Area

Total land area

Why is this important?

Land area is a profile variable that is used in calculating many of the other variables in the Quality of Life Explorer. The 462 Neighborhood Profile Areas (NPAs) that comprise the county are of unequal sizes. In order to compare NPAs on a map, the variables must be normalized to account for these differences in size. For example, all other factors being equal, a larger area will have more people than a smaller area. To normalize the population for comparison across NPAs, we divide the total count of population in an NPA by the land area of the NPA, yielding population density, or people per acre.

Did you know?

Previous Quality of Life reports were organized around neighborhood units with familiar names like Beverly Woods, Cherry or Plaza Midwood. Now the information is broken out into many more geographical areas, so that one neighborhood may take in several Neighborhood Profile Areas (NPAs), which have numbers, not names. The Beverly Woods neighborhood, for instance, in earlier years was listed by name, and in 2010 had the ID number 182. Now the Beverly Woods neighborhood is made up of NPAs 44, 143, 213 and 359.

About the Data

Land area is calculated by the U.S. Census Bureau for census block groups and aggregated to Neighborhood Profile Areas (NPAs). NPAs are comprised of between one and eight Census block groups.

Block groups are delineated by the U.S. Census Bureau to contain populations between 600 and 3,000 people, with an optimum size of 1,500 people. Block groups are the smallest geographical unit of the Census for which reliable data is available.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER) files

Additional Resources