Monthly Archives: May 2011

Men’s Health on the isolation of suburbia

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One can find commentary about suburbs almost anywhere, including at a Men’s Health blog. Here are their thoughts about the isolation of suburbia:

Researchers note that urbanites find liveliness, other people, and diversity more satisfying than those in the suburbs do. Suburbanites seem to find more satisfaction in economic status…

In the process, we replaced urban “stoop culture” with isolation. “Immigrants and other urbanites used to have casual interactions on a daily basis,” she says. “But once people started moving to the suburbs, they lost that sense of spontaneous social interaction.”

Sure, suburbanites technically could have walked the distance to their neighbor’s house. But the focus was more on individual households—partly due to the decline of the extended family. “Moving to the suburbs also meant moving away from your extended family into single family households,” Park explains.

This made our individual—fenced in—households the focus of our lives. Not just that—our new neighbors had different backgrounds and we had less in common with them, meaning forming new relationships took even more effort. (Fortunately, we finally had the TV to turn to instead!)…

The problem isn’t really suburbia itself; it’s isolation, which can affect anyone. (Fess up, city dwellers. Do you really even know who lives next door?)

On one hand, this post trades in some common images of suburbia: isolated homeowners who really live in “Disturbia, USA” (in the headline) and a thesis that asks “what’s wrong with the modern suburb?.” On the other hand, this issue of isolation is a commonly-cited problem in American life today. Interestingly, the last part of the post I cited above suggests the problem of isolation is found in both cities and suburbs. So is the problem really suburbia or is suburbia simply a symptom of larger issues of individualism and status-seeking within American culture?

Quick Review: The Cosmopolitan Canopy

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While I have already written some about Elijah Anderson’s new book The Cosmopolitan Canopy (here and here), I had a chance to read the book for myself and I have a few thoughts.

1. The book is supposedly about the public spaces in Philadelphia (and other big cities) where people of different races and social classes can mingle and interact without the difficulties that race and social class can often impose. Interestingly, this isn’t really the focus of the whole book (more on this shortly). But in this section, I thought some of the analysis was thin. It is clear that Anderson has spent a lot of time in some of these spaces, such as the Reading Terminal Market. I don’t doubt his observations but others have written before about public spaces and how they operate.

1a. Thinking about this, I would enjoy seeing some work on this in suburban settings. Since this is where most Americans now live, how do public spaces in the suburbs operate?

2. The strongest part of the book, in my opinion, was the latter half when Anderson focuses more on the experiences of black males in these canopies and elsewhere. Here, Anderson provides a lot of insight into how race still is a master status, even within high-powered workplaces. His examples are interesting, including settings like law firms and upper-end restaurants, and he has some insights into how race still has a profound impact on everyday interaction. This section reminded me of Anderson’s extended story of John Turner in Code of the Street where the ethnographic data really tells us about the current state of American race.

2a. It would also be interesting to get the stories of the whites involved in these examples.

3. The emphasis of the book is Philadelphia but I would have enjoyed reading about the flavor of this particular city opposed to other large cities. Would cosmopolitan canopies work the same in other places? Does the interaction depend on the mix of groups and races? What happens in newer large cities where there may be fewer public spaces and established neighborhoods? Are spaces like Rittenhouse Square or The Gallery unique or similar to other spaces?

On the whole, I think Anderson contributes to our knowledge by exploring how race still matters in American lives today. The part about cosmopolitan canopies is intriguing but could be better developed.

Highlighting the isolation and independence of McMansions

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A feature of McMansions that sometimes draws criticism is the possible isolation they offer their inhabitants. Neighborhoods of these homes are sometimes envisioned as wastelands where neighbors don’t know each other and really don’t want to have any interaction. Here is an illustration of this idea within an article about the “peer-to-peer economy”:

The mentality peaked during the ’90s and first half of the last decade. Heaven was a safe job, a McMansion, a Target (TGT) in your city, a Starbucks (SBUX) down the road, a credit card with no limit, and a seven-figure bank account. No need to ever interact with strangers! The perfect bliss of isolation, err, “financial independence.”

The general idea here is that the goal of life during this time period was to have so much money that people don’t have to interact with others that they don’t want to interact with. While this may be in the name of being “financially independent,” it is really about becoming self-sufficient and not having to depend on anybody.

Several thoughts about this:

1. Even with this so-called “financial independence,” it is hard to escape the need for other people. I’m reminded of Durkheim’s idea of organic solidarity where people are more interdependent on others than ever due to the division of labor but also feel more independent. This seems related to American cultural ideas of individualism: the goal is to become a self-made man/woman who can do it all on their own. Can we then interpret advice from people like Dave Ramsey as promulgating American individualism more than fighting debt?

