Data Release: City-Defined Neighborhood Boundaries in the United States

Neighborhoods are frequently cited as impactful for social, economic, political, and health outcomes. Measuring neighborhoods, however, is challenging, as the definition of a neighborhood may change dramatically across places. Researchers lack widespread but locally-sourced data on neighborhoods, and instead often adopt widely available but arbitrary Census geographies as neighborhood proxies. Others invest in the collection of more precise definitions, but these types of data are hard to collect at scale. We address this tension between scale and precision by collecting, cleaning, and providing to researchers a new dataset of city-defined neighborhoods. Our data includes 206 of the largest cities in the United States, covering more than 77 million people. We combine these data with block-level Census demographic data and provide them along with open-source software to aid researchers in their use.

社区常被认为对社会、经济、政治及健康结果具有重要影响。然而，衡量社区具有挑战性，因为社区的定义可能因地域不同而存在巨大差异。研究人员缺乏广泛可用的本地来源社区数据，因此往往采用易获取但任意的人口普查地理区域作为社区代理变量。另一些研究人员投入资源收集更精确的定义，但这类数据难以大规模收集。我们通过收集、清洗并向研究人员提供一个新的城市定义社区数据集，来解决规模与精度之间的这一矛盾。该数据集涵盖美国206个最大城市，涉及超过7700万人口。我们将这些数据与街区级人口普查人口统计数据相结合，并提供开源软件以帮助研究人员使用这些数据。