William writes in and introduces himself to his new neighbors.

I’m a data and GIS analyst (and former reporter) who just moved to the Medlock area after working for The Palm Beach Post down in South Florida for the past decade. I specialized in stuff like census and real estate data, so I thought I’d throw together some maps of my new home after seeing your post a couple of weeks ago about the NYT’s census map.

You may be wondering about the map above.  It’s straight off a new post on William’s blog showing the black Atlanta population from the 2010 census.  The darker the shading, the larger % of the group; the higher the bar, the more people from the group in the block.  Pretty interesting way to look at it.  Check out his post for similar maps showing the Atlanta Hispanic and Asian populations.

And for the more hyper-local among us, William also created an interactive, block-by-block Google Map of 2010 Census data for just DeKalb County.  Here’s a screen-shot of it, centered around Decatur.  If you want to play around with it, you’ll have to jump over to William’s blog and scroll down a bit.

Over on Fresh Loaf, Thomas Wheatley rightly points out that the brand-new census maps put up on the New York Times website are a total time-suck.

Zoom into Decatur’s city limits and check out how the city’s population has changed in the past 10 years.  From a look at changes in the city’stotal population #s (map above), to racial make-up, to density, to vacant housing, the map tells a not-so-surprising story about Decatur over the past 10 years.

As you can see from all the blue in the map above, populations grew in each of Decatur’s four census tracks except for what can loosely be described as the southeast Winnona Park tract.  The largest growth (+10% to 20%) was seen up in the northeast tract.

The largest change in racial make-up, not surprisingly, was seen in the southeast Oakhurst tract, with the white population more than doubling since 2000 (+113%) and the black population dropping 47%.

And when it comes to vacant housing, only the southwest Oakhurst tract had fewer vacant properties than it did in 2000.

Anyway, enough from me!  Check it out and let us know what else you find.

A DM reader gives some great local tidbits on the 2010 Census data released yesterday…

Decatur between 2000 and 2010 grew modestly — 4.7% to 19,335. That’s slower than the 7.5% in the ’90s.

What’s worth noting is that the black population shrank by almost a third (-31 percent) — going from 5,592 to 3,858. That’s nearly double the 16.7% loss in the ’90s.

The white population grew 15.7% to 13,896 from 11,935 (it grew 33% in the ’90s). …But we gained diversity in other ways. Asian population went to 554 from 312, a 77.7% increase. And the proportion of population identifying as Hispanic — this can be any race — grew to 612 from 309, a 98% increase.

Another big growth area, and one of the most interesting: people who checked more than one race on the census form. It went to 416 from 221, an 88% increase. The rest of the racial breakdown is an infinitesimal share of Native Americans, Pacific Islanders and “other.”