Monthly Archives: September 2011

Poor in the suburbs: a growing plurality in the United States

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After a headline earlier this week about a “suburban depression,” more data shows the suburbs contain a growing plurality of the poor in the United States:

Significantly, the 2000s also marked a turning point in the geography of American poverty. The 2010 data confirm that poor populations continued their decade-long shift toward suburban areas. From 2000 to 2010, the number of poor people in major-metro suburbs grew 53 percent (5.3 million people), compared to 23 percent in cities (2.4 million people). By 2010, suburbs were home to one-third of the nation’s poor population—outranking cities (27.5 percent), small metro areas (20.5 percent), and non-metropolitan communities (18.7 percent)…

The magnitude and pace of growth in the suburban poor population over the past decade caught many communities unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with the growing need. In many suburbs, the safety net is patchy and stretched thin to begin with. The suburban social services infrastructure is not as developed or robust as in urban centers with a longer track record of addressing the challenges of poverty, nor is it as funded. And as governments continue to tighten their belts and philanthropic resources dwindle, safety net service providers are increasingly asked to do much more with significantly less.

There is also an interesting map showing the differing rates of growth in the suburban poor population across major metropolitan regions in the United States.

What’s the long-term solution to this? From what politicians seem to be suggesting, middle-class suburbanites need help keeping/buying a home, middle-class tax breaks, and good jobs. How exactly can the typical suburban communities provide services in this era of economic crisis? I wonder how much politicians and suburban communities are willing to truly deal with this or whether the ones that can afford to (or think they will afford to) will act like the issue doesn’t really exist and can’t be allowed to threaten the image of prosperous suburbs.

Sociologists join the Census Bureau Scientific Advisory Committee

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While sociologists may not be terribly influential on the whole within the American government, there is at least one area where they are quite involved: the Census Bureau (see an earlier story here).

U.S. Census Bureau Director Robert Groves has named 10 new members and a chairwoman to the Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee, which provides advice on the design and implementation of Census Bureau programs.

In addition to the director being a sociologist, of the 11 new members (out of 20 total), 5 are sociologists, 3 are statisticians, and the other three have different backgrounds.

When the Bureau director has not been a sociologist, does this mean the Census Bureau and this particular committee had fewer sociologists involved?

Are there any other posts within the government that sociologists hold and then also have the ability to appoint other sociologists to certain positions?

How the recession is affecting American society

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USA Today looks at “the sociology of recession” – how the economic crisis is changing some key features of American society. A quick overview: Americans are getting married later, the birth rate for 20 to 34 year olds has dropped, the divorce rate has dropped, more Americans are now living with relatives, the home vacancy rate is up, driving alone more, and fewer children are attending private schools.

This article suggests these features could become “the new normal,” particularly for younger generations who are facing more uncertain futures, but I’m not so sure. If the economy turns around, which of these would continue to decline and which ones would reverse direction? I suspect the marriage age and birth rate would still decline – these are longer term trends in the United States that also mirror patterns in other industrialized nations. The divorce rate was declining prior to the economic recession, at least according to the 2011 Statistical Abstract (see Table 1335), so perhaps this would continue. The last four I suspect would change course with a better economy.

“Zoning bigots” holding Americans back from how they really want to live?

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It is not too often that one sees opinion pieces about the current state of zoning in America. But here is some provocative commentary (“zoning bigots”?) based on zoning in the Los Angeles area:

You could make a decent case that the campaign to harass and remove property owners is no less bigoted than Mayor Mahool’s quarantine proposal. Although blacks, whites, and Latinos have all been targeted for nuisance abatement raids, these folks share one characteristic: They don’t meet the standards of respectability set by the political class and large urban landowners. In some cases the county’s lifestyle demands shade into bias on religious grounds. Oscar Castaneda, a mechanic and Seventh Day Adventist minister who was ordered to tear down his entire property, lives in the high desert because his faith impels him to a rural, self-sufficient life.

