Every two years the Community Foundation pulls together and overview of trends in Boulder County, the latest report just came out. You can find plenty of topics in there to seed this blog. Here are reports in the Louisville Times, the version of it by the Camera, Times-Call and Jerry Lewis' editorial in the Boulder County Business Report.
How about these two stats that touch on our open space debate:
84 percent of county housing is priced at more than $200,000 and 65% of Boulder County land is publicly owned. That's not a misprint.
10 percent of local residents do not have health insurance. Nearly 70 percent of the local workforce commutes alone to work. There are aging demographics, a rising disparity between wealthy and poorer residents and only 5% of us regularly use public transportation.
So what should be brought up in each community's Council election debates and forums?
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4 comments:
Many stats to chew on in this report. Lafayette had the lowest percentage of residents who also work in the community (10 percent), compared with Erie (35 percent) and Longmont (44 percent), both of which are higher than Boulder (32 percent). Can that be accurate for Erie, and, if so, where are all those people working?
The open space stat is not shocking, considering that most of the western county is federal land...
As to the stat with 84% of housing valued above $200,000, I wonder how that stat would change if you took the City of Boulder out of the mix. I also wonder if a multimillion dollar apartment complex is counted as a multimillion dollar property, regardless of the cost to rent one unit - there are many ways that the valuation stat fails to elicit the exact situation with housing costs.
I'd also note that $200,000 may seem like a shockingly high price to some, but it is well below the approximately $350,000 threshold that is currently considered "market affordable" by Lafayette's rules. And, really, you just can't build for much cheaper than that with construction materials getting exponentially more expensive each year. Not unless larger multifamily buildings are encouraged.
After reading deeply into the report, I’ve a fair amount of mistrust with the numbers.
1,200 homeless children, (the schools say it could be higher), and yet deeper into the report they claim there are 1,000 total homeless people in the county. Huh?
The Erie number for working in the same community is suspect, like Alex pointed out. 35%? Unless, of course, many Erie residents work at home. The report claims 10% of County residents work at home, is it possible it’s 3 times that rate in Erie?
In charts purporting to show the sources, by sector, of greenhouse gas emissions, there are 2 “Industrial” sectors listed, one accounting for 11% and the other 5%. Which is it? And, cement manufacturing is blamed for 5% of those emissions, the 4th largest source in the entire county. Difficult to believe.
Statements like “Studies suggest that outdoor irrigation accounts for up to 58% of residential water use…” are not supported with facts in the report. Unsupported statements like this indicate the report is produced with some underlying agenda, as they lead readers to “logical” conclusions, with no apparent basis in fact.
Also from the report – “Ten percent of licensed BVSD teachers were identified as people of color in 2006/2007 (up from 8% almost 10 years ago), a rate far below the nearly 23% of students of color. Similarly, 14% of students are Latino but only 7% of teachers.” This statement is presented to prove a failing on the part of the schools to attract teachers to reflect their pupils, as if it’s a given that teachers of color are better at teaching students of color, an arguable assumption.
Overall, the report is interesting, but reads like a propaganda brochure from a think tank. Lots of stats, but far too many assumptive statements. I would’ve, probably naively so, expected something more neutral from a community survey.
C'mom, fellow bloggers. You can do better than that.
Council members were mailed the 2005 version. So this is an update from that.
Better than what? at what?
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