Your home may not be the inflation-beating investment it is sold to be. Ask Marvin Blevins. In 1981 he bought his three-bedroom ranch house in a suburb of Kansas City for $62,550. If the value of the home had kept up with the rising cost of living, it would have sold for more than $103,000. He sold it last fall for $73,000.
In the Kansas City metro area, the housing values in more than half the census tracts did not keep up with inflation between 1980 and 1990. So, even though the cost of homes in these tracts might have increased, the real value of the home declined.
That is one of the key discoveries of Kansas reporters Chris Lester, Jeffrey Spivak and Greg Reeves in their six-part series examining the cost and character of sprawl. The series, "Divided We Sprawl," ran Dec. 17-22, 1995. It was a 1996 Pulitzer finalist for explanatory journalism.
Start your engines
From the beginning, Lester knew the project would require a lot of number crunching. "The computer work was the key to analyzing white flight and income flight," said Reeves. He found that Kansas City lenders reject applications from blacks 2.5 more times than they do from whites. Even high-income blacks are rejected more than low-income whites.
They also wanted to come up with a way to measure the cost of sprawl. Many people leave the urban core for a promise of a better life in the suburbs. This spread creates a maze of government, from school districts, sewer districts, library districts, to cities and counties. The cost is staggering.
A computer analysis of the 1987 Census of Government Finance Statistics found that Kansas City ranked third in the nation in governmental units per person. The total regional cost is $3 billion with an average annual cost per household of $5,000.
Another question they had was, "What is the pattern of housing value in the entire metropolitan area between 1980 and 1990?"
Reeves massaged the numbers. Then Lester and Spivak used the results to stimulate their investigation.
They analyzed every census tract in metropolitan Kansas City and looked at median housing values in each tract from 1980 to 1990. The increase seemed small, so they decided to check it against inflation. The results were surprising: Many homes lost value, even in wealthier suburbs.
The Golden Rainbow
Lester discovered some research done in Ohio that suggested people who make money on their homes tend to purchase homes farther from the urban core. The tax code encourages this behavior.
If a homeowner makes a profit, he can avoid paying a capital gains tax by buying homes of equal or greater value. These homes tend to be in the suburbs. "That got us all agitated about the codification of sprawl in the tax code," Lester said.
He wanted to see what was happening in Kansas City.
Reeves used Atlas GIS to map housing values in the metro area. He then calculated the average housing value of owner-occupied units within a two-mile radius of the downtown intersection of 12th and Main. Then, he determined the average value for the next ring and the next ring, and so on.
Average housing values increased incrementally until peaking in a ring 14 to 16 miles from downtown - the golden rainbow.
He did the same analysis using census figures from previous years and discovered the golden rainbow of peak property values had been creeping away from downtown about two miles a decade. This figure became one of the measures of sprawl in the story.
Cities tend to grow in directions, not circles. So they picked the quadrant with the greatest wealth, Johnson County, and used that figure in the series.
Lester and Spivak used the computer results, together with interviews with more than 700 sources, to try to explain sprawl. It wasn't easy.
"This wasn't about investigating one public official who did something wrong and sending them to jail," Lester said. "This is about trying to explain in some rational way why American society came out the way it did over the last 50 years."
The reporting team got the 1980 and 1990 Census housing tables online. They typed in the
values for 1950, 1960 and 1970. This wasn't as much work as it seems: Each year had only 200 to 300 records.
The Census of Government Finance Statistics came from the Missouri state data center. Each state should have one, but the file is also available directly from the Census Bureau. "This is the database from hell," Reeves said. The file contains 70 to 80 fields, many of them coded.
"You'll get used to the codes," he said. They obtained HMDA data from NICAR and checked parts of their analysis against published government reports.
Comparing census tracts over several decades was tricky. Tracts change and split as the population changes. Be prepared to spend a lot of time massaging the numbers if you plan to do this.
The following week-long bootcamps offer hands-on training in computer-assisted reporting skills:
NICAR Bootcamps, featuring training in the use of spreadsheets and database managers, accessing data in various media, such as nine-track tapes, and negotiating for data; May 19-24, July 14-19, and Aug. 11-16. Columbia, Mo. For more information, call NICAR