Rishi Verma

Who Owns Your City?

Introduction

This research question was the subject of an investigation conducted between September 2018 and January 2019, to try to answer a simple question: who really owns your city?

The key question was focused on trying to identify ultimate ownership of the businesses that consumers frequent, and which of those businesses truly constituted the tag of being “locally owned.” The research focused on Pasadena, California as a case-study city, and consisted of trying to identify the source ownership of all 13,000+ Pasadena businesses.

Research Questions

• Who owns the specific businesses I see in Pasadena? Including (per commercial property):
  • Name and geographic region of owner or largest stakeholder
  • Determination of business type: e.g. private, public, co-operative, etc.
  • Number of locations (if chain)
  • Gross revenue
• Aggregated statistics for the above criteria, in terms of total number of businesses in Pasadena.

Methods

For this investigation, research was conducted by taking the names of existing businesses in the Pasadena area and following their ownership trail until the ultimate owner was identified. A variety of data sources were used to identify ownership and other miscellaneous information.

The following data sources were used to compile final results:

• Business information
  • Wikipedia
  • OpenCorporates
  • Company / business websites
  • Calling the business / company directly
  • City records
  • Reference USA
• Financial information
  • Reference USA
  • Google Finance
  • Company / business websites
• Location information
  • Reference USA
  • OpenStreetMap
  • Google Maps
• General background
  • (Film) The Corporation, Joel Bakan
  • (Book) Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America, Jack Beatty
  • (Book) Incorporate Your Business, Attorney Anthony Mancuso
  • (Book) The Corporation That Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational, Nick Robins

Results

The results of this research project consisted of a database storing key business information, including ownership. The database was derived primarily from data obtained from Reference USA — access which was provided from the Pasadena Public Library. This data was then supplemented with geographic information, like geo-location, from OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim service. Analytics from the resultant database were used to generate the infographic below, with the help of the codebase below and visualization tools like Elastic Kibana.

Infographic

The infographic below represents a subset of aggregated results from this research exercise, specifically for Pasadena. Key findings highlighted below include:

• A heat map of ownership of businesses in Pasadena, where ownership location is shown to be sourced from around the United States.
• Top corporate owners by number of separate and individual properties owned in Pasadena.
• Top corporate owners by total revenue generated within Pasadena.
• Top business earners — counting the total number of businesses categorized by the type of business operated.
• Business location map — detailing the locations of select corporate owners and highlighting the numerous sub-businesses that are owned by them.
• Top local food / drinks — a list of locally-owned restaurants, cafes, bars, and light food joints that are owned by owners whose offices are located in Pasadena or nearby cities.

Code

One of the results of this project was to generate a codebase that could produce graphs, charts, and numerical data on the nature of business ownership for any city, including Pasadena, California.

Follow the link below to build and run the code for any city in the United States or Canada and generate similar charts as demonstrated in the infographic above.

Business OwnerSHip Analyzer (BOSHA)

¹ archive.virtualchase.justia.com / finding the company owner