This will be our last post of 2016, as such we wanted to reflect upon the topics we have covered on Present Value this past year and share with our wonderful readers our Top 10 posts of the year. It has been a great year with many compelling contributions from Principals, Senior Advisors, Directors, Analysts and Interns alike.
2016 has been a busy year all around, for the Nation with the Presidential Elections, for Philly having hosted the Democratic National Convention and for ESI launching Community Data Analytics and a joint venture with Roubini ThoughtLab. All of which Present Value has featured, along with much more! Below is a word cloud of our blogs top used words throughout the year, as you can see we are city loving urbanites at heart!
And without further ado, below is the list of our Top 10 blog posts of the year!:
1. Philadelphia Housing Index: Neighborhoods and Heat Maps
This year we remodeled our Housing Price Index, a free interactive tool that allows users to cross reference Philadelphia real-estate throughout all of the city’s neighborhoods, this blog post highlights the updates in the remodeled tool and explains all of the new versions features.
In this post, Jonathan Tannen explores the trends and technical aspects of gentrification and movement in the various neighborhoods of Philadelphia.
3. The Impact of Race/Ethnicity and College Major on Earnings
Former ESI intern, Camille Choe, wrote this piece outlining the intricacies of the relationship between race/ethnicity and choices of college major and thus the adverse impact on earnings.
Senior Vice President and Principal Lee Huang co-authored this post along with Michael Banks, Jamie Gauthier, Peter Gonzales, Jennifer Rodrigues, and Narasimha Shenoy. The piece focuses on the ways neighborhoods and their local amenities still matter despite an increasing digital dependency.
5. A New Technique for More Accurate Impact Assessment
In this post Senior Advisor Dr. Sidney Wong examined the existing disconnect that occurs when researching for impact assessment studies and offered solutions by highlighting the benefits of a new technique that improves accuracy.
6. The Economic Case for Fixing Blight
President and Principal Richard Voith and former Research Analyst Caitlin Furio wrote this piece on the economic benefits of fixing real-estate blight and vacancy in urban areas using various neighborhoods of Baltimore as examples.
7. Generational Change in Car Usage
ESI Director Ethan Conner-Ross researched and wrote this piece on the cross-generational decline of car dependent transportation throughout Philadelphia and the city’s 5 major counties.
8. Philadelphia Housing Index: Back to School
ESI Director Jonathan Tannen added High School and Elementary School data to the remodeled Philadelphia Housing Index (see blog post mentioned above). With this addition, schools of various districts and neighborhoods can be compared side by side, in this post Tannen explains the research behind the new feature.
9. One Way (of Many) to be a World-Class City
ESI Principal and President Stephen Mullin outlines the strategy, methodology, and benchmarks needed to become a world class city using Philadelphia as an example. Steve also highlights the pitfalls that present themselves along the way.
10. The View from Ridge: Neighborhood Change Along Philadelphia’s Ridge Avenue
Senior Research Analyst Alexandra San Roman wrote this post focusing on the developmental changes in Philadelphia’s Ridge Avenue neighborhood and the socioeconomic impacts they have had thus far.
We will be back in January with bigger and better posts! And with the New Year come new blog topics, if you are interested in contributing to Present Value please contact our Business Development and Marketing Director, Benedicte Clouet.