2,333 research outputs found
Housing in the nation’s micropolitan areas: A first look
Micropolitan area is a newly defined unit of analysis for examining housing affordability. Before the creation of micropolitan areas in 2003, U.S. counties were categorized as either metropolitan or nonmetropolitan. The category of micropolitan area allows for a more detailed analysis of housing affordability conditions in areas with populations less than metropolitan areas but more than nonmetropolitan areas. Variables examined in this analysis of micropolitan areas include demographic and housing characteristics. A policy section highlights how the findings from this analysis may be applied to micropolitan geography
What does smart growth mean for housing?
Barely noticed amid the returns from the 1998 midterm elections was a quiet revolution that goes to the heart of how and where Americans live. While most news accounts focused on the high-profile candidate elections, voters across the nation-in Democratic and Republican areas alike-approved more than 160 state and local ballot measures intended to preserve open space and limit urban sprawl.
The coalition forming around the idea of limiting sprawl includes environmentalists, farmers, big-city mayors, and some developers. But perhaps most important, the so-called smart growth movement also includes many suburban voters who are fed up with growth. For example, suburbanites in New Jersey-who swept Republican Governor Christine Todd Whitman into office a few years ago on her promise to cut taxes-overwhelmingly supported her proposal to devote about $1 billion a year in taxes and user fees to help preserve half of the state\u27s two million acres of open space over the next ten years. The idea of land preservation is so appealing to many suburbanites that they are willing to pay for it, in contrast with their typical distaste for more taxes
Arithmetical Congruence Preservation: from Finite to Infinite
Various problems on integers lead to the class of congruence preserving
functions on rings, i.e. functions verifying divides for all
. We characterized these classes of functions in terms of sums of rational
polynomials (taking only integral values) and the function giving the least
common multiple of . The tool used to obtain these
characterizations is "lifting": if is a surjective morphism,
and a function on a lifting of is a function on such that
. In this paper we relate the finite and infinite notions
by proving that the finite case can be lifted to the infinite one. For -adic
and profinite integers we get similar characterizations via lifting. We also
prove that lattices of recognizable subsets of are stable under inverse
image by congruence preserving functions
Techniques for Modeling Hazardous Air Pollutant Emissions from Landfills
The Environmental Protection Agency’s Landfill Air Estimation Model (LAEEM), combined with either the AP-42 or CAA landfill emission factors, provide a basis to predict air emissions, including hazardous air pollutants (HAPs), from municipal solid waste landfills. This paper presents alternative approaches for estimating HAP emissions from landfills. These approaches include analytical solutions and estimation techniques that account for convection, diffusion, and biodegradation of HAPs. Results from the modeling of a prototypical landfill are used as the basis for discussion with respect to LAEEM results
Growth reduction of similarity transformed electronic Hamiltonians in qubit space
Accurately solving the electronic structure problem through the variational
quantum eigensolver (VQE) is hindered by the available quantum resources of
current and near-term devices. One approach to relieving the circuit depth
requirements for VQE is to "pre-process" the electronic Hamiltonian by a
similarity transformation incorporating some degree of electronic correlation,
with the remaining correlation left to be addressed by the circuit ansatz. This
often comes at the price of a substantial increase in the number of terms to
measure in the unitarily transformed Hamiltonian. In this work, we propose an
efficient approach to sampling elements from the unrestricted pool of N-qubit
Pauli products which minimize the onset of new terms in the transformed
Hamiltonian, while facilitating substantial energy lowering. We find that
utilizing an operator selection criteria which takes into account both energy
gradients and expected growth can substantially reduce the number of Pauli
products in effective Hamiltonians used for a subsequent VQE optimization
Suppression of Decoherence and Disentanglement by the Exchange Interaction
Entangled qubit pairs can serve as a quantum memory or as a resource for
quantum communication. The utility of such pairs is measured by how long they
take to disentangle or decohere. To answer the question of whether qubit-qubit
interactions can prolong entanglement, we calculate the dissipative dynamics of
a pair of qubits coupled via the exchange interaction in the presence of random
telegraph noise and noise. We show that for maximally entangled (Bell)
states, the exchange interaction generally suppresses decoherence and
disentanglement. This suppression is more apparent for random telegraph noise
if the noise is non-Markovian, whereas for noise the exchange interaction
should be comparable in magnitude to strongest noise source. The entangled
singlet-triplet superposition state of 2 qubits ( Bell state) can
be protected by the interaction, while for the triplet-triplet state
( Bell state), it is less effective. Thus the former is more
suitable for encoding quantum information
Community acceptance of affordable housing
Despite historically low interest rates, organizations across the nation have become increasingly concerned about the impacts of regulatory constraints and anti-growth sentiments on the availability and cost of housing. This concern is by no means limited to a few “high cost” areas like Boston and San Francisco. It can also be found in Iowa City, where new single-family houses were recently selling from 375,000 (prices readily considered affordable in many larger metropolitan areas) and even in rural areas where spill-over growth and “drive to qualify” solve the commuter’s affordability problem while creating unforeseen affordability problems for the rural native.
Today the residents of communities where jobs and population are expanding do not automatically assume that growth is good. Quite the contrary, they raise a skeptical eyebrow and demand “positive” growth. Developers must justify their proposals to the public (particularly neighbors to their developments) throughout zoning applications and subdivision reviews. With inadequate supplies of land zoned at densities to support affordable housing, opponents of development can place substantial pressure on public officials to deny the required zoning or to significantly modify the development, making it more expensive and possibly unfeasible. Neighbors are rarely opposed to development in general, just the specific development near them, a sentiment dubbed “Not in My Back Yard” or NIMBY. Similarly, local public officials are rarely “anti-growth” but want to be sure that new development will have a positive fiscal impact on local government. Since the tax revenue streams associated with residential development are complex and only partially captured by the locality, the presumed (or even estimated) fiscal impact of residential development is often negative
Target marketing can help attract city residents
While suburban growth continues, city living is regaining popularity. It is common knowledge that urban neighborhoods often attract young, single professionals, but a more precise identification of potential city dwellers could help cities understand and develop their comparative advantages. Now, perhaps more than ever, cities need to know which people want to live in them and how their vision of urban life may be accommodated by public policy.
A common concern expressed among urban mayors is that the quality of their city services, especially schools, stacks up poorly against that of most suburbs. Improving public education is often cited as the key to attracting suburbanites to cities. Enhancing school quality is indeed an important element in any urban revitalization effort, but it may be less critical than is commonly assumed. Consider that households made up of married couples with children under 18 now account for only a quarter of the nation\u27s total, down from 4 in 10 households in 1970
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