By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – President Obama, Congressman David Cicilline and other Democrats were propelled to victory last November by a surge in voting by Hispanic and black Rhode Islanders as well as a sharp drop in participation among white citizens, a WPRI.com analysis of new Census data shows.

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By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – Many Americans associate Southern New England with the devout pilgrims who settled here in the 1600s, but a new poll shows the region’s religiosity is waning four centuries after the Mayflower arrived.

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• Related: Study: RI has 3rd-most baptisms, remains most Catholic state (March 12)

Rhode Island’s 2011 voter ID law was a hot topic on the campaign trail in some General Assembly races last fall, with Democrats in liberal districts saying they got an earful about the need to repeal it. House Speaker Gordon Fox has promised to consider the issue this session.

The strange spectacle of a heavily Democratic legislature implementing a policy that’s usually pushed by conservative Republicans raised eyebrows at The New Republic and deeply dismayed many local liberals. But should they rethink their opposition to voter ID?

Michael Waldman, president of NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, seems to think so – and his voice will carry weight, considering the Brennan Center is one of the nation’s most prominent voting-rights organizations. In the new issue of the influential progressive journal Democracy, Waldman pushes for an aggressive agenda – and tells his political allies they should look to Rhode Island for a model:

Progressives will need to do much better, too, at making clear our commitment to election integrity. …

[P]rogressives look Pollyannaish if we belittle concerns about election integrity. After all, politicians have been trying to stuff the ballot box since senators wore togas. It was progressive reformers who fought for decades to improve the honesty and integrity of elections. …

I believe progressives must take one more step. We should unambiguously embrace an election-integrity agenda that protects against genuine risks without disenfranchising legitimate voters. The Republican demand for voter-ID laws is not the problem per se. The problem comes from laws requiring ID that many people do not have. About 11 percent of voters lack a driver’s license or another current government photo ID. Rhode Island, in contrast to the stricter ID laws conservatives favor, passed a law that accepts nongovernmental ID such as insurance cards, credit or debit cards, even health-club cards. This approach has caused little disenfranchisement or fraud.

Rhode Island’s law is being phased in, with some forms of non-photo ID still allowed this year. Photo IDs – though not necessarily government-issued ones – will be required at the polls starting next year. A bill to repeal voter ID [pdf] was considered by the House Judiciary Committee last week.

• Related: Is RI’s new voter ID law just an ‘oddity’ – or a ‘game changer’? (July 28, 2011)

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! There are plenty of people to celebrate with around here.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 22.7% of Massachusetts residents and 18.5% of Rhode Island residents were of Irish ancestry in 2011, compared with 11.1% for the nation as a whole.

Jed Kolko, chief economist at real-estate data firm Trulia, put together a bunch of information on where Irish-Americans live in the United States. As this map shows, Eastern Massachusetts is a hot spot – though the closer you get to Rhode Island, the lower the percentages are:

Rhode Island will likely remain one of the most heavily Catholic states in the nation if a new generation of baptized babies stays among the faithful when they grow up.

Rhode Island had the nation’s third-most Catholic infant baptisms as a percentage of all babies born in 2010, with an estimated baptism-to-births ratio of 34%, according to statistics compiled by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. The state had 11,177 births and 3,804 baptisms that year.

The only two states with more Catholic infant baptisms as a share of births in 2010 were California (35.9%) and New Jersey (35.6%), the center said. Massachusetts ranked fourth (32.7%) and Connecticut ranked sixth (30.5%).

Rhode Island was still the most heavily Catholic state in the country as of 2008 despite a significant drop in the number of adherents over the last two decades, according to a survey by Trinity College’s Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture.

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Maps are sometimes as deceiving as they are revealing.

Take this map of Rhode Island:

Which places grab your eye? Burrillville, Glocester, Coventry, West Greenwich, Exeter – the geographically large places in the western part of the state that cover a lot of land.

But anybody who knows anything about Rhode Island knows those five communities aren’t where the vast majority of Rhode Islanders live. Their combined population of 73,104 residents is less than half the size of Providence’s and slightly smaller than Warwick’s or Cranston’s.

That’s where another type of map can come in handy – a cartogram, in this case a population cartogram, which rescales political jurisdictions to reflect how many people live in them. (Cartograms have become popular with Democrats who don’t like the sea of red they see when they look at national election results.)

