Fall Data Release: New Features, Updated Data, and More!

The City Health Dashboard is excited to announce new features and updated data, continuing our commitment to reliability, timeliness, and innovation.

Read on to learn more about what we’ve added this month!

New Features

Customize an Area

Users can now customize an area on their city’s Dashboard map that they care most about, enabling them to seek focused data on health metrics specific to that area. For example, let’s say a user is interested in city council districts, wards, precincts, school districts, or catchment areas comprised of multiple neighborhoods. This new feature empowers users to knit together adjacent census tracts to derive area-specific data for any of the Dashboard’s 30+ neighborhood-level metrics. It’s especially valuable for users and community-based organizations working in well-defined but rarely mapped areas.

Historically, we’ve used census tracts on the Dashboard to present neighborhood data. Census tracts, however, do not always overlap precisely with the neighborhoods we care about. We’ve heard from many of our users that they work in areas that may cross multiple census tracts within a city or even span multiple cities. The Customize an Area feature was built to help meet this user need.

You can access this feature on the Metric Detail page by clicking the “Customized Area” tab on the “Find Values” sidebar or directly clicking on multiple census tracts and clicking “add tract to customized area”. From there, the Dashboard will immediately calculate a weighted average for the customized area. The video below shows just how easy it is to customize your data. Interested users can reference our technical document to learn more about how customized area weighted averages are calculated.

Demographic Data Now Available for Download

The Dashboard provides a demographics overview for each Dashboard city, including data on Race, Ethnicity, % Foreign-born, and Age, for cities and census tracts via the City Overview page. These data are from the U.S. Census American Community Survey and are now also available to download from our Access Dashboard Data page. These new data make it easier for users to explore essential demographic information at both the city and census tract level. Learn more about demographic data on the Dashboard here.

New Years of Data

This data release introduces new years of data for seven metrics. Updated metrics include three natality metrics from the National Vital Statistics System (now with data through 2023), Park Access and Voter Turnout (with data through 2024), and Chronic Absenteeism (with data through 2023). We’ve also updated our monthly unemployment metric with new months of data through July 2025.

See below for a full list of metrics with updated data:

New Definition for Racial Groups

As part of this data release, we have also updated how we define racial groups for our metrics that use NVSS natality data. This change helps improve accuracy by ensuring that our racial group classifications align with the ACS population data used in the metrics. For these metrics, we have updated how we operationalize different race and ethnicity group definitions for our Black, Asian, and Other categories. These groups now include Hispanic-identifying individuals. As a result, demographic breakdown estimates for the Prenatal Care, Low Birthweight, and Teen Births metrics may differ substantially from estimates previously shown on our site. We advise against comparing these updated demographic estimates to estimates you may have previously downloaded or used in the past.

The Latest in Trends

Chronic Absenteeism

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, chronic absenteeism rates rose sharply nationwide, and Dashboard data mirrors this trend. Across Dashboard cities, rates reached approximately 30% in 2022, nearly double the rate in 2020. These increases were alarming to many and became a focus of national attention.

In the most recent year of data, 2023, rates across Dashboard cities show a slight decline. But at about 28% overall, they remain well above pre-pandemic levels.

Disparities also persist by race and ethnicity. In 2023, chronic absenteeism among Black students was approximately 35%, compared to about 16% among Asian students. Similar gaps exist between Hispanic and Other race groups, highlighting opportunities for improvement.

Chronic absenteeism is associated with poor educational outcomes, higher dropout rates, and poorer long-term health outcomes, underscoring the importance of addressing and prioritizing chronic absenteeism in communities across the county.

Explore Chronic Absenteeism in your city.