16 ms·

Mapping the U.S. By Property Value Instead of Land Area

272 points by Thevet 11y ago

angersock 11y ago
It's kind of delightful watching NYC and SF in the gif inflate like gigantic pustules, cysts of real estate.
- npkarnik 11y ago
  This imagery makes me cringe while being spot on.
- perfTerm 11y ago
  Totally agree. It's easy to understand the implications but as a New Yorker it's hard not to be proud of your city in some ways. The UES being worth more than six states, it just boggles the mind to try to do the comparisons in your head.
- tsiki 11y ago
  I'm the most surprised how LA blows up, I thought it was quite a bit cheaper there than in SF/NY.
  - refurb 11y ago
    LA county has almost 10M people living in it. SF has only 800K. If housing prices were equal, you'd expect LA to be 10 times the size (assuming an equal number of people per dwelling).
    - bagacrap 11y ago
      Yes, it's difficult to make a fair comparison across counties of such vastly different areas and populations. LA county includes far-off places like Palmdale which bring the average housing price way down. If you only looked at more central neighborhoods like Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, etc. you'd see distortion more akin to SF.
- pcrh 11y ago
  Perhaps because it's HN, the discussion is focused on SF and NY. But it's SoCal and Florida that surprised me.
deleted 11y ago
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davidw 11y ago
> The demand to live in these places is soaring, but the desire among incumbents to accommodate newcomers is low Sums up why we ended up in Bend, Oregon rather than Boulder, Colorado. In the latter, there is a small but significant group of people whose idea is that the area needs fewer jobs, not smarter housing. Edit: http://journal.dedasys.com/2015/06/18/boulder-colorado-vs-bend-oregon/ http://journal.dedasys.com/2015/06/18/boulder-colorado-vs-be... - more about our choice, for the curious.
- stevesearer 11y ago
  I love Bend! Even though there does seem to be a large influx of people in cities like SF, NYC, Austin, it seems like there is going to be an even larger exodus to smaller towns with sane costs of living in the coming years. It could also be my that my friends are all also finally entering the age where we want to buy homes, so these sorts of places are more appealing than ever.
- ajross 11y ago
  But if Boulder looked more like Denver (or Bend like Portland), you might not have made that choice, right? I'm guessing that you wanted those spots because they were semi-rural mountain cities with low population density. So even if you did move to Boulder, you'd probably oppose the construction of more high-density housing, right?
  - davidw 11y ago
    I want to live someplace that's not too big in area, actually. Padova (where I've spent most of the past 15 years) is actually about the same size as Boulder, and has more than twice as many people, and I liked it just fine. What I want is to live within biking distance of where I work (10 minutes today - yay!), as well as be able to ride my road and mountain bikes, and have other outdoor stuff close by. In Boulder, to get something affordable, you need to live in one of the nearby towns, which means either an hour by bike, or a drive. Thus - for me - defeating the entire purpose of not living in a big city. I like density in other words, as long as the total population is not too high.
  - 11y ago
jbattle 11y ago
Isn't this just the same as population density? I think there's an XKCD about this ... https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/
- ticviking 11y ago
  Roughly that's all it's showing. I'd be far more interested in the cartogram of land value/population. I suspect it would do much more to show some of the oddities that I'm sure exist. (i.e. Park City where a lot of people have really expensive vacation homes for skiing and don't live there.)
  - iaw 11y ago
    I wonder if it should be normalized by population or population density. I think population density would show the most interesting market divergences.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Not quite fair. Usually the xkcd syndrome is caused by plotting density of something that is intrinsic to people e.g. red hair. You end up with a heatmap of population. Here, land prices may be higher because more people are there bidding up the prices. But its not a direct property of the individuals. So the heatmap effect is indirect. Maybe not big point, but there it is.
  - rmxt 11y ago
    Not to be pedantic, but I think your example is a little off the mark. Red hair isn't evenly distributed amongst all human populations. [1] A heatmap of population that would leave out most of China and India isn't quite a heatmap of population. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_hair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_hair
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Ok, talking US maps. Not many per-person maps that would work worldwide. What do you suggest for an example?
lordnacho 11y ago
How does the transformation work? It must be something that keeps the same borders regardless of what numbers you put in.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  It's up to the producer what properties of the original map are preserved. Wikipedia seems reasonable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartogram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartogram (Note especially the table of algorithms)
sgnelson 11y ago
I don't think I've ever seen a worse Cartogram. At least they did an animation to make it easier to understand, but a regular map with simple choropleth would be a thousand times better.
- vegabook 11y ago
  I think the animation turns it from one of the worst visualizations I have ever seen to one of the best. Its point is ultra clear when you see tiny red dots become huge swathes of overvalued crimson. Texas is amazing. Look how even intra-state, cities crush rural (for now). This is exhibit A on how animation can transform data visualization.
amenghra 11y ago
I wonder how things will change once self driving cars become the norm.
- vvladymyrov 11y ago
  and something like hyper loop will be built
  - MarkPNeyer 11y ago
    if you can live in Fresno and work in SF with a half hour commute, expect huge changes here.
- humanrebar 11y ago
