Monthly Archives: September 2011

Comprehending the office and retail space in an edge city

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After explaining the concept of an edge city to my American Suburbanization class, a discussion arose about how much space these places really have. When defining the edge city, Joel Garreau had these as two criteria (out of five total): “has five million square feet or more of leasable office space” and “has 600,000 square feet or more of leasable retail space.” This is a lot of space, as much as a smaller big city, but can still be hard to understand.

For example, there is much more commercial and retail space in the exemplar of the edge city: Tysons Corner, Virginia.

Around 2007 Tysons Corner had 25,599,065 square feet (2,378,231.0 m2) of office space, 1,072,874 square feet (99,673.3 m2) of industrial/flex space, 4,054,096 square feet (376,637.8 m2) of retail space, and 2,551,579 square feet (237,049.4 m2) of hotel space. Therefore Tysons Corner has a grand total of 33,278,014 square feet (3,091,628.7 m2) of commercial space.

How do we put this in more manageable terms?

1. Garreau compares this suburban space to the office and retail space in existing cities. The 5 million square feet of office space “is more than downtown Memphis.” While we may have traditionally associated this much office and retail space only with the downtowns of big cities, now concentrations of this space can be found right in the middle of the suburbs. This is unusual because suburbs are often portrayed as bedroom suburbs, places like people live and sleep but have to work elsewhere.

2. Compare this space to large buildings. The Willis (Sears) Tower in Chicago has 4.56 million square feet of space, 3.81 million rentable. So an edge city would have at least slightly more space this notable office building though perhaps it is difficult to visualize this space since it is a skyscraper and each floor seems smaller. An ever bigger building, The Pentagon, has 6.5 million square feet, more than the lower threshold for an edge city. Therefore, Tysons Corner has nearly 4 Pentagons of office space. Comparing this edge city space to shopping malls, Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, Illinois (an edge city itself) has 2.7 million square feet while the Mall of America has a total of 4.2 million square feet.

3. We could measure edge cities in terms of square miles or acres and then compare to bigger cities. Square miles make some sense: Tysons Corner is 4.9 square miles while Memphis, a city Garreau says has downtown space similar to that of an edge city, is 302.3 square miles (on land). Acres are a little harder to interpret: a common suburban house lot is an eighth of an acre, a square mile has 640 acres (hence the dividing of the American frontier into 160 and 640 acre plots), and an acre has roughly 43,500 square feet. Then, an edge city with 5 million square feet of office space has about 115 acres of office space. Perhaps acres are best left to farmers.

In the end, I think Garreau made the right comparison to demonstrate the office and retail space within an edge city: we have some ideas about the size of downtowns of smaller big cities and the image of this amount of space existing in the suburbs is jarring.

Sociologist uses Twitter for class but are the students learning more?

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Stories like this are not uncommon: professors utilizing technology to engage their students (and here is another one about clicker use).

Wendy Welch is incorporating the use of the social networking site Twitter into her cultural geography class this semester. The adjunct instructor said she decided to use the social networking site in her class after having problems with students using their phones in class for less-than-appropriate purposes.“If you can’t beat them, get ahead of them,” Welch said. “That’s the way the world works now.”…

Each student was assigned a country in Africa and asked to tweet facts about their country, such as languages and population, using designated hash tags, or categories. That way, each student only has to research one country but has access to all the information they may need from other students.

Welch also plans to have students use their mobile devices or laptops to research information during class sessions, she said…

She said she hopes to “get students to understand and participate in their own education.”

Perhaps this does increase the engagement level of the students. All professors want their students to be engaged and we don’t want to be seen as being behind the times. But, I think there is often something missing from discussions about student engagement and the use of technology in the classroom: does this actually lead to higher levels of student learning or student outcomes?

I suspect professors will always try to keep up with technology as it changes and each of these changes will be accompanied by hand-wringing. However, we need to be able to distinguish between engaging students with technology versus helping them learn. Take this Twitter example from class: do students do better on tests? Do they retain the knowledge better? Can they apply their knowledge from this particular class to other settings, particularly if the technology is not present? Does technology itself help students think more deeply about the big questions of our world?

