Monthly Archives: August 2012

McMansions have marble floors, hardwood dominates elsewhere

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In addition to their size, McMansions are often said to have other defining characteristics like granite countertops and stainless steel appliances. Here is another suggested defining feature: marble floors.

Solid hardwood is the residential flooring gold standard, unless you’re in a McMansion, where marble might rule. But in Tucson, where tile has been the class act for so long, increasingly hardwood floors have the look for high-end homes. And more modern products that capture the look of hardwood – engineered hardwoods, a hardwood veneer over high-density plyboard bases, and laminates (convincing photographic reproductions of hardwoods over high-density board) – are moving in on the traditional tile, polished concrete and carpet throughout the area.

Hardwoods – from oak, the most common, maple and hickory, to exotic tropical woods and our own rock hard mesquite – are enjoying a resurgence in custom homes.

I can’t say that I have seen too many McMansions featuring marble floors. When I think of marble floors, I think of the expansive foyers of mansions that might also feature things like winding staircases and ornate chandeliers.

Hardwood floors seem to dominate many housing forms today from urban lofts, condos, starter homes, and McMansions. I’m not quite sure why this is but here are a few possible reasons: it is relatively easy to maintain; it has a reasonable price point compared to other options; people really don’t like the look of carpet, particularly in important social areas like a kitchen, dining room, and foyer; there are some sustainable options (if you are willing to pay for it); and it is what homebuyers appear to want. I might also add that marble floors might be considered too pretentious compared to hardwood which is viewed as both durable and classy.

Is an emotional experience in church really like a drug?

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Several sociologists of religion make an interesting claim about worship experiences: they are like drugs.

Wellman and co-authors Katie E. Corcoran and Kate Stockly-Meyerdirk analyzed 470 interviews and about 16,000 surveys on megachurch members’ emotional experiences with their churches. Four themes emerged: salvation/spirituality, acceptance/belonging, admiration for and guidance from the leader, and morality and purpose through service.

Many participants used the word “contagious” to describe the feeling of a megachurch service where members arrive hungry for emotional experiences and leave energized, the study says.

One church member said, “(T)he Holy Spirit goes through the crowd like a football team doing the wave. …Never seen it in any other church.”

Wellman said, “That’s what you see when you go into megachurches — you see smiling people; people who are dancing in the aisles, and, in one San Diego megachurch, an interracial mix I’ve never seen anywhere in my time doing research on American churches. “We see this experience of unalloyed joy over and over again in megachurches. That’s why we say it’s like a drug.”

I haven’t seen this full study but I wonder about this comparison. here is what it could mean:

1. It is just a metaphor. Drugs can give people euphoric experiences and religious experiences can also generate euphoria.

1a. Some sociologists might argue that this kind of euphoria is generated more by a collective effervescence (Durkheim) or collective emotional energy (Collins) than religion itself. Put enough people together, give them a common focus, and you might be able to generate similar feelings in a sports stadium, at a rock concert, in a mob, etc.

Indeed, the researchers seem to be building on this. From another report on this study:

Megachurch services feature a come-as-you-are atmosphere, rock music, and what Wellman calls a “multisensory mélange” of visuals and other elements to stimulate the senses, as well as small-group participation and a shared focus on the message from a charismatic pastor.
The researchers hypothesized that such rituals are successful in imparting emotional energy in the megachurch setting — “creating membership feelings and symbols charged with emotional significance, and a heightened sense of spirituality,” they wrote.

2. There could be a suggestion that churches have a sort of power over people. In other words, the conditions are set up so that people are pushed into these upbeat experiences. Outside of this megachurch setting where people’s senses are bombarded, people may not have such experiences.

3. This seems like a great time to include neuroimaging in a sociology study. One could compare the physical response in the brain to drugs versus the physical response to certain worship settings. Do they both engage the same areas of the brain and to the same level? If they do, it doesn’t mean there still isn’t a sociological phenomenon to study but it does link physiological responses with social interactions and outcomes. I suspect we’ll see more and more of this sort of matching of social and physical data in the coming years.

Australia retakes the lead for largest new homes in the world

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In recent years, Australia and the United States have alternated having the largest new homes. New data suggests Australia has retaken the lead:

In any case, that Australian homes should be costly is not so surprising given the peculiarities of the domestic market.

