2010 Census Take II
I got a second census form in the mail yesterday. I guess I didn't send in the first one quickly enough. Though I got the first form a good while ago, I waited because I honestly did not know who was going to be living with me April 1st. Was it going to be my cousin or a roommate or nobody. Well as soon as I got back from my Florida vacation my cousin left and returned to the housing farm of upper PG County to be with her parents. My roommate, who I didn't know I was going to have until a week before his move in (he's a returning roommie so all the background checks were done before), arrived shortly after she left. Census wants age and date of birth, and though it is on an application somewhere, lost in a pile somewhere in the house, I figure it is just easier to ask the second occupant of the house to fill that part out. So a few days before the 1st I asked him to fill out his portion and I mailed it back.
Now I got another form sitting in the living room. Apparently,
according to the Census blog, it is a replacement form and I can disregard it.
Labels: data/demographics
2010 Census- Count your roommate
At Monday's BACA meeting there was someone from the Census trying to educate us about the census and census jobs. But a very telling question came from the citizenry, do you count the student/intern/ roommate on the same form. YES. This is not like taxes. If you're all under the same roof, in the same unit, you are a household. So pick someone as the head, and the rest of you roommates (and couch surfers who have failed to chip in) get listed as "roommate". You can go old school and call yourselves "boarders" or "roomers" as how you're related to the head.
Also don't worry about over counting, as there are a bunch that will be undercounted, so if your roommate's boyfriend spent April 1 over at your pace, list him too.
Labels: data/demographics
Truxton Circle- People and a lost traffic circle
If you haven't seen it arleady
Left for LeDroit has a post on the Truxton Circle and how you can still find it's outline today.
And I think I can say I can now start the writing portion of Truxton Circle 1900. I cleaned up a lot of data, deleted addresses that you'd think were in the study area, but aren't and tracked down people for whom some enumerators were too drunk to write down their addresses. When I started out whites outnumbered black residents by a smidgen. With the data clean-up and address removal, blacks outnumber whites by a smidgen and I still have 4 Chinese guys.
There was this one fellow, Paul Pearson, of 218 N Street. He was a white DC born Druggist, who lived with his Maryland born wife, Emma, and owned his home free and clear. According to the 1899 city directory he worked at 500 New Jersey Avenue NW. The National Association of Realtors building sits where his workplace sat. Considering where his home and work were located he must of had a pretty good commute. And if memory serves me right there was a streetcar nearby that could have taken him straight there.
Labels: data/demographics, neighborhood history, Truxton Circle
Don't fill out 2010 Census forms drunk
This year is when we will get the 2010 Census in the mail or if you don't get it or fill it out, census takers will come to your door. Anyway, my cousin has completed the 1900 census for the Truxton Circle area and I still got to mash the data up, clear out the non-addresses, and decide what kind of paper I want to write. The last enumeration district she had to do, was ED 63, and according to her complaint, the dude who was the census taker must have been drunk. Since it is 1900 I will concur on the drunk part, and not chalk it up to crack. The census taker's work was sloppy, disjointed, and simply disorganized. We imagine that he was staggering around eastern Mt. Vernon Square area asking random passersby where they lived.
Maybe he kept stopping by bars. I don't know about the number of saloons or bars in the TC area circa 1900 but apparently a lot of the Irish that were captured in our study were barkeeps. Yes, I know that just goes right into a stereotype. What can I say, our data has stereotypes. Don't blame us, blame the occupational landscape for Irish, and African Americans for 1900.
Back to our drunken census taker, he has made trying to clean up the data hard, and there will probably be some holes. So for the sake of any future researcher in 2090, please write clearly with a clear head, when you fill out your 2010 census form.
Thank you.
Labels: data/demographics, history
SQUEEEE!!!! Census data
Ah, the best use of an unemployed college graduate and a spare room. I hired my cousin to do some data entry on the 1900 census and she has just completed enumeration district 64, which is the northern part of the TC. Enumeration District 64 (ED64)goes from the 1400 block (odd #) of NJ to the 1700 block, Florida and Rhode Island Aves, 1st St, to Q and O Streets. I immediately tossed the Excel worksheet into an Access database and created a query about working women. Now I'm still getting used to the updated MS Access program and can't seem to figure out how to exclude women "at school". Women over the age of 15, 595 of them had some occupation. Of those 595 women, 473 were black. In 1900 the TC north African American women were laundresses, nurses (child and sick), house servants, and cooks. White working women were saleswomen, teachers, house keepers, landladies, office workers, and seamstresses.