If technology alone becomes the answer in the classroom, we will be in trouble.

McMansions are too costly in terms of money and relationships

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In another article about McMansions in Australia (and I have been seeing more and more of these  – perhaps due to the recent news that the country has the largest new homes on average), one writer suggests McMansions cost too much and have a negative impact on relationships:

Australians live in the world’s biggest homes but new research shows our trend to upsize our living space is reversing. The average size of new houses being built in this country is getting smaller as people start to realise that living in a McMansion does not make sense. While the financial implications of owning a large home have surely been considered, there are other costs that are not as obvious…

The reasons are obvious- it costs too much. Far from being energy efficient, the financial burden that comes with a bigger pad can weigh too heavily on a household already struggling to keep up with the rising cost of living. There are bigger gas and power bills and mortgage repayments not to mention the hassle of having to spend time and money maintaining and keeping the whole thing clean … no wonder we are thinking again.

Another problem of the larger, have-it-all home is that we have less need to leave it to meet our daily needs. Social interaction is being replaced by home-based activity for our convenience. It is easier to get on the treadmill, ‘chat’ to someone on Facebook, play tennis on the wii and shop online instead of getting out into our communities.

There is no substitute for real communication and the lack of it can affect our sense of well-being. Mental health issues such as depression and the feeling of isolation that many people experience is the reason some programs are being developed, specifically aiming to get people out of the house, talking to others and active in their communities. ‘The Shed’ for men and ‘R U OK’ Day are a couple of examples.

The financial costs of McMansions are clear, particularly if you include costs beyond the price of the home and consider the impact on other areas like cars, roads, infrastructure, and filling/furnishing a larger home.

The relational impact of McMansions has also been covered by others, particularly since they seem to encourage more private lives. But, my mind jumped to the next step in the argument illustrated in this article: how small would houses need to be in order to encourage interaction even among family members? If a McMansion is roughly 3,000-6,000 square feet, it seems like it would be fairly easy for family members to avoid each other. But, if a home is 2,000 square feet, would families necessarily interact more? Perhaps if we went back to the era of Levittown sized homes, around 900 square feet, this could induce some interaction.

But even in smaller homes, there are other factors at work. At the end of the article, the writer suggests that perhaps the real problem isn’t the size of the home:

I am conscious of creating an environment where communication is encouraged and valued so we know what’s going on in each other’s lives. There are no computers, TVs or other electronic entertainment in the bedrooms. Our living space is used for meals, games, entertainment, homework and handstands. It’s a bit cluttered but it’s homely and there’s always someone to talk to.

Technology could play a role as could cultural ideas about the need for “time alone.”

In the end, a smaller home probably increases the number of times people have to run into each other but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will have deeper, more meaningful relationships. There are larger issues at work here beyond the number of square feet a home has or whether the home has a porch close to the street.

Considering the humanity of our leaders

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Here is a fascinating essay that reveals some of the humanity of a polarizing figure: George W. Bush.

Do we even want to know the more human side of our leaders? It is easy to build them up, as a paragon of virtue and strength, or to tear them down, as an enemy who must be defeated. Even though we are more than two years out from the end of his presidency, how many people can read a piece like this with somewhat objective eyes?

The real America can be found at Wal-Mart

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I vividly remember what one professor told us one day in a sociology of religion class in graduate school: “If you want to find real Americans, just go to Walmart.” Several members of the class gasped – could the real America really be at Walmart, that exemplar of crass consumerism, low wages, and the loss of community life in America? This story from NPR makes a similar point:

The Wall Street Journal spotted the phenomenon recently. The headline: “Today’s Special at Wal-Mart: Something Weird.” “Almost any imaginable aspect of American life can and does take place inside Wal-Mart stores, from births to marriages to deaths,” observed the Journal‘s Miguel Bustillo. “Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin once officiated a wedding at the Wal-Mart in her hometown of Wasilla.”…

