Robert David Sullivan 2

Are hate crimes 10 times more likely in Massachusetts than in Mississippi?

That's what a superficial reading of the latest FBI statistics would indicate. Massachusetts law enforcement agencies reported 333 crimes "that manifest[ed] evidence of prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity” last year to the FBI. That translates to 52 such crimes per million residents, which would make us the fifth most hate-filled state in the union (behind New Jersey, Delaware, South Dakota, and Michigan).

At the other end of the scale, Mississippi law enforcement agencies that participated in the FBI survey reported a grand total of four hate crimes last year. Those agencies cover about 750,000 people, which makes for a rate of 5.3 per million. (Mississippi has 2.9 million people overall, but most of the state doesn't even bother to send data to the FBI.)

The extreme variation in reporting techniques from state to state, and often from year to year, mean that the reported 11 percent increase in hate crimes based on sexual orientation last year is highly questionable, and the FBI explicitly warns against comparing data from year to year.

It does not follow that hate crime laws and anti-violence programs are unnecessary. They're justifiable simply on the grounds of human decency. But touting shaky data without explaining its limitations (as the Human Rights Campaign does here) is the kind of "anti-science" tactic more often associated with global warming deniers and supply-side economists.

Tax Foundation gives middling grade to Massachusetts

The Tax Foundation today released its 2009 rankings of the states on 38 different tax-and-spend issues. Massachusetts has the 5th highest annual state-and-local tax burden per capita ($5,377 in FY2008), but that's largely because we're the 2nd wealthiest state (with annual income per capita of $58,661. On the measure of state and local tax burden as a percentage of state income, we're pretty near the middle of the pack, in 23rd place. An estimated 9.5 percent of our income goes to Beacon Hill or City Hall. The comparable figures are 11.8 percent in first-place New Jersey, 11.7 percent in New York, and 11.1 percent in Connecticut.

As far as the Tax Foundation is concerned, Massachusetts gets high marks for its sales tax burden (9th best, or lowest, in the US, much better than 49th-place New York). And we rank 16th best in terms of the income tax.

But we ranked 44th (or 7th worst) in terms of the property tax burden; we were also 47th in the "unemployment insurance tax index" and 44th in the "corporate tax index."

Massachusetts had the 3rd highest cigarette tax in the survey, the 40th highest beer tax, and the 26th highest gas tax. But if Gov. Deval Patrick wins enactment of a 19-cent increase in the gas tax, we would hit 42.5 cents per gallon -- vaulting past first-place New York, now at 41.3 cents per gallon.

Mass. bucks trend, drives more in December

The Federal Highway Administration estimates that Americans drove 1.6 percent fewer miles in December 2008 than in December of the previous year. That makes 14 consecutive months of driving declines. The biggest drops were in Oregon and Washington, due "in part, to unusually large snowfall."

Curiously, auto traffic went up in Massachusetts last December by 3.0 percent Only Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas registered bigger increases.

Was our counter-trend due to falling gas prices? Was it frustration with the MBTA? (Ridership did go down in December; see the fourth paragraph.) Or were Bay Staters doing all their Christmas shopping in New Hampshire?

Home builders deem Worcester "80 percent affordable"

The Worcester area has the most affordable housing stock in New England, according to new data from the National Association of Home Builders. The group's Housing Opportunity Index (HOI) estimated that 79.5 percent of the area's homes sold in the last quarter of 2008 were affordable to families making the median household income of $76,900. Thanks to falling home prices, the share of homes deemed "affordable" was up from 72.6 percent in the previous quarter and 57.8 percent in the previous year. That figure hit a low of 42.2 percent in 2005, when median sales prices in the Worcester area hit a high of $265,000.

The trend isn't limited to Worcester. The NAHB reports that "Nationwide housing affordability surged at year-end 2008 to its highest level in at least five years."

The HOI indicated that 62.4 percent of all new and existing homes that were sold in the final quarter of 2008 were affordable to families earning the national median income of $61,500, up considerably from the 56.1 percent of homes that were affordable to such families in the previous quarter and the 46.6 percent of homes that were affordable to them at the end of 2007.

The most affordable metro area was Lansing, Michigan (95.0 percent of homes affordable to families making the metro median income of $62,700), followed by Sandusky and Lima, both in Ohio. But given that all three have higher-than-average unemployment rates, they probably aren't going to be attracting a lot of new families.

Jobs outlook in Mass. is stingy for the hospitality industry, devastating for construction

Via USA Today, Moody's Economy.com predicts that Massachusetts will tie with Kentucky for the seventh-worst job loss in 2009. (Who will supposedly be worse off than us? Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio.) The Bay State is projected to shed 2.8 percent of our jobs, compared with a national loss of 2.0 percent. No state is expected to add jobs, or come as close to breaking even as the District of Columbia (down 0.1 percent).

Construction jobs will disappear the quickest, both nationally and at the state level. But the outlook for leisure and hospitality jobs looks especially bleak in Massachusetts compared with the nation as a whole.

