PolicyMap at the APDU 2013 Conference

Two of us from PolicyMap traveled to DC this week to get the latest information on publicly available datasets from the Association of Public Data Users at the APDU 2013 conference.

At APDU we attended sessions on housing, transportation and health data. We also heard updates from many federal statistical agencies including the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Department of Transportation, Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), and the Census Bureau.

Some of the highlights from the conference include:

  • The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reports that HMDA (Home Mortgage Disclosure Act) data may have more detailed information for us to share with our users in the coming years.  Some possible indicators include property value and rate spreads, provided along with the mortgage information we aggregate and present at various geographic levels.
  • We saw a preview of the Location Affordability Index from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). This data looks at housing cost relative to driving and transportation costs. We’re greatly looking forward to checking out in the next month or so, and hope to bring some of the data to PolicyMap.
  • We got the latest from the Census’ Local Employment Dynamics (LED) program on new indicators including job-to-job flows and job numbers based on the age of firms. We’ll be unveiling LEHD data on PolicyMap later this fall.

Most exciting of all was the announcement of the launch of the American Community Survey (ACS) Data Users Group (http://www.acsdatausers.org/).  In the coming weeks, our colleagues at the Population Reference Bureau will be releasing the Online Community on the site.  You can bet that we’ll be a part of it!  And we’ll definitely see all of you ACS users at the first ever annual conference in May 2014 (http://www.acsdatausers.org/Events.aspx).