Merging OnTheMap's point jobs data with Census Block Groups shapefile using ArcGIS Desktop?

Question

I'm trying to figure out an easy way to take county level jobs point data (exported from the Census bureau's OnTheMap) and merge it with census block groups in order to give each block group a total amount of jobs.

The idea would be to visualize total jobs in a similar way as you can visualize total population on the block group level.

So far I have my block groups from TIGER block group shapefiles and I have my jobs point shapefile, but combining them is proving difficult as OnTheMap is pretty rough. I could, I believe, select each census block group in OnTheMap and export the data, add it up myself into a spreadsheet and combine them all manually to join by way of block group number, but that would take so long.

There has to be a better way, right?

I figure I should be able to run an anaysis of which points are falling in which blockgroup polygon and intersect them via that, but it doesn't work.

Answer 1

You could run an intersect between the points and polygon.

Then run the dissolved tool using the polygon census id as the dissolve field and sum the jobs as the stats.

Then perform a spatial join using the dissolved id and polygon is as the link.

That should give you jobs per polygon.

Answer 2

Don't merge or use any spatial operation. There is a common tabular field between both files you can use to do a join with. Spatial join will also (in some cases) generate some weird problems due to the centroids of multi-part polygons, sliver polygons, and 'crescent'-shaped polygons where the 'center of gravity' placed centroid created by using 'create centroids' tool, won't fall inside the polygon. Relevant field name should be USID or GEOID or FIPS.