Hello gang,

Our mortgage dept. has asked for a list of zip codes in Wayne County, MI which are in low/mod income areas (my response "arent they all?" wouldn't suffice). Does anyone know an easy way to gather this info? While looking at the maps available on the American Factfinder website I realized that a given zip code encompasses several census tracts. There must be an easier way than manually looking up every census tract within a given zip code on the FFIEC site. Can anyone spare me the agony of doing this?

Thanks!

If you download the census data windows application from the FFIEC website (in the CRA Section), you can export by state/county into Excel.


http://www.ffiec.gov/cra/censusproducts.htm

Best of luck!

You are in for a long night. The boundaries of ZIP codes and census tracts don't "nest" into one another. This means the boundaries don't match. Moreover, some ZIP codes contain multiple tracts and some tracts contain multiple ZIP codes. So you may find some ZIP codes contain parts of low income tracts and parts of middle income tracts or any other combination of tracts.
Simply put, you have been asked to do the impossible. The best thing you can do is to get a map depicting census tracts using a color "theme" to depict income class and displaying an overlay of ZIP codes. This will give you an idea of where the LMI tracts are relative to ZIP codes. I would suggest a good mapping program to do that.

Two ideas:

Check this out - I just found it. http://proximityone.com/ziptractequiv.htm

Scroll down to the table that you can search. If you know your tract numbers you can check corresponding zip codes. You will see by looking up a few that one tract can be in multiple zip codes and one zip code can cover multiple tracts. It is not a direct correlation.

Also if you search on census tract to zip report you will find some lists you can purchase that are not terribly expensive, vs the time trying to create such a list