Monthly Archives: June 2011

Great Quotes in Homeownership #2: Herbert Hoover on the value of owning a home in 1931

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Herbert Hoover is not a well-regarded President. But he did have a lot to say about home ownership even as the country was going through the Great Depression. Here are some of Hoover’s thoughts from 1931:

“Next to food and clothing, the housing of a nation is its most vital problem. . . . The sentiment for home ownership is embedded in the American heart [of] millions of people who dwell in tenements, apartments and rented rows of solid brick. . . . This aspiration penetrates the heart of our national wellbeing. It makes for happier married life. It makes for better children. It makes for courage to meet the battle of life. . . . There is a wide distinction between homes and mere housing. Those immortal ballads, ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ and ‘The Little Grey Home in the West’ were not written about tenements or apartments. . . . They were written about an individual abode, alive with tender associations of childhood, the family life at the fireside, the free out-of-doors, the independence, the security and the pride in possession of the family’s own home. . . . Many of our people must live under other conditions. But they never sing songs about a pile of rent receipts. . . .”

Over these warm words and some 1,900 others like them President Hoover had worked with a full heart for two months. One evening last week he took them all, in the form of a keynote address, to Constitution Hall and there, in a voice brimming with emotion, delivered them to the assembled delegates of the President’s Conference on Home Building & Home Ownership. At this great gathering President Hoover again demonstrated his ability and leadership in an unofficial activity outside the constitutional realm of the Presidency.

The conference’s major purpose, President Hoover said, was “to stimulate industrial action,” not “to set up government in the building of homes.” To promote home owning the President urged a better system of home financing, thus keying his program in with his proposed Home Loan Discount system (TIME, Nov. 23).

Of course, Hoover gets some of the blame for not being able to move the country out of a position where it was difficult for many Americans to imagine homeownership, let alone a steady job. But these and other quotes from Hoover suggest he was a President who was committed to helping average Americans move from a monthly rent to a mortgage even in dark economic times. He suggested homeownership would lead to better social outcomes plus lead to feelings of nostalgia, “independence,” “security,” and “pride.”

This is also a reminder that the American value of homeownership was not just a post-World War II phenomenon. The rate of suburbanization was impressive in the post-war period but there had been a wave of suburbanization in the more prosperous 1920s that was interrupted by the Great Depression. I have occasionally found it interesting to think about how suburban growth patterns would have been different without the Great Depression and World War II. Several things might have happened earlier, like the building of interstates or the mass building of suburban communities (exemplified by the Levittowns). Perhaps the whole process might have simply taken longer, giving citizens and politicians more time to react and adjust.

I also wonder how Hoover’s goals of homeownership are viewed by today’s scholars who look back at this period: did these sentiments directly contribute to prolonging the Great Depression? How many of Hoover’s ideas ended up getting implemented in some form by subsequent leaders?

Sociologist who studies sports riots tries to explain Vancouver riots

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On Thursday, I threw out a few ideas about the riots in Vancouver after the Canuck’s Game 7 loss. A sociologist who has studied over 200 sports riots suggests what happened in Vancouver was quite unusual as it followed a loss rather than a win:

In fact it is so unusual that Jerry Lewis, the author of Sports Fan Violence in North America, told CBC News that what we saw Wednesday night “might be called the Vancouver effect.”

An emeritus professor of sociology at Kent State University in Ohio, Lewis has looked closely at over 200 sports riots in the U.S. and none of them followed a loss by the home team.

That little quirk aside, however, Vancouver’s night of rampage does fit relatively well with the overall pattern of sports riots in North America. From his research, Lewis has identified five common conditions:

  • A natural urban gathering place.
  • The availability of a ‘cadre’ of young, white males.
  • Championship stakes.
  • Deep in the series.
  • A close, exciting game.

