Monthly Archives: June 2012

Civilization II a good “sociological simulator”? I say no

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I was amused earlier this week to see a report from a guy who has been playing the same game of Civilization II for ten years. Here is a little bit of his report on the state of the Civ II world:

  • The world is a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation.
  • There are 3 remaining super nations in the year 3991 A.D, each competing for the scant resources left on the planet after dozens of nuclear wars have rendered vast swaths of the world uninhabitable wastelands.

While I loved playing Civ II (and I think the gameplay was superior to later versions of the game), I’m scratching my head at how much attention this report has received in the media. Does it really tell us anything about the world’s possible future? Here is one overview from the BBC that I think goes too far:

A man who has been playing the computer game Civilisation II for ten years describes the year 3991 AD as a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation.

Daniel Knowles, from the Telegraph and a fan of the game, says the game has certain assumptions built in to it about what will happen if there is a nuclear war or if you stop producing green technology.

“It’s a kind of sociological simulator… a giant economical model” he told the Today programme.

He believes gamer James Moore “would not still be playing it if he had reached an Utopia”.

Civilization II is a “sociological simulator”? I doubt it. Granted, the game is intended to replicate real-world nation-building and interaction. As you build your society, you have to make decisions like what kind of government to have (for example, in latter stages of the game fundamentalism is quite effective when waging all-out war), what to build and produce in individual cities, how to move certain units (military and otherwise) around, and pursue scientific and technological advancements. But, all of these types of games (and I’ve also been a fan in recent years of Age of Empires III) are only as good as what they account for. In other words, this is a low-level simulator of anything. The real world is far more complicated and many more moving pieces that games like this can allow. Indeed, these sorts of games seem geared toward all-out war between nations even as some would argue the international scene is getting more peaceful.

We are still far from a true “sociological simulator” that could account for all of the human variability in real life. This hasn’t stopped some scientists from trying – there was news recently of a group trying to put together a “Living Earth Simulator.” But, we need to remember what Civ II really is: it is a fun game with some modeling of human behavior but it really tells us very little or nothing about what the world might look like in 3991 AD.

Australians love the suburbs

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Few countries in the world embrace the suburbs in the same way as Americans. One close contender is Australia: an Australian professor describes their enthusiasm for the suburbs:

Historian Graeme Davison asked if Australia was the first suburban nation. He knew the scientific answer didn’t matter. We were, whatever the carbon date, among the most enthusiastic of peoples to embrace the suburban promise. Despite the mythic outback imagery that Australia has vigorously exported and exploited, the record shows we like suburbs more than any other way of living. We enjoy living together more than we care to admit – but not too closely. The suburb struck the perfect balance between collective security and individual possibility. The great quilt of this human accord hugs the continental coastline. Sea change and tree change means no change, really – more suburbia, only in new places.

This has some interesting parallels to the American case: Americans liked their frontier imagery (though the mass urbanization of the 1900s weakened this). Americans like community (see the oft-quoted passages from de Toqueville about voluntary participation) but have always held this in tension with individualism. Americans like the balance between being close to urban amenities and yet having some yard in a smaller community. I’ve wondered before how much the fact that both the US and Australia are British settler nations factors into this embrace of the suburbs.

A reminder: just a few years ago, Australia passed the United States in having the largest average new houses in the world. However, I suspect since the average American new home has once again gotten larger, the US is back at the top of this list.

The real first time the New York Times used the term “McMansion”

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I recently ran across an article that made this claim about when the term McMansion was first used in the New York Times:

Primarily due to plunging home values, the net worth of the median family in America from 2007 to 2009 fell to the level it was at in the early ’90s –- a time when Mark Zuckerberg was being driven to play dates and several years before the word “McMansions” appeared in the New York Times for the first time in a piece Benjamin Cheever wrote about “almost” buying one a few miles away from Zuckerberg’s Westchester County hometown.

This claim is based on the Wikipedia entry on McMansions:

The stunt word “McMansion” seems to have been coined sometime in the early 1980s. It appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 1990 and the New York Times in 1998.

Having done some research on this topic, this sounded off so I decided to check it out. According to a Lexis-Nexis search, the first result for McMansion in the New York Times is from February 7, 1993. In an article titled “Builder’s Motto: ‘Move On, Clean House,’” here is how McMansion is used:

Last year the Toulsons won the Regal award from the Home Builders Association of Delaware for the best house with more than 2,500 square feet. But it has been for sale since July and remains unsold, as do dozens of others of extravagant homes, both old and new, that dot what is know locally as “Chateau Country.”

