Parisian Catacombs

Just got back from a lovely weekend in the Catacombs of Paris. A lot of people have asked me about visiting them, so I figured I should write up a quick FAQ for people who want to go check them out. It's over on the travel blog here.

Queens Tribune Article

Short article about me by Nathan Tempey of the Queens Tribune. As an added bonus, included is this picture of me looking seriously bootylicious.

Damn.

The stroll itself was nice - walking all of the New York Connecting Rail Road (and other freight tracks) is a loose goal of mine, and I was happy to get in a mile or so of that. Other highlights included an Albanian Mosque in Glendale, a nice view from a rickety old bridge over the railroad tracks, which you can see in the article also. Drawbacks included a 25-degree drop in temperature from the day before, and learning the M-train at Fresh Pond Road was out of service.

Neighborhoods: East Williamsburg, Middle Village, Maspeth, Glendale
Tracts Walked: B483, B455, Q535, Q595, Q603, Q607, Q633.01, Q623, Q625, Q627

Are there really "not enough men to go around?"

Reading this piece by Patricia Park in the Times on Friday was an echo of a familiar refrain often heard from women about dating in New York: that the problem is simply in the numbers - there's just “not enough men to go around.” Ms. Park seemingly confirms this axiom by noting that women who are single, divorced or widowed in Greater New York outnumber the same men by more than 700,000.

However, what Ms. Park doesn't note is that this discrepancy is entirely a function of the fact that, on average, women live longer than men. If you look only at the single, divorced and widowed aged 18 - 49, there are actually 96,105 more men than women. This shouldn't be a surprise - Greater New York is a heavily immigrant area, and immigrants demographically skew toward working-age males.

Now, given, this is heavily imperfect information - "never married, divorced, or widowed" hardly transfers directly into "wants a relationship with someone of a different gender," but it's what we've got to work with. And it’s enough to deduce that for women, that there “simply aren’t enough men to go around” only really holds true if you're over 50.

So what accounts for this perception that there are not enough available men in New York? The answer is simple - due to the diversity and size of New York, criteria that we tend to think of as incredibly baseline - age, health, geography, language - actually narrow the pool of potential partners considerably. For instance, it seems hardly necessary to say that you expect your partner to fluently speak the same language as you. But if you’re a monolingual English speaker you’ve just eliminated almost a quarter of the people in the five boroughs. In short, we’re not considering “singles” - we’re really considering singles in or near our particular social grouping. We hardly expect a Uzbeckistani widow from Rego Park to date the quarterback for the Spotswood, NJ High School football team. Yet both are singles in the Greater New York Area.

And some of these subsets do have heavy gender skews - mainly due to different countries sending different types of immigrants to New York. Maybe the subset of "attractive, smart and succesful" folks that Ms. Park cites has a gender skew also, although there's not really a way to measure it.

And, of course, the reason you can't measure this is because standards of "attractive, smart and succesful" are incredibly subjective and relative terms. And if you find that you can't get a date, well, maybe consider either trying to expand your social circle or reconsidering some of these criteria instead of claiming there's "not enough men to go around."

The Future of Ethnic Neighborhoods

A pretty good article about recent Demographic trends from the NY Times. Again, it's important to note that this is not a snapshot of the city today, or even in 2010. This is survey data from 2005 - 2009, and has a sometimes very significant margin of error.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/23/nyregion/20110123-nyc-ethnic-neighborhoods-map.html?ref=nyregion

One passage in the article that is very important, and kind of gets glossed over, is the following: American Community Survey data released last month revealed a striking metamorphosis during the last decade. Traditional ethnic enclaves sprawled amoeba-like into adjacent communities.

This, in my opinion, is going to be the future of New York. We are very, very used to thinking of neighborhoods in ethnic terms - Bensonhurst is Italian, Bed-Stuy is African-American, Washington Heights is Dominican, and so on. We are also very used to thinking of ethnic change as neighborhood-based and total: Ozone Park was Italian, then became South Asian; Riverdale was Irish, then became Jewish; the Lower East Side was Jewish, then became Puerto Rican, then becamse hipster/yuppie. This process can be short (East New York turned over from Jewish to African-American in about 2 years), or long (the turnover of the West and South Village from Italian to Yuppie took almost half a century), but it always ends the same - one group moves in, displacing the other.

But the future may hold something different. Instead of smaller, more solid ethnic neighborhoods, I think we'll be seeing larger, less solid, ethnic neighborhoods overlapping each other. And instead of one group slowly or quickly replacing another, I think we'll see a few different groups achieve a balance throughout a neighborhood.

The hows and whys of this theory, in my opinion, are really interesting but need to be backed up with some migration data that I haven't dug into yet. We'll see if me or the Times gets to this first

Redesign

I'm currently taking down my 1998-esque main site and transferring everything over to the two blogs (NYC blog and Travel blog). All the old pages will eventually end up here, although it might take a bit.

It's starting....

Released yesterday was the 2005-2009 American Community Survey Data. Why is this important? Because this 5-year sample data allows us to access Census-Tract Level data for the first time since 2000. Instead of being limited to Public-Use-Microdata-Areas (PUMAS), which are more or less the size of a Community Board, and generally have over 100,000 residents, we can now access information for Census Tracts - areas as small as a few square city blocks, with populations of only a few thousand people.

The NY Times has already started with a series of maps focusing (somewhat predictably) on race and Hispanic ethnicity. What's a bit strange about this is that 2010 Census Data - which includes race information - is due to be released starting in February. This will be much more up-to-date, with 100% data from 2010 as opposed to sample data (with a margain of error) from 2005-2009. In the meantime, there's a wealth of new information on income, housing, immigration, language, ancestry, and geographic mobility available for micro-demographic analysis that won't be in the 2010 Census release. Go check it out - I know I am. I hope the Times is also.

Conflux Panel

Lots of fun at the Conflux Festival - a really great group of people coming together, some of whom I'd been wanting to meet for a while. I got to be on a panel with Steve Duncan, Julia Solis, and Miru Kim, which you can check out here - be warned it's 2 hours and the sound isn't so great.