Happily, the good folks at The Providence Plan – which just celebrated its 20th anniversary – have the tools and the data to create a population cartogram for Rhode Island. Rebecca Lee, assistant director of ProvPlan’s information group, created this one for WPRI.com using 2010 U.S. Census data:

(Thank you to The Rhode Island Foundation’s Jessica David and ProvPlan’s Andrew Bramson for their help.)

​By Ted Nesi

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – Rhode Island lost 354 residents in the year ended June 30, 2012, a decline of 0.03% compared with a year earlier, the U.S. Census Bureau announced Thursday.

Read the rest of this story »

• Related: The rise and fall and rise of Providence’s population (March 23, 2011)

Rhode Islanders just aren’t making babies like they used to.

The state’s fertility rate fell to the lowest level in at least two decades last year as relatively few Rhode Island women of childbearing age brought home a newborn, according to a new National Center for Health Statistics study.

The study shows Rhode Islanders gave birth to 10,960 babies last year, which translates to 51.5 births for every 1,000 female residents between the ages of 15 and 44 – the lowest fertility rate of any state in the nation.

The fertility rate nationwide was 63.2 births but it was significantly lower throughout New England, with the region’s highest rate in Massachusetts, which had 54.4 births per 1,000 women 15 to 44. Women in Utah have the nation’s highest fertility rate: 83.6 births, about 32 more babies than women in Rhode Island.

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What do House Republicans have against Rhode Island?

Perhaps that’s a little harsh. But a little-noticed vote taken last week by the U.S. House of Representatives would eliminate a crucial source of information about our state and its 1 million inhabitants.

House Republicans voted to cut off funding for what’s known as the American Community Survey, a yearly U.S. Census Bureau survey of 3 million Americans which “generates data that help determine how more than $400 billion in federal and state funds are distributed each year.”

Why does this matter to Rhode Island? “Without the ACS,” Washington City Paper’s Shani Hilton explains, ”states like North Dakota and Rhode Island – and non-states like our dear District [of Columbia] – would have to rely on the (less detailed) data that comes out every 10 years from the decennial U.S. Census.”

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The Providence metropolitan area fell a jaw-dropping 124 spots on Forbes magazine’s annual list of the Best Cities for Job Growth, plunging from No. 256 in 2011 to No. 380, only 18 spots away from dead last.

Providence scored a 17.7 on Forbes’ weighed index of employment growth, which measures recent and longer-term trends. Odessa, Texas, was No. 1 with a 99.4 score, while Dalton, Ga., was last with a 0.5.

Providence fared even worse among other large-sized cities, coming in second to last out of 65 metropolitan areas; only Birmingham, Ala., fared worse. The Providence area’s unemployment rate was 10.8% in March, down from 11.1% a year earlier but up from 5.1% in March 2007, according to the U.S. Labor Department.

If there was any silver lining for Providence, it was in the accompanying article by Joel Kotkin, which suggested: “When it comes to growth, economic and demographic, opportunity increasingly is to be found in smaller, and often remote, places.” That wouldn’t include the Providence metropolitan area, but it could fit the capital city itself.

“Why are the stronger smaller cities growing faster than most larger ones?” Kotkin writes. “The keys may lie in many mundane factors that are often too prosaic for urban theorists. They include things such as strong community institutions like churches and shorter commutes …. Young families might be attracted to better schools … and the access to natural amenities common in many of these smaller communities.”

It’s no secret that Hispanics are a growing and increasingly influential segment of Rhode Island’s population, with the 2010 U.S. Census classifying 131,000 of the state’s 1 million residents as Hispanic.

Politico’s James Hohmann calls the growth of America’s Hispanic community “one of the most important demographic trends of our new century … with enormous policy and political implications.” The Republican-aligned group Resurgent Republic has a cool new microsite with lots of details – check it out.

Rhode Island is one of the least religious states in the country, but its residents are still more devout than those of any other New England state, according to a new Gallup survey.

The poll shows 32% of Rhode Islanders are “very religious,” tied with New York as the 10th-least religious state in the nation.

Another 31% of Rhode Island residents are moderately religious and 37% are nonreligious, meaning they say religion is not an important part of their daily lives and they seldom or never attend services.

Rhode Island is still a generally religious place, with 63% of all residents either very or moderately religious. That’s lower than the 68% of all Americans who are religious but higher than residents of other New England states: 57% in Connecticut, 53% in Massachusetts, 52% in Maine, 48% in New Hampshire and just 43% in Vermont.

