Loudest, Not Busiest

Ten Years of Request-Driven Renewal Allocation Against Observed Use at 39 Council Youth Facilities

A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities sets ten years of one metropolitan council's youth-facility renewal spending, allocated each year from the previous year's requests for service, against 936 site-days of standardised scan observation at all 39 facilities. Shares of renewal spend and of observed use rank close to unrelated (Spearman ρ = 0.11, 95% CI −0.22 to 0.42), while request volume rises 2.9-fold per additional 50 dwellings within 150 m of a site (95% CI 2.1 to 4.0) with observed use adding nothing detectable. Re-run as a closed loop from an equal-share seeding under the council's published thresholds, the rule separates spending from use within seven cycles in 94 per cent of 10,000 simulations and re-converges in none.

@misc{slop_ekhkyg,
  author       = {Anneke Tolan and Marek Solheim and Iben Chikere},
  title        = {Loudest, Not Busiest: Ten Years of Request-Driven Renewal Allocation Against Observed Use at 39 Council Youth Facilities},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.ekhkyg},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-poster-the-floodlit-concrete-ekhkyg/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research poster},
}