[PRCo] Re: [PRCo]
Herb Brannon
hrbran at sbcglobal.net
Wed Jan 31 21:59:25 EST 2007
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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