Los Angeles zoning practice is bigoted in other ways that are often overt. A city (not county) ordinance preventing residents from keeping more than one rooster on a property is clearly aimed at Latino homeowners. A maze of restrictions on convenience stores and fast food joints applies in South L.A. but not in tonier areas. During the jihad against “McMansions” a few years ago, the popular term for large properties was “Persian Palaces”—a swipe at L.A.’s Iranian-American community.

“There’s definitely an attempt to squeeze out of Angelenos the very things that make them Angelenos and not New Yorkers or Bostonians,” says Chapman University urban theorist Joel Kotkin. “There are two forces at work: One is the effort to re-engineer people into wards of the state. The other is urban land interests who want to force people to live in ways they don’t want to live.”

Or to live somewhere else. Many of the Antelope Valley homeowners we spoke with for a recent reason.tv report have given up the struggle and are planning to leave California. What Antonovich (who refused requests for an interview) has in mind for their vacated properties is not clear. Educated guesses include a plan for massive wind-power generation and a scheme to turn the half-horse town of Palmdale into a high-density, smart-growth hub for the California high-speed rail project. If you know Palmdale you know that the notion of turning it into a hipster paradise would be funny—except that this pipe dream is destroying the lives of real people. They’re just not the right sort of people.

A few thoughts while trying to sort out this argument:

1. Good point: zoning can be a tool used by the powerful (politicians, those with money, etc.) to control development. The political economy model in urban sociology is based on this idea: the elite are able to push development that helps make them money.

2. Odd point: this argument about “bigoted zoning” is somewhat different from a more common argument about “exclusionary zoning.” This argument is predicated on the idea that zoning takes away the rights of all individuals, regardless of race/ethnicity or social class. It is simply a tool of the upper classes, interestingly, a Marxist type argument. Exclusionary zoning, the subject of a number of court cases, argues that zoning takes place to exclude certain groups of people, typically minorities and the lower class from suburbs. So all individuals who are not the upper class are being discriminated against in this Marxist/populist argument?

3. Somewhat intriguing argument: these zoning guidelines limit people from doing what they really want to do, like buy McMansions and raise chickens. In this line of thinking, Americans all want the suburban lifestyle where their home is their castle and they have a little bit of land to play around with. The government is a bogeyman, trying to force people into denser developments (like nice New Urbanist developments or high-rises downtown?) and generally trying to squelch suburban life.

This argument misses some of why the suburbs even exist in the United States today. On one hand, there is some cultural impetus to this all: from the beginning, Americans have had debates about urban vs. rural life, the Thomas Jefferson’s who wanted “gentlemen farmers” versus the Alexander Hamilton’s who wanted to live in thriving cities. Americans like open space and retained the British emphasis on property rights. This cultural spirit is still with us today: we love cars and our big homes.

However, this was all made possible and encouraged by some other factors. To start, developing technologies, from the railroad to the electric streetcar to the automobile, opened up areas for development. More importantly, developers and businessmen saw these transportation lines and the adjacent land as opportunities so they sold homes and land to make money. Then, particularly between the 1930s and 1960s, the government made a concerted push to promote the suburban lifestyle, privileging highway construction and longer-term mortgages that helped make the suburban dream possible. Without this profit seeking and government support, would the suburbs have still happened? Perhaps. But not likely to the scale we know now.

To argue now that generally government is opposed to the suburban life is silly. Most of the policies, even during this time of economic crisis, have been about maintaining the suburban middle-class lifestyle: limiting their tax burden, helping them keep their homes, ensuring a quality education and a college degree, etc. Yes, this current administration has suggested some new ideas like high-speed rail but this isn’t a total assault on the suburbs. Indeed, it would be tough for any party right now to assault the suburbs too strongly: they probably can’t win without suburban voters, particularly independents.

