Politics & Government

Explore Census Data for Charlestown

Online tool allows easy access to census data for the city of Boston.

Did you know that the largest chunk of residents in Charlestown—according to the 2010 census—are between the ages of 20 and 34? Or that the town is slightly more female than male?

That’s just some of the interesting information you can find by poking around in the City of Boston’s myNeighborhood Census Viewer.

The tool compiles census-tract level data for the city into an easy-to-use online interface. Simply select an area on the map and watch the data break down into brightly-colored pie charts.

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This information is also available at Census.gov, but has been difficult to find and unwieldy to work with even for those who know how to use spreadsheets (trust me, I’ve tried).

Just within Charlestown, Census.gov lists more than 350 fifty tracts. Data that granular is great if you want to know what’s going on in your immediate area (and you know how to find it block within the tracts), but it can be cumbersome to aggregate into a picture of the entire neighborhood.

Find out what's happening in Charlestownwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Mayor Thomas Menino and the Boston Redevelopment Authority released this tool in November, but the BRA and the Census Bureau recently partnered with Cambridge College to conduct a workshop called “Your Community by the Numbers.”

That class, taught to 15 Cambridge College undergraduates, featured the myNeighborhood tool.

According to the BRA’s web site, the class will be the first in a series.

"The U.S. Census Bureau and the BRA will continue to host public workshops through a developing educational partnership," a spokesperson for the Authority said.


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