Once almost exclusively the domain of the heirs to the E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company chemical fortune, much of the rolling countryside has gone under the bulldozer in recent years. Several large parcels, formerly held by the du Ponts or senior managers of the company, have been sold as subdivisions, albeit with homes priced from $800,000 to more than $1 million.

Developers, some of whose immigrant grandfathers did construction work for du Ponts, moved into the old du Pont mansions with the lovely French names while they put up $850,000 homes often called “McMansions.” Mr. Toulson himself and his father before him worked at “the Company.”

This appears to have some of the basic meanings of how the term McMansion is used today: big and expensive homes built on former undeveloped land in a Chateau style (an interesting fit for the Delaware countryside).

Lesson: the Wikipedia page is not the most accurate source for this particular issue. Interestingly, while the NYT first used the term McMansion in 1993 and not 1998, the term wasn’t used much at all before 2000. According to Lexis-Nexis, the NYT only used the term 23 times before 2000. But, as my research suggested, usage really picked up in the 2000s as the NYT used it over 600 times.

“House Hunters” not so real

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Several former participants in HGTV’s House Hunters say the story shown on TV isn’t exactly reality:

The premise of ‘House Hunters’ is that viewers follow a buyer as they anxiously decide between three different houses. Jensen says that, in fact, one house has already been purchased–the producers wouldn’t even finalize her as a subject until after the closing. “When I watch other episodes of the show now I can usually pick out the house they were getting based on hair-dos alone,” says Jensen. Houses are sometimes shot months apart. While the two rejected properties may be on the market, in Jensen’s case, “They were just our two friends’ houses who were nice enough to madly clean for days in preparation for the cameras!”

A former subject of the spin-off “House Hunters International” confirms that one house on the program has already been bought before filming begins. Ted Prosser, who did his real estate search in the Virgin Islands, said in an interview with a St. John blog: “The show is not really a reality show. You have to already own the house that gets picked at the end of the show. But the other houses in [my] show are actually the other houses we considered buying.”…

When confronted with Jensen’s allegations, a publicist for ‘House Hunters’ told Entertainment Weekly in a statement:

“We’ve learned that the pursuit of the perfect home involves big decisions that usually take place over a prolonged period of time – more time than we can capture in 30 minutes of television…. We’re making a television show, so we manage certain production and time constraints, while honoring the home buying process…. Showcasing three homes makes it easier for our audience to “play along” and guess which one the family will select. It’s part of the joy of the ‘House Hunters’ viewing experience. Through the lens of television, we can offer a uniquely satisfying and fun viewing experience that fulfills a universal need to occasionally step into someone else’s shoes.”

Is there any reality in reality TV? Seriously though, the “reality” shown on House Hunters would be cost prohibitive: how could a network afford (or justify) following a couple around as they see sometimes dozens of houses. I’m also a little surprised this information hasn’t come up before -participants must sign quite a contract.

I’ve noted before the popularity of HGTV shows. While the story of the couple on some of these shows is important, I wonder how much it really matters. Don’t people really want to see the different houses and options? You can’t have completely boring people on the show who like everything but at the same time, the real focus of these shows is the houses.

New party spot: foreclosed McMansions

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Curbed National hints at a new possibility: foreclosed McMansions could become party spots for teenagers.

Certain youngsters in certain parts of the country have turned their attention to foreclosed McMansions, which prove better accommodations than, say, dorm rooms and are generally really great places to throw parties. This is kind of on par with that burgeoning trend, except the mansion in question here is not foreclosed, nor is deserve the preface “Mc”: recently more than 100 local teenagers threw a raging party at the Marin County home of imprisoned former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, trashing the place and making off with silver candlesticks, leather coats, laptop computers, and a Pablo Picasso lithograph worth $30K. Apparently police were called to the sprawling home as early as 10 p.m. on the night of the festivities, despite its remote location down a private lane, at which point attendees scattered into the surrounding countryside. The nine-bedroom, 19,500-square-foot house, where Eddie Murphy once stayed during filming, belongs to an LLC tied to the disgraced former Ukrainian P.M., who is currently imprisoned in Marin while seeking asylum to avoid money laundering. That left the place wide open for the party of the century.

