What's New - September 2003

Site of the Month: Windows on Urban Poverty

September's Site of the Month represents another significant step forward in the effort to make data presentation on the web more transparent and meaningful.  Windows on Urban Poverty (www.urbanpoverty.net) provides a powerful and easy-to-use interface for tracing out changes in the pattern of concentrated poverty in the nation's metropolitan areas.  

A companion resource to Paul Jargosky's book on the reversal of urban poverty concentrations ("Stunning Progress, Hidden Problems: Concentrated Poverty in the 1990s," Brookings Institution), this website allows interested researchers, advocates, and GIS neophytes to readily map  poverty, demographic, and housing trends at the census tract level from 1970 to 2000, using Census data.  

The user interface is a simplified GIS system; you can zoom into particular states or metropolitan areas from a U.S. map, and view data at the census tract level.  Map color coding lets you examine the level of poverty in years between 1970 and 2000, and the change in poverty rates at the tract level for ten-year periods.  You can also map data for race, ethnicity, population density, housing value and housing age.
www.urbanpoverty.net

Silicon Valley Dynamics

The Public Policy Institute of California has just published a very detailed study of the development of the Silicon Valley, tracing the role of individual firms in the nation's premiere high-tech region.  "High-Tech Start-Ups and Industry Dynamics in Silicon Valley" by PPIC's Junfu Zhang, examines the sources of startup firms, and shows that many of the critical competitive advantages of the region stem from its ability to quickly assemble talented teams and get them needed funding.  New firms arrange venture capital investment five months faster than firms in other regions, giving them a decisive head start in reaching the marketplace.  Over the decade of the 1990s, the region's ability to continuously generate new firms lead to continuing growth.  

Of interest to economic developers, and in spite of the continuing pilgrimages of industrial recruiters to the imagined happy hunting grounds of disaffected Silicon Valley firms, relatively few firms move out of the region, and fewer still out of California.  Over the past decade, some 1,500 high tech businesses left Silicon Valley, an impressive number but less than 3 percent of the region's total high tech base.  And these were offset in part by nearly 900 high tech businesses that moved into the Valley.  For a table listing the primary destinations of firms leaving the region, see page 74 of Zhang's report, which shows the top ten destinations of firms leaving the Silicon Valley between 1990 and 2001.  But don't settle for this one detail; for an insightful look at the dynamics of high tech, read the whole report, at:
http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/R_703JZR.pdf

Small Business State Profiles:  2003

Echoing the PPIC report's findings on a national scale, the latest data released by the Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy highlights the role of small and startup businesses in job creation.  The SBA's latest Small Business State Profiles for 2003 report the job creation impact of small business by state.  Nationally, according to SBA, small businesses accounted for three quarters of net new job creation.  

Individual state profiles are available in the Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) format at the SBA website. Each profile reports overall small business numbers for 2002 (including women- and minority-owned), numbers of small business firms and jobs by industry category for 2000, and change in employment by firm size from 1999 to 2000.  You can find a directory of state reports at:
http://www.sba.gov/advo/stats/profiles/

New Links Added

For September, our new links get down and dirty, as we examine sources of mineral industry information, all provided by our friends at the U.S. Geological Survey.

U.S. Geological Survey
Mineral Industry Surveys
Detailed geographic data on approximately 100 mineral industries.
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/mis.html

Mine and Mineral Processing Plant Locations
Locations of 1,879 coal mines and facilities, 8 uranium mines, and 1,965 mines and processing plants for 74 types of nonfuel minerals and materials.
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/mapdata/

Mineral Resources Program
Access to data on mineral resources.
http://minerals.usgs.gov/

National Coal Resource Assessment
Data on five priority coal-bearing regions: the Appalachian Basin, Illinois Basin, Gulf Coast, Colorado Plateau, and Northern Rocky Mountains and Great Plains.
http://energy.er.usgs.gov/ncra/

GEO-DATA Explorer
Spatial display of geophysical data.
http://dss1.er.usgs.gov/