Tag: us

• We’re getting fatter

  I know I know this, but this is still an alarming chart:

  

  This is saying that, as of 2016, over 36% of Americans were considered to be obese. In Canada, the number was just under 30%. And in the UK, it was just under 28%, which is the highest rate in Europe.

  We often talk about the health benefits of living in a walkable community. And there’s lots of research to back up that this is in fact the case: obesity rates tend to be inversely correlated with higher prevalences of active transportation (walking, cycling, and so on).

  But we also can’t ignore diet. And here’s what has happened in the UK, as well as in other Western countries:

  An increased reliance on cheap, ultra-processed food, which accounts for 57 per cent of what Britons eat according to a 2019 study conducted by researchers at the University of São Paulo, suggests that the health crisis is unlikely to change anytime soon without intervention, argue campaigners.

  It can be hard to eat healthy, especially if you don’t have a lot of money and you live a busy life. But in my view, we need to change the course of this graph. And two very good places to start looking would be (1) our built environment and (2) the Japanese diet.

  Actually, now that I think of it, Japanese cities would be a good place to look as well.

  Chart: FT

  2023.10.13

• Skyscraper construction speed by city

  Brian Potter, of Construction Physics, recently tried to determine which cities build skyscrapers the fastest.

  Here’s how he went about that:

  • He started by looking up the 50 largest cities in the world on Wikipedia
  • He then pulled data from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat to get a list of every skyscraper completed between 2000-2020 that was over 100 meters, had a start and completion date, and had a gross floor area
  • The result was a list of 986 skyscrapers completed in 39 cities, most of which (~740) were completed in the US, China, Japan, and Canada
  • Finally, he calculated completed square feet per year and made some charts

  Here are the results:

  

  

  And here’s one thing he had to say about them:

  Interestingly enough, the huge outlier in slow construction isn’t the US, but Canada, with an average skyscraper construction speed of half that of the US’s.

  For a lot more information on this topic, click here.

  2023.03.24

• What cars can tell you about a neighborhood

  This is an interesting study from a team of AI researchers at Stanford. What they did was use car images taken directly from Google Street View (so images of cars parked on-street) to predict income levels, racial makeup, educational attainment, and voting patterns at the zip code and precinct level.

  Admittedly, it’s not a perfect survey, but when they compared their findings to actual or previously collected data (such as from the American Community Survey), it turns out that their study was actually remarkably accurate. Google Street View allowed them to survey 22 million cars, or about 8% of all cars in the US.

  Here are some of the things they found:

  –  Toyota and Honda vehicles are strongly associated with Asian neighborhoods.

  – Buick, Oldsmobile, and Chrysler vehicles are strongly associated with black neighborhoods.

  – Pickup trucks, Volkswagens and Aston Martins are strongly associated with white neighborhoods.

  Interestingly enough, the ratio of pickup trucks to sedans, alone, is a pretty reliable indicator of voting patterns. If a neighborhood has more pickup trucks than sedans, there’s an 82% chance it voted Republican in the last election.

  Perhaps this isn’t all that surprising given that car purchases are highly symbolic. But given that the American Community Survey costs $250 million a year to administer, this study is a good preview of what cheaper and more realtime data collection might look like.

  2017.12.07

• A century of homeownership and renting in England and Wales

  This morning while I was reading about gentrification in Berlin, I clicked through to an interesting overview of homeownership and renting in England and Wales over the last century. Here’s a video. If you can’t see it below, click here.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDnGryGJ1ZA]

  The video starts in 1918, where the vast majority of households (77%) rented. As of 2011, this number has reversed. 64% of households in England and Wales now own their home.

  If you compare this housing trend to what happened in the United States and Canada, you’ll see a similarity. Although, the US was ahead in terms of promoting homeownership. They reached 50% ownership somewhere in the mid 1940s, whereas England and Wales didn’t reach this number until around 1971.

  

  All of this is an interesting reminder that our obsession with homeownership is a relatively new one. But it’s also not a universal one. The homeownership rate in Berlin is 15.6%, and it’s only 49.5% in London. People in big cities tend to rent more.

  2014.06.09
• In the U.K. the average home is only 915 square feet. In the U.S. the average new single-family home is 2,480 square feet.

  Businessweek

  2013.05.20