Fanning out from its headquarters bounded by Vesey and Murray Streets, next to the World Financial Center and a block northwest of ever-rising ground zero, there is now a kind of Goldman village anchored by Goldman Alley, as the locals call the public passageway between Vesey and Murray that’s shielded by a tilted glass canopy.
via It’s a Goldman World in Battery Park City – NYTimes.com.
Those who are following the resurgence of urban centers, this won’t be a surprise – the population in cities growing faster than in suburbs:
For all 51 metro areas with a million or more people, cities as a whole grew by 1.1% from 2010 to 2011, while suburbs increased 0.9%. That’s a big change from the last decade, in which suburbs expanded at triple the rate of cities.
“This can really be seen as a milestone,” said William Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer who analyzed the census data to be released Thursday. “What’s significant about it is that it’s pervasive across the country.”
via U.S. population in cities growing faster than in suburbs – latimes.com.
The Sacramento Area Council of Governments has an interesting white paper entitled Changing National Demographics and Demand for Housing Types which reinforces this larger trend:
Myers and SungHo Ryu argue [in Aging Baby Boomers and the Generational Housing Bubble: Foresight and Mitigation of an Epic Transition – ed.] that the future population and age structure will lead to differences between age and home buying and selling. The aging, retirement and lifestyle patterns of the 76 million baby boomers will likely shape U.S. housing markets and trends for decades ahead. They conclude that there will be an oversupply of homes offered for sale by aging baby boomers – many of which may not be of the housing type that young buyers want. The researchers raise the idea that where decline once occurred as housing moved from the central city to the suburbs, it may now be reversed as the suburbs will see surpluses of large-lot single-family housing.
The suburbs have long enjoyed subsidies many magnitudes greater than central cities, which is a travesty when you rank the productivity and economic output of denser central cities to suburbs. It isn’t even close according to the New York Fed in Management of Large City Regions: Designing Efficient Metropolitan Fiscal Policies:
Among the 363 MSAs [ed. what’s an MSA?] defined by OMB, just fifty had populations over one million. Yet the output of these fifty cities accounted for nearly two-thirds (65%) of national GDP of $11.5 trillion (in $2001).
I can’t talk about others whom champion cities, but I think there is a place for hyper dense cities such as Manhattan, merely dense cities such as Brooklyn or even Boston and the suburbs. But the fact that the suburbs are given subsidies over and above cities is just wrong from a moral point of view (unless you are buying land in West Virginia as future oceanfront property) but also from an economic point of view. Investing in multimodal transportation – high speed rail and local mass transit – not only makes sense from an economic viewpoint, but increases individual liberty by allowing people to chose to walk, take the train or buy and drive their personal car.
How the Prudential Center came to be – Bright Solutions from the Dark Age of Urban Planning:
Prudential, pursuing a course of corporate decentralization in the 1950s, settled on Boston as the location for its New England Regional headquarters, with plans for a signature tower. This was a bolder move than you’d expect, as Rubin’s engrossing account of the political and business climate in mid-20th-century Boston illustrates. At the time the tallest building in New England was in Hartford.
The stack flow above by Barcelona design concern Bestiario depicts the 590 most populated cities sorted column by their population between 1950 and 2010 in 5 year intervals, and projected for 2015, 2020, 2025. Cities’s colors are generated from their geographic coordinates, with the hue varying with longitude, as the below image shows (cirlces areas are proportional to cities population in 2010). The interactive version is quite a data dump – I wish you could isolate just one city and turn off the rest.
There is a really interesting article in the New York Times about college graduates clumping in certain metros, and I was wondering if my friends, and friends of friends, also fit this pattern.
So can you please take a minute and fill out the following form. The data will be anonymous – give me as much as you feel comfortable – and I will never, ever sell or give away this dataset to a third party.
Ville Contemporaine was an unrealised project to house three million inhabitants composed of a centralized group of sixty-story cruciform skyscrapers built on steel frames and encased in curtain walls of glass. Also see Le Corbusier and La Ville Radieuse.
News to me: besides having a Congestion Charge zone, London also has a Low Emission Zone
The Low Emission Zone (LEZ) was introduced in 2008 to encourage the most polluting heavy diesel vehicles driving in the Capital to become cleaner. The LEZ covers most of Greater London. To drive within it without paying a daily charge these vehicles must meet certain emissions standards that limit the amount of particulate matter (a type of pollution) coming from their exhausts.
The low emission zone started operating on 4 February 2008 with phased introduction of an increasingly stricter regime until 3 January 2012, and as shown below, covers pretty much all of metropolitan London (the congestion charge zone is shaded orange).
The LEZ is monitored using Automatic Number Plate Reading Cameras to record number plates checking vehicles against the records of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency to enable Transport for London to pursue owners of vehicles for which the charge has not been paid.
It would come as little surprise to my reader that I am a proponent of the London Low Emission Zone; much like the congestion zone, the low emission zone prices (ever so bluntly) an externality: particulate matter which is being dumped into the air by commercial vehicles. A charge both prices in this externality and will drive innovation to reduce vehicle emissions.
I also love the graphic sensibility of the advertising and communication on their website and in collateral, examples shown below.
Living in New York City I’ve never been to where the state government is located: Albany; I can count on one hand my friends who have been to Albany. It is fairly clear that Albany has no clue, or care, about the needs of New York City, cf., denying the city the right to police bus lanes using video cameras, denying the city the ability to raise money and regulate automobile usage in Manhattan’s urban core through the implementation of a congestion charge, and on, and on; to the point that I’ve agitated, in half-jest, for partition creating a separate state for New York City.
