Monthly Archives: April 2012

Movie line: “Victims live in McMansions. You live in a bungalow.”

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A review of the new movie Detention includes an interesting  bit of dialogue spoken to a character who has just survived an encounter with a horror movie villain:

Victims live in McMansions. You live in a bungalow.

Since I don’t watch horror films or a lot of ultra-violent movies, I wasn’t aware that victims are often McMansion dwellers. If this is true: is this simply tied to the idea that the privileged/wealthy/popular/snobby types tend to live in such houses (meaning the setting is not the main point of the scene) or is it a larger commentary about consumption and poor-quality yet large tract housing?

Naperville government leads Illinois’ top 20 cities in social media use

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Naperville is used to accolades – see this well trumpeted #2 ranking in Money‘s Best Places to Live in 2006. Here is a new measure of excellence: Naperville is #1 in a suburban government’s use of social media.

A University of Illinois at Chicago study ranks the western suburb No. 1 among local government websites in a study of social media use by Illinois’ 20 largest cities.

Researchers from the university’s College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs analyzed the websites using at least 90 criteria to determine how well each provided residents with information and the opportunity to interact with officials. Chicago and Elgin round out the top three…

In addition to its main website, Naperville uses Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, RSS feeds and about two dozen e-newsletters to communicate with residents. It also is looking into starting a mass notification system that Community Relations Manager Nadja Lalvani likened to a “reverse 311.”

“It’s very important for us to be able to communicate effectively and efficiently with residents and other constituents,” Lalvani said. “Social media is very prevalent and another tool to make sure the message is penetrating our audience.”

The UIC study also found increasing use of social media by cities around the country. In 2011, 87 percent of the 75 largest U.S. cities used Twitter, compared with 25 percent in 2009. Likewise, 87 percent used Facebook, compared with 13 percent two years prior.

It doesn’t surprise me that Naperville would lead the way: they seem to have the resources to make this happen as well as the interest in being efficient, taking advantage of new technology (see the ongoing debate over wireless electricity meters – the city’s view and an opposition group), and communicating with people.

I wonder if the study included talking to residents to see if these efforts are reaching them. This is an on-going issue for many communities: the city/village/town claims that they are putting out information while residents suggest they are blindsided at the last minute or aren’t informed at all. I think both sides are often right: many communities have newsletters and websites where information can be found. However, searching out and reading this information does require some effort on the part of residents. Add in the issue that many communities are without local newspapers and it is more difficult to transmit this information broadly. If this plan of attack in Naperville is successful, I imagine more communities will follow their lead.

A second issue could still limit the effectiveness of the social media outreach. I was reminded of this by a talk I heard last week: governments may make information publicly available but they don’t necessarily make the information easily understandable. For example, a community may release some data or an important report but the language and data requires interpretation that the average citizen may be incapable of doing. There is a translation issue here from technical or government speak to what people can understand and then react to. Or a large dataset may be public but it requires knowledge of statistics and specialized software to make some sense of it. Granted, it can be hard to boil down complex issues into newsletter items but it also shouldn’t be the case that newsletters and tweets only cover basic stuff like brush pick-up and meeting times.

 

Controversy in using sampling for the dicennial Census

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In a story about the resignation of sociologist Robert Groves as director of the United States Census Bureau, there is an overview of some of the controversy over Groves’ nomination. The issue: the political implications of using statistical sampling.

