Demographics and housing information from the American Community Survey.

• Author: Rogers, Carol O.

Household and family types, income, occupation, travel to work, home values, mortgage burden, single-family versus apartment or mobile home. These are the characteristics of people and housing now available for Indiana on an annual basis from the American Community Survey. This article is a cursory overview of these statistics, based on the surveys from 2000 and 2002.

Households

The majority of households in Indiana are formed by married couples. Nowadays, fewer than half of all married couple households have children under the age of eighteen. Of households with children under eighteen, the majority are married (22 percent) with an ever growing but still small number of single-mother households (7 percent).

Between 2000 and 2002, the number of Indiana households with children under eighteen has declined by 1 percent, reflective of the aging of our population (see Figure 1).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Born in Indiana

Nearly 5 million Hoosiers lived in the same house the year prior to the survey in 2002, while 132,000 people lived in a different state.

The percent of native Hoosiers living in households declined slightly (-0.5 percent) to 71 percent in 2002 compared to 2000 estimates. The proportion of the state's household population born in another state grew slightly to 25 percent. Such minor but telling trends can also be seen in the slight up-tick in the percent of the household population born in another country, which grew from 3.3 percent (or 193,765 people) in 2000 to 3.4 percent (205,499 people) in 2002 (see Table 1).

English Spoken Here

The household population age five and older speaking only English at home declined by less than 1 percent between 2000 and 2002, to 5.08 million. The majority of those who spoke a language other than English at home in 2002 also indicated that they spoke English well or very well.

Close to 3.5 percent of persons age five and older spoke Spanish at home, compared to a national figure of 11 percent and 11.6 percent in Illinois. Indiana ranked twenty-eighth in the nation based on this measure, while New Mexico had the largest proportion of Spanish speakers, at 28 percent, followed closely by Texas (27.4 percent) and California (26.8 percent).

It's Off to Work We Go--Usually Driving Alone in Our Cars or Trucks

The vast majority (83 percent) of working Hoosiers age sixteen and older drove to work alone in their cars or trucks in 2002, which is similar to previous years. Another 10 percent carpooled to work. The...