To see recent spike in murders in big cities, you have to see the decline before that

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New data suggests murders are up in some major American cities. Yet, to see this spike, you have to acknowledge the steady decline in previous years:

Baltimore, Chicago, Milwaukee, New Orleans, New York City, St. Louis and Washington, D.C., among others, have all seen significant increases in their murder rates through the first half of 2015.

Homicides in St. Louis, for example, are up almost 60% from last year while robberies are up 40%. In Washington, D.C., 73 people have been killed so far this year, up from 62 last year, an 18% jump. In Milwaukee, murders have doubled since last year, while in nearby Chicago homicides have jumped almost 20%…

Criminologists warn that the recent spikes could merely be an anomaly, a sort of reversion to the mean after years of declining crime rates. But there could be something else going on, what some officials have called a “Ferguson effect,” in which criminals who are angry over police-involved shootings like that of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager who was shot and killed by a white police officer in August, have felt emboldened to commit increased acts of violence.

It is hard to have it both ways by complaining about high crime rates before this year and then now complaining about a spike. Crime rates were down for nearly two decades in most major cities prior to this year. Yet, this wasn’t the perception. Thus, we might see this spike as “Crime rates were high and now they are even higher!” or it could be “Crime rates declined for a long period and now this is a spike.” These are two different stories.

Two other quick thoughts:

1. This story is unclear about whether this is true across the board in major American cities or just in the places cited here.

2. It is hard to know what this spike is about as it is happening. What will happen in a few months or in the next few years?

American culture wars to move next to fighting over the suburbs?

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Joel Kotkin is back with the claim that the next American culture war will be over the suburbs:

The next culture war will not be about issues like gay marriage or abortion, but about something more fundamental: how Americans choose to live. In the crosshairs now will not be just recalcitrant Christians or crazed billionaire racists, but the vast majority of Americans who either live in suburban-style housing or aspire to do so in the future. Roughly four in five home buyers prefer a single-family home, but much of the political class increasingly wants them to live differently…

Yet it has been decided, mostly by self-described progressives, that suburban living is too unecological, not mention too uncool, and even too white for their future America. Density is their new holy grail, for both the world and the U.S. Across the country efforts are now being mounted—through HUD, the EPA, and scores of local agencies—to impede suburban home-building, or to raise its cost. Notably in coastal California, but other places, too, suburban housing is increasingly relegated to the affluent.

The obstacles being erected include incentives for density, urban growth boundaries, attempts to alter the race and class makeup of communities, and mounting environmental efforts to reduce sprawl. The EPA wants to designate even small, seasonal puddles as “wetlands,” creating a barrier to developers of middle-class housing, particularly in fast-growing communities in the Southwest. Denizens of free-market-oriented Texas could soon be experiencing what those in California, Oregon and other progressive bastions have long endured: environmental laws that make suburban development all but impossible, or impossibly expensive. Suburban family favorites like cul-de-sacs are being banned under pressure from planners…

Progressive theory today holds that the 2014 midterm results were a blast from the suburban past, and that the  key groups that will shape the metropolitan future—millennials and minorities—will embrace ever-denser, more urbanized environments. Yet in the last decennial accounting, inner cores gained 206,000 people, while communities 10 miles and more from the core gained approximately 15 million people.

This is one long piece but provides a lot of insight into what Kotkin and others have argued for years: liberals, for a variety of reasons, want to limit the spread and eventually reduce the American suburbs in favor of more pluralistic and diverse urban centers. I would be interested to know which issue Kotkin is most afraid of:

1. Maybe this is really just about politics and winning elections. The split between exurban Republican areas and Democratic urban centers has grown with the suburbs hanging in the balance. Perhaps conservatives fear moving people to cities will turn them more liberal and hand all future elections to Democrats. Of course, lots of liberals had fears after World War II that new suburbanites were going to immediately turn Republican.

2. This may be about the growing teeth of the environmental movement operating through legislation but also agencies and others that are difficult to counter. Suburban areas may just take up more resources but Kotkin and others don’t see this as a big issue compared to the freedom people should have to choose the suburbs. Should there be any limits to using the environment on a societal level?