Dr. Robert M. Groves announced on Tuesday that he was resigning his position as director of the U.S. Census Bureau in order to take over as provost of Georgetown University. “I’m an academic at heart,” Groves told The Washington Post. He will leave the Bureau in August. Unlike some government officials who recently have had to resign under a cloud, such as Regina Dugan of DARPA and Martha Johnson of the General Services Administration, Groves received universal praise for the job he did directing the 2010 Census, a herculean task he completed on time and almost $2 billion under budget.
At the time of Groves’ nomination, Rep. Darrell Issa, (R-California), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said that he found it “an incredibly troubling selection that contradicts the administration’s assurances that the census process would not be used to advance an ulterior political agenda.” However, by the time Groves announced that he was leaving, Issa had changed his tune and issued a statement that “His tenure is proof that appointing good people makes a big difference.”
When President Barack Obama nominated Groves on April 2, 2009, he was viewed as a generally uncontroversial professor of sociology.  However, his nomination turned out to be contentious anyway because his support for using statistical sampling, a statistical method commonly used to correct for errors and biases in the census, raised the ire of Republican critics, who believed that sampling would benefit minorities and the poor, who generally vote Democratic…
A specialist in survey methodology and statistics, Groves was no stranger to the Census Bureau, whose decennial census is one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated statistical exercises.  Groves served there early in his career as a visiting statistician in 1982, and later as associate director of Statistical Design, Standards, and Methodology from 1990 to 1992.  It was during the latter period that Groves became embroiled in the controversy over the proposed use of statistical sampling to correct known biases and deficiencies in the Census head count.  Groves and others at the Census Bureau proposed using sampling techniques to correct an admitted 1.2% undercount in the 1990 Census, which failed to include millions of homeless, minority and poor persons mainly living in big cities, which lost millions of dollars in federal funds when Republican Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher vetoed the sampling proposal.

Considering Groves’ track record in sociology, I’m not surprised that he is now regarded to have done a good job in this position.

Perhaps this is a silly question in today’s world but does everything have to become politicized? Is the ultimate goal to get the most accurate count of American residents or do both parties simply assume that the other side wants to use the occasion for political gain? If you want to limit funding to cities based on population, why not go after this funding rather than try to skew the count?

Of course, this is not the first time that the dicennial Census has been politicized…

Another note: a sociologist apparently saved the government $2 billion! That alone should draw some attention.

Trayvon Martin case: social problems still present in gated communities

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An academic expert on “place-based crime prevention” talks about the role the gated community might have had on the Trayvon Martin case:

The answer is, according to Schneider, that there are no easy answers. “It’s hard to make a generalization,” he tells me, pointing out that there are many different types of gated communities catering to all parts of the economic and social spectrum. Some of them are walkable; some are not. Some are racially mixed (as is the Retreat at Twin Lakes), and some are not. Some are relatively affordable — you can find gated trailer parks – and some are filled with McMansions. Many of them are indistinguishable from any other suburban neighborhood. Did the built environment play a role in Martin’s death? Add it to the list of things we can never really know for sure about this terrible case.

As for whether gated communities deliver on one of their main selling points — protection from crime — Schneider says that research to date has been inconclusive. “It’s not a panacea,” he says about erecting gates. “You’re just as likely to be burgled by your next-door neighbor, especially if there are teenagers.” Criminals from outside are also quick to figure out how to get in. “They learn the code from the pizza guy,” says Schneider. “The effects of gating decay over time.”

Gated communities exploded in popularity in the United States during the end of the 20th century, but Schneider points out that they are an old phenomenon. “We used to call them castles,” he says.

Here is the conclusion to this article:

If the case of Trayvon Martin has shown us anything, it’s that a society’s problems — inequity, racism, and fear among them — have no problem getting through the gates.

Even if social problems do end up affecting gated communities, academics tend to argue that people buy into and want to live in these communities because they perceive them to be safer. This supports a classic sociological axiom: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” Realistically, while these communities are said to be “gated,” they are rarely as restrictive as castles could be and are often fairly open to people who want to pass through. I wonder if these communities would be better off to get rid of the gates (in whatever form they take) and simply build their development in a more inaccessible place, such as a location that only has an entrance to a busy road (cuts off pedestrian traffic) or is located in a wealthy or out-of-way area (which limits vehicular traffic).

As it encounters opposition to a NYC project, can Toll Brothers escape its McMansion past?

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Residents in the Carnegie Hill neighborhood in Manhattan are opposed to a possible development from Toll Brothers:

Following news that the builders, who have slowly been expanding their Manhattan presence, had closed on the purchase of a townhouse at 1110 Park Avenue and also had their eye on neighboring 1108 Park Avenue, Tolls’ new neighbors are trying to stop them.

Toll Brothers has kept mum about the whole thing (a rep told the Observer that the company is not commenting on the transaction), but rumors are circulating that the developer plans to build a 15-story tower where the two townhouses now stand, according to Curbed.

