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AHS 2002 Metro Survey Data Released!

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At 12:00 noon EDT today, HUD and the Census Bureau released the 2002 American Housing Survey public use file (PUF). The 2002 survey is part of the metropolitan survey. SAS and ASCII versions of the dataset are available for download from the HUD USER web site, https://www.huduser.gov/datasets/ahs.html . The SAS version is also available from the Census Bureau FTP site, ftp://ftp2.census.gov/AHS/2002_Metro_Sample/ orhttp://www2.census.gov/AHS/2002_Metro_Sample/ .

In addition to the dataset, the HUD USER site includes links to download the "file flattener" utility program (for SAS users), the new version (1.20D) of the AHS codebook in PDF format, and a data dictionary in ASCII format. Additional documentation and descriptive statistics will be added to the web site soon.

The 2002 American Housing Survey-Metropolitan Survey covers these metropolitan areas:

SMSA Name Previous
---- ---- --------
0360 Anaheim-Santa Ana, CA 1994
1280 Buffalo, NY 1994
1520 Charlotte, NC-SC 1995
1840 Columbus, OH 1995
1920 Dallas, TX 1994
2800 Fort Worth-Arlington, TX 1994
3760 Kansas City, MO-KS 1995
5000 Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, FL 1995
5080 Milwaukee, WI 1994
6200 Phoenix, AS 1994
6440 Portland, OR-WA 1995
7280 Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA 1994
7320 San Diego, CA 1994

Because this is the first time these areas have been surveyed since the 1997 redesign, many changes are to be expected. Users may want to consult the "Documentation of Changes in the 1997 American Housing Survey" for details. You can download this document from https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/ahs.html .

New to the metropolitan survey this year is the journey-to-work module. This module has been in the national surveys for years. It includes data on commuting and also working at home.

The new version of the codebook updates the documentation through the 2002 survey. It also corrects some errors and omissions. We have added a new section on how to use the codebook. The variable names in the detail sections are now followed by an equal sign (for example, "CONTROL ="), to make it easier to go directly to the variable entries using Adobe Acrobat Reader's search function.

The ASCII data dictionary is actually an intermediate file from the production of the full codebook. It contains the variable names, labels, and value definitions. Because it is part of the codebook production process, it also contains some formatting tags, which we hope will be easy to ignore.

Dav Vandenbroucke
Economist
U.S. Dept. HUD
david_a._vandenbroucke@hud.gov
202-708-1060 ext. 5890