Monthly Archives: February 2012

Modern-day boom towns in the American West

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While we might consider boom towns to be part of American history, the discovery of oil and gas in the American West is leading to rapid population increases with some negative effects:

Stepped-up oil and gas development in northwestern North Dakota and northeastern Montana is punctuating the landscape with drilling rigs, trucks and hastily erected barracks, known as “man camps,” to house thousands of mostly male workers crowding into small communities where residents once greeted each other by name and left their homes and cars unlocked…

In Sidney, Montana, about 45 miles (72 km) southwest of Williston, officials have been scrambling to keep pace with oil and gas activity that is expected to double the population – from 5,000 to 10,000 – in five years and add an estimated 774 new students to the public school system…

Utah State University sociologist Richard Krannich said years-long studies of boomtowns in the West show a sharp rise in negative consequences such as crime and the fear of crime in the earliest phases of a boom.

“But we also saw the recovery once the initial phase ended and the workforce stabilized, the pressure on local services eased and infrastructure caught up with demand,” he said.

I’m not sure how you prepare for this. I can’t imagine local politicians could say no to needed jobs and future revenues and yet the quick changes in a community are difficult to handle until revenue streams are established.

What I think is particularly interesting here is that communities across the country are subject to outside social forces that can quickly change their trajectories. I assume most of these Western towns were small and hadn’t changed much in recent years but as soon as valuable resources are discovered, things can change very rapidly. Each community can make different choices about how to respond. Of course, these rapid changes can’t or won’t last forever and the town will return to some equilibrium and once the resources wind down or are depleted, a downward cycle can begin again. Boom towns and ghost towns are notable because most communities don’t experience this kind of rapid change – we expect some kind of gentle growth or at least a stable plateau. Just the idea of population loss can be troublesome because it suggests a community is on the road to dying or it is going to lose funding for services and tough cuts will have to be made to budgets.

I wonder if there are any consultants or academics to help communities adjust to these boom periods in order to take advantage of them (mainly, find tax dollars) as soon as possible. Additionally, I imagine there are some interesting interactions between long-time residents and newcomers and both sides try to adjust.

Sociologist: Oscars are “insiders rewarding insiders”

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As people watching the Oscars last night might have wondered what some some of the winning films were about (Best Picture winner, The Artist, has taken in just over $31 million at the box office), a sociologist argues that the Oscars represent “insiders rewarding insiders”:

“The annual Oscars are a vital component of our cultural machinery, not only reflecting taste but producing it – and thereby creating profit for moviemakers,” says Ben Agger, director of the Center for Theory in the University of Texas at Arlington’s sociology department, in an e-mail. “The voters are insiders rewarding insiders.”…

A Los Angeles Times report found that 94 percent of Academy members are white and 77 percent are male, with blacks making up only 2 percent and Latinos less than that. The median age of Oscar voters is 62, with just 14 percent under 50 years old.

This has led to accusations of gender and race bias. But Charles Bernstein, who for 10 years was chairman of the Academy Award rules committee, is a bit tired of the yearly accusations that come AMPAS’s way.

“The Academy is not a democracy but a meritocracy,” he says.

The job of the Academy is not to reflect but to lead, he adds. These are great professionals who have achieved distinction in motion picture-making, and they are merely saying, “Here is what we most respect.’”

This is a classic culture question: does culture reflect society (perhaps the organizations and social conditions or the demands of consumers)? Or put another way, should cultural products be rewarded for being popular or being the best or outside of the box?

This could be viewed as a gatekeeper issue: who gets to decide the merits of a cultural product? I suspect the battle between “mass culture” and “high culture” will not be settled anytime soon. At this point, what would Hollywood gain by changing the current system? The Oscars are popular television and there still are enough blockbusters for Hollywood to keep moving forward. At the Oscar gathering I attended, another attendee and I were thinking through an award titled “the movie American movie-goers loved the most,” perhaps marked by the box office winner or some votes from people who actually attended the movies (perhaps like the older system of doing all-star balloting at sporting events). I also wouldn’t be surprised if the Oscars found a way to include some voting input from the public, even if it was more symbolic than anything else. Perhaps their solution right now is to include enough popular films (like Bridesmaids) and celebrities (like Tom Cruise, Jennifer Lopez) in the show to keep people happy even though the popular people aren’t going to win.