4. Flip this around: what might happen if there is no zoning? Does this really empower individual land owners? Zoning helps ensure that certain uses are not next to other uses. For example, zoning for a suburban subdivision typically means that a single-family home will not end up next to a coal power plant. Or a school next to a sewage treatment plant. Yes, zoning can be draconian and it can be used by people in power but it can also be used well.

There are cities that have less or no zoning. Houston is a classic example in urban sociology and as one might suspect, its development patterns look a bit different than other major cities.

Is no zoning really the answer? While homeowners might not like some of the plans in the Los Angeles region, doesn’t it also protect them at other times? In a world with no zoning, wouldn’t the more powerful actors almost always win out over the average homeowner? How would homeowners protect themselves from other homeowners?

One way to retain zoning but turn it toward different ends would be for citizens to get themselves on zoning boards and then starting voting how they like. Zoning boards may not be flashy and it can be difficult to get on them, particularly in places where it is about political connections, but this would be the place to start fighting back if one was inclined to do so.

Sociologist suggests celebrity chefs can help limit food waste by promoting uses for leftovers

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It is common to find food waste demonstrations in college cafeterias where students fill large receptacles with their leftover food. A sociologist argues that people need better models for how to use leftover food to limit food waste:

Sociologist Dr David Evans, from The Sustainable Consumption Institute at the University of Manchester, says the pressure to cook meals from scratch using fresh ingredients while enjoying a variety of dishes throughout the week can actually lead to waste.

His qualitative study – in which he went into the homes of 19 Manchester households – helps explain why Britain throws away enough food each year to fill Wembley stadium ten times over…

Current levels of food waste, he argues, should be viewed as the fall-out of households negotiating the complex and contradictory demands of their day-to-day lives.

For example the pressure to cook and eat in the ways that celebrity chefs advise means that a lot of food is already at risk of getting thrown out.

He said: “A lot of so-called proper food is perishable and so needs to be eaten within a pretty narrow timeframe. Our erratic working hours and leisure schedules make it hard to keep on top of the food that we have in our fridges and cupboards…

People with influence – like celebrity chefs – he says, should acknowledge these issues and think about ways of making it socially acceptable or even desirable for us to eat the same meal several nights in a row or use frozen vegetables.

It sounds like this sociologist is suggesting that it is unfashionable and unreasonable right now for most consumers to eat all of the food that they have prepared.

1. I assume the fashionable aspect has to do with the image that food needs to be prepared fresh for every meal. This is what cooking shows typically demonstrate but it would be rare that home cooks could cook an exact amount at each meal. Could the Food Network really sell a show solely built around dressing up or using leftovers?

2. The second part of the argument is that life is too hectic for consumers to really eat all of their food. Couldn’t meal planning help here? (Or perhaps they need Ziploc bags to limit waste as an ad I just saw on TV suggested.)

Overall, this sociologist is arguing that we need a cultural shift regarding leftover food and the place to start is with important cultural figures/gatekeepers who can make it cool to not waste food. This is an interesting solution compared to the work of someone like Michael Pollan who suggests the answer to food issues lies more in rethinking our relationship to food and slowing down when we make and eat food.

Building intermodal facilities to relieve traffic congestion

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After examining a new report that Chicago has some of the worst traffic bottlenecks in the country, the suggestion is made not to add lanes to the highways but rather to build more intermodal facilities:

“This is a roadway that has 1950s technology that we are using for 2011 traffic,” said Don Schaefer, executive vice president of the Mid-West Truckers Association. “Aside from a few locations on the Illinois Tollway, there are very few roadways in the Chicago area that are engineered to handle 2011 traffic volumes.”

Adding highway lanes is unlikely to produce the capacity necessary to ease congestion, experts said. A partial solution involves building more intermodal facilities where truck trailers are loaded onto flatbed train cars and transported long distance by rail, then transferred to trucks for the last segment of trips.

One such facility is the sprawling CenterPoint Intermodal Center near Joliet, on the site of the former Joliet Arsenal. But even there, truck traffic is a problem on Arsenal Road leading to Interstate Highway 55.

