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Do Your Neighbors Spend Lavishly On Political Causes?

October 13, 2011 in Demographics, Politics with 1 Comment

From now through next year’s presidential election, each quarterly report from the Federal Election Commission will be scrutinized by reporters and political pundits. And for a good reason: these are the reports that show who gave how much to which party or candidate. Occasionally, a reporter looking for a new angle on an old story will look to see which zip codes were responsible for the highest number of campaign contributions.

Not surprisingly, the zip codes tend to be for affluent neighborhoods in big metro areas. But few people have taken the time to look and see if certain zip codes favor one party over another.

Until now.

Using zip code data for reports released Aug. 23 and analyzed by Open Secrets, and comparing it with U.S. Census Bureau population data, a pattern emerges and you start to see certain patterns.

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Richard Florida on the Economic Crisis, the Great Reset and Creativity

October 6, 2011 in Demographics, Economy, Employment, Interviews with 5 Comments

Courtesy of Creative Class Group

Richard Florida, Senior Editor, The Atlantic, and Professor, University of Toronto, has spent the past decade talking about the virtues of the Creative Class and its ability to drive economies. The Great Reset, his fifth book on the Creative Class takes a somewhat contrarian view on the current thinking on the economic recession. The view is contrarian in that it’s more optimistic, and rooted in a belief that members of the Creative Class have the skills and talent to lead the global economy out of the current economic crisis.


The last time you and I had a chance to talk in depth, we were heading into the 2004 election. A lot has happened since then, needless to say. How have cities, and North American cities in particular, been changed by the economic crisis?

Cities and regions are likely to rise and fall, possibly dramatically. Places in North America with diversified economies and high concentrations of highly educated people and those that work in the “creative class” have done much better in weathering the current economic storm. Cities and regions that are based on older industries, or where growth was fueled by housing and sprawl, have had a tougher time. The new spatial fix from this economic downtown has been bigger than the industrial city and mass suburbanization combined. The history of capitalism is a history of the more intensive and expansive use of land and space. It’s no longer city versus suburb but the rise of a new and larger form of economic landscape – the mega-region. Mega-regions are gigantic complexes of cities and suburbs like the greater Boston-NY-Washington corridor and others across the U.S. and the globe. The world’s 40-largest mega-regions produce two-thirds of all economic output and nine in 10 new innovations while housing only 18 percent of the world’s population. Mega-regions are to our time what suburbanization was to post-war growth.

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What Makes Pot Prices Rise?

September 29, 2011 in Open Data, Weather with 0 Comments

Massachusetts decriminalized marijuana possession for quantities under an ounce effective January 1, 2009 and anecdotal reports suggest that the law is loosely enforced (I work with college students who tell me when their “friends” have been caught, the police officer has confiscated the pot and given them a lecture instead of giving through the hassle of writing the wrist-slap, $100 citation).

With that in mind, it’s reasonable to assume that nearly three years after the new rules went into effect, marijuana prices in Massachusetts have dropped. The basic economic principle is that if you take away or reduce the legal risk of an illicit product, the supply should go up and the price should go down. That would be a reasonable assumption, but also an inaccurate one. Massachusetts, according to The Price of Weed, still has some of the highest pot prices in the country:

Screen shot from www.priceofweed.com taken Sept. 16, 2011.The Price of

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Fighting Urban Density May Mean Fewer Jobs

September 27, 2011 in Employment, Real Estate, Urban Design with 1 Comment

With beautiful scenery and climate, hip culture and one of the world’s best food scenes, as well as average household wages of $85,000 in 2009, it’s hard to find someone who will say a bad word about San Francisco.

So let me give it a shot: San Francisco is just not dense enough.

Despite all that San Francisco has to offer, half a million people moved away in the last decade. Efforts to manage growth through strict zoning and building codes made the housing market in San Francisco one of the most expensive in the country. That premium in salaries means nothing if it (plus some) is gobbled up in housing costs. That’s why so many people have left San Francisco for places like Phoenix, even if it meant pay cuts of up to 40 percent. Phoenix issued two or three new house construction permits for everyone one issue in San Francisco between 1992 and 2009, making housing much more affordable.

Which is how Ryan Avent, an economics correspondent for The Economist, was able to make the argument that the key to more jobs is denser cities in an essay that appeared in last Sunday’s New York Times.

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Do Cities with Higher Education Spending Have Lower Drop-out Rates?

September 13, 2011 in Education, Tech with 1 Comment

Photo by Andrew Schwegler.

When it comes to education, few countries spend more per pupil than the U.S., with a national average of $10,499 in 2009, up 2.3 percent from the previous year. In some states, spending is much higher; New York spent $18,126 per student, followed by Washington ($16,408), New Jersey ($16,271), Alaska ($15,552) and Vermont ($15,175).

A big driver for the increases during a time when states were struggling with reduced revenue streams as a result of the recession was more spending on technology in education.

A call for more tech in schools is nothing new, but, as reported in last Sunday’s editions of the New York Times, it’s often hard to tell if school districts are getting a return on their investment in laptop computers, Smart Boards, and other products purchased with the hopes of improving learning outcomes. Despite billions spent, little research has been done to measure what advantages, if any, all that tech gives to students.

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Over 50% of Boston Graduates Fail to Earn College Diplomas

September 7, 2011 in Education with 0 Comments

Photo by Lewis Wickes.

This week, millions of American kids head back to schools that rate their success on a wide range of factors, including how many of those kids eventually enroll in four-year colleges. But until recently, most schools have avoided taking a look at how well those kids do in college.