If we truly are headed toward a more individualistic, more culturally diffuse world, we might expect that the Oscars and Grammys and all sorts of cultural gatekeepers (officials reviewers, critics, etc.) will face more trouble. This would not only be an issue of whether a majority of a culture actually experiences significant works (an interesting question in itself) but whether the public actually cares about what the gatekeepers think (why watch the Oscars if they don’t even talk about movies that most people see?). I don’t think we are close to the end of the gatekeepers but this is going to continue to be a fault line to watch.

“The moral self of bankers and brokers”

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A recent article in American Sociological Review looks at how some bankers and brokers were able to help lead the country toward recession:

Those bankers, stockbrokers, and mortgage lenders whose actions helped cause the recession were able to act as they did, seemingly without shame or guilt, perhaps because their moral identity standard was set at a low level, and the behavior that followed from their personal standard went unchallenged by their colleagues, said Jan E. Stets, a sociologist with the University of California in Riverside.
“To the extent that others verify or confirm the meanings set by a person’s identity standard and expressed in a person’s behavior, the more the person will continue to engage in these behaviors,” said Stets, co-author of “A Theory of the Self for the Sociology of Morality” in the February issue of the American Sociological Review. “If others have a low moral identity and do not challenge the illicit behavior that follows from a person’s identity standard, then the person will continue to do what he or she is doing. This is how immoral practices can emerge.”
Studying the moral self is opportune given the practices of bankers, stockbrokers, and mortgage lenders whose behavior, in some cases, helped facilitate the recent recession in the United States, said Stets and fellow researcher Michael J. Carter of California State University at Northridge.
“The fact that a few greedy actors have the potential to damage the lives of many brings issues of right and wrong, good and bad, and just and unjust to public awareness,” they said. “To understand the illicit behavior of some, we need to study the moral dimension of the self and what makes some individuals more dishonest than others.”

This sounds like a good illustration of some basic sociological principles: personal aspects of the self can be heavily influenced by their context. Humans have agency but their options are constrained and influenced by the social environment in which they find themselves.

Here is what I wonder: can regulations alone successfully promote a higher personal identity standard?

Another question: are Americans angry/distraught/upset about moral lapses from individual actors within the financial industry or with the entire system? In other words, do Americans blame the context or the bad actors? In thinking about this, do most Americans even know who the main individuals involved in the economic recession are (beyond government officials)?

Living alone means having no “social checks and balances”?

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As more Americans live alone, these solo dwellers may have different behaviors at home:

In a sense, living alone represents the self let loose. In the absence of what Mr. Klinenberg calls “surveilling eyes,” the solo dweller is free to indulge his or her odder habits — what is sometimes referred to as Secret Single Behavior. Feel like standing naked in your kitchen at 2 a.m., eating peanut butter from the jar? Who’s to know?

Amy Kennedy, 28, a schoolteacher who has a two-bedroom apartment in High Point, N.C., all to herself, calls it living without “social checks and balances.”…

Among her domestic oddities: running in place during TV commercials; speaking conversational French to herself while making breakfast (she listens to a language CD); singing Journey songs in the shower; and removing only the clothes she needs from her dryer, thus turning it into a makeshift dresser…

What emerges over time, for those who live alone, is an at-home self that is markedly different — in ways big and small — from the self they present to the world. We all have private selves, of course, but people who live alone spend a good deal more time exploring them.

This sounds like Goffman’s dramaturgical approach: those living alone can be truly back-stage with themselves perhaps in a way they never could with a spouse or family. Would all of us exhibit this kind of quirky behavior if we didn’t have others around at home? Without others around to enforce the social norms of behavior, perhaps we become our only standard.

This makes me think about an area of life we don’t examine enough: what do people do when they are alone? Do they generally follow social conventions or are all people quirky? Do they feel comfortable when alone? Are there limits to much we can talk to each other about being alone or how much we can ask about what others do when they are alone? How do alone behaviors and feelings about being alone differ across cultures? Do people in the Western world today spend more or less time alone than in the past? Do we feel a need to have more alone time (“me-time”?) or do simply express this more? How do others tend to respond when we express loneliness or express that we like to be alone?

