LA County Demographic Data Project, 1950-2010

In 2022, a team of USC Library specialists and myself received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to make publicly available a large U.S. dataset that I collected in the course of working on The New Suburbia. The dataset includes over 50 variables for every municipalities of L.A. County from 1950-2010. When it’s ready, it will be put up on the USC Library website — and available to the public (no paywall here!).

It’s a remarkable set of data that I’ve used extensively to understand the social change transforming the communities of L.A. County. It includes data on race, class, household composition, gendered work patterns (so, for example, it allows us to see the social geography of stay-at-home wives), age, education, marital status, housing types, and housing tenure. The website will include extensive notes on our methodology, links to the original Census pages we used, and the entire dataset itself. We anticipate it will go live in Spring 2024.

To read more about it, click here.

One of my articles based on this data is “Map Room: Stay-at-Home Moms in Los Angeles County, 1950-2000,” California History 93, 3 (Fall 2016), 2-8.