It appears that the riots in Vancouver followed some of the patterns of sports riots (the five cited above) except for the fact that they came after a loss. Lewis and another academic go on to suggest that the rioting in Vancouver “was simply an expression of frustration.” Another academic also suggests that North Americans tend to pout after sports losses while European crowds are more liable to cause trouble because they see it as an attack on their identity.

If all of this is true, then the real question to ask is why this happened in Vancouver (and also happened in 1994)? Lots of cities go through big sports losses and there are a lot of frustrated sports fans every year as only one team can win a championship in each major sports. What leads to a different reaction in Vancouver? This sounds like it could be a very interesting case study.

Dioramas of suburbs and McMansions

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The New York Times has a story about photographers who build model homes and suburban scenes in order to photograph them:

Yet “Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities,” at the Museum of Arts and Design, circles back to the two-dimensional image in ways that feel very sophisticated. A good number of the show’s more than 40 artists build model homes, cities and landscapes mainly to photograph them…

James Casebere, meanwhile, shows his photographs but not the architectural models of suburban housing developments on which they are based. By controlling the lighting and printing his images on a large scale, he makes sprawl seem even more aggressive and insidious. In “Landscape With Houses (Dutchess County, N.Y.) #8” tightly spaced McMansions tower over a quaint white-clapboard farmhouse.

Mr. Casebere is something of an anomaly in this show because he is so focused on the present. Other examples of model architecture tend to indulge nostalgia, along the lines of Michael Paul Smith’s bland 1950s strip mall and Alan Wolfson’s gritty little slice of 1970s Canal Street in New York…

The trip through all of these microcosms can be tedious: too many shoeboxes, not enough ideas. One exception is a video by Junebum Park, who uses his hands and a rooftop camera to turn an ordinary parking lot into a kind of moving diorama. A simple trick of perspective is all it takes to make him the master of Matchbox cars and ant-size pedestrians.

The article ends by suggesting that too many of the dioramas are similar. What would happen if an artist presented suburban homes in a positive light rather than portraying sprawl as “aggressive and insidious” – would this be different enough or unacceptable?

I am intrigued by the idea that a “bland” 1950s strip mall induces nostalgia. What exactly does this look like?

A new bridge in Wheaton highlights problems with the railroad tracks, north-south routes

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The Wesley Street bridge in Wheaton recently reopened after being completely rebuilt. Here is how it was changed:

The project involved several components including demolishing the existing bridge and reconstructing the approach roads, according to a press release..

A stoplight has been added where Manchester Road, Bridge Street and Wesley Street intersect, and a change in traffic pattern will allow drivers to turn left onto Bridge Street. This turn was previously prohibited due to the structural deficiencies with the old bridge, the release said.

The new structure also does not have weight restrictions, opening it up to emergency vehicles, school buses and trucks.

This is the only news story online I could find that actually had a picture of the bridge (though it is not a great angle to show off the new road bridge). Particularly compared to the old bridge, the new one has some nice styling and is a nice addition to the landscape.

But the reopening of the bridge also highlights two long-running issues in Wheaton:

1. This is the only bridge/underpass near the downtown and when the bridge is out, drivers would have had to go west to County Farm Road and or to the east side of Glen Ellyn to avoid an at-grade crossing. For decades, the City of Wheaton has looked at possible plans to avoid the railroad tracks downtown. Unfortunately, any major construction would have altered the existing buildings near Main and Front Street, the heart of the historic downtown. (Wheaton has approved plans for a pedestrian underpass at Chase Street but this requires losing an at-grade crossing plus it is east of the downtown.)

2. One possible bridge/underpass solution touched on another issue: the lack of north-south routes through Wheaton. This is partly a legacy of the hub and spoke model of the Chicago area where railroad lines (and Wheaton was built on the first one) radiate out from the center of Chicago but the connections between these lines are rare. Several decades ago, the city considered linking up Naperville Road, which dead ends just south of the railroad tracks to Main Street so that there would be a single major road through downtown Wheaton. Again, this would have required a lot of work so plans never moved forward. Another option was to push Gary Road further south but this also would have required a lot of work. While this bridge is helpful in navigating around the railroad tracks, it still requires driving around the downtown and isn’t part of a north-south path through the city.