One thing I noted when reading this article: what about being alone yet through different mediums not really being alone? I’m thinking of situations where someone is alone but they are watching TV, listening to the radio, or interacting with people online. (Might reading also fall into this?) Of course, this kind of interaction is different than face-to-face interaction but is it truly living alone? I tend to be a person who likes to listen to talk radio – am I alone when doing this? Additionally, does this mediated interactions limit the quirky side of living alone?

It might be difficult methodologically to get at alone time. I assume the best way to do this would be to have cameras observing people while alone. Of course, it would take some time for people to forget the cameras are there but it would happen eventually. Other methods would not be as good: having a person do the observations would alter the setting too much; time diaries are unreliable; and surveys or interviews after the fact could be helpful but would end up being interpreted accounts.

The wealthy “walking away from the McMansions”

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One commentator suggests the number of wealthy homeowners walking away from their large mortgages is on the rise:

Nationwide, foreclosures on loans over $1 million are up nearly 600 percent since 2008…

Walking away has even become something of a boast among the more-or-less wealthy – a solution with few downside risks that also marks the walker as a smart player.

That’s because California is one of a small number of “non-recourse” states. Here, the mortgage lender cannot recover the full value of the loan if the homeowner defaults; the lender can only recover the house, not the owner’s other assets.

The effect is producing a death spiral for loaded McMansions in some upscale neighborhoods. When owners default, they expand the inventory of over-priced houses, undercutting the value of similar homes in the neighborhood, lowering their resale value and prompting a new round of “strategic defaults” by other owners.

I wonder how lenders are responding to this issue. Would they move more or less quickly since these homes are worth more and the bank could make more money (though they might lose more on the mortgage)?

Another issue: how much does walking away from a large mortgage hurt someone who was able to get such a large loan in the first place? While foreclosures for “average homeowners” are often portrayed as huge problems (looking for somewhere to live, a hit to their credit rating), is this as much of an issue for those with bigger mortgages? According to this look at Beverly Hills, this decision is being made by some who can pay the mortgage but don’t want to deal with the decreased value of their homes:

Many are walking away not because they can’t pay, but because they judge it would be foolish to keep doing so…

She said she had seen in Beverly Hills a big increase in “strategic defaults,” in which owners who can still afford to make their monthly mortgage payment choose not to because the property is now worth so much less than the giant loan used to buy it during the housing bubble…

Bremner said she helped a client buy a Beverly Hills mansion last year that the prior owner had bought for over $4 million. He decided to stop paying his $3 million mortgage – even though he could easily afford it – when the value of the property had dropped to $2.5 million.

“They were able to comfortably cover the loan,” Bremner said. “They were just no longer willing to see the value of the property drop.”

If more wealthier homeowners are walking away from their mortgages, is there anything that should be done? Should they have harsher penalties if they have other assets to cover the mortgage? Should we be concerned that the Beverly Hills housing market is having difficulties, i.e. does this effect other housing markets or is it simply an issue between wealthy players?

It would be nice to have some exact numbers on how much this is happening across the country…

Battening down the Facebook privacy hatches

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The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a new study yesterday that suggests Facebook users are paying more attention to their privacy settings, meaning they are editing comments and photos more and being more selective about their friendships:

The report released Friday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that people are managing their privacy settings and their online reputation more often than they did two years earlier. For example, 44 percent of respondents said in 2011 that they deleted comments from their profile on a social networking site. Only 36 percent said the same thing in 2009…

Along those lines is “profile pruning,” which Pew reports is on the rise. Nearly two-thirds of people on social networks said last year that they had deleted friends, up from 56 percent in 2009. And more people are removing their names from photos than two years ago. This practice is especially common on Facebook, where users can add names of their friends to photos they upload…

Women are much more likely than men to restrict their profiles. Pew found that 67 percent of women set their profiles so that only their “friends” can see it. Only 48 percent of men did the same…

Possibly proving that with age comes wisdom, young adults were more likely to post something regrettable than their older counterparts. Fifteen percent of social network users aged 18 to 29 said they have posted something regrettable. Only 5 percent of people over 50 said the same thing.

Several thoughts about this:

1. This isn’t a huge trend: for both deleting comments and friends, a little less than 10% more users did this than two years ago. If this is a long-term trend that keeps going up 10% every few years, this would be especially noteworthy.

