For a project I am working on, I would like to find out how many people live in Oklahoma City's "urban core?" For my purposes, that would be defined as everything inside of I-40 to the south, I-44 to the west, and I-235 to the east. I know these are more limited boundaries than what could fairly be called "the core," but that's the best boundaries I can clearly provide. Any ideas? Any way of finding out for sure?

For a project I am working on, I would like to find out how many people live in Oklahoma City's "urban core?" For my purposes, that would be defined as everything inside of I-40 to the south, I-44 to the west, and I-235 to the east. I know these are more limited boundaries than what could fairly be called "the core," but that's the best boundaries I can clearly provide. Any ideas? Any way of finding out for sure?

how far north?

I-44 to the north, as well.

You can get a good estimate by looking at this zip code map and then clicking on the zips within those approximate boundaries.

Of course, most of them overlap the the streets you have defined:

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (OK) Zip Code Map - Locations, Demographics - list of zip codes (http://www.city-data.com/zipmaps/Oklahoma-City-Oklahoma.html)

Another way to approach this would be to look at everything within a 5-mile radius of downtown:

http://www.okctalk.com/images/pete/dtradius.jpg

According to FreeDemographics (http://www.freedemographics.com) the population in the area shown above is 213,392.

If I understand the boundaries you are trying to set, for this 2-mile radius the population is 52,985 (2010 census):

http://www.okctalk.com/images/pete/dtradius2.jpg

If I understand the boundaries you are trying to set, for this 2-mile radius the population is 52,985 (2010 census)

That's awesome Pete. Any guesses to what this number will look like in 2020? With the rate of redevelopment in the inner core, I'd guess some pretty strong growth in the near future...

Very helpful! Thank you so much, Pete!

I have to confess, it's less than what I thought it would be.

I agree that does seem quite low, 53K for the most densely populated part of the city? ???

How do we get to 213K for the inner loop if the NW quadrant is only 53K but it has the most people/households?

Here are a couple of sources for you. The first is an interactive database from the OKC Chamber of Commerce.

Oklahoma City, OK Industrial and Commercial Sites and Buildings (http://www.okcedis.com/)

If you want to get statistics related population, labor force, wages, businesses, etc... do a building search for For Sale commercial buildings and find one in the downtown area (224 E. Main for example). After you find this building in the search results select View Reports. At the top of the report will be multiple heading respresenting the different data types. Select the one you are interested and the report will show up. By default the data is from a 10 mile radius around the property but if you click "Modify Report" on the right side you can change the distance to whatever you want. For example, within 2 miles of 224 E Main there are 13,637 males and 10,630 females and 843 households have an income over $100K. There are reports that tell you how many business are in the circle, what type of business they area, how many people work at each, and the approximate sales at each.

When looking at populaton remember there are two types - night time population and day time population. For the area around downtown those numbers are inverse what you would find outside of downtown.

You could actually go nuts looking at how much data is available.

The second link is to the US Census interactive map.

Mapping the 2010 U.S. Census - NYTimes.com (http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/map)

I agree that does seem quite low, 53K for the most densely populated part of the city? ???

How do we get to 213K for the inner loop if the NW quadrant is only 53K but it has the most people/households?

Since I am both a nerd and a loser, I calculated the density for each "circle" The 2 mile radius circle has a density of 4,220 people/sq mile. Not Manhattan, but pretty good for these parts. Its especially good considering the 5 mile radius circle's density falls off to about 2,710 people/sq mile. Lots of empty river bottom land and industrial land in that sphere.