1a. This fear of strangers is an interesting idea. It is often invoked when talking about the formation of American suburbs (white flight out of cities) or gated communities (trying to keep certain people out). I wonder if there is survey data that would suggests Americans are more afraid of strangers than citizens of other countries.

2. Is a single-family house more of a place to avoid people or to build up the individual and the family unit?

3. I understand the idea of a McMansion and a large bank account fitting the theme of isolation but what do a safe job, Target, and Starbucks have to do with it? In all three of these settings, people interact with others, particularly on the job. With money, one can purchase a customizable experience at Target and Starbucks but this would be true in a lot of commercial settings.

The limits of GPS in the West

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Technology can be a good thing but it can also lead people astray. Hence, a warning out West regarding using GPS in certain areas:

Travelers in the western U.S. should not rely solely on technology such as GPS for navigation, authorities said, after a Canadian couple were lost in the Nevada wilderness for 48 days.

Albert Chretien, 59, and his wife Rita Chretien, 56, sought a shorter route between Boise, Idaho and Jackpot, Nevada during a road trip from British Columbia to Las Vegas…

Sheriff’s offices in remote, high-elevation parts of Idaho, Nevada and Wyoming report the past two years have brought a rise in the number of GPS-guided travelers driving off marked and paved highways and into trouble.

The spike has prompted Death Valley National Park in California to caution on its web site that “GPS navigation to sites to remote locations like Death Valley are notoriously unreliable.”

When two roads diverge in Western lands, take the one more traveled, authorities said.

Perhaps this could be read as a warning about over-reliance on technology: it is not infallible.You can occasionally find stories of people driving into retention ponds or crashing into things because the GPS told them to turn. At the same time, how bad are these GPS maps that people can get lost so easily? This would seem to be bad news for GPS makers if they don’t cover certain areas very well. Could a GPS maker ever have any liability for any of these unpleasant occurrences? Additionally, I wonder how many GPS owners also carry around a map of some kind in their vehicle or on their person.

More broadly, this is a reminder that one doesn’t have to travel very far to leave the comforts of the modern world and get lost in nature.

Witold Rybczynski on McMansions, American housing, suburbs

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With the continued housing slump (and a story going around that the $8,000 homebuyer credit of recent years only masked the issues of the housing market), a number of commentators have shared their thoughts about the future of housing in America. Witold Rybczynski weighs in with his prediction for the near future in a piece with the headline of “McMansions dead at last?“:

Owning single-family houses represents a long-established tradition that the U.S. shares with many countries (Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway), but 10 years is long enough for traditions and behavior to change. It is likely that in the future multifamily housing will represent a larger share of the American housing market than the one-in-five new dwellings that has been the historic norm.

What about single-family houses, which will still remain for many people the home of choice? There is some evidence that urban townhomes and infill housing are more popular, as rising gas prices increase the cost of commuting. Higher energy costs also affect heating and air conditioning, which may have the effect of discouraging homebuyers from purchasing large houses with soaring entryways and expansive family rooms. While the evidence is fragmentary—the current reduction in average new house sizes has more to do with the preponderance of first-time buyers than an overall shift in demand—it is clear that the long recessionary cold-shower will dampen the exuberance that characterized the boom years of 2000 to 2005. That will mean smaller houses closer together on smaller lots in inner suburbs, fewer McMansions, and fewer planned communities in the distant hinterland. An alternative scenario is that American optimism will prevail and it will be business as usual, as happened during the boom of the 1950s following the Great Depression, or during the period following the Energy Crisis of 1973, when car buyers, after a brief flirtation with Japanese compact cars, embraced minivans and SUVs. But I wouldn’t count on it.

It sounds like Rybczynski thinks the American housing market will be denser and smaller in the future as a reaction to the last few years. He also makes the point that one big issue plaguing the housing market is more demographic in nature: household formation has slowed down as more people are living with other people rather than starting their own households that require a separate home.

Two other things also seem noteworthy:

1. Rybczynski suggests the reduction in home size is more due to having more first-time buyers than anything else. What about downsizers, particularly Baby Boomers who are retiring or whose children have left the house, that others have talked about?

2. Rybczynski also suggests that we will have fewer planned communities. I assume he is referring to larger planned communities/suburbs that simply may not be possible with low housing demand. But what about a possible uptick in smaller planned developments done by New Urbanists and others who can offer a denser form of suburbia?

Perhaps the fun part about reading pieces like this now is that we likely have years before we can really assess whether something has changed. In the meantime, we can wonder how low home values might go.

