Monthly Archives: February 2012

Naperville downtown like “Rush street west”?

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In response to the stabbing death that happened in downtown Naperville this past weekend, one city councilman suggests the city needs to enforce liquor regulations more closely:

Councilman Doug Krause pointed out that the city has only shut down one bar for one day in the past five years due to a liquor license infraction, and that an ordinance passed last month will allow bars to stop serving food at 9 p.m.

“It’s becoming more of a Rush Street after 10 o’clock at night — it’s like Rush Street west,” Krause said Sunday night. “It’s been increasing over the last eight to 10 years. There are mobs out there.”…

“We had over 6,000 calls for police service in downtown Naperville last year. The problem is an enforcement problem,” Krause said referring to liquor law enforcement.

Councilman Grant Wehrli disagreed with Krause, calling his response a “knee jerk reaction to an event that is still under investigation.”

This sort of reaction is something I was expecting even though Naperville is a relatively safe place.

At the same time, this does lead to a larger issue that I hinted at on Sunday: how Naperville wants to balance being a cultural and entertainment center while also remaining family-friendly. On one side, having a lot of bars in a suburban downtown is not usually considered family-friendly. Particularly on warm summer nights, there are a lot of people who congregate in downtown Naperville late into the evening, including many teenagers and families, to partake of music, shopping, the Riverwalk, and family restaurants and eateries. This sort of violence is not clearly not helpful to maintaining this environment but even public drunkenness is not terribly conducive to this.

On the other hand, having a thriving restaurant and bar district can bring in a lot of tax revenue. Instead of residents going elsewhere (perhaps downtown Chicago even?), they spend their money out in downtown Naperville. Lots of suburban communities would love to have the problem that Naperville has had of not having enough parking spaces for all of the downtown visitors or having the kind of restaurants that exist in most suburbs only in shopping centers. The restaurants and bars help attract other businesses.

So how does a well-respected suburb balance these two interests? One of the worst things that could happen to the downtown is that it is branded “unsafe” and people turn away. At the same time, when there are plenty of people around and there is alcohol involved, it is really hard to stop everything bad from happening.

“Farewell to the suburban age”?

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One strategist argues that the “suburban age” is over in America:

Note how this process is self-reinforcing. As people moved out, municipal revenues stagnated in the old urban core. This meant that deteriorating urban services in downtown areas pushed out more people. Meanwhile, the expanding suburban population could use its growing political clout to demand more public spending on highways and other urban infrastructure for the suburbs. The expansion of urban infrastructure was fiscally very expensive, but America’s powerful mid-century economy could afford it. By the end of the 20th century, some suburbs had spread so far from any urban core that they were given a new name: “exurbs”.

Today, however, these very dynamics, both financial and sociological, have gone into reverse. Concerns about the state of US federal, state and municipal finances have grown sharply. In August 2011, ratings agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded the credit rating of 11,000 municipal issues following the downgrade of the federal government. In November 2011, Jefferson County, Alabama, filed for bankruptcy, the largest such filing in US history. At the very least, this means that the United States will not be able to afford further expansion of urban infrastructure for many years. Indeed, American city managers will be forced to recognise that urban services are much cheaper to supply in a concentrated urban form…

Meanwhile, the structure of American society is also changing rapidly. In 1950, households based on married couples accounted for 78 per cent of all households. Single-person households accounted for less than 10 per cent. Over the following 60 years, however, the institution of marriage went into steep decline in America. The latest census data shows that married couples accounted for only 48 per cent of households in 2010 and that their share is rapidly falling. In contrast, the single person household now accounts for 27 per cent of households.

The residential requirements of this new social structure are drastically different from those of the traditional family. The single individual, for instance, is likely to prefer an easily managed apartment and close proximity to bars, restaurants, hospitals, shops and friends. The implication of the above sociological and fiscal dynamics is that the future trajectory of American cities is towards increased density. Some old city-centres will revive even as new hubs will emerge.

There are two major arguments here against the suburbs:

1. They are too expensive to maintain in the long-run.

2. Family structures have changed and the new forms of social arrangement, such as living alone, would be best done in the city.

Both of these are problems though I’m not sure they necessarily mean that Americans will revert to city living and promoting urban policies over suburban policies. I wonder if the shift toward the densification of the suburbs, often built around New Urbanist developments or retrofitting, would adequately solve both of these issues.

