Piton site holds a trove of Baker demographics

Submitted by garbanzito on Mon, 09/28/2009 - 19:36

the Piton Foundation, a private foundation benefiting communities, publishes detailed demographics of the Baker neighborhood

the site is full of useful and interesting facts on housing, economics, safety and families, plus some powerful tools for exploring the data; for example the "map" links on each data row load a geographic comparison of Baker with surrounding Denver neighborhoods on the relevant statistic

one of the most telling statistics is the birth rate; Latino and non-Latino white births together account for over 90% of Baker's babies; while Baker's overall birth rate is dropping dramatically

the proportion of Latino to non-Latino white births is also changing dramatically

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interesting - alternate views on the data

Submitted by greg on Tue, 09/29/2009 - 07:42.

My impression is that these graphs on the piton site are scaled to be dramatic and while their data tools are impressive I couldn't get them to show graphs with the context of another neighborhood.

I uploaded two alternate takes on the data. First, the nominal data plotted with Denver as a whole:

And the percent change year on year

Especially the percent change seems to show that Baker is a bit more volatile than Denver as a whole and that while there was a big drop in the 2004/05/06 years that 2007 seems to have picked up again quite a bit. Given the specific insight that the last 4 years showed a big drop in Latino births I wonder what the underlying social changes might have been that caused the change.

These alternate data and graphs are on the site as an OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet (OpenOffice.org is a free "business productivity" suite including a spreadsheet program similar to Microsoft's Excel).

thanks for the alternate

Submitted by garbanzito on Tue, 09/29/2009 - 12:17.

thanks for the alternate graphs -- i think they show the downward trend in Baker birth numbers, while variable, started in 2001; note that there has been a small decrease in Baker's population during these years:

so the birth rate trend is not quite as pronounced as the birth number trend; in contrast, Denver's population has increased about 25% since 1990:

yet Denver's birth numbers increase is not so high -- so birth rate per 1000 is declining city-wide ... (again, these are not zero-based graphs, click on them to see more detail including the numbers on the scale)

yes, the underlying social changes were my main point ... i suspect the data reflect a drop in the proportion of Latino population in Baker, and the non-Latino white births reflect both an increase in non-Latino residents and an increase rate of non-Latino child-bearing; Piton doesn't have enough data to draw these conclusions, though, so i presented the raw birth data

the graphs on the Piton site are auto-generated after choosing basic criteria; i don't think they are intentionally exaggerated; it may just be the default configuration of the drawing tool they're using; i've added a reminder on the main pages for those charts that they are not zero-based

(i found i could compare neighborhoods on one graph by requesting data for those neighborhoods, then clicking the "By Indicator" tab on the search results)