SHREVEPORT – In a season of giving, LSUS’s Center for Business and Economic Research unwrapped a valuable tool that drills down into vast amounts of census data to produce a neighborhood-level view of the City of Shreveport.
Instead of a demographic and economic picture of Shreveport as a whole, director Douglas White and the center provide that data for Shreveport’s 44 distinct neighborhoods.
The tool highlights demographic information such as household poverty status and education attainment as well as economic information such as home ownership vs. renter status and cost burden, which breaks down how many homeowners or renters pay at least 30 percent of their income to housing.
The center obtained the data from the 2022 American Community Survey, which is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau and is designed to provide population snapshots in between the full census conducted every 10 years. This survey includes aggregated data from the last five years.
“We created this tool with the idea that would it help local nonprofits,” White said. “They typically don’t have the time or the resources to be able to get a lot of data they may need.
“We thought this would be a very easy way to obtain basic data for their neighborhood so if they wanted to apply for a grant or reach out to their donor base to tell a specific story, they’d have the data to do that.”
White presented the tool to a group of local nonprofit leaders who are participating in an in-depth capacity building workshop series through LSUS’s Institute of Nonprofit Administration and Research.
Madison Poche, the executive director of The Highland Center, has queried White often for various data about the Highland neighborhood.
“Our mission is to create a thriving neighborhood to improve the lives of our residents, and this data allows us to stay in tune with what’s happening in our neighborhood,” said Poche, who’s center offers meals, clothing, and other programs. “One of every three households live below the federal poverty level in Highland – that’s three times the national average.
“This data provides us with information like how many households rent vs. own or how many households are headed by single mothers. Knowing information like this can help us target our services, including things like home ownership resources and diaper banks.”
White formed the neighborhoods using census boundaries and block groups, which are clusters of homes and streets, which can change from survey to survey.
But the neighborhoods, from Allendale to Westwood, do roughly adhere to what Shreveport residents would consider the traditional neighborhoods of the city.
Frances Williams, the executive director of Bernstein Development, Inc., said the neighborhood-level data is incredibly beneficial for her small organization that serves the Hollywood/Werner Park/Sunset Acres areas.
“This data helps me greatly because when I’m applying for grants or asking for corporate donations, they often want to know detailed demographic information like how many residents went to college, how many finished, what’s the per capita and median incomes of these neighborhoods,” said Williams, whose organization serves meals and provides educational service programs. “We serve a severely impoverished area, so having this kind of data on a neighborhood level can highlight the need of our communities.”
Because the American Community Survey is a sample that captures around three percent of the total population, there are margins of error and other reliability factors, particularly for small sample sizes.
Data in green has high reliability, while blue (medium) and red (low) offer differing reliability levels.
“Low reliability numbers aren’t worthless and still have value, there just may be more error associated with that number,” White said. “The reliability piece came from feedback after the last time we pulled this together three or four years ago.”
Tool uses extend well beyond the nonprofit sector, such as locating a target market for products or searching for housing in the city.
White welcomes any questions or feedback on the tool, adding that he aims for the tool to evolve to meet community interest.
