Monthly Archives: September 2013

Teardowns McMansions responsible for the big American homes of today?

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A story about a family who has downsized links teardown McMansions to the big American homes of today:

At a time when smaller, older homes are routinely torn down to build sprawling new “McMansions” — the median American home size has soared 250 percent from 1,000 square feet in 1950 to 2,500 in 2008 — Lindsay and Sue took the opposite approach when they remodeled their 1920 Arts and Crafts style bungalow in 2011. They actually lost square footage, about 40 square feet.

Just how indicative are teardowns of bigger American homes? They can be viewed as a symptom of longer and larger trends, particularly when looking back to 1950. Over the course of 60 years, the average new American home expanded by a factor of 2.5. This is significant as it led Americans to have the largest average new homes in the world. And all of this has happened as the average American household shrunk – perhaps suggesting Americans like even more space and more stuff in that space. Across the board, Americans now consume more than their counterparts in the 1950s – and this includes houses.

But, there might be some merit to linking teardowns to a larger average house size. Teardowns are still relatively rare. They occur most frequently in wealthier or gentrifying neighborhoods where there is money to spend on buying a home, destroying it, and constructing a whole new home. Yet, the average new house size might continue to be pulled up by the luxury housing market that may not have been hit as hard during the economic crisis. Look at the distributions of new homes by square feet from 1999 to 2012: 34% of new American homes in 1999 were over 2,400 square feet (17% over 3,000) compared to 45% over 2,400 square feet in 2012 (26% over 3,000).

On one hand, McMansions are often the whipping boys of the early 21st century American consumer culture. On the other hand, their presence may have helped keep the average new house size high even as the lower end of the housing market has had more difficulty recovering.

Focus groups examine home designs in a warehouse

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Pulte recently put together some new home designs in a Chicago area warehouses to see how consumers would respond:

Basically, it was the latest incarnation of the company’s ongoing experiment: walking focus groups of consumers through full-size prototypes of floor plans of homes that Pulte intends to build, and asking for reactions before the first shovelful of earth has been dug. The consumers’ input enables the builder to tout the homes as “Life Tested.”

So on this September day, in an 88,000-square-foot warehouse in suburban Franklin Park, nine Chicago-area homeowners were life-testing “houses” framed in lumber and covered with sheets of Tyvek house wrap to simulate walls.

Pulte brought in a team of carpenters to do the framing for 11 houses and the fixtures within, such as kitchen islands and bathroom sinks, which were covered in corrugated paper and marked — in case you weren’t sure what you were looking at — “island,” “sink,” etc…

Total silence ensued — they weren’t supposed to speak to one another, so as not to influence opinions — as they wandered from room to room. Then they moved “upstairs” (that is, next door) to do the same thing.

This sounds like a helpful approach to getting feedback about particular interior features, even if the features aren’t fully constructed. However, I wonder how valuable this feedback is without situating a home within a particular neighborhood. I assume Pulte would say the neighborhood is another important factor and that they build attractive neighborhoods that only enhance the individual homes.

It is also interesting to see that Pulte’s designs are then said to be “life tested.” Pulte has built enough homes over the decades to legitimately claim this for established featuresbut can they really say this for new designs?

“Normal accidents” and black swans in the complex systems of today

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A sociological idea about the problems that can arise in complex systems is related to Taleb’s ideas of black swans:

This near brush with nuclear catastrophe, brought on by a single foraging bear, is an example of what sociologist Charles Perrow calls a “normal accident.” These frightening incidents are “normal” not because they happen often, but because they are almost certain to occur in any tightly connected complex system.

Today, our highly wired global financial markets are just such as system. And in recent years, aggressive traders have repeatedly played the role of the hungry bear, setting off potential disaster after potential disaster through a combination of human blunders and network failures…

In his book Normal Accidents, Perrow stresses the role that human error and mismanagement play in these scenarios. The important lesson: failures in complex systems are caused not only by the hardware and software problems but by people and their motivations.

See an earlier post dealing with the same sociological ideas. Nassim Taleb discusses this quite a bit and suggests knowing about this complexity should lead us to different kinds of actions where we try to minimize the disastrous risks and find opportunities for extraordinary success (if there are inevitable yet unknown opportunities for crisis, there could also be moments where low risk investments can pay off spectacularly).

