Summer Data Release: New Cities, New Metrics, and More!

Welcoming 122 New Cities to the Dashboard!

This month, the City Health Dashboard team is excited to announce the addition of 122 new cities to the site, bringing the total number of cities on the Dashboard to 1,225. Dashboard cities now represent 45% of the U.S. population, approximately 148 million people.

96 Small Cities

The Dashboard is committed to expanding the population threshold for inclusion on the website. This summer, we are adding 96 small cities, all with populations 1,000 to 50,000, including cities selected through Put Us on the Map Challenge. All of these cities can now find their data for 30+ metrics on the site.

The Put Us on the Map Challenge invites representatives from small to midsize cities to apply to be added to the Dashboard so they can gain access to local data on health and its drivers specific to their communities. This year, the team selected 37 cities from across the country.

21 New Census Designated Places

The Dashboard recently expanded its “city” definition to include Census Designated Places (CDPs), which are unincorporated communities that do not have a legally defined boundary or an active governmental structure such as planned communities, university towns, or resort towns. In this release, 21 Florida CDPs have been added to the site.

5 Cities Added to Represent Historically Redlined Places

Last year, the Dashboard added 35 cities to the website for which historic redlining maps, drawn in the 1930s by the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps, were available. Since then, additional HOLC maps have been released, and now we are adding five more historically redlined cities to the Dashboard. We are also launching a new mapping feature focused on redlining, described below.

New Metrics

CO2 Emissions

Our planet is warming, and CO2 emissions are a principal contributor to rising temperatures. Rising temperatures have increased the frequency, intensity, and duration of extreme weather and climate events such as heat waves, floods, wildfires, cyclones, and hurricanes, each of which affect human health. Research has demonstrated that rising temperatures are associated with cardiovascular, reproductive, and mental health.

To stay aligned with public health priorities and help meet cities’ needs, the Dashboard is introducing two CO2 Emissions Metrics: Census Tract Average, a measure of annual tract-level CO2 emissions averaged across the city, and Per Capita, a measure of the city’s average annual CO2 emissions per person. Both of these represent CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. The Census Tract Average metric also displays actual census tract values, facilitating within city comparisons. The city-level per capita metric, which normalizes CO2 emissions by population, allows for between-city comparisons.

The sources of CO2 emissions in both metrics are broken down by sectors: Commercial Buildings, Electricity Production, Industrial Buildings, Residential Buildings, and Transportation. These categories reflect the percentage CO2 emissions that were generated by sector and are presented visually with bar graphs, in addition to the metric maps. These visualizations are the first of their kind on the Dashboard. By providing sector-specific data, users can gain a more comprehensive understanding of the CO2 emission landscape and identify the highest contributing sectors in their cities, helping to drive targeted interventions and inform policy development. These metrics are calculated using data from Crosswalks Labs and multi-year data are available.

Learn more about CO2 Emissions – Census Tract Average and CO2 – Per Capita and explore the data for your city.

Food Insecurity

Food insecurity remains a widespread hardship in the U.S., with more than 17 million households experiencing food insecurity at some point in 2022. Food insecurity is influenced by household members’ income, employment, and disability status, as well as local infrastructure such as transportation, accessibility, and affordability. To help address this challenge, the City Health Dashboard is adding a new measure of Food Insecurity.

This metric measures the percentage of adults who report that, during the past year, they did not have enough food and did not have money to get more. Food Insecurity is calculated using data from the CDC’s PLACES project and is available for 39 states. Users can access neighborhood-level data for this metric.

Learn more about Food Insecurity and explore the data for your city.

New Features

Redlining

Recent public attention has focused on the far-reaching impacts of structural racism on health, wellbeing, and opportunity in communities across the U.S. Redlining, racial covenants, and community disinvestment have emerged as potential historic drivers of present-day health and socioeconomic disparities and neighborhood residential segregation. Redlining maps were created in the 1930s by the U.S. Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) for about 225 cities. They reflect how neighborhood racial and economic composition were often used to determine mortgage risk. These maps assigned city neighborhoods with letter grades: "A" (map colored green) for the safest investment and "D" (map colored red) for the highest risk. Areas with predominantly Black or immigrant residents were labeled as high-risk or “redlined” (i.e., “red” Grade D).

Today, the City Health Dashboard is adding redlining maps for 364 of its cities. The 225 cities and counties covered by the 1930s HOLC maps now, in 2025, include parts of 364 of the Dashboard’s cities. For example, the area covered by the single HOLC map for the Los Angeles region now includes over 12 on the Dashboard. For these 364 cities, users can now access redlining information through any map for that city, from the button labeled “Redlining Map.” Once clicked, all four grades appear, and users can toggle between the grades.

You can learn more about redlining and this new feature in a new blog here.

Data Download

Users can now download Dashboard data more efficiently and easily than ever before. Using the redesigned data download feature, you can choose which metrics, cities, and years of data to download without the need for detailed computer code. The same data that has historically been available through the on-site .csv files or the API will also be available through this new data download selector.

Updated Data

This data release is introducing new years of data for 15 metrics, including 12 from the American Community Survey, now with data through 2023. We’ve also updated the three “monthly” metrics: Ozone and PM 2.5, through December 2024, and Unemployment – Current, City-Level, through February 2025.