Slashdot Mirror
Figuring Out Where To Live Using Math
An anonymous reader writes: Dave Munson was thinking about moving, and had a couple broad requirements for a new home: it must be affordable, and its neighborhood must be walkable. Price is easy to chart, but how do you compare the walkability of hundreds of cities? Simple: use math. A website called Walk Score provides rough walkability ratings, but doesn't tell you much about affordability. Munson downloaded the data that went into a city's Walk Score, weighted the relevant variables, and mapped the top results. Then he looked for overlap with the map of areas in his price range. He says, "Capitol Hill, Seattle led the pack. To be honest, I was expecting something a smaller, affordable Midwest town or something, but it the highest scoring areas were usually just outside of major downtowns. Other top areas included Cambridge and Somerville outside of Boston, and the South End in Boston; Columbia Heights, Washington, DC; The Mission District, Lower Haight, and Russian Hill, San Francisco; Midtown, Atlanta; Greenwood, Dyker Heights, Kensington, and Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn; Graduate Hospital in Philadelphia, where we used to live; Lake View, Chicago; and Five Points, Denver."
If Midtown Atlanta made the top 10 list for walkability you need to check your math.
Capitol Hill is a giant freak parade with depressing weather.
are you fricken serious? ...
Graduate Hospital in Philadelphia, where we used to live
try to walk there unarmed or after dark
Cities Suck .. you take your life in your hands for what? a Museum you will never visit? .. Close Proximity to clubs with glory holes? come on man .. serious? .. i mean sure maybe you don't want to live in a one redlight town where you have to drive 30 miles to get to the walmart which is the only store around.. but living in the city is for losers .. the prices are higher.. you can't live a free life because you are always watching for some lunatic.. its just bad news .. unless you are hooked on crack then i guess nothing matters.. and living near UPENN is just asking to die young...
Do you really think you can live there when you are past 60?.. not in any rustbelt city.. heck not in LA not in any city .. you will be easy pray.. .. fricken idiot.. you need to go back to school because your math sucks.
and how are you going to let your kids play outside? please
And most of the areas listed in the article are too expensive for mere mortals
And the way to buy a home is to ask how are the schools? Good school districts will keep value long after walk ability and other fads wear out. Problem with cities is too much rentals. Too easy for people to flee once their lifestyle changes
Some of these "scores" of the best/worst cities for This/That/The Other Thing are amusing, but to call them scientific or mathematical is laughable. Every one of them goes through dozens of formula iterations until the originators decide that the results make sense.
It's all just Internet forum bullshit.
how do you get Cambridge, the mission district and Sheepshead Bay Brooklyn in the same list?
i know people there and drive there once a month or so. it sucks. the schools suck. parts are close to the subway but large parts are a 30 minute walk. the stores within walking distance suck as well. unless you speak russian or chinese you won't fit in.
with amazon prime it's cheaper to live in a car dependent area, drive to work, buy from amazon and drive grocery shopping once a week
I just checked the first couple of locations and crime seems TERRIBLE in those areas.. Finding 'cheap' places to live near supposed high income earning doesn't make for GOOD places to live.
This sounds like it needs some tweaks. Most of San Francisco is walkable; but most of it isn't affordable. I'm familiar with Columbia Heights in DC. It was a bit more affordable than areas further south; but not that much more affordable. It was less walkable to things I wanted. A pure mathematical model can't account for the "feel" of the neighborhood either. I walked up the hill to Columbia Heights a few times, passing through Adams Morgan, a Hispanic neighborhood, and then what seemed like an empty quarter of apartment buildings. It just didn't appeal to me. For just a bit more, you could live in DuPont. You'd be closer to Safeway, Whole Foods, theatres, downtown, etc.
Ask yourself does this property lie in a flood plane, mud slide prone area or some other natural disaster related zone.
Does this "app" also give an indication of the number of insane, crazy, drug-addled, pan handling and just plain creepy people you will encounter on your walk?