California housing forecast includes fewer McMansions, depressed construction industry

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Several researchers from UCLA suggest California housing industry will experience some changes in the next few years including a construction industry that will need years to recover:

UCLA forecasters have seen the future of California’s housing market, and it looks like this: more apartments near the coast, fewer McMansions in the desert…

That’s bad news for the state economy, however, for two reasons. One is that construction of multifamily homes requires less labor than construction of single-family homes. Second, areas such as the Inland Empire and Central Valley that were hit hardest by the housing bust won’t get a construction boom to help pull them out of the economic doldrums.

This means “there is an even larger structural unemployment problem in California than we originally thought,” Nickelsburg wrote in the forecast. “Not only do we have excess construction, real estate and support skills, but some of those that will be demanded will be in the wrong geography.”

California won’t start adding a significant number of building permits until 2013, forecasters say, which is one of the reasons the state’s unemployment rate will stay above 10% until the middle of that year. Nonfarm employment in the state won’t return to pre-recession levels until 2014, and construction employment won’t reach those levels until at least 2021.

The demographic shifts and move away from McMansions have been predicted elsewhere but the longer-term impact of a troubled construction industry has sort of flown under the radar. I wonder how much of the current unemployment troubles in the US are the result of the lack of home construction, i.e., what percent of the unemployed are construction workers? Where do construction workers end up working in a prolonged housing industry slump?

All of this is a reminder that the housing crisis which helped lead to the economic crisis is a longer-term issue. Lower housing prices don’t just influence homeowners who wish they could sell or get a return on their home or large lending institutions who lost a lot of money – millions of construction workers are under- or unemployed and communities can no longer rely on quick single-family home construction to help revive their economies.

Championship wins and losses as an “acceptable” time to riot

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It has become a somewhat common ritual (though it doesn’t happen in all instances): a team wins a championship and happy fans celebrate with small riots and civil disturbances. But the script got flipped Tuesday night in Vancouver after the Canucks lost Game 7 to the Bruins:

Almost 150 people required hospital treatment overnight and close to 100 were arrested after rioters swept through downtown Vancouver following a Canucks loss to the Boston Bruins in the decisive Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals…

Rioting and looting left cars burned, stores in shambles and windows shattered over a roughly 10-block radius of the city’s main shopping district.

Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson said “organized hoodlums bent on creating chaos incited the riot” and noted the city proved with the 2010 Winter Olympics that it could hold peaceful gatherings. A local business leader estimated more than 50 businesses have been damaged…

“The destructive actions and needless violence demonstrated by a minority of people last night in Vancouver is highly disappointing to us all,” the team statement read. “We are proud of the city we live and play in and know that the actions of these misguided individuals are not reflective of the citizens of Vancouver or of any true fans of the Canucks or the game of hockey.”

The rest of the article goes on to suggest that people in Vancouver are shocked that this happened. But this brings up some interesting questions:

1. Why riot after the outcome of championship series and not so much at other times (like at the Olympics)? Sports do invoke a lot of emotions but as a friend suggested to me recently, sports help channel passions into non-destructive channels. So people these days get so worked up over sports that it spills into civil disobedience? Perhaps we are taking sports too seriously.

2. Could there be small groups of people in cities that are looking for excuses to do things like this and then seize upon the circumstances of a sports championship? If this is the case, then there are larger systemic issues to deal with. At the same time, it means that a city can blame some “bad apples” (“organized hoodlums” in the story above) rather than admitting there may be bigger problems.

