The ACSdownload package for R has functions helping to download and parse raw data files from the United States Census Bureau dataset called the American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year summary file. In particular, this package allows you to obtain all of the block group and tract-level data for any or all US States/DC/PR, rather than one State or one County at a time, for specified variables in specified tables. In contrast, other tools such as the tidycensus package tend to use Census API requests and provide more limited subsets such as one US County or State at a time, when working with block group or tract resolution tables, and require you obtain a key from Census.
Key functions include get_acs_new() to download and parse specified data, and various helper functions.
Installation
This package is not on CRAN – install it from Github:
if (!require('devtools')) install.packages('devtools')
devtools::install_github('ejanalysis/ACSdownload')