I'm assembling data for a piece (or a series of pieces) on 'Death in the Big City' - or 'Why Do So Many People Drown in the Blue Castle Moats?'. I can't choose between them yet. I've done the crime stats already and I have the city list - what I'm looking for now is a little advice on which data points from this Census Page are of interest.
So far I have:
Population
Population, percent change, 1990 to 2000
Persons with a disability, age 5+, 2000
Homeownership rate, 2000
Per capita money income, 1999
Persons below poverty, percent, 1999
I'd like to keep it to 10 items so I need 3 more (violent crime rate isn't on the Census Report).
Suggestions?
10 comments:
Seems to me big cities are more about rent than home ownership. Maybe some stats on rent rates?
Syl,
I think that subtracting owners from total households equals renting households - I'll present it in that manner, anyway. It's intriguing that the 2000 national rate was 66.2% - the last national rate that I've seen is 69.1% which is a helluva jump in five years.
FA,
I pulled current data (2004) off of the FBI Summary file for the cities themselves - MSAs aren't quite tight enough. I'm using city rather than MSA data from the Census Reports too to keep things equivalent.
The 'suburban rings' are part of the MSAs but they are outside the moat - where things are a little safer.
Knuck - No I'm not pointing just at crime. It's more of an economic picture of what the Blue Barons are actually "providing" for their subjects. So far, anyway.
It's more of an economic picture of what the Blue Barons are actually "providing" for their subjects. So far, anyway.
-could you map the proximity of neighborhoods with high numbers of professionals and PhDs to institutions of the welfare state, and similarly map locations of church membership and denominations?
TP,
I can find number of churches but I haven't seen membership broken out on a citywide basis. PhD's get grouped in with 'post graduate degrees' which include teaching credentials - that's what gives that demographic a Dem skew. I'd argue that teachers ought to be included in the union component - but maybe that's just my little bias.
If you want to mull over curious juxtapositions - the two largest Presbyterian evangelical churches (don't laugh - they really are evangelical) in the Bay Area are Menlo Park - next to Stanford and First Pres. Berkeley next to - you guessed it. And most of the PhDs that I've met from both churches work at one of the two uni's. On the hard science side to boot.
That juxtaposition doesn't surprise me entirely, Rick. Scientists are disproportionately members of the lower to middle classes with strong ambitions to make something of themselves. SUch people are less likely to focus on their choice of church as a question of social status, but will rather like a religion that makes them productive by providing a personal discipline, however "irrational" some will call it. If i recall past polls correctly, the vast majority of American scientists profess a belief in God.
Knuck,
I'm looking for a two layer approach and what I'm already seeing is that there are at least two things happening. The first is that the really ugly Blue Castles are losing population due to crime and going broke, the second is that "successful" Blue Castles are just going broke. Philly, Detroit, New Orleans being good examples of the first and Seatttle and maybe Portland of the second.
Knuck,
Do cities fulfill any purpose beyond gathering points for those in need? The original purpose was a defendable (on a hill preferably next to a river) place in which to exchange surplus. It's been a while since that was true. What purpose, beyond political, do they serve now?
Cultural centers? They would have to be a bit safer. And the "culture" involved would have to be rather special given the means of communication now available.
Did you know that the big cities in the Bay Area are all showing population decreases? SF, San Jose and Oakland are all net losers over the past 15 years - and SF has been throwing up some rather bodacious large condo projects built precisely for the 'young and adventuresome' that you reference.
Is part of the reason that this is occuring without much comment because media is city centric? Only 15% of the US population live in the fifty largest cities - and the fifty include such booming metropoli as Louisville, Arlington and Colorado Springs.
Knuck,
On a stict change in population set the biggest numerical drops in pop occurred in:
Milwaukee
Washington
Boston
Cleveland
New Orleans (pre Katrina)
San Francisco
Chicago
Philadelphia
Detroit
The net drop in population for this subset since 1990 is 428,736 or 4%. They are all Dem run cities, of course, but there is something else working - LA and NYC showed increases of 3% and 1% respectively.
If I do a Red state versus Blue state comparison in population differential I come up with a net increase in Blue state big cities of 5% and an increase in Red state big cities of 14%. The real number increases are 1.4M for Blue and 2.5M for Red.
There is definitely something going on but 'What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear'.
And so my cry for help - what are the other factors involved here? Are they available in the census tables or are they a matter of the 'Wisdom of the Great Unwashed Masses' acting under the auspices of Adam Smith's 'Unseen Hand'?
The 20th century was largely a matter of consilidation of economic activity and human services into urban areas in the "developed" world.
Enormous areas of the US countryside have become depopulated. Lots of nice areas, too, not all deserts and windy plains. I think that the end of the small farmer and rancher has played a large role in this, its economics.
Last time I spent much time in NM the countryside was dotted with small abandoned towns. The former inhabitants were still around, but they had moved into the larger towns along the Rio Grande. The story I heard was schools: people moving to the towns so their children could go to school. But I think there were larger forces in play.
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