  You'd also need to reform the way school districting works. Well, I guess it could cause another round of suburban flight of the affluent, but the underlying problem would still be there.
trhway 11y ago
i kind of understand why people here frequently against high-density - the way it is done in US ends up with pretty unlivable space of towering boxes surrounded by concrete and asphalt (which is just obvious result of profit maximization while obeying height limits, etc.. While i think having a 200 stories tower surrounded by a park would be better than a bunch of 20-30 stories mid-towers sticking out of concrete/asphalt space)
- Balgair 11y ago
  I feel that sound is a big part of it too. European buildings tend to be a titch bit better about this, but American ones are downright terrible. I'd love to live in a apartment building for a long time, but the sound is what gets me. I can't play my sound as loud as I want, I can't stand other people ignoring that the walls are paper thin, I hear every toilet flush and chopping of carrots in the building. If you can find a way to really dampen the sound, then I feel a lot of people wouldn't mind the high density quite as much.
  - vonmoltke 11y ago
    This is honestly one of the big things that turns me off of high density here. I feel like I am losing privacy and having to walk on eggshells constantly to avoid pissing off my neighbors.
  - cortesoft 11y ago
    That doesn't have to be the case... I live in a large apartment building on a high floor, and I rarely hear my neighbors. Good walls and smart design go a long way. Granted, this is a fairly new building that is a bit expensive, but my point is that noise problems in high rise buildings aren't inherent to all large buildings.
- xxpor 11y ago
  >While i think having a 200 stories tower surrounded by a park would be better than a bunch of 20-30 stories mid-towers sticking out of concrete/asphalt space) Ugh, please no. This is essentially what Le Corbusier advocated and the results are disasterous. It leads to all of the downsides of density. Lots of people taking up space, but none of the benefits (easy access to shopping, entertainment, school, work, etc.), because everything's so damn far away from each other.
lubesGordi 11y ago
> "The stubborn unwillingness of incumbent homeowners in highly productive places—namely San Francisco and New York City, which are barely visible on the land-area map, but dominate the housing value map—is a huge drain on the nation’s economy." Are they trying to say that if people didn't have to spend as much on housing then there would be greater GDP?
- Balgair 11y ago
  I think that if rents weren't such a drain, then yes, you could spend the money on other things and drive up GDP. SF currently has bad rents that are hurting the local economy. Money that just a few years ago was going to eating out, new cars, vacations, etc. is now going to a greedy landlord.
  - cheald 11y ago
    Monies spent on rent are already included in the GDP; they don't depress it.
    - asabjorn 11y ago
      I think he is alluding that high rent leads to wealth concentration. A lot of salaried people can invest a tiny bit in a much larger variety of interests than a few wealthy, or choose to work on something less profitable while still making rent. These investments by a lot of people will at some point lead to unexpected value creations that increase GDP. At least that is the tenet of a consumer and market economy.
      - Balgair 11y ago
        Bingo.
  - johnhaptiste 11y ago
    How are the landlords greedy?
- AndrewKemendo 11y ago
rmxt 11y ago
Going down into the rabbit hole, here is a JSON file [1] containing the county level data from the Economist. I think that this is the source of the data used by the author. [1] http://infographics.economist.com/2015/ASBTest/Land/js/countyData.js http://infographics.economist.com/2015/ASBTest/Land/js/count...
- tuckermi 11y ago
  The original post from Metrocosm is here: http://metrocosm.com/the-housing-value-of-every-county-in-the-u-s/ http://metrocosm.com/the-housing-value-of-every-county-in-th.... It provides a link to the source data from the Economist for the county-level data.
  - rmxt 11y ago
    Where is the link on that site? I didn't see one, which is why I went digging for it and turned up the link above.
    - vonmoltke 11y ago
      I finally found it in a different article linked via a pingback. The article above does not reference county-level data at all from what I can tell.
    - tuckermi 11y ago
      The metrocosm post links to this page on the Economist: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/04/daily-chart-2 http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/04/daily-c..., but unfortunately I am now hitting the paywall and don't have my subscription info handy :-/
- breck 11y ago
  Not quite JSON, but a find + replace using /\n([^\=])+\=/ + ",\n" and adding [] around the start and end will fix it
lubesGordi 11y ago
Why should land values be homogenous?
- VLM 11y ago
  General cultural belief in equality of both opportunity and outcome. Why should a real estate developer, and the whole horde of commissioned vampires that follow them, make 10x as much "over there" as "over here" when its the same product for the same people making mostly the same money at mostly the same jobs, just a different location? Various standard of living effects, the $3M I'm not spending on similar housing in CA is improving my standard of living and retirement plans far beyond folks living there, after all its not like CA pays much more (maybe 30% tops, but the cost of living is like 2 times higher) or that stuff ordered from Amazon costs people in CA any less. Is it fair that I get a 90th percentile national salary but because I don't live in CA I get to experience a roughly 95th percentile lifestyle locally? In post industrial world, once capital investments are worthless (capital as in giant factory, enormous milling machine, whatever its all scrap iron moved to China now) then the only worth is people, who can move around anywhere very quickly, yet they don't. This also impacts multi-site multi-office sized companies... the mantra for very small companies is everyone has to be at the same site in the same place in the same open office for 12 hours a day breathing each others coughs and sneezes because thats modern business, but how this interacts with multinationals is mysterious. I'll be honest, I have no idea how many offices my employer has, but I assure you its very large, I can't even be sure how many timezones... Work no longer requires physical plant investments, so where do / should people live if they no longer need to live in walking distance of the foundry or factory? If my boss lives and works at an office three states away, why do I need to drive 20 miles each day into an office to "work" "with" him? Its an aspect of economic belief that is in considerable turmoil where common beliefs when mashed up against observation create all kinds of strange cognitive dissonance.