3. I wonder how much stories like these continue to push people toward the suburbs.

A call for more TV shows about science and academia

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Certain television genres are well-established. One academic suggests TV should branch out and include a show about science, knowledge, and academia:

No matter what new sitcoms and dramas the networks dream up this coming fall, I can almost guarantee the absence of one type of show: a show about academia. But a television show about academics — professors, scientist and graduate students — is more necessary than ever before. And with a film being made out of Piled Higher and Deeper — an online comic about the trials and tribulations of graduate students — the time may be right to fill this gaping hole on the small screen…

The interplay between the objective quest for knowledge and the all-too-human drama that surrounds it is something that the average viewer has probably heard of, but does not know much about.

And there’s no shortage of real drama to fuel story lines. This show, which I would call The Ivory Tower, would be packed with backstabbing and gossip, glimpses into the intellectual servitude of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, the agony of dissertation defenses, the thrill of scientific discoveries, the ulcer-creating tenure process, professors’ quests for 15 minutes of fame, and, of course, the inevitable lab love affairs.

Episodes could revolve around topics ranging from the conflict-of-interest riddled nature of how scientific ideas are vetted by peers, to those rare but gut-wrenching cases of academic dishonesty and faking data, to the intense deliberations over thesis defenses. Academia is a very non-rational endeavor.

Here are a few things such a show would have to deal with:

1. There seems to be a good number of Americans who think academics are elitist or liberal or Godless (or perhaps all three). Viewers need to be able to relate to the characters or the settings. This is an image problem.

2. As the writer suggests, the show would have to revolve around relationships in the same way that every other show does. Yes, it would have to include all of TV’s tropes including unrequited love between co-workers and bad/incompetent bosses.

3. I have a sneaking suspicion that this whole proposal is a joke. Who wants to watch “the agony of dissertation defenses” or the “ulcer-creating tenure process”?

4. Perhaps such a show could be based around an innovative science or research project. Therefore, the overall payoff of the show wouldn’t just be the episode-to-episode relationships but rather a large story arc about curing cancer or developing space travel vehicles for humans that would go beyond the moon.

4a. Why couldn’t the project-driven show work as a reality show on Discovery or National Geographic?

5. I suspect many academics get into academia because they are excited about “the objective quest for knowledge.” But how many professors have given such a speech to students about the joys of research, hard work, and discovery only to be met with blank stares? Some students enjoy this – but would the general public?

6. Which discipline would get to be featured in such a show? I wonder how TV creators and producers would make this choice. I imagine they would have to go with something relatively well-known and/or controversial.

7. There are plenty of shows and movies about high school. There still aren’t that many about college, let alone the academic side of college. Is this because high school is a more universal experience or is it more uniform across schools?

Class I railroads converge in Chicago region

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Chicago continues to be a critical transportation hub in the United States. A recent short interview in Chicago said 70% of American rail traffic moves through the Chicago area and 6 of the Class I railroads in the United States run through the region. Here is a description of Class I railroads from the Department of the Interior:

There were 554 common carrier freight railroads operating in the United States in 2002, classified into five groups.

Class I railroads are those with operating revenue of at least $272 million in 2002. Class I carriers comprise only 1 percent of the number of U.S. freight railroads, but they account for 70 percent of the industry’s mileage operated, 89 percent of its employees, and 92 percent of its freight revenue. Class I carriers typically operate in many different states and concentrate largely (though not exclusively) on long-haul, high-density intercity traffic lanes. There are seven Class I railroads ranging in size from just over 3,000 to more than 33,000 miles operated and from 2,600 to more than 46,000 employees.

Here are the seven Class I carriers: “The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe (BNSD); CSX Transportation (CSX); Grand Trunk Corporation, which consists of the U.S. operations of Canadian National (CN), including the former Grand Trunk Western (GTW), Illinois Central (IC), and Wisconsin Central; Kansas City Southern (KCS); Norfolk Southern (NS); The former Soo Line (800) owned by Canadian Pacific (CP); Union Pacific (UP).”

Of course, this can lead to a number of issues:

1. The Chicago region has a large number of at-grade crossings and long freight trains are a nuisance for many drivers, particularly in denser areas.

