In 2019, only 72% of households in Plainfield Township had a high-speed internet subscription, the lowest rate in the Lehigh Valley. Five years later, that’s jumped to 92%, leapfrogging over the rates of Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton.

That’s just one of the millions of statistics published recently in new data released from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The bureau conducts numerous surveys and data-gathering programs to help the federal government administer various programs and direct tens of billions of dollars every year. Last week, the bureau published the five-year summary American Community Survey results covering 2019 through 2024.

While the annual results are published only for areas with a population of at least 64,000 people, the five-year summaries are available for even the tiniest municipality, Census tract or block group, giving a more granular view of population changes over time.

The Morning Call took a quick look at the more than 1,500 detail, subject tables and data profiles with billions of data points. Here are some key takeaways.

A learning curve: Educational attainment

The bureau defines educational attainment as the highest level of formal education completed by a person. These data are published for adults age 25 and older, since they have generally completed their schooling. Statewide, more than 92% of adults have at least a high school diploma or equivalent, and 35% have a four-year college degree. The map below is shaded by the percentage of population that has achieved at least a four-year college degree in each of more than 2,500 municipalities in Pennsylvania. The information for each place includes data on professional and doctoral degrees.

In the Lehigh Valley, Upper Saucon Township has the most adults who have a doctorate or other terminal degree (the highest offered in a field of study), at almost 5%. The greatest concentration of doctorates in the state is in Swarthmore, where more than 18% of the Delaware County borough’s 3,400 adults have a terminal degree.

This table summaries the information for 63 Lehigh Valley communities, and shows that values range from less than 10% of adults in West Easton, Slatington and East Bangor having finished a college degree to more than 36% of the adult populations of Lower Macungie, Lowhill and Upper Milford townships having done the same.

A decrease in the number of people who list high school as their highest degree is generally a good thing, because it means they have gone on to higher education. Places like West Easton, Heidelberg Township and Lower Nazareth Township, where both high school and four-year degrees are decreasing, indicate higher dropout rates.

Internet connections

The American Community Survey recently began asking households about what kind of electronic devices they use, and how those devices access the internet, if at all. The question was not asked 10 years ago, so these numbers are compared with the five-year survey published in 2019.

The survey results show that only four Lehigh Valley municipalities — Coplay, East Bangor, Lynn Township and Stockertown — have fewer households with broadband internet subscriptions than they did five years ago. Some of those differences might be accounted for by margins of error. A quarter of local towns saw at least 10% more households with broadband access than they did five years prior.

Coplay in Lehigh County has the lowest broadband connection rate, at 77.2% of households, while 14 towns have high-speed subscriptions in at least 95% of their households. Tatamy tops the list with more than 99% of its 450 households having access to high-speed internet.

This map shows more detailed computer and internet information for virtually every place in the state. Select a town to see where households lack desktop or laptop computers, and rely only on cellphones for digital work. The pop-up information also includes information on satellite phone use and cellular home internet subscriptions.

The towns in bright red have at least a quarter of their households lacking high-speed internet. Most of those place are in rural areas and also have a higher percentage of households relying on home cellular data subscriptions or satellite phones. Several communities in Lancaster, Mifflin and Indiana counties have some of the highest percentages of households without internet access. Those counties also contain the highest percentage of Amish and Mennonite families in Pennsylvania.

Housing, more and less

The Census Bureau publishes dozens of tables regarding where and how people live, since housing and family living arrangements are pertinent to many federal programs. We took a look at a couple of high-level stats, including how many housing units are in each county. (Twenty-seven of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties have populations below the 64,000 threshold to be included in most annual surveys.) The numbers include both occupied and vacant units.

Much has been written about the Lehigh Valley’s housing crunch. The table below shows that Lehigh and Northampton counties have added almost 17,000 units since the 2014 survey, giving local families more than 280,000 places to live, an increase of 6.4%, which is significantly higher than the statewide gain of 4.1%. The numbers do not include what the bureau calls “group quarters,” including dormitories, nursing homes, group homes, residential hospitals, military barracks and prisons.

However, the table also shows that more than half of the state’s counties have fewer housing units than they did 10 years ago. Those 35 counties — including Monroe and Schuylkill — lost almost 30,000 housing units in the last decade, accounting for minus 2.8% change. The other 32 counties added 257,728 places to live, a 5.5% increase. The state has more than 5.8 million housing units, according to the latest estimate.

But the map below, which shows vacancy rates per county, illustrates the problem of supply and demand: 13 of the 14 counties shaded red in the southeast corner of the state have added housing units at a higher rate than the state average sine 2014, with Berks equaling the Pennsylvania rate. But all of those counties still have vacancy rates lower than the statewide average of 9.2%, indicating that demand is still outstripping supply.

Lancaster County had the state’s lowest vacancy rate in 2024, at just 3%, with Lehigh and Northampton ranking eighth and 11th, respectively. Montour County, with fewer than 20,000 residents and about 8,100 housing units, is the only county in the top 10 lowest vacancy rates that is not in the southeastern quadrant.

An area’s occupied housing units are delineated by ownership or rental status, what the Census Bureau refers to as “tenure.” Home ownership has traditionally been the goal of most families, but availability and affordability are depressing ownership rates in about a third of the state’s counties, including Lehigh and Northampton, where ownership rates have sunk in the last decade by 1.4 and 1.2 percentage points, respectively. The steepest decline came in Montour, which dropped from 72.9% percent of homes being owner-occupied, to 68.5% in 2024, and 4.4 percentage point decrease.

This map shows the details for all counties.

Larger metropolitan areas tend to have more transient populations, and higher renter rates. Philadelphia has the lowest ownership rate in the state, but more than half of the city-county’s housing units are owner-occupied, according to the latest data. With more than one-third of occupied housing units being rented, Lehigh County ranks sixth lowest for ownership, while Northampton comes in 14th place. Pike County boasts the highest home ownership rate, at 86% of its 24,262 occupied housing units.

The map below illustrates how much of their monthly income homeowners are spending on housing. The pop-up data breaks out houses with a mortgage and those without. The rates are medians, meaning that half of homeowners spend more, and half spend less, but we don’t know how much more or less.

Regionally, Hanover Township and Slatington, both in Lehigh County, have the highest median costs, at almost 26% of monthly income spent on housing. On the flip side, Chapman and Lower Mount Bethel Township, both in Northampton County, have the lowest median housing costs, with families there spending about 13% of their monthly income on housing.

Increasing diversity

Only two of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, Forest and Union, have seen an increase in the portion of their population that is non-Hispanic white, continuing a long trend of incrementally increasing diversity. Unlike many of the previous statistics that are based on households, race figures are based on total resident population, whether citizens or not, and covers all places of residence, including housing units, group quarters or unhoused people. That possibly explains why Forest saw its portion of population that is non-Hispanic white jump by over 9%: the five-year estimates include the period of time when the state prison in Forest was significantly depopulated during the COVID-19 pandemic. The prison normally accounts for more than one-third of the county’s total population, and, statewide, Black people are more than six times as likely as whites to be in a Corrections Department facility, compared with their portion of the overall population.

By comparison, Union’s change was just over 1%, some of which is likely the result of margins of error within the survey. The county saw its total population drop by about 2,500 in 10 years, to 42,456 in the 2024 five-year summary. The current data show that only white and Asian populations increased in percentage over the past decade, with Hispanic, Black and multiracial populations decreasing their portion of the county’s population.

Here is the racial and ethnic breakdown for the state.

The Morning Call will look at some of these data in more depth in the coming weeks, including taking a look at some changing neighborhoods in Lehigh Valley municipalities.