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    >General cultural belief in equality of both opportunity and outcome. Why should a real estate developer, and the whole horde of commissioned vampires that follow them, make 10x as much "over there" as "over here" when its the same product for the same people making mostly the same money at mostly the same jobs, just a different location? This might be a general subcultural belief. It's hardly generally accepted that equality of opportunity and outcome needs to be spread geographically spread out. In fact, I've never ever heard a serious case for it. >Is it fair that I get a 90th percentile national salary but because I don't live in CA I get to experience a roughly 95th percentile lifestyle locally? Fair in what sense? Without a definition of what you're considering to be fair, such questions are purely rhetorical.
nickhalfasleep 11y ago
It would be interesting to see areas cross referenced by job creation and relative affordability over time. Perhaps there are counties whose plans did provide growth without economic isolation?
kpennell 11y ago
I recommend following Kim-Mai Cutler's Twitter if you want to find interesting articles/takes on SF's housing crisis. https://twitter.com/kimmaicutler https://twitter.com/kimmaicutler I especially liked this Vox piece on what actually happens in the process of trying to build more housing in SF: http://www.vox.com/2015/6/15/8782235/san-francisco-housing-crisis?utm_campaign=vox&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter http://www.vox.com/2015/6/15/8782235/san-francisco-housing-c...
deleted 11y ago
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shasta 11y ago
I'm guessing you generate these by fixing three points along the boundary and then find the conformal map with the prescribed scale ratio at each point. Cool tech. If only this was a useful way to present the information. Color contours work much better.
deleted 11y ago
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rwhitman 11y ago
The conclusions from the article seemed a bit rushed. NYC and the Bay Area are pretty different when it comes to NIMBY policies and commutes from low income areas to high income.
- humanrebar 11y ago
  > NYC and the Bay Area are pretty different when it comes to NIMBY policies and commutes from low income areas to high income. How so? New York has plenty of NIMBY policies and commuters.
  - rwhitman 11y ago
    In NYC if you need a $1200 / mo 1BR apartment, sure Manhattan and north eastern Brooklyn aren't options but you still have places like Harlem, Queens, New Jersey, The Bronx, Staten Island all of which are under an hour commute from Manhattan (and with a rapid transit system that respects shift workers by running 24hrs a day). NYC has also been adding high density (albeit market rate) housing stock by the tens of thousands each year since 2013 or so. NIMBY-ism in Bay Area communities tends to be opposed increased density of any sort, but for the most part in NYC it's focused more on the boundaries of low income housing areas. East coast municipalities also have a lot more power to make mandates without the kind of broad community consensus that California cities have to abide by. So while residents can express opposition to a development plan and sometimes fight it in NYC, NIMBY advocates only carry weight when they're well equipped to battle city hall. Basically my point is that it's kind of a stretch to draw a conclusion that the same patterns are applicable to both housing markets. The New York metro and the Bay Area metro are very different places with very different policies and political landscapes. New York's inflated housing market has more to do with legacy policies from the Bloomberg administration and real estate speculation than too few units and NIMBY attitudes, which are a much bigger problem in SF
    - humanrebar 11y ago
      I don't want to get drawn into a long debate on it, but I think it's clear that NYC has competitive commute times to the Bay Area. Some even think it's worse: http://fortune.com/2015/05/20/these-american-cities-have-the-worst-commutes/ http://fortune.com/2015/05/20/these-american-cities-have-the... As far as NIMBY goes... I guess I was taking that more broadly. There isn't objections against density qua density, but projects are blocked because they block views. And projects are blocked because of what they'd do to the neighborhood (think highways and housing projects, Forest Hills as a popular counterexample). There also seems to be some empirical evidence that NYC is actually building housing slower than SF. http://newyorkyimby.com/2014/08/new-york-citys-is-americas-slowest-building-growing-big-city.html http://newyorkyimby.com/2014/08/new-york-citys-is-americas-s...
personjerry 11y ago
How can the random large splotches be translated into usefulness or meaning? The gif seems to imply that the areas are resized based on their value, that is SUPER not helpful. And the bucket $40b - $1tr?! Almost everything falls in that bucket! I don't think this map is of great value.
- seccess 11y ago
  I thought that bucket was large too, but then I realized it is only used for color, not size. So size of county is a more granular measure for housing measure, if that's what you're looking for. EDIT: I see, you're saying the areas are hard to compare. Good point!
tuckermi 11y ago
From the standpoint of at least one "user", I would have gotten a lot more value out of the animation if I could control it (e.g. with a slider). The pulsing back and forth makes it more difficult for me to pinpoint something of interest (e.g. a less expensive city like Detroit) and then track it.
transfire 11y ago
This situation is exacerbated by government cost of living increases which take location into account. (i.e. New Yorkers get bigger raises) It is also a consequence of the lack of a quality passenger rail system.
