Census Blocks aren't just used for population, for instance in traffic modeling the number of employees in a block is often non-zero - think of commercial or in

Census Blocks aren't just used for population, for instance in traffic modeling the number of employees in a block is often non-zero - think of commercial or industrial areas. Back in a past lifetime I created numerous land-use models that allocated all sorts of things to "zero-pop" blocks: sewer capacity, revenue, spending, pollution generation. While allocation could use any polygon Census Blocks were convenient.