What is it about Walmart? As a species, we are fascinated by the place. The Web is awash with sites that scrutinize the Arkansas-based retailer’s every move. Walmart Watch, funded by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, says its mission is to challenge the multibillion-dollar retail chain “to more fully embrace its corporate responsibilities.” The now-infamous and snarky People of Walmart posts photos of shoppers. Hel-Mart offers anti-Walmart merchandise, such as T-shirts that say, “Resistance Is Futile.” Videos of people praising, mocking, pranking, walking around, dancing in Walmart are continuously posted on YouTube…

Officially, Walmart explains the apparent zaniness this way: “Over the years, Walmart has become a microcosm of American life,” says company spokesman Lorenzo Lopez. “With stores serving millions of customers in communities nationwide, it’s not uncommon for us to see our share of what happens every day in cities and towns all across the country.”…

* Of the 3,822 Walmart stores, 2,939 are Supercenters, which means they are open 24 hours a day. So in virtually every county, 500 people work at Walmart, and there is a Walmart open every hour of every day, and every one of those Walmarts is being visited by 37,000 people a week — that’s 220 people an hour, in every Walmart, in virtually every county in the whole country, every hour of the day.

So how come there are not more sociologists doing studies at or about Walmart? I suspect many do not like the place – even though some may even shop at Target and other big box stores. But just because sociologists might disagree with the practices of Walmart does not mean that it shouldn’t be the focus of much research.

This story also illustrates something Joel Best likes to talk about: the scale of numbers. Some of the statistics about Walmart from the article include half of American adults visit Walmart each week covering 70 million hours and the company has 1.5 million employees. This is hard to visualize because these are big numbers. We know what a couple of hundred people looks like but to understand 1.5 million, we might need to make some comparisons such as this is about the population of the City of Philadelphia or is around the same size as the metro area of Nashville or Milwaukee. Another way to understand these big numbers is to break it down into how often something happens per hour or minute or second. In this article, this translates to “that’s 220 people an hour, in every Walmart, in virtually every county in the whole country, every hour of the day.” We know what roughly 220 people looks like so we can then grasp a little better the enormity of the figures.

Crowd Counting 101

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Every now and then, often connected to politically contentious events like the “Restoring Honor” or “Rally to Restore Sanity” in 2010 or Egyptians taking to the streets in early 2011, you will see articles about how officials and media sources estimate the number of people who attend. Here is a primer on crowd counting. Some of the possible new methods could help give us accurate and not politically-driven counts:

And, as Yip said in a statement about his study, a good way to count crowds could cut through the politically motivated stats we put up with now. “In the absence of any accurate estimation methods, the public are left with a view of the truth colored by the beliefs of the people making the estimates. The public would be better served by estimates less open to political bias.”

I look forward to improved crowd counting.

h/t Instapundit

Misleading Chicago Tribune headline about Illinois foreclosures being up 18% in August?

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Here is a prominent headline featured on the front of the Chicago Tribune‘s web page early yesterday: “Illinois foreclosures surge nearly 18% in August.” Based on the headline, this sounds like bad news for the Illinois housing market. However, if you read into the story, the news isn’t all bad and perhaps some of it could even be interpreted as being good:

Illinois home foreclosure activity rose 17.6 percent in August compared to the previous month…

The filings represent one in every 424 housing units in the state. That rate is almost 26 percent lower than in August of last year and eighth-highest nationally.

RealtyTrac says the increase in many states likely is due to lenders resolving paperwork processing problems that had delayed many foreclosures. And it may signal more bank repossessions in coming months…

The number of U.S. homes that received an initial default notice — the first step in the foreclosure process — jumped 33 percent in August from July, foreclosure listing firm RealtyTrac Inc. said Thursday.

The increase represents a nine-month high and the biggest monthly gain in four years. The spike signals banks are starting to take swifter action against homeowners, nearly a year after processing issues led to a sharp slowdown in foreclosures.

There are a couple of trends going on here. First, foreclosures may be up nearly 18% from July 2011 to August 2011 and this sounds bad. But, compared to last August, the rate of foreclosures is down just over 25%. Isn’t this good news for Illinois homeowners?

The second trend is that it appears the rate of foreclosures might be picking up because lenders may now be moving more quickly against residents behind in their payments. This would be bad for these residents but might also be good as it means that foreclosures might be more quickly removed from the market rather than dragging out the process and having a longer negative effect on nearby housing prices.

