William M. Hartnett

The fourth and final installment of the Mapping the Boom series. Without a doubt, the best of the bunch. The hot spot map on the cover of the 56-page special section was created in the spatial statistics program CrimeStat, and took nearly nine hours to process on my old PC. (I later repeated the procedure [...]

The third installment of the Mapping the Boom series, updated through the third quarter of 2005. The focus of this 32-page section was on pre-retirees and splitters, Baby Boomers who are buying now in preparation for retirement. The dwindling supply of affordable homes also was covered.
DOWNLOAD THE PRINT SECTION
Print pages in PDF: Right-click and [...]

Three weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, and with memories of the 2004 hurricane season still fresh, we told readers what would happen if “the big one” struck South Florida. I used SLOSH model data, property records and population statistics to describe the impact that a Category 5 hurricane would have on our [...]

The second installment of the Mapping the Boom series, with updated data through the first half of 2005. This 48-page section focused on some of the side-effects of the housing boom, including investor activity, high turnover and part-time residents. I made interactive maps showing sales activity rates and full-time residency status, but they’re not online [...]

I built custom base maps and analyzed nearly 500,000 home sales to produce this report. The results were published in a 48-page (with ads) special section. I also made a series of interactive maps for the web, but they aren’t online anymore.
DOWNLOAD THE PRINT SECTION
Print pages in PDF: Right-click and save-as to download (21.0 [...]

My colleague Kathleen Chapman and I built a one-of-a-kind, 17,000-record employee database for this investigation of hiring practices in Florida’s mostly outsourced and privatized juvenile justice system. That data allowed us to do what the state could not: Identify at least 200 employees hired by juvenile justice centers even though they had already been fired [...]

To find out how well Florida retains its college graduates, I compiled information on more than 500,000 graduates of both public and private institutions. For every person who received a degree between 1990 and 2000, I obtained their hometown city, state and ZIP code; current city, state and ZIP code; and degree year, major and [...]

By WILLIAM M. HARTNETT
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Higher education is billed as America’s great equalizer, but the economic rewards of a college degree are significantly smaller for minorities than for whites, according to a Palm Beach Post analysis of data recently released by the Census Bureau.
At every level of education - from high school dropouts [...]

By DAVID SEDORE and WILLIAM M. HARTNETT
Palm Beach Post Staff Writers
LANTANA - Carlos Cavanagh has a professional interest in the war in Iraq.
His company, Control Logistics of Lantana, makes most of the windows used on Army helicopters.
“When they land and throw up all that sand, I wonder how long my work is going to last,” [...]

This project was done almost entirely on night and weekends, sometimes until well past midnight, while my colleague Kathleen Chapman and I were both beat reporters in The Palm Beach Post’s Martin County bureau. We were flying so far under our editors’ radar back in those days that I was forced to cough up my [...]