Platform · Glossary
Census tract.
A statistical subdivision of a county, typically 1,200 to 8,000 residents, designed by the Census Bureau to be relatively homogeneous in population, economic condition, and living conditions. Boundaries are kept stable across decennial cycles to support comparison over time.
Why 3Y uses tracts as the analytical atom
Most market data — incomes, rents, education, employment, housing characteristics — is published at the tract level by the ACS. Tracts are small enough that they generally don't average across radically different neighborhoods, and large enough that ACS estimates are statistically reliable. Anything coarser (county, metro) blurs real differences; anything finer (block group) starts to lose statistical power for many variables.
This is the unit 3Y uses for tract-level distributions on market pages, for location scoring, and for benchmarking individual properties against their immediate surroundings.
Tract-to-city assignment
3Y assigns a census tract to a city when the tract's geographic centroid falls within that city's boundary. This keeps each tract assigned to exactly one city, even when a tract touches or crosses multiple municipal boundaries, and prevents double-counting in city-level distributions.
Tracts are not neighborhoods
A census tract is a statistical construct, not a community boundary. Tract boundaries follow roads, rivers, and political lines convenient for statistical aggregation but don't necessarily match how residents describe their neighborhood. The 3Y glossary treats "tract" and "neighborhood" as related but distinct: a neighborhood is qualitative and community-defined; a tract is quantitative and Census-defined.