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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.
Walking is only a 'fad' for suburbanites who don't understand you shouldn't need a car to go to the store. City dwellers are increasingly being found to be fitter than suburbanites because they walk more.
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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
That was an impressive rant...
IMHO, cities suck because of traffic sucking hours of your life, pollution, limited recreation opportunities, and prices an order of magnitude higher than less desirable cities nearby which require sacrificing decades of your life under florescent lights, to pay for... Never mind the noise, the cramped conditions, and the stress as a result of all of the above.
Fear of crime is pretty low on my list. You're plenty likely to have your house/car broken into in a rural area, too. There's less crime in absolute terms, due to fewer people, but per-capita, it's often as bad or worse than stereotypically crime-ridden cities.
With online stores, you don't need to be close to most shopping. A decent grocery store is still a requirement, but a long drive to it once every few weeks isn't a problem. And a home center sure helps, as the cost of shipping appliances and 10ft 2x4s can multiply the price. But even with furniture, ordering online can work better than local stores, even in the city. The same goes for entertainment, like Netflix.
But one thing you might not think of, is that a decent number of remote areas don't even have mailboxes, but instead require driving to a central post office to check your box. That puts a big hurdle in Netflix's DVDs-by-mail or getting Amazon deliveries.
Criminals aren't vampires. Get a LoJack on your car, and carry credit cards with basically no cash.
Scammers can target old people anywhere they might be, via phone and postal mail, so the city is no worse-off there.
Umm... supervised? In a park? Don't act like rural areas don't have child abductions, because they sure do.
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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...
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
Yes, those are likely what we'd call Section 8 or subsidized housing. That's there to allow minimum wage workers to live close enough to their low paying jobs so they they can wait on the rich people who live in the area. The high crime rate in those areas is not necessarily guaranteed, but given the socio-economic realities, is quite probable.
Math might be a way to find the real gems in the rough, but let's be honest with ourselves and admit that unless the math has a lot of data and a very finely tuned model, it isn't going to expose value that millions of people haven't been able to find on their own via trial and error.
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Of the top ten States in terms of strictest gun laws, 7 have the lowest number of gun deaths. Transport of guns across state lines hamper efforts. Most if not all illegal guns in Canada, guns in the hands of criminals, come from America.
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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.
when the millenials start to have kids instead of partying all the time and the kids go to school and they realize their precious snowflake is going to school with kids who bring in guns and curse and are dummer than farm animals and are bussed in from the bad city neighborhoods because of diversity or because the projects are two blocks away then,
the millenials will forget all this walkability and carbon footprint nonsense and move out to places with good schools where precious snowflake who reads 2-3 grades above the average kid in the USA won't be in the same class as the dumb shits who barely know the alphabet in first grade. in the 80's when the baby boomers got tired of their camaros it was called White Flight and the cities with all their rentals became ghost towns. Today it's going to be the same except for more ethnicities doing it
give it another 5-10 years and it will happen. the chicks will wake one day and hear their biological clock ticking louder than ever and dump all the man kids who do nothing but party
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
Correlation does not prove causation. You are suggesting that gun ownership leads to lower crime rates and citizen safety. It's just as likely that highly dangerous regions of the US put in place gun restrictions in an effort to do something about the crime rate.
Also your comment about the UK is completely throwaway; this is very common US argumentation. 'The US is the best place and any other place's experience is irrelevant.' WTF "that doesn't make it a nice safe place"?? Actually the UK is both nice and it's safe. You are BSing so much on this one that your eyes are brown!
In actual point of fact there are virtually no other developed countries with gun ownership rates, or policies like the US. The only ones that come to mind are Switzerland and Israel and they truly have different cultures and political situations than the US. If you don't want to float a canard then make some honest comparisons. Germany, France, UK, Canada, Australia. All have dramatically lower rates of murder, violent crime, and particularly gun-enabled crime. Also accidental shootings are much lower.
Other locations with high rates of gun ownership include Somalia, Iraq, Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, etc. None are particularly safe places.
But I don't expect you to learn anything. You long ago made up your mind and the facts are irrelevant, aren't they?
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.
Focusing on gun crimes is the tactic that gun control advocates use.
The problem is that victims don't care if they are stabbed to death or shot to death.
The correct metric is _total_ crimes of bodily threat or assault. Good guys use legally carried weapons to deal with bad guys irrespective of what the bad guys did or didn't bring.
So, don't focus on gun deaths (which, btw, also counts suicides.. which is also totally disingenuous)
Focus on murders. How does Illinois compare to say, North Dakota, in murders?
I'll stay in rural North Dakota, thanks.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Got a source? I can cite plenty to show the opposite:
http://pjmedia.com/blog/states...
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10...
International:
http://www.law.harvard.edu/stu...
That's the talking-point advocates use to defend their failures. But it really doesn't explain why crime rates show a relative increase, and these facts don't stop them from advocating those stronger restrictions, that don't work and keep killing people. It's insanity. They refuse to live in the real world.
I'm sure plenty of Canadians buy guns from the US, and never use them to commit crimes, too.
I'm betting criminals in Canada buy US-made cars pretty often, too.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Of the top ten States in terms of strictest gun laws, 7 have the lowest number of gun deaths.
You know when gun deaths were really low? Before guns were invented. The homicide rate, however, was about an order of magnitude higher than it is now.
Your statement is true, but utterly irrelevant to the question of where the safest places to live are. Does it matter what weapon is used to kill you? Or rob you or, rape you, or... Of course it doesn't. You have fallen victim to (or else are disingenuously pushing, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're foolish, not malicious) to a very clever stratagem pushed by advocates of gun control: Focusing only on gun crime and ignoring other crime.
The statistic that matters isn't the number of gun deaths, it's the number of homicides, assaults, rapes, robberies, etc., total. And on any one of those scales, those states with strict gun laws don't do particularly well. To make them look good you have to do exactly what you did: arbitrarily exclude much of the violence.
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Per capita. It's from this report.
In downtown Toronto (city is about 2.5 million, metro around 5.6 million), there are a huge numbers of families and schools. The students there are just as smart as anywhere else in the country. Crime is low. Of that gang crime that is there, it is of the variety imported from the U.S. along with the guns. And most of that is not in the down town.
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