> One way, often used regarding so-called food deserts, is to drop pins on the map representing consequential retail locations, draw a circle around them, and count who is and is not within one of the circles using census data. This is fairly naive and therefore is much beloved of social scientists, who can get grad students to do it for them.
> Some people in society have to actually be right about what they publish, and they have developed an important novel insight into human behavior: people cannot fly.
Haha savage.
I really love this article - it's a love letter to understanding all of the minutiae that goes behind something simple.
Patrick mocks the concept of "so-called food deserts", in part because social scientists use as-the-crow-flies distance to grocers to determine them, but compared to using road networks that is actually understating the problem of food access. (eg one might live one mile from a grocery store, but the walk would certainly cover more distance than that, and never less. not to mention lights slowing people down further...). So I'm not really sure what his burn is about.
I was introducing a jargon word that some readers would not be familiar with in an aside, so “so-called” is a flag to readers that food desert is a term of art they can look up if they want.
The comment is specifically that people who are not often considered intellectuals/researchers/etc, who have titles like Real Estate Acquisition Specialist, have a much higher fidelity understanding of the issue of access than the people society believe are largely the responsible voices regarding access issues.
This was in the context of an extended discussion about how e.g. regulators with an access mandate care about maps but that is insufficient.
Fwiw to this reader it read as distracting snark and peripheral to your overall point.
Edit: if you simply wanted to flag “food desert” as a term of art, enclosing it in quotes would have been best. Your “so-called” implies that you are casting doubt on their existence.
Well, they do exist, but they exist because the people who live in them don’t want to eat the approved kind of food. Far more a matter of demand than supply.
> Food Deserts and the Causes of Nutritional Inequality
> We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy eat more healthfully than the poor in the United States. Exploiting supermarket entry, household moves to healthier neighborhoods, and purchasing patterns among households with identical local supply, we reject that neighborhood environments contribute meaningfully to nutritional inequality. Using a structural demand model, we find that exposing low-income households to the same products and prices available to high-income households reduces nutritional inequality by only nine percent, while the remaining 91 percent is driven by differences in demand. These findings counter the common notion that policies to reduce supply inequities, such as “food deserts,” could play an important role in reducing nutritional inequality. By contrast, the structural results predict that means-tested subsidies for healthy food could eliminate nutritional inequality at a fiscal cost of about 15 percent of the annual budget for the U.S. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Agreed. I also didn't see any useful connection as to how the information that the Real Estate Acquisition Specialists (REAS) have would actually generate more understanding of food access between different communities. Yes, the REAS for Stamford, CT is going to know a lot about access in Stamford, but almost nothing about access in Detroit, MI. Since the goal is to compare access across the country, using as-the-crow-flies data is preferred because it's universal and obtainable by a small research lab. The alternative is what, to interview a REAS from each of the 100 largest cities in the US, somehow convert their personal anecdotal knowledge into quantified data, and then use that to better understand access?
Expertise on a subject in one specific area doesn't necessarily translate to expertise in the general concept.
The REAS is local to the community. They work for the real estate developer, not for the HQ at the bank, which decided “We need 10 new branches in Chicago but eff if we know where they go; bring me proposals for corners you think you could get under contract.”
The reason they’re better at this than a professor is a bit controversial but I will own up to saying it: banks actually care about people using their branches and need to design systems which will correctly site those branches. Professors need to design systems which get their papers cited. Making accurate observations about reality is not necessarily required.
Right, okay. I still think this is a bit of straw man. Professors don't generally claim to be an experts in local community access, so criticizing them for not being good at it doesn't help. Their focus is necessarily on publishing, and in making claims about access broadly that can be tested, or that can advance the field and be responded to, or cited.
"A grocery store on the corner of 24th and Main would help food access a lot and be quite successful" is not really a great research paper; but it is very useful to a business development person. "Food access is a significant problem in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas" is a fairly good research paper, but not something that you could ask the REAS in Community X to do for any area beyond Community X.
In the end, I think my question would be this. Let's take as true that Professors aren't all that accurate in their assessments of some issue, and that in their communities, REASs are more likely to be accurate in similar assessments. What then? How can we easily take that accurate, anecdotal REAS data, and turn it into broad comparative data that lets us better understand the problem nationwide?
The bank of course has much greater incentive to get their siting estimate right—but it’s hard for me to see how the bank-local REAS feedback loop would work in practice. There’s no ability to test a counterfactual, and local branch performance only becomes apparent years after the siting decision, and with many confounders.
In contrast if the professor’s paper a) actually gets noticed and b) the study conclusions are actually sensitive to the details of the distance estimation methodology, there’s a possibility (not guarantee) of someone writing a rebuttal in six months, which is embarrassing. B is important—spherical cows are frequently good enough!
