What Census Tract is that?

A user recently asked me – “In which census tract is this particular address located?” SAVI can tell you.  Also, if you have some mysterious census tract number, SAVI can show you where it is. Both of these tasks can be accomplished using SAVI’s Community Profile tool.

What Tract is that Address in?
First, let’s tackle identifying a tract for a particular place or address. We start by going to the Community Profile tab.
Next, we click on the point radius tab and select “Specify a radius around: a specific address”

Then we type in our address and click next.

And then click “find address”

Next we tell SAVI that we want to look at 2010 census tracts within .25 miles. The distance doesn’t really matter for our task since we are looking for a single tract so let’s leave it at .25 miles.

Finally, click the Save button.

This takes us back to the Community Profiles map page with a marker for your address and any census tracts within .25 miles of it highlighted.

In case you see multiple census tracts highlighted you can turn off those tracts that don’t contain your address simply by clicking on them.

We now see the census tract shown on the map and the number is listed in the “Your Selections” text box. In this case our address is located in census tract 3536.00 in Marion County.

At this point, you can view a profile of the tract’s demographic s and socio-economic conditions by clicking “View Profile.”

Where is that census tract?

Now let’s talk about identifying where a particular census tract is. Some organizations define their service areas as a collection of census tracts, and they might tell you that they serve Marion County census tracts 3503.00, 3504.00, 3509.00, 3510.00, 3515.00, 3516.00, and 3905.00. Where exactly is that? SAVI can show you.

Let’s go back to the Community Profiles tab, change our geography type to 2010 Census tracts, select Marion County and click the Find button.

We are then given a list of census tracts in Marion County and it’s simply a matter of clicking the check boxes next to those tract numbers. The tracts are then automatically highlighted on the map for you and your entire list can be seen in the “Your Selections” text box.

We see in this example that the census tracts make up the Mid North neighborhood.

Click “View Profile” if you want to check out the community.

So don’t let census tracts scare you too much, they are really pretty easy to deal with.