The NYC Department of City Planning has released new tables and maps based on the 2010 Census Redistricting data, which gives us basic counts of the population. The tables (in PDF and Excel format) are provided for the city, boroughs, individual census tracts, and new areas called Neighborhood Tabulation Areas (NTAs). Here’s their definition:
*Neighborhood Tabulation Areas (NTAs) are aggregations of census tracts that are subsets of New York City’s 55 Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMAs). Primarily due to these constraints, NTA boundaries and their associated names may not definitively represent neighborhoods.
There are 195 NTAs in the city – more manageable then the 2,168 census tracts (small areas with an ideal size of 4,000 people) and more precise than the 55 PUMAs (large areas with an ideal size of 100,000 people). It looks like the department may be trying to re-align and standardize how they’re going to report the new 2010 Census data with how they’ll be reporting the annually updated American Community Survey (the Census Bureau will probably report next year’s ACS using updated 2010 Census boundaries). The city provides cross-tabs that you can use if you wanted to aggregate tract-level data to NTAs on your own, and helpful maps that show you where the NTAs are.
All of these geographies nest within each other: census tracts -> NTAs -> PUMAs -> Boroughs -> City. The city hasn’t said whether or how they’ll report data for the Community Districts; it seems likely that they will, since the CDs were established by city law. The 59 CDs were also constructed by aggregating census tracts and they are similar in size to PUMAs, but they don’t align well with the PUMA boundaries.
It’s likely that the city will release more tables and maps once the complete 2010 census data for Summary File 1 is released this summer.