Midland 2005
Category: Local...
Posted Wednesday, August 30, 2006 at 11:34 AM [GMT-6]

The Census Bureau has released its 2005 American Community Survey, and here are some Data Profile Highlights for the city of Midland (county stats are on a separate page):

• Our fair city is fairer still due to the fact that 52.3% of its population is female (vs. 51.0% nationwide).


• We're younger than the nation as a whole, but not by a lot. Our median age is 33.8 vs. 36.4 overall. 11.9% of Midlanders are 65 and over (vs. 12.1%), and 7.7% are younger than 5 (vs. 7.0%). The survey didn't assess how many of us act younger than five.


• We're sadly lacking in residents of Polynesian descent (0.0% vs. 0.1% nationwide), but we more than make up for it with our Latin flavor. 34.5% of Midland's population declared itself to be of Hispanic or Latino ethnicity, vs. 14.5% nationwide.


• Midland's average family size is right on the money vs. the country overall: 3.19 members vs. 3.18 overall. This probably excludes dogs and geckos, although this isn't explicitly stated, presumably due to yet another bureaucratic oversight.


• This surprises me a bit: a lower percentage of Midlanders have a bachelor's degree or higher (26.2%) than the nation's average (27.2%). We've always trumpeted our highly educated workforce.


• Another surprise. 8.9% of Midland residents admit to being foreign-born, vs. 12.4% of Americans in total. One might question the honesty of the respondents for a variety of reasons we need not recount.


• In a glaring statistical aberration, the Census Bureau reports that 100.0% of Midlanders speak a language other than English at home (vs. 19.4% overall). Apparently, West Texas Drawl is deemed to be a unique linguistic characteristic.


• My head hurts trying to assess the logic of this; perhaps it's more transparent to you. 62.3% of the male population in Midland (over the age of 15) is married, but only 53.7% of the women are married. Both of these percentages are higher than their nationwide counterparts (55.9% and 51.0%, respectively). There are also 1,051 "unmarried partners" in Midland households, but the stated margin of error for this statistic is +/-527, rendering it unusable for anything other than lame jokes.


• The "Mean Travel Time to Work" is estimated to be 16 minutes in Midland vs. 25 minutes everywhere else. I can't tell if this includes driving through downtown on Big Spring Street. If it does, then the actual mean for everyone else is, like, 3 minutes. Also, it occurs to me that "Mean Travel Time" takes on a whole different meaning if you're commuting down, say, Central Expressway in Dallas, or I-10 in Houston.


• In the "No Way Category," the Census Bureau reports that 4,473 Midlanders -- 10% of its working population -- carpools to work. And in other news, most Midlanders say they'll vote for Hillary in 2008.


• I'd be interested in seeing a national comparison for this one, but it's not in the online report. 5,640 or about 20% of Midland's workforce are self-employed. That seems to be an unusually high number.


• Getting serious for a moment, the economic stats are sobering. In the category of "families with female householder, no husband present," 30.7% of them had annual income below the poverty level; this percentage rises to 63.4% for those households with related childen under 5 years. Overall, 15.1% of Midlanders reported annual incomes below the national poverty level.

Time doesn't permit us to explore some of the more esoteric data presented in the report, but I recommend especially looking at the social category of that data, to get insights on criteria such as "Education, Marital Status, Fertility, Grandparents..."