2. This is still a low number of people who say they “posted something regrettable.” These figures seem to suggest that many users are ahead of the game here: they are making sure they are being presented in a good light before it could turn into something regrettable. These figures go against a common media image that social media users regularly do crazy things, are always at risk, or don’t know what they are doing.

3. Is privacy the best word to describe all of this? I wonder if we could call this behavior “selective interaction” as it is more about limiting the display of information to certain people rather than hiding information from everyone. If people truly wanted online privacy, they wouldn’t have a Facebook profile in the first place.

4. The removal of friends is interesting. I wonder if this is more of a function of how long one has had Facebook (tied to realizing that one doesn’t really interact with that many people and all of those friends don’t show up in your news feed even if they are updating their information) or changes in life stages (once one leaves high school or college, does one need to remain friends with all of those people you once ran into or thought you might interact with?).

h/t Instapundit

In defense of Portland

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Mark Hemingway takes aim at Portland, Oregon in a long cover story in the Weekly Standard:

Unlike the New York Times, I write not to praise the place but to note the litany of things that plainly have gone wrong. Also to alert anyone else who’s listening: Right now, America’s civil and social engineers are beavering away trying to turn your city or town into the next Portlandia.

Mark’s piece is a rambling barrage that roughly summarizes as follows:

  1. Portland gets a lot of attention from the media, particularly the New York Times and via the TV show Portlandia (paragraphs 1-14).
  2. Portland is crazy-town (“quietly closing in on San Francisco as the American city that has most conspicuously taken leave of its senses”) (paragraphs 15-20)…
    1. …because of its development policies, particularly light rail (paragraphs 21-37);
    2. …because of its “generally hostile business climate” (paragraphs 38-53); and
    3. …because of its lax sexual mores (paragraphs 54-84).

A few thoughts re: development policies.  Mark suggests “[t]hings began to unravel in 1973, when the Oregon legislature required cities in the state to set development boundaries with the goal of preserving farmland.”  Portland responded by “cancel[ing] a major interstate freeway project” in order to start a light rail system.  Mark objects to this decision because (a) the light rail has low ridership (“It’s called ‘light’ rail not because the trains are less heavy, but because it’s more lightly used by the public than, say, New York’s subway or Washington, D.C.’s Metro”) and (b) it allowed “Oregon’s integrated land use and transportation planning system [to be] manipulated to award [a former-politician-turned-consultant’s] clients hundreds of millions in state and city contracts relating to light rail expansion and the accompanying high-density developments.”

While I’m certainly no expert on either Portland or light rail ridership statistics, a cursory web search turned up this Wikipedia article suggesting that Portland’s system ranks 4th in ridership among similar U.S. systems and ahead of (much larger) cities such as San Diego (5th), Philadelphia (6th), and Dallas (7th).  And as far as the revolving door between local politics, consultancies, and developers goes, it strikes me that this is a problem that has little to do with light rail as such.  The placement of new roads and highways is similarly susceptible to backroom-dealing that favors the wealthy and well-connected.  Mark makes no effort to explain why corruption (whether of the “small-c” or “big-C” variety) poses a bigger or more inherent problem with publicly funded mass transit projects (e.g., light rail) than with publicly funded car-based projects (e.g., highways), and I fail to see an argument so obvious that it needn’t be even implied (let alone spelled out).

A few thoughts re: Portland’s “generally hostile business climate.”  Mark begins by quoting extensively from a 2010 op-ed written by the chairman of Nike, a company started and headquartered in Portland, which opposed an increase being considered in the state income tax.  Whatever the merits or demerits of the tax increase or this two-year-old op-ed, it is hard to understand why Mark cites this as his leading example of Portland’s hostile business climate in particular rather than Oregon’s in general.

Worse, this op-ed is the closest Mark comes to criticizing Portland directly.  In the subsequent paragraphs, he (a) tells the story of his own grandparents as an example of the “upwardly mobile, working-class life now seems out of reach for much of the city,” (b) notes that income is unevenly distributed in Portland (“Don’t tell Portland’s scabies-infested Occupy camp, but between 1980 and 2007, the share of wealth earned by Portland’s middle quintile declined by about 20 percent, while the top 1 percent’s share doubled”), and (c) rises to defend “the traditional working class” from “the new hipsters.”

