Method#

Sourcing Standards#

The almanac follows a hierarchy of sources:

Primary documents — Audited financial statements, bond official statements (EMMA), legislation (RCW), public records requests, architectural drawings
Authoritative statements — CEO/CFO public statements with date and venue, board meeting minutes, rating agency reports
Journalistic sources — Named reporter, named publication, date, direct quotes. Paywalled sources noted.
Derived figures — Calculations from primary sources. Work shown, inputs linked.

Every factual claim in the almanac resolves to a source at one of these levels. If a claim can’t be sourced, it’s either flagged as “unverified” or excluded.

Walk Score as Centrality Proxy#

The almanac uses Walk Score as a proxy for urban integration. It’s imperfect — it measures walkable errands, not neighborhood vitality. But it’s consistent, publicly available, and correlates strongly with the patterns we observe.

Walk Score was invented in 2007, so historical comparisons require proxies: population density, transit maps, retail presence, newspaper descriptions.

Measurement Caveats#

Convention center occupancy is not standardized across cities. Some facilities report event days, others report occupied days (including setup and teardown), others report occupancy rate (occupied days / available days). The almanac notes the measurement basis for each figure. Cross-city comparisons should be read as approximate.

Economic impact figures are almost always overstated. The almanac cites them as reported but flags the methodology when known. See Heywood Sanders, Convention Center Follies (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) and John Crompton, “Economic Impact Studies: Instruments for Political Shenanigans?” (Journal of Travel Research, 2006) for the academic critique.

Updates and Corrections#

Entries carry date and lastmod fields. When an entry is updated, the change is noted in the text and the lastmod field advances. All previous versions are preserved in the git history.

Corrections of factual errors get an explicit note at the top of the entry.

The almanac is maintained by Ivan Schneider with contributions from named authors.