Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Muleshoe . . . and Other Texas Cities
Last week we received an email from an employee of a Houston comedy club asking if demographic data are available on the ZIP codes the club collects through ticket sales. Specifically, he wanted stats on housing, age, ethnicity, and income.
We were delighted to inform him that, yes, those figures are available through a number of free online tools. One we especially recommend is the U.S. Census Bureau’s American FactFinder. It’s remarkably easy to navigate for a website overseen by a government agency (take that, IRS).
With FactFinder, you can search by state, county, city, or ZIP. Punch in your destination, hit "go," and you’re off. FactFinder will load tables of Census data on population estimates, age, business and industry, education, housing, income, poverty, race, and more. When using the data, keep in mind that the Census Bureau does a complete census every ten years (2010 was the last), but they make estimates of the in-between years in their American Community Survey.
So, for example, now you can say with authority that the estimated population of Muleshoe, Texas, in 2014 was 4,975, and the median age of its residents was a spry 33. The city had around 1,950 total housing units, of which 252 were vacant. Most were built in the ’60s.
Of course, what good is the site if you can’t extract the data, right? FactFinder allows you to bookmark tables for future reference, print tables as PDFs, or download in several formats, including as Excel spreadsheets.
If a tool like FactFinder can help a comedy club learn more about its customer base, imagine how it could help, say, a retailer trying to decide where to open a new store, a homebuilder looking for areas to build, or a developer wondering whether to apply for HUD housing programs and state housing grants.
