Monthly Archives: November 2011

Austerity in the suburbs: turning off and ripping out the lights in Highland Park, Michigan

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As many suburbs face budget shortfalls, some have instituted new measures. While California communities drew attention last year for contracting out services previously provided by the city, the Detroit suburb of Highland Park is trying another option: turning off and ripping out the street lights.

But when the debt-ridden community could no longer afford its monthly electric bill, elected officials not only turned off 1,000 streetlights. They had them ripped out — bulbs, poles and all. Now nightfall cloaks most neighborhoods in inky darkness…

Highland Park’s decision is one of the nation’s most extreme austerity measures, even among the scores of communities that can no longer afford to provide basic services.

Other towns have postponed roadwork, cut back on trash collection and closed libraries, for example. But to people left in the dark night after night, removing streetlights seems more drastic. And unlike many other cutbacks that can easily be reversed, this one appears to be permanent…

The city’s monthly electric bill has been cut by 80 percent. The amount owed DTE Energy goes back about a decade, but utility executives hesitated to turn off the juice…

Most of the 500 streetlights still shining in Highland Park are along major streets and on corners in residential areas. DTE Energy has listed the city’s overdue bill as an uncollectable expense.

It would be interesting to hear what else the community has had to do or has considered in order to lessen the $58 million budget deficit.

While it is certainly a shock to have street lights torn out, I wonder how much of an effect this will actually have. It sounds like lights have been retained at certain places for traffic safety. I vaguely recall reading a piece at The Infrastructurist that suggested street lights on residential streets are there more for nervous residents than actually for reducing crime or improving traffic safety.

The description of Highland Park, losing more than half of its population between 1980 and 2010 plus a 42% poverty rate, suggests that this is an inner-ring suburb. While Detroit is notorious for struggling, many inner-ring suburbs are facing similar issues: once prosperous, the issues facing big cities have moved beyond their boundaries. These suburbs often have limited tax revenues and increasingly poor residents. How can they compete with the big city (if it happens to be at least somewhat thriving) or suburbs further out that have more modern amenities and wealthier populations? This is why people like Myron Orfield suggest that we need more metropolitan revenue sharing in order to help these communities survive and have hope for turning their fortunes around.

Of the suburbs that have had to turn to more drastic measures to close budget shortfalls, how many of them are inner-ring suburbs? Do these places share other characteristics? I would assume many wealthier suburban communities haven’t had to consider such options yet.

Disagreement on whether there are 7 billion people on earth just yet

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There have been a number of recent stories about how the world’s population has reached 7 billion. Interestingly, not everyone agrees that this has happened yet:

According to United Nations demographers, 6,999,999,999 other Earthlings potentially felt the same way on Monday when the world’s population topped seven billion. But if you’d rather go by the United States Census Bureau’s projections, you’ve got some breathing room. The bureau estimates that even with the world’s population increasing by 215,120 a day, it won’t reach seven billion for about four months.

How do the dueling demographic experts reconcile a difference, as of Monday, of 28 million, which is more than all the people in Saudi Arabia?

They don’t.

“No one can know the exact number of people on the globe,” Gerhard Heilig, chief of the population estimates and projections section of the United Nations Population Division, acknowledges.

Even the best individual government censuses have a margin of error of at least 1 percent, he said, which would translate in the global aggregation to “a window of uncertainty of six months before or six months after Oct. 31.” An error margin of even as little as 2 percent would mean that Monday’s estimate of seven billion actually was 56 million off (which is more people than were counted in South Africa).

Figuring this out is not an easy task. It requires a central group to tabulate results from all of the countries around the world. Could there be a difference in the reliability and validity of the results across nations? For example, can we trust population counts from honed operations in the United States and other Western nations more than counts from Third World countries? (I wish the article went into this: how accurate are population figures from different countries? How big might the margins of errors be?) I’ve seen this before when doing some research in graduate school on suicide figures that the United Nations has collected – in the period I was looking at, roughly 1950 to 1970, some countries didn’t report, some had rougher estimates, and countries could have different definitions about what constitutes a suicide. Absolute population counts should be more straight forward but I imagine there could be a number of complications.

