[R] Error in running get_acs()

[Duncan Murdoch]

The tidycensus package is a contributed package, it's not part of R. 
You should probably report this to its maintainers at

   https://github.com/walkerke/tidycensus/issues

Duncan Murdoch

On 2025-04-09 12:15 p.m., Deana Kittaneh via R-help wrote:
> Hi R team!
>      Since last Friday 04/04, my team and I have faced an error with running  the 'get_acs()' command from the tidycensus package. The code we ran and the error message we received are shown below. Our troubleshooting efforts showed that:
> 
> 1. When we run the code with geometries turned off, the code runs as intended, but once geometry is made TRUE the code does not work.
> 2. We checked geometry = TRUE with various geographies (block group, place, county) and the error remained the same
> 3. We were still able to download and use the shapefile data from the Census Tigerlines folders online, which led us to suspect the error may be within R since the shapefiles are functional on the Census website.
> 
> Thanks for the help!
> 
> Code that works (geometry is FALSE here):
> #median household income for IL by tract
> acs  <- get_acs(geography = "tract",
>                   table = "B19013", #can turn off if variables specified
>                   state = "IL",
>                   year = 2023,
>                   geometry = FALSE,  #FALSE removes geometry, TRUE keeps it
>                   cache_table = TRUE)
> 
> Code that doesn't work (geometry is TRUE here)
> #median household income for IL by tract
> acs  <- get_acs(geography = "tract",
>                   table = "B19013", #can turn off if variables specified
>                   state = "IL",
>                   year = 2023,
>                   geometry = TRUE, #FALSE removes geometry, TRUE keeps it
>                   cache_table = TRUE)
> 
> Error message:
> Getting data from the 2019-2023 5-year ACS
> Downloading feature geometry from the Census website.  To cache shapefiles for use in future sessions, set `options(tigris_use_cache = TRUE)`.
> Loading ACS5 variables for 2023 from table B19013 and caching the dataset for faster future access.
> Using FIPS code '17' for state 'IL'
> Error : Cannot open "C:\Users\DKittaneh\AppData\Local\Temp\RtmpQpm4Z8"; The source could be corrupt or not supported. See `st_drivers()` for a list of supported formats.
> In addition: Warning message:
> In unzip(file_loc, exdir = tmp) : error 1 in extracting from zip file
> Error: Your geometry data download failed. Please try again later or check the status of the Census Bureau website at https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/
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