole Polizzi, AKA Snooki, Snickas, Snooks, Snickers and the Princess of Poughkeepsie.  (Even Obama knows about her by now.)

The Washington Post describes her fame, “After the media storm of ‘Jersey Shore’s’ initial season, Snooki has every reason to believe the world revolves around her, which it very well may.”

Social Explorer lets you learn even more about this icon and her world.

For this installment of The Jersey Shore Data Hookup, we’ll use Social Explorer to find out all about her hometown of Marlboro, NY, (population 3,874) through an interactive map.

This map uses one of Social Explorer’s new color schemes called “Pink Panther”–ideal for fashionable mapmakers.

You can also create reports to find out more about where she grew up, such as:

-Just how Italian is Marlboro?  31.1% (nearly seven times the rate nationwide)

-And, how many other Chileans live nearby? 70 in Ulster County (total population 177,749)

Click on the map (or the pouf) to explore more.

Vampires are booming thanks to Twilight’s book sales, movie tickets and fainting fans.  With Social Explorer you can learn where they might be booming in the US too.

Count von Count wanted us to count up his vampire peers.

Of course, there is no “are you a vampire?” question on the census form, but using Social Explorer’s reports tools, you can examine the Romanian population—those hailing from the land of the legendary Transylvania, which is purportedly the land of Vampires.  (Of course being Romanian does not make one a vampire, who after all are mythical.  Besides, once bitten, one from any ancestry or origin can become a vampire.)

Vampire buzz is on the rise, and Social Explorer can (almost) let you work with vampiric datasets.

In 2000, the remote city of Forks, Washington (Clallam County), where the Twilight saga takes place, had eight residents who were born in Romania, and 29 who identified as having Romanian ancestry.

Because Clallam County has a small population, we won’t have the exact numbers on the Romanian  increase until the 2010 Census data are released, but using the American Community Survey estimates for 2006-2008, we can look at trends in Washington State to examine the population shifts.

Back in the 1920s (Nosferatu’s heyday), there were 102,803 US residents born in Romania. That number has grown to 164,294, according to the 2006-08 ACS.

As the Twilight books rose up the bestseller list, the Washington Romanian population grew too.  Between 2000 and 2008, the Romanian population in Washington State increased from 4,345 to 7,339, and the number of residents with Romanian ancestry increased from 9,964 to 17,041.

Click here to create Social Explorer reports about potential vampires, werewolves (purportedly  to have originated in Germany) and other notable populations.

In “White Population Rises in Manhattan,” Sam Roberts details the latest shift in the demographics of New York City.  Based on 2009 American Community Survey estimates, Roberts writes about the changes in the white population across the city, as well as in individual neighborhoods, such as Harlem.  This trend marks the first time since 1970 that a majority of Manhattan residents are non-Hispanic white.

The article quotes Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge on the larger population movements behind the shift, “Overall, the trend of people, particularly younger people, is staying in cities to build their lives and careers…People would die to live in Manhattan now.“

Click here to read the full article.

The Census Bureau just released 2009 sub-county and place estimates and Social Explorer already crunched the numbers for the New York Times.  In the article “City Growth May Affect Party Control in Albany,” Sam Roberts looks at the latest population numbers for New York.  As of July, 2009, the city population now numbers 8,391,881.  The article also details the population growth in the city and suburbs, and the declines upstate.

He explains the power of demographics on politics, “Because redistricting is done on the basis of population and the city is overwhelmingly Democratic, the balance of power in Albany is likely to remain the same or perhaps shift even further in favor of the Democrats.”

In the article, Beveridge states, “Whoever ends up in charge of redistricting will find it virtually impossible to ignore the fact that the population and power shift from upstate to downstate continued unabated.”

Click here to read the rest of the article.