In percentage terms, the biggest increase in the Bay State will be in natural resources and mining (which includes farming and fishing), but that sector employs only about 2,300 people here -- compared with 720,000 in our biggest sector, education and health. More notable is our projected gain in the "information" sector, which includes not only publishing and data processing, but also our nascent film industry.

FBI: Gangs migrating to suburbs; 640 gangs operate in New England

The FBI has just released its National Gang Threat Assessment 2009, which estimates that there are "approximately 1 million gang members belonging to more than 20,000 gangs" in the US as of September 2008. Among this year's trends:

Gang members are migrating from urban to suburban and rural areas, expanding the gangs’ influence in most regions. They are doing so for a variety of reasons, including expanding drug distribution territories, increasing illicit revenue, recruiting new members, hiding from law enforcement, and escaping from other gangs...

According to the report, "approximately 640 gangs with more than 17,250 members are criminally active in the New England region." The "most signficant" gangs here are the Hells Angels, Latin Kings, Outlaws, Tiny Rascal Gangster Crips, and the United Blood Nation. And here's a slippery statistic: "Gangs are responsible for as much as 60 percent of the crime in some communities" in New England.

Chicago appears to have the worst situation, thanks to an influx of "West Coast-based Hispanic gangs." Curiously, Boston is one of the few big cities whose police department is not listed among the sources for the FBI report. The Boston field offices of the FBI and DEA are credited instead.

CommonWealth magazine reported on gang activity on the North Shore last year, in a story by Jay Atkinson.

Bay State is tops in college completion, not so hot for immigrants' high school completion

The education gap between native-born citizens and immigrants is apparently higher in Massachusetts than in most states, according to a new report by the US Census Bureau.

Last week's press release from the Census Bureau had a rather tabloid-ish headline: "Foreign-Born Exceed the Native-Born in Advanced Degrees." In fact, the rate of completion is higher among immigrants, but there are still more native-born Americans with advanced degrees. The Census Bureau estimates that 9.9 percent of the 166 million native-born Americans over the age of 25 have such degrees, compared with 10.9 percent of the 32 million foreign-born over 25.

And to a far greater extent, the foreign-born "exceed" the native-born at the other end of the education scale:  32.0 percent of immigrants over 25 have not completed high school, compared with 12.4 percent of native-born Americans in the same age group.

State-by-state data on the completion of advanced degrees are not available, but Massachusetts ranks first in the attainment of bachelor's degrees: 37.9 percent of all residents over 25, versus 27.5 percent at the national level. (Colorado is runner-up, at 35.0 percent.) But the Bay State is 12th in the share of its immigrant population with bachelor's degrees: 34.2 percent, versus the national average of 26.9 percent.

Old Boston may have to feel sorry for that punk city in Arizona

Last summer, the Census Bureau admitted that Boston's population is growing (though not as much as the city claims it is). This week, the Arizona Republic reported on signs that Phoenix -- long the über-example of explosive population growth in the Sun Belt -- may be shrinking:

City records show declining trends in several key areas. Among them: 
• Foreclosure numbers have skyrocketed, meaning fewer city homes are occupied.
• Water hookups are down, suggesting the same.
• Some aspects of trash collection have ebbed because fewer people are buying things that produce waste.
• Crime has declined across the city while police are getting fewer calls for services, a possible indicator of fewer people.
• Sales-tax revenues are likely to drop for the second year in a row, with this year's collections off almost 8 percent from last year.

There are hundreds of reader comments below the Arizona Republic, many of them trying to attribute any population loss to reasons other than a bad economy. (Some hope that there are fewer illegal immigrants in the city, as if that would be the upside of mass foreclosures, disappearing jobs, etc.) Whatever the reasons, it would be quite a reversal of fortune if Boston's population is truly growing faster than Phoenix's for the first time in .... ever?

Winter weather already causing financial sinkholes for cities and towns

Unfortunately, depleted snow removal budgets don't seem to be a harbinger of spring this year. Rather, they're starting to appear well before Martin Luther King Jr. Day. According to the Georgetown Record, that North Shore town has already blown past the $104,000 budgeted for snow removal this season and gone $18,000 in the red. Georgetown's Highway Department is planning to use less road salt (now practically a luxury item at $63 a ton) and more sand in the winter storms to come.

Older cars hurting municipal revenues

The soft market for automobiles is hurting state treasuries, as I noted earlier this week, but municipal governments are also feeling the pinch. The Patriot Ledger reported in May that local revenue from excise taxes is plunging as residents put off buying new cars:

In Weymouth, motor vehicle excise tax collections are lagging far behind what they were just a year ago.

“We haven’t seen this type of dramatic drop since the early '90s,” said James Wilson, Weymouth’s chief financial officer.

As of May 1, the town had collected $4 million, down from $5.3 million at this point last year and $5.9 million in 2006...