DUBUQUE COUNTY SMART PLAN
Community Overview
Before the Dubuque County region can create a vision for its future, it must have an accurate picture of current conditions in trends. This chapter includes a summary of the current demographic and economic conditions in each community, and future forecasts for total population and employment. The data presented in this chapter will be used to assess the strengths and weaknesses of each community and the region as a whole. Consortium members will use this information to create goals and objectives that will build on community strengths and address any weaknesses. The majority of the data in this chapter comes from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates. The ACS is based on a questionnaire that is sent each month to a sample of about 250,000 addresses in the United States. Each calendar year, these data are pooled and estimates are produced for about 60 different social, economic, and housing characteristics. Since the size of a geographic area largely determines the size of the sample, only larger areas -those with 65,000 or more people—receive 1-year estimates. For smaller places, estimates are created for multiyear periods: for areas with populations between 20,000 and 65,000, 3 years of data are needed; and for areas with fewer than 20,000 people, 5 years of data need to be collected in order to provide estimates. All survey and census estimates include some amount of error. Estimates generated from sample survey data have uncertainty associated with them due to their being based on a sample of the population rather than the full population. This uncertainty, referred to as sampling error, means that the estimates derived from a sample survey will likely differ from the values that would have been obtained if the entire population had been included in the survey, as well as from values that would have been obtained had a different set of sample units been selected. A complete description of all data analysis methods used can be found in the Appendix.
COMMUNITY OVERVIEW
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