That is slowly changing. Two years ago, a report that found more than half of Boston Public School graduates that went on to college failed to earn a diploma. That has prompted city and school officials to partner with local universities to implement programs aimed at helping improve graduation rates. The programs include everything from summer enrichment programs for students entering their first year of college to the creation of “learning communities” to offer students support once they arrive on campus.

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Which Metro Areas Have Best Weathered the Recession?

September 2, 2011 in Demographics, Economy, Employment with 1 Comment

More than two years after the recession “officially” ended, according to economists, this weekend’s Labor Day holiday may not be the celebration of work it once was for many Americans. Nationally, unemployment is still 9.1 percent and economists say recent drops in the rate are most likely the result of people giving up on looking for work, not the result of new job creation.

Still, the Labor Department released some encouraging statistics on Wednesday, reporting that unemployment was down between July and June in 193 metropolitan areas. The rate held steady in 61 metro areas and increased in 118, but economists were upbeat after watching the unemployment rise in 90 percent of metropolitan areas just one month earlier.

Year-over-year, the jobless rate was down in 257 of 372 metro areas, while the nonfarm payroll employment rose in 232 communities.

The numbers, however, require some interpretation and are not all upbeat. Morgantown, W. Va., for example, had the biggest monthly decrease in unemployment, for 6.6 percent in June to 5 percent last month. But that’s only because people stopped looking for work, and the government only counts people as unemployed if they are actively seeking a job.

Historically, according to Oklahoma Employment Security Commission economist Lynn Gray, unemployment drops nationally in July. Unemployment was down in 72 of Oklahoma’s 77 counties last month, but Gray was cautious in her assessment of what the numbers meant.

Meanwhile, previously hard-hit areas suffered more setbacks. Detroit’s jobless rate jumped to 14.1 percent in July from 12.5 percent in June. Eleven of the 12 cities with the highest unemployment rates were in California. And in Yuma, Ariz., the unemployment rate was 30 percent, up from 27 percent one month earlier. That was the largest increase in any of the metro areas and attributed to shifts in the farming hub’s migrant workforce, the Associated Press reported.

Despite adding 117,000 jobs last month, the economy would have needed to add twice that number to make a significant dent in the national unemployment rate. (A Soshable info-graphic offered a great primer on where all the jobs are going. One-word hint: outsourcing)

Some areas of the country, however, had bona fide boasting rights when it came to unemployment figures:

  • North Dakota: Bismark (3 percent) and Fargo (3.7 percent) held the number one and number two spots for lowest unemployment rates in the nation, thanks in large part to an oil drilling boom in the state.
  • Rockford, Ill.: Things are still grim, with a 12.1 percent unemployment rate and a slight increase from the previous month. But year-over-year, Rockford’s 3.3 percent decrease was the largest in the nation. “Long-term trends show that Illinois is in a better place today than it was one year ago,” Illinois Department of Employment Security
    Director Jay Rowell told WREX News.
  • New York State: While Wednesday’s Department of Labor report showed no significant gains, two reports released by think tanks this week show the Empire State has done better than most throughout the recession. New York added jobs more rapidly between 2007 and 2010, then lost jobs at a less painful rate.
  • West Virginia: This week’s reports showed unemployment at its lowest level in nearly two decades. Political leaders praised a host of economic development and construction projects in the state. Coal mining is also faring well in the state.
Nationally, there is some reason for optimism, according to the Associated Press, which reported “The July-September quarter is off to a better start. Consumer spending rose 0.8% last month, the largest gain in five months. Americans bought more cars and spent more to cool their homes during a heat wave.”
The Labor Department is scheduled to release its federal unemployment rate for August on Friday, heading into the holiday weekend. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones expect the rate to hold steady at 9.1 percent and show that the economy added 80,000 jobs last month.

Real Estate: Add Demographics to Location, Location, Location

August 30, 2011 in Open Data, Real Estate with 0 Comments

Photo by Images Of Money used under a Creative Commons license.

The first three rules of real estate may be “location, location, location,” but a close fourth could be “demographics.”

“There are definitely relationships between demographics and home prices,” said Phil Hanner, a licensed Realtor for Keller Williams Realty in Port Orange, FL. Pride of ownership is also higher. “Annual turnover rates, and median years in residency tend to be better in areas where marriage rates are higher.”

After location, few factors trump condition and price when buyers consider a home, but that first factor includes so much more than just an address. PlotOrNot, a website that lets users mash common, publicly-available demographic data with the API feed from the real estate sales website Trulia, can help would be buyers see whether those factors correlate to home sale data in a given locality.

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Which Cities Are Getting the Most AT&T Network Upgrades?

August 29, 2011 in Mobile, Open Data with 0 Comments

Mobile phone industry observers and customers were surprised last week when AT&T released data on upgrades made in several of its major markets. No, customers in New York and San Francisco — cities where AT&T has had notoriously bad wireless service in the past — can’t get access to the data in their towns just yet, but the release of the data for nine other metro areas is a game changer for the cell phone industry.

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Residents in Rural States Are More Likely to Ditch Their Land Lines

August 25, 2011 in Mobile with 0 Comments

State-level comparisons of the percentage of adults living in wireless-only households, using modeled estimates: July 2009-June 2010 (Click to enlarge)

One of the reasons that the recently-ended strike by Verizon workers didn’t disrupt life as much as it would have a generation ago is that the company’s wireless division was not part of the labor dispute. Increasingly, we’re relying less and less on landlines and more and more on mobile phones, particularly in the home.

Fewer and fewer people have landlines these days, but the places where more people are opting for “wireless substitution” — the industry jargon for giving up your land line — may be surprising. Since Center for Disease Control  started publishing its annual report (.pdf file) on the subject, the states leading in wireless substitution have often been rural and not the tech hotbeds on the coasts, where you might expect people to ditch their home phones:

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