What’s New in the National Equity Atlas

After months of rebuilding the National Equity Atlas, our team is thrilled to share this updated data resource with you!

We are dedicated to maintaining the most comprehensive and user-friendly source of equity indicators deeply disaggregated by race/ethnicity, nativity, gender, ancestry, and income for communities across the nation. And we are committed to providing not just metrics but the story behind the data and trends, and the policy solutions that can work to close racial and economic inequities and move communities toward inclusive prosperity.

Here are the new features and updates you will find in the Atlas:

  1. The Racial Equity Index: This new index — available for cities, metropolitan regions, states, and the US — allows you to track how well your community is doing on equity compared with other communities (and over time), and identify the most important challenges and areas of progress to develop targeted equity strategies.
     
  2. Updated and more robust data: All 30 indicators have been updated with the latest available data (generally 2017). We’ve also added new breakdowns to several indicators, including comparative rankings, disaggregation by race, gender, nativity, and ancestry, and historical data whenever possible.
     
  3. State-of-the-art data, visualization, and mapping infrastructure: The technological underpinnings of the Atlas have been upgraded based on the Bay Area Equity Atlas (named a Top Urban Planning Website of 2019 by Planetizen) to instantaneously put equity data at your fingertips to use in policy research, development, advocacy, and community organizing.
     
  4. Two new indicators: We added two brand-new indicators: life expectancy and the economic benefits of eliminating rent burdens. The life expectancy indicator replaces several health indicators (asthma, overweight and obese, diabetes) for which updated data was not available.
     
  5. More contextual information and updated strategies and examples: We’ve added an introductory page explaining our indicator framework and expanded our indicator pages to provide more information about why these metrics matter for communities and what are the drivers of inequities. We’ve also updated all of our strategies and examples.
     
  6. Data and PowerPoint downloads: For the first time, you can easily download all of the data behind the Atlas indicators in spreadsheet format to do your own analyses and create your own visualizations. You can also download PowerPoint slides to add local equity indicators to your presentations.

We hope that you find these new features to be helpful in your equity efforts! We would love to hear your feedback via this short survey and you can always reach us at info@nationalequityatlas.org.