rufugee 11y ago
Where would one find the source data for property value analysis like this?
- maxerickson 11y ago
  It's discussed at one of the links: http://metrocosm.com/new-york-city-property-values-in-perspective/ http://metrocosm.com/new-york-city-property-values-in-perspe...
  - rufugee 11y ago
    Thanks!
birk5437 11y ago
It'd be nice to see the values adjusted for household income.
petercooper 11y ago
So the US mapped by property value looks like China.. :-)
vegabook 11y ago
Talk about big city distortion. I can't help thinking this trend is at its zenith. Where economic growth is faltering, we're seeing de-urbanization, and I would be long the yellow areas and short the red, because if there is any upset to the JIT way our cities operate (London for example is said to have a mere 4 days worth food in stock), for reasons of climate change or political upheaval or some other reason (no more opportunity in overcrowded cities?), the rural areas on which we still enormously depend for food and water may suddenly revalue upwards.
- boomshucka 11y ago
  Look outside the US. The US is not anywhere near as distorted as several asian countries and even mexico has a more extreme situation. Asia suggests it's not even close to it's zenith
iskander 11y ago
>Folks who can’t afford to live in those places don’t get to take advantage of those labor markets. The demand to live in these places is soaring, but the desire among incumbents to accommodate newcomers is low. Hence NIMBYism, high housing costs, severe inequality—the whole shebang. NYC has had a massive residential construction boom (see Williamsburg, downtown Brooklyn, Long Island City, &c). Almost all of the housing that goes up is luxury and seems to do very little to bring down the city's extreme housing costs. Maybe severe inequality is driven by factors other than just NIMBYism? The new condos seem to attract wealthy outsiders.
- briandear 11y ago
  Also NYC real estate is a very safe place to park cash. So many properties simply sit empty.
  - abandonliberty 11y ago
    I've always wanted a validation of this. Vancouver, Canada supposedly has the same problem. I have yet to see anything beyond circumstantial evidence.
jschulenklopper 11y ago
A well-known prior art of this idea -- and perhaps not even the first -- is Worldmapper at http://www.worldmapper.org/ http://www.worldmapper.org/. "The world as you have never seen before" contains striking world maps with their areas proportional to measures like population (even the population in AD 1), income, aircraft flights, toy exports, nuclear weapons, languages, people killed by floods and 600 more.
bobbles 11y ago
I'd love to see this for Australia, so much of the population is in like 5 cities it would just look like one of those plastic ball molecule model things
herdrick 11y ago
This appears to be housing value, not property value. So this is leaving off commercial property, which is probably usually proportionate to housing value, and agriculture land, which isn't.
ggchappell 11y ago
Interesting. BTW, there is a glitch in the animation. One city -- Lincoln, Nebraska, I think -- does not expand smoothly.
SilasX 11y ago
Awesome idea! If they could make it less ugly, I would prefer standardizing on this as a way to plot geographic data in certain cases. Graphing by land area often means spending huge chunks of the map where nothing (relevant to a particular purpose) happens, and cramming all the interesting stuff into a few places on the coasts. (Note all the hedges and caveats; I don't want to trivialize anyone's home here, but we definitely see this effect a lot.)
michaelochurch 11y ago
s/value/price/g
aflyax 11y ago
The fact that people don't all prefer everywhere equally is a "troubling inequality"? Property value is just a reflection of demand vs. supply. People want to live in some areas of the country more than in others, but, since the area is limited, the increased desire drives prices up. Is it really so shocking that more people would rather live in San Francisco than Alabama?
tripzilch 11y ago
While it looks extremely cool, is this really the best way to visualise this data? Every method of visualisation has its strengths and pitfalls. One of the pitfalls of this method is that it always looks rather dramatic, regardless of the data. Changing the shape of well-known things gives an uneasy feeling, regardless of what you map. Only data that is perfectly equal will not result in arbitrary distortions. The amount of distortion, magnitude of the local scale factor, is (or should be) a parameter of the visualisation, just like the decision of using a fiery red-yellow colour gradient. Linked source has a bit more info on what exactly they did. Which is simply substituting area for value in dollars. Only makes sense if the data somewhat follows a normal distribution. And I'm going to guess here, property value does not, at all. It's not even bounded. I'd have picked log value, because an exponential distribution for the value is a much more reasonable assumption. In case of a visualisation like this, I might actually decide to do something that is generally frowned upon: change the "origin" of the data. That is, add some constant value to the scale factors, to smooth out the severity of the distortions a little. If I were mapping the log value that wouldn't be necessary since it'd be equivalent to scaling dollar values to $1000 or $1M, etc. I'm trying to remember other examples where data was mapped to local scale in a non-shape preserving way. The only thing I can come up with was a sort of homunculus visualisation (I forget if it was just a drawing or actually made into a 3d clay statuette). It scaled our body parts roughly proportional to the volume of our brain dedicated to it. So you'd get a giant head with huge bulging eyes, etc. It looked weird, funny, still somewhat human/cartoonish. It showed things as "this is MUCH bigger than that" or "huh I didn't realise my tongue was that important". It wasn't a very clear visualisation, but I'm also hard pressed to come up with a better way to do it. In other words, this type of visualisation helps to show the data in a mostly qualitative way, not quantitative. And like the homunculus example, the data doesn't need to be super exact (we can't estimate relative area/volume of irregular shapes very well). But it looks cool.
galfarragem 11y ago
Supply and demand explain most of phenomenoms..