Fundamentally, we shouldn’t be surprised that the methods appropriate for “decide where to spend $20M on a building” and “spend <$100k of researcher time to perform population-level analysis” should differ.
Even if you're right — I don't think you are, but even if you are — you're derailing your own point to indulge in petty sniping targeted at another profession. The aside makes the piece weaker because it detracts from the focus and makes you sound like a jerk. If I were your editor, I'd have struck out the entire aside about social scientists and compressed it to "as is often the case, the naïve method has problems, so what banks do instead is…"
When I lived in Seattle, the nearest grocery store was a significantly shorter walk than drive thanks to the large park in the middle. Never say never, I guess.
"A curb cut is authority granted to you by the owner of the road (often the state government) to make a physical change to your property and the road to allow customers access"
This development model is very specific to Illinois and should not be generalized across the country. In many places the road could be owned by a local development corp, the county, a non-profit, a pension fund, the bank itself or some combination of the above. Illinois has harsh winters, a 9-5 suburb/downtown traffic pattern, average traffic and lots of land which makes the drive through an important feature and curb cuts EXTREMELY valuable.
There was an article about a homeowner in SF who had a curb cut but was recently denied the ability to park in their (paved) “yard” anymore due to code. They were looking for historical photos of a car in that spot from 80-100 years ago so they could get grandfathered in
“often the state government” does not mean “always.” And I’m not sure how the value of the curb cut fits into the quote and your reply. Can you provide more details?
The whole sequence of: business wants change to curb >
asks state officials for permission >
state official reviews request>
state official send business decision is predicted on the following:
- there is substantial value to creating a curb from specific local traffic patterns
- there is one state body that is tasked with "approving" changes to curbs
- changes are "rationed" so that businesses need to request approval
For example the commission of Clark county in Nevada often prioritizes the interest of the local casino's and can move very fast to remove any "obstacles"
In NYC the value of a curb is going to be much less because there is relatively more foot traffic and much less car traffic, so a bank is not going to prioritize local zoning changes.
In smaller towns you are not going to get as much casual car traffic in general
It's not just a single drive-through window either, even in small towns in the US there will be multiple lanes at the bank drive-through, with pneumatic tubes to send your money and documents from the car to the inside of the bank [0]. When I was a kid, I loved watching the container get sucked through the tube, plus they'd usually send back candy with the receipt.
Fun fact, there were originally plans to build entire city networks of those pneumatic tube delivery systems until the USPS decided it would be too much fun (as well as bypass their mail delivery monopoly). They successfully convinced congress to ban them in any situation where they could compete with delivered mail (basically, they can't run between any two addresses).
After email killed off intra-office mail, banks are one of the last viable economic uses for pneumatic tube systems.
I'm not sure where you got that story from, but there was pneumatic tube mail in New York city from 1897 to 1953, operated under contract to the USPS. Networks existed in four other cities but New York's was the largest. It eventually halted because it was ridiculously expensive compared to moving mail on trucks.
My pneumatic tube story about things that can go wrong with them: A customer pulls up to the drive-thru, puts their money and deposit slip in the carrier and sends it off into the building. The teller receives it but it's empty and tells them "I'm sorry, but you need to include your paperwork" and sends the carrier back. The customer holds up the carrier so the teller can see that there's paper & money in there and sends it off again. The teller holds up the carrier they received at the window, and it's empty!
What had happened was a previous customer had driven off with the carrier, and the teller put their spare into the tube. Then the customer who had absconded with the carrier realized what they had done, and returned to the drive-thru lane - putting the carrier back in and leaving without saying anything. Now there were two carriers in the tube. So when the next customer arrived, the carrier that arrived at the teller was the spare, the one that didn't have their documents in it.
The drive-thru windows are often open LATER and EARLIER than the branch itself, because it's secure the teller can open it the moment she arrives and keep it open almost until she leaves. It's not uncommon for the window to open half an hour before the branch and close up to an hour later.
pneumatic systems like these are so fun, costco used to have big tubes they sent wads of cash and other things through, and of course there are great articles about the old pneumatic postal infrastructure in paris
From 1897 to 1953, New York City operated a pneumatic tube mail transport system. It consisted of 27 miles of tubing connecting 23 post offices and carried 95,000 letters per day, amounting to 30% of the city's mail volume. The canisters were two feet long and eight inches in diameter and could carry 600 letters.[1]
Jams were a bear. Crews would travel the route of the tube and check air pressure at test points every two blocks where the tube surfaced. When they found a drop in pressure at a test point, they would try to free the stuck canister by injecting extra pressure. If that failed, they would have to dig up the street.[2]
In the early 2000s, parts of the network were repurposed to run fiber optic cable.
> Bank branches are not destinations. Like Starbucks and cell phone shops, they rely on capturing your day-to-day custom when you’re out and about. In the U.S., that mostly means being maximally accessible by cars. (In Japan, and other places with different transit behavior, bank branches are among the most likely user for large parcels directly adjacent to hub train stations, with smaller light branches and ATM-only locations being deployed close to far-from-station workplaces.)
