crosswalk: Streamlined Inter-Temporal and Inter-Geography Crosswalking of Census Data

Provides a standardized interface for accessing and applying geographic crosswalks between United States Census geographies, both across geographies (e.g., tracts to ZIP Code Tabulation Areas) and across time (e.g., 2010 tracts to 2020 tracts). Crosswalks are sourced from the Missouri Census Data Center's Geocorr applications, IPUMS NHGIS, the CT Data Collaborative, and a curated registry of county boundary changes drawn from Census Bureau documentation, and are returned with consistent column names and rich metadata. Also interpolates count and non-count variables from source to target geographies, with diagnostics describing join quality.

Details

The package standardizes access to geographic crosswalks from four sources: GeoCorr (Missouri Census Data Center) for same-year geography changes, IPUMS NHGIS for cross-decade changes, the CT Data Collaborative for Connecticut's 2020-2022 county changes, and a curated registry of county boundary change events for county crosswalks between any pair of years from 2000 onward.

Typical usage involves two functions:

• get_crosswalk() fetches one or more crosswalks (chaining them automatically when both geography and year change)

• crosswalk_data() applies crosswalk(s) to a dataset, interpolating count and non-count variables and reporting join quality

Two helpers support discovery:

• get_available_crosswalks() lists every supported combination of source and target geography and year

• list_nhgis_crosswalks() lists the NHGIS subset with source URLs

To get oriented, see vignette("crosswalk"). For the interpolation methodology and guidance on choosing weights, see vignette("how-interpolation-works").

See also

Useful links:

• https://ui-research.github.io/crosswalk/

• https://github.com/UI-Research/crosswalk

• Report bugs at https://github.com/UI-Research/crosswalk/issues

Author

Maintainer: Will Curran-Groome wcurrangroome@urban.org