“The state is building a new interchange to relieve traffic, but today truck traffic trying to get off I-55 southbound is backed up on to the highway,” Schaefer said.

While adding lanes may seem like “common sense,” studies consistently show that this simply encourages more traffic. Think about places have kept adding lanes like downtown Atlanta (I-75 corridor in particular) or the Los Angeles region. Traffic is still an issue during peak times and those roads are already at six or more lanes in each direction.

Intermodal facilities are an intriguing solution. A few thoughts about these:

1. Do most Americans even know what they are? If not, they should as many of their consumer items are routed through these facilities.

2. Part of the reason this article caught my attention is that just last week I drove right by the Centerpoint Intermodal Center which is just east of I-55 and just south of the Des Plaines River. The area was an interesting one: the large facility itself is surrounded by a number of warehouses and distribution centers, including Wal-Mart. When driving a car through such places, I tend to feel out of place as everything is a little bigger: the buildings, the space, the trucks. And yes, the ramp to get on I-55 northbound at Arsenal Road had a long backup of trucks.

Here is some more information on the CenterPoint Facility that just opened in 2010:

The facility will be a central spot where train containers from California, Texas and the Pacific Rim will be delivered for pick-up by trucks moving goods to warehouses and distribution centers throughout the Midwest.

CenterPoint already has an international intermodal facility in nearby Elwood. Combined, the sites will be the country’s largest inland port. In an era of high fuel costs and declining numbers of cross-country truck drivers, the facility is expected to be a more efficient, environmentally-friendly mode of hauling.

A third CenterPoint facility also is planned for Crete.

The $2 billion Joliet development – located on 3,800 acres south of Laraway Road between Brandon and Patterson roads – is the largest construction project in Will County.  It has created about 1,000 construction jobs.

3. What would it take to build more of these? One obvious question is where to put them. This one near Joliet is just outside the Chicago region and there is not much around it: an oil refinery and the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery. Most importantly, there are not a lot of houses nearby. If you tried to build these closer to cities, I’m sure there would be NIMBY issues. Imagine if someone wanted to build a new one near the Circle Interchange in Chicago – residents would complain and the price of land would likely be prohibitive. There are some older facilities embedded in the Chicago region; for example, there is one in Chicago just south of Midway Airport between 65th and 73rd Streets. You can see Union Pacific’s Chicago region facilities here.

But these facilities are needed, particularly in the Chicago region with its radial railroad system and many at-grade crossings. In recent years, the goal has been to relieve some of the rail traffic closer to the city which was behind the fight over whether Canadian National should be allowed to purchase the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern beltline railroad that runs around the city and on which CN wanted to run more freight trains.

Suburgatory nears first show; will it offer anything new?

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Yesterday, I ran into a full-page promotional ad for Suburgatory, a new ABC sitcom which first airs on September 28. Here is the ad (image from DisneyDreaming.com):

Suburgatory Full Page Advertisement

Watch the trailer here and also read ABC’s description of the show (these are separate paragraphs but I think they are meant to be two different descriptions):

Single father George only wants the best for his 16-year-old daughter, Tessa. So when he finds a box of condoms on her nightstand, he moves them out of their apartment in New York City to a house in the suburbs. But all Tessa sees is the horror of over-manicured lawns and plastic Franken-moms. Being in the ‘burbs can be hell, but it also may just bring Tessa and George closer than they’ve ever been.

Tessa (Jane Levy) and George (Jeremy Sisto) have been on their own ever since Tessa’s mom pulled a “Kramer vs. Kramer” before she was even potty trained. So far, George has done a pretty good job of raising Tessa without a maternal figure in their lives, but suddenly he’s feeling a little out of his league. So it’s goodbye New York City and hello suburbs. At first Tessa is horrified by the big-haired, fake-boobed mothers and their sugar-free Red Bull-chugging kids. But little by little she and her dad begin finding a way to survive on the clean streets of the ‘burbs. Sure, the neighbors might smother you with love while their kids stare daggers at your back, but underneath all that plastic and caffeine, they’re really not half bad. And they do make a tasty pot roast.