I know headline space is limited understanding the nuances about this particular foreclosure statistic seems quite important. The news about a “surge nearly 18%” will catch people’s attention but there has to be a better way in the headline to reflect what is behind this number.

It doesn’t matter which party is in charge when an economic crisis happens; they will be punished

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As part of a piece looking at whether President Obama should have ever been compared to FDR, Megan McArdle suggests one of the cultural narratives of the Democratic Party doesn’t hold up: the Great Depression wasn’t a “Republican problem” because when looking at other countries, whichever party was in power at the start of the Depression was punished at the polls:

Yet even recognizing that FDR got tremendously lucky in his choice of election years does not cause McElvaine to question the Ur-Myth; instead, he segues into a complaint that Obama needs to be feistier, like FDR was.

Smart progressive Ezra Klein, however, offers what I think is the correct take:

The pat story behind FDR’s victory and the ensuing decades of mostly Democratic dominance is that the president got the policy right and the politics followed. Whatever you believe about FDR’s policies, a more international perspective will disabuse you of the notion that the golden age for the Democratic Party was an ideological triumph rather than an accident of history. As Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, has written, globally, the pattern is clear: Whichever party was in power when the Great Depression hit was booted out of office, and whichever party was in power when the global recovery took hold reaped huge political benefits.

“In the U.S.,” wrote Bartels, “voters replaced Republicans with Democrats and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Sweden, voters replaced Conservatives with Liberals, then with Social Democrats, and the economy improved.

Of course, cultural narratives aren’t necessarily rooted in facts but rather in the story that a group or nation or other party wants to tell. Looking at data can help us figure out the veracity of a narrative. This sounds like a good example of using comparative data: by looking at other cases, one can see that what might seem to be a “common sense” observation based on the United States doesn’t necessarily hold up. What we would also want to do is to look at other economic crises, both in the United States and abroad, to see how the severity of the crisis, length of the crisis, relative standing of other countries, and other historical and social factors affect election outcomes after the economic crisis starts.

The takeaway for politicians and political parties? Beware of running for election if the economy took a dive while you or your people were in office.

Whether corporate tax breaks help the average citizen

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Phil Rosenthal tackles an interesting question that pertains to Illinois and Chicago after recent news about certain companies threatening to leave unless they get more tax breaks: do such deals help the average citizen? While the conclusion is unclear, here is a bit about the effect of TIF (Tax Increment Financing) Districts which typically generate funds for localized development and infrastructure:

The TIF has become a fashionable way for a municipality to encourage a business to set up shop in a particular locale it might not have chosen otherwise.  Some, however, see TIFs as too often just a handout for businesses that want to go somewhere.

“They’re a very popular tool for economic development,” Rebecca Hendrick, an associate professor in political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, whose book, “Managing the Fiscal Metropolis,” is due out in November. “There are a lot of discrepancies in the empirical research as to whether they’ve had the intended effect. Would the steel company have come in but for the TIF, or would it have come in anyway?”…

“But it turns out that tax rates go up in the entire jurisdiction in the city of Chicago as a result of a TIF being created in the city of Chicago because the way the property tax works is kind of a zero-sum game. If someone gets money, someone else has to pay for it. … Plus, it’s also off-budget.”

Chicago has a lot of TIF districts so this is not a small issue. Of course, there are different ways to measure the benefits of such development for the average citizen: should it lead to a smaller property tax bill? Should it lead to more city and state services since they should have more tax dollars? Should it lead to a better quality of life in rebounding neighborhoods? Should it lead to more jobs? The common focus seems to be on jobs, as the recent offer from Amazon.com to the State of California illustrates. But these tax breaks often lead to a very limited number of jobs.

The article also hints that certain kinds of economic change receive press coverage while others do not:

A steel company moving to Chicago gets our attention. One person losing his or her home generally doesn’t. Even 100 people losing their homes might not make the papers.