3. Perhaps this is about maintaining a distinctively American way of life compared to Europeans. Some fear that international organizations and the United Nations are pushing denser, green policies that most Americans don’t really want. The suburbs represent the American quest for the frontier as well as having a plot of land where other people, particularly the government, can’t come after you. This ignores that there still are single-family homes in Europe – though on average smaller homes on smaller lots.

Or, maybe this is a combination of all three: “If the suburbs go, then what America was or stands for dies!” Something like that. Imagine “Don’t Tread On Me” making its last or most important stand on the green lawns of post-World War II split levels.

I have a hard time seeing this as the next big culture war topic that reaches a resolution in a short amount of time (say within a decade), primarily because so many Americans do live in the suburbs and the suburbs have such a long standing in American culture. But, perhaps a movement could start soon that would see fruition in the future.

NYC Council to Google: mark truck routes, no left turns

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Two members of the New York City council have two recommendations for the routes provided by Google Maps:

Council members Brad Lander, deputy leader of policy for the council, and Ydanis Rodriguez, who chairs the council’s transportation committee, wrote a letter to Google on July 1 suggesting two enhancements to the company’s maps. One would create a “stay on truck routes” option for truck drivers. The other, which has a much broader application, would allow users to select “reduce left turns,” minimizing the number of such turns required on a given trip.

Why reduce left turns? In their letter, Lander and Rodriguez cited an extensive report from WNYC reporter Kate Hinds about the danger of left turns by motor vehicles in an urban environment where lots of people travel on foot and by bicycle. According to data compiled by Hinds and her colleagues, 17 pedestrians and three bicyclists were killed in New York by left-turning vehicles last year. The fatality rate for pedestrians struck by drivers making lefts in the city is the highest in the nation, according to Hinds’s report…

The city’s department of transportation has been redesigning intersections to make left turns safer by changing signals and incorporating other design measures. But Lander and Rodriguez got the idea to ask Google to help by giving its map users the chance to request a “reduce left turns” routing option. “We haven’t heard back yet,” says Rodriguez. “But we hope, knowing that Google is one of those good private entities, that Google can look at this.”…

Nationally, a quarter of motor-vehicle crashes involving pedestrians occur during left turns. A 2013 study found that when drivers make “permitted” left turns—in which they do not have the protection of a left-turn green arrow—they are not even looking to see if there is a pedestrian in their path as much as 9 percent of the time. Such turns, the study found, pose an “alarming” level of risk to pedestrians.

Generally, I would be in favor of Google Maps and others programs offering more route options for those who have particular routes they might want to choose. Routes with late night gas stations? Routes that are more scenic? Routes that avoid long stretches of strip malls? Scenic routes? Routes that involve driving near fewer semis? Routes with more interesting sights along the way? Just like Google Mail has lab features you can turn on and off, why not do some of this for driving routes?

Even if Google makes the left turn information available as an option, how much of an effect would it have on safety? The average driver probably doesn’t think much about reducing left turns. So, Google could help by suggesting people might want this but I could also imagine a public campaign advising against left turns. Now, if Google started eliminating left turns without telling people, that could get interesting…

“Jennifer Aniston leads fight against giga-mansions” in Beverly Hills

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Even the wealthy don’t want “giga-mansions” in their neighborhood:

Her own $21 million (£13 million) Bel Air mansion covers a rather more modest 8500 square feet.

But it has been rapidly overtaken by a new trend for the giga-mansions. The ultra-wealthy are buying and bulldozing some of the area’s biggest villas, to build even bigger homes, filled with fountains, swimming pools and space for entertaining.

Opponents say they bring months of construction noise, threaten existing homes by destabilising the ground and that their huge size represents an invasion of privacy as they tower over neighbours.

Prince Abdul Aziz, a Saudi Arabian prince and deputy foreign minister of his country, is among the buyers to have angered neighbours. He bought a Spanish colonial residence from Jon Peters, the film producer behind Superman Returns and Man of steel, before promptly tearing it down and lodging plans for an 85,000-square-foot estate.

But the real fury is reserved for the 30,000-square-foot creation of Mohamed Hadid, a real estate developer and father of Gigi Hadid, the model.

