I hope you will consider voting for me on May 4th (or earlier!). As my last name is Zoorob, I will be the last candidate listed on the ballot for Town Meeting Member in Precinct […]

Homeownership and Turnout in State and Local Elections in Brookline
This post compares participation in state and local elections among likely renters and likely homeowners in Brookline, MA, where I live. I will examine voting in three elections: first, the 2019 local election, which included […]

Supporting the Gateway East Bus Lane in brookline
Below is a copy of the letter I wrote to the transportation board in support of bus lanes on Washington Street. The featured image for this post comes from this YouTube video. Dear members of […]

Density, Covid, and the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem
The statistical association (bracketing causal inference at this point) between people living near one another (population density) and the rate of COVID-19 cases seems to vary between different levels of aggregation (e.g. neighborhood versus city […]

Homeowners of local politics (Brookline edition)
It is well-known that homeowners have an outsized role in local politics. In Brookline, 50% of residents rent and 50% own their homes. We also have a representative Town Meeting form of government, meaning that […]

Keep Brookline Dense
This is a copy of a letter to the editor published in the Brookline Tab print ediiton December 5, 2019 and online on December 7. — I appreciated your recent article “Despite traffic, more Brookline […]

Letter to Harvard Administrators about strike
HGSU-UAW, my campus union, has provided a simple form for emailing administrators about the upcoming strike deadline and urging them to stop a strike. They have even provided templates for different constituencies (undergraduates, family, faculty) […]

Dispensary density and sales
Please find replication materials (code and data) reproducing all figures and statements made in this blogpost at this link. One perennial theme on Brookline’s Townwide Discussion Facebook page is the NETA cannabis dispensary, with a […]

Norfolk 15th Primary Election (MA state House, 9/4/18)
In the weeks leading up to the primary election, I walked around this state house district and counted/geocoded all the lawn signs for the Norfolk 15th State House race in a smartphone application. (These are […]

MA-7th Primary All Precincts
Caveats: Chelsea results are citywide; Everett had some precinct 3’s in the (state) shapefile that don’t seem to exist (mean imputed from city for map).