The overall premise of this piece is echoed by others (see a similar argument from The Atlantic last year) and I wonder how much of this is simply the same suburban critique that we have heard now for decades: suburbs are unsustainable and their design does not cater to everyone (teenagers, singles, the elderly, etc.). Is this era of economic crisis going to be the period where these critiques actually move residents and policymakers toward other options?

There is another intriguing part about this analysis: how American policies about suburbs influence other country’s policies. This writer suggests that India is aspiring in some ways to follow the American model when the country would be better served to promote denser cities. If the American suburban model does decline (and we would have to think about how exactly you would measure this decline), would other countries abandon their smaller suburban plans?

Another contender for the anti-McMansion: “upscale cottage colonies”

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A few days ago I highlighted a photo gallery that suggested a 1938 Cape Cod was the “anti-McMansion.” Here is another contender for that crown: new “upscale cottage colonies.”

Under the direction of Mark DeWitt, the 8-acre Grindell’s RV Park on Old Wharf Road will see its last season this summer. On Nov. 1, ground will be broken for Heritage Sands, a condominium-style cottage colony…

Brennan pointed to similar projects recently opened in Wells, Ogunquit and Kennebunkport, Maine. “These successful shore communities show us what’s possible in cottage design,” he said. “Heritage Sands will offer six cottage styles and include responsible environmental planning.” Brennan noted that The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Forbes magazine considered the new cottage colonies “the anti-McMansions of the post-bubble real estate market.”…

Cottages will have one, two or three bedrooms with no opportunity to expand. “This is part of our septic approval,” Brennan said. While they can’t add more bedrooms, owners may opt to install solar panels on their roofs, taking advantage of the south-facing site to save on energy bills…

Pre-construction sales on the cottages, which Brennan said start “below $400,000,” begins in March. Brennan said he has a growing list of people waiting to go to contract. “These cottages are going to be unparalleled on the Cape,” he said. “We expect rapid absorption by people who are looking to recapture their summer experience on the Cape as kids. The return on investment will be photo albums and memories passed down from generation to generation.”

Here is what appears to make these cottages anti-McMansions: they are more environmentally friendly, a bonus near the water. There are going to be “colonies” of these homes as opposed to large houses on large lots where people are trying not to interact with others. The homes can’t be expanded and presumably smaller (though we aren’t told about how many square feet they are).

On the other hand, here are some features of these houses that might go against the anti-McMansion idea. They are meant to be second homes where people can recapture their childhood. These are not older houses. They are not exactly cheap. They don’t come with all the green features – solar panels have to be added, driving up costs. In the end, these are still homes for fairly wealthy people.

This leads me to another idea: is one of the new desirable status symbols the anti-McMansion?

Researchers develop an equation to help predict the next hit song

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A team of researchers says they have developed an equation that helps predict which songs will become hit singles. Here is how the equation works:

We represent each song using a set of 23 different features that characterize the audio. Some are very simple features — such as how fast it is, how long the song is — and some are more complex features, such as how energetic the song is, how loud it is, how danceable and how stable the beat is throughout the song. We also took into account the highest rank that songs ever achieved on the chart.

The computer can combine a song’s features in an equation that can be used to score any given song.

We can then evaluate how accurately the computer scored it by seeing how well the song actually did.

Every single week now we’re updating our equation based on how recent releases have done on the chart. So the equation will continue to evolve, because music tastes will evolve as well.

As the researchers note, this equation is based mainly on the musical content and doesn’t factor in the content of the lyrics or budgeting for the song and music group. The equation seems mainly to be based on whatever musical styles and changes are already popular so I wonder how they account for changes in musical periods.

If this equation works well (and the interview doesn’t really say how accurate this formula is for new songs), this could be a big boon for the culture industries. The movie, music, and book industry all struggle with this: it is very difficult to predict which works will become popular. There are ways in which companies try to hedge their bets either by working with established stars/performers/authors, working with established stories and characters (more sequels, anyone?), and trying to read the cultural zeitgeist (more vampires!). But, in the end, the industries can survive because enough of the works become blockbusters and help subsidize the rest.

At the same time, haven’t people claimed they have cracked this code before? For example, you can quickly find people (like this and this) who claim they have it figured out. And yet, revenues and ticket sales were down in 2011. There is a disconnect here…

Why “Your Facebook friends have more friends than you”

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Here is an overview of an interesting quirk on Facebook: your Facebook friend likely has more friends than you do.

