“Powelton Village has every reason to top the list of Philadelphia’s most desirable neighborhoods. Let’s start with location. As the first residential area west of Center City, it is a brisk 15-minute walk from downtown. It boasts some of the best transit connections in town, a rich stock of Italianate villas and Victorian twins, and postcard views of the skyline. Geographically, it occupies the same urban niche as Georgetown and Cambridge.”

And yet, she writes, it’s not nearly as desirable as Georgetown and Cambridge. The reason, she writes, is that Powelton Village is dominated by renter-occupied housing, mostly transient college students, who don’t maintain the houses or develop the community. A look at PolicyMap shows that she’s absolutely right—the rental rate in Powelton is 91%:


Georgetown shows significantly lower rental rates, ranging from 32% to only as high as 57%:

Saffron writes that the solution to this issue is better zoning. You can read the whole article here.

“Here, if you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw. There it is, that’s a straw, you see? You watching? And my straw reaches acroooooooss the room, and starts to drink your milkshake… I… drink… your… milkshake! I drink it up!”
-There Will Be Blood

However, when it comes to home heating, that oil goes through a straw acroooooooss the country, and it’s the Northeast that drinks the oil:


So to your list of Northeastern stereotypes, you can add something new: Northeasterners use oil or kerosene to heat their homes more than anywhere else in the country.

Here are the top ten oil producers (by employment) and consumers (by household) in the United States:

This month the creative assets mapping team took our project to local stakeholders here in Philadelphia for feedback and discussion. As we begin to coalesce around the tool’s data, design, and features, we decided it was critical to get input early on from the tool’s community of potential users.

Our conversations were dynamic, with ideas ranging from generating Philly neighborhood arts and culture profiles to using the tool to locate new creative firms or target potential cultural audiences. In addition to use cases, we identified many of the datasets that users want to have at their fingertips, and even located sources for much of this information. We are particularly excited about the willingness of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) specialists from the City to make data available to us to share with the public through our creative assets mapping platform.

Altogether we hosted four user-group sessions on November 3rd and 4th, each centered around a distinct type of user: artistic and creative programming, tourism and marketing opportunities through cultural assets, real-estate and economic development applications, and cultural funders and capacity building. Each of the sessions was unique in its focus, but many common themes and ideas permeated all the sessions including: using the tool to facilitate relationship building and data sharing; using it to evaluate the impact of policies and programs over time; and using the tool to help make better decisions either through advocacy or in investment decisions.

Most of all, we are thrilled at the level of anticipation that greeted our presentation of the data we have already and the analytical opportunities afforded by interactive online mapping. As we move now into a more intensive development phase of the tool, we will continue to seek input from these voices as well as Philadelphia’s broader cultural and creative community.

You can nominate PolicyMap at : http://is.gd/6w80va

Please nominate PolicyMap everyday and ask all your social networks to do the same. Nominations close Dec 13th.

TRANSCRIPT
Listen to the full audio broadcast of this story here

Kai Ryssdal: The recession is, officially, over. A lot of experts and some economic indicators agree on that. But the experts and the indicators don’t know what they’re talking about.

In California’s Inland Empire, that’s definitely true. The Inland Empire’s out in in the desert east of L.A. with 4.3 million people living there, nearly double the population of Nevada. In the decades before the recession, it was the place families went to to pursue the American Dream. There were cheap suburban houses with two-car garages and good jobs in construction and warehousing and trucking. There were so many jobs, in fact, that the unemployment rate fell below 5 percent. Now, it’s triple that in many towns, and the dream has turned into something of a nightmare.

Today, in the first of a two-part series, Marketplace’s Mitchell Hartman takes a trip to to see what the future might hold.

Click Here to read the complete transcript by Mitchell Hartman on Marketplace published 11/21/2011.

Map: Track your state’s unemployment rate through the years

Map: Track your metro area’s unemployment rate through the years

The Community Impact Award is bestowed each year “to dedicated compliance professionals and their institutions,” to honor “outstanding and innovative efforts in furtherance of the goals of the Community Reinvestment Act.” The Award also is intended to encourage innovative community lending and to provide the financial industry with examples of superb programs that have made a large impact on underserved communities.

Click Here to read the full press release on MarketWatch published on 11/17/2011.

Area clinic and hospital resources, capacity issues highlighted

Concerned with areas in Palm Beach County that are at risk for poor health due to lack of access to health care facilities, the Florida Public Health Institute and the Community Health Network, with funding from the Quantum Foundation, has created an interactive mapping tool to clearly identify areas of need. The new interactive map was unveiled at the Community Health Network meeting on Wednesday, October 26.

