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Cornell Program on Applied Demographics
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Census 2020: What State and Local governments need to Know

 

New York Block Browser LUCA Evaluation System (NYBBLES)

In preparation for Local Update Census Addresses (LUCA) the Census Bureau made address list counts available. These counts represent the number of residential and group quarters addresses in each Census block. These counts can be compared with counts of local address listings. Differences in counts can help focus efforts on a limited number of blocks.

The Cornell Program on Applied Demographics analyzed data from the Real Property Tax Services (RPTS) and produced block counts based on that data.

The online NYBBLES tools consist of two kinds of pages:
  1. Overview and comparison of block counts by County
    • Table overview
      Link: https://pad.human.cornell.edu/census2020/lucabl_stats.cfm

      This page compares Census Block counts with RPTS based block counts for all blocks in a selected County.

      Columns can be sorted by clicking on the headers, and blocks can be filtered by filtering on town and/or place (2010 boundaries).

      The column RPTS-LUCA is the difference between the Real Property based block count and the Count of residential addresses in the Census Bureau Master Address File. A positive number in this column indicates that Real Property based count is higher and could mean that the Census Bureau is missing some units in that block. This could be a high priority block to prepare individual addresses for, as the Census Bureau will ask for those addresses during LUCA as 'adds'.

      Clicking on the GEOID of a block takes you to the second kind of page. GEOID is the Geographic Identifier used by the Census Bureau to uniquely identify each block.

    • Map overview
      Link: https://pad.human.cornell.edu/census2020/nybblesmap.cfm

  2. Overview of parcels that intersect with a given block, for example:
    Link: https://pad.human.cornell.edu/census2020/lucablbrowser.cfm?geoid10=360010023002000

    This example shows information about residential parcels in block 360010023002000, the block that includes New York State Executive Mansion. If you know the latitude/longitude of an address, but not the block, you can also get to the same overview through: https://pad.human.cornell.edu/census2020/lucablbrowser.cfm?latlng=42.646759,-73.761019

User guides

More on NYBBLES and how to use it is in the NYBBLES User guide

More on using NYBBLES Data in GUPS in the Using NYBBLES Data in GUPS guide

Jan Vink presented an intro into parcel counts and the use of NYBBLES in the LUCA webinar series organized by NY Council on Children and Families. Listen

Geocoders

The Census Bureau has a geocoder that enables you to find lat/long AND blocks that go with an address (or list of addresses)

On our web site you can also find a geocoder that can be used to find blocks and/or latitude,longitude of a single address. Links in the geocoder brings you to the NYBBLES parcel overview in the block with that address. This geocoder shows data from the Census geocoder, but also from Google's and Bing's geocoders.

Last modified: March 7, 2018