Social Explorer announces today that the newly-released 2010 American Community Survey (ACS)  and 2010 Summary File 1 from the Census are available for all US states and territories, for all summary levels and all variables.

Fresh from the Census Bureau, this data set give users new levels of detailed demographic information on all census survey questions. The ACS has data on everything from education to employment to home heating fuel, and so much more. To understand the difference between the  ACS and the Census, please read Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge’s Gotham Gazette column on the two data sources.

You can access this wealth of data through the Social Explorer reports tab, where you can create customized demographic reports with just a few clicks.  (The data will also be available in our interactive maps soon.)  Our reports are available in the same American Fact Finder-like interface that we have used for several years.  We are committed to offering the user quick and easy access to demographic data as we continue to improve our system and add new tools.

The full version is available in the Premium edition, and population change data is available in the Free edition.  For more on subscriptions and trials to access all that Social Explorer has to offer, please click here.

The recent release of the 2010 census data offers new information about the impact of the recession around the country.  In the article “Reading, Pa., Knew It Was Poor. Now It Knows Just How Poor,” Sabrina Tavernise explores widespread poverty in Reading, PA:

a struggling city of 88,000 that has earned the unwelcome distinction of having the largest share of its residents living in poverty, barely edging out Flint, Mich., according to new Census Bureau data. The count includes only cities with populations of 65,000 or more, and has a margin of error that makes it difficult to declare a winner — or, perhaps more to the point, a loser.

Reading began the last decade at No. 32. But it broke into the top 10 in 2007, joining other places known for their high rates of poverty like Flint, Camden, N.J., and Brownsville, Tex., according to an analysis of the data for The New York Times by Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College.

The article reveals that:

• The city’s poverty rate is now 41.3 percent (edging out Flint, MI)
• The employment rate in Reading dropped by 10 percent from 2000 to 2010
• Only about 63 percent of Reading’s residents have a high school diploma, compared with more than 85 percent nationally.  (For a further discussion of education and income, check out Social Explorer’s Back to School series.)

A chart of the most impoverished cities accompanies the article (based on data from Andrew Beveridge and the Census Bureau).

Click here for the full article on poverty in Reading, PA.  You can explore the 2010 data yourself using Social Explorer’s report tools.

Today’s release of the 2010 census data offers new information about the impact of the recession.  Also, these new data will be available to Social Explorer users later this month.

In the New York Times article “Data Show County’s Pain as Economy Plummeted,” Sabrina Tavernise reported on the hardest hit area in the nation–Greenwood County, South Carolina–citing data and analysis from Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge.

The falloff of the economy of Greenwood County, a district of almost 70,000 people that once pulsed with busy factories and mills, was the steepest in the country by two counts.

According to an analysis of Census Bureau figures made public on Thursday, its poverty rate more than doubled to 24 percent from 2007 to 2010, the largest increase for any county in the nation.

The decline also engulfed the middle class. Median household income plunged by 28 percent over the same period, shaving nearly $12,000 off the annual earnings of families here during the recession, according to the analysis, by Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College.

Read the full story about the local effects of the recession here.

Additionally, nationwide maps of increases in poverty and decreases in median income accompany the article.  The maps use data and analysis from Social Explorer and the Census Bureau.

Click here to see how different parts of the nation fared after the recession.

A recent New York Times article “Steps Away but Worlds Apart in New York” by Gina Bellafante explores the stark contrasts between poverty and privilege in New York City, often within the same neighborhood, or even street.

For decades, the intersection of Park Avenue and 96th Street has remained one of the city’s most obvious and despairing emblems of disparity, with East Harlem and its challenges spreading out to the north, and a vast gridlock of extraordinary privilege colonizing the acreage below. It is worth debating whether a visit to this corner ought to be mandated for tourists; few spots so profoundly render the truths of New York’s economic extremism. Liberal parents hoping to foster their own political values in their children might consider pilgrimages. When I stood there, as a teenager, for the first time in the early 1980s, I felt a call to fierce and equalizing justice, ready, suddenly, for Latin American guerrilla work and the Red Brigades…

With Social Explorer, you can dig deeper into neighborhoods across the city to learn more about wealth, poverty and other demographics over the decades.  These maps of this Upper East Side neighborhood illustrate the divide along the 96th Street.  The first one depicts median income (the darker shading indicates higher median incomes), and the second one depicts poverty rates.

Income and Poverty on Manhattan’s Upper East Side

(Both maps use 2005-09 American Community Survey data at the census tract level)

Click around to view other variables and neighborhoods.

