Tag Archives: new york times

The Best Places to Live

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn’t necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that’s that.”
― J.D. Salinger, A Girl I Knew

Dallas Skyline at Night

I know very well not to take an article that lists “The Best Places to Live” very seriously.

However, I did stumble across one that caught my eye. I saw an article in the Dallas Morning News that referred to another article in the New York Times.

The times noted that, EVERYONE IS MOVING TO TEXAS, and said that of the top ten best places to live in the United States, seven are in North Texas.

The list (North Texas Cities in Bold):

  1. Euless
  2. Woodlawn, Ohio
  3. Edgecliff Village
  4. Garland
  5. Grand Prairie
  6. Mesquite
  7. DeSoto
  8. Cedar Hill
  9. Brooklyn Center, Minn.
  10. Forest Park, Ohio

My wife is from Grand Prairie, I worked in Garland (and now live almost on the border) for a couple decades, and lived in Mesquite for a while. So, I know a bit about the Texas cities on this list and feel free to comment.

The interesting thing is that, for someone that lives here, these are not the best cities in North Texas. Most people would list Plano, Frisco, or some of the other more outer-ring suburbs. I am a big fan of Richardson, where I live, and cite its extreme diversity, high tech industry, and cycling infrastructure (of course) as small, but important, items that set it above its neighbors.

When I look at this list, the biggest thing that jumps out at me are the cities listed are generally not built out. That means that on at least one side, there are cotton fields waiting to be plowed under and concreted over. That tends to drop the cost of housing somewhat. Cedar Hill, DeSoto, Mesquite, Grand Prairie, and Garland all are considered a bit less expensive and a bit less desirable that their neighbors.

Euless is next to the massive DFW airport – the article mentions that the city boasts large numbers of Tongan residents – many immigrated to work at the airport and contribute to the dominant High School Football teams in that area.

I know little about Edgecliff Village – a tiny enclave in Fort Worth – may visit the next time I’m in those parts.

All in all, an interesting take… but I’m sure there are a few people who still manage to be happy even though they live somewhere that the New York Times doesn’t think is in the top ten.

What I learned this week, May 4, 2012

Posted on by Bill Chance

I have been writing about the ultra-expensive condominium Museum Tower cooking the Nasher sculpture center the same way a bully with a magnifying glass burns the ants on the sidewalk:
here
here
and here

The New York Times now has an article on the issue,

Dallas Museum Simmers in a Neighbor’s Glare

There are a couple of interesting quotes. First, from the Los Angeles based architect that designed this monstrocity:

Scott Johnson, the Los Angeles architect who designed Museum Tower, said he was willing to consider remedies but that the Nasher also had to be open-minded. “My responsibility is to fully vet solutions vis-à-vis Museum Tower — that’s my building,” he said. “But I can’t say sitting here now that the Nasher may not need to do something on their end.”

So, you see his concern for the neighbor (The Museum) that actually made his project (The Museum Tower) possible. I would imagine it would have been a good idea to “fully vet” his design before the thing was built, don’t you?

And also, a fact I did not know, that helps to emphasize the whole political disgustedness of the whole thing:

Complicating matters is that the $200 million Museum Tower is owned by the Dallas Police & Fire Pension System, on whose board sit four members of the City Council.

Ok, that makes it even more clear how the developers knew they could get away with this without the city doing a thing to stop them. Remember, none of this went into action until Raymond Nasher died – then the powers that be moved in to devour the carcass of his philanthropic vision.

The final word is from the livid Renzo Piano… who just might know a little about this sort of thing.

“By doing this, they kill what they use to sell it,” Mr. Piano said.

I think that, right now, the tower should be requred to change its name (Maybe to “Death Star Condominium Tower”) and to remove all reference to the Nasher Museum from its sales pitch (where it, of course, figures very prominantly). Actually, they should be required to warn their potential residents of the skin cancer danger poised by the neighbor next door due to the reflected sunlight.