Is the Picasso the party favor? Here are a few more details on the story:

The caretaker, who has not been identified, returned a day later to discover three teens, including two boys and a girl in the backyard, Riddell said. The three fled, and the caretaker discovered that a glass coffee table in the house was broken and a fire extinguisher was inside.

The nine-bedroom, 19,500-square-foot house was acquired by Dugsbery Inc. a Novato entity prosecutors have linked to Lazarenko in 1998, just months before the former head of state was arrested in Switzerland on suspicion of money laundering.

Two quick points. First, I don’t envy the task of lending institutions, municipalities, and homeowners in trying to keep foreclosed and/or abandoned homes secure. However, it seems like some low-level security, such as a home security system or occasional checking-in, would help in avoiding these situations which could get out-of-hand or even dangerous. Second, this is a mansion at 19,500 square feet, not a McMansion.

But perhaps the occasional teen party is better than finding that a squatter has claimed the McMansion through “adverse possession”…

Photographing Detroit for something more than “ruin porn”

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Pete Brook over at Wired profiles Brian Widdis and Romain Blanquart, two photographers whose project “Can’t Forget the Motor City” argues that “Photos of Detroit Need to Move Beyond Ruin Porn“:

As a symbol of the U.S. economy in general, even before the crash of 2008, Motor City has been the subject of much “ruin porn” – photography that fetishizes urban decay.

“The portrayal Detroiters are used to seeing – crumbling buildings with no people to be seen – is frustrating because they know their city is more than that,” says Detroit photographer Brian Widdis. “Nobody here denies that those things are real, but seeing the city portrayed one-dimensionally – time and again – it’s like hearing the same awful song being played over and over on the radio. Detroiters want to hear a different song once in a while.”…

Ruin porn worships the 33,000 empty houses and 91,000 vacant lots of Detroit and overlooks the 700,000+ residents. It doesn’t come close to describing the city.

“I still do not understand her. The complexity of Detroit makes many give up, move out or move on, if they can. But for others, we want to further that relationship with her,” says [Romain] Blanquart….“Detroit is not a tragedy. We attempt to show its humanity[.]”

Widdis and Blanquart’s photographs are indeed beautiful and, generally, full of people.  While I’m not convinced that there’s anything inherently “pornographic” about photographing urban ruins (and underscoring the now-absent humanity those ruins imply), I agree that there is something wrong with hitting this same point to the exclusion everything else, especially insofar as this singled focus implies that there is nothing else to show or say.  However small Detroit’s population may be compared to its heydays, the city is still home to hundreds of thousands of people whose lives–and stories–are still ongoing.  I applaud these photographers’ efforts to document Detroit’s continuing stories through their artistry and not simply focusing on architectural echoes from the past.

Sociological study on why “nearly half of the motels in the U.S. are owned by Indian Americans”

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A new sociological book titled Life Behind the Lobby tackles an interesting topic: why Indian Americans have gravitated toward the motel business. Here are some thoughts from the author about the study:

At first, I was caught by the numbers of it all: 40% of all motels in the United States are owned by Indians. After initial conversations with motel owners, I realized there was a lot more to learn: how they got started, how they afford motels, what happens to their children. There are so many layers, it becomes fascinating. I wouldn’t have pursued this project because of the numbers alone, but they were a key part of why I got started…

Dating back to the 1940s, the first Gujarati motel owner, Kanjibhai Desai, who came to the U.S. via Mexico, was based in San Francisco. He managed a “residential hotel,” which is the present-day equivalent of a youth hostel. People who stayed there were generally down and out.

Other Gujaratis who came to the U.S. in the 40s and 50s were typically farmers back in India, and even if they didn’t own land, they didn’t want to work for someone else. Part of the reason they gravitated towards the motel business was related to their desire to be autonomous in their work lives. They also wanted to know people who had done it before and succeeded. Those two factors helped create motivation and triggered a domino effect where others who were interested in small business and concerned about mobility went into the same thing…

At the same time, they still have to prove they are worthy owners as there are still stereotypes of Indian owners that pervade. They still have to make sure they are seen as 100% American. They’ve moved from becoming a novelty to a trend to a problem (especially following 9/11) to being somewhat accepted. There’s a lot about it that’s very impressive and it’s a testament to America, in terms of opportunity. But once you see the sacrifices the owners make—all the family living in motels, relying on kin from India to make things work—you realize they have other things that help them move up and it’s not just about meritocracy.

