Tech We’re Using: Windows on How Cities Change Can Be All Too Captivating

I also like to know how places vote. For the 2016 election, I refer to a pretty incredible interactive precinct-level map The Times published this year. I draw information from the Census Bureau on things like demographics, population change and housing stock. The University of Virginia’s Racial Dot Map, based on the 2010 census, is a fantastic resource for eyeballing patterns of racial segregation; also, it’s just beautiful to look at. And I spend a lot of time lurking on the housing market in other cities through sites like Trulia and Zillow.

What have you found are some of the main unintended consequences of technology on how we live?

For nearly every form of technology I use for work, or use for myself, I have mixed feelings. (These mixed feelings are also a good source of story ideas.) I love apps, like Redfin, that make public information about the housing market incredibly accessible. But I wonder if they also reinforce the unhealthy American expectation that we should all make money off our homes.

Redfin emails me probably once a month with its estimate of what my house is worth. (I assume the company figured out which house is mine based on what I’ve clicked on in the past.) The subtext is that I can watch my investment grow, just as someone might check on a stock portfolio. And I suspect that for a lot of people, this becomes addictive. But fretting about property values is at the root of a lot of political problems in cities — fights over where to open homeless shelters, how to draw school boundaries, whether to build new housing. I’m not sure these fights are helped by this addictive live feed of data about housing values.

Tech advances in transportation have major unintended consequences, too. We clearly see this in the fight in New York City over whether Uber and Lyft have made traffic worse. Studies in several cities suggest that they’re putting cars on the road for trips people might otherwise have taken by foot or transit, or not at all. And they’ve certainly made the curb more crowded. Now, all of a sudden, cities have to figure out how to manage that space where people hop in and out of cars — as if at a cab stand, but everywhere.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/technology/personaltech/windows-on-how-cities-change-can-be-all-too-captivating.html?partner=rss&emc=rss