About

Overview

This dashboard is a collaboration between the Central Valley Opportunity Fund (CVOF) and the Urban Institute. It aims to provide data and evidence reflecting Merced, California’s ability to support its residents’ upward mobility from poverty.

Data

Data Included in the Charts

Most data shown in the dashboard come from the Urban Institute’s Upward Mobility Intiative mobility metrics dataset. We adopt the term “measure” here to refer to Urban’s data, as well as other data we collect and present.

For charts that show a single year of data, the dashboard shows the most recent year of data available.

A suggested citation for this data is:

Urban Institute. 2025. Mobility Metrics Data for the Upward Mobility Framework (v2025.01). Accessible from https://datacatalog.urban.org/dataset/mobility-metrics-data-upward-mobility-framework. Data originally sourced from, developed at the Urban Institute, and made available under the ODC-BY 1.0 Attribution License.

Other data come from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and various sources from the state of California.

Data Downloads

Data powering each chart can be downloaded with the “Download Data” button located below the chart. We round numeric variables to the ten thousandths place to limit file sizes. This means that a percent variable shown in the dashboard as “12.3%” which in the original data might have been 0.123456 would be rounded to 0.1235 in the data available on the dashboard.

Data Dictionary for Data Downloads:

Data downloaded from the Download CSV button from Upward Mobility data will have columns of the following form:

  • Year: (numeric) The year corresponding to the data. Note that meaning of year changes depending on the variable. For more details on the specific meaining of the year, see the details in the Source and Note(s) dropdown.

  • county_name or place_name: (character) The name of the region (city or county) corresponding to the data. For city data, the column name will be place_name.

  • subgroup: (character): The subgroup within the county or place to which the data refers. Common subgroups types in the data are race and ethnicity and neighborhood racial composition. For charts that do not show disaggregation by subgroup, this column will be missing. Neighborhood racial composition groups are defined by their share of non-Hispanic white residents. White neighborhoods have at least 60 percent non-Hispanic white residents. Mixed neighborhoods have between 40 percent and 60 percent non-Hispanic white residents, and neighborhoods of color have between 0 and 40 percent non-Hispanic white residents.

  • [measure name]: (numeric) The estimate for the selected measure (EX: Share of Employed Adults Ages 25 - 54).

  • [measure]_quality: (character) The strength of the data, as assessed by the Mobility Metrics team. See the Data Quality section for more details

  • [measure]_lb and [measure]_ub: (numeric) The lower and upper bounds of the 95th percent confidence interval for the metric. When not available for a given metric, no columns will be shown.

  • [measure]_median_ca: (numeric) The California weighted median for the measure. If not available, this will be NA.

  • [measure]_median_national: (numeric) The national weighted median for the measure. If not available, this will be NA.

  • [measure]_print and label: (character) Formatted data labels as shown on the charts. The [measure name] column stores the raw data, but these show more human-readable versions of the data.

The full datasets are also available from the Urban Institute Data Catalog. On this page, there are several files which group the mobility metrics in different ways. For this dashboard, we use the overall, race/ethnicity, and race share datasets at both the county and city scales. In the full datasets, the county-scale data show mobility metrics for every county in the United States, and the city-scale data contain metrics for approximately 480 cities with populations of greater than 75,000.

The data catalog also provides national weighted median data. We calculated weighted medians for California and different racial and ethnic groups specifically for this dashboard. Those weighted median variables are available via the data download buttons below the charts.

Missing Data

For some measures, some racial groups and/or years of data will not be shown in the dashboard. There are two reasons for this omission:

  1. Missing underlying data: Measures for some years and/or subgroups may not be available from the original data source. For example, the public transportation use and public transit spending measures are derived from data originally from The Center for Neighborhood Technology’s H+T Index only releases data for specific years, so this dashboard cannot show data from other years.
  2. Data Quality: Some data may be available but low quality. We omit this data. See the section below for more details.

Because of this approach to missing data, not all charts showing the most recent year of data will have national and/or California median data because that data may not be of high enough quality to provide.

Data Quality

For each data point from Urban’s Mobility Metrics, Urban staff assesses the quality of the data point and assigns it one of the following labels:

  • Strong
  • Acceptable
  • Weak

We do not display “Weak” data given that Urban reports that “Weak” data have “serious issues, including critical concerns with measurement error, missing data, sample size, or precision.” Strong and acceptable data are of high quality or have limited issues, respectively. Urban does not have major concerns regarding these data and notes that “[c]ommunity partners can act on this information but should corroborate it with local data sources.”

Medians

The tooltips in the dashboard contain population-weighted median data for California and the entire United States. For overall data, the estimates represent the county measure for the average American or Californian, respectively. For subgroup data, the weighted median reflects the experience of people within that subgroup in the population-weighted median county. That is, for subgroups, we still weight by total population, but we report the value of the subgroup from the population-weighted median county.

To ensure that these medians are high quality, we exclude medians calculated where more than 15% of the population for which the median is calculated is missing or represented with “low” quality mobility measure data. For this reason, some data points and measure-years are missing weighted median data.

Peer Communities

In addition to showing data for Merced at the city and county scales, this dashboard also compares Merced to the cities of Fresno, Stockton, Modesto, and Visalia and to Fresno, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, and Madera counties. CVOF and Urban collectively decided on this set of peers for the following reasons:

  1. Proximity and Relevance: The peer communities are geographically close and relatively similar to Merced in that:
  • All are in the Central Valley.
  • All are along or near the Interstate-99, the key freeway connecting Merced to other parts of the Central Valley.
  • All cities are mid-sized (50,000 - 500,000 residents).
  1. Data Availability: Urban’s mobility metrics contain data for these cities and counties.

Upward Mobility Initiative

As noted above, much of the data shown in this dashboard comes from the Urban Institute’s Upward Mobility Initiative. In addition to providing mobility metrics, the initiative has developed an Upward Mobility Framework which provides an evidence-based foundation for efforts to advance upward mobility and racial equity, designed a toolkit for increasing upward mobility, published their own data dashboard with a national focus, conducted multiple rounds of technical assistance and training, and completed substantial research and case studies around upward mobility.

Updates

This dashboard will be updated annually with newly released data from the American Community Survey and Urban’s mobility metrics. The dashboard was most recently updated in December 2025.

Questions

For questions about this dashboard or CVOF more broadly, please reach out to Kimberly Garner.