Disclaimer-
To clarify, my census project is sponsored personally by me. I get moral and other minimal support from my employer, as it sort of falls under professional development. Secondly, this is NOT a building or house history project. Things like houses are secondary, people are more interesting. I have no intention of putting the raw data on-line. For one, it's too much. ED 64 is over 2,500 names alone, and there are 3 other EDs to go. I do hope to go on to census years 1910-1930. However the rate we're going I'll probably get through to 1910 or 1920.
Labels: data/demographics, neighborhood history, Truxton Circle
Turnover part 2
This map is of houses sold on these few blocks between 1999 and this year below $500K. There are still plenty of red stars representing sales. The blue are more than likely houses that sold prior to 1999, or the odd property selling at $500K and above. Since I did throw in the more than $500K on the map (not shown) it seems there were a few but not many. Comparing the map from
Turnover part 1 to this one, a majority of the 1999-2009 sales were less than 1/2 a mil.
Yet the thing that I find really interesting is not so much the amount houses finally sell for, but the fact there are so many houses that change hands in a 10 year period. It seems to reflect the transient nature of DC or the investor fueled real estate boom of the 2000s.
Let's say, for the most part, that the blue dots represents long timer residents and the red stars newer residents. It isn't perfect, as the blue dots could be rentals that turn over every couple of years but never sold, and red stars rentals bought by new investors that remain rentals. On my own block one of the red stars was a rental home that the renters later bought from the owner. But anyway let's say those red stars represent new blood on the block, in some spots, except that part of the 100 block of P, there is a fair amount of turnover.
If you get on the DC gov website and play with the
DC Atlas for Real Property and compare and contrast with other parts of the city regarding final sale prices (which sometimes isn't the listing price) and turn over, it's interesting.
Labels: data/demographics, gentrification
Turnover part 1
This was stolen off of the DC government's DC Atlas website and what it shows are houses sold between Jan 1, 1999 and yesterday. More accurately it shows houses sold for more than $1 and below a billion. I had to throw that in when it showed every house with a red star and I discovered the database had some quirky dates of homes being bought by their longtime owners for 0.00, and had to find a way to exclude that misinformation.
Each red star represents a property sale, that's it. However, one can make guesses that a majority of those sales resulted in some turn over.
Labels: data/demographics, gentrification
Economic identity
A comment I got here annoyed me, in the same way that being called white annoys me. I'm an African American, but a pale one, so the attack on my identity, as I see it, irks me. Same thing with the discussions of gentrification and neighborhood change, there is a string of thought that fails to see a neighborhood's residents in terms of grades of economic diversity. Instead it is the rich, that being anyone not in subsidized housing or elderly on a fixed income, and poor, and very little in between.
Sometime back I got an inquiry from a journalism student, who asked about neighbors couching it it terms of poor neighbors vs rich ones. The more I learn about my neighbors the more I know what I don't know about them. I can guess whose house is a Section 8, whose retired and on a fixed income, but knowing if someone is on food stamps or other forms of state assistance, I don't know and really it isn't any of my business. Same thing for other neighbors who have jobs and careers, So-in-So works for the government, Theotherguy works as IT, She is a freelance graphics artist, Blahblah is an Asst. Director at a non-profit, and Whatshername does something (I'm not sure what) at Pepco. Are these people rich? Wealthy? Not likely. But they are more apt to be 'wealthier' or 'richer' than neighbors who are unskilled workers or persons starting out in their careers or others for whom employment is problematic. Anywhere else in America So-in-So, Theotherguy and the rest are just middle class people living on a cul-de-sac, here, we become fabulously wealthy.
The money to buy our homes comes from savings, sometimes family members, recently deceased grandparents, and raiding the old 401K for the deposit. The renovation money from 2nd mortgages, building loans, family, savings and once again raiding that 401K. We turn to same resources the rest of middle class America does. Because we're next door or down the street from people whose economic state is more dire or more obviously distressed, the side by side comparison makes it look like two extremes. Rich and poor.
Labels: data/demographics, gentrification
Running and screaming into PG County or visa versa
According to the
IRS migration data for 2005-2006 (if the link doesn't work go to the Missouri Census Data Center
Single County Migration File & pick District of Columbia) of the 23,432 taxfilers (households/ returns/ whatever) 5,703 of them escaped, ran, bolted, slinked over, or just got the F outta Dodge City, making PG County the place receiving the most DC migrants. Montgomery was a second with 2,865.
