A couple of weeks ago I was looking for some crime and poverty data for three towns in New York State and came across a really useful resource that I thought I would share with you: https://datausa.io.

It was developed by a team at MIT and Datawheel with funding from Deloitte and is the most comprehensive website and visualization of publicly available data for towns, cities, counties, and states. It includes a lot of variables such as health, population, income, economy, education, housing and living. It also includes an overview of the geography in question.

You can select a city and then ask the system to compare it other units such as the state or the county in which it sits. I found it very useful, user-friendly, and laid out in a really clear fashion. It is free and I tried to find out the funding/revenue model for it but couldn’t – so if you know please let me know.

It is often not easy to find granular data at the local level so this site is a boon for those of us who work in rural areas.

I hope you find this as helpful as I did.

Jana