convertUSCensusCongress: Convert US congressional districts shapefile

In MazamaSpatialUtils: Spatial Data Download and Utility Functions

Convert US congressional districts shapefile

Description

Returns a simple features data frame for US Congressional Districts for the 116th US House of Representatives.

The full resolution file will be named "USCensus116thCongress.rda". In addition, "_05", _02" and "_01" versions of the file will be created that that are simplified to 5%, 2% and 1%. Simplified versions will greatly improve the speed of both searching and plotting.

Usage

convertUSCensusCongress()

Details

A US congressional district shapefile is downloaded and converted to a simple features data frame with additional columns of data. The resulting file will be created in the spatial data directory which is set with setSpatialDataDir().

#' The source data is from 2021.

Value

Name of the datasetName being created.

Note

From the source documentation:

Congressional Districts are the 435 areas from which people are elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. After the apportionment of congressional seats among the states based on census population counts, each state is responsible for establishing congressional districts for the purpose of electing representatives. Each congressional district is to be as equal in population to all other congressional districts in a state as practicable. The 116th Congress is seated from January 2019 to 2021. The cartographic boundary files for the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Island Areas (American Samoa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands) each contain a single record for the non-voting delegate district in these areas. The boundaries of all other congressional districts are provided to the Census Bureau by the states by May 1, 2018.

You can join this file with table data downloaded from American FactFinder by using the AFFGEOID field in the cartographic boundary file.

References

https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/GENZ2021/

See Also

setSpatialDataDir

MazamaSpatialUtils documentation built on Sept. 8, 2023, 5:22 p.m.