New England is the least religious region of the country, according to Gallup, with Vermont and New Hampshire tied as the least religious states. Just 23% of their residents residents are “very religious,” according to Gallup.

“It appears there is something about the culture and normative structure of a state, no doubt based partly on that state’s history, that affects its residents’ propensity to attend religious services and to declare that religion is important in their daily lives,” Frank Newport, Gallup’s editor in chief, wrote in an analysis of the results.

Rhode Island is near the bottom of the list when it comes to how many residents finished high school, according to new Census data released Thursday.

The Census reported 83.5% of Rhode Islanders had a high school diploma in 2010, which ranked ninth from the bottom among the 50 states. Wyoming was No. 1 at 92.3% and Massachusetts ranked 18th at 89.1%. California and Texas tied for last place at 80.7%.

The share of residents with a bachelor’s degree or higher was 30.2% in Rhode Island, which ranked 13th. Massachusetts was No. 1, with 39% of residents holding a bachelor’s or more. West Virginia was last at 17.5%.

Educational attainment is even lower across the broader Providence metropolitan area, which includes 1.6 million residents in Rhode Island and Bristol County, Mass.

The Census said 82.6% of Providence area residents were high school graduates in 2010, which was fifth from the bottom among the nation’s 50 most populous metropolitan areas. But 28.5% of the region’s residents had a bachelor’s degree or higher, which ranked 33rd. The Boston area ranked No. 4 and No. 5, respectively.

(map: U.S. Census Bureau)

Slate posted a map showing the share of Mormons in each county across the United States. Unsurprisingly, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has relatively few adherents here in staunchly Catholic Rhode Island.

Bristol County is 0.67% Mormon, the most in the state, followed by Newport County (0.43%), Providence County (0.21%) and Kent County (0.15%), according to the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies.

Washington County is listed as 0% Mormon. Is that right? Does anyone know a Mormon who lives in Charlestown, Exeter, Hopkinton, Narragansett, New Shoreham, North Kingstown, Richmond, South Kingstown or Westerly?

Update: The map shows no Mormons on Nantucket either, Josh Barro points out via Twitter.

That’s what Joel Kotkin of Forbes.com thinks:

An analysis comparing the results of the 2008 election and the most recent Gallup surveys with data by demographer Wendell Cox shows a remarkable correlation between the states and regions with the highest proportion of childless women under 45 – the best indicator of offspring-free households — and the propensity to vote Democratic. …

At the top of the list, with 80% of its women under 45 without children, stands the rock-solid blue District of Columbia. Just behind that taxpayer-financed paradise the six states with the highest percentages — Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Vermont and California — also skew Democratic. In each of these states the percentage of childless women exceeds 55%.

Interesting. What do you think?

(chart: Pew Research Center)

The pension overhaul wasn’t the only surprising-for-a-blue-state policy Rhode Island enacted in 2011. Another that passed to liberals’ dismay was the new law requiring that voters show an ID before they cast a ballot.

The New Republic’s Simon van Zuylen-Wood, who graduated from Brown last year, returned to Rhode Island recently in an effort to answer the question that headlines his new article, out today: “Why Did Liberal African-Americans in Rhode Island Help Pass a Voter ID Law?”

Here’s an excerpt:

Whether minority legislators voted for voter ID in good faith, or to disenfranchise ethnic rivals, the law effectively contributes to the state’s increasingly conservative slant. More important, Rhode Island’s poor, elderly, and minority citizens risk losing their vote when the law takes effect in 2014. And while Rhode Island’s law is actually more lenient than those passed in other states, and was not part of the centralized Republican push to move such bills through state legislatures, it may have more staying power.

Read the whole story here. (Full disclosure: Simon interviewed me as he prepared his story.) The best quote comes from State Rep. Anastasia Williams, D-Providence, who tells TNR she noticed one particular case of voter fraud because the alleged perpetrator “was a hottie.”

• Related: Is RI’s new voter ID law just an ‘oddity’ – or a ‘game changer’? (July 28)

The Census Bureau says Rhode Island lost population faster than any other state over the past year. But don’t tell that to Allied Van Lines.

Rhode Island once again made the inbound list on the moving company’s 44th Annual Magnet States Report, an annual study of where Americans are going and where they’re leaving based on Allied’s shipping data.

