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Cartographic boundaries (1:500,000) for all U.S. counties and county equivalents, as a national sf object. Geometries are simplified for a compact package size. Use as a base layer for mapping the county-level estimates (homeless) and with the Census-to-CoC crosswalk.

Usage

counties

Format

An sf data frame (CRS EPSG:4269, NAD83) with one row per county and 9 attributes plus geometry:

fips

5-digit county FIPS code.

STATEFP

2-digit state FIPS code.

COUNTYFP

3-digit county FIPS code.

NAME

County name.

NAMELSAD

County name with legal/statistical description.

STUSPS

Two-letter state abbreviation.

STATE_NAME

State name.

ALAND

Land area in square meters.

AWATER

Water area in square meters.

geometry

County boundary polygon.

Source

U.S. Census Bureau TIGER/Line cartographic boundary files, via the tigris package (https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files.html).

Details

This object defines the canonical county FIPS vintage for the whole package: area, homeless, homeless_na, sp_homeless, county_pit, county_pit_detail and the county_coc* / tract_coc* crosswalks are all keyed on it. County codes change over time – Connecticut replaced its eight counties (09001-09015) with nine planning regions (09110-09190), Alaska split Valdez-Cordova into Chugach (02063) and Copper River (02066) and renamed Wade Hampton to Kusilvak (02158), and South Dakota renamed Shannon to Oglala Lakota (46102) – so joining data built on different vintages returns nothing for the affected counties. The frame is pinned to the 2024 TIGER/Line vintage.