If these are inherent traits of complex systems, does this mean more people will argue against such systems in the future? I could imagine some claiming this means we should have smaller systems and more local control. However, we may be at the point where even much smaller groups can’t escape a highly interdependent world. And, as sociologist Max Weber noted, bureaucratic structures (a classic example of complex organizations or systems) may have lots of downsides but they are relatively efficient at dealing with complex concerns. Take the recent arguments about health care: people might not like the government handling more of it but even without government control, there are still plenty of bureaucracies involved, it is a complex system, and there is plenty of potential for things to go wrong.

Fastest-growing American counties are suburban

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Joel Kotkin highlights the fastest growing counties large counties in the United States:

Yet an analysis by demographer Wendell Cox of the counties with populations over 100,000 that have gained the most new residents since 2010 tells us something very different: Suburbs and exurbs are making a comeback, something that even the density-obsessed New York Times has been forced to admit. Of the 10 fastest-growing large counties all but two — Orleans Parish, home to the recovering city of New Orleans, and the Texas oil town of Midland— are located in the suburban or exurban fringe of major metropolitan areas.

Fastest Growiing US Counties: 2010-2012
Counties over 100,000 Population
Rank County Equivalent Jurisdiction    Growth
1 Williamson, TX 7.94%
2 Loudon, VA 7.87%
3 Hays, TX 7.56%
4 Orleans, LA 7.39%
5 Fort Bend, TX 7.16%
6 Midland, TX 7.14%
7 Forsyth, GA 7.07%
8 Montgomery, TN 7.04%
9 Prince William, VA 7.04%
10 Osceola, FL 6.97%

What these findings demonstrate is that more people aren’t moving “back to the city” but further out. In the last decade in the 51 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, inner cores, within two miles of downtown, gained some 206,000 people,  while locations 20 miles out gained over 8.5 million. Although the recession slowed exurban growth, since 2011, notes Jed Kolko at Trulia, suburbs have continued to grow far faster than inner ring areas as well as downtown. Americans, he concludes, “still love their suburbs.”

Rather than an inevitable long-range shift, the post-crash slowdown of suburban growth seems to have been largely a response to economic factors. The retro-urbanist dream of eliminating, or at least undermining, suburban alternatives depends very much on maintaining recessionary conditions that discourage relocation, depress housing starts, as well as lowering marriage and birthrates.

Where incomes are growing along with rapid job growth , suburban and exurban growth tends to be strong.  The metro regions that contain our fastest-growing counties — Austin, Houston, Nashville and Northern Virginia — all epitomize this phenomenon. For example, nearly 80% of all housing growth in greater Houston takes place in the areas west of Beltway 8 (the outer beltway). A similar pattern can be seen in the D.C. area, where the number of units permitted in Loudon has more than doubled since 2007. In 2012 permit issuances were the highest since 2005, and the vast majority were for either detached or attached single-family houses.

Kotkin’s conclusion is that the economic crisis slowed suburban growth for a few years, not a growing American move to cities and denser suburban areas. Some of this can’t be known until more time goes by; if Kotkin is right, recent years will be a blip and the kinds of places that were the fastest growing counties from 2010 to 2012 will continue to be fast-growing places.

There might be another approach that would allow both Kotkin and proponents of cities to both be able to claim some victory: outer suburbs might continue to grow as might attractive big cities (think Richard Florida’s creative class moving to the city) while inner suburbs who often have big-city problems, older housing stocks, and tax bases that have a hard time supporting suburban services languish.

Gangs using social media in Chicago

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Wired looks at how Chicago gangs are using social media:

We naturally associate criminal activity with secrecy, with conspiracies hatched in alleyways or back rooms. Today, though, foolish as it may be in practice, street gangs have adopted a level of transparency that might impress even the most fervent Silicon Valley futurist. Every day on Facebook and Twitter, on Instagram and YouTube, you can find unabashed teens flashing hand signs, brandishing guns, splaying out drugs and wads of cash. If we live in an era of openness, no segment of the population is more surprisingly open than 21st-century gang members, as they simultaneously document and roil the streets of America’s toughest neighborhoods.

There’s a term sometimes used for a gangbanger who stirs up trouble online: Facebook driller. He rolls out of bed in the morning, rubs his eyes, picks up his phone. Then he gets on Facebook and starts insulting some person he barely knows, someone in a rival crew. It’s so much easier to do online than face-to-face. Soon someone else takes a screenshot of the post and starts passing it around. It’s one thing to get cursed out in front of four or five guys, but online the whole neighborhood can see it—the whole city, even. So the target has to retaliate just to save face. And at that point, the quarrel might be with not just the Facebook driller a few blocks away but also haters 10 miles north or west who responded to the post. What started as a provocation online winds up with someone getting drilled in real life.