Will we get another round of news stories when the Census Bureau says we have hit 7 billion? I wonder if the perceived global authority of the United Nations versus that of the Census Bureau plays a role. For example, did the New York Times report the 7 billion figure as front-page news and then print this caveat story later in the news section?

A final note: the story ends by suggesting the two estimates are not that far off. If we could be so lucky that all of our estimates have only a 1% margin of error, science would benefit greatly. But it is a reminder that official figures are estimates, not 100% counts of social phenomenon.

The sport of hockey has a sociology department?

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Here is a quick look at recent happenings of sociological import within the sport of hockey:

Hockey’s sociology department is really having a hell of a year. There was the banana thrown at Wayne Simmonds of the Philadelphia Flyers, a black player, during a pre-season game in London. Ont.; there was Simmonds caught on camera calling Sean Avery of the New York Rangers a “faggot” a couple days later. If you wanted to go further, there is the visor debate, which boils down to a sort of libertarian approach to personal safety, much as, say, seatbelts did. We all know how that one turned out.

And then Sunday, there was Raffi Torres and Paul Bissonnette. Bissonnette, the Phoenix Coyotes forward who has become a Twitter celebrity as @BizNasty2point0, who has over 150,000 followers, put a picture of his Coyotes teammate and his wife in their Halloween costumes as Jay-Z and Beyoncé. They had coloured their skin to appear black…

Hockey is a closed society, in a lot of ways. Diversity exists – Russians, Finns, Swedes, Czechs, etc. – but racially, it remains the least diverse major sports league, unless you get into NASCAR, tennis, or golf. That’s demographics as much as anything, and it is slowly changing. Bissonnette’s mother is half-black, but Canada has no notable tradition of blackface, and it is not exactly taught in our schools. For many Canadians, how would we know?…

Some jokes never get funny. Here’s one more chance to learn.

It sounds like some hockey players could benefit from a social education. Also, they might want to discuss what exactly they do in public or voluntarily post online.

I wonder how much all of the major sports do this kind of training. I know some have increased training for rookies and young players in recent years but how much involves social issues such as race, social class, and gender?

In discussion of Occupy Wall Street, McMansions seen as part of the culture war

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As part of a larger fascinating discussion about who the members of Occupy Wall Street actually are (the almost-elite versus the elite?), Megan McArdle suggests McMansions are part of the larger culture war in the United States:

Orwell goes on to point out that it is the anxious lower-upper-middle-class who have the most venom towards those below them–precisely because to preserve their status, they have to keep themselves sharply apart from the workers and tradesmen. And I think that that does apply here as well, at least to some extent. One of the interesting things about going back to my business school reunion earlier in the month was simply the absence of the sort of cutting remarks about flyover country that I have grown used to hearing in any large gathering of people. I didn’t notice it until after the events were over, because it was a slow accumulation of all the jokes and rants I hadn’t heard about NASCAR, McMansions, megachurches, reality television, and all the other cultural signifiers that make up a small but steady undercurrent of my current social milieu, the way Polish jokes did when I was in sixth grade.

Some of my former classmates now live in flyover country, of course, but mostly, I think, they just didn’t care. No one seemed very interested in the culture war.

So why does that same culture war seem so important to so many of the people that I know in New York and DC? (“The intellectuals”, as one of my classmates laughingly called us, when I started dropping statistics in the middle of cocktail chitchat, and then lamely explained that this is kind of what passes for fascinating small talk in DC.)

It’s not entirely crazy to suspect, as Orwell did, that this has something to do with money. Specifically, you sneer at the customs of the people you might be mistaken for. For aside from a few very stuffy conservatives, no white people I know sneer at hip-hop music, telenovelas, Tyler Perry films, or any of the other things often consumed by people of modest incomes who don’t look like them. They save it for Thomas Kinkade paintings, “Cozy cottage” style home decoration, collectibles, child beauty pageants, large pickup trucks***, and so forth.

