Mapping the Promised Lands: Welcome To the ‘Slacker Strata’

November 14, 2011, 9:00am

Wherever you don’t get ripped off buying skunk bud you’re less likely to find a surplus of drinking establishments, according to a preliminary, admittedly “flippant” finding recently released by a group of economic-information geographers better known as the Floating Sheep collective.

By superimposing their two most popular maps to date, The Beer Belly of America and The Price of Weed, the researchers first noticed how many places with relatively high levels of geotagged data about bars likewise register relatively high street prices for marijuana. Consider Minnesota and Wisconsin. Both states proudly boast great numbers of bars while consistently and (maybe?) not-so-proudly registering steep prices on the Price of Weed, a global, crowd-sourced price index for cannabis.

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So it stands to reason, the Floating Sheep claim, that those regions with the lowest weed values, possibly excepting Northern California and Louisville, KY, typically aren’t teeming with bars.

Full disclosure: The author is a native Chicagoan

Of course, this cartographic mashup also illustrates the inverse of what urban studies theorist Richard Florida calls the creative class. In other words, the above map highlights those places comprising what the Floating Sleep dub the Slacker Strata.

It’s in these swaths, they explain, that “the ability to be usefully creative would be severely compromised.” Put another way, this is where the going rate for a sack of sticky Buddha is low and the watering hole option is high.

For a lot of folks, these are the Promised Lands. But for the researchers, these regions demonstrate an “intriguing relationship.” It’s as if weed and booze, at least when viewed on a macro scale, “largely act as substitutes to one another.” To be sure, they caution to “interpret [the visualization] with care.”

Even still, this all probably goes to reaffirm what we already know: In a place like Brooklyn, where an ounce of high-quality green will set you back about $480, where at too many sub-par bars a pint of merely OK draft brew goes for something absurd like $8, and where the mere act of breathing will likely cost you $57/hour plus two square centimeters of your soul, you’re shit out of luck when it comes to “having a good time,” “unwinding,” or whatever, if that’s your thing.

In theory, Brooklyn is one of the farthest removed regions from the Slacker Strata. And yet Brooklyn oozes slackers, many cloaked in fashion ponchos. Seriously, what’s up with fashion ponchos? People, stop wearing fashion ponchos.

I’d go on, here, but… Eh, forget it. It’s Monday. I just want some pizza.