Editorial policy
PlainCities publishes the Census Bureau's figures as the Bureau publishes them, with their margins of error, and describes places only through those figures.
Published · last revised
What is published
Figures from the Census Bureau's files named on the methodology page, for every geography the Bureau publishes them for. A figure is never rounded into a different claim, never shown without its year, and never shown as exact when it is an estimate.
How places are described
Sentences on a place's page are built from that place's figures and say what the figures say: "half of the households earn less than", "the margins cannot tell the two periods apart". PlainCities does not call a place good or bad, safe or dangerous, a place to live or to avoid. A ranking orders one figure and says so; a "highest" or "lowest" is a measurement, not a verdict.
What is left out
Estimates the survey cannot support stay on the page with a ring and their margin, but are never ranked or used in a sentence that compares them. Subjects other than the census record of a place (crime, climate, schools, prices) are not published here.
Who decides
PlainCities' data editor, a role carried out with AI agents and scripts, decides what each page type shows and runs the release checks. The rules above are applied by code, the same way for every place.
Corrections
Report an error to hello@plaincities.com. Corrections are made at the source (the pipeline or its rules), applied to every page they touch, and listed on the corrections page with the date.