It is fascinating to think about the comments that McArdle describes: in some circles, there is a different set of profane objects while such objects barely rate as topics among “average” people in middle America. Being in academia also leads to hearing more of such comments. I would add Walmart in as another significant “cultural signifier” in these conversations.

McMansions is an interesting addition to this group. There is often quite a bit of scorn intended when using this term. Of course, most people in flyover country don’t own McMansions (though perhaps they aspire to own them) but many communities allow them. I have found that the use of the term McMansion is often tied to sprawl, another issue that can separate the big cities from flyover country. McMansions are often seen as a part of the larger package of sprawl which includes an emphasis on cars, big houses, a waste of natural resources, and a lack of beauty and quality.

I don’t know if she knows it but it sounds like McArdle is making Bourdieu’s argument: those with more education look at aesthetics and a deeper understanding of objects while those with more money purchase for functionality. Take a McMansion: someone with more education might note its lack of quality, its contribution to sprawl, and wish for an architect-designed home. Someone with more money might note that you can have eight family members easily fit in the home and each can have their own bedroom, bathroom space, and play space.

A side note: I did have to laugh when McArdle suggests that dropping statistics into conversation is also a signifier. If so, I am guilty…

(A caveat: these sorts of flyover country/big city or red vs. blue state dichotomies are always more complex than they are commonly presented in public discourse. But just because they are broad terms describes tens of millions of people doesn’t mean that there isn’t necessarily some truth to them.)

Census data shows increase in people living in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty

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New Census data shows that the population of the “poorest poor” in America has grown (about 20.5 million Americans), particularly in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty:

After declining during the 1990s economic boom, the proportion of poor people in large metropolitan areas who lived in high-poverty neighborhoods jumped from 11.2 percent in 2000 to 15.1 percent last year, according to a Brookings Institution analysis released Thursday. Such geographically concentrated poverty in the U.S. is now at the highest since 1990, following a decade of high unemployment and rising energy costs.

Extreme poverty today continues to be prevalent in the industrial Midwest, including Detroit, Grand Rapids, Mich., and Akron, Ohio, due to a renewed decline in manufacturing. But the biggest growth in high-poverty areas is occurring in newer Sun Belt metro areas such as Las Vegas, Riverside, Calif., and Cape Coral, Fla., after the plummeting housing market wiped out home values and dried up construction jobs.

As a whole, the number of poor in the suburbs who lived in high-poverty neighborhoods rose by 41 percent since 2000, more than double the growth of such city neighborhoods.

Elizabeth Kneebone, a senior research associate at Brookings, described a demographic shift in people living in high-poverty neighborhoods, which have less access to good schools, hospitals and government services. As concentrated poverty spreads to new areas, including suburbs, the residents are now more likely to be white, native-born and high school or college graduates — not the conventional image of high-school dropouts or single mothers in inner-city ghettos.

Two things to note: the percentage of people living in poverty concentrated areas is back at 1990 levels and these areas themselves have shifted to new places like the suburbs and the Sun Belt. Are we any better off in addressing this issue than we were when scholars called attention to this like William Julius Wilson in the 1980s and Paul Jargowsky in the 1990s?

It is interesting that there is very little in current political or cultural discourse about the “poorest poor” as most of the current talk centers on the middle class or perhaps the working class. Even Occupy Wall Street seems to be about the middle and working classes. Perhaps much of this group’s anger is driven by the middle-class who now feels the pinch of the economic crisis but the “poorest poor” have been dealing with similar and/or worse concerns for decades.

Claim: 2012 election will be decided by “Walmart Moms”

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Each new election cycle seems to bring about claims about a previously underappreciated demographic group that candidates need to pay attention to. Several pollsters argue that “Walmart Moms” will help decide the 2012 elections:

From the Hill: “Republican pollster Neil Newhouse and Democratic pollster Margie Omero are going shopping at Walmart. For voters. The pair told attendees at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast this morning that a key demographic in 2012 will be a group of voters they call Walmart Moms. The successors to Soccer Moms and Hockey Moms, Walmart Moms are female voters with children 18 or younger who shop at the discount retailer at least once a month. According to Newhouse and Omero, these women make up 14% of the electorate.”

