About the Project

In 2015, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and CDC Foundation launched the 500 Cities Project in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In 2018, this partnership was extended through 2020.

Project Purpose:

This project reports city and census tract-level data, obtained using small area estimation methods, for 27 chronic disease measures for the 500 largest American cities.
The data are published through a public, interactive “500 Cities” website that allows users to view, explore, and download city- and tract-level data.
Although limited data are available at the county and metropolitan levels, this project represents a first-of-its kind data analysis to release information on a large scale for cities and for small areas within cities. This system complements existing surveillance data necessary to more fully understand the health issues affecting the residents of that city or census tract.
These high-quality, small-area epidemiologic data can be used both by individual cities and groups of cities as well as other stakeholders to help develop and implement effective and targeted prevention activities; identify emerging health problems; and establish and monitor key health objectives. For example, city planners and elected officials may want to use this data to target neighborhoods with high rates of smoking or other health risk behaviors for effective interventions.

Cities:

The project will deliver data for the 497 largest American cities and will include data from the largest cities in Vermont (Burlington – population: 42,417), West Virginia (Charleston – population: 51,400) and Wyoming (Cheyenne – population: 59,466) to ensure inclusion of cities from all the states; bringing the total to 500 cities.
The number of cities per state ranges from 1 to 121.
The cities range in population from 42,417 in Burlington, Vermont to 8,175,133 in New York City, New York.
Among these 500 cities, there are approximately 28,000 census tracts, for which data will be provided. The tracts range in population from less than 50 to 28,960, and in size from less than 1 square mile to more than 642 square miles. The number of tracts per city ranges from 8 to 2,140.
The project includes a total population of 103,020,808, which represents 33.4% of the total United States population of 308,745,538.
List of 500 Cities pdf icon[PDF-314KB]

Unique Value of the 500 Cities Project

The 500 Cities Project reflects innovations in generating valid small-area estimates for population health.
It provides data for cities, many of which cover multiple counties or do not follow county boundaries, and for census tracts for the first time. These data will be filterable (by city and/or tracts; as well as by measure) and downloadable for use in separate analyses by the end-users.
The project will enable retrieval, visualization, and exploration of a uniformly- defined selected city and tract-level data for the largest 500 US cities for conditions, behaviors, and risk factors that have a substantial effect on population health.

For More Information

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation hosted an informational webinar on the 500 Cities Project on June 30, 2016. The 500 Cities Project webinar recording is now available.

The 500 Cities Project: Local data for better health [PDF-2.1MB]

Measures

The 27 measures include 5 unhealthy behaviors, 13 health outcomes, and 9 prevention practices.
The measures include major risk behaviors that lead to illness, suffering, and early death related to chronic diseases and conditions, as well as the conditions and diseases that are the most common, costly, and preventable of all health problems.
Each measure will have a comprehensive definition that includes the background, significance, limitations of the indicator, data source, and limitations of the data resources.
Measures will complement existing sets of surveillance indicators that report state, metropolitan area, and county-level data, including County Health Rankings, Chronic Disease Indicators, and Community Health Status Indicators.

500 Cities Measures:

Unhealthy Behaviors

Health Outcomes

Prevention

Methodology:

The method of generating small area estimation (SAE) of the measures is a multi-level statistical modeling framework.
Specifically, CDC will use an innovative peer-reviewed multi-level regression and poststratification (MRP) approach that links geocoded health surveys and high spatial resolution population demographic and socioeconomic data.
The approach also accounts for the associations between individual health outcomes, individual characteristics, and spatial contexts and factors at multiple levels (e.g., state, county); predicts individual disease risk and health behaviors in a multi-level modeling framework, and estimates the geographic distributions of population disease burden and health behaviors.
The MRP approach is flexible and will help CDC provide modeled estimates of the prevalence for each indicator at the census tract and city levels.
Small area estimates using this MRP approach have been published using data from CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and the National Survey of Children’s Health.
CDC’s internal and external validation studies confirm the strong consistency between MRP model-based SAEs and direct BRFSS survey estimates at both state and county levels.
The primary data source for this project is the CDC Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.

Further information on the small area estimation methodology can be obtained from: