We recently announced the release of a free and open source tool that allows easy access to American Community Survey data — ACS Alchemist.   While we built the tool to support a project to predict changing crime levels based on statistical models using socioeconomic and demographic data, the tool can be used by anyone to extract Shapefiles of ACS variables with only a few minutes of work.

Below is a video tutorial that walks you through installing ACS Alchemist, extracting the median income and total population for each census blockgroup in Philadelphia, and displaying the data in Esri’s ArcGIS for Desktop software.

Download the utility from GitHub:  ACS Alchemist