  • (A), the fact that the WWII generation could be both “upwardly mobile” and “working-class” is well documented, as is the fact that similar opportunities are vanishingly scarce for younger America today.  While I am certainly happy for Mark’s grandparents, it’s hard to imagine that today’s public school teacher and bus driver will, in 35 years, “retire to a farm…[and] rais[e] quarter horses.”  And it’s not likely that choosing to live in Peoria rather than Portland will make any difference.
  • (B), the fact that income is unevenly distributed in Portland only proves that Portland is normal relative to the rest of the U.S., not that it is a statistical outlier.  Moreover, without further explanation, it is unclear why Mark thinks uneven wealth distribution contributes to a “generally hostile business climate.”
  • (C), as his sole example of hipster-on-working-class attacks, Mark cites a five-year-old Willamette Week article which makes reference to “drunken red-neck[s].”  Apparently, Mark did not read the prologue to the article, which clarified that it was a humorous “series of bitter, petty, pessimistic rants that generally s**t on everything—and hopefully poke holes in the Portland hype” in order to “persuade prospective Portlanders not to crowd out our way of life for a little longer.”  Whatever one thinks of this brand of humor, it’s as surprising as it is clear that Mark missed this context and tone.

One final note.  Mark does begrudge respect to Portland’s small businesses, though he apparently can’t resist a few barbs:

While it’s hard not to root for entrepreneurial initiative wherever you find it, in Portland it carries a whiff of desperation. I submit that the real reason Portland has a thriving artisanal economy is that the regular economy is in the dumps. Portland’s hipsters are starting craft businesses in their garages and opening restaurants not merely because they “reject passive consumption” but because they can’t find jobs, the kind that offer upward mobility.

Perhaps Mark should re-read that 2010 op-ed he cited.  Before Phil Knight was a multi-billionaire and the chairman of a Fortune 500 corporation, he was just another small business owner with “a whiff of desperation” about him:

Forty-six years ago [as of 2010], when Mark Hatfield was governor, I started a small business in Oregon. In our first year, sales totaled $8,000. I am proud that [Nike] eventually became a major employer in the state.

It has been my hope that other entrepreneurs would similarly pursue their dreams in Oregon.

Today, across the U.S. and not just in Portland, “the regular economy is in the dumps” and people “can’t find jobs, the kind that offer upward mobility.”  If “a small city like Portland” has enough entrepreneurs to open “671 food trucks”, I say we should encourage them.  The last thing we need is for the supposedly conservative Weekly Standard to ape the Willamette Week in its quest to publish “series of bitter, petty, pessimistic rants that generally s**t on everything.”

Regulating teardown McMansions in the Boston suburbs

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The town of Sharon, Massachusetts is having a classic discussion regarding teardown McMansions:

Although any architectural style can be part of the large-house phenomenon, the typical structure that draws concern has a high roof line and sits closer to the property line than the one it replaced. Whether the problem is purely aesthetic or a more practical one of blocked views and bright outdoor lighting, some people dislike a house that dwarfs the rest of the neighborhood. Call it McMansion backlash.

A few Boston-area communities, including Cohasset and Wellesley, have imposed special regulations on new houses over a certain size, and now the town of Sharon is considering doing the same…

Typical discussion. Some people want the right to sell their home to whomever wants to buy it and people should be able to do what they want with their property. Others argue that the character of neighborhoods are changing, older residents may be priced out of the neighborhood by rising property taxes, and the bigger homes are ugly or too large.

Since this is a common story, I wonder how many communities prepare for this situation beforehand. On one hand, perhaps this seems like a waste of time – if it is not a problem, why bother spending time addressing the issue? Certain communities may never really have to deal with teardowns because the property is not that valuable and the community is far away from urban areas. On the other hand, many suburbs could be in this position, particularly with calls for redevelopment and a growing interest in being closer to work or amenities. Why not have some regulations on the books before it turns into a contentious public discussion? Once things start changing and the land is so valuable that there are people willing to offer big money for older homes, it is harder to slow the process.

An added bonus of having this discussion early on would be that it could a rare moment for community members to discuss what they really want the community and its neighborhoods to look like in the future. Without these clear plans, communities tend not to discuss these things until something drastic or large pops up and then people become passionate. Planning ahead could both save some trouble and also allow residents and leaders to be proactive in setting guidelines and ideals.

