Area for all U.S. counties and county equivalents

Area in square kilometres for every county in the canonical county frame (counties), including the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories.

Usage

area

Format

A data frame with one row per county and 2 variables:

fips

Five-digit FIPS code uniquely identifying a county or county equivalent in the United States.

skm

Area, in square kilometres (land plus water).

Source

U.S. Census Bureau TIGER/Line cartographic boundary files, via the tigris package.

Details

Area is land plus water (Census ALAND + AWATER). Water is included because the original series was built by summing census-tract polygons, and coastal and Great Lakes tracts extend over water: Keweenaw County, Michigan measures 15,452 km2 on that basis against 1,520 km2 of land. Keeping the same denominator keeps the population-density weights used by the county apportionment comparable with the published estimates of Almquist, Helwig and You (2020).

Used as the denominator of density in homeless and as the weight in the CoC-to-county apportionment.

See also

counties for the county frame this is keyed on.