It comes as no surprise that nearby townhouse dwellers are not super happy about the possibility of a new tower rising in their midst. Even if the developer’s New York properties are a far cry from McMansion, they do share at least one characteristic—size.

Curbed reports that not only are residents writing letters to get the Landmarks Preservation Committee to extend the historic district from 86th to 96th Street (the buildings lie right outside the Carnegie Hill historic district), but residents of neighboring 1112 Park Avenue may have hired a lawyer in attempt to block any project that could block their view. (Never mind that theirs, and just about every other building on Park, is now quite large, the days of townhouses and mansions on the boulevard long since passed.)

I wonder how much of this opposition is driven by the fact that Toll Brothers is behind the project. If you look at a picture of the properties in question, it looks like the neighborhood has already moved beyond just having townhouses. During the building boom of the 1990s and early 2000s, Toll Brothers became well-known because of their “estate homes” (McMansions to critics). Even though the company has branched out into more urban projects (see this earlier post about another NYC project), can the company ever escape the image that they build oversized and architecturally incongruent structures? Just hearing the name Toll Brothers, many defenders of traditional neighborhoods as well as opponents to sprawl likely cringe and think about a corporate behemoth who throws their weight around. Both critics and media sources were very effective in making Toll Brothers the poster child for McMansions and ideas such as excessive American consumption. While the company seems to be trying to fly under the radar in this particular project, perhaps they will have to instead be aggressively friendly to the community and stress their good intentions.

Statistics learning opportunity: “Hunger Games Survival Analysis”

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Fun with statistics: a survival analysis of The Hunger Games (quick reviews of the books and movie). According to the final analysis, the only significant factor is the rating of each participant:

My interpretation of this is that the Gamemakers know what they’re doing when they assign the ratings. They’ve been doing this for years, so they give scores that are so accurate that they’re actually better predictors of survival time than whether a tribute is a volunteer, a Career, male or female, or forms an alliance. Pretty impressive.

An alternate and more cynical interpretation is that the Gamemakers are concerned about their own reputations and thus engineer the games so as to confirm their ratings, occasionally killing off players who do better or worse than expected based on the ratings, all so that the Gamemakers can look like they knew what they were doing all along. Unfortunately, the political system of Panem ranks so slow on Freedom House’s annual scores that we simply can’t tell what’s going on behind the scenes at all. To cut through their lies we simply need more data.

If you read this, you just also learn something about survival analysis and event history analysis. Bonus: the data and Stata code is also available for download!

Thinking about the event history class I took during grad school, we didn’t look at any data that was remotely close to popular culture.

Also, why not include the data from the second and third books? Granted, the games change a bit in the sequels to ratchet up the tension but that would provide more data to work with…

Is there such a thing as “wealth addiction”?

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Citing the writings of a PhD in sociology, a commentator suggests that we should pay attention to wealth addiction:

The Occupy Wall Street and the 99 Percent Movement named the core issue of our time: the overwhelming power of Wall Street and large corporations. Now it’s time we named the problem underlying this issue. It’s called addiction. I’ve been treating addicts for more than 40 years and when I hear the descriptions of those for whom millions and billions of dollars in wealth drives them to want more and more, I know we’re dealing with addiction.

Philip Slater has an A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard and taught sociology at Harvard, Brandeis and UCSC. He is the author of numerous books including Wealth Addiction. He says:

“Those who devote their entire lives to amassing or retaining huge sums of money are neurotically addicted, trying to fill an inner void with money. And since such psychic voids cannot be filled with money — any more than with alcohol, tobacco, cocaine, food, or sex — even a billion dollars doesn’t satisfy them.”We say people who can’t stop drinking when they’ve had enough are alcoholics. We say people who can’t stop eating when they’ve had enough are food addicts. We say that people who can’t stop gambling when they know they should quit are gambling addicts. “But people with a billion dollars who can’t stop trying to make more,” Slater says, “we call successful.”

I imagine this could be a good conversation starter. But this would have to be part of a larger conversation taking place right now about some other kinds of addiction including sex addiction and Internet addiction. Some might ask whether saying billionaires are suffering addiction lets them “off the hook” for amassing so much wealth.