I've lived in a number of European countries and have had dealings with banks as both a private and business customer. The whole article sounds very different from what I would consider a bank branch in Europe.
Here a bank branch is basically a physical way of dealing with customer service. The people you talk to in the branch are no different than the people you talk to on the phone, they don't have any real power in decisions, they are just navigating the paperwork and submitting applications that someone/something in HQ (which may even be another country) makes a decision on. Some branches don't even deal with cash, you can only use an ATM to withdraw and deposit.
Same here. When I went to visit relatives in the US I saw a place where you could drive to get both a coffee and then money, next to each other, without getting out of the car.
I wonder how this idea will age. I haven't been to a bank branch in so long. Hell, I've written 5 checks in the last 2 years. I deposit the rare check with my phone or ATM. Why would I want to go to a branch? I took out my last mortgage with my credit union and still never when in the branch. My 20-something daughter never considered branch locations at all when picking her new bank.
Cash. I have used a branchless bank for much of my banking, but it is still useful to keep an account open with a branched bank for the times that I need to do transactions with amounts of cash that are larger than ATM limits.
Yep, cash. Especially in the age of: 1) robo-support with pre-defined assistance paths that are engineered precisely to avoid servicing the types of issues you will run into at critical moments, and 2) banks / money processing services cutting you off with no warning.
I asked my bank a while back to send me a new card as I regularly do when the current card gets worn out and starts to more frequently fail chip/strip readers, and it got lost in transit. I requested them to send me another; however, this time they had marked my old card having been lost/stolen and closed the debit account.
Not wanting to struggle with finding a friend both actually having money to spare and willing to engage in some attentive coordination, I was effectively cut off from _all_ of my cash, as far as I could see. I'm not particularly familiar with all the money movement mechanisms.
I had to make the effort to get to the bank the next day during business hours (I am a night owl and work full time), and I withdrew a good chunk of cash to hold me over while waiting for my card, which finally arrived yesterday.
Yadda yadda, something something don't put all your eggs in one basket. Yes, I know. I have only on the order of months been making enough to be able to entertain sharding off more than negligible amounts into a secondary account. It is on the to-do list.
We just transfer money directly to bank accounts, or pay by direct debit, or electronic invoice. For paying small amounts (up to about 500 USD) we have a Scandinavian mobile app called Vipps that lets private individuals pay other people just by knowing their mobile number.
All these things are free to use but using a cheque costs money.
I have to go every month or so to get quarters for laundry. Ever since covid started they have limits on the number of quarters I can get per trip. There's no change machine in the laundry room in my apartment building. This is Mountain View, Silicon Valley.
Meeting with a banker face-to-face can often work better if your situation is in any way unusual or complicated. The definition of "unusual" might not be what the reader would expect.
For example, the process to open a new account at SMBC (one of the three largest banks in Japan) can be done entirely online, unless the customer has a middle name. Why? Probably some ancient COBOL program that can only be bypassed by hand-verifying the customer's info.
> Banks can substantiate, with voluminous data, that banking relationships are very sticky.
Indeed. I'd have changed my main bank years ago if not for the pain of changing over all my automated payments. I don't like them at all but they've not done anything bad enough to make it worth several hours of irritation, probably spread over multiple months, moving everything.
… I kid you not that my last bank, in order to close the account, demanded that I travel 1,667 miles. It had to be closed in person. So yeah, they were incredibly sticky.
They also required me to find a fax machine, too, when they were the victim of fraud.
The last article was off in interesting way (see the community bank commenter), this is more off.
I suppose they are written as if broadly true and without caveats, but in practice are drawn from relatively specific types of experiences that are not reflective of the whole.
In this article, I’d say most aren’t sited like this. Might appear like this, but this was not the algo. In the prior article, it’s possible a large set of small or regionals thought like that, but most megas do not, albeit with various ways of differing.
Good reads though, always well written and enjoyable. Just keep a YMMV in mind.
There’s a saying that transportation is land use and land use is transportation. This article has a great example talking about how a bank wants to occupy a large amount of space on a busy corner mostly with parking that is mostly empty, and take away large portions of the sidewalks for curb cuts so cars can make high-speed turns across the sidewalk. It’s a feature for the bank that what a town would like to be a lively location is either empty or just storing cars, and it’s a regrettable but necessary consequence to the bank that the curb cuts are dangerous or deadly to people walking along the street, thus discouraging people from walking.
Add up many such decisions and you get the current car dependence of the United States.
> Some people in society have to actually be right about what they publish, and they have developed an important novel insight into human behavior: people cannot fly.
Haha savage.
I really love this article - it's a love letter to understanding all of the minutiae that goes behind something simple.