Laugh at their clothes. Laugh at their fashion faux pas. They’ll see you on Election Day.

I wonder how much these “Walmart Moms” line up with the suburban independent demographic that Joel Kotkin argued has determined the outcome of the last few national elections.

More on what “Walmart Moms” care about when voting:

Walmart Moms are more interested in microeconomic issues such as college affordability than macroeconomic concerns such as the debt ceiling. The literature the pollsters distributed at the breakfast said, “It will be important for candidates to clearly communicate how their policies or ideas will personally impact these women and their households for the better.”

So it is about household economics and basic middle-class consumer items (groceries + college educations). Is there a politician that could effectively link these micro and macroeconomic concerns so that the American public understands the relationship between the two?

h/t Instapundit

How to qualify as a pop sociologist

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One Wired writer has a humorous take on what one has to do to be a pop sociologist:

I’ve been reading a lot of books by Malcolm Gladwell and books remarkably similar to books by Malcolm Gladwell. The pattern is pretty straightforward: You give your book a one-word title and then explain what the hell you’re talking about in the subtitle…

The two main qualifications for being a pop sociology author appear to be the ability to ask rhetorical questions, and the ability to share anecdotes that vaguely answer those questions. Is this something I could do? According to a tangentially related study of bar-hopping patterns among female youth in Prague, yes it is…

Learning about what made Darwin, Gershwin and to a lesser extent Paquin who they are is not going to do a damn thing for you, any more than the Babar books turned you into elephant royalty like you always secretly hoped they would. So my book is going to focus on the one thing that all successful, world-changing geniuses have in common: They’re not you.

What follows is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Nope: Success, Brilliance, Innovation and Why Those Words Never Come Up When People Talk About You.

Funny.

I do have to give Gladwell some credit. He does seem to do his scientific homework as even sociologists like his work (as evidenced by the award he received from the American Sociological Association). Not everyone can do what he does: present scientific findings in an engaging way. I wonder if sociologists are sometimes jealous at the kind of writing he is able to do compared to the more scientific writing required in academic journals and monographs.

Oh, and it doesn’t hurt to pick a topic that is ripe for translating from new scientific findings into the popular realm.

Viewing the insides of stores on Google Maps

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Adding to its Street View capabilities, Google also will allow browsers to see inside some retail establishments that allowed Google to photograph their interiors:

A test program launched in April of last year was bearing fruit in a growing array of panoramic images taken inside businesses that volunteered to be part of the project.

“We’ve been seeing renewed interest in the past few days because, as promised, we’re getting more imagery online,” Google spokeswoman Deanna Yick told AFP on Monday…

Small businesses in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States have been able to invite Street View photographers into their shops or eateries to capture images then served up with Google online maps.

“With this immersive imagery, potential customers can easily imagine themselves at the business and decide if they want to visit in person,” Google Maps product manager Gadi Royz said in a blog post early this year.

My big question: will this actually bring more customers inside the shops? I’m skeptical: how many times would someone be wondering about whether they should visit a store, look up the interior image on Street View, and then make a positive decision. What if the image is actually a negative thing, perhaps due to the lighting (I wonder if they adjusted for this), outdated decor, or, for lack of a better term, a lack of “coolness”?

We could also ask whether Google’s efforts in these areas actually encourage in-person community. If given more information in general through search engines, images, and reviews (with Google recently buying Zagat), will people be more likely to venture out of their homes or away from their internet-enabled devices? Will they become overwhelmed with the choices (like Barry Schwartz argues in The Paradox of Choice) and be less likely to choose any?

In the end, Google must think that providing these interior images are going to help them make money.