It’s just the digital reflection of what’s known to sociologists as the “friendship paradox.” In 1991, sociologist Scott Feld found that, generally speaking, any person’s friends tend to be more popular than they are. The reason, he said, is fairly simple: people are more likely to be friends with someone who has more friends than someone who has fewer friends.

This is true on Facebook as well, the study found. A small number of people are isolated and don’t appear on many lists, but popular people show up again and again.

Another interesting result of the study finds that Facebook users tend to get more messages, friend requests, likes and photo tags than they give, pointing to the existence of a few Facebook “power-users” driving the site’s activity.

Keith Hampton, a professor at Rutgers University and the lead author of the report, said that power users make up around 20-30 percent of Facebook’s users, and that there are three specialties within these power users. Some users send a lot of friend requests, while others most frequently “like” posts and pictures. A third kind of power user tends to make a lot of photo tags.

If you put this in social network terms, there are certain people who are nodes in the Facebook network. These nodes have more friends and are centers of information, comments, pictures, likes on Facebook, between different groups and users.

If we know this is how the world works, you could imagine how this information could be put to use. Perhaps Facebook puts information from these nodes more often in your news feeds. Perhaps marketers hope to specifically target these people as they can have a wide reach. Perhaps other users could look to connect with these nodes, knowing that these people could help them get to information (like jobs? social events?) that a less connected user could not.

I was thinking about this as I was trying to explain network behavior to some students in class recently. Are users of Facebook aware of where they fall within their networks, meaning are they nodes themselves or far from the center of activity? If they are aware of this, does this change their behavior? Would it be beneficial for Facebook to show users where they fall in their network with the chance that it might boost their online activity levels?

Reminder after murder in Naperville: the suburb has the lowest crime rates of a city its size in Illinois

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In the aftermath of a murder Friday night in Naperville, I wanted to issue a reminder about crime in Naperville before anyone jumps to any conclusions about violence in the suburb. Naperville is a safe place:

Naperville is by far the safest city of its size in Illinois.

The 2010 crime statistics released by the FBI Monday show that the level of crime in Naperville is far lower than is typical for Illinois’ largest cities.

For every 10,000 residents in the city, there were about 151 property crimes in Naperville, compared to 203 in Elgin and 216 in Aurora…

Rockford and Springfield reported by far the highest crime rates among the state’s largest towns. For every 10,000 Naperville residents, 9 violent crimes were reported. Elgin (33), Aurora (36) and Joliet (36) had the next best rates.

Violent crime is rare in Naperville although not unheard of. The city likes to trumpet the low crime rate. Notice how it is part of the one paragraph lead-in to the “Welcome to Naperville” video on the city’s website:

Located 28 miles west of Chicago, Naperville, Ill., is home to approximately 145,000 people. This vibrant, thriving city consistently ranks as a top community in the nation in which to live, raise children and retire. The city is home to acclaimed public and parochial schools, the best public library system in the country, an array of healthcare options and an exceptionally low crime rate. Naperville has ready access to a variety of public transportation, housing and employment options. The city’s diversified employer base features high technology firms, retailers and factories, as well as small and home-based businesses. Residents also enjoy world-class parks, diverse worship options, the opportunity to serve on several city boards and commissions, a thriving downtown shopping and dining area, a renowned living history museum known as Naper Settlement and an active civic community.

Not just a “low crime rate” but an “exceptionally low crime rate.” This pitch is made by many people beyond City Hall.

Still, a well-regarded suburb like Naperville must always be wary of perceptions. Murders in your downtown entertainment district are not the kind of news that you want. Even if crime rates are low, perceptions can change quickly and crime is one of those factors that pushes suburbanites into other communities. See this commentary from one of the Naperville high schools:

As the population rises within Naperville so do the crime rates. Naperville is known as one of the safest cities to live and raise a family in. The town claims to have a protected and secure profile, though lately there have been signs of increasing crime rates.

