Data product
535 Insights
535 Insights is Lafayette Square Institute's congressional-district view of the working-class economy. The tool combines small-business density, owner-age distribution, retirement-wave timing, housing cost burden, job quality, and working-class employment share into a single queryable resource, searchable by state, district, zip code, or representative.
535 Insights at a glance
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Look up the working-class economy in your state or district.
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The opportunity
A district-level view of the working-class economy.
National averages miss what a working-class lawmaker actually needs to know. How many small businesses in a given district are approaching succession? How many renter households are paying more than half their income toward rent? What share of jobs in a state meet a reasonable definition of a good full-time job? Those answers exist only at the district, the county, and the employer level.
535 Insights brings those answers into a single, searchable resource. The tool draws on Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, IRS Statistics of Income, and LSI-sourced data to produce a standardized report for each of the 435 U.S. House districts and all 50 states. Every figure is traceable to a public source, and the methodology is published alongside the data.
What the tool covers
Six domains, one district at a time.
Each district report pulls together six domains of working-class economic data: small-business density and owner-age distribution, the timing of the retirement wave that will move millions of businesses into new ownership over the next decade, housing cost burden and rental supply, job quality and benefits coverage, wages relative to cost of living, and the share of local employment concentrated in working-class sectors.
The tool is used by House and Senate offices, committee staffs, state legislators, journalists, and academic researchers. Reports are free to access, and every data point cites its underlying source.
Building the investment policy agenda
Connecting district-level data to state and federal action.
LSI uses 535 Insights to ground its research, coalitions, and policy portfolio in district-level reality. Research teams across LSI's three pillars use 535 Insights to anchor findings in the working-class geographies they describe, and LSI convenings use the data to identify the states and districts where place-based investment and working-class policy can most meaningfully move.