So – the number is in, and the questions (I’m sure) are on their way. The Census released population figures from the 2010 Census yesterday as part of the redistricting process yesterday!
LA County’s population increased by only 299,267 people between 2000 and 2010, from 9,519,338 to 9,818,605. Still a lot of people!
Here are a couple of initial files that were sent to me:
To get the data yourself – here is the link to the Census website: http://www.census.gov/rdo/data/2010_census_redistricting_data_pl_94-171_summary_files.html
Personally, I’ve been quoting a figure above 10 million for a while now. My assumption is that we had a bell curve – that we gained many more people until the recession, where we lost population. Anecdotally, I believe that the northern part of our County (Palmdale, Lancaster, etc) was the center of growth for a while – this is perhaps where we lost of lot of people too.
My thoughts initially are to do both a spatial and a temporal analysis – showing changes in time and space. What is the best way to do this? What would you look at?
Have fun – lots more data to come!
[...] freeways over the comfort of trains and buses. Last year, in a county with a population of nearly 10 million people, some 1.2 million took buses every day and a little more than 300,000 hopped on [...]
[...] that have anything to do with a broader exodus from L.A.? In this disturbingly chirpy blog post, County Geographic Information Officer Mark Greninger notes that overall L.A. population is flat or [...]
Its quite amazing to see such a small increase for such a large and a populous county over a period of 10 years. Its also interesting to see the increase in number of census tracts over the same time period indicating re-distribution of the population rather than real growth. Your suggested spatial and temporal analysis should reveal that very nicely. Look forward to it.
Vandana