Two quick thoughts:

1. These really are some large homes. They might work on larger pieces of property but not so well when neighbors are relatively close by. A 103 foot tall home is more like a 10 story skyscraper in a small size city than a welcomed member of a residential neighborhood.

2. This does invite questions about how large of a home is too large. A $21 million 8,500 square foot home in Beverly Hills is expensive and large by all measures. Presumably, the Los Angeles regulations allow for this size. But, how exactly does a municipality decide on the cut-off? The way around this in many communities that address teardowns is to insist on certain guidelines and styles that effectively limit the square footage.

Sociologist proposed moving Hong Kong’s population to Northern Ireland

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Recently declassified documents show conversations about one sociologist’s plans to move residents out of Hong Kong:

Newly-declassified documents released at the National Archives in Kew, west London reveal how senior civil servants reacted enthusiastically to proposals in 1983 from a University of Reading academic that a chunk of Ulster – between Coleraine and Londonderry – be turned into a new home for Hong Kong’s 5.5m citizens.

The proponents of the plan, which one Northern Ireland office official declared should be “taken seriously”, suggested the mass transportation of Cantonese speakers would have the dual advantage of boosting the Ulster economy while solving Britain’s dilemma over what to do with the millions of Hong Kong residents concerned they would have no future under Chinese rule…

When details of the scheme, floated by sociology professor Christie Davies, appeared in a Belfast newspaper in October 1983, they caught the eye of George Fergusson, an official in the Northern Ireland office…

The academic, who has subsequently specialised in studying the nature of comedy, said: “I am glad my sensible idea was taken seriously. It was humorous but deliberately ambiguous. My test of a good humorous satire is if a significant minority take it seriously.”

Perhaps this is more revealing of those who were excited about this plan – we can simply move millions of people to solve two political issues at once! – than of the one who made the proposal. Deliberately relocating millions of people halfway around the world sounds like it could lead to all sorts of unintended consequences. How in the world would something like this even be carried off?

Another issue is whether a city could be swiftly moved and replicated elsewhere. Diasporas are not unheard of but the settlements in the new locations can’t completely mirror the original location or scene. Modern Hong Kong was formed out of a unique social and political context as was Northern Ireland. Building a Northern Ireland version of Hong Kong (or a Canadian Atlantic version or a West African version) could turn out to be very interesting…

Did Back to the Future succeed because it was set in a small town?

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One journalist argues Back to the Future was aided by its small town setting:

Strip away the time-travel facade and Back to the Future is a fun, zany small-town comedy, with its nastiest villain a high school bully and its biggest triumph a kiss between his two victims. Director Robert Zemeckis seized upon the concept of Marty McFly’s DeLorean trip to 1955 while looking through his parents’ basement and stumbling upon relics from their graduating class. He pitched the idea to Steven Spielberg, who agreed to produce the project. The strength of the movie is that its most fantastical element is rendered as something any audience member could imagine: the bizarre and frightening experience of meeting your parents as their teenaged selves. Compared to the current era of summer movies, so focused on omnipotent superheroes doing battle on a planetary scale, that simplicity feels revolutionary…

But Back to the Future topped them all, literally traveling back in time to tap into America’s small-town ‘50s nostalgia.

An interesting argument as Americans do like the idea of small towns. And I suspect that data may suggest that most recent blockbuster films – whether action/superhero movies, disaster films, and dystopian films – are primarily set in big cities. Big cities may offer bigger spectacles, more potential for destruction and a broader scale for both danger and heroism, while small towns in such films suggest more intimate lives. Of course, the devastation and action portrayed in such films would have a profound impact on a suburban or rural landscape (disturbing major sources of agriculture could be quite problematic) but there are fewer people and buildings involved.

Homeownership rate continues to drop (63%); why aren’t politicians talking about it?

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The American homeownership rate is 63%, matching 1993 levels:

Overall, home ownership, the cornerstone of the American Dream, is down to 63 percent, a far cry from the 69 percent registered in 2004. The Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University’s annual “State of the Nation’s Housing” report said current home ownership percentages rival that of 1993.

Those figures, however, are much worse for minorities, especially blacks. “The homeownership rate for minorities continues to lag: It peaked at 51.3 percent in 2004, and has now fallen to 47.2 percent. Of all minority groups, African Americans have the lowest rate of homeownership, just 43.8 percent,” said the report.

