Search Results

The U.S. poverty line is a notoriously bad measure of economic hardship. First, it’s stingy: in 2003 a family of four could earn as little as $18,401 and still not be considered impoverished. Obviously, many families who are well above the poverty line still find it impossible to make ends meet. Second, it’s inflexible: the poverty line is the same in Spokane as it is in Manhattan, even though the...

Most physical health trends have improved over the past half century. But mental health trends have diverged radically, according to this article (pdf) (Summarized in my previous post.) For reasons that no one really understands (social isolation? pollution? competitive individualism? media saturation? secularism? modern conveniences?), as societies around the world have grown richer at a galloping pace, their mental health has plummeted. Depression rates in the United States have climbed...

The decline in local farming and the rise of the long-distance tomato are familiar stories. But a new report on the western Montana “foodshed” adds compelling new data on the local impacts of our increasingly outsourced food production. Using a community-driven research method, University of Montana graduate students and faculty gathered census and public-record data and used it to track patterns in the local food and farming system. They found...

This fascinating article in Harvard Magazine summarizes some of the latest research on obesity and inactivity-one of the most important health trends of the decade in Cascadia. (Check if you’re too heavy on the calculator here.) Some snippets to convince you to read it: Two-thirds of American adults are overweight, and half of these are obese. . . [and] up to 80 percent of American adults should weigh less than...

I ran across this the other day from researchers with the U.S. National Institutes of Health (emphasis added). Based on research showing that uninsured adults are 25 percent more likely to die than insured adults, we estimate that about 18,000 Americans age 25 to 64 may die prematurely each year because they lack insurance coverage and access to the effective health care that it can provide. Now, in one way...

An excellent article in today’s Seattle Times documents the sundry carrots and sticks that businesses use to reduce solo driving. Few things are less sexy but more powerful than parking—a point Sightline has been making for some time. (This op-ed ticked off Rush Limbaugh, despite the fact that our argument—that parking should be deregulated—comes straight from the free-market playbook.) The federal tax code should stop subsidizing parking and local governments...

 (This post is part of a series.) It appears that a growing number of Seattle residents are questioning whether the Alaskan Way Viaduct—the elevated highway that hugs the Seattle waterfront through downtown—ought to be torn down and replaced with…well…nothing at all. There has been a lot written about this in the past few years—especially recently. This is not nearly as radical an idea as it might seem. Portland removed a...

Thirty-five years ago—the year before the first Earth Day—many of the major environmental problems of the day seemed so enormous, pervasive, and intractable, that progress must have looked impossible. More than a hundred million highly polluting cars filled the highways. Tens of thousands of industrial and municipal facilities, from city sewer systems to factories, spewed pollution unchecked into air and water. Persistent and frighteningly hazardous pesticides were the norm. And...

Discouraging, but far from unexpected. In an excellent post, blogger Kevin Drum summarizes the dilemma of making transit work in sparsely populated suburbs, using data from Joel Garreau’s Edge City. According to Garreau, the “floor-to-area” ratio (or FAR)—the ratio of the floor space of buildings to the land on which they sit—is highly predictive of transportation conditions. At an average ratio of 1.0 (that is, where the total floorspace of...

This is definitely a trend worth watching. A slow job market is gradually discouraging people from even seeking work. This trend is troubling in itself, but also creates confusion about how to measure the actual conditions of the job market. To count as “unemployed” in government surveys, you have to be actively looking for a job—so people who stop looking for work don’t count as unemployed. This means that if...