NICAR Database Library

This story is part of our ongoing coverage of Chicago's massive plan to demolish old public housing projects and replace them with new neighborhoods that were supposed integrate public housing residents with wealthier families.

Curious about all the news stories surrounding safety and security at our airports and prompted by Dave Savini’s terrific investigation into safety issues and the lack of tracking of security badges at Chicago airports, I started asking questions about other facets of the industry.

I talked with pilots, air traffic controllers and others about what they perceived as a growing problem of “near misses” among airplanes in our skies. So I set out to find out if their perceptions were correct and could be backed up by data.

Georgia law requires children to be immunized against certain diseases before they can enroll in school. But many metro Atlanta schools and health officials don’t enforce the law, allowing thousands of children to enroll and remain in school without proof of required vaccinations.

Share your ideas -- and read what others are saying -- about what should be offered at the 2009 CAR Conference in Indianapolis, March 19-22. Post your suggestions for panels, classes or speakers on our Writeboard for conference ideas (Access code = 'indy09').

Listen to Steve Doig, Knight Chair in Journalism at Arizona State University, and Philip Meyer, recently retired Knight Chair at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, discuss the past and future of precision journalism. They share examples of how social science techniques and advances in personal computing have given journalists the tools to find stories that matter.

Showing the big picture around a story sometimes takes more than an interview. This is especially the case when it comes to the U.S. housing crisis, where federal data can be a useful resource for reporters.
Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data, recently updated available through the IRE-NICAR Database Library, can show, on the state and even the Census tract level, the number of subprime loans in a community – who received those loans (at least, their race, gender and ethnicity) and for how much.

NICAR's copy of the Housing Mortgage Disclosure Act dataset for 2007 has been updated.

This dataset, maintained by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, provides information about property loans in the United States, including, for each loan application:

• the race, ethnicity and gender of the applicant
• how much money was requested in the loan
• the annual income of the applicant
• if the loan was considered "sub prime" -- defined in this dataset by being three points higher than the prime rate -- how much higher it was
• The U.S. Census tract where the property lies -- highly useful for mapping

Whenever I acquire a new dataset to play with, one of the first things I want to know if how the tables relate to each other. Ideally, I know that for each main record, I'm going to want to know pretty much everything the data says about it. For example, typically when dealing with FEC campaign contributions, I want to know who gave, how much and who they gave it to. And that means joining a few tables, since candidate information is kept separately from donor information.

Did you know you are slightly more likely to die within a month of your birthday? Or that people are fleeing some of the US's largest cities?

Well, maybe you did know that stuff. But there's only one way to talk about these concepts with authority. There's only one way to find out exactly how much more likely you are to die within a month of your birthday and how many people are fleeing urban areas.

And that's with data.

Peter Spiegel of The Los Angeles Times reported that a U.S. auditor has called for an end to American funding of reconstruction in Iraq.