Media and product consumption by political views

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This article looks at how political campaigns are using media and production consumption data to make appeals to voters and also includes some interesting charts that map out the differences between those with different political leanings:

Inside microtargeting offices in Washington and across the nation, individual voters are today coming through in HDTV clarity — every single digitally-active American consumer, which is 91 percent of us, according to Pew Internet research. Political strategists buy consumer information from data brokers, mash it up with voter records and online behavior, then run the seemingly-mundane minutiae of modern life — most-visited websites, which soda’s in the fridge — through complicated algorithms and: pow! They know with “amazing” accuracy not only if, but why, someone supports Barack Obama or Romney, says Willie Desmond of Strategic Telemetry, which works for the Obama reelection campaign…

All of these online movements contribute to what Gage calls “data exhaust.” Email, Amazon orders, resume uploads, tweets — especially tweets — cough out fumes that microtargeters or data brokers suck up to mold hyper-specific messaging. We’ve been hurled into an era of “Big Data,” Gage said. In the last eight years the amount of information slopped up by firms like his, which sell information to politicians, has tripled, from 300 distinct bits on each voter in 2004 to more than 900 today. We have the rise of social media and mobile technology to thank for this.

What I like about this analysis is that it starts to get at an understanding of different lifestyle behaviors or groups that underlie both consumer choices as well as political choices. Voting decisions are not made in a vacuum nor are consumer choices: these are guided by larger concerns that sociologists often talk about such as class, education level, race/ethnicity, and two factors that doesn’t get as much attention as perhaps they should, where people live and who they interact with on a regular basis (not necessarily the same things but related to each other). While the microtargeting may help tailor individual appeals, it might also obscure some of these larger concerns.

While the article suggests this data collection is all very creepy, this is made tricky because of one fact: some of this information is offered voluntarily by users.

Both Obama and Romney’s sites allow, if not encourage, visitors to login to their campaign websites with a Facebook account, thereby unveiling a wealth of information: email address, friend list, birthday, gender, and user ID. Obama’s team, in accordance with the president’s call for greater transparency, details his campaign’s privacy policyin an exhaustive 2,600-word treatise. It begins like an online Miranda Rights: “Make sure that you understand how any personal information you provide will be used.” Then things get a little weird.

Among other points, the policy says the campaign can monitor users’ messages and emails between members, share their personal information with any like-minded organization it chooses, and follow up by sending them news it deems they’d find worthwhile. In other words, target anger points. Then there’s something called “passive collection,” which means cookies — lots and lots of cookies. Obama’s campaign, as well as third-party vendors working with, spray trackers so other websites can flash personalized ads based on knowledge of the trip to barackobama.com. And finally, near the end of the policy, comes one more caveat: “Nothing herein restricts the sharing of aggregated or anonymized information, which may be shared with third parties without your consent.”

Romney’s site apparently wants even more from its visitors, asking users who login with Facebook to “post on (their) behalf” and “access (their) data any time” they’re not using the application. You can deny both functions.

Perhaps at the least, users should be made more aware upfront of how their information is going to be used. This could be similar to the new boxes included on credit card statements: the consumer should be able to clearly see what is going to happen rather than have to dig through online user agreements. At the same time, making users aware is different than stopping companies from using information in certain ways. I also wonder how these online companies, like banks and credit card providers, will find other ways to collect data and money if these avenues are closed off. For example, would the average internet user rather give up some of this personal information for the sale of targeted advertisements or pay a small fee to access a website each year?

Economist argues best restaurants often in “dumpier locales”

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Over at the Atlantic, George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen explains why excellent restaurants consistently appear in the “cultural wasteland” of suburbs:

Low-rent restaurants can experiment at relatively low risk. If a food idea does not work out, the proprietor is not left with an expensive lease. As a result, a strip-mall restaurant is more likely to try daring ideas than is a restaurant in, say, a large shopping mall. The people with the best, most creative, most innovative cooking ideas are not always the people with the most money. Many of them end up in dumpier locales, where they gradually improve real-estate values…..