And, coming soon to Social Explorer, you’ll be able to explore the latest data with the soon to be released 2010 numbers for the Census and the American Community Survey.

With the new school year approaching, Social Explorer is taking a closer look at education data today and over the years.  In this installment, we are looking at the rise of high school and college education through the decades.

Some of the earliest detailed census data on education came from 1850 when the census reported information about school attendance.  For many decades, the census focused on literacy rates, which we discussed in part two of the back to school series.

By the mid-1900s, data on educational attainment emerged (elementary school, high school, college, etc.), adding new insight into education levels across the nation and between population groups.  Using the 1940 and 1970 censuses and the 2009 American Community Survey, Social Explorer investigated these changes in detail.

Educational attainment, as measured by earning degrees, increased nearly one and a half times over between 1940 and 2009 at both the high school and college levels.  The trends in the data also show that college degrees today are even more prevalent than high school degrees were in the 1940s.

Comparing genders, women have had consistently higher numbers in attaining high school degrees, while men earn more college degrees.

However, by 2009, the differences in attainment between the two genders became quite small, with men catching up to women in high school degrees and women catching up to men in college degrees.  The following tables examine this growth:

Education levels have been rising across the board, but in recent years, the number of young women attending college has increased markedly.  As of 2009, 9,219,928 women were enrolled in college, which outnumbers the 7,234,021 men enrolled.  This influx of women attending college has propelled the growth in the overall number of adult women with college degrees.

We hope you enjoyed parts one, two and three of our back to school series.  Please visit Social Explorer’s maps and reports sections to learn more about education and other data.

In his latest Gotham Gazette column “10 Years Later: Enumerating the Loss at Ground Zero,” Social Explorer’s Andrew Beveridge examines the changing demographics of the Trade Center area, and the economic performance of the city a decade after 9/11.

The direct losses to New York and the United States from the World Trade Center attack are incalculable when one considers the personal and emotional loss to family and friends of the victims, as well as to all other New Yorkers, who have contended with the specter of 9/11 during the past decade. Yet, the magnitude of the losses and especially the recovery are being calculated daily…

First, Beveridge describes who the victims were:

Given the firms for whom many of those in the World Trade Center worked, as well as the large number of firefighters and other rescue workers, the other demographic facts should not be that surprising. The victims were overwhelmingly male (about 75 percent), young (many under 40, most under 50) and white (about 75 percent). Only about 8 percent were black, 9 percent Hispanic and about six percent Asian. About 75 percent were born in the United States, and the others originated from many different countries. Together New York and New Jersey residents accounted for about 87 percent of the victims. Many of the airplane passengers came from Boston and California.

Beveridge goes on to detail the scope of the economic losses and the status of the neighborhood and sector today:

Altogether, the 1,294 companies paid about $3.9 billion (all figures are in 2009 dollars) in wages and salaries, averaging about $126,000 per employee, far higher than the average for the New York metro salary of about $69,300 per employee. Few other ZIP codes and none outside of the Financial District rivaled the World Trade Center in generating employment income per employee. Most of the stores, restaurants and other retail establishments paid high rent to be in the trade center. Sandwich shops and other establishments, where less well-off employees worked, were mostly “just” across the street in another ZIP code.  Lower Manhattan accounted for about 3 percent of the employment and over 5 percent of the earnings in the large New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania Metropolitan area, which extends to Montauk at the tip of Long Island in one direction and to Hope County, Pa., in the other. The finance sector accounted for about 9.2 percent of the employment in the entire region, but 19.2 percent of the wages paid in the New York metropolitan area in 2000.

For instance, once the financial center of the world, Manhattan no longer accounts for over half of all employment in the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate sector:

Though Lower Manhattan seems to have recovered in terms of employment if not in terms of income, the financial sector in Manhattan seems to have taken a blow from which it has yet to recover. When the financial sector in Manhattan is compared to financial sector in the entire metropolitan area it is plain that some of its jobs have moved away from Manhattan. The sector in this larger region showed some decline to 2005 and then a small increase to 2009. In 2000, Manhattan accounted for 50.7 percent of the employment in finance in the wider metropolitan area. By 2005 that percentage had declined to 46.6 percent, and by 2009 it dropped further to 44.0 percent.

Among his conclusions, Beveridge states that “It seems Manhattan has permanently lost a substantial share of the financial sector.”

To read the full article, please visit GothamGazette.com. For Beveridge’s 2002 article on the same zip code, visit the archived article here.