Emanuel floats $2 congestion tax, parking lots fight back

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Chicago’s Mayor Emanuel this week floated the idea of imposing a $2 congestion fee for commuter parking and parking lot operators are not happy:

Parking industry executives said the mayor’s strategy, which City Hall officials said is intended to reduce traffic gridlock in the central business district and River North and encourage increased public transit ridership and investment, fails to address congestion issues across the Chicago region. They said Emanuel’s plan would create more problems than it would solve.

“We think highlighting parking taxes as a fix to a regional problem is missing the point,” said Marshall Peck, chief executive officer of InterPark, a major owner-operator of parking properties downtown. “The congestion of Chicago is primarily on the highways. Once you get off the highways in the morning, traffic is really not problematic.”

Many commuters and numerous traffic studies, however, would challenge the suggestion that downtown traffic flows well.

InterPark and other members of the Parking Industry Labor Management Committee have posted placards in their facilities showing the current taxes and how the top tax would increase 67 percent, from $3 to $5, under Emanuel’s plan. The companies are also distributing fliers to their customers encouraging city residents to tell their aldermen to vote against the proposed new fee.

There are some interesting ideas floating around here:

1. While a number of cities have looked into congestion taxes, they are still not widespread. In an American context, I presume this is due to their unpopularity.

2. This is just one possible idea among many others the City of Chicago is looking at in order to increase revenue.

3. Having parking lot operators suggest we need more regional solutions to traffic is laughable. The whole system as it is currently set up in most American regions privileges automobile traffic. So they want more people not to drive, potentially reducing their business? Additionally, many regions, such as Chicago, don’t really have metropolitan bodies that can enforce metropolitan solutions to congestion. To solve the problem in the Chicago region, the RTA, CTA, Metra, City of Chicago, State of Illinois, and dozens of municipalities would have to be involved and agreeable.

4. A number of people have argued that parking is way too cheap and this encourages driving. Congestion taxes then do two things: (1) raise revenue (2) reduce traffic by discouraging driving.

5. The parking industry is an interesting one as the long-term prospects for many surface lots is to make money while the company waits for a company to come along and make an expensive offer for the land.

6. Just how much are motorists willing to support the parking lot operators? Would companies and businesspeople really leave the city over a $2 charge?

The contradictions of social commentary: too much and too little saving and moving is bad

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In this week’s column, Gregg Easterbrook points out two interesting contradictory social messages regarding the behavior of the American public:

Ten years ago the fact that Americans had a negative savings rate — by borrowing, most spent more than their incomes — was said to be very bad. In the last three years the personal savings rate has gone steadily up as Americans react to the unsettled economy by spending less and building up reserves. That was supposed to be bad, too. Prominent commentators blamed “higher personal saving” for dampened demand, which in turn slows GDP growth. So not saving is bad, and saving is also bad.

Wait — the latest indicators are that not saving is on the upswing again, and of course, that’s bad. The sudden surge in not saving “raises the question of whether consumers are returning to their old spendthrift habits.”

In the recent past, the fact Americans move often has been decried as rootlessness and a barometer of too many unconnected to the life of their communities. “Bowling alone” and all that. Now comes word that the Great Recession has led to a sharp decline in moving. Previously, moving was said to be bad. Now not moving is bad, being spun as evidence of “loss of mobility.”

Here are several possible interpretations of these conflicting takes:
1. Commentators have moved to generally seeing only negative traits in people’s behaviors.

2. Most commentators genuinely don’t know what is good or bad for the economy or larger society so they always suggest the opposite. Sometimes they may be right, sometimes they may be wrong.

2a. An added bonus: when the situation appears to be “bad” (which is often a social construction itself), commentators want any action that attempts to reverse the trend. Doing nothing is seen as worse than trying something that you perhaps think has a reasonable chance of failing.

3. Americans themselves live with these tensions. Take the mobility issue. We have always had a running battle in the United States between rootedness/community and mobility. We say we value civic organizations and discussions but we also are willing to drop everything and leave if a great job offer comes along. Plenty of people wrestle with this on a regular basis. These commentators simply reflect true tensions in American culture.