The U.S. Census Bureau has launched an extremely useful -- and fun -- interactive tool that can help you bore in on the characteristics of an area's population with an incredible level of detail.

Just put in your address on their interactive population map and you can see -- down to the block level -- how many people the 2010 Census counted, their age, race, age, and gender. You can use the interactive map to see how many of your neighbors are tenants and how many are homeowners. 

For example, just now I learned that the my block in Southwestern San Francisco has 169 residents, including 79 Asians, 39 African Americans, and 28 whites, along with 15 Hispanics (who may be of any race).

There are 57 children living on my block and 16 senior citizens.

Forty-three of the homes are owner occupied, while ten of them are rentals. Three units were vacant at the time of the census. Two were for rent and one was for sale.

If that's not enough for you and you are more of a computer geek and are able to manipulate an extremely large .csv file, you can see everything the Census knows about the Golden State and all its communities by downloading the Bureau's Summary Data file for the state of California.