In the early 1980’s Atlanta’s Bureau of Planning created a set of 139 “statistical neighborhoods” and 24 Neighborhood Planning Units (NPU’s) that they sent off to the United States Bureau of the Census. These geographic areas cut across formal Census tract and block-group boundaries, and thus statistical tabulations for them were unavailable except through the Bureau’s special User Defined Areas Program (UDAP). The Bureau produced a 1980 NPU and neighborhood statistical report for the City of Atlanta.

In 1992 Professor David Sawicki of Georgia Tech offered his services to George Aldridge, then Director of the research division of the City’s Bureau of Planning. Together David and George used the city’s Census blocks as the basis for creating an electronic map of what had been submitted to the Bureau in the 1980’s as a hand-drawn map. The Bureau produced a 1990 NPU and neighborhood statistical report for the City of Atlanta.

In the fall of 2003 Professor Sawicki learned that the Bureau had eliminated the User Defined Areas Program in the 2000 Census. With the City of Atlanta’s neighborhoods undergoing such rapid change, many people were asking for comparisons of those neighborhoods over time. To answer that need Professor Sawicki gathered together his professional staff at GT’s Data and Policy Analysis group, together with a small group of graduate students in the City and Regional Planning program, and devised ways, using the latest Geographic Information Systems technology, to estimate year 2000 statistics for Atlanta’s NPU’s and neighborhoods using Census Bureau block and block-group data from Summary Files (SF) 1 and 3.

Several caveats are in order. First, when SF1 (full enumeration, short form) data are employed on simple variables like counts of people by age and race, and counts of households, etc. our statistics are simple summaries of block data. Thus, the only possible chance for error is one of addition (not likely for GT grad students). But when reporting variables from the long-form survey, SF3, it was necessary to “proportion” block-group data into NPU and neighborhood boundaries. We did this with utmost care, but our results have to be regarded as estimates.

Second, this is a report about the City of Atlanta’s statistical NPU’s and neighborhoods, whose boundaries have remained the same since they were first delineated in 1980. There are many different versions of NPU and neighborhood boundaries and maps in existence. Indeed, the City itself sometimes uses what Professor Sawicki calls “artful maps” of the City’s neighborhoods. Our report contains very detailed maps of the City’s official statistical NPU’s and neighborhoods. The reader should check them carefully before assuming they coincide exactly with some other geographic delineations.

Please provide us with feedback on possible errors and suggestions for additions to the report. We plan to create a second version sometime in the future. You may send suggestions and comments to Professor Sawicki