Yeah, uh, no. In Midwest towns there's an expectation that you have a vehicle because rarely does the town you live in have all you need. Further, the cost of sidewalks is shifted mostly (if not entirely) on the property owner including things like snow removal (not that many people actually follow that)--because taxpayers don't want to have to pay for the miles and miles of sidewalk*. The biggest thing, though, is that as to the first point, the inverse is true in downtown areas--it's more expected you don't have a vehicle because everyone have a vehicle would be an unworkable traffic issue even with shifting start/stop times for work to reduce congestion. Hence it's cheaper and more reasonable to fund sidewalks which can hold many more people during rush hour and don't require a bulky parking space to house a vehicle for 8 hrs/day.
*They also don't like to pay for roads, hence the horrible state of roads as well. But at least the highways are used enough that people tolerate the cost of their repair.
It may be affordable and walkable, but would you actually want to walk there?
I've always been weary when I took the RTD to the light rail station there at night and the crime statistics tend to bear this caution. Not to say it might not be some sort of up-and-coming neighborhood (don't live in Denver now so my information is a few years old), but historically, that's been fits-and-starts for that area with little progress since the '90s even though downtown was getting all the ball-park redevelopment...
On the other hand Capitol Hill in Seattle doesn't seem nearly as bad. It isn't the greatest neighborhood and although I don't generally wander around that area at night when I travel to Seattle (although I did occasionally drive by there because I know someone who used to have a restaurant there). I wonder how much crime got factored into this so-called walkability "math"... I'm a bit suspect of this WalkScore anyhow as it yields very unexpected ratings for the last few places that I lived...
should be a sign to avoid the place at all costs - cities BLOW. The correct place is to live far out in the burbs or way out in the country. Why would you live in a place that has high taxes on those who work, like a wage tax, and and then have to deal with strong unions (aka people who don't actually work but feel they are owed something).
How about looking for good non-union schools in a school district that has a good football program, and non existent music and art programs because that stuff is for sissies. It should also be a very strong conservative area which should survive any influx of moronic democrats.
You know how you're not supposed to notice that there are a lot of people with 23 pairs of chromosomes in certain high crime areas?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
or does it not list crime
Five points is NOT a place I would look to live, even today... downtown Denver is booming all over but not as much there at all. Closer to Union Station is where all the action (and walkability) is at.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have attempted to use Walkscore for this very task: moving to an area, sight unseen. I have found it incredibly lacking. It computes "nearby" locations using either as-the-crow-flies distance or an automobile driving map; I'm not sure which. While this might be acceptable in a gridded downtown area, which has ample sidewalks and pedestrian signals, it does not work everywhere.
Here in the deep South, we tend to place multi-lane, high-speed highways everywhere and anywhere we can. These roadways are nearly impossible to cross on foot. The result is that many places listed in Walkscore will not be reachable without exposing yourself to considerable danger.
In a perfect world, everything you needed to know about housing would be on the internet. Unfortunately, not everyone lists their rentals on Zillow et. al., and I've had a hard time dealing with realtors over the phone. Other factors like noise, crime, and general ambiance are very difficult to judge. If you have access to just one person who knows the area quite well, suddenly these things become much easier.
While data fusion techniques might help, any results need to be very rigorously cross-checked, by hand, using Street View, aerial photography, online comments, and as many other sources as you can find.
At our school, we don't earn a degree when we graduate—we earn pi/180 radians
I swear I read Where to live using meth.
Anyone who says Capitol Hill in Seattle is affordable must not be looking at current figures or have a very high definition of 'affordable'. Outdated apartments are easily going for 2-3$/sqft, and the more 'modern' places go for even more. The prices have increased by about 25% each year for the past 2-3 years. Once the transit station is finished they'll likely shoot up even higher.
Every European city >> every U.S. city. Especially if mass transit factors into walkability.
You could extend this to every global city, with possible exceptions of SF and Manhattan if you are a multi-millionaire or rent protected.
To findout where best/safest to live, look at sheriff crime database(online in many cities), it plots where and the type of crime(down to traffic stops and 'suspicious cars'). Then you can look at the sex offender database, you'll see a definite clustering in bad areas. Then if you want to be even less conspicuous, find an area with similar racial/ethnic background and you likely don't be targeted specifically.
