Highlights from Texas’ latest census figures

Some statistical highlights taken from the latest Census 2000 data on Texas, which was released by the U.S. Census Bureau on Wednesday:

UNMARRIED PARTNERS
-About 328,000 households, more than 4 percent of the total, reported as unmarried partners living together. The Texas zip code with the highest number of such pairings, 8.6 percent of the area’s homes, was in Austin.
-About one in 13 of Texas unmarried couples were homosexual, the U.S. Census Bureau reported. Gay partnerships accounted for about .06 percent of all Texas households. The census did not count homosexuals not living together as couples.


AGE
-Sixty-one counties had a median age among white non-Hispanics of 45 or older, while no county’s Hispanics fit that category. Only two counties – Brazos County (home of Texas A&M University) and Coryell County (Fort Hood) – had white non-Hispanics with a median age under 30, compared to 230 counties where the median age for Hispanics was less than 30.


GROUP QUARTERS
-About 375,000 Texans were institutionalized in jails, prisons, nursing homes, hospitals and elsewhere when the census was taken in 2000. Of those, about 244,000 were incarcerated, more than half in state prisons.
-Hospitals were home to about 16,400 Texans when the headcount was taken, while nursing homes held about 105,000 residents.
-Of the 186,000 who lived in group settings outside of institutions, about half were in college dormitories and another 34,000 were in the military, including 782 stationed on ships at the time of the census.


HISPANICS
-Not much new light was shed on the huge increase in the “other Hispanics” category, as a vast majority who checked that they were not of Mexican, Puerto Rican or Cuban descent failed to write their nationality of origin or ancestry. A recent Census Bureau survey estimated more than 100,000 Texas residents claimed Salvadoran descent.
-Of the 79,000 Salvadoran-Americans who identified themselves as such on the short form, 47,000 live in Harris County, most in Houston. The next-highest Salvadoran population was Dallas County with about 18,200.