So it comes as no surprise that a 2012 research paper from the Harvard Kennedy School and Singapore Management University entitled Isolated Capital Cities, Accountability and Corruption: Evidence from U.S. States
(PDF) makes the case that US State capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption. Their findings:
empirical connection between isolated capital cities and greater levels of corruption across U.S. states.Holding a
very robust connection… with different measures of corruption, and different measures of the degree of isolation of the capital city.
Isolated capitals are often smaller than the cities which drive the economy:
Which means that voter turnout in those states are lower. Furthermore, the authors find the following conclusion:
We have explored the connections between the spatial distribution of population, accountability and corruption, in the context of US states. We first established the stylized fact that isolated capital cities are associated with greater levels of corruption. This holds true for different measures of the isolation of the capital, and of corruption.
We also saw evidence that state politicians tend to get more money from campaign contributions in states with isolated capitals, belying the fear that having the capital in a major economic center would lead to a greater risk of capture of state politics by economic interests – and consistent with the idea that lower levels of accountability in isolated capitals would actually increase that risk.
From a policy perspective, in particular, one is led to conclude that extra vigilance might be needed, when it comes to polities with isolated capital cities, in order to counteract their tendency towards reduced accountability.
These blobs represent the extent that you’d be able to travel on public transit in 30 minutes. The 20 maps below were made by Mapnificent, a new website created by Stefan Wehrmeyer that suck in Google Maps-friendly transit data to show just how much of the city you can cover in however much time you want to spend. A handy slider allows you to change your allotted time, and your starting point can be anywhere on the map.
via 30 Minutes on Mass Transit in 20 World Cities – Commute – The Atlantic Cities.
Besides going back on their debt ceiling promise (and wanting to raise taxes on poor families) House Republicans voted to end the American Community Survey, which isn’t part of the decennial census, but is a yearly survey which records supremely useful survey charting what exactly it is that we Americans do, ranging from where you work and how you get there to your family and relationships. This is wonderful data and everyone from researchers to the business community uses this data to help craft products and services for Americans.
But to House Republicans, it is EVIL:
The House voted Wednesday to eliminate the detailed surveys of America that have been conducted by the Census Bureau since the nation’s earliest days.
House Republicans, increasingly suspicious of the census generally, advanced a measure to cut the American Community Survey. It passed 232 to 190.
The survey is not part of the constitutionally mandated population count, but some version of it has been done by law as part of the decennial survey since the time of Thomas Jefferson to assess the needs of the nation. It’s generally considered a vital tool for business.
Republicans, acknowledging its usefulness, attacked the survey as an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, arguing that the government has no business knowing how many flush toilets someone has, for instance.
“It would seem that these questions hardly fit the scope of what was intended or required by the Constitution,” said Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.), author of the amendment.
“This survey is inappropriate for taxpayer dollars,” Webster added. “It’s the definition of a breach of personal privacy. It’s the picture of what’s wrong in Washington, D.C. It’s unconstitutional.”
via House Votes To Cut Census Survey Done Since Thomas Jefferson.
Too bad that the data is anonymized and individual records are not shared with anyone, including federal agencies and law enforcement entities. By law, the Census Bureau cannot share respondents’ answers with anyone, – not the IRS, not the FBI, not the CIA, and not with any other government agency. Rep. Webster should please review the meaning of “unconstitutional” before using those big words.
Luckily this bill has no chance of passing in the Senate.
Via Atlantic Cities blog post, What Killing the American Community Survey Would Actually Mean comes this article from Census Director Groves entitled, A Future Without Key Social and Economic Statistics for the Country:
The ACS is our country’s only source of small area estimates on social and demographic characteristics. Manufacturers and service sector firms use ACS to identify the income, education, and occupational skills of local labor markets they serve. Retail businesses use ACS to understand the characteristics of the neighborhoods in which they locate their stores. Homebuilders and realtors understand the housing characteristics and the markets in their communities. Local communities use ACS to choose locations for new schools, hospitals, and fire stations. There is no substitute from the private sector for ACS small area estimates. Even if the funding problems were solved in the proposed budget, the House bill also bans enforcement of the mandatory nature of participation in the ACS; this alone would require at least $64 million more in funding to achieve the same precision of ACS estimates.
Not to mention that many government programs are by statute dependent on data derived from the ACS. Conservative Republicans often complain that government isn’t as efficient as the private sector (a point I don’t agree with after working with many Fortune 100 companies), so how might we make government more efficient? Their solution is to cut any customer reporting and steer the ship blind. Thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Madness.
In even more ACS news, the New York Times thinks Rep. Webster is heralding the The Beginning of the End of the Census:
“This is a program that intrudes on people’s lives, just like the Environmental Protection Agency or the bank regulators,” said Daniel Webster, a first-term Republican congressman from Florida who sponsored the relevant legislation.
“We’re spending $70 per person to fill this out. That’s just not cost effective,” he continued, “especially since in the end this is not a scientific survey. It’s a random survey.”
In fact, the randomness of the survey is precisely what makes the survey scientific, statistical experts say.
Each year the Census Bureau polls a representative, randomized sample of about three million American households about demographics, habits, languages spoken, occupation, housing and various other categories. The resulting numbers are released without identifying individuals, and offer current demographic portraits of even the country’s tiniest communities.
It is the largest (and only) data set of its kind and is used across the federal government in formulas that determine how much funding states and communities get for things like education and public health.
…
Other private companies and industry groups — including the United States Chamber of Commerce, the National Retail Federation and the National Association of Home Builders — are up in arms.Target recently released a video explaining how it used these census data to determine where to locate new stores. Economic development organizations and other business groups say they use the numbers to figure out where potential workers are.