It's worked for me a couple of times.
Only time I actually leave town is to go to another town to see somebody or the sticks to shoot bunnies.
New relationship, eh?
Once your comfortable, you won't even get out of bed to shoot bunnies. Not even when your lady's petting the bunny.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Body temperature is 99F degrees, so 85 is nice and cool... You don't even need to sweat.
I am sorry but that is simply a retarded statement, anyone who has ever lived in a place with high humidity is laughing at you.
At that temperature walking four blocks means I'll need a shower when I get to where I'm going - too bad for everyone else at the store.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The comment that started this chain did not mention humidity, so that is where the opprobrium should lie. Those of us who are aware that Atlanta has very high humidity understand that is the real issue.
I live in a place without any humidity to speak of, I still wouldn't want to carry multiple bags of groceries four blocks in 85+ degree heat with the sun out.
But yes, by far the worst aspect of the exact situation is humidity.
I wouldn't think anyone would state categorically that 85 degrees was not hot without at least a caveat about humidity though... I still think he just has no idea what that is like.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Bozeman. Bozeman Montana.
I'm well aware of the humidity in Atlanta. That's why I mentioned sweat. 85F is still moderate.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Not really worth the energy to reply.
It is trivial to create a cost function that defines being near restaurants is worth say $20 in monthly rent. These cost functions are arbitrary and can be adjusted to give any result one desires. So this is just math mumbo jumbo to disguising fundamentally subjective rankings. I would rather state my subjective opinions openly rather than hiding behind bogus formulas. Automobile magazines use a similar technique; they assign points to criteria like power, interior appearance, handling, etc and pretend that by adding the points up they have meaningful rankings. You are much better off buying a car or selecting a living location by gut feel rather than looking at silly pseudo scientific rankings.
Try losing 100 lbs first...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Great :) Now can you please figure out using math who to live with?:)
IT IS tyme we get racist MODERATION!!
The topography of the zoning and building layout matter. Consider two neighborhoods which are 2-mile squares in shape. One neighborhood has a commercial district in a single corner, the other neighborhood has two such districts at opposite corners of its square. The second neighborhood may score twice as walkable, but what matters to the home's individual walkableness is how close it sits to one of those districts, since you presumably want to walk to the store and to an office in a corner that has a commercial district.
Choose a place you would like to walk, shop and work, then find a home located within a walking distance from those places, and you may have MANY good options, more than your zone-based averaging will reveal.
That alone should disqualify it as a place for /. readers to live. I have 0.192 Mbps DSL at home and Comcast doesn't offer service to my building. A little faster than ISDN BRI access in 2014 is ridiculous. My modem's status page:
http://upstate.net/jen/centurylink_dsl.png
Actually, the areas with the most relaxed gun laws in the US, *are* the safest. And those areas where they put the most restrictions on guns, have the highest crime rates. It has been a pretty undeniable trend wherever it can be observed. And when the courts force certain cities or states to relax their gun restrictions, crime falls, dramatically.
Also, countries with higher gun ownership rates than the US, have lower crime than many nations where guns are completely banned. In the UK, you're more likely to be stabbed than shot, but that doesn't make it a nice safe place.
But which is the cause, and which is the effect? (Yes, even when one comes after another there can be non-obvious cause and effect. Think about it for a moment.)
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I came here to write something like this, but the parent nailed it. I have no mod points, someone please mod him up.
No way 85 is lovely weather even with humidity, still goof for a stroll, now when it cracks 110, that's hot. You can even tell whether or not it is humid at 110, a cold drink of what ever description is delightful and a short stroll at that temperature really does make you appreciate of air conditioning. Of course when it comes to grocery shopping and walk ability you have completely the wrong idea, no weekly shopping trip, instead daily shopping trips, buying today what you will be cooking and eating today and tomorrow and regularly replacing what you have run out of. In fact near enough and far enough become desirable, near enough to walk, far enough to achieve exercise (that is subject to dwelling style house versus apartment).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
As the old saying goes, when you express an interest in Capitol Hill...are you gay, or are you in a band?
and I do too. Two of them voted you down. Internet access isn't an important factor when deciding where to live. If it was, Seattle's population wouldn't be increasing. While I miss the 10 Mbps connection I had in Macon, GA fifteen years ago, I would rather live in Seattle with my 64 kbps DSL connection than in GA.
