Almanac of American Demographics

CONTENTS

Introduction    3
Useful Information   7
Summary of Results   21
State Rankings    47
Top 25 Places Nationally  81  
America’s Largest Cities Rankings 121  
State by State Rankings   155 
Ancestry Rankings   555
Index of Places by State  611

INTRODUCTION

Every ten years the United States Census Bureau undertakes a counting of the American people.  The final numbers give a glimpse of who we are and how we live.  The detail of the data can range from as high as how many people are in a certain racial group or the median age of a population down to the number of bedrooms in a home or the type of transportation we use to commute to and from work.  This book will give an overview of and highlight the great diversity of the places across the United States.  We will look at topics such as race, age, education, employment, income, languages spoken, marital status, ancestry and many others at the state and local levels.
 Throughout this book we will be ranking the places and states by many demographic characteristics.  The majority of the book deals with the presentation of the data in tables.  Thus, this book is intended to be browsed through rather than to be read from beginning to end.
The first section of this book gives some useful information on what is included and how it is presented along with many definitions of the demographic characteristics.  The second section gives a quick summary of the results found within the many rankings inside this book.  The remaining parts of this book will present the rankings in detail.  We will start by looking at a very high level by ranking the fifty states by sixty-one demographic characteristics.  Second, we will look at the top twenty-five cities and towns across the nation by seventy-three demographic characteristics for places with populations of thirty or more people and for places with populations over 5,000.  Third, the sixty-seven largest cities of the United States (populations higher than 250,000 in 2000) are ranked by sixty-one demographic characteristics.  Next is the largest section of the book where we see the rankings of seventy-four demographic characteristics for each individual state.  Here, the top ten places for each characteristic are listed.  Lastly, the final section lists the top five states and the top ten places by 169 ancestry groups.  The place rankings by ancestry group are also broken out with separate rankings for places with a population of thirty or more and for places with a population of 5,000 or more.
 The Census Bureau publishes statistics and population estimates for many different levels of geography, from the state and national levels down to the neighborhood levels of census blocks and tracts.  The level of census geography that this book will focus on mostly is the ‘place’ level which accounts for more than 25,000 cities, towns, villages and other areas that we live in.  I chose not to focus on zip codes because most people only know the zip code that they live in and the one they work in.  Census blocks and tracts are much too small and numerous to work with.  And the county and state levels are too large to adequately show the great diversity of the demographic characteristics across the country.
In ranking the states and places of this country I chose to rank the places by percentages of the population that share a characteristic rather than the number of people that share a characteristic.  This way I feel we better identify places with unique characteristics that led them to the top or bottom of a list.  If we used the actual number of people that share a characteristic then we will have lists that are dominated by California, the state with the most people, and by New York City, the largest city in the nation; which has more people than many states do.  In addition to percentages, some demographic characteristics are ranked by numerical values, such as median household income and median age, among others.
 As stated earlier, many of the rankings of the places only include places with populations of thirty or more people.  Places with fewer than thirty people are extremely small and can have their demographics influenced by just one or two people.  The same can be said for characteristics that deal with households (for example, median household income).  Thus, for household characteristics only places with thirty or more households are included.  As you will see, many of the places that rank the highest on a list are often small towns, which is why I also provided the rankings for places with five thousand or more people in many parts of this book.  Large cities are known for their great diversity of residents which can cause these cities to not stand out in many of the demographic rankings which is why they have their own section in this book.  The section of the book that shows the rankings of places for each individual state only uses places with a population or number of households greater than thirty in order to save space.
 The index at the end of the book lists all of the places that are listed within this book.  All together there are more than 13,000 places in the index, which is more than half of the places in the United States.  The index of places is grouped together by state.  Thus, to find a particular place, you first need to find the state the place resides in and then find the place.