item-282

It's that time of year again. The UofC is having its annual scavenger hunt and this is my small contribution.

#snitchcock #emphaticallyyes #alburquerqueintlbaloonfestival

For item 282, the judges have requested "the most average census tract in America. We want to see the GEOID, a description of your rigorous yet creatively innovative methodology, and an illustrative map"

Methodology

1. Understand the problem

As is the case with most scav items, I had no idea what this meant upon the first several readings. So I asked friends, and then emailed the customer service branch of the United State Census Bureau. Apparently, the US Census Bureau employs individuals who are both lovely and helpful. You can find their response in the file entitled "response-from-census.md".

2. Follow the instructions provided to me by the US Census Bureau.

• I downloaded the National Census Tracts Gazetteer Files for the year 2018. These are based on the 2010 census. This is a .txt file containing the following fields:

USPS GEOID ALAND AWATER ALAND_SQMI AWATER_SQMI INTPTLAT INTPTLONG

• I opened this file in Google sheets. You can find the spreadsheet here.

• I averaged the floating point values for columns for which this made sense using regular ol' Google formulas, i.e. =AVERAGE(F3:F) etc. You can see the averages in the top row of the spreadsheet.

• Then, I applied conditional formatting to the cells, highlighting a row's land area (mi^2) or water area (mi^2) values if the average for either was ±1.0 of the overall average for that field.

• One handsome tract had values within 1.0 of both averages, and that was tract 1001020801. I used the Response Outreach Area Mapper to search for that tract. You can find the beautiful map of this wonderful (and average) tract below.

Results

Most average census tract in terms of water area (mi^2) and land area (mi^2)

GEOID: 1001020801 Link to map (for some reason GitHub is not letting me add an image to the readme): https://imgur.com/9B7WuH5