As I suggested back in March, this show at least appears that it may cover typical suburban territory: an innocent person moves to a nice-looking neighborhood but finds that the people aren’t what they seem and hijinks or unpleasant events ensue. The suburbs are full of fake people and I’m sure the show will have some commentary about striving for social status, “authentic” living in New York City, and perhaps even takes a shot or two at McMansions and SUVs. Perhaps this show’s twist is that the main characters are a teenage daughter and a single dad but hasn’t this also been tackled by other shows and movies? A new prediction: if it simply updates Desperate Housewives or Revolutionary Road for the teenage set, I don’t think it will last until the end of the first season.

Thinking about this show, it would be interesting to compile a database of television shows that really tackle suburban living. To do this, one would first have to distinguish between shows that take place in the suburbs (say Boy Meets World – not sure why this popped into my mind) versus ones that revolve around suburban themes and issues. I’ve thought about doing something similar for popular music songs in order to look for patterns. In both hypothetical databases, I suspect I would find a generally critical (or perhaps “satirical”) take on suburbs even as Americans have continued to move into these places.

I’ll be tracking the fate of this show and may also have to watch an episode for research purposes…

Majority of young adults “see online slurs as just joking”

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A recent survey of teenagers and young adults suggests that they are more tolerant of offensive or pejorative terms in the online realm:

Jaded by the Internet free-for-all, teens and 20-somethings shrug off offensive words and name-calling that would probably appall their parents, teachers or bosses. And an Associated Press-MTV poll shows they don’t worry much about whether the things they tap into their cellphones and laptops could reach a wider audience and get them into trouble.

Seventy-one percent say people are more likely to use slurs online or in text messages than in person, and only about half say they are likely to ask someone using such language online to stop…

But young people who use racist or sexist language are probably offending more people than they realize, even in their own age range. The poll of 14- to 24-year-olds shows a significant minority are upset by some pejoratives, especially when they identify with the group being targeted…

But they mostly write off the slurs as jokes or attempts to act cool. Fifty-seven percent say “trying to be funny” is a big reason people use discriminatory language online. About half that many say a big reason is that people “really hold hateful feelings about the group.”…

It’s OK to use discriminatory language within their own circle of friends, 54 percent of young people say, because “I know we don’t mean it.” But if the question is put in a wider context, they lean the other way, saying 51-46 that such language is always wrong.

This would seem to corroborate ideas that anonymity online or comments sections free people up to say things that they wouldn’t say in real life. Perhaps this happens because there is no face-to-face interaction or it is harder to identify people or there are few repercussions. In the end, the sort of signs, verbal or non-verbal cues, that might stop people from saying these things near other people simply don’t exist online.

I would be interested to see more research about this “joking” and how young adults understand it. Humor can be one of the few areas in life where people can address controversial topics with lesser consequences. Of course, there are limits on what is acceptable but this can often vary by context, particularly in peer-driven settings like high school or college where being “cool” means everything. These young adults likely know this intuitively as they wouldn’t use the same terms around parents or adults. Are these young adults then more polite around authority figures and save it all up for online or are they more uncivil in general as some would argue?

For an important issue like racism, does this mean that many in the next generation think being or acting racist is okay as long as they are among friends but is not okay to exhibit in public settings? Is it okay to be racist as long as it is accompanied by a happy emoticon or a j/k?

Knowing that this is a common issue, what is the next step in cutting down on this offensive humor, like we are already seeing in many media sites’ comments sections? And who gets to do the policing – parents, schools, websites?

The “suburban depression”

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The ongoing economic crisis has hit a lot of sectors of American society. Some new data suggests the economic crisis has particularly hit the suburbs, the proverbial “land of milk and honey” in American life:

There has not been so large a portion of Americans in poverty since 1993. But this time the growth in poverty is different, hitting whites and suburbia harder than it did during the early 1990s slump…

The suburban poverty rate is 11.8 percent, a level not seen since 1967…

A key factor in the rise in suburban poverty may be the fact that the housing market has played such a central role in the economic slump.