“One hundred people losing their mortgages may involve the same amount of money as a steel company moving to Chicago,” Bowman said. “One of the reasons that TIF money is provided to these businesses is it does get more attention, and people feel like, ‘Maybe things are starting to turn around if Chicago’s more attractive than Cleveland.'”

So is this more of a journalism problem? If newspapers and other media sources are more interested in the “movers and shakers,” typically politicians, business leaders, and entertainment/celebrity figures, does this help the average citizen? I assume the media would suggest that they are the public “watchdog,” helping inform people about abuses of power. But, the media, often in big corporations themselves, can also easily be cozy with these bigger interests and also want to be boosters and help improve the image of their community.

In these poor economic times, I imagine we will be hearing more about corporate tax breaks and whether local, state, and national governments should be in the business of handing them out.

The Atlantic declares “The Beginning of the End for Suburban America”

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While this is not the only recent claim that the suburban era in America is coming to an end, this piece still has a bold headline and claim:

In the years following World War II, the United States experienced an unprecedented consumption boom. Anything you could measure was growing. A Rhode Island-sized chunk of land was bulldozed to make new suburbs every single year for decades. America rounded into its present-day shape.

Along the way, there were three inexorable trends at the base of the societal pyramid. First, we plowed more energy into our homes each and every year. We cooled and heated our houses more (sometimes wastefully, sometimes not), brought in more and more appliances, added televisions and computers and phones. Per capita electricity shot up from about 4,000 kilowatt-hours per US resident to over 13,000 kilowatt-hours by the 2000s. Second, we needed more electricity because our houses got huge. The median home size shot up from about 1,500 square feet in the early 1970s to more than 2,200 square feet in the mid-200s. Third, we drove more and more miles every year to get around and between our sprawled-out cities. Back in 1960, Americans drove 0.72 trillion miles. By 2000, that number had reached 2.75 trillion miles. In 2007, vehicle miles traveled hit 3.02 trillion…

Taken together, the end of growth in residential electricity consumption and vehicle miles traveled form a momentous signal. The United States we all grew up with is changing, or rather, it’s changed and the numbers are beginning to reflect that. The growth in housing size, electricity demand and miles traveled were the hallmarks of the suburban/exurban era. They were the statistics of sprawl — but also of economic growth. Now that their relentless upward march has stopped, what happens? We need a new model for American prosperity that doesn’t require ever greater injections of fossil energy. That’s a generational challenge that hasn’t been captured by the pro- or anti-green jobs rhetoric here in Washington.

Two quick thoughts come to mind:

1. I wonder if these are symptoms regarding sprawl and don’t really tell the full story of what is happening. None of these factors alone makes sprawl happen. Many would argue that certain government policies, stretching back to the New Deal and decisions made to spend government money on interstates and roads and make mortgages more affordable. Such policies are still in place: more money is spent on roads than mass transit, there is much talk about how to boost home sales and write off mortgage debt, and how to lower the price of gasoline. Could these figures cited in this article simply be reactions to certain market factors and not reflect deeper cultural and political shifts?

2. We’ve heard this story about the end of sprawl before. I was reminded of this when my American Suburbanization class recently finished Kenneth Jackson’s 1987 classic Crabgrass Frontier. In the final chapter, Jackson also suggests that American suburban growth will eventually slow, probably due to energy problems. This article in The Atlantic and Jackson are not the only people predicting this: many more have said that the suburbs are unsustainable and eventually Americans will have to pursue other development forms. But harkening back to my first point, whatever crisis may arise still has to be big enough to overcome an established cultural and political ideology that supports suburbs. In terms of miles driven, what if electric cars make driving cheaper (or, “Is a Car Battery Subsidy Just a Sprawl Subsidy?”)? What if new technology can ensure that McMansions are energy efficient? Who wants to be the first politician to tell voters that the suburban dream of a single-family home on at least a little yard in a good neighborhood is no longer attainable? What if the economy picks up again and homes get larger again?

In the end, how do we know that this is really the point where we have turned a corner and the American suburbs are now on the decline? Could the future suburbs be more dense, a la New Urbanist developments, and more energy efficient while retaining their key suburban traits? These three statistics do suggest something has changed – but there is a long way to go before we can write off the American suburbs.