Finding Places within Counties for Your State and Region.

This is an “R” script which uses readily downloadable files from the decennial census to build a file of places within counties within states. This can then be subsetted to extract lists of places within a one-county or multi-county region. The following examples used 2010 Census data for the states of California,  Texas, and New York, and can hopefully be easily adapted once the 2020 Census data becomes available spring 2021.

 The standard Census geography hierarchy diagram shows that “places” are below “states.” “Places” are NOT below “County” geographic levels. This is because there are some “places” in the United States that straddle two-or-more counties! This is an inconvenience if the analyst is interested in, say, the population characteristics of all places (cities, census designated places) within a one-county or multi-county region.