Wash U Economist attacks Northside plan numbers

One of the more interesting news articles yesterday was that the chair of our Economics department here was being called upon for a court case against Paul McKee's redevelopment efforts on the northside of the city. The faculty member, Michele Boldrin, kept calling it "pie in the sky" with his best argument being about the 6,000 single family homes with an average price of about $450,000. He asks "Where are these 6,000 homeowners who can afford $450,000 homes going to come from?" That is a very good question! Personally I believe redevelopment on the northside of the city would be fantastic, but only if it is done realistically. That is a lot of fairly high priced homes to be for sale in the city. If there were 6,000 of those homes out in the county it would still be hard to sell so many of them, but in the city it would be next to impossible. In fact I checked one of my favorite local housing websites, stlouis.blockshopper.com. If you look at the sales statistics there and look at the year 2009, a total of 6,000 homes would cover all the homes sales in Florissant (incorporated and unincorporated), O'Fallon, St Peters, St. Charles, University City and Ferguson combined in 2009. That's a lot of homes! If you look at sales by region in West County, for example, the total in 2009 for all of West County was 2500 houses sold. So McKee wants to build more than twice as many homes as were sold in all of West County in the past year.

Other interesting numbers arise from the 2010 Winter Olympics. During the parade of nations during the opening ceremonies it was interesting to hear how many athletes were competing from each country. I was curious if there would be more from the USA or from host Canada, and the USA ended up being the most at 224 (Canada has 218). You can find the full numeric count at the Yahoo! Olympics for each country. You can tell the US media is trying to demonstrate how wonderful Team USA is doing by reporting the number of medals it has won, but how can smaller countries with just a handful of athletes possibly compete against the 224 from Team USA? Perhaps we should take the number of medals earned and divide by the number of athletes too, so that Team USA's current 14 medals give a numeric ratio of 14/224 = 0.0625 (medals per athlete). In comparison Germany's 10 medals give a ratio of 10/166 = 0.0602 and France's 7 medals give a ratio of 7/131 = 0.0534. The leader in medals per athlete would be South Korea who has 5 medals with only 46 athletes for a ratio of 5/46 = 0.109. It helps that they do not have a big hockey team increasing their athlete count (only one medal possible per hockey team!) They have also bragged how there are over 2600 athletes from 82 countries, but the top 10 countries (USA, Canada, Russia, Switzerland, Germany, France, Italy, Norway, China and Japan) account for over 1500 of the athletes.

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