I'm not sure how to read the data, when looking at the average adjusted gross income of the migrants into and out of DC. On average it looks like people leave out of here better off than they came, except for some city migrants.
I found my data sheet about where people come from, also pulled from the Missouri Census Data Center, from the Census 2000, Summary File 3, DC native whites are about 13.52% of native US born citizens; DC native blacks 58.48%; Native Americans 39.16%; and Asians 21.41% of those born in the US.
Labels: data/demographics
Gentrification and Me, issue 3
Yuppie Scum save the neighborhood: ABC NewsActually titled "There Goes the Neighborhood?Gentrification May Be Good for Everyone, Some Experts Say," by Oliver Libaw for ABC news.com. This April 2002 article's focus is in Brooklyn, NY another gentrifying area on the east coast. The author says despite the opinions of gentrification and attitudes towards the young urban professional, gentrification is actually good for lower income residents. Why? They are less likely to move out and benefit from the improvements gentrification brings. He quotes from Frank Braconi, a co-author in a New York City gentrification study that examined gentrification and low income residents. They do acknowledge that displacement of the poor, one of the major problems of gentrification, does occur. However it must be placed also in the context of general movement of people, as this is a mobile society where people move around a lot.
Gentrification and Displacement, by Lance Freeman & Frank Braconi
A PDF file and article/report from the Citizens Housing and Planning Council's
The Urban Prospect publication volume 8, no. 1. This is a lovely 4 page report regarding the displacement of low income people in gentrifying areas of New York City.
First they get into, "define displacement". Displacement, could be several things, it could be the government moving people by force (think highway project), it could be people looking for cheaper rent (Secondary Displacement), or it could be people moving out due to social forces (think moving 'cause they don't wanna live near Puerto Ricans). There are several factors in secondary displacement, which people most associate with gentrification. The desire for lower rents could be pushed by rise of rents or loss of income.
To track displacement they used the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey to gather data. This allowed them to look at movement in the 1990s. Looking at a chart they provide, except for the period between 1991-1993 the rate of displacement was between 5%-6%, kind of small.
They challenge an assumption that "low income households [are] more likely to move out of gentrifying neighborhoods than other neighborhoods?" with "gentrification could encourage households to stay put." Right now I'm thinking Tracy Chapman's
Fast Car where the goal is to get out of the lower income environment and "get a bigger house and live in the suburbs." Well what happens when the nice neighborhood comes to you? Being one who has been poor, and talking with others who have lived in "the ghetto", there is this goal to get the heck out of the ghetto to live a better life. So in this scenario, the better neighborhood comes to the ghetto in the form of gentrification. Well that's my theory.
They state that lower income households are faced with a decision when gentrification comes to them. On one hand, stay and take advantage of the neighborhood improvements or move because of higher housing costs. What these families do, depends on which factor is more important. For the authors gentrification makes it less likely that a lower income household will move. They say "poor households residing in on of the seven gentrifying neighborhoods were still found to be 20% less likely to move than poor households residing elsewhere."
The authors never say that displacement does not occur. Yet, we cannot ignore general mobility among people. They say it best in their concluding paragraph that as vacancies appear in gentrifying neighborhoods, they are filled by middle class households, coupled with loss of affordable housing, it takes an appearance that the middle class is driving out the poor.
The economic cleansing of San Francisco: Is San Francisco becoming the first fully gentrified city in AmericaOkay, I couldn't end this without a story of evil gentrification kicking out the poor and defenseless. Despite the above reports of gentrifying being good for a neighborhood, we all know the mainline thinking that gentrification is evil, evil, evil because it forces families on the streets and the anti-gentrification forces have the examples to prove it. This is one such example from a 1998 San Francisco article about 3 poor elderly Latino women in danger of losing their home due to raising rents. Other Latino women are profiled too. Okay no one is kicked out in the story, but they are all endanger of not being able to keep up with the rents.
And for good measure
" Case Study in Displacement on Elizabeth Street Warning: Gentrification in Progress" by J.A. Lobbia in New York City. This covers a NYC building in the process of gentrifying. There are poor immigrants crammed in some units, while other units rehabbed & expanded for 1 or 2 people. The landlord is finding ways to kick out the poorer residents, such as suing them for lease infractions. The truly EVIL part of the landlord is that he sues his Chinese renters and buys off his Latino renters to get them out.
Labels: data/demographics, gentrification