I am not sure about that. Oh wait...
I live in the actual tropics where it's 85 and 80% humidity about 320+ days per year. Carrying groceries half a mile isn't a big deal--you just don't do it at noon (only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun, as they say).
Try losing weigth?
I am 1.75m and 55kg. Where I live I wouldn't call 30C "nice and cool".
In fact, it means you should stay home and start the air conditioner.
You obviously do not live in a high-humidity place, or anywhere near the sea or a big lake.
live in a place without any humidity to speak of, I still wouldn't want to carry multiple bags of groceries four blocks in 85+ degree heat with the sun out.
Then I'm going to either call you a weakling, or criticize your ability to plan your shopping more wisely (more trips, fewer bags per load). And there's this thing called a 'bicycle' which can be equipped with a rack or even a small trailer, which can also be equipped with a cooler for any frozen or otherwise heat-sensitive items.
I wouldn't think anyone would state categorically that 85 degrees was not hot without at least a caveat about humidity though
I will. Even at 99% RH I don't find it to be any more oppressive under 90(F) than I did when I lived where the humidity averaged 15%. What matters is if there's wind, and if you're walking primarily in sun or shade, and if you're walking over blacktop/pavement or if there's a lot of grass around. Often when the official temp is 85(F) the ambient air temp where you're walking along a road is closer to 90 or above due to heat radiating from the pavement.
So I would argue that it's less about having experienced the heat with high humidity, and more about people not realizing that temperature varies quite a bit from spot to spot, and often doesn't match the reported "area temperature".
There's about as much math here as there is software engineering in a hello world script.
Can't walk four blocks? Are all you fuckers 300+ lbs?
Since he was looking affordable to him and basing that on residents income small towns in the midwest aren't likely to hit the radar. Those places are cheap because the locals don't make much money and therefore can't afford to pay much.
As for walkability, traffic might be low in a place like that but things are actually more spread out. The denser the population the more walkable somewhere becomes. The reason is simple, in a dense city there are enough people to support a walgreens and mcdonalds every few blocks, there are automatic walk lights and bike lanes, etc.
In a small town there will be only one mcdonalds and one walgreens for the whole town and those might be on opposite ends of town and fry's is likely in a different larger town 30-40min away. There likely are no bike lanes because small towns don't have the budget to be trendy and most people don't ride a bike 3 miles to go to McDonalds.
Hell city suburbs are ridiculously dense and walkable compare with small towns and yet they aren't particularly walkable unless you live in the "downtown" of your burb.
Quote: " "Capitol Hill, Seattle led the pack."
I've lived in Seattle. If you're talking about relatively short walks to shopping or medical care, Capitol Hill is fine. There are lots of businesses on Broadway and the hill is where is disproportionately large share of the city's hospitals and medical clinics are located.
If you want longer walks are perhaps to bike, it is a loser. First, it's a hill, so walking off that hill entails trudging back uphill. But more important, Capitol Hill is, for walking, biking or driving, an island. Every direction hits barriers.
West (to downtown) is blocked by I-5 and the limited number of streets that cross it.
East is Lake Washington. The shoreline is pretty, but mostly privately owned and you certainly can't walk any further in that direction.
North there's the University of Washington, but to get there you've got to take one of the few routes across the Montlake Cut (a canal) and a busy E-W expressway.
South, locals will tell you, you don't want to go. Off the hill top, you enter a low-income, high-crime area.
The high Walk Score rating, as with the other places on your list hint, is because Capitol Hill has a lively social scene for the sort of well-heeled singles to go to sites like Walk Score. Those with families tend to look at schools not walking.