I love exploring the suburbs for first-rate ethnic food. Many people consider suburbs a cultural wasteland, but I am very happy searching for food in Orange County, California; the area near San Jose; Northern Virginia, near D.C.; Somerville, Massachusetts; and so on….It is especially common to see good ethnic restaurants grouped with mid-level or junky retail outlets. When it comes to a restaurant run by immigrants, look around at the street scene. Do you see something ugly? Poor construction? Broken plastic signage? A five-and-dime store? Maybe an abandoned car? If so, crack a quiet smile, walk through the door, and order. Welcome to the glamorous world of good food.

Cowen’s argument about restaurants reminds me of another Atlantic piece celebrating “low road” buildings which Brian previously discussed.  It’s not surprising that great work–and great food–often happens in low rent locales like “junky” suburban strip malls and office parks given their lower (financial) barriers to entry and lower operating expenses that free up more cash to flow each month into improving their tenants’ business.

Still, it strikes me that the financial health of restaurants is more location-dependent than for many of the business populating “low road” office parks.  Whereas many office-based business are not dependent on high volumes of foot traffic for survival, restaurants almost invariably are.  (Unless, of course, that particular restaurant focuses primarily on a delivery and/or catering business model.)  A less prestigious restaurant location is a good value for the owner (and likely to survive long term) only if the drop-off in foot traffic/customers due to the “bad” location is more than outweighed by lower rent.

Gearing up for a “quick-take” approach to the land for the Illiana Expressway

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The Illiana Expressway has been talked about for decades but now it looks like the government is determining how to acquire the land:

Compounding the fear for the couple and hundreds of others who live along or near the 47-mile corridor is legislation pending in the Illinois House that would give the state controversial “quick-take” power to acquire land for the project.

Quick-take allows local governments to act fast in seizing land for public projects, skipping the possibly lengthy legal proceedings under eminent domain condemnation.

Anxiety levels are sky-high among many farmers and homeowners who could be affected by the expressway that would connect Illinois and Indiana. Public meetings have been standing room only. Property owners in Lake County, Ind., and Will County have been flocking to an interactive map at illianacorridor.org to see whether their homes, businesses, backyards or back 40s are within the path.

“There’s no question property can be condemned for a highway. The state or whoever is going to get it,” said Dan Tarlock, a professor at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. “The question is how much the landowner is going to get paid. Quick-take is designed to take first and then fight about the money.”…

State Sen. Toi Hutchinson, D-Chicago Heights, sponsored the quick-take legislation in the Senate, where it passed 44-8 on March 28. She said the measure is necessary to streamline the process so that ground can be broken for the Illiana by 2016…

Hutchinson, whose district includes much of the Illiana corridor, said the project is vital for job creation and economic development in southern Cook and northern Will counties.

This is a classic situation pitting the interests of the “greater good” versus individual property owners. The article also suggests there is little or no opposition to the project itself, rather the opposition is to how the land is seized. I wonder why the article doesn’t talk more about what prices landowners get for their property in the quick-take process compared to a more protracted process. Isn’t that what is at stake here?

Looking at the proposed routes for the expressway, who exactly is this supposed to serve? Here is the overview of the project:

Previous studies have indicated possible benefits for an east-west transportation corridor extending from I-55 in Illinois to I-65 in Indiana. These include providing an alternate route for motorists traveling the I-90/94 corridor, relieving traffic on the I-80 Borman/Kingery Expressway and U.S. 30, serving as a bypass for trucks around the congested metropolitan highways, providing access to one of the largest “inland port” intermodal freight areas in the U.S. and the proposed South Suburban Airport, supporting economic development in this area, and the potential for substantial job creation. Will County, IL was one of the fastest-growing counties in the U.S. between 2000 and 2010, adding 175,000 residents and increasing demand for additional transportation options.

This doesn’t seem aimed at the Chicago area really because a better route for the Chicago region might be to extend I-355 south and then loop it over to I-65. Is this primarily for warehouses in Will County so they can have easier access to both I-55 and I-65? Are there expectations for more suburban growth south of Chicago?

A reminder: some of funding for studying the Illiana Expressway was to come from the increased tolls on Chicago area highways.