And the police are watching:

Gang enforcement officers in Chicago started looking closely at social media sites about three years ago, after learning that high school students were filming fights in the hallways and alcoves of their schools and posting the videos online. Boudreau tells me that they began to hear about fight videos going on YouTube during the day, and then they would often see a related shooting later in the afternoon. In the department’s deployment operations center, the other unit in the force that regularly monitors social media activity, officers first took notice when they read in the newspaper about a West Side gang member who was using the Internet to find out about enemies being released from prison. But “virtual policing” became a priority only after kids aligned with local cliques started calling each other out in rap videos…

Police and other experts say the ad hoc, emotional nature of street violence today might actually present an opportunity. Repairing big rifts between warring criminal enterprises is really hard; defusing minor beefs and giving kids skills to regulate their socio-emotional behavior is highly labor-intensive but effective. And the public nature of social media gives police and advocacy groups some warning about trouble before it starts. For a long time, criminal-justice experts have talked about predictive policing—the idea that you can use big data to sniff out crimes before they happen, conjuring up an ethically troublesome future like the one depicted in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. But in Chicago and other big cities, police are finding it’s much easier than that. Give people social media and they’ll tell you what they’re about to do.

And this activity on social media helps fuel a social network approach to examining gangs.

Seven square feet of self-storage for every American

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The decluttering industry can rejoice: Americans have enough stuff for the self-storage industry to have seven square feet for each American. I’ve always wondered about the relationship between bigger homes and more stuff. Which comes first: having more stuff leads to a bigger house or having bigger houses leads acquiring more to fill them? I suspect the two are mutually reinforcing. Americans generally have quite a few things, even poorer Americans, thanks to general prosperity and a consumer-oriented society which kicked into high gear starting in the early 1900s. As a kid, I liked looking repeatedly at the book Material World which had families around the globe pose for a picture in front of their house with all of the stuff from their house piled around them. The average American family had quite a bit while many around the globe had very little.

This bit of data would bolster the arguments of some who suggest big homes are just a symptom of a larger problem: a society that likes consuming things.

The “immortal” B-52

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Even as technology cycles speed up for smartphones and other devices, there is one remarkable plane that is still flying and might continue to fly for decades more: the B-52.

Don’t be surprised if another generation of the family is in the cockpit before it goes into retirement. The Air Force plans improvements that will keep the plane around till 2040.It’s not quite your grandfather’s B-52. True, its onboard computers are pitifully underpowered antiques and some models still have vacuum tubes — Google that, kids. Barry Posen, director of the Security Studies Program at MIT, informs me that “there are dials in the B-52 cockpit that have not been connected to anything for years.”

But the plane has been repeatedly remodeled and upgraded to assure its utility, with new engines and electronics. Soon it will be “getting modern digital display screens, computer network servers and real-time communication uplinks,” according to the Times…

One of its virtues is relatively low cost, which presumably makes the Pentagon more willing to use it. The high price tags on the B-1 and the B-2 Stealth bomber mean the Air Force can’t buy as many of them and has to exercise more caution about putting them in harm’s way.

Another factor is that while more advanced aircraft possess capabilities that are rarely needed, the B-52 is perfectly adequate for most real-world contingencies. MIT defense scholar Owen Cote told me that since the 1990s, “we’ve been essentially continuously at war against smaller powers with weak or nonexistent air defenses, against whom the range, persistence and versatile payloads of the B-52 can be invaluable.”

I saw this story while recently thinking about the amazing aspects of modern car engines: they can be turned on and off thousands of times a year and they generally are expected to last at least 100,000 miles. Car engines are remarkably consistent considering all of the moving parts and the internal combustion taking place. Take the consistency of cars and then apply them to these larger aircraft and the idea that they can last for decades or even a century is remarkable.

Additionally, the end of the column hints that these old aircraft are perfectly fine in most modern situations – not all, but many. I know there is a whole history of bombers not being as flashy as fighter  and we would prefer to be prepared for all circumstances but it does lead me to wonder about claims that we need always need to be creating the best fighter-jets possible…is this a physical manifestation of American exceptionalism?

How long until suburban homeowners use goats to keep their lawn in shape?