One suggestion: If you do settle on Seattle, look into the Phinney Ridge/Greenwood neighborhood near the city zoo. I lived there and it's a great place to live if you like to walk and it doesn't have the isolation of Capitol Hill.
The comment that started this chain did not mention humidity, so that is where the opprobrium should lie
No -- the "opprobrium should lie" with idiot meterologists who teach us to quote temperature numbers as if they had a good correlation with comfort level for humans.
Temperatures are useful in some laboratory situations, but they're pretty useless alone for humans. At a minimum, we generally want to take the humidity into account, since the amount of moisture in the air will determine: (1) how fast sweat will evaporate from our bodies, and (2) how much heat is directly transferred to/from our bodies by convection. What matters for human perception of heat is the rate of heat transfer with the environment, not some absolute number that doesn't quantify that well. (Think about why the coin on your desk feels "cold" even though it's the same temperature as the wood -- we perceive heat transfer; our bodies aren't built to measure temp.)
We already have a single number that quantifies that: dewpoint. (One could also cite temperature and relative humidity, but it takes quite a bit of experience with those two numbers to glean the same information that one immediately gets from citing dewpoint.)
Temperature is almost meaningless to me in a weather forecast, particularly above 60 degrees F (15 C) or so. It's not even in the top 3 numbers I want to know. Dewpoint is the most useful. If I want to further correct for convection effects, knowing average windspeed would probably be next. Radiative heat from the sun is another factor, so the third thing I'd want to know is the average brightness/cloud cover. MAYBE after that I might actually care about the details of actual temperature and relative humidity... but except at extremes, the dewpoint already tells me a lot of information about comfort.
What the OP really should have said in this thread was that carrying groceries in downtown Atlanta when dewpoints are above 75 F (about 25 C) will generally be really uncomfortable. Anyone who has ever gone out early in the morning in a humid climate thinking "I'll get some of the yardwork done before the temperature rises too much" and comes in 30 minutes later covered in sweat even though the temperature is only 70-75 degrees F knows what I'm talking about.
But our weather forecasters have misled us into thinking that the rise in temperature over the course of the day actually was tellilng us something useful about when it would be best to work outside. Instead, I should have looked at the dewpoint forecast, and if that was relatively stable, rising temperatures would probably not matter as much. I would look to see if it would be breezier at some point of the day or if the midday sun would be beating down on me later -- those are often bigger considerations to think about than temperature.
This kind of problem is solved by something called a suitability analysis.... and its been in textbooks teaching GIS since at least 2005.
it isn't going to expose value that millions of people haven't been able to find on their own via trial and error.
But it might make such errors less likely to have catastrophic consequences. Having an SO who moves every two years can't be good for your own resume, for instance, and it disrupts a child's socialization with peers.
My personal criteria for home location is pretty much Climate, and Volcanic Activity. YMMV.
OTOH, in the part of San Francisco I'm in right now, my elderly neighbors are safe on the streets 24/7, I guess the shmoogs don't want to hike up the hill or something. One evening I noticed a neighbor had left the car windows open with four sacks of groceries in the back seat, all still there at 0800 the next morning. Looked like two hundred dollars' worth, at least.
We are under-supplied with dirtbags here, that's all. The phenomenal prices help.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Internet bandwidth is an important consideration, IMO. I'm going to hook onto the fiber right from the farm in Oregon.
Ha-Ha!
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
It's an interesting optimization problem, and undoubtedly Walk Score is using moderately sophisticated algorithms, but Munson didn't use any math beyond basic arithmetic.
You can't carry useful quantities of groceries, much less anything else, on a bike unless you're anorexic hipster douche who just likes to be seen biking around in public every other day.
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head."
"it must be affordable, and its neighborhood must be walkable."
"Other top areas included... The Mission District, Lower Haight, and Russian Hill, San Francisco; "
The median 1 bedroom apartment in SF (in the Mission) is now over $3,000 per month.
http://sf.curbed.com/archives/...