272 points by Thevet 11y ago

angersock 11y ago

It's kind of delightful watching NYC and SF in the gif inflate like gigantic pustules, cysts of real estate.

npkarnik 11y ago
This imagery makes me cringe while being spot on.
perfTerm 11y ago
Totally agree. It's easy to understand the implications but as a New Yorker it's hard not to be proud of your city in some ways. The UES being worth more than six states, it just boggles the mind to try to do the comparisons in your head.
tsiki 11y ago
I'm the most surprised how LA blows up, I thought it was quite a bit cheaper there than in SF/NY.
- refurb 11y ago
  LA county has almost 10M people living in it. SF has only 800K. If housing prices were equal, you'd expect LA to be 10 times the size (assuming an equal number of people per dwelling).
  - bagacrap 11y ago
    Yes, it's difficult to make a fair comparison across counties of such vastly different areas and populations. LA county includes far-off places like Palmdale which bring the average housing price way down. If you only looked at more central neighborhoods like Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, etc. you'd see distortion more akin to SF.
pcrh 11y ago
Perhaps because it's HN, the discussion is focused on SF and NY. But it's SoCal and Florida that surprised me.

deleted 11y ago

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davidw 11y ago

> The demand to live in these places is soaring, but the desire among incumbents to accommodate newcomers is low Sums up why we ended up in Bend, Oregon rather than Boulder, Colorado. In the latter, there is a small but significant group of people whose idea is that the area needs fewer jobs, not smarter housing. Edit: http://journal.dedasys.com/2015/06/18/boulder-colorado-vs-bend-oregon/ http://journal.dedasys.com/2015/06/18/boulder-colorado-vs-be... - more about our choice, for the curious.

stevesearer 11y ago
I love Bend! Even though there does seem to be a large influx of people in cities like SF, NYC, Austin, it seems like there is going to be an even larger exodus to smaller towns with sane costs of living in the coming years. It could also be my that my friends are all also finally entering the age where we want to buy homes, so these sorts of places are more appealing than ever.
ajross 11y ago
But if Boulder looked more like Denver (or Bend like Portland), you might not have made that choice, right? I'm guessing that you wanted those spots because they were semi-rural mountain cities with low population density. So even if you did move to Boulder, you'd probably oppose the construction of more high-density housing, right?
- davidw 11y ago
  I want to live someplace that's not too big in area, actually. Padova (where I've spent most of the past 15 years) is actually about the same size as Boulder, and has more than twice as many people, and I liked it just fine. What I want is to live within biking distance of where I work (10 minutes today - yay!), as well as be able to ride my road and mountain bikes, and have other outdoor stuff close by. In Boulder, to get something affordable, you need to live in one of the nearby towns, which means either an hour by bike, or a drive. Thus - for me - defeating the entire purpose of not living in a big city. I like density in other words, as long as the total population is not too high.
- 11y ago

jbattle 11y ago

Isn't this just the same as population density? I think there's an XKCD about this ... https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/

ticviking 11y ago
Roughly that's all it's showing. I'd be far more interested in the cartogram of land value/population. I suspect it would do much more to show some of the oddities that I'm sure exist. (i.e. Park City where a lot of people have really expensive vacation homes for skiing and don't live there.)
- iaw 11y ago
  I wonder if it should be normalized by population or population density. I think population density would show the most interesting market divergences.
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Not quite fair. Usually the xkcd syndrome is caused by plotting density of something that is intrinsic to people e.g. red hair. You end up with a heatmap of population. Here, land prices may be higher because more people are there bidding up the prices. But its not a direct property of the individuals. So the heatmap effect is indirect. Maybe not big point, but there it is.
- rmxt 11y ago
  Not to be pedantic, but I think your example is a little off the mark. Red hair isn't evenly distributed amongst all human populations. [1] A heatmap of population that would leave out most of China and India isn't quite a heatmap of population. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_hair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_hair
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Ok, talking US maps. Not many per-person maps that would work worldwide. What do you suggest for an example?

lordnacho 11y ago

How does the transformation work? It must be something that keeps the same borders regardless of what numbers you put in.

maxerickson 11y ago
It's up to the producer what properties of the original map are preserved. Wikipedia seems reasonable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartogram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartogram (Note especially the table of algorithms)

sgnelson 11y ago

I don't think I've ever seen a worse Cartogram. At least they did an animation to make it easier to understand, but a regular map with simple choropleth would be a thousand times better.

vegabook 11y ago
I think the animation turns it from one of the worst visualizations I have ever seen to one of the best. Its point is ultra clear when you see tiny red dots become huge swathes of overvalued crimson. Texas is amazing. Look how even intra-state, cities crush rural (for now). This is exhibit A on how animation can transform data visualization.

amenghra 11y ago

I wonder how things will change once self driving cars become the norm.

vvladymyrov 11y ago
and something like hyper loop will be built
- MarkPNeyer 11y ago
  if you can live in Fresno and work in SF with a half hour commute, expect huge changes here.
humanrebar 11y ago
You'd also need to reform the way school districting works. Well, I guess it could cause another round of suburban flight of the affluent, but the underlying problem would still be there.

