MapsToItCity Data

199U.S. cities mapped

Methodology

Every published city page must include the full metric set. Incomplete records are blocked from shipping by a catalog validation step at build time.

Live enrichment sources

City figures are merged from public agency feeds into checked-in enrichment JSON, then built into the published catalog (`npm run build-catalog`). Each city page lists source labels and a last-updated date.

  • U.S. Census Bureau ACS 5-year — population, median household income, median home value, and median gross rent from Census summary files (`scripts/enrich-census.ts`). The on-page housing cost index is derived from home value and rent versus national ACS medians (100 ≈ U.S. average) — not a BLS consumer price index.
  • BLS LAUS — county unemployment rates via Local Area Unemployment Statistics series (`scripts/enrich-bls.ts`), joined to each city through FCC lat/lon → county FIPS.
  • FBI Crime Data Explorer / CIUS — agency violent and property offense rates (`scripts/enrich-crime.ts`). Prefer live CDE annualized monthly rates per 100k. When the CDE API gateway is unavailable, we fall back to FBI CIUS Table 8 city offense counts converted to rates per 100k (vintage noted in the source string). When an agency/city match is still missing, we publish crimeIndex.source: "data unavailable" instead of keeping a placeholder number.
  • NOAA Climate Normals (1991–2020) — summer high, winter low, annual rainfall, and a sunny-day proxy from the nearest normals station (`scripts/enrich-climate.ts`).
  • Census Bureau Population Estimates Program — annual population by year for the population trend chart on city pages (`scripts/enrich-population-history.ts`). Reuses the place already resolved by the Census enrichment step above. A city only gets a trend chart once at least two years of estimates resolve; a missing or partial history is omitted rather than interpolated or estimated.
  • Unsplash — two photos per city (`scripts/enrich-photos.ts`), used under the Unsplash License and credited to the photographer on the page. A city with no usable search results simply shows no gallery.

What we still curate

Commute minutes, Walk Score (where shown), featured flags, neighborhood shortlists, and nearby-city links remain curated companion fields. They are not overwritten by the enrichment scripts.

New cities launch with a curated-seed baseline — population, income, housing, climate, and crime figures that are reasonable estimates, not yet a live agency pull — until the enrichment scripts above are run for them. Pages built from curated-seed data say so explicitly wherever a real per-agency figure would otherwise be implied, most visibly on the safety metric, rather than presenting an estimate as sourced fact.

Publishing rules

Thin pages are out of scope. If a city cannot be fully populated, it is omitted until the next batch. See the city index for what is live today. State overview pages average only mapped catalog cities — they are not full-state statistical universes.

City limits vs metro

Population, income, home value, rent, and crime figures on city pages describe the incorporated place (city limits / municipal agency), not the broader Metropolitan Statistical Area, unless a metric note says otherwise. Unemployment uses BLS LAUS county rates joined via lat/lon → county FIPS.

Crime is hyper-local

A single citywide violent or property rate can misrepresent neighborhoods within the same municipality. Treat FBI CDE / CIUS city aggregates as a starting point, then inspect local police reports and neighborhood-level tools before drawing relocation conclusions.