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I read that Naperville is using goats to clear some parkland and I had an idea: why shouldn’t suburban homeowners use goats to keep their lawns short? This could provide some nice benefits: no need to buy a lawnmower; less pollution; less noise; goats could handle grass as well as other vegetation (weed control!); they could be shared or rented out so that not every homeowner has to have a few goats. The drawbacks: the lawn probably wouldn’t look as nice; goats may be unsightly or detract from nicer neighborhoods (see discussions about suburban chickens); and tending goats would be time consuming.

I don’t suspect this is going to happen in large numbers anytime soon. Oddly enough, the biggest drawback might be that the goats won’t be able to produce the kind of finish that suburbanites tend to prefer…

 

Internet commenters can’t handle science because they argue by anecdote, think studies apply to 100% of cases

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Popular Science announced this week they are not allowing comments on their stories because “comments can be bad for science”:

But even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader’s perception of a story, recent research suggests. In one study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, 1,183 Americans read a fake blog post on nanotechnology and revealed in survey questions how they felt about the subject (are they wary of the benefits or supportive?). Then, through a randomly assigned condition, they read either epithet- and insult-laden comments (“If you don’t see the benefits of using nanotechnology in these kinds of products, you’re an idiot” ) or civil comments. The results, as Brossard and coauthor Dietram A. Scheufele wrote in a New York Times op-ed:

Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.
In the civil group, those who initially did or did not support the technology — whom we identified with preliminary survey questions — continued to feel the same way after reading the comments. Those exposed to rude comments, however, ended up with a much more polarized understanding of the risks connected with the technology.
Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they’d previously thought.

Another, similarly designed study found that just firmly worded (but not uncivil) disagreements between commenters impacted readers’ perception of science…

A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.

In addition to rude comments and ad hominem attacks leading to changed perceptions about scientific findings, here are two common misunderstandings of how science works often found in online comments (these are also common misconceptions offline):

1. Internet conversations are ripe for argument by anecdote. This happens all the time: a study is described and then the comments are full of people saying that the study doesn’t apply to them or someone they know. Providing a single counterfactual usually says very little and scientific studies are often designed to be as generalizable as they can be. Think of jokes made about global warming: just because there is one blizzard or one cold season doesn’t necessarily invalidate a general trend upward for temperatures.

2. Argument by anecdote is related to a misconception about scientific studies: the findings do not often apply to 100% of cases. Scientific findings are probabilistic, meaning there is some room for error (this does not mean science doesn’t tell us anything – it means it is hard to measure and analyze the real world – and scientists try to limit error as much as possible). Thus, scientists tend to talk in terms of relationships being more or less likely. This tends to get lost in news stories that suggest 100% causal relationships.

In other words, in order to have online conversations about science, you have to have readers who know the basics of scientific studies. I’m not sure my two points above are necessarily taught before college but I know I cover these ideas in both Statistics and Research Methods courses.

Connecting McMansions to water runoff problems

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Echoing a post from a few days ago, a editor to the letter suggests the construction of McMansions has led to more flooding problems in Needham, Massachusetts:

The recent Times article on flooding after our “hundred year storm” didn’t mention one likely contributor to the storm water runoff problem — McMansions. Teardowns surely contributed to the recent flooding, because each new McMansion’s large footprint eliminated a big chunk of drainage land from Needham’s overall water absorption capacity. And building large homes on previously open lots is an even more direct “drain” on our Town’s total runoff capacity.

I’m sure someone could go through the records and calculate exactly how many acres have been lost to big houses (and driveways) over the past 10 years of heightened development. Though we haven’t exactly “paved Paradise and put up a parking lot,” I’m guessing this is enough of a factor that it should be taken into account as Needham considers its longer range development future.

At face value, this seems to make sense. However, I would still have a few questions:

1. What if the new teardown McMansions actually include more efficient drainage systems? This might occur because of updated building codes. I’m not quite sure how this might balance out against having a larger footprint.

2. Is the problem really McMansions, large houses on smaller lots, or is this more of a problem of sprawl in general? Perhaps bigger suburban houses are worse than smaller suburban houses when it comes to water issues but it seems like the underlying problem might be suburban development in the first place.

3. Are there better ways for homebuilders to limit water runoff with new homes? If so, why not require these options for new homes? Local municipalities could make such decisions if they are unwilling to limit more sprawl. Why not require permeable driveways and roadways in new developments?