trhway 11y ago

i kind of understand why people here frequently against high-density - the way it is done in US ends up with pretty unlivable space of towering boxes surrounded by concrete and asphalt (which is just obvious result of profit maximization while obeying height limits, etc.. While i think having a 200 stories tower surrounded by a park would be better than a bunch of 20-30 stories mid-towers sticking out of concrete/asphalt space)

Balgair 11y ago
I feel that sound is a big part of it too. European buildings tend to be a titch bit better about this, but American ones are downright terrible. I'd love to live in a apartment building for a long time, but the sound is what gets me. I can't play my sound as loud as I want, I can't stand other people ignoring that the walls are paper thin, I hear every toilet flush and chopping of carrots in the building. If you can find a way to really dampen the sound, then I feel a lot of people wouldn't mind the high density quite as much.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  This is honestly one of the big things that turns me off of high density here. I feel like I am losing privacy and having to walk on eggshells constantly to avoid pissing off my neighbors.
- cortesoft 11y ago
  That doesn't have to be the case... I live in a large apartment building on a high floor, and I rarely hear my neighbors. Good walls and smart design go a long way. Granted, this is a fairly new building that is a bit expensive, but my point is that noise problems in high rise buildings aren't inherent to all large buildings.
xxpor 11y ago
>While i think having a 200 stories tower surrounded by a park would be better than a bunch of 20-30 stories mid-towers sticking out of concrete/asphalt space) Ugh, please no. This is essentially what Le Corbusier advocated and the results are disasterous. It leads to all of the downsides of density. Lots of people taking up space, but none of the benefits (easy access to shopping, entertainment, school, work, etc.), because everything's so damn far away from each other.

lubesGordi 11y ago

> "The stubborn unwillingness of incumbent homeowners in highly productive places—namely San Francisco and New York City, which are barely visible on the land-area map, but dominate the housing value map—is a huge drain on the nation’s economy." Are they trying to say that if people didn't have to spend as much on housing then there would be greater GDP?

Balgair 11y ago
I think that if rents weren't such a drain, then yes, you could spend the money on other things and drive up GDP. SF currently has bad rents that are hurting the local economy. Money that just a few years ago was going to eating out, new cars, vacations, etc. is now going to a greedy landlord.
- cheald 11y ago
  Monies spent on rent are already included in the GDP; they don't depress it.
  - asabjorn 11y ago
    I think he is alluding that high rent leads to wealth concentration. A lot of salaried people can invest a tiny bit in a much larger variety of interests than a few wealthy, or choose to work on something less profitable while still making rent. These investments by a lot of people will at some point lead to unexpected value creations that increase GDP. At least that is the tenet of a consumer and market economy.
    - Balgair 11y ago
      Bingo.
- johnhaptiste 11y ago
  How are the landlords greedy?
AndrewKemendo 11y ago

rmxt 11y ago

Going down into the rabbit hole, here is a JSON file [1] containing the county level data from the Economist. I think that this is the source of the data used by the author. [1] http://infographics.economist.com/2015/ASBTest/Land/js/countyData.js http://infographics.economist.com/2015/ASBTest/Land/js/count...

tuckermi 11y ago
The original post from Metrocosm is here: http://metrocosm.com/the-housing-value-of-every-county-in-the-u-s/ http://metrocosm.com/the-housing-value-of-every-county-in-th.... It provides a link to the source data from the Economist for the county-level data.
- rmxt 11y ago
  Where is the link on that site? I didn't see one, which is why I went digging for it and turned up the link above.
  - vonmoltke 11y ago
    I finally found it in a different article linked via a pingback. The article above does not reference county-level data at all from what I can tell.
  - tuckermi 11y ago
    The metrocosm post links to this page on the Economist: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/04/daily-chart-2 http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/04/daily-c..., but unfortunately I am now hitting the paywall and don't have my subscription info handy :-/
breck 11y ago
Not quite JSON, but a find + replace using /\n([^\=])+\=/ + ",\n" and adding [] around the start and end will fix it

lubesGordi 11y ago

Why should land values be homogenous?

VLM 11y ago
General cultural belief in equality of both opportunity and outcome. Why should a real estate developer, and the whole horde of commissioned vampires that follow them, make 10x as much "over there" as "over here" when its the same product for the same people making mostly the same money at mostly the same jobs, just a different location? Various standard of living effects, the $3M I'm not spending on similar housing in CA is improving my standard of living and retirement plans far beyond folks living there, after all its not like CA pays much more (maybe 30% tops, but the cost of living is like 2 times higher) or that stuff ordered from Amazon costs people in CA any less. Is it fair that I get a 90th percentile national salary but because I don't live in CA I get to experience a roughly 95th percentile lifestyle locally? In post industrial world, once capital investments are worthless (capital as in giant factory, enormous milling machine, whatever its all scrap iron moved to China now) then the only worth is people, who can move around anywhere very quickly, yet they don't. This also impacts multi-site multi-office sized companies... the mantra for very small companies is everyone has to be at the same site in the same place in the same open office for 12 hours a day breathing each others coughs and sneezes because thats modern business, but how this interacts with multinationals is mysterious. I'll be honest, I have no idea how many offices my employer has, but I assure you its very large, I can't even be sure how many timezones... Work no longer requires physical plant investments, so where do / should people live if they no longer need to live in walking distance of the foundry or factory? If my boss lives and works at an office three states away, why do I need to drive 20 miles each day into an office to "work" "with" him? Its an aspect of economic belief that is in considerable turmoil where common beliefs when mashed up against observation create all kinds of strange cognitive dissonance.
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  >General cultural belief in equality of both opportunity and outcome. Why should a real estate developer, and the whole horde of commissioned vampires that follow them, make 10x as much "over there" as "over here" when its the same product for the same people making mostly the same money at mostly the same jobs, just a different location? This might be a general subcultural belief. It's hardly generally accepted that equality of opportunity and outcome needs to be spread geographically spread out. In fact, I've never ever heard a serious case for it. >Is it fair that I get a 90th percentile national salary but because I don't live in CA I get to experience a roughly 95th percentile lifestyle locally? Fair in what sense? Without a definition of what you're considering to be fair, such questions are purely rhetorical.

