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About PLACES
PLACES is an expansion of the original 500 Cities Project that began in 2015. The original project was launched by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and CDC Foundation. In 2018, this partnership was extended through 2020. In 2020, the project expanded to provide small area estimates (SAE) for counties, places, census tracts, and ZIP Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTA) across the entire United States.
Purpose
- PLACES reports county, place, census tract, and ZCTA data and uses small area estimation methods to obtain 40 (36 in the 2023 release, 29 in the 2022 and 2021 releases; 27 in the 2020 release) chronic disease and other health-related measures for the entire United States. In December 2023, 9 social determinants of health (SDOH) measures from the American Community Health Survey (ACS) were included in PLACES but are not updated in the 2024 release. The SDOH measures can enhance community planning efforts to improve health.
- The data are published through a public, interactive “PLACES” website that allows users to view, explore, and download data by county, place, census tract, and ZCTA.
- Although limited data are available at the county and metropolitan levels, PLACES represents a first-of-its-kind data analysis to release information for all US counties, places, census tracts, and ZCTAs. This system complements existing surveillance data by providing estimates necessary to understand the health issues affecting the residents of local areas of all sizes and regardless of urban or rural status; develop and implement effective and targeted prevention activities; identify health problems; and establish key health objectives.
Geographic Coverage
In the 2024 release, PLACES started to use Census 2020 geographies that include Connecticut planning regions as a county equivalent.
- County: 3,144 counties within 50 states and District of Columbia (DC), including 8 county and city consolidated cities.
- Place: 29,923 of 31,617 Places or Census Designated Places (CDP) with Census 2020 adult population count (≥18 years) of ≥50.
- Census tract: 83,522 of 84,112 census tracts in the 50 states and DC that have a Census 2020 adult population count (≥18 years) of ≥50.
- ZCTA: 32,520 of 33,642 ZCTAs in the 50 states and DC with a Census 2020 adult population count (≥18 years) of ≥50.
Unique Value of PLACES
- PLACES extends the original 500 Cities Project, reflects innovations in generating valid small area estimates for population health, and provides data uniformly across the urban-rural spectrum.
- PLACES is the first-ever project to provide data at multiple local area-levels, i.e., county-, place-, census tract-, and ZCTA-levels. These data can be viewed by geographic level as well as by measure and downloaded by users for their secondary analysis.
- PLACES enables retrieval, visualization, and exploration of uniformly-defined local area data in the 50 states and Washington, DC for conditions, behaviors, and risk factors that have a substantial effect on population health.