Allied said 56% of its Rhode Island shipment volume was inbound during the first 11 months of last year, down slightly from 57% in 2010 and 2009, even though Census numbers show the state’s population fell 0.12% to 1,051,302 as of July 1.

“Moving van activity is seen by some experts as a good indication of migration for executive-level employees,” according to The Orange County Register. “These pricier relocations are often paid for by the moving workers’ employer.”

The top magnet state was Texas with 58% of shipments inbound, while the biggest loser was Illinois with 59% of shipments outbound, according to Allied.

Update: A very different view from United Van Lines:

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) – Migration trends tracked by the nation’s largest moving company show Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Maine are among Northeastern states with the highest number of people heading out.

The study by St. Louis-based United Van Lines also says Washington, D.C., continues to be the nation’s most popular destination, and that moving households also prefer western United States.

Like most of the developed world, the United States is facing the challenge of how to deal with an aging society over the next few decades. And no region of the country will face a bigger challenge than New England.

“A critical macroeconomic question is how a proportionately smaller working-age population can support a proportionately larger population of retirees,” Federal Reserve scholar Richard Woodbury wrote in a recent paper. Nearly 35% of Rhode Island’s adult population will be over the age of 60 by the year 2030, he said.

“Where will the work capacity come from to maintain the country’s aggregate economic production, or standard of living?” Woodbury wondered. “Can the United States, New England, Massachusetts, or Rhode Island continue to produce as much output (and thus earn as much income) if a large wave of Baby Boomer retirement shrinks the relative size of the labor force?”

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News preferences say a lot about people. For example, as a Nesi’s Notes reader you are obviously smart, discerning, good-looking, and just generally above average.

The Pew Research Center is out with a big new analysis of the American electorate that tries to find new ways of breaking down our political preferences. I haven’t read the whole thing, but Time magazine’s writeup makes me think I should:

So what do we learn from this? A ton, and it cannot be summarized in a blog post. You should read the full 159 page report here. But it can be said that while the country is historically polarized, the edges do not command all that many of the votes. Elections are still decided by groups that are motivated less by ideology than by identity, whether it be socioeconomic or cultural. Further, one can see in this framework the pathways for victory for both Obama and his Republican challenger in [2012].

Pew came up with nine categories to classify Americans’ political views: Solid Liberals; Hard-Pressed Dems; New Coalition Dems; Post-Moderns; Disaffecteds; Libertarians; Main Street Republicans; Staunch Conservatives; and Bystanders.

I found it interesting to see where the different groups get their national news (if they get it at all):

Which types do you think predominate in Rhode Island?

Update: The study also shows the Drudge Report remains extremely influential and Twitter isn’t all that popular, a reader points out.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat was a bit embarrassed yesterday after he wrote that the median American family of four makes $94,900 a year. Yahoo! Finance’s Daniel Gross explained why that figure was wide of the mark; Douthat eventually related how he got confused.

Gross’ response included a link to median family income by household for each state, which caught my attention. As a refresher, “median income” means this is the midpoint among families of each size; half earn more than this amount and half earn less.

Want to know how your family’s income stacks up? Here’s median family income for Rhode Island:

• Family of 1: $46,136 a year
• Family of 2: $58,511 a year
• Family of 3: $72,184 a year
• Family of 4: $88,593 a year

But why use prose when you can make a chart? I included Massachusetts as a reminder that everyone there has more money than us:

Obama speaks in Providence last October

President Obama’s strategists probably aren’t too worried about whether he’ll win Rhode Island and its four electoral votes again next November. And one of the reasons for that is the high level of support he received from white Rhode Islanders in 2008.

Obama won 58% of the white vote in Rhode Island in the last presidential election. The only states where white support for the Democrat was higher were his birthplace, Hawaii (70%), and Vermont (68%). He also won 58% of the white vote in Maine and 57% in Massachusetts.

But in another sign of how demographic developments are changing the face of Rhode Island, Obama could still win the state next year even if his support among whites fell to 43% thanks to a growing non-white electorate, according to a new analysis by National Journal’s Ron Brownstein.