This sounds a little like chain migration where established immigrants bring over family and friends. However, in this case, the family and friends who came from India also often got involved in the motel industry.

This is a limited conversation here so I wonder about a few things:

1. How profitable is the motel industry these days? It may have made more sense in the 1940s and 1950s but is this lucrative today?

2. How much opposition have Indian American hotel owners had to overcome over the decades?

3. Is there competition between Indian American motel owners as they might be cutting into each other’s profits? If so, how does this get resolved?

4. How unusual is it to have this great of a concentration of one ethnic/racial group in one industry?

Developing new architectural ideas from Third World slums

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Here is an interesting discussion of how some architects are looking to third-world slums for innovations in design:

The lofty vision of “Favela Cloud” touches upon several trends cycling through architecture today. First, it responds to the rising popularity of “architecture for social change,” for which the profession nobly renounces its service to the rich to address the issues of the poor. But the “Cloud” purportedly distinguishes itself from more conventional do-good design because its principle source of inspiration is the slum itself. As eVolo explains, the success of the design hinges on its “additive system that can grow and adapt to its site conditions,” motivated by the existing self-organizing logic of the favela. In other words, the intervention draws from the social and organizational qualities characteristic of the very environment it seeks to improve, a methodology that has its own backstory in architectural discourse, as I’ll explore later. By returning to its point of departure and theoretically folding back into itself, the shiny edifice straddling Santa Marta brings into question if and how architecture can intervene in communities that have developed in the abject absence of a welfare state…

With basic rights to food, potable water, and shelter categorically denied to slumdwellers, decent public architecture is but a pipe dream. Without functioning infrastructure, working sewage systems, proper housing, and designated civic spaces, slum-dwellers are forced to engineer their own systems of order. Waste from the city proper is salvaged in the slums to form constellations of cinderblock shelters fortified with sheets of tin and plastic-bag insulation; the meager space of a home easily and often doubles as a workshop; makeshift marketplaces sprout like weeds in every available space. As urban sociologist Erhard Berner wrote in his 1997 book examining land use in Manila, “Virtually all the gaps left open by city development are immediately filled with makeshift settlements that beat every record in population density.”…

Around the same time when Koolhaas was traveling to Lagos, San Diego-based architect Teddy Cruz was visiting Mexico’s border towns with a similar resolve to study under-the-radar urban phenomena. Cruz observed in Tijuana how developers were importing a superficial image of the American dream across the border in the form of cheap, miniature replicas of the suburbs. “What I noticed is how quickly these developments were retrofitted by the tenants,” Cruz told the New York Times, bringing attention to the makeshift mechanics’ shops and taco stands that quickly took over front lawns and the spaces between the homogenous suburban shells. Here along the border, the ersatz American utopia could not help but evolve into something much more layered and complex.

Cruz studied the individuated forms and programs and exported these lessons back across the border to suburban San Diego, where he was working on a design for a residential development for Latino immigrants. His resulting prototype weaves 12 affordable housing units, a community center, offices, gardens, and spaces for street markets and kiosks into a concrete frame. “In a place where current regulation allows only one use, we propose five different uses that support each other,” Cruz explains in an article for Residential Architect Magazine. “This suggests a model of social sustainability for San Diego, one that conveys density not as bulk but as social choreography.”

Combining technical and theoretical expertise with how people “live on the ground” seems like it could be a winning combination. It is one thing to impose a particular design or program on a group and another to work with them and utilize their own expertise. This can require some humility on the part of trained professionals…it would be interesting to know how this is viewed within the broader discipline of architecture.

I’ve highlighted Cruz’s work before.

40% drop in Americans’ wealth tied strongly to declining housing values

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Homeownership is big in American cultural ideology as well as on American asset sheets. Thus, when housing values drop, the wealth of Americans drops:

The Federal Reserve said the median net worth of families plunged by 39 percent in just three years, from $126,400 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010. That puts Americans roughly on par with where they were in 1992…

But it was the implosion of the housing market that inflicted much of the pain. The median value of Americans’ stake in their homes fell by 42 percent between 2007 and 2010, to $55,000, according to the Fed.

The poorest families suffered the biggest loss of wealth from the drop in real estate prices. But middle-class Americans rely on housing for a larger part of their net worth. For some, it accounts for just more than half of their assets. That means every step downward is felt more acutely.

