The 2010 NYC Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMAs) are statistical geographic areas defined for the dissemination of Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) data. PUMAs have a minimum population of 100,000, are aggregated from census tracts, and approximate Community Districts (CDs), or combinations of CDs (There are 59 CDs and only 55 NYC PUMAs because of such combinations). This geography is also used for disseminating American Community Survey (ACS) estimates. These boundary files are derived from the US Census Bureau's TIGER project and have been geographically modified to fit the New York City base map.

Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMAs) are non-overlapping, statistical geographic areas that partition each state or equivalent entity into geographic areas containing no fewer than 100,000 people each. They cover the entirety of the United States, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. https://usa.ipums.org/usa/resources/codebooks/2010_PUMS_codebook.pdf

This map displays both the 2000 and 2010 Decennial Census Based PUMAs of Migration boundaries.Clicking on a PUMA will highlight and describe the 2010 MIGPUMA, 2000 MIGPUMA, and County boundaries associated with the selected area. You can select which boundaries you want to view using the Layers menu at the top of the map.

The NYC Department of City Planning’s (DCP) Housing Database Aggregate Tables provide the 2010 census count of housing units, the net change in Class A housing units since the census, and the count of units pending completion for commonly used political and statistical boundaries. These tables are aggregated from the DCP Housing Database, which is derived from Department of Buildings (DOB)-approved housing construction and demolition jobs filed or completed in NYC since January 1, 2010. Net housing unit change is calculated as the sum of all three construction job types that add or remove residential units: new buildings, major alterations, and demolitions, and can be used to determine the change in legal housing units across time and space.

Neighborhood Tabulation Areas (NTAs) were created to project populations at a small area level, from 2000 to 2030 for PlaNYC, the long-term sustainability plan for New York City. Since population size affects the error associated with population projections, these geographic units needed to have a minimum population, which we determined to be 15,000. This criterion resulted in combinations of neighborhoods that probably would not occur if one were solely designating boundaries of historical neighborhoods. Moreover, the neighborhood names associated with the neighborhood tabulation areas are not intended to be definitive. Another feature of the sustainability plan, was the creation of projections for Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMAs), which are approximations of New York City's Community Districts developed for use with the Census Bureau's Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS). In order to make the boundaries consistent with PUMAs, NTAs were created using whole census tracts, from the 2010 census, within PUMAs. Since NTAs were not permitted to cross PUMA boundaries, this further restricted our ability to identify what may be thought of as historical neighborhood boundaries. Thus, users need to be cognizant of the reason why NTAs were created and the demographic/geographic constraints inherent in how they were configured. Despite these limitations, NTAs are a valuable summary level for use with both the 2010 Census and the American Community Survey (ACS). Regarding the decennial census, these geographic areas offer a good compromise between the very detailed data for census tracts (2,168) and the broad strokes provided by community districts (59). For the ACS, NTAs offer a statistically reliable alternative to the high sampling error that renders data for most individual census tracts unusable.