LA County Demographic Data Project, 1950-2010

During my work on The New Suburbia, I compiled a large dataset tracking social, economic, and housing traits in all incorporated towns of L.A. County from 1950-2010. I donated the dataset to the USC Digital Library, and the dataset is now live and freely available to the public (no paywall here!). Here’s the website: LA County Demographic Data Project, 1950-2010. Thanks to the NEH and the Haynes Foundation for helping to fund this 12-year project.

It includes data for all towns on race, class, household composition, gendered work patterns, age, education, marital status, housing types, and housing tenure. The website includes extensive notes on our methodology, links to the original Census pages we used, and the entire dataset itself. It also includes data on poverty levels and voter registration in all towns, 1962-2020. I compiled this with the help of a team of student research assistants.

You can see a visualization here: “Suburbanization in Los Angeles County: Tracing suburbia’s transformation from homogeneous to diverse, 1950–2010.” And you can read more about it, click here.

My book The New Suburbia draws many of its insights from this data. Here are two additional articles based on this data: “Opinion: Can’t afford a house in L.A.? Here’s how that happened,” Los Angeles Times, Sept 28, 2023, and “Map Room: Stay-at-Home Moms in Los Angeles County, 1950-2000,” California History 93, 3 (Fall 2016), 2-8.