Today, the M.I.T. Media Lab announced the release of Data USA, a website it built in collaboration with Deloitte that repackages the government’s open data in a format that’s easy to search and understand — not to mention easy on the eyes.
The best part? It’s all open source, so developers can access the data through an API and build their own apps and services on top of it.
All you have to do to quantify your favorite place or subject is visit the site and start typing in the search box. We took it for a test drive and scanned pages of infographics for fresh facts about Austin. Here’s what we found:
There’s no shortage of disparity in Austin’s wage and poverty breakdowns, but the highest paid ethnicity came as a bit of a surprise. According to census data, Alaska natives earn 1.17 times more than any other ethnic group in Austin.
Dataset: 2014 ACS PUMS 5-year Estimate
864,122 people live below the poverty line in Austin, according to 2014 census data. That’s 17.8 percent of the local population — higher than the national average of 15.8 percent.
It’s dominated ethnically by whites, and by women — specifically those between the ages of 18 and 24.
Dataset: 2014 ACS 1-year Estimate
Sure, some of you have super commutes, defined as any drive in excess of 90 minutes. But that’s only 1.39 percent of the local workforce, which is about half the national average.
Even our regular commutes aren’t that bad, compared to the rest of the country. The average travel time is 21.7 minutes, a little more than three minutes shorter than the national average.
Dataset: 2014 ACS 5-year Estimate
Austin proper is actually in the middle of the spectrum of tech salaries, but the West Central Texas public use microdata area (PUMA), which surrounds Abilene, has an average tech salary of $250,070. In the valley, you could almost live on that.
Dataset: 2014 ACS PUMS 5-year Estimate
For all our bragging about our startup hustle, most of the city enjoys a pretty regular work week. If you narrowed the data set to just tech workers, it’s likely that number would rise. But the average Austinite enjoys a solid hour or more of leisure over workers in San Francisco, Mountain View and Palo Alto, where work hours range from 41 to 43 hours per week.
Dataset: 2014 ACS PUMS 1-year Estimate
Bonus: There’s a town called Startup, WA
Just thought you should know.
Spot something cool we should know about? Tell us or tweet us @BuiltInAustin.