It’s a little confusing, but basically Brownstein cut Obama’s non-white support by 10% from its level in 2008 and then projected how much of the white vote he’d need to win to still take each state. But that’s just a small part of Brownstein’s larger story about the rapidly morphing American electorate:

Last week’s release of national totals from the 2010 census showed that the minority share of the population increased over the past decade in every state, reaching levels higher than demographers anticipated almost everywhere, and in the nation as a whole. If President Obama and Democrats can convert that growth into new voters in 2012, they can get a critical boost in many of the most hotly contested states and also seriously compete for some highly diverse states such as Arizona and Georgia that until now have been reliably red. …

Even as the growing minority population creates new opportunities for Democrats, however, the party faces persistent challenges within the majority-white community. …

These twin dynamics suggest that in many states the key question for 2012 may be whether Republicans can increase their advantage among whites enough to overcome what’s likely to be a growing share of the overall vote cast by minorities, who still break preponderantly for Democrats.

Update: Turns out this post was more timely than I realized: President Obama formally launched his reelection campaign this morning, Tim White informs us via Twitter.

(photo: Tim White/WPRI)

As Rhode Island goes, so goes the nation? Only when it comes to Hispanics.

The U.S. Census Bureau reported yesterday (emphasis mine):

More than half of the growth in the total U.S. population between 2000 and 2010 was because of the increase in the Hispanic population. Between 2000 and 2010, the Hispanic population grew by 43 percent, rising from 35.3 million in 2000 to 50.5 million in 2010. The rise in the Hispanic population accounted for more than half of the 27.3 million increase in the total U.S. population. By 2010, Hispanics comprised 16 percent of the total U.S. population of 308.7 million.

That national number jumped out to me because it’s nearly identical to the one for Rhode Island – the Hispanic population grew 44% here between 2000 and 2010. So the increase here was very much in line with national trends. Hispanics’ share of the Rhode Island population is only 12%, though, compared with 16% nationally.

That’s quite a contrast with the trends among non-Hispanics. Here’s the Census Bureau again:

The non-Hispanic population grew relatively slower over the decade at about 5 percent. Within the non-Hispanic population, the number of people who reported their race as white alone grew even slower (1 percent). While the non-Hispanic white alone population increased numerically from 194.6 million to 196.8 million over the 10-year period, its proportion of the total population declined from 69 percent to 64 percent.

In Rhode Island, there was no growth at all in those two categories from 2000 to 2010 – the number of non-Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites both shrank, with each group declining nearly 4%. Non-Hispanics’ share of the total Rhode Island population fell from 91% to 88%, while non-Hispanic whites’ share dropped from 85% to 81%.

Notably, Michigan – the only state with slower population growth than Rhode Island from 2000 to 2010; it shrank – did not keep pace with national Hispanic population growth the way Rhode Island did. Michigan’s Hispanic population grew by just under 35%.

That’s the number of people living in the City of Providence as of each U.S. Census since 1790, the second year of George Washington’s presidency.

As you can see, Providence’s population peaked at 253,504 in 1940, then dropped nearly 40% over the next four decades as people flocked to the suburbs in the years after World War II.

The city stopped the bleeding at 156,804 in 1980 and then slowly recovered some of its losses over the 30 years since, with the population rising to 178,042 in 2010.

Thankfully, then, Providence is no Detroit. But that’s still 75,462 fewer people than were living here on the eve of the Second World War.

By another measure, though, the city has been losing ground since John Adams was president.

Rhode Island’s capital was the ninth-largest American city by population in 1800 – the equivalent of Dallas in today’s U.S. – and was 20th-largest as late as 1900, according to Census records.

But the postwar exodus pushed the city steadily down the list during the latter half of the 20th century, from No. 37 in 1940 to No. 43 in 1950; No. 56 in 1960; No. 71 in 1970; and No. 100 in 1980, the last year Providence made the rankings.

OK, now let’s do some crowd-sourcing. All the Census data about Rhode Island released today is available here – dig in and share what you find interesting in the comments section below.

Update: South Kingstown? More like South Boomtown! Census shows S.K., Cumberland grow most.

Earlier: Rhode Island population inched up since 2000 (Dec. 21)

Thus reports The Atlantic in its April issue. Instead of 50, the magazine divided America’s counties into 12 states based on their economies and looked at how median incomes have fared in each since 1980.

Do you live in Bristol, Kent, Newport or Washington County? If so, The Atlantic says you reside in a “Monied ‘Burb.” Median income in those places has grown from $55,688 in 1980 to $59,404 in 2010 (after inflation), a good-sized leap. Monied ‘Burbs have “higher-than-average family income and educational attainment” and are “closely divided politically,” the magazine says.