This web based tool will highlight clinics and healthcare facilities by location and cross reference them with several demographic and other indicators to tell the “visual” story about the county’s health needs and resources.

“This online, interactive map is the first of its kind for the Palm Beach County healthcare community,” said Greta Von Unruh, Executive Director of Economic Development Resource Institute and project consultant. “This is a critical time for health care planning, and thanks to the generous funding made available by the Quantum Foundation this information is available for anyone interested in health care delivery issues to access for free.”

Powered by the nation’s premiere community mapping initiative, PolicyMap, this interactive resource will eventually feature up to fifteen sets of data including information on patients served, locations of clinics on bus routes, population data against known patient information such as age, disease treated and type of insurance used to pay for services. The information can be viewed by municipal and political boundaries, zip codes and census tracks. In addition, the Florida Public Health Institute will now be able to quickly produce data-rich reports and fact-based strategic plans for customized geographic areas in Palm Beach County based on even more layers of information drawn from PolicyMap’s national database.

The map can be accessed on Palm Beach County’s new community data and information web site www.pbccounts.org and on the Florida Public Health Institute’s website: www.flphi.org.

Click Here to read the full article by Liz Locke of YourPBC.org on 11/16/2011.

The Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED), with support from the U.S. Department of the Treasury and in partnership with the San Francisco Office of Financial Empowerment, the National League of Cities and the New America Foundation, has launched a new-and-improved Bank On website. JoinBankOn.org uses PolicyMap (http://www.policymap.com) as its platform to offer a look into communities to see if banking resources are available.

JoinBankOn.org is the online home for the national community of Bank On initiatives, which are locally-led coalitions of government agencies, financial institutions and community organizations working to promote financial access for low- and moderate-income Americans.

Among the features offered on the site is Research Your Community (http://webtools.joinbankon.org/community/search), a tool that offers estimates and maps of the number of unbanked and underbanked households in your local community. This new tool allows users to:
• Download estimates of unbanked and underbanked households at the state, county, city, MSA and census tract levels.
• Download supplementary demographic data on at-risk populations.
• Print customized reports on financially underserved populations.

The interactive maps that are part of the website are powered by PolicyMap, an online data analysis and mapping tool (http://www.policymap.com/online-mapping-tools/index.html). PolicyMap allows users to generate maps, tables and reports based on over 15,000 data indicators. Using Geographic Information Systems (http://www.policymap.com/) technology, PolicyMap offers key social and economic statistics for U.S. communities down to a neighborhood level. PolicyMap also offers custom widgets – embeddable versions of the site – to organizations like Bank On interested in tracking a particular issue.

“PolicyMap made it simple for us to share the extensive data we have on the unbanked and underbanked populations in America,” explained Kasey Wiedrich, Senior Program Manager at CFED. “PolicyMap not only offered us a quick and easy platform to map our own data, but its embeddable interactive maps, allows us to share these maps with any user across the country. Access to this data is particularly important to anyone working to develop effective strategies aimed at increasing financial access for those who may be living outside of the financial mainstream.”

About TRF and PolicyMap
PolicyMap (www.policymap.com) is a service of The Reinvestment Fund, a nonprofit leader in financing neighborhood revitalization. As a fully web-based interactive map tool, PolicyMap empowers decision makers with better access to credible market and demographic data in an easy-to-use geographic information system. www.policymap.com

The Reinvestment Fund documents the effects of creative activity and cultural engagement in Philadelphia.

The Reinvestment Fund (TRF), in collaboration with the Social Impact of the Arts Project at the University of Pennsylvania and the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy, continues to examine the ways creative activity and cultural engagement play a role in neighborhood economic development and what we call the Architecture of Community.

“Given their interrelated webs of universities, cultural institutions, design firms and culturally diverse population, all of which help attract creative workers and spur creative content, cities – like Philadelphia – are naturally positioned to take advantage of this sector. Yet, if we develop a more comprehensive view of how creative activity, particularly community-based arts and culture, interacts within cities, we can stimulate even more integrated and effective action in the development of distressed urban places.”

Creativity and Neighborhood Development, Strategies for Community Development, Jeremy Nowak

With generous funding from ArtPlace and the National Endowment for the Arts, this partnership will further its research and produce a web tool with access to a robust, spatial database that can inform planning, marketing, policy development and public investment strategies in Philadelphia.

Read the rest of the Creative Assets Maps release and see an interactive map on the ArtPlace website here.