City data, a catalog of data sources for small cities

The "quality of life" in small cities is difficult to measure because information is scattered and difficult to come by, in contrast to the considerable body of centralized information on large urban centers. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has widened the scope of its interest in large cities to embrace smaller communities, and is seeking to gauge the conditions of life there as well. To enlarge the body of information it can draw on, HUD contracted with RAND to locate and catalog sources of data pertaining to the quality of life in individual small cities. The body of this report is an annotated listing of 272 data sources that were accordingly compiled. Each data source includes information on its suitability for a specific application: a brief description of content, geographic coverage, frequency of collection, years covered by the data, availability of the data in hardcopy form or as a machine-readable file, and an agency contact point where the user can obtain more information.