Using a list of “sleep-deprived professions to illustrate statistical and substantive significance”

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I ran into a list of “sleep-deprived jobs” yesterday and I think it is a useful tool for illustrating what significance means. The top five sleep deprived jobs (starting with the least rested): home health aide (6 hours, 57 minutes), lawyer, police officers, physicians/paramedics, and economists. The top five jobs with the most sleep (starting with the most rested): forest/logging workers (7 hours, 22 minutes), hairstylists, sales representatives, bartenders, and construction workers. Here is where the data from the list came from:

The lists are based on interviews with 27,157 adults as part of the annual National Health Interview Survey, conducted by a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Sleepy’s says its rankings were based on two variables: 1) average hours of sleep that respondents said they got in a 24-hour period, and 2) respondents’ occupations, as they would be classified by the Department of Labor.

Let’s talk about significance. First, statistical significance. The lower value is 6 hours and 57 minutes and the highest value is 7 hours, 22 minutes. We would need to know how the data is clustered, meaning does it look like a normal distribution (meaning most jobs are clumped in the middle) or it is a broader distribution? With a standard deviation, we could figure out how far these highest and lowest values are from the mean and whether they are outside 95% of all the cases.

Perhaps more interesting in this case is the second aspect of significance: even if a case is significantly different from the other cases, is this a meaningful difference in the real world? Just looking at the ten occupations at the top and bottom of this list, the top and bottom are separated by 35 minutes. Would roughly a half hour of sleep really change the quality of life or health between home health aides and forest/logging workers? Of course, sleep might not be the only factor that matters here but is this a meaningful difference? The Mayo Clinic recommends 7-9 hours a night for adults, the National Sleep Foundation also says 7-9 hours a night, and both agree that there are a lot of other factors involved. On the whole then, it appears that the average American (who is in an occupation) is on the low end of recommended sleep (a recurring theme in news stories over the years).

It appears that this list isn’t that helpful if everyone is relatively clustered together. But if we had a little more information, we could know more and determine whether there are (statistically and substantively) significant occupations.

Toll Brothers still moving forward

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While some may claim that the McMansion era is over, one of the prominent builders of some of these homes is still moving forward. Here is an update on Toll Brothers:

Luxury-home builder Toll Brothers has rebounded impressively since the start of October, along with its industry. The stock has risen by two-thirds and now trades at 71 times forward earnings estimates.

This is the case even with a reported quarterly loss announced Monday:

Toll Brothers Inc. swung to a fiscal-first-quarter loss as fewer deliveries and increased cancellations weakened revenue for the luxury-home builder.

But the company, known for its sprawling suburban homes and high-end urban condos, said it was optimistic because contracts were the highest for any first quarter in five years. It also sees recovery along Florida’s east coast and in Phoenix, markets hard hit by the housing crash…

Revenue dipped 3.6% to $322 million. Analysts expected a per-share profit of two cents on $361 million in revenue, according to a survey conducted by Thomson Reuters.

It sounds like some are optimistic that the housing market is turning a corner or has already reached its bottom. On the other hand, it sounds like there is still a lot of potential volatility. Here is a mixed report:

Homebuilders have struggled to compete as foreclosed properties sell at a discount and the U.S. unemployment rate remains above 8 percent. Toll Brothers depends on people selling their homes and buying its more expensive residences.

Sales of previously owned U.S. homes rose in January to an annual pace of 4.57 million, the highest level since May 2010, the National Association of Realtors reported today from Washington. The results were below the median forecast of 4.66 million by 74 economists surveyed by Bloomberg…

Toll Brothers’ earnings miss wasn’t “significant,” because it was caused by the longer period needed to complete high-rise condos in New York, which accounted for its most profitable sales, Chief Executive Officer Douglas Yearley Jr. said on Bloomberg Television today.

“This is the best we’ve felt in about five years,” he said on “Street Smart” with Trish Regan. “For the first three weeks of February, our orders are up significantly. We’re seeing deposits up. We’re seeing traffic up.”

My translation: we are still far from clearly positive results in the housing market.

I don’t know how many houses the biggest builders build but the figures from Toll Brothers are intriguing. Toll Brothers attracts a lot of attention but they “delivered 564 homes in the latest quarter, down slightly from 570 homes a year earlier.” This is not a lot of homes. I assume Toll Brothers gets more attention then because they tend to build high-end homes?