Planners' ToolBox

GIS Shapefile

1. Access to the Shapefile Warehouse
Access to an easy to navigate portal which includes a "starter pack" of current shapefiles for all counties. The Census Bureau recently released official geography boundaries for all Census geography. We have downloaded the most common geographies and translated them into shapefiles (meant to be used with ArcGIS) which is a huge time saver. Files for each county include new 2005 First Edition Tiger/lines updated as of January 1, 2005. In most instances we have a shapefile from the year 2000 and the year 2005. These may be different, or may be the same.

For each county (plus the entire state) we have one zipped file that includes:

- 2005 Streets Network
- 2005 County Boundaries
- 2005 Place Boundaries (i.e. Cities)
- 2005 School District Boundaries
- 2005 Census Zip Code Tabulation Areas
- 2005 Water Boundaries
- 2000 Voting Districts
- 2000 Census Tract Boundaries
- 2000 Census Block Groups
- 2000 Census Blocks
- 2005 American Indian/ Alaska Native / Hawaiian Homelands
- 2005 Key Landmarks
- 2000 Public Use Microdata Areas
- 2000 Traffic Analysis Zones
- 2000 Oregon Growth Boundary



2. Web Workshop Series

Analyzing Your Community: Using Census Data to Better Analyze Changing People and Places

This workshop is divided into a series of modules meant to teach the user how to extract data from the Census of Population and Housing and how to use that data to perform community analysis.

Module 1: What is the Census of Population and Housing

-What are the strengths and weakness of using Summary Files 1-4 and the American Community Survey
-What are the most commonly used Census geographies, especially for community analysis
-How Accurate is the Census

Module 2: Getting the Data from American Factfinder

-How do you extract raw Census data from the block level up to the national level (and all geographic levels in between)
-How can you use the Census to map data online through American Factfinder


3. Cheat Sheets