Architect discusses Bin Laden’s McMansion

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I’ve continued to track the meme of Bin Laden’s Abbottabad house being a McMansion and a new mentions trickle in each day. Here is an explanation of the Bin Laden-McMansion connection from an architect at Architect magazine:

It may be unfair to tar your typical New Jersey Neo-Colonial with the brush of a Pakistani compound, especially since Bin Laden’s crib seemed to be home to a multigeneration community of interest and family. It made better use of sprawling space than most nuclear family–inhabited American homes, and I hate to say that it looks from the photographs to be more honestly modern than most of our fake palazzos and palaces.

The bin Laden compound was also not like a true McMansion because it was not about flash. There were no fancy cars in evidence, no landscaping that was put in place every spring and ripped up again in the winter, no garish colors. There was, for heaven’s sake, not even an Internet connection–how did they play games? How did they get onto Groupon?

We have made Osama Bin Laden everything we are afraid of. It is fitting that evil turns out not to lurk in caves, which would be so last millennium, or live in a tent, which would be so the millennium before that. It lives in the suburbs. It turns out that our fear of cities and our distaste of others was something he shared while fostering the paranoia that we might be in danger if we leave our cocoon through his and his cohorts’ murderous programs. So we, or at least the government that many of us do not want to pay for, swooped in, surgically extracting the emblem of that fear. I note that, unlike in so many other operations against our enemies, we left the McMansion standing.

A few things stick out:

1. There are a number of jabs here at McMansions. So we don’t like Bin Laden and we don’t like McMansions – why not put the two together? Seriously, the argument here is that McMansions are emblematic of sprawl, have poor architecture/design, are full of tacky people (who use Groupon! and have garish landscaping!), and they are all about flash.

2. There is another story referred to here: Bin Laden was found in the suburbs, the last place Americans would expect and one that goes against all our fears of people who live in caves or cities. I’ve already written about this and still find it a bit strange to claim that Bin Laden was living a suburban lifestyle in a suburban home when this particular community seems somewhat unique as a miltary community.

3. Additionally, it is claimed that Bin Laden, like Americans, was afraid of cities and others, hence, the need to live in a compound/McMansion in a suburb. Americans do have quite an anti-urban bias and occasional fear of others. There is likely some truth to this but I wonder how the average American might respond to being equated to Bin Laden.

4. Is it safe to presume that the last sentence indicates that the author would have preferred that this particular raid have destroyed the Bin Laden McMansion? If so, is it more because it was home to Bin Laden or because it is a McMansion?

Overall, this a good piece for illustrating the common critiques of McMansions.

Just how many McMansions have actually collapsed like Trump’s polling figures?

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One common critique of the McMansion is that they are poorly built. The story continues that because they are mass-produced, the materials are bottom of the line so builders don’t have to do anything more than necessary  in the search for big profits. This idea was found in a recent story about the decline of Donald Trump’s polling figures:

Public Policy Polling finds Donald Trump’s numbers collapsing like a poorly-built McMansion.

Might some people find this phrase redundant and ask whether McMansions are poorly-built by definition?

Perhaps I am being too literal here but this gets me thinking about how many McMansions have actually collapsed. I would guess that not too many have collapsed on their own so perhaps the more appropriate figures to search for would measure how many McMansions needed major renovations or fixes and then how this data compares to other kinds of homes. Would HGTV, the network always on the search for homes that need help, be a good source for figures? This is probably not the kind of data builders would want to keep and it would be difficult to collate the information from millions of individual homeowners.

And what would be a better metaphor for the collapse of Donald Trump’s polling numbers?

Indicators of suburban poverty at food banks

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Amidst recent news and research that more poor residents are moving to and living in the suburbs compared to previous decades and the typical image of wealthy suburban communities, use of suburban food banks may also be an indicator of these trends:

Vicki Escarra, president and CEO of Feeding America, the nation’s largest hunger-relief charity with a network of more than 200 food bank partners, says there is a growing problem with suburban poverty, “where new clients are individuals who have never needed to rely on the charitable food system.”…

At the end of the economic boom in 2007, 13 million people or about 11% of all households were considered “food insecure,” the official term used by the government to define one’s inability to access an adequate amount of nutritious food at times during the year.

“Not everyone who is food insecure is literally going hungry,” says Mark Nord, sociologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. “Some are able to head off hunger by reducing the quality and variety of their diets. But if food insecurity is severe or prolonged, it is likely to result in hunger.”…

With that has come the increase in need among groups that were historically less vulnerable to hunger, according to the USDA’s Household Food Security in the United States annual report.

It would be interesting to see more specific data about the claims this article is trying to make: just how prevalent are hunger, food insecurity, and food stamps in the suburbs versus other areas? Without this data, this article is more about hunger in America and the already widely-reported statistic about food stamp usage. Ultimately, the article is just able to hint a possibly interesting story that would shed light on the changing nature of American suburbs.