It's walkable, but I wouldn't consider that to be affordable.
When I was 300 lbs. I could carry your average American male adult four blocks. Two with some rigging. Unsurprisingly I didn't care to and would get quite sweaty even in winter. Did you have a point besides being a midget or a stick-man who lacks reading comprehension?
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head."
A strange definition of affordable; given those locations, clearly it was a low factor in the equation...
... that's where you want to live. Not around non-whites. As everybody knows.
Unfortunately, most non-whites want to live around white people (since non-whites are parasites), and we are constantly moving away from them.
ps to the AMERICAN cretin who spelt 'arithmetic' as 'arithmAtic', you are a fucking idiot.
I do, actually. Only a couple miles inland.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Does this math take into account the likelihood of being mugged while you're walking? These days it's not so bad, but when I was young, 5 points in Denver was no place to be walking around...
LOL @ this blimpout
Where I live, most people do their shopping by bike. Sure, you can carry less than you can on foot, but it is more comfortable and you can go to the shops in one go when you ride home from work.
Where I live we shop for the week at least. Why the hell would you shop ever damn day? That's a horrible waste of time.
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head."
Really, really not worth a read or a reply.
I picked where to live over 30 years ago using math, Venn Diagrams and weighted analysis. Decades later I'm very happy where I am. Works for those of us of the mathematical, logical, engineering bend. Emoties could learn a lot from math.
The tropics usually have wind though. It's much more comfortable at 85 degrees in Aruba than it is Atlanta.
I have lived in Cambridge, MA for 8 years and I can attest that the city is eminently walkable...and very unaffordable.
Not the same AC, but where I we get conditioned for winters with plenty of days below -10F. Doing a 100 degree swing from winter to summer really makes you hate the heat (and the cold!). We keep the house at 65 in the winter and that feels comfortable, maybe just a touch cool. My room is an addition with a crappy window and bad circulation from the furnace so I often wake up with the temperature gauge in my room below 50.
Lost about 60lbs in the past two years (down to 165), and it hasn't done anything to stop me from sweating in the summer.
I do not recall where I learned this at but it seems to be generally true: The human body generates as much heat as it loses when the air temperature is 70F or 21C. For some people, it is a bit higher, for others, it is a bit lower, but those numbers are roughly true for everyone.
At 85F, your body needs to work to cool itself. How much it needs to cool itself depends on the energy density of the surrounding air. This is largely dominated by humidity. The more water that is in the air, the greater the energy density., the more your body needs to work to get rid of the excess heat... and right now, it is 113F at 95% humidity and I am DYING (not literally). 113F is not good, but it is quite tolerable when there is no humidity (7% average).
In other words, I am restating what you said but with more information. I agree completely with what you said.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
I, also, am priced out of neighborhood. Not a race issue.
You, OTOH, serve to demonstrate the risks inherent to inbreeding.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
I'll meet that challenge:
I live in Tampa, today the high will be 94, I will be outside working in and out of the sun. Depending on the level of output required I might (OMG~!!!) sweat. But, because I keep the house AC at 80 (I have AC in the "common" area of the house where our guests spend time: I have a small B&B), I don't get uncomfortable in heat and humidity.
I hired a guy to come and help me load (and take to the dump) some roofing I had ripped off yesterday. Halfway through the loading (say about 4pm) he had to stop, fire up his truck and sit in the AC for ten minutes before he could go on. This is the state of the nation.
It is not the heat, or the humidity: it is your personal habits, your laziness, your lifestyle that abjures contact with the natural atmosphere in preference to your "comfort." I often point out that when I was young, in the 50s and 60s, my family lived in tidewater VA where the summer humidity was "stinkin'." We had a single fan in the cieling above the stairs to the bedrooms. That was it. I am sorry that your abusive parents treated you like a fragile flower and you didn't build up the immunity to heat that is a built-in possibility for you. Sue them!
(My kids often complain now about having air conditioning set too low: they "escape" to the outside, just as I have done most of my adult life. I hate AC, and especially the closed windows and doors that go along with it.)
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.