The Census Bureau dropped its county and metropolitan area estimates this week. Here are a few points that jumped out at me. Austin, Texas was once again the fastest growing major metro, at 2.7%. Brooklyn (Kings County) is losing population, down by 2,088 people last year. This is a big reversal from earlier in the decade when Brooklyn was adding over 30,000 people per year. Growth levels also fell sharply in the other boroughs (apart from Staten Island). Not sure what is going on here, but it's something to watch. The city of … [Read more...]
Sprawl In Its Purest Form, Cleveland Edition
Jason Segedy tweeted the image below contrasting the amount of urbanized land in Cleveland's Cuyahoga County in 1948 vs. 2002. The county population was identical in both years: 1.39 million. I'm not a hater on suburbanization. Growing populations require new urbanized land on the fringes. But when population growth is flat or negative in a region, which is the case in Cleveland and many Rust Belt cities, then sprawl has negative effects. One of the them is the Chuck Banas quip that Buffalo has the same number of people, but three … [Read more...]
Is Marijuana Legalization Causing More Pedestrian Deaths?
A recent article in the New York Times raises the question of whether marijuana is causing pedestrian deaths to increase: Pedestrian deaths in traffic accidents have reached levels not seen in years, and a safety group has sought to explain why. It has identified several possible causes, like digital distractions and an increase in driving. Now it has added another: marijuana. Over the first six months of 2017, pedestrian fatalities rose sharply from a year earlier in states that had legalized recreational marijuana, according to the … [Read more...]
Brain Drain as Economic Development, Akron Edition
If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you'll know that I don't believe brain drain is the problem it's been made out as. Often talent export can actually itself be a form of economic development. A recent New Yorker profile of the Silicon Valley firm Glassdoor, which allows employees to post reviews of their employer, made this point implicitly in passing. Robert Hohman, the CEO of Glassdoor, is from Akron. One day last fall, I met with Robert Hohman, Glassdoor’s C.E.O., at the company’s Chicago office. He had just hosted … [Read more...]
Reconnecting People to the Labor Force
Friday's jobs report was one of the best in a long time. There were 313,000 new jobs added to the economy. But more important were increasing signs that people who've been out of the labor force are reconnecting to work. As reported by the NYT: The number of adults not in the labor force fell by a whopping 653,000 people, as the participation rate — the proportion of adults who either have a job or are looking for one — rose a healthy 0.3 percent to 63 percent. The proportion of people in their prime working years (25 to 54) who are working is … [Read more...]
The Rise and Fall of Cities in Books
Google Books' ngram tool lets you search and compare mentions of various terms in books that they've digitized. I ran some city names through it to see how the relative level of mentions of these places has changed over time. These aren't perfect. Some city names are too generic to really isolate, like Columbus (could refer to Christopher) or Charlotte (a common name). Others I assumed do typically refer to the major city of that name, but have other uses as well (Paris, St. Louis). Also, these are English language city name searches, and I'm … [Read more...]
Millennial Footprints
William Frey, a demographer at Brookings, recently put up a post on Millennials, finding at their biggest footprint was in the South and West. Here's one of his charts: He notes: Overall, with a few exceptions like Florida, the South and West “Sun Belt” areas tend to show the highest growth and biggest millennial footprints, while those in the North and West “Snow Belt” areas are more likely to register low growth and smaller millennial shares. This bodes well for millennials’ impact in the more rapidly growing regions of the … [Read more...]
Is Mayor a Dead End Job?
We constantly hear that it's the era of cities. Benjamin Barber wrote a book called If Mayors Ruled the World. Mayors are touted as pragmatic problem solvers who are taking on the challenges politicians at other levels of government are afraid to face. One would think that if mayors were that much better than state or federal officials, then mayor would be a great stepping stone to higher office. However, that does not appear to be the case. Only three presidents had ever served as mayor: Andrew Johnson, Grover Cleveland, and Calvin … [Read more...]
A Brief Look at Data on Seattle
Seattle is a rapidly booming and transforming city. I was browsing through some stats yesterday and noticed some areas where the city stood out, particularly in public transit and growth in foreign born population. So I thought I'd put some of these up quickly. Keep in mind most of this data comes from the ACS, which has a margin of error. So changes in rankings based on small differences could be statistical noise. But this foots to what we see from other studies, such as the recent survey on downtown transit commute growth … [Read more...]
When Politicians Fall
Today Nashville Mayor Megan Barry plead guilty to felony theft and resigned as mayor of Nashville. Barry had been carrying on an affair with the head of her security detail. Both of them were married at the time. As often happens with these things, this apparently involved activity that happened on the clock, questionable travel expenses, and getting the daughter of the person she was having an affair with a job. Meanwhile in Missouri, Gov. Eric Greitens is under indictment for felony invasion of privacy after he had an affair with his … [Read more...]
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