| Author | Message | ||
     Gerardryan |
After an awful lot of work by Larry Seltzer, I'm pleased to say that a number of maps of the township, with revaluation data, are available online. Larry's put together a number of maps of the data that are available from the revaluation spreadsheet that I built. All of these maps are from the 1/19 data. No changes after that date are available yet. You can look at maps of old and new assessments, old and new taxes, tax changes as a percentage and tax changes as a dollar amount. Some of the maps are available in a large format that you can scroll through; all are available in one-page formats. They are GIF files and are easily downloaded. Also available are maps of sales data. Folks interested in viewing growth (or lack of growth) of sales prices in particular areas in town should take a look at these maps. I've concluded some things about the so-called "2000 bubble" from these maps as well as the nature of prices across town. I think all of the maps are very interesting. I suggest that you check out the README file that Larry assembled before viewing the maps. Larry really deserves a lot of thanks from folks for all of his work on this. He's hosted the maps on Berkshire Park, his neighborhood association's website see http://www.bpna.org/reval for all the information Thanks, Larry! Jerry Ryan | ||
| Octofoil |
Thats just a huge amount of work! Thanks very much to both Jerry Ryan and Larry Seltzer! | ||
| Dytunck |
Color coded maps! This is an outstanding idea!!! ;) Nicely done. Larry and Jerry are personally responsible for driving Hammond Map Co. out of Maplewood!! :-) | ||
| Townie |
Astonishing Larry. Thanks so much. kathleen | ||
| Lseltzer |
Have fun everyone. I also have the spreadsheet (residential only again) up as a database on the same site. You might have noticed 2 reports up there (top 100 residential tax increases and top 100 residential tax bills) and you can look up specifics on any particular address. On the "Look up data on a particular address" report you can put in a portion of an address; for example, type "Baker" and you'll get all the addresses that contain "Baker", and you can then click on the one for which you want details. If you have any ideas for further reports or maps pass them on here. | ||
| Jem |
That old saying is proven true again: a picture really isworth a thousand words. Fantastic job, Larry and Jerry. Wow! And thanks. | ||
| Nakaille |
Larry - beautiful work! Thank you so much! Bacata | ||
| Joancrystal |
Larry - This is great. The maps show trends that just aren't apparent from the spread sheets and the search feature is a vast improvement over data search in Excel. Thanks so much. | ||
| Melidere |
Larry, they are wonderful. Octofoil, i'm dying to see what you read from them, particularly about when this change in relative values took place. | ||
| Sac |
Great Job! One question, though - I noticed that certain addresses are not in the database (on the link for "Look up data on a particular address"). Notably three houses in a row on my block, right across the street from me. Why would that be? | ||
| Lseltzer |
Sac: What addresses? E-mail me if you don't want to do this online: larry@larryseltzer.com | ||
| Lseltzer |
About Sac's message, one of the interesting and really strange things I learned about Maplewood in this exercise is that there are a number of houses whose legal addresses are not the same as the addresses on the street. For example, 129 Parker Ave, next to me, is legally 131 Parker Ave. | ||
| Fairtax01 |
Larry - what a fantastic job - thank you - may I suggest to the FairTax e-mail list that they check out your maps? Lydia | ||
| Lseltzer |
Lydia, Please go ahead, they're open to the public. | ||
| Lseltzer |
BTW, like I say somewhere on the site, the maps were made with Microsoft MapPoint, and these maps just scratch the surface of the product's capabilities. In fact, it's actually a lot better at showing maps of aggregate data (average income per census tract, total beer sales per 9-digit zip code, that sort of thing) than it is with data on individual addresses. When the census 2000 data comes in I expect to have a lot of fun with this product. But if you have business data analysis applications that have a geographic angle to them, this is a really useful program. | ||
| Lseltzer |
Another interesting point about online maps. Like all maps, they have mistakes, and there are a couple of interesting ones on these. On Berkshire Road there is a point labled "Newark Heights," and near the corner of Ridgewood Rd. and Mountain Ave there is a point labeled "Vauxhall." I noticed the "Newark Heights" point several years ago on Yahoo! Maps and Mapquest and traced them back to the US Geological Survey, the main source from which everyone in the online mapping business gets their map data (although they have other sources). I asked an old-timer here (Howard Wiseman) who seems to know everything about town history, and he identified the name Newark Heights as the terminus of a defunct commercial rail line at the current site of Wooley Fuel (formerly Wooley Coal; the train delivered coal to Wooley and elsewhere). If you take Rutgers Street towards Newark Way, there is a minor hump in the road that used to be the rail bed. I e-mailed the USGS and asked them if it would be possible to correct this error in their maps, and they said that I would need to provide them with some documentation that "Newark Heights" was not where they said it was (doesn't this just sound like government to you?). I have failed to locate such documentation. I have no idea how the "Newark Heights" point got where it was, same for the "Vauxhall" point. It's possible that there are other errors too, although I haven't found any meaningful ones, and I've done a lot of spot-checking. | ||
| Octofoil |
Larry, Fascinating details! Keep it coming! I don't if others are interested in the following analysis, but I have found it very interesting. I've run some frequency distributions and associated descriptive statistics on sales and ratios by year and am now in the process of doing so by neighborhood. The reason for my doing so is to examine the statistical properties of the data. The motivation for examining the statistical properties is that we see and hear the use of "average" throughout the discussions by individuals and "average" is also specified in various statutes (in some cases without specification as to specifics of determination). The objective is to determine whether or not there are instances in the reval or assessment process where the concept of central tendency is not appropriately or sufficiently defined by either statute or popular usage. In other words, does the reliance on an "average" which in almost all cases that I've seen thus far,is taken to mean the arithmetic mean, obscure or otherwise distort the results from that which was/is intended. In other words, the intention is pretty clear, but have we gone about it the wrong way? Preliminary results suggest that there may some distortions and unintended results, but it is far too soon to be definitive. Your thoughts would be appreciated. | ||
| Gerardryan |
Octofoil: Remember that sales that are not arms-length sales have to be left out of the mix. | ||
| Hillbilly |
This is fantastic. A true public service. Thank you Larry. | ||
| Nursie |
Larry, What a beautiful job. Thanks so much for the very useful information! |