The reason for the decline is the languishing economy and poor pay. Harvard said that a key factor is the “steady erosion” of incomes since the recession began.

While I would assume most politicians would continue to support the idea of homeownership (and most major politicians since the early decades of the 1900s have done so), I haven’t really heard much about this in policy debates. Perhaps this is because other issues – immigration, gay marriage, taxes – have been in the spotlight but homeownership was a pretty foundational idea for much of the last century of American life. Or, perhaps this is because few people have ideas for how to increase homeownership, especially with the housing crisis of the late 2000s still looming large in the rearview mirror.

If a politician wants to make a novel/old tried and true argument for the 2016 election, they could push homeownership for all again. The rental market is tight, the bottom end of the housing market is sluggish, and I imagine there are a lot of voters who would like to hear how they can purchase a home.

The ongoing mystery of counting website visitors

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The headline says it all: “It’s 2015 – You’d Think We’d Have Figured Out How to Measure Web Traffic By Now.”

ComScore was one of the first businesses to take the approach Nielsen uses for TV and apply it to the Web. Nielsen comes up with TV ratings by tracking the viewing habits of its panel — those Nielsen families — and taking them as stand-ins for the population at large. Sometimes they track people with boxes that report what people watch; sometimes they mail them TV-watching diaries to fill out. ComScore gets people to install the comScore tracker onto their computers and then does the same thing.

Nielsen gets by with a panel of about 50,000 people as stand-ins for the entire American TV market. ComScore uses a panel of about 225,000 people4 to create their monthly Media Metrix numbers, Chasin said — the numbers have to be much higher because Internet usage is so much more particular to each user. The results are just estimates, but at least comScore knows basic demographic data about the people on its panel, and, crucial in the cookie economy, knows that they are actually people.5

As Chasin noted, though, the game has changed. Mobile users are more difficult to wrangle into statistically significant panels for a basic technical reason: Mobile apps don’t continue running at full capacity in the background when not in use, so comScore can’t collect the constant usage data that it relies on for its PC panel. So when more and more users started going mobile, comScore decided to mix things up…

Each measurement company comes up with different numbers each month, because they all have different proprietary models, and the data gets more tenuous when they start to break it out into age brackets or household income or spending habits, almost all of which is user-reported. (And I can’t be the only person who intentionally lies, extravagantly, on every online survey that I come across.)…

And that’s assuming that real people are even visiting your site in the first place. A study published this year by a Web security company found that bots make up 56 percent of all traffic for larger websites, and up to 80 percent of all traffic for the mom-and-pop blogs out there. More than half of those bots are “good” bots, like the crawlers that Google uses to generate its search rankings, and are discounted from traffic number reports. But the rest are “bad” bots, many of which are designed to register as human users — that same report found that 22 percent of Web traffic was made up of these “impersonator” bots.

This is an interesting data problem to solve with multiple interested parties from measurement firms, website owners, people who create search engines, and perhaps, most important of all, advertisers who want to quantify exactly which advertisements are seen and by whom. And the goalposts keep moving: new technologies like mobile devices change how visits are tracked and measured.

How long until we get an official number from the reputable organization? Could some of these measurement groups and techniques merge – consolidation to cut costs seems to be popular in the business world these days. In the end, it might not be good measurement that wins out but rather which companies can throw their weight around most effectively to eliminate their competition.

How much money a third observation deck in Chicago might generate

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Potential buyers of the Aon Tower in downtown Chicago are looking into making money through the addition of an observation deck:

A third observatory could generate tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue for the 1,136-foot-tall office building overlooking Millennium Park. The building, owned by Johns Creek, Ga.-based Piedmont Office Realty Trust, is attracting bids above $650 million, people familiar with the sales process say…

It would cost millions of dollars to design the space, to create an entrance and elevator access separate from those used by office tenants, and to promote and operate the observatory. Plus, unlike in most cities, two formidable competitors already are in place.