nickhalfasleep 11y ago

It would be interesting to see areas cross referenced by job creation and relative affordability over time. Perhaps there are counties whose plans did provide growth without economic isolation?

kpennell 11y ago

I recommend following Kim-Mai Cutler's Twitter if you want to find interesting articles/takes on SF's housing crisis. https://twitter.com/kimmaicutler https://twitter.com/kimmaicutler I especially liked this Vox piece on what actually happens in the process of trying to build more housing in SF: http://www.vox.com/2015/6/15/8782235/san-francisco-housing-crisis?utm_campaign=vox&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter http://www.vox.com/2015/6/15/8782235/san-francisco-housing-c...

deleted 11y ago

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shasta 11y ago

I'm guessing you generate these by fixing three points along the boundary and then find the conformal map with the prescribed scale ratio at each point. Cool tech. If only this was a useful way to present the information. Color contours work much better.

deleted 11y ago

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rwhitman 11y ago

The conclusions from the article seemed a bit rushed. NYC and the Bay Area are pretty different when it comes to NIMBY policies and commutes from low income areas to high income.

humanrebar 11y ago
> NYC and the Bay Area are pretty different when it comes to NIMBY policies and commutes from low income areas to high income. How so? New York has plenty of NIMBY policies and commuters.
- rwhitman 11y ago
  In NYC if you need a $1200 / mo 1BR apartment, sure Manhattan and north eastern Brooklyn aren't options but you still have places like Harlem, Queens, New Jersey, The Bronx, Staten Island all of which are under an hour commute from Manhattan (and with a rapid transit system that respects shift workers by running 24hrs a day). NYC has also been adding high density (albeit market rate) housing stock by the tens of thousands each year since 2013 or so. NIMBY-ism in Bay Area communities tends to be opposed increased density of any sort, but for the most part in NYC it's focused more on the boundaries of low income housing areas. East coast municipalities also have a lot more power to make mandates without the kind of broad community consensus that California cities have to abide by. So while residents can express opposition to a development plan and sometimes fight it in NYC, NIMBY advocates only carry weight when they're well equipped to battle city hall. Basically my point is that it's kind of a stretch to draw a conclusion that the same patterns are applicable to both housing markets. The New York metro and the Bay Area metro are very different places with very different policies and political landscapes. New York's inflated housing market has more to do with legacy policies from the Bloomberg administration and real estate speculation than too few units and NIMBY attitudes, which are a much bigger problem in SF
  - humanrebar 11y ago
    I don't want to get drawn into a long debate on it, but I think it's clear that NYC has competitive commute times to the Bay Area. Some even think it's worse: http://fortune.com/2015/05/20/these-american-cities-have-the-worst-commutes/ http://fortune.com/2015/05/20/these-american-cities-have-the... As far as NIMBY goes... I guess I was taking that more broadly. There isn't objections against density qua density, but projects are blocked because they block views. And projects are blocked because of what they'd do to the neighborhood (think highways and housing projects, Forest Hills as a popular counterexample). There also seems to be some empirical evidence that NYC is actually building housing slower than SF. http://newyorkyimby.com/2014/08/new-york-citys-is-americas-slowest-building-growing-big-city.html http://newyorkyimby.com/2014/08/new-york-citys-is-americas-s...

personjerry 11y ago

How can the random large splotches be translated into usefulness or meaning? The gif seems to imply that the areas are resized based on their value, that is SUPER not helpful. And the bucket $40b - $1tr?! Almost everything falls in that bucket! I don't think this map is of great value.

seccess 11y ago
I thought that bucket was large too, but then I realized it is only used for color, not size. So size of county is a more granular measure for housing measure, if that's what you're looking for. EDIT: I see, you're saying the areas are hard to compare. Good point!

tuckermi 11y ago

From the standpoint of at least one "user", I would have gotten a lot more value out of the animation if I could control it (e.g. with a slider). The pulsing back and forth makes it more difficult for me to pinpoint something of interest (e.g. a less expensive city like Detroit) and then track it.

transfire 11y ago

This situation is exacerbated by government cost of living increases which take location into account. (i.e. New Yorkers get bigger raises) It is also a consequence of the lack of a quality passenger rail system.

rufugee 11y ago

Where would one find the source data for property value analysis like this?

