We've updated Place Forecast with its first set of socio-economic markers, starting with the Families theme.
A marker is a quantity or breakdown you look at for an area. These Families markers are built from the Census and describe the people and households behind a place: how they live together, their families, and their relationships. They sit alongside Place Forecast's housing-led projections, adding context rather than driving the forecast.
You’ll find them under a new Markers menu, sitting next to Reports and Components. Each one has a single-area view and a Compare small areas view, a filter to focus on the categories you care about, a count-or-percentage toggle, and downloadable charts and tables.
Here are the six Families markers, shown on real data:
Household type splits homes into couples with children, couples without children, one-parent families, other families, lone person, and group households.
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Family blending breaks couple families with children into intact, step, and blended families.
Registered marital status is the legal status of people aged 15 and over: married, separated, divorced, widowed, and never married.
Registered marital status of Kwinana
Social marital status is relationship status in the home: registered marriage, de facto marriage, and not married.
Social marital status of Mansfield
Children ever born is the lifetime number of children women have had, from none through to six or more. It's the one we're quietly chuffed about: you won't find it in the other Australian council demographic tools.
Children ever born of Mid-Coast
Same-sex couples counts couple families by the sex of both partners: female same-sex, male same-sex, and opposite-sex.
Curious to see it on real data? Click on any link under the charts above, or take a look through our demo forecasts.
Want to see it in action? Reply to this email to book a walkthrough.
This is the first theme in a longer body of work, and it's a meaningful one to start with. Families touches some sensitive ground (same-sex couples, children ever born, marital status), so we took our time with the wording on every page, leaned on advice about Indigenous Data Sovereignty, and chose to show our working rather than dress the numbers up as more certain than they are.
More themes will follow. For now we're happy with how this one landed, and we'd love to hear which markers are most useful to you, so we can aim the next round well.
Andrew and Bernd from Place Info
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