“It’s not a build-it-and-they-will-come type of operation,” says Randy Stancik, who has been general manager of the Skydeck for 10 years after eight years at the Hancock’s observatory. “You really have to work at it to build a visitor attraction. You have to be prepared to stay with it through some rough times.”…

There is little precedent to indicate whether a third observatory can thrive here. New York is the only city in the world with three, says Daniel Thomas, executive director of the World Federation of Great Towers, a group dedicated to generating tourism for its 49 member towers. New York has the Empire State Building Observatory, Top of the Rock at Rockefeller Center and the recently opened One World Observatory atop the new One World Trade Center.

This could be another front of the ongoing Chicago-New York City feud: could the two cities have an equal number of observation decks?

I would guess the Aon Center could have two major selling points compared to its competitors:

1. A different location. The Sears Tower deck is quite good for looking out into the suburbs but its views to the east are filled with buildings. The John Hancock observation deck offers different views to the north and over Lake Michigan. But, the Aon Center would be the only one with unobstructed views of Millennium and Grant Parks.

2. It is the newest. This may not mean much these days with a sort of arms race between the other two observation decks: the glass floor protruding deck at the Sears Tower and the Tilt at the John Hancock. I imagine the Aon Center buyers could come up with something unique that could attract people.

Perhaps this could lead to some sort of price wars between three observation decks leading to great deals for visitors…this is something I imagine people could get behind.

Patterns in college major by parent’s income

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College students with parents with higher incomes study different subjects:

Once financial concerns have been covered by their parents, children have more latitude to study less pragmatic things in school. Kim Weeden, a sociologist at Cornell, looked at National Center for Education Statistics data for me after I asked her about this phenomenon, and her analysis revealed that, yes, the amount of money a college student’s parents make does correlate with what that person studies. Kids from lower-income families tend toward “useful” majors, such as computer science, math, and physics. Those whose parents make more money flock to history, English, and performing arts.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/college-major-rich-families-liberal-arts/397439/
The explanation is fairly intuitive. “It’s … consistent with the claim that kids from higher-earning families can afford to choose less vocational or instrumental majors, because they have more of a buffer against the risk of un- or under-employment,” Weeden says. With average earnings for different types of degrees as well-publicized as they are—the difference in lifetime earnings among majors can be more than $3 million, one widely covered study found—it’s not hard to imagine a student deciding his or her academic path based on its expected payout. And it’s especially not hard to imagine poorer kids making this calculation out of necessity, while richer kids forgo that means-to-an-end thinking.

Another trend expressed in the data, Weeden notes, is that lower-income families and higher-income families tend to send their children to schools with different options for majors: Most of the priciest, top-tier schools don’t offer Law Enforcement as a major, for instance. There is also the possibility that children from higher-income families were more exposed to the sorts of art, music, and literature that colleges deem worthy of study, an exposure that might inspire them to pursue those subjects when they get to college…

From this angle, college majors and occupations start to look more and more like easily-interpreted, if slightly crude, badges doled out to people based on the wealth and educational levels of the parents they were born to. There’s a reason that the first question asked at parties is often “So, what do you do?” “If we tend to avoid asking acquaintances about their income,” four prominent sociologists wrote in the 2011 anthology The Inequality Reader, “it’s not just because doing so is viewed as too intrusive and personal but also because we suspect that querying about occupation will yield more in the way of useful information.”

Four quick thoughts:

1. Of course, what majors actually lead to what jobs is not as clear as people might make it out to be. Just because someone has a particular major doesn’t mean that is where they will be working in 10 or 20 years. At the same time, some majors might lend themselves to particular jobs right after college.

2. Outside of an associate’s degree, the majors with the lowest parent incomes (top of the chart) are helping professions. This might indicate a bigger interest in wanting to work with people or directly give back to the community. Reading uncharitably, do the majors with higher parent incomes lend themselves to a certain distance from people?

3. It is interesting that sociology, political science, and anthropology are higher up on the list of parent’s incomes. Students sometimes seem to suggest that these are luxury subjects – interesting perhaps (if they don’t think it is just common sense) but too difficult for finding a career.

4. This would all make sense in Bourdieu’s ideas about social class. Those with less economic capital tend to favor more functional items while those with more capital lean toward the abstract. Why should college major be exempt from the powerful organizing forces of social class?