2. This requires a lot of space to transfer cargo. In recent years, the newer intermodal facilities have moved further out from the city of Chicago with new facilities in Rochelle (west of DeKalk, south of Rockford) and the Joliet Arsenal.

3. Freight tracks closer to the city can be congested, delaying passenger trains.

The trick for the railroads (and others?) is to remind residents of the Chicago how important railroads are for transporting goods. In recent years, there has some more advertising about this, particularly touting the greener use of fuel compared to trucking. But more could be done within the region to provide evidence that Chicago continues to be important partly because of this traffic.

Reversing Righthaven

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The court system issued another stunning rebuke of Righthaven and its business model, as an Electronic Frontier Foundation press release reports:

In a decision with likely wide-ranging impact, a judge in Las Vegas today dismissed as a sham an infringement case filed by copyright troll Righthaven LLC. The judge ruled that Righthaven did not have the legal authorization to bring a copyright lawsuit against the political forum Democratic Underground, because it had never owned the copyright in the first place. [emphasis added]

This is a big win for bloggers, and the news gets even worse for Righthaven:

As part of his ruling today, the judge ordered Righthaven to show why it should not be sanctioned for misrepresentations to the court.

More coverage at Techdirt.

I guess we’re starting to get that copyright law clarity I was hoping for…

Quick Review: Scorecasting

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I have written about Scorecasting several times (see here and here) so I figured I had better read it. Here are my thoughts on what I read about “the hidden influences” in sports:

1. This book truly aims for the Freakonomics crowd: there is a blurb both at the top of the cover and the back from Freakonomics author Steven D. Levitt. Those University of Chicago professors stick together…

2. I know that I have heard a number of these arguments before, particularly ones about why football teams should not punt, the unfairness of coin flips at the beginning of overtime in the NFL, and the phenomenon of the “hot hand.” Perhaps this indicates that I read too much sports news or that the sports world in recent years really has taken a liking to new kinds of statistics and statistical analysis.

3. A number of the explanations included psychology, just like Spousonomics. Is this because psychological terms and studies are better known (compared to disciplines like sociology) or because psychology truly does provide a lot of helpful information about sports situations? A lot of sports can be broken down into individual performances and efforts – see all of the recent psychoanalyzing of LeBron James – but they are also team games that require cooperation. Could we get more analysis of units or collectives?

4. There were particular chapters and insights that I found fascinating – here are a few:

4a. The overvaluing of round numbers, such as 20 home runs in a season or a .300 batting average, compared to hitters with 19 home runs and/or a .299 average. I don’t know if teams could really save a lot of money doing this but there is a fixation on certain figures.

4b. The trade value chart used around the NFL Draft and pioneered by the Dallas Cowboys needs to be revised.

4c. Two things about home field advantage. First, it is fairly consistent within sports across time and across countries. Second, officiating make up a decent amount of this advantage. I like the evidence of how baseball umpires suddenly started advantaging the road team on close calls when they knew that technology was being used to evaluate their calls.

4d. The chapter on the Cubs curse shows again that the idea is irrational.

5. In reading through this, I was reminded again of the wealth of statistics available in baseball. Other sports have to try to catch up to quantify as much as baseball can. But there is clearly a revolution underway with more professional teams taking these numbers seriously, including the new NBA champions. Could we get an analysis of whether teams that pay more attention to advanced statistics and analysis actually have better records? “Moneyball” was a big idea for a while as well but doesn’t seem to get as much attention now that Billy Beane isn’t competing as well out in Oakland.

5a. I’m sure someone has to have translated an undergraduate statistics course into an all-sports data format. How appealing would students find this and does this improve student learning outcomes?

Overall, I enjoyed this book: this should be of little surprise since it involves sports and statistics, two things that interest me. While some of the arguments may be familiar to sports fans, it does provide some more fodder for future sports conversations.