The Housing Assistance Council (HAC), a national nonprofit organization that supports rural affordable housing efforts, has updated and enhanced its Rural Data Portal, located at www.ruraldataportal.org. The portal is a simple but powerful online resource that provides information on the social, economic, and housing characteristics of communities in the U.S. Although its emphasis is on rural communities, information on urban and suburban areas is included as well. Key features of the portal include an interactive, roll-over map that provides at-a-glance data profiles of the 50 states and District of Columbia, down to the county level, and a tool that can generate reports on 36 different data indicators and automatically export them to a printer, Excel spreadsheet, or PDF file. The information the portal provides is largely based on HAC tabulations of public-use data sets, including U.S. Census Bureau releases and data reported under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act.
