Link to data
Prepared by: Kathryn Foster, Cornell University
Date: August 2026
Authors: U.S Census Bureau, Department of Commerce
About: The Local Air Conditioning Estimates (LACE) data is a part of the experimental data products produced by the Census Bureau and provides national, state, county, and tract-level estimates of the number of occupied housing units with or without air conditioning (AC). The data is derived and created from two sources: American Housing Survey (AHS) and the American Community Survey (ACS).
Data are available on: The Local Air Conditioning Estimates (LACE) data is a response to comments from users of the Community Resilience Estimates (CRE) for Heat, who suggested that the lack of AC is an important measure of social vulnerability to extreme heat, yet it was not recorded in the data at granular geographic levels. LACE was created through cross-survey modeling by using the data from the AHS to train machine learning models to estimate how respondents in the ACS would have responded to questions from the AHS about AC.
The LACE contains estimates (and margins of error) for the number and percentage of occupied households with and without any kind of AC at national, state, county, and tract-levels. The data can be used for assessing vulnerability to extreme heat risks. Furthermore, the data can be combined with other dataset such as ACS age estimates or the Health and Retirement Study to estimate heat and health risks for older populations.
Additional Resources about the LACE data:
Local Air Conditioning Estimates Experimental Web Page https://www.census.gov/data/experimental-data-products/lace.htmlCross-Survey
Modeling: Fusing Data from Multiple Data Sources to Enhance Multi-Dimensional Measures Working Paper
https://www2.census.gov/library/working-papers/2025/demo/sehsd-wp2025-05.pdf