Tag Archives: poverty

E Pluribus Unum: “For Anything to Change, Missouri Should Consolidate St. Louis”

Haves, have-nots.

For Anything to Change, Missouri Should Consolidate St. Louis – CityLab.

This happens to be a topic that fascinates me.  It fascinates me in two ways.  The topic of sub-state governments themselves is of interest to me because just about every state is different.  Counties (some strong, some close to non-existent), parishes, judicial districts, cities, towns, villages, boro(ugh)s, and sometimes more than one at once.  And that doesn’t even get to single-purpose local governments like fire protection or school districts.

The endless debates over regional consolidation, which is occasionally punctured by actual changes, is also of interest partly because of where I was raised.

Anyway, Saint Louis and more specifically the 6 square miles of Ferguson, Mo, are in the news and there is actually, a regional consolidation aspect to it.  Read the article for the author’s thoughts.

 

“Ten Lanes Is Not an Option” | Streetsblog USA

Article: Denver Auditor Blasts Plan to Widen I-70: “Ten Lanes Is Not an Option” | Streetsblog USA.

Refreshing to see a government official recognize that the capacity CDOT wants to add may never be used given the trend of the last decade.

What’s worse is that Denver is spending billions on public transit and this state project will compete with that directly.

Enrique Peñalosa: Why buses represent democracy in action

This guy has what many would think is a radical socialist worldview … but really, it’s about equality.  A bus with 80 passengers should have the right to 80x the road space of a car with a single occupant.

Make sure you pay attention to the effect of automobiles on cities – 0 US automobile deaths in 1900, 7000 US children killed in 1925.

Poverty, Mapping

1 Comment

Why Is the American Dream Dead in the South?

Interesting findings, at least as presented here.  The map is interesting to me, too.  Often, maps seem to end up looking like population density maps because the underlying data don’t seem to have been adjusted for that.  So it will seem to look, for instance, that people seem to have more blue cars in NYC than they do in Kallispell, Montana, when really, it’s just because there are more cars in NYC because there are more people there.

The map here isn’t so bad.  The writer of the article (not the paper) almost comes off like he’s blaming “the blacks” (he isn’t) but he doesn’t go very far beyond that, like looking at overall poverty instead of just race.

What the map shows, or tries to show, is the probability that kids born into the lowest income quintile will make it to the highest quintile.

I suspect that that the “problem”  is that the people in certain areas are poor, not that they are black (or white or hispanic or native).  And I can’t tell if they tried to adjust for regional disparities in income — someone in the top quintile of income in New Mexico likely has less income than someone in the top quintile of income in New York.

But I’ve only read the abstract of the paper.  Maybe if I read it, I’d answer my own questions?  🙂  It’s a “working paper” from the National Bureau of Economic Research (Paul Krugman says all the research in econ is coming out as “working papers” since the traditional journals take a very long time to publish anything).