The Museum Tower Condominiums tower over Tony Cragg’s “Lost in Thought”

From Bloomberg: Dallas Museum Seeks to Shade Pension-Backed Tower’s Sunny Glare

Nine Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School

Optical Design

15(ish) Things Worth Knowing About Coffee

Get the Lead Out

Posted on by Bill Chance

For a long time, I have had an idea that, when I was silly enough to say it out loud, received more than its share of derision. The idea is a theory I have had concerning the question of why has crime been falling so much in the last decades.

The most famous (and controversial) theory is from Steven Levitt and John Donohue – the Freakonomics Guys – they famously said that the drop in crime is mainly caused by the legalization of abortion in the US – so on and so forth. It is an unsettling theory, though a compelling one.

So I read Freakonomics and found the book to be well written and thought provoking, though I found their crime theory to be not completely convincing. I may have missed something, but they did not close the loop in my mind – they showed plenty of correlation, but failed to indicate causation.

Correlation does not prove causation. Never. Read and remember that. Very few people – and nobody that appears on television understands that simple sentence.

So, what is my theory of the drop in crime?

I have been saying for a long time (years before Freakonomics) – as a matter of fact, I predicted it before it really happened – that a large portion of the drop in crime can be attributed to the removal of lead from gasoline.

You see, for years I have had access to sampling results (some done by me) of lead in both emergency release situations (spills, waste sites, industrial pollution) and in background, “ordinary” locations and situations. Over those years I was repeatedly shocked at the elevated levels of lead near highways, especially in urban areas, and at the blood levels of lead in animals and humans living in those areas. These levels were regularly high enough to expect noticeable behavioral effects. While leaded gas was still being sold, I would talk about how I thought that was one environmental hazard that was more serious than anyone thought (and there were plenty of others that I thought/think weren’t/aren’t so important). When the tetraethyl lead anti-knock compounds were formulated out, I felt that we would see an improvement in behaviors from the populations (mostly densely urban) that were exposed to lead residues fairly quickly as the lead dissipated.

Nobody took my rantings seriously. I had one female actually tell me, “That is so typical, for a man to blame something like the drop in crime on some chemical.”

That didn’t make me very happy. My response was, “Well, I think it’s a typical response for a man that has had years of access to large numbers of lead sampling results and who has studied the dangers and effects of lead exposure to the point of doing work on protecting elements of the population from the possible effects of heavy metal poisoning.” She gave me a very dirty look and refused to talk to me any more. It’s no surprise I could never get dates.

I’m not sure what she objected to… was it my refusal to acknowledge the importance of unicorn saliva in making the world a friendlier place? This was before the Freakanomics book, so it couldn’t be a pro-choice argument (though that is a slippery slope point of view that nobody, rightly so, would touch with a ten foot pole). Now, I am very aware of the, “If all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail,” principle, and concede that there is a lot of that at work, but that still doesn’t mean I was wrong.

You see, unlike most people, and all pundits and politicians, I looked at the data first – then made predictions from the data – then tested this against reality. There is a huge difference between operating from data first and doing what the pundits and polititians do – coming up with some cute theory that you can benefit from and then searching for data to support it.

Well, now that I’ve dug up all this dirty laundry, what is the point? Someone else has come up with the same idea. After all these years, the New York Times has come out with an article that agrees with my point about lead levels and crime rates. There is a detailed study (pdf) that talks about it.

Of course, there are already articles that contradict the theory and I’m sure we will see more.

So what do I think? More importantly, what do I think now?

As I get older and more experienced (and more muddled and more cranky) I have come to believe the disconnect between correlation and causation is even more tenuous that we think. I’m beginning to believe that it is only under very rare and special conditions that we can even talk about causation in a confident way. I think that chaos (mathematical chaos, not philosophical chaos) rules almost everything we do – feedback loops, sensitivity to initial conditions, and unintended results are the norm, not the exception. I think that we are fooling ourselves when we think we know what’s going on and why.

So after decades of thought and research – why do I think that the crime rate is decreasing? Is Batman a transvestite? Who knows? I think the important thing is to remember to enjoy the walk in the evening that we were too scared to take a decade ago.

Here is an old, bad photo of me working on the Geneva Superfund Site in South Houston, Texas. Circa 1983. It's no wonder I couldn't get dates.