maxerickson 11y ago
It's discussed at one of the links: http://metrocosm.com/new-york-city-property-values-in-perspective/ http://metrocosm.com/new-york-city-property-values-in-perspe...
- rufugee 11y ago
  Thanks!

birk5437 11y ago

It'd be nice to see the values adjusted for household income.

petercooper 11y ago

So the US mapped by property value looks like China.. :-)

vegabook 11y ago

Talk about big city distortion. I can't help thinking this trend is at its zenith. Where economic growth is faltering, we're seeing de-urbanization, and I would be long the yellow areas and short the red, because if there is any upset to the JIT way our cities operate (London for example is said to have a mere 4 days worth food in stock), for reasons of climate change or political upheaval or some other reason (no more opportunity in overcrowded cities?), the rural areas on which we still enormously depend for food and water may suddenly revalue upwards.

boomshucka 11y ago
Look outside the US. The US is not anywhere near as distorted as several asian countries and even mexico has a more extreme situation. Asia suggests it's not even close to it's zenith

iskander 11y ago

>Folks who can’t afford to live in those places don’t get to take advantage of those labor markets. The demand to live in these places is soaring, but the desire among incumbents to accommodate newcomers is low. Hence NIMBYism, high housing costs, severe inequality—the whole shebang. NYC has had a massive residential construction boom (see Williamsburg, downtown Brooklyn, Long Island City, &c). Almost all of the housing that goes up is luxury and seems to do very little to bring down the city's extreme housing costs. Maybe severe inequality is driven by factors other than just NIMBYism? The new condos seem to attract wealthy outsiders.

briandear 11y ago
Also NYC real estate is a very safe place to park cash. So many properties simply sit empty.
- abandonliberty 11y ago
  I've always wanted a validation of this. Vancouver, Canada supposedly has the same problem. I have yet to see anything beyond circumstantial evidence.

jschulenklopper 11y ago

A well-known prior art of this idea -- and perhaps not even the first -- is Worldmapper at http://www.worldmapper.org/ http://www.worldmapper.org/. "The world as you have never seen before" contains striking world maps with their areas proportional to measures like population (even the population in AD 1), income, aircraft flights, toy exports, nuclear weapons, languages, people killed by floods and 600 more.

bobbles 11y ago

I'd love to see this for Australia, so much of the population is in like 5 cities it would just look like one of those plastic ball molecule model things

herdrick 11y ago

This appears to be housing value, not property value. So this is leaving off commercial property, which is probably usually proportionate to housing value, and agriculture land, which isn't.

ggchappell 11y ago

Interesting. BTW, there is a glitch in the animation. One city -- Lincoln, Nebraska, I think -- does not expand smoothly.

SilasX 11y ago

Awesome idea! If they could make it less ugly, I would prefer standardizing on this as a way to plot geographic data in certain cases. Graphing by land area often means spending huge chunks of the map where nothing (relevant to a particular purpose) happens, and cramming all the interesting stuff into a few places on the coasts. (Note all the hedges and caveats; I don't want to trivialize anyone's home here, but we definitely see this effect a lot.)

michaelochurch 11y ago

s/value/price/g

aflyax 11y ago

The fact that people don't all prefer everywhere equally is a "troubling inequality"? Property value is just a reflection of demand vs. supply. People want to live in some areas of the country more than in others, but, since the area is limited, the increased desire drives prices up. Is it really so shocking that more people would rather live in San Francisco than Alabama?

tripzilch 11y ago

While it looks extremely cool, is this really the best way to visualise this data? Every method of visualisation has its strengths and pitfalls. One of the pitfalls of this method is that it always looks rather dramatic, regardless of the data. Changing the shape of well-known things gives an uneasy feeling, regardless of what you map. Only data that is perfectly equal will not result in arbitrary distortions. The amount of distortion, magnitude of the local scale factor, is (or should be) a parameter of the visualisation, just like the decision of using a fiery red-yellow colour gradient. Linked source has a bit more info on what exactly they did. Which is simply substituting area for value in dollars. Only makes sense if the data somewhat follows a normal distribution. And I'm going to guess here, property value does not, at all. It's not even bounded. I'd have picked log value, because an exponential distribution for the value is a much more reasonable assumption. In case of a visualisation like this, I might actually decide to do something that is generally frowned upon: change the "origin" of the data. That is, add some constant value to the scale factors, to smooth out the severity of the distortions a little. If I were mapping the log value that wouldn't be necessary since it'd be equivalent to scaling dollar values to $1000 or $1M, etc. I'm trying to remember other examples where data was mapped to local scale in a non-shape preserving way. The only thing I can come up with was a sort of homunculus visualisation (I forget if it was just a drawing or actually made into a 3d clay statuette). It scaled our body parts roughly proportional to the volume of our brain dedicated to it. So you'd get a giant head with huge bulging eyes, etc. It looked weird, funny, still somewhat human/cartoonish. It showed things as "this is MUCH bigger than that" or "huh I didn't realise my tongue was that important". It wasn't a very clear visualisation, but I'm also hard pressed to come up with a better way to do it. In other words, this type of visualisation helps to show the data in a mostly qualitative way, not quantitative. And like the homunculus example, the data doesn't need to be super exact (we can't estimate relative area/volume of irregular shapes very well). But it looks cool.

galfarragem 11y ago

Supply and demand explain most of phenomenoms..