[PRCo] Re: [PRCo]

[Richard Allman]

fred-you left out Boston and Providence-2 respectably sized capital cities. 
RICH
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Fred Schneider" <fwschneider at comcast.net>
To: <pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2007 12:04 PM
Subject: [PRCo] Re: [PRCo]


> NO REASON, HERB, TO SCRATCH HEADS.  The methods for deriving poverty
> thresholds and the number of people in poverty are all public
> knowledge.   Look at the links below.
>
> http://www.ocpp.org/poverty/how.htm
>
> http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/05poverty.shtml
>
> The first link leads to a definition of how the poverty numbers are
> created or derived.   Once we have determined what poverty is, i.e.
> how many dollars you need to be out of poverty, then you can easily
> update that every year for any area because we know from tax return
> data or employer wage data what people in that city or county or MSA
> earn in any given year and we can easily count the number of familiy
> units that have earnings below the povery threshold (or let a
> computer do it for us).   Some states are easier than others ...
> Pennsylvania, for example, requires employers to report all wage and
> employment data by social security number for the unemployment
> insurance program which gives a vast amount of data for statistical
> information.  It would not tell anything about you per se but it
> could be used collectively to provide information about the entire
> population of any area as long as it did not disclose information
> about any one person or family.
>
> The second link shows what the poverty values are in 2005 for
> families of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and more people.   It starts with
> somewhere over $11,000 for a family of one.
>
> Remember that those poverty numbers were the percent of people in
> poverty --- 31% I think it was for Cleveland.  Columbus was half that
> number.   That does not surprise me at all.   State capital cities
> are usually dominated by government and lobbyist employment with
> little factory employment to screw things up, and therefore the
> poverty numbers tend to be better.  Look at the list ... the capital
> cities that are large enough to list rank 8 (Atlanta), 23
> (Washington), 30 (Phoenix), 32 (Ok City), 34 (Columbus), 38 (Austin),
> 40 (St. Paul ... and it has less poverty than Minneapolis), 44
> (Nashville), 47 (Indianapolis), 50 (Sacramento), 52 (Honolulu), 53
> (Denver), 62 (Raleigh) and now we're into cities too small to bother
> with.   I could expect Trenton to have high poverty for a state
> capital because it was a manufacturing city that has lost all its
> industry but most of them had no industry.
>
> I suspect that you might have answered the issue of poverty in
> Cleveland when you came up with the large Spanish and Black
> numbers.   Pittsburgh just doesn't have that kind of a population.
> It may also be that a lot of Cleveland's money is going back to
> Mexico???   That would affect bank deposits.   If the people in
> Cleveland are only there for part of a year and go home to Mexico,
> that could also affect the income numbers, could it not ... in effect
> it would create a man with a part-time job and make him look like a
> person in poverty.    Of course, if that is what is happening, the
> Mayor would love it because think of all the Federal funds he can get
> because of it!
>
> fws3
>
>
>
> On Jan 31, 2007, at 9:59 PM, Herb Brannon wrote:
>
>> People here are scratching their collective heads and wondering how
>> those poverty figures were arrived at. It seems like any other
>> large Northern city to me. Even in the hardcore ghetto-type
>> neighborhoods there are scores of  new businesses and houses/
>> apartments recently completed (last 2-3 years) or under
>> construction. Many think this may have been done to get some extra
>> government assistance for renewal. It is a mystery to me how this
>> statistic was arrived at, or why.
>>
>> Cleveland is the largest metropolitan area in Ohio both in
>> population and area. Columbus is the largest city in Ohio when one
>> considers the population only INSIDE the city limits. I prefer to
>> use the metro figures inasmuch as the wheel and spokes (the
>> suburbs) cannot exist with the hub (the central city). It is
>> noteworthy that Cleveland's median income is nearly the same as
>> Pittsburgh's. Yet, Cleveland is ranked number one in poverty while
>> Pittsburgh is way down the list at thirty-seven. Go figure! Or,
>> maybe the federal government should go figure !!
>> Herb Brannon
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----
>> From: Fred Schneider <fwschneider at comcast.net>
>> To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org
>> Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2007 9:16:13 PM
>> Subject: [PRCo]
>>
>>
>> http://www.census.gov/acs/www/Products/Ranking/2003/R01T160.htm
>>
>> http://bea.gov/bea/newsrel/MPINewsRelease.htm
>>
>>
>> My old friend Bill Vigrass, native Clevelander, mentioned that
>> Cleveland had the most people living in poverty of any city in the
>> country.  Being an old statistician, I had to look for the numbers.
>> The two URLs above provide somewhat conflicting information.   One
>> shows cities and one shows metropolitan statistical areas.  An MSA is
>> a city of 50,000 or more people and the counties around it that have
>> been linked to the core city and to each other by commuting to work
>> patterns.   Those patterns are reestablished and changed if needed
>> after each census, i.e. 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, etc.   So
>> the city data is just that ... the area within the city boundary.
>> The MSA is the city and counties around it ... the suburbs, farms,
>> what have you until you run out of people commuting into the city and
>> then on to the nearest county line.   In my part of the country, the
>> line between Lancaster and Chester counties is an arbitrary boundary
>> for the end of the Philadelphia MSA because that is were the magic
>> share of commuters drops below the threshold needed but it is still
>> traffic and commuters and well, you get the picture.   But the north
>> edge of Los Angeles County, California along I-5 near Lancaster is in
>> the desert with nothing around.
>>
>> The first form does show that Cleveland has 31.3 percent of its
>> citizens living in poverty, the highest of ANY CITY FOR WHICH SUCH
>> DATA ARE COLLECT.   Note that only 68 cities are large enough to
>> collect data.   Newark is second, Detroit is third, Fresno is fourth
>> (I suspect a lot of migrant workers), Miami is fifth (at the risk of
>> sounding bigoted, I am going to suggest a lot of immigrant Cubans,
>> Mexicans, Puerto Ricans -- 66% of the population, 22% black, and very
>> skewed to young and old -- 20% under 20 and 20% over 62).
>> Philadelphia is 10th.  Buffalo is 12th, farther down the list than I
>> would have believed from looking at the place.  [It's sort of like
>> the blind men describing the elephant.   I guess I didn't pat enough
>> of the elephant to understand it.]     PITTSBURGH IS WAY DOWN THE
>> LIST AT 37TH IN SPITE OF ALL THE MILL CLOSURES.   I suspect that Herb
>> Brannon helped to explain that when he told me that Cleveland has a
>> heavy Spanish immigrant population and Pittsburgh simply has an
>> elderly non-immigrant population ... fewer kids and more older
>> people.  Why?   Believe it or not, per capita income tends to rise
>> with older people because the kids are gone and you thus have few
>> people to divide into the total number of dollars.
>>
>> The second URL is area family income.   The most recent Cleveland -
>> Elyria-Mentor figure was $35,542.   Pittsburgh is slightly higher at
>> $36,208.   Johnstown is $26,780.   And the national average was
>> $36,048.  The fact that Pittsburgh MSA's population averages about
>> 2.5 years older than Cleveland's might be sufficient to account for
>> the higher per capita income in Pittsburgh.   I'm not going to commit
>> myself to a precise answer,
>>
>
>
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