Poverty- San Mateo County- American Community Survey

Poverty threshold available at https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/threshld/index.html

Additional information about how the Census Bureau measures poverty is available at https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/overview/measure.html

How Poverty is Calculated in the ACS

Poverty statistics presented in ACS reports and tables adhere to the standards specified by

the Office of Management and Budget in Statistical Policy Directive 14. The Census

Bureau uses a set of dollar value thresholds that vary by family size and composition to

determine who is in poverty. Further, poverty thresholds for people living alone or with

nonrelatives (unrelated individuals) and two-person families vary by age (under 65 years

or 65 years and older).

If a family’s total income is less than the dollar value of the appropriate threshold, then

that family and every individual in it are considered to be in poverty. Similarly, if an

unrelated individual’s total income is less than the appropriate threshold, then that

individual is considered to be in poverty. The poverty thresholds do not vary

geographically. They are updated annually to allow for changes in the cost of living

(inflation factor) using the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

Poverty status was determined for all people except institutionalized people, people in

military group quarters, people in college dormitories, and unrelated individuals under 15

years old. These groups were excluded from the numerator and denominator when

calculating poverty rates.

Since the ACS is a continuous survey, people respond throughout the year. Because the

income items specify a period covering the last 12 months, the appropriate poverty

thresholds are determined by multiplying the base-year poverty thresholds (1982) by the

monthly inflation factor based on the 12 monthly CPIs and the base-year CPI.

(Source: https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/poverty-cal-in-acs.pdf)

Querying over HTTP

Splitgraph serves as an HTTP API that lets you run SQL queries directly on this data to power Web applications. For example:

curl https://data.splitgraph.com/sql/query/ddn \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d@-<<EOF
{"sql": "
    SELECT *
    FROM \"performance-smcgov/poverty-san-mateo-county-american-community-survey-3e6u-fsvg\".\"poverty_san_mateo_county_american_community_survey\"
    LIMIT 100 
"}
EOF

See the Splitgraph documentation for more information.