Naperville police have found that burglaries rose nearly thirty percent since last year while robberies climbed nearly thirty-five percent. Although property crime rates are on the rise, violent crime has decreased from the past few years.  A few months ago, senior Stephy Drago had a few friends over at night. There was about eight cars lined up in front of the house and two of the cars were broken into. A paycheck and an IPod were stolen from one car and money from the other…

Even though property crime continues to expand, recently the Naperville Police Department has let go of six police officers in late November due to a budget deficit. Hundreds of residents protested through Downtown Naperville to the outside of City Hall objecting the layoffs of these officers…

Still, proper precautions should be taken such as hiding important valuables if left in a car or locking a garage door at night.

Even though the article says Naperville has low crime rates, the perception is that crime is always just lurking around the corner. Without the “right” number of police, the safety of the town could quickly disappear. Since Naperville is such a large suburb, I wonder if it is easier for people to make the association between crime rates and the big city, making Naperville into a different kind of place. Perhaps this all says more about how Americans think about crime in general: even in the nicest places, the perceived risk of crime is up.

We shall see what happens: I assume the city will go out of its way to assure residents that this downtown incident is an isolated one and not in the character of the community. On the other hand, residents and others might start to wonder if this sort of news will become “normal.” Managing these perceptions and expectations will be important as Naperville moves forward.

The anti-McMansion is a 1938 Cape Cod?

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The Washington Post highlights what it calls the “anti-McMansion”: a 1938 Cape Cod in Silver Spring, Maryland. A couple of thoughts after looking through this photo gallery:

1. What seems to make this the “anti-McMansion” is its smaller size and older age. At the same time, we are never told the exact size – does this mean it isn’t all that small? We also don’t know what kind of neighborhood this is in – a denser subdivision or bigger lots?

2. Like many houses from this era (see the homes from Levittown as another example), this home has undergone some changes. The garage was converted into a room. A 12-by-15 room was added to the back of the house. The entrance was moved. There are two sunrooms.

3. Older house with Restoration Hardware and Ikea furniture but also a lot of older objects like teapots. Interesting mix…

4. Things we don’t see: no televisions in the pictures (though two computers), no view of the kitchen, only the kid’s bathroom, a view of the yard.

5. How can you have a gallery like this and not have a picture of the outside???

6. I’m still thinking through this idea of an “anti-McMansion.” Here are some of the other differences these photos are trying to point out: the home has been customized (not one size fits all). There are older furnishings. The emphasis is not on the “impressive” parts of the house such as a huge foyer or a gleaming kitchen but rather in the carefully chosen furniture and furnishings. There is no large garage that dominates the house. There isn’t one big huge “great room” space. Is this the best example of an “anti-McMansion”? I’m going to keep looking.

Journal editors push authors to add citations to improve impact factors?

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A new study in Science suggests that some journal editors push authors to include citations in their soon-t0-be published studies to boost the reputation of their journals:

A system of “impact factors”, tied to references listed in studies, pervades the scholarly enterprise, notes survey author Allen Wilhite and Eric Fong of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who reports the survey of 6,672 researchers in economics, sociology, psychology, and business research in the current Science journal. The survey covered journal editor behavior from 832 publications.

Overall, about 20% of survey respondents say that a journal editor had coerced extra citations to their own journal from them. Broadly, journals with higher impact factors attract more prestige, advertising and power in hiring and firing decisions in scholarly circles, the authors note, giving journal editors an incentive to extort added citations to their publications in the studies they consider for publication. “(T)he message is clear: Add citations or risk rejection,” write the authors.

In particular, younger professors with few co-authors who need publications to keep their jobs reported the most pressure. Business journal editors coerced the most often, followed by economics, and then psychology and other social sciences. As well, “journals published by commercial, for-profit companies show significantly greater use of coercive tactics than journals from university presses. Academic societies also coerce more than university presses.”

Less than 7% of the respondents thought researchers would resist this coercion, so desperate for publication are professors. “Although this behavior is less common in economics, psychology, and sociology, these disciplines are not immune—every discipline reported multiple instances of coercion. And there are published references to coercion in fields beyond the social sciences,” concludes the survey report…

While I’m glad to see that sociology seems to be toward the bottom of this list, this is still a problem. In some ways, this is not surprising as many in academia feel the pressure to make their work stand out.

However, I think you could ask broader questions about the system of citations. Here are a few other ideas:

1. Do researchers feel pressure to add citations to articles simply to reach a “magic number” or to have enough so that it looks like they have “properly” scoped out the topic?

2. How much have citations increased with the widespread use of online databases that make it much easier to find articles?

2a. Since I assume this has increased the number of citations, does this lead to “better research”?