Rakesh Kochhar, associate director of research at the Pew Hispanic Center, calls this phenomenon the “reverse wealth effect.” As consumers watched the value of their homes rise during the boom, they felt more confident spending money, even if they did not actually cash in on the gains. Now, the moribund housing market has made many Americans wary of spending, even if their losses are just on paper.

Alas, it doesn’t look like housing values will be shooting back up anytime soon.

Some other tidbits regarding housing and wealth from the Federal Reserve report:

-“The decline in median net worth was especially large for families in groups where housing was a larger share of assets, such as families headed by someone 35 to 44 years old (median net worth fell 54.4 percent) and families in the West region (median net worth fell 55.3 percent).” (p.2)

-“Housing was of greater importance than financial assets for the wealth position of most families. The national purchase-only LoanPerformance Home Price Index produced by First American CoreLogic fell 22.4 percent between September 2007 and September 2010, by which point house prices were fully 27.5 percent below the peak achieved in April 2006. The decline in house prices was most rapid in the states where the boom had been greatest. For example, California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida saw declines of 40 to 50 percent, while Iowa saw a decline of only about 1 percent. Homeownership rates fell over the period, in part because some families found it impossible to continue to afford their homes. By 2010, the homeownership rate was back down to a level last seen in the 2001 SCF, although that was still higher than in any previous SCF since at least 1989.” (p.4)

-“As might be expected from the previous discussion on the role of the decline in housing values in explaining median and mean wealth losses across various demographic groups, there are large differences in net worth changes by housing status. Median net worth for homeowners fell 29.1 percent between 2007 and 2010, while the mean fell 12.7 percent. The decline in median net worth for non-homeowners (hereafter, renters) was only 5.6 percent, though the decline in the mean was much larger at 23.4 percent. Renters have much lower median and mean net worth than homeowners in any survey year, so the dollar value of wealth losses for the renter group tended to be much smaller; for example, the median net worth of renters fell $300 over the three-year period, in contrast with $71,500 for
homeowners.” (p.22)

-“Housing wealth represents a large component of total family wealth; in 2010, primary residences accounted for 29.5 percent of total family assets. Over the 2007–10 period, this percentage declined 2.2 percentage points overall. The relative importance of housing in the total asset portfolio varies substantially over the income distribution, with housing generally constituting a progressively smaller share of assets with increasing levels of income, as shown in the following table…Homeowners in virtually all demographic groups saw losses in the median, and most of those losses were substantial; the one exception was the lowest quartile of the net worth distribution, where homeownership
jumped 8.1 percentage points and the median home value increased 31.2 percent, most likely reflecting a compositional shift within that lowest wealth group. Otherwise, substantial decreases in median housing values were widespread.” (p.47-49)

It sounds like the West (compared to other regions) and homeowners (compared to renters) were hit hard by a drop in housing values.

Philadelphia fighting food deserts through fresh fruits and vegetables at corner stores

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Philadelphia is launching a new initiative to fight food deserts through existing corner stores:

The $900,000 investment in better health depends on apples and oranges, chips and candy, $1,200 fridges and green plastic baskets. The results could steer the course of American food policy.

Philadelphia is trying to turn corner stores into greengrocers. For a small shop, it’s a risky business proposition. Vegetables have a limited shelf life, so a store owner must know how much will sell quickly — or watch profits rot away. He also lacks the buying power of large supermarkets and is often unable to meet the minimum orders required by the cheaper wholesalers that grocery stores use.

With shelf space at a premium, shop owners must pick and choose the products they think will sell best. Chips and candy and soda are a sure bet. Eggplant? It’s hard to know…

The city has recruited 632 corner stores — of 2,500 overall — to its Get Healthy Philly initiative. Of those, 122 have gotten more intensive support, been supplied with new fridges to store produce and connected with wholesalers from whom they can buy at lower prices. It is also working with schools to improve nutrition and helping neighborhoods launch farmers markets, a multifaceted approach officials hope will improve public health.

As the article suggests, there is a lot riding on this project. It will be interesting to see if this could (1) substantively help improve health and (2) be profitable.

The advantage here seems to be that the stores are already established in neighborhoods and probably already have an established clientele. This program then puts healthier food in front of people who may already be visiting these stores. Working with existing infrastructure sounds like it would be more effective as well as cheaper in the long run.