The American Community Survey provides a wide range of important statistics about all communities in the country. The American Community Survey gives communities the current information they need to plan investments and services. Retailers, homebuilders, police departments, and town and city planners are among the many private- and public-sector decision makers who count on these annual results.

How can you innovate around these statistics? Just to give a few example problems to stimulate your creative genius:

• Consider problems surrounding income, poverty and health insurance or education accessibility
• Display the latest numbers on owners and renters
• Provide a local government a range of socioeconomic statistics on its population.

Please note that for this data set, the API may return the following in place of data:

1. An '**' entry in the margin of error column indicates that either no sample observations or too few sample observations were available to compute a standard error and thus the margin of error. A statistical test is not appropriate.
2. An '-' entry in the estimate column indicates that either no sample observations or too few sample observations were available to compute an estimate, or a ratio of medians cannot be calculated because one or both of the median estimates falls in the lowest interval or upper interval of an open-ended distribution.
3. An '-' following a median estimate means the median falls in the lowest interval of an open-ended distribution.
4. An '+' following a median estimate means the median falls in the upper interval of an open-ended distribution.
5. An '***' entry in the margin of error column indicates that the median falls in the lowest interval or upper interval of an open-ended distribution. A statistical test is not appropriate.
6. An '*****' entry in the margin of error column indicates that the estimate is controlled. A statistical test for sampling variability is not appropriate.
7. An 'N' entry in the estimate and margin of error columns indicates that data for this geographic area cannot be displayed because the number of sample cases is too small.
8. An '(X)' means that the estimate is not applicable or not available.

See more on available data at the Census Bureau’s Developer Site.

We hope the API will give data users in research, business and government the means to customize our statistics into applications that their audiences and customers need. Please tell us how well we’re executing on that hope on our forum.

Feel free to email us with any kind of question, concern, recommendation/suggestion, or any other issues you may have: cedsci.feedback@census.gov