Compare two places

How does my county stack up against yours? Pick two and see every measure side by side — the raw number and where it lands nationally (its percentile). Each measure shows its latest available year; the dashboard ranks ingredients, it never decides a winner.

Los Angeles County, California vs New York County, New York

About these places

Before the numbers — what are these two places? A one-paragraph Wikipedia intro for each, so a profile reads like a place, not just a column of statistics.

Los Angeles County, California

Los Angeles County, sometimes abbreviated as LA County, is a county in the U.S. state of California, in the southern region of the state. It is the most populous county in the United States, with 9,694,934 residents estimated in 2025. Its population is greater than that of 40 individual U.S. states. Comprising 88 incorporated cities and 101 unincorporated areas within a total area of 4,083 square miles (10,570 km2), it accommodates more than a quarter of Californians and is one of the most ethnically diverse U.S. counties. The county's seat, Los Angeles, is the second-most populous city in the United States, with 3,878,704 residents estimated in 2024. The county is globally known as the home of the U.S. motion picture industry since its inception in the early 20th century.

New York County, New York

Manhattan is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. Coextensive with New York County, Manhattan is the smallest county by area in the U.S. state of New York, and one of the smallest in the United States. Located almost entirely on Manhattan Island near the southern tip of the state, Manhattan is centrally located in the Northeast megalopolis and represents the urban core of the New York metropolitan area. Manhattan serves as New York City's economic and administrative center and has been described as the cultural, financial, media, and entertainment capital of the world.

Summaries & images from Wikipedia, licensed CC BY-SA.

The %ile columns are each measure's national percentile that year (0% = lowest county, 100% = highest) — the weightable ingredient. Higher is not always "better": for unemployment, a high percentile means high unemployment. The Difference is Los Angeles County, California minus New York County, New York in the measure's own units.

The headline: where a dollar goes furthest

Cost-adjusted income is the mission's core analytic — per-capita income divided by the local cost of living, so two places are compared on real purchasing power.

Will it keep pricing out? (affordability + 2-year forecast)

Housing affordability is the price-to-income ratio — typical home value ÷ median household income (lower = more affordable). The solid line is the measured history (2009–2024); the shaded cone on the 2025–2026 tail is a forecast (a per-county Holt time-series model, with its 80% prediction band). This is the platform's first predictive measure — and an honest one: the model is backtested against held-out years and graded against a naive "next year = last year" baseline. The backtest verdict (does the model actually beat that baseline?) is recorded in `ml/reports/affordability_backtest*.md`._ Treat the tail as a measured guess with error bars, never a promise.

The two faint lines around the forecast point are its 80% prediction interval — the band widens at the 2-year horizon because uncertainty grows the further out we project. A wide cone means "we really don't know"; that honesty is the point (per the project's ML boundary, AD-5).

Is it gaining or losing people?

Affordability tells you what a place costs; net migration tells you which way it's trending. Net = people arriving − people leaving (IRS county-to-county flows, ~people via tax exemptions). Above the zero line the county is gaining people; below it, losing. A place with rising home values and net in-migration reads very differently from one with rising prices and people heading for the exits.

Health, opportunity & environment (SDOH)

Money and housing are only part of a place. The social determinants of health — how long people live, how many children grow up in poverty, the air they breathe, whether the internet reaches them — round out the picture, and they often tell a different story than the economic numbers do. These come from County Health Rankings (each measure on its most recent available year). As everywhere on this dashboard, they are ingredients, not a verdict — the percentile is where the county lands nationally, and which direction is "good" is yours to decide (longer life and more broadband rank high; more premature death, child poverty, inequality, food insecurity and particulate pollution rank high too — invert those in your head).

A blank cell means the measure is suppressed for that county — County Health Rankings withholds small-county rates (infant mortality, some death rates) rather than publish an unreliable figure, and the platform carries that as honest "no data," never a fabricated zero.

Health, social & environment measures from the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, countyhealthrankings.org.