Economic Development Data

[Urbplanner]

Hi Ive been assigned by the Economic Development Director in my department to find some data she can use to intergrate with Arcview 3.2 for map presentations. This is an opportunity for me to enhance our usually frugal department and I dont want to mess it up. Only the Lord knows the next oppurtunity I will have to purchase additional software or data. Is there anyone out there that can point me in the right direction on data purchasing for Arcview or any good software programs I can extrapolate the data from and present it in arcview , if so let me know

 

[donk]

I am not really sure what you are looking for, or trying to present, but there is a program called Pcensus from tetrad that works with mapinfo and is exportable to Arc based products.

PCensus is a visual mapper of census data and provides other tools for the economic assessment and analysis. (drive times, market areas) It has data sets available for both Canda and the US.

If you describe more of what you want to do then other options/suggestions may be available.

 

[Chet]

Try Mike Robbins at Taurean Group - they do all kinds of data collection and assessment. We're purchasing all of our market's demogrphic and economic assessment data from them in formats compatible with ArcGIS.

PS - depending on what you want, this might not be cheap - ours wasn't!

taureangroup.com

 

[Urbplanner]

Well I was looking for socioeconomic data that I could plug into Arcview with little or no extra work. I didnt want to get into alot of data entry. I was hoping to here what kind of tools other Economic Development Departments were using. I have used PCensus before but not with Arcview. Is using Arcview with PCensus a simple process.

 

[adaptor]

PCensus with ArcView has some good points, especially if you’re already familiar with the software.
First of all, they’ve got the latest Census data on household income, poverty, value of housing and other economic statistics interpreted and available. It’s worth the cost to not have to download the files you need from the Census Bureau and format them yourself.
You can retrieve the data in their tables at a block group, tract or community level with out any trouble. You can also use ArcView to classify data by your own geography or define a radius from a given point. ArcView runs inside PCensus and you get all the familiar ESRI menu options.
You can upgrade to an ArcView compatible version and get the Census data for less than $1,000 – maybe closer to $500.
The biggest pain for me was converting the map files to decimal degrees (unprojected). PCensus couldn’t deal with the projection system we use. It takes a little work but depending what version of ArcView you’re using the Projection Wizard can be fairly painless. You can get unprojected TIGER files fro streets and Census geography from ESRI as free downloads but you’ll spend a few hours receiving and unzipping the files.