Many suburbs have seen a vast amount of wealth erased by declining housing markets and mortgage foreclosures, resulting in a great deal of economic dislocation. Since white Americans are more likely to own homes than African Americans, this could also explain why whites have fared worse than they did in the 1990s while African Americans have fared better.

The interpretation here is that with homes losing a significant portion of their value, an investment vehicle that many suburbanites had relied on has proven to be a hindrance instead. I would want to see more data: how does the growth of the poverty rate in the suburbs compare to cities and rural areas? If you look at the Census 2010 figures, the poverty rate for central cities is 19.7% (14.8% for metropolitan regions) and it is 16.5% outside of metropolitan areas. While falling housing prices may be part of the problem, what about jobs – are a higher percentage of lost jobs suburban jobs? I haven’t seen anyone write about this jobs link.

This data also affects two other larger ideas narratives about suburbs:

1. Life in the suburbs is not supposed to get worse; rather, it is supposed to always get better. Have we simply reached the point where the standard of living and incomes simply can’t rise much more?

2. There is evidence from recent years that more poor people live in the suburbs than in cities. While the percentages of poor people are lower in the suburbs, the absolute numbers are higher. This is part of a growing trend: the suburbs aren’t just (and never totally were) where wealthy whites can live.

Quick Review: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

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I recently viewed the latest (April 2011 release) Morgan Spurlock film The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. Here are a few thoughts about this film which could be a nice conversation starter for a number of sociology courses.

1. If you know of Morgan Spurlock and his “formula” (Supersize Me, the TV show 30 Days), you won’t be surprised by how this film goes as Spurlock tries to finance his documentary about product placement (“brand integration”) by having corporations pay to sponsor it. Even though the process may not be a surprise, the movie still feels fresh in a way that many documentaries can’t match.

2. At the most basic level, this film is about raising awareness regarding advertising. It treads some familiar ground about how companies are really selling images or aspirations and how Americans are bombarded with these ideas. While Spurlock doesn’t offer much of a solution at the end (go out into nature for a little?), he certainly is drawing attention to an issue worth paying attention to.

3. Here are a few of the more intriguing sociological insights I picked out of the film:

3a. Spurlock wants to pull back the curtain on product placement and marketing but interestingly, the big companies don’t want to participate. In the end, he catches the attention (and money) of mostly smaller/challenger brands who don’t have the big marketing budgets. From a Marxist perspective, we could suggest that the big companies want to continue to “hoodwink” consumers while the challengers are really interested in doing anything to get product exposure, even exposing their marketing tactics.

3b. Spurlock spends some time in Sao Paulo, Brazil, a city that recently banned outdoor advertising. The mayor and residents talk about how this helps eliminate “visual clutter.” Could we imagine this ever happening in an American city? How many of our famous spaces, like Times Square or Las Vegas, would no longer be famous spaces if advertising was not present?

3c. One marketer suggests Spurlock could play off religious imagery, perhaps portraying himself at the Last Supper surrounded by a bunch of companies who want to use him or to show Spurlock carrying a cross covered in advertising stickers (like a stock car in NASCAR). While the marketer suggests this might be considered blasphemous, it would also get a lot of attention. Later in the film, another insider says to Spurlock regarding marketing his film that “the path of salvation” is to “Sell! Sell! Sell!” in America. What does this commentary suggest about the role of religion in marketing and selling “Christian products”?

4. Spurlock leaves us in a tough spot: can we do marketing with integrity? Can one really “buy in” without “selling out”? The answer is unclear but Spurlock provides us an entertaining venue for starting to think about answers to these questions.

(The movie received fairly good reviews from critics: it is 71% fresh, 77 out of 109 reviews were fresh, on RottenTomatoes.com.)