Of course, one could go look at the USDA report cited in the article. With a quick search for the word “suburb,” here is what turns up in the 2 mentions:

Food insecurity was more common in large cities than in rural areas and in suburbs and other outlying areas around large cities. (p.6)

Across the metropolitan area classifications, the prevalence of food insecurity was higher for households located in principal cities of metropolitan areas (17.2 percent), than for those in nonmetropolitan areas (14.2 percent), and in suburbs and other metropolitan areas outside principal cities (13.2 percent).  Regionally, the prevalence of food insecurity was highest in the South (15.9 percent) and West (15.5 percent), intermediate in the Midwest (13.9 percent), and lowest in the Northeast (12.2 percent). (p.17)

Here are the figures about food pantry use:

Use of food pantries was higher in principal cities of metropolitan areas (5.0 percent) and in nonmetropolitan areas (5.9 percent) than in metropolitan areas outside of central cities (3.9 percent). The percentage of households that used food pantries was higher in the Midwest and West than in the  Northeast and South. (p.43)

It would be helpful to have comparisons to past data to see whether these figure for the suburbs has risen over the years. And while the percentages are lower for the suburbs, since more Americans live in the suburbs, there are probably larger absolute numbers of people dealing with food insecurity in the suburbs. (Quick calculations with a rough population estimate of 300 million: since at least 50% of Americans live in suburbs vs. 30% in cities, the food insecurity figures would translate into roughly 15.5 million in the cities and 19.8 million in the suburbs).

Studying the declining use of nicknames in sports

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Nicknames for professional athletes are on the decline – and there are academics to prove it:

But most famous athletes are now best known by their given name. The Yankees won generations of championships with men known as Babe, Iron Horse, Joltin’ Joe, Scooter, Yogi, Catfish and Mr. October. More recently, they won with players named Derek, Mariano and Andy. Alex Rodriguez — A-Rod — has what passes for a nickname these days.

The sociologist James Skipper, author of “Baseball Nicknames: A Dictionary of Origins and Meanings,” found that the use of nicknames peaked before 1920. It has since been in steady decline, dropping quickly in the 1950s.

Using a baseball encyclopedia listing all major league players from 1871 to 1968, Skipper found that 28.1 percent of players had nicknames not derived from their given names. (Lefty, Red and Doc were most popular.) No doubt the percentage has since dipped precipitously.

“The era of the colorful nickname may be over,” Skipper concluded about 30 years ago…

“Their own names now act as brand names,” said Frank Neussel, editor of Names: A Journal of Onomastics, and a University of Louisville professor of modern language and linguistics. “Your identity is not your nickname. It’s your stats.”

I’ve always heard old-timers talk about this downturn in sports nicknames and I have found it difficult to understand what the big fuss is about.

Based on what is said here, here is one possible sociological explanation for this trend: athlete’s names have become McDonaldized in the interest of efficiency and marketing. Single given names, like Shaq or Tiger, seem to be best. More whimsical nicknames might detract from what really is important now: endorsements and championships (which also happen to lead to more endorsements).

Perhaps the litmus test for the average sports fan today is what they think of Chris Berman’s insistence on using crazy nicknames. Since I tend to find him bearable, perhaps this indicates I’m not ready just yet to give up on the more joyful side of sports.

And what do the athletes themselves think of this shift?

Durkheim discussed “suicide viruses”?

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I was reading a recent edition of Newsweek at the gym and ran across a story about a Russian model who committed suicide. Toward the end of the article, the writer tries to explain higher suicide rates in Russia and invokes Emile Durkheim:

Young women from the former Soviet bloc are particularly fragile. Six of the top seven countries worldwide for suicide rates among young females are former Soviet republics: Russia is sixth in the list, Kazakhstan second. The sociologist Emile Durkheim argued that suicide viruses occur at civilizational breaks, when the parents have no traditions, no value systems to pass on to their children. Thus there is no deep-lying ideology to support them when they are under emotional stress. Ruslana’s and Anastasia’s parents were brought up in the Soviet Union; their children lived in a completely different world.

I find this idea of  “suicide viruses” to be somewhat strange as it makes suicide sound like a contagion or a disease. Durkheim himself suggested in Suicide that suicides were the result of anomie, the idea that individuals in a society need to be integrated into the surrounding or they may feel disconnected and take drastic action. Imitation was not much of a social cause (see this summary here); rather, suicides are driven by a normlessness that one can experience if not properly integrated into society.

I think this paragraph referring to Durkheim could be better executed by talking about how young women in these former Soviet Republics have a difficult time finding their place in society. In this particular story, it sounds like the model was destabilized by this particular group/cult and didn’t know where to turn. The socialization process between parents and children might play a role in this but there could be other factors as well. The suggestion in the story is that parents have little ideology to pass on to their children and this is more of a society-wide concern than simply the responsibility of individual families.