Make your home in Providence County? Then you’re a resident of The Atlantic’s “Industrial Metropolis” state. Those places aren’t as wealthy as Monied ‘Burbs, but they still did OK over the past few decades, with median income rising from $53,921 to $56,234. Industrial Metropolises are “high-density, young, and diverse, with many rich and many poor.” Sound like Providence and its environs to you?

Some of the magazine’s other 12 states – including “Evangelical Epicenters,” “Immigration Nation,” and “Emptying Nests” – actually saw median incomes fall over the last 30 years. Most of the Northeast falls into two other states: “Service Worker Centers” and “Campus and Careers.”

(map: TheAtlantic.com)

Rhode Island’s population totaled 1,055,247 on April 1, an increase of 6,928 since 2000, according to figures released this morning by the U.S. Census Bureau based on last spring’s decennial national count.

The only state which saw its population grow more slowly than Rhode Island’s over the past 10 years was Michigan, which actually lost 0.6% of its residents from 2000 to 2010. (Puerto Rico’s population shrank 2.2%, as well.)

The other big news locally was that Massachusetts will indeed lose one of its 10 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives after the 2012 elections. Prepare for that scramble among the Bay State’s congressmen I previewed last month. Rhode Island has two seats and will keep them both.

Rhode Island’s population has roughly doubled over the last century while the nation’s has tripled. Here’s a chart showing the number of residents in the state from 1910 to 2010:

And here’s another chart showing the 10-year percentage change in the state’s population. The growth in the number of residents from 2000 to 2010 was the second-slowest in the last century; it was only slower in 1970-1980:

The U.S. population stood at a bit over 300 million on April 1 – 308,745,538 – up 9.7% from 281,421,908 in 2000, the Census Bureau said. A century ago, in 1910, the country had fewer than 100 million residents. The American population first topped 200 million in the 1970 Census.

This map from the Census Bureau shows which states gained the most residents over the past 10 years. Nevada was tops, with a 35% jump in its population. The only places that last population were Michigan and Puerto Rico:

Along with Massachusetts, the other states losing a U.S. House seat are Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania; losing two seats are New York and Ohio. Texas will gain four seats, Florida will gain two, and one seat each will go to Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah and Washington. While not unexpected, that list will make Democrats cringe.

Rhode Island’s population of 1,055,247 includes 2,680 people who live overseas; the resident population here in the U.S. was 1,052,567.

Update: Rhode Island ranks as the 8th-smallest U.S. state by population at just over 1 million. The states with the fewest total residents are:

1. Wyoming (568,300 residents)
2. Vermont (630,337)
3. North Dakota (675,905)
4. Alaska (721,523)
5. South Dakota (819,761)
6. Delaware (900,877)
7. Montana (994,416)
8. Rhode Island (1,055,247)
9. New Hampshire (1,321,445)
10. Maine (1,333,074)
11. Hawaii (1,366,862)
12. Idaho (1,573,499)

The New York Times’ all-star Web team has come up with another gem, this time an interactive tool that visualizes Census Bureau data on a map. You can zoom in by address, zip code, state, city – wherever you want, all over the country – and then choose the type of information you want to see: race and ethnicity; income; housing and families; or education.

As an example, here’s a screenshot I took of the NYT’s visualization for race and ethnicity in the Providence region. Each little dot represents 100 people. A green dot is for the white population; a blue dot is for black residents; yellow is for Hispanics, red for Asians and gray is for “other.”

The Census survey being used was taken between 2005 and 2009, and you can see the concentration of the local Hispanic community in South Providence and up in Central Falls:

Pretty neat. Check it out.

And thanks to the Nesi’s Notes reader who sent it along – it’s a big Internet out there, and I’m always looking for things like this to share.

Update: While we’re talking demographics, circle your calendars for next Tuesday, Dec. 21 – that’s the day when the Census Bureau will release the first trove of information from this year’s formal count, the one done every 10 years. (The information in the NYT’s map tool above comes from a sample survey that’s done more frequently, not the actual house-by-house count.) There will be charts!

Anchor Rising‘s Justin Katz writes in to add some more context on those divorce statistics I highlighted last week. They showed Massachusetts as having the nation’s lowest divorce rate: 1.8 divorces per 1,000 residents.

