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Progress in Data and Technology 81
burden (Dowell n.d.). The partnership began with 10 states and by 2011
had expanded to all 50 states. In 2005, the Local Employment Dynamics
Program debuted OnTheMap, a data series showing where workers are
employed and where they live. The development of OnTheMap demonstrated
remarkable advances in politics, methodology, and dissemination
of data. The data series shows the payoffs from the cooperation between
state government agencies and the federal government to create a new
data resource. OnTheMap was a methodological innovation because it
was the first synthetic data product released by the Census Bureau. The
Bureau uses state unemployment insurance records, individual wage
records, and ES-202 records on employers to create a dataset with similar
statistical properties to the original dataset but without compromising
confidentiality (Lane et al. 2001). The data series is published at the
census block level and consists of three components: (1) counts of jobs
by industry, earnings, and worker characteristics such as race, age, sex,
and educational attainment; (2) counts of workers by their residential
location for the same categories; and (3) a commuting series that reports
worker counts for pairs of residential blocks and employment blocks.
The Bureau’s dissemination efforts are also extraordinary. Users can
access OnTheMap data through a powerful online mapping and reporting
tool, and a listserv and annual conference have cultivated an active
user community for peer learning and support. (See the Wascalus and
Matson essay at the end of chapter 2 for a description of Minnesota-3D,
a local portal that allows users to visualize patterns from Local Employment
Dynamics data.)
In another illustration, the US Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD) recognized the need for more current, finegrained
data about property vacancy as the foreclosure crisis began
to unfold in early 2007. The US Postal Service maintains records on
the status of mail delivery for every address in the country, and these
records contain information on whether the house is vacant. However,
the Postal Service sells the records to private firms to repackage, primarily
for marketing purposes, and the cost of purchasing these records is
too high for most public interest groups. HUD successfully negotiated
with the Postal Service to publish census tract–level counts of address by
mail delivery status at no cost to the public. (In a subsequent round of
negotiations ending in 2012, HUD restricted access to governments and
nonprofit organizations.) The data played an important role in identifying
tracts eligible for the later rounds of the Neighborhood Stabilization