3. When choosing what articles to cite, how much are researchers influenced by how many other people have cited the article (supposedly a measure of its value) and the impact factors of the journal the article is in?

Cultural differences regarding the “accordion family”

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A new sociology book highlights the phenomenon of the accordion family by contrasting different cultural approaches to the issue:

The global economic recession is a big driver of this phenomenon but hardly the only one. Cultural attitudes about “boomerang kids’’ vary widely. In Japan, which has been in recession for two decades, both parents and their adult children are filled with shame, and turn inward. For the Japanese, writes Newman, “personal character takes center stage,’’ not abstract explanations about diminishing economic opportunity. The Japanese “retain a strong normative sense of what is appropriate and what is deviant in the evolution from youth to adult,’’ Newman writes, and boomerang kids represent deviance (the Japanese often refer to boomerangs as “parasites’’), bringing social stigma on the entire family.

Italy is a completely different story. Italians, especially Italian men, have for centuries remained in the family home until they get married, which may find them there into their 30s or beyond. Newman interviews various 30-something Italian men living at home who quite simply don’t see a problem. The parents Newman interviews also don’t consider it dysfunctional, generally enjoying the company of their adult children. There is no social stigma attached, writes Newman, since “37 percent of [Italian] men age thirty have never lived away from home.’’

In the United States, we are somewhere in between Japanese-level stigma and Italian-style acceptance. “American attitudes are more conditional than other cultures,’’ explains Newman. Parents will support a boomerang adult child who has a plan, a way forward to improve life (e.g., through additional education, training, or an internship), but will object if their adult child is using the family home as an escape from the world.

These are some interesting contrasts across these countries. The American case in the middle here has me thinking about moral symbolic boundaries. The idea here would be that young adults living at home are fine as long as they can justify this move and reassure their parents that this is a step toward their eventual success and moving out. If they can’t make this case, this is seen as mooching. This fits with a larger American idea that we are willing to help people who also seem willing to help themselves.

I wonder if Newman also tracks these attitudes over time as perhaps these are relatively recent developments to adjust to a changing industrialized, globalized world. What aspects of a society or culture directly lead to these rules about who can live at home?

Another note from this review. Here is a paragraph that sums up the work:

Newman interviewed hundreds of boomerang adults and their parents for this accessible book, which effectively, even entertainingly, combines rigorous, statistics-driven social science with personal accounts to provide a vivid portrait of what’s happening globally.

Here is my translation of this paragraph: “It is an academic book that doesn’t read like one, meaning that you will be convinced by the data (hundreds of interviews!) but it has plenty of personal accounts to keep you entertained.” Perhaps that is too cynical. But this does offer some insights into how the general public tends to read social science research. Data, numbers in particular, can’t be too overwhelming. The book still has to be entertaining in the end, even if it is making an important point. Stories, whether they are personal accounts or good examples, are very helpful. None of these things are necessarily bad things to do yet one wonders whether the larger point of the work is muted by having to meet these requirements.

All those new Facebook millionaries won’t be buying McMansions

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As Facebook prepares its IPO, you might not have considered how it would affect the real estate market in Silicon Valley:

Typically clients pay cash for the homes, he said, which can range anywhere from 4,000 to 15,000 square feet (372 to 1,393 square meters) depending on the size of the family.

Real estate agent Dawn Thomas said she is already seeing home prices rise in areas surrounding Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters and expects that to continue…

Thomas described her tech-savvy homebuyers as “very, very green-minded” and in search of smaller, tech-equipped, energy-efficient homes with high-end amenities.

“They don’t want ‘McMansions,'” she said, referring to super-sized houses that can gobble up energy.

The implication: the young and wealthy wouldn’t be caught dead buying a home that could be considered a McMansion. If the home is indeed big, and I would say 4,000 square feet is McMansion territory and 15,000 square feet is a just a plain mansion, it has to be green and energy-efficient. Is this the same argument that Gisele Bunchen tried to make recently?

This makes me think that we might need a new term to describe an abnormally large home that is intentionally not a McMansion. A “green home” or “eco-home” doesn’t cut it because these homes are still much larger than the average size of the new American home (around 2,400 square feet). A “greenwashed mansion” but be more accurate but I don’t think these tech-savvy buyers would like the connotations of this term either. Playing off the “Not So Big House,” how about the “not so polluting house”?