Tiger/Lines or shapefiles of USA states and cities?

Question

i've been asked to generate some demographic reports (crime rates, birth/deaths, etc) based on state and cities for the USA. I have all the demographic data (provided by our client) but can't seem to find any places which have the boundaries (read: LAT/LONG's) of the USA States and their cities.

Our data are Lat/Long points of data (eg. a crime, a birth, etc) and we want to get some mapped reports and also datamine using Sql server (we're using MS Sql 2008, but that shouldn't impact this question).

So .. can anyone direct me to where there are some state and city boundary sources? I know our government has all this information available for free at the US Census Bureau, but i can't seem to understand where it's found and how to digest this info.

I'm assuming that this info will be in the form of lat/long polygons (eg. a shapefile, etc) which i can then import into the DB and mine away.

Can anyone help, please?

Answer 1

A bit late, but in case anyone stumbles across this like I did:

To get the city boundary layers you navigate to "Download Shapefiles" for the year you're interested in and drop down to the city boundary layer, which is called "Places". (which is not an intuitive enough name for me...)

http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/geo/shapefiles2011/main

That's the link for 2011's shapefiles.

Answer 2

I can suggest the post http://adventuresdotnet.blogspot.com/2009/06/sql-server-2008-importing-tigerline.html