Katz points out that Massachusetts also has one of the nation’s lowest marriage rates, which could skew the numbers. Here’s how he described it in a post back in 2004:

New Hampshire’s 2001 divorce rate was only lower than those of four of the ten Southern states, and Oklahoma and South Carolina would only be average among the Northeastern states. Nonetheless, [UConn professor William D'Antonio] is correct to note that Massachusetts had the lowest number of divorces per 1,000 inhabitants in 2001, at 2.4. Leaving out the flukish Nevada, Arkansas was at the other end, with 6.6 divorces per 1,000 inhabitants.

Of course, that year, Arkansas also had one of the highest marriage rates, at 14.8, compared with Massachusetts’ 6.4, which was the sixth lowest. That means that Arkansas gained 8.2 marriages per 1,000 inhabitants, while Massachusetts gained only 4.0. (For Rhode Island, the calculation is 8.6 marriages minus 3.3 divorces equals a 5.3 gain.) Little wonder that the 2000 Census found that 54.3% of Arkansas’s households were married-couple families, while only 49% of Massachusetts’ and 48.2% of Rhode Island’s were.

Congratulations to the married couples of Massachusetts, who apparently have stronger bonds than their counterparts anywhere else in the country.

There were only 1.8 divorces per 1,000 people in the Bay State in 2008-09, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and compiled by WSJ.com. Washington, D.C., was second-place with 2.1 divorces per 1,000, followed by Pennsylvania at 2.3 and Iowa, New York and North Dakota, all tied at 2.5.

Rhode Island was in a five-way tie for the country’s 14th-lowest divorce rate, with 3.2 dissolved marriages per 1,000 people, the same as in Georgia, Nebraska, Ohio and South Dakota.

Matrimony fared the worst in Nevada – home of divorce-happy Reno – with 6.6 breakups per 1,000. Also on the high side were Arkansas at 5.6, Wyoming at 5.2, and Idaho and West Virginia, tied at 5.0.

Today is Veterans Day, the federal holiday created in 1954 to honor those Americans who have served in the military. Before that year, the holiday was called Armistice Day in remembrance of the agreement that ended World War I in 1918. (In other parts of the world, like the U.K., Nov. 11 is still known as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day.)

Rhode Island’s first formal effort to aid veterans came in 1889, when the State Board of Soldiers Relief was formed and charged with creating a veterans home; it opened two years later in Bristol. Today the State Board has morphed into the Division of Veterans Affairs.

As of last January, the federal government estimated that there were 79,616 veterans in Rhode Island, about 80% of whom served during a war. The biggest group of wartime vets was the 26,127 who served in Vietnam, followed by the two Persian Gulf wars (12,618); World War II (12,540); and Korea (11,128). Another 17,203 served during peacetime. This marks the first year the number of Rhode Island veterans who served in the Gulf is larger than the number who served in Korea, according to the veterans division.

Veteran’s Day is a regular work day here at WPRI, but blogging will be light as I work on a special project. If you have the day off, enjoy it. And if you’re a veteran, thank you for your service.

When Rhode Islanders move out of state, their most likely destinations are Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey.

Those are the findings of a 2008 U.S. Census Bureau survey that asked Americans who’d changed residences during the previous year about their starting and ending points. It’s an inexact science, like all statistical samples, but an interesting snapshot just the same.

Among the roughly 34,500 people who left Rhode Island in 2007-08, nearly half went to Massachusetts (9,874), New York (4,052) and New Jersey (2,809), the survey found. Here are the destinations and the numbers of Rhode Islanders who went to each one:

1. Massachusetts    9874
2. New York    4052
3. New Jersey    2809
4. Connecticut    2758
5. Florida    2371
6. North Carolina    1335
7. California    1223
8. Arizona    1165
9. South Carolina    625
10. Maryland    595
11. Virginia    587
12. Hawaii    562
13. New Hampshire    553
14. Texas    525
15. Tennessee    451
16. Nebraska    444
17. Colorado    398
18. Pennsylvania    377
19. Georgia    340
20. Washington, D.C.     336
21. Maine    313
22. Minnesota    307
23. Oklahoma    301
24. Illinois    283
25. Washington    256
26. Ohio    239
27. Mississippi    237
28. Louisiana    233
29. Vermont    201
30. Oregon    176
31. Puerto Rico    172
32. Missouri    101
33. Wisconsin    89
34. West Virginia    72
35. Indiana    71
36. Alaska    58

There were also 14 states where no Rhode Islanders went, according to the Census survey: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming.