Monthly Archives: June 2012

Argument: fake “House Hunters” does a disservice to the realities of American homeownership

Posted on by

Responding to the recent news that the HGTV show House Hunters may be fake, one writer suggests this does a disservice to the realities of American homeownership:

So what’s the problem? By now, the onus is on the viewer to consume all “reality television” with a chuckle and a grain of salt. The genre’s underlying appeal is often rooted in its escapist, aspirational qualities (or, at other end of the spectrum, its indulgence of our basest schadenfreude). But House Hunters was always much more about showing us an attainable reality than a fantasy. The show (and its many iterations), in which people just like us (juggling budgets, worried about school districts, pulled between city and suburb), go shopping for the best home their money can buy, not only glorifies the dream of home ownership, but makes it seem achievable. (If that IT guy and his elementary school teacher wife can successfully get out of their dingy apartment and into a new home with the requisite granite countertops, “marriage-saving” double vanities, and bedroom-sized walk-in closets, so can I!) This plays right into our inexplicably unwavering attachment to home ownership: Despite the collapse of the housing market, polling continues to demonstrate that we regard owning a home as the cornerstone of the American Dream—a perception that undoubtedly played a role in the home-buying craze prior to the bubble’s burst.

Showing houses that aren’t even for sale at prices divined by its producers, House Hunters is presenting dangerous misinformation about the home-buying process and deleting all of the accompanying complications and consequences. It’s turned what is actually a messy, frustrating, often dead-end process into a seamless (and perhaps necessary) path toward fulfillment. What’s more, it seems likely that viewers use the prices, locations, and home criteria discussed on the show as barometers for their own house hunts because the information is presented as fact. No, House Hunters does not explicitly condone selling one’s soul for a white picket fence, and other HGTV shows like My First Place and Property Virgins do delve into money and home-inspection woes from time to time. But doesn’t HGTV have some obligation to portray the housing market as it is, or, at the very least, offer a pronounced disclaimer about the producers’ creative and logistical liberties?

Maybe they could fix this whole mess and wipe the slate clean with a good old fashioned “where are they now” episode, showing us the truth after those mortgage payments start taking a toll.

So the main worry here is that House Hunters makes homeownership seem too easy and could lead too many people into more decisions? Perhaps we need an extra paragraph here extolling the virtues of renting…

I’m not sure what to make of this argument. Homeownership is indeed an American value. One could argue that HGTV itself stands as a giant beacon for homeownership and a consumerist lifestyle. Is this necessarily bad? Does HGTV simply reflect the interests Americans have or does it insidiously push people toward too much homeownership and consumption? Are impressionable kids and adults watching this channel and then going out and spending beyond their means? I don’t think we have the public data to examine this (though some marketing company may have this information).

In the end, I suppose it comes down to this: do you think HGTV has a moral/ethical/social obligation to also show the downsides of homeownership?

The rules for buying a home, seven years ago

Posted on by

Here is one writer’s take on the rules for buying a home circa 2005:

The old-school home-buying rules (well, not your granny’s old school, more like 7 years ago old school) told us:
A. To buy as much home as we could afford, ahem, qualify for, with as little money down as possible.
B. To buy the biggest McMansion in the neighborhood so everyone would know we “made it.”…
C. We’d always make money, because homes “always appreciated.”

While I haven’t seen rules like these formally written down, I suspect many observers would agree that these rules were commonly followed (if not formally written) and helped lead to the current economic crisis. However, I wonder how many people actually followed these rules. In other words, what percentage of mortgages actually qualified as A? How many people actually bought their homes for the primary reason to show people they “made it”? What percentage of homes lost money between 2005 and 2012? Since I suspect 100% of home purchases did not meet these criteria, how much does the common narrative fit what actually happened?

Sociologist: economic crisis leads to mistrust of the system

Posted on by

As the economic crisis drags on and Americans have lost a lot of wealth, one sociologist suggests the economic uncertainty leads to mistrust of the system:

“I don’t want to romanticize the past — it wasn’t perfect — but there was a sense of security, and that is gone,” said Thorne, a sociologist at Ohio University and an expert on bankruptcy and consumerism.

“We felt that if we played by the rules, that we would do all right. Now there is a feeling that you are never on solid ground, even if you do the right thing.”

Thus the biggest loss may go beyond the decline in the American family’s assets, she said: trust.

“Despite our most honest efforts, through all of our lifetimes, we worked our jobs, we played by the rules, and we still lost. That fosters fear and mistrust in the system.”

While the economic effects of a recession or slow recovery are well-known, I’ve been interested in commentators who have argued that there is much longer-lasting social and emotional impact. While Thorne is quick to not “romanticize the past,” there is some nostalgia here: American prosperity after the end of World War II was perhaps unprecedented in history. What happens if we never see this again, in the United States or elsewhere in the world? If this sort of prosperity and certainty doesn’t come back for a long time, how would people find a new level of trust in the American system?

Study suggests US gov’t loses $71 billion a year because of tax exempt religious institutions

Posted on by

A new study suggests tax exemptions for religious institutions cost governments $71 billion a year:

How much money does the U.S. government forgo by not taxing religious institutions? According to a University of Tampa professor, perhaps as much as $71 billion a year.

Ryan Cragun, an assistant professor of sociology, and two students examined U.S. tax laws to estimate the total cost of tax exemptions for religious institutions — on property, donations, business enterprises, capital gains and “parsonage allowances,” which permit clergy to deduct housing costs…

If history is a guide, the Free Inquiry article and any call for tax reform it may engender are not likely to have much effect. Since the 1950s, there have been several attempts to quantify religious tax exemptions — all of them wildly varied in their conclusions — and only a handful of legal challenges to those exemptions. Most were unsuccessful…

States bypass an estimated $26.2 billion per year by not requiring religious institutions to pay property taxes.

This seems like a lot of money but here are a few thoughts about this:

1. You would need to put the cost of these exemptions versus other areas of the tax code in order to know how this compares. For example, would repealing the mortgage interest deduction bring in more money? The study itself makes some of these comparisons:

To put this into perspective, the combined total of government subsidies to agriculture in the United States in 2009 was estimated to be $180.8 billion.38 Religions receive at least 40 percent of the subsidy that agriculture does in the United States. Another way to illustrate the size of the subsidy may be to illustrate how much tax revenue would increase at the state level if religious institutions had to pay property taxes. In Florida, where the state government’s budget was $69.1 billion in 2011, the amount of tax revenue lost from subsidizing religious property was $2.2 billion or 3 percent of the state budget. The additional revenue would have mostly prevented the $1.1 billion cut to firefighter and police retirement plans and the $1.3 billion cut to public schools.39

So is this a battle worth fighting instead of fighting agriculture subsidies?

2. I think we may see more calls for things like this during this period of economic troubles. The federal government as well as state and local governments need money so they are looking for ways to find “easy” money.

3. It could be interesting to look at how this affects local municipalities, particularly ones with more religious congregations that consequently don’t get the tax dollars they might if that land was occupied by homeowners or businesses. For example, a community like Wheaton, Illinois has a large number of churches (including a claim that the suburb has “more churches per capita than any other town in America”) and could have more tax revenue if that land was put to other uses.

Don’t acquire “McMansion syndrome” when looking for housing

Posted on by

McMansions are often held up as the exemplar of excessive consumption yet I have not seen this suggestion: you can get “McMansion syndrome.”

Here are four ways to minimize lifestyle inflation:

Housing. Housing is the biggest monthly expense for most of us. One way to minimize housing costs is to live in a smaller space. A smaller house in the same area almost always costs less than a bigger house. Fifty years ago, a family of five could live comfortably in a 1,700 square foot home. Why is the ideal home size so big these days? A smaller home will cost less to furnish, maintain, heat, and cool. If you can resist the McMansion syndrome, you can save a lot of money…

Is this a condition now? This reminds me of the 2001 book Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic which was based on two 1990s documentaries with the same word. “Affluenza” is clearly a play on “influenza” but I don’t think this term has really caught on. Perhaps “McMansion syndrome” would be catchier?

Facebook’s Data Science Team running experiments

Posted on by

Facebook’s Data Science Team of 12 researchers is working with all of its data (900 million users worth) and running experiments:

“Recently the Data Science Team has begun to use its unique position to experiment with the way Facebook works, tweaking the site-the way scientists might prod an ant’s nest-to see how users react… So [Eytan Bakshy] messed with how Facebook operated for a quarter of a billion users. Over a seven-week period, the 76 million links that those users shared with each other were logged. Then, on 219 million randomly chosen occasions, Facebook prevented someone from seeing a link shared by a friend. Hiding links this way created a control group so that Bakshy could assess how often people end up promoting the same links because they have similar information sources and interests.

“He found that our close friends strongly sway which information we share, but overall their impact is dwarfed by the collective influence of numerous more distant contacts-what sociologists call “weak ties.” It is our diverse collection of weak ties that most powerfully determines what information we’re exposed to.”

But if that sounds a little creepy, it shouldn’t. Well, not too creepy, because these kinds of experiments aren’t designed to influence us, but rather understand us. The piece continues:

“Marlow says his team wants to divine the rules of online social life to understand what’s going on inside Facebook, not to develop ways to manipulate it. “Our goal is not to change the pattern of communication in society,” he says. “Our goal is to understand it so we can adapt our platform to give people the experience that they want.” But some of his team’s work and the attitudes of Facebook’s leaders show that the company is not above using its platform to tweak users’ behavior. Unlike academic social scientists, Facebook’s employees have a short path from an idea to an experiment on hundreds of millions of people.”

I think there is a lot of room to explore the world of weak ties on Facebook and similar websites. Just how much do friends of friends affect us? What is the impact of people a few ties along in our network? For example, the book Connected shows that traits like obesity and happiness are tied to network behavior which could be examined on Facebook.

I would guess some people may not like hearing this but there are at least three points in Facebook’s favor here:

1. They are not the only online company running such experiments. Google has been doing such things with search results for quite a while. Theoretically, these experiments could help create a better user experience.

2. People are voluntarily giving their data. I don’t think these companies have to explain that user’s data might be used in experiments…but perhaps I am wrong?

3. This is “Big Data” writ large. Facebook and others would love to be able to run randomized trials with this large group and with all of the information available to researchers.

Sociological study of sitcom fathers from the 1950s to today: men portrayed similarly

Posted on by

It is a common complaint that television sitcoms make fathers out to be buffoons or at least incompetent parents. One PhD student in sociology looked at sitcoms from the 1950s to today to see how the fathers compare:

Miller found that while family structures in sitcoms has kept up with real social change — there are more single and divorced men in the recent sitcoms, for example — the men in both eras are more likely to be similar than different.

There is almost no difference in how often men express anger or emotional attachment. And men in the 1950s were almost as likely to say they were being victimized by someone else, such as their boss, as they do in the recent sitcoms.

Men in both sets of sitcoms also show almost equal amounts of self-deprecating behaviour…

Probably the greatest difference Miller noted is that men in the recent sitcoms make fewer imperative statements, are less likely to be respectful to others, and less likely to be respected by others. It might signal a decline in male authority, but it’s also a sign of all-around lower standards of decorum and politeness, she says.

Men in the recent sitcoms are also more likely to be immature. In Miller’s recent sample, there were about five times as many incidents of immaturity as in the 1950s series. But sitcom women have also become increasingly immature.

Perhaps the real story here is the consistency of television formats: the sitcoms of the past may not really be that different from the sitcoms of today even as the characters and situations have changed slightly.

Another possible takeaway is that television probably isn’t the best place to look for examples of good behavior. I assume most Americans would readily agree with this but considering the number of hours people watch plus the cultural power shows can have, television characters end up establishing certain behaviors.

Samuel Barber asks what might happen “If Mayors Ruled the World”

Posted on by

Richard Florida interviews Samuel Barber about his forthcoming book titled If Mayors Ruled the World. Here is why Barber thinks mayors are increasingly important:

The problem here is that political sovereignty has passed to the economic sector, where global financial capital and multinational corporations exercise an undue influence on both domestic and international affairs. Cities share jurisdiction over the economic resources of the city — where commercial, financial and information capital are concentrated — but that jurisdiction is limited by the emerging sovereignty of economics over politics.

Where the city is able to exercise control of economic resources it must live with the superior jurisdiction of nation-states, who may interdict cities trying to collaborate across borders. A city boycotting goods made by child labor in a developing country may be held in violation of the WTO’s fair trade rules (which bar certain kinds of boycotts); or a city trying to control guns may be ruled in violation of the right to bear arms, as happened recently when the Supreme Court invalidated the District of Columbia’s gun control rules…

What I want to suggest is that these myriad global networks, and the inherent disposition of cities to cooperate, exemplify the deep capacity of cities to work together across borders, and justify my claim that a global “parliament of mayors” could achieve a good deal of concord voluntarily both on common policies and on common actions. This is what the networks are already doing, and what a formalization of the process could achieve. The key is a “soft” bottom-up approach to cooperation organized around “glocality” rather than a top-down “legal mandate” approach of the kind we associate with (and fear from) “world government.”…

While the details of a parliament of mayors would be worked out at an inaugural convening of interested cities, I propose some guidelines that could be considered. That there be three parliaments/audiaments per annum, each in a different (voluntary) city, and each representing 300 cities chosen by lot from a list of all cities wishing to attend. This would allow up to 900 cities per annum to participate. Given that all common actions would be voluntary.

The starting point for this conversation is the growing power, particularly economic, of the top global cities. While these cities operate within nation-states, they have economies and populations that rival nations.

Several thoughts about this:

1. While national leaders also talk about the economy and jobs, it seems like mayors may have more direct influence on bringing jobs to their domain. I would guess that overall, mayors are more pro-business and are always looking to attract top corporations and new firms. Perhaps mayors have to be more pragmatic about jobs and business climate as their connections to the business interests in their city are very important.

2. Let’s say Barber’s ideas about a “parliament of mayors” come to pass. What might actually come out of this? Mayors in the largest cities already meet and try to share best practices. Perhaps Barber thinks the mayors can forge stronger economic ties between their respective cities? Perhaps mayors can band together to put pressure on national governments?

3. I would be interested to know how the political clout of mayors around the world compares. Certain mayors in the United States are well-known but is this primarily because of the size of the cities in which they were elected or are their dynamic movers and shakers from smaller cities as well. Are mayors in different parts of the world more important or less important compared to US mayors? I could imagine that in countries with weaker governments mayors might have more relative influence.

A Prius can only power a McMansion for a few hours but a Japanese home for four days

Posted on by

A future study will look at how a Toyota Prius can power a home:

Pull electricity from a Toyota Prius Plug-in to a McMansion, and the lights may go out within a matter of a couple of hours. For a typical Japanese house, though, you’d be taken care of for the better part of a week.

Toyota said it will start testing a vehicle-to-home (V2H) system with the Prius Plug-in in Japan by the end of the year. The trial will involve a two-way power-supply system in which the car could supply the home with power in the event of a black-out. About 10 Toyota City homes will be involved in the testing.

The Japanese automaker says a fully-charged, filled-up Prius Plug-In can supply a typical Japanese house with 10 kilowatts, or enough for about four days. In addition to supplying power to blacked-out homes, the car will eventually be able to power up emergency shelters and other buildings.

Last August, Nissan started testing a similar system with its battery-electric Leaf, which the automaker said could provide about two days electricity for an average Japanese home when the car is fully charged. Nissan said it intended to commercialize the system, but didn’t provide further details.

So, if you are really worried about your power supply, one option is to buy a Toyota Prius and purchase a Japanese-sized home. Figures from 2003 suggest the average Japanese home has about 1,021 square feet. Or, you could go further: pair a Prius with a Japanese or American “tiny house” and have power for even longer!

In the long run, is having the Prius help power your home (or other objects) a greener outcome?

Three kinds of segregation in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty

Posted on by

Sociologist Lincoln Quillian discusses three kinds of segregation that are present in minority neighborhoods of concentrated poverty:

Lincoln Quillian, professor of sociology and faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, analyzed data from the 2000 census and found that the disproportionate poverty of blacks’ and Hispanics’ other-race neighbors plays an important role in creating racial disparities in neighborhood poverty. The other-race neighbors of black and Hispanic families are disproportionately likely to be poor regardless for black and Hispanic families of all income levels.

Concentrated poverty in minority communities results from three segregations: racial segregation, poverty-status segregation within race and segregation from high- and middle-income members of other racial groups, according to the study. Past work has emphasized racial segregation and poverty-status segregation within race, but has missed the important role played by the disproportionately low-income levels of other-race neighbors of blacks and Hispanics…

“Nationally there is evidence that as racial segregation has been slowly going down that income segregation has been going up,” Quillian said. “Blacks and Hispanics often are co-residing with poorer members of their racial groups.”

White middle-class families overwhelmingly live in middle-class neighborhoods and send their children to middle-class schools. But many black and Hispanic middle-class families live in working-class or poor neighborhoods and send their children to high-poverty schools.

This seems like more evidence for the value of having mixed-income neighborhoods. This idea was behind the two-decade HOPE VI housing program from the Department of Housing and Urban Department which demolished public housing high-rises and moved some of the residents to new mixed-income neighborhoods with people of other races and income groups on the site of the former projects. Whether this program works in the long run is still up for grabs and also highlights how it is difficult to create such neighborhoods solely through the private sector.