The Australian dream requires you to own a detached house with a large garden, a land-hungry type of accommodation that makes up no less than 76 percent of all homes.

Three-quarters of all homes have three or more bedrooms, and almost a third have four or more. The average newly built home is now the largest of any country at 243 square meters (2,615 square feet), taking the McMansion mantle from the United States.

And, while it is one of the emptiest countries on the planet, it is also one of the most urbanized, with most of the population crowding the coast in just eight sprawling cities.

I wonder how much this has to do with something I suspect is at play in the United States: housing starts may be down but those that are being built are primarily aimed at the upper ends of the market toward people who haven’t been hit as hard by the recession.

It is interesting that this is buried in the final paragraphs of a story about the Australian housing market. The overall piece suggests that a country can have large homes without necessarily having an overextended housing market like we see in the United States. One complaint about McMansions in the United States is that they have ruined the housing market, pushing buyers and lenders to have bloated mortgages and generally corresponding with American habits of overspending and incurring debt. But it doesn’t have to be this way: the article tells of different mortgage patterns in Australia such as homeowners paying them off quicker and having a small amount of subprime loans. In other words, having a large home doesn’t have to be tied to the ideas of profligate spending if the system is set up in a different way.

Odd and interesting sightings at ASA

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1. I just caught the beginning of the Sunday night sociology jam session and I think it is a great idea. The president of the ASA started it out on the fiddle and it is nice to see some other creative outlets at the conference beyond papers and talks.

2. At a reception on Sunday night, I had a chance to sample some local cuisine: fried buffalo oysters. I believe they often go by another name: Rocky Mountain oyster. Not bad taste but a little squishy.

3. I really liked the meeting spaces and site overall. Both the Hyatt and Convention Center were spacious but not too large (as convention centers can sometimes be). And it was a plus to not have to compete with all of the slot machines and gambling like in Las Vegas last August.

4. Denver has some cool features. While there are some tall buildings, there is a lot of lower density space near these buildings including the Mall, a thriving pedestrian only (plus free public buses from one end of the street to the other) thoroughfare, and LoDo. This gave the area an intimate feel and there were plenty of people on the street both Saturday and Sunday nights. The weather is also great and consistently being able to see the mountains is a bonus.

5. One complaint: no rail service from the newer (and quite nice) airport to downtown. Riding the buses were not bad but a dedicated rail system, which one local publication said was to be completed in 2016, would be an upgrade. I wonder if ASA should only go to big cities that have such mass transit connecting the airport to the meeting location.

6. The airport is modern and spacious. It puts older airports, like Midway, to shame.

7. I noticed a board on the first floor of the Convention Center that added up the attendees by categories (faculty, grad students, etc.). If my quick math was correct, the total attendance was about 4,800. Is this down from previous years and if so, why? Is Denver not the same kind of attraction as New York (the site of next year’s meetings) or San Francisco? Are travel budgets tighter this year?

8. I like public art so I enjoyed seeing the bear looking into the Convention Center:

What’s wrong with including a little whimsy into public settings?

83 year old Hamptons resident sues for demolition of McMansions in her neighborhood

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The McMansion battles continue, this time in the Hamptons as an 83 year old resident takes on the newer big houses in her neighborhood:

Evelyn Konrad claims in a new federal lawsuit that her high-powered neighbors — many of them finance honchos — have turned her subdivision into an overcrowded “Queens by the sea” because of an improperly adopted zoning code.

The suit doesn’t seek money — it seeks demolition.

Undeterred by her wealthy opponents, the brassy Stanford law graduate once skewered the supersized digs as “multimillion-dollar penis enlargements,” in a letter to a local newspaper…

In addition to Southampton Village Mayor Mark Epley, the suit names a host of cash-flush neighbors, including former Merrill Lynch honcho Donald Quintin and Manhattan attorney Denis Guerin.

Not your typical octogenarian, the yoga-practicing, bikini-wearing former NBC business reporter said that her modest, 2,200-square-foot colonial, purchased in 1984, has been slowly encircled by ballooning buildings ever since a new zoning code was adopted in 2005…

Konrad has demanded a jury trial and will argue the case herself, thank you very much.

I wonder what a jury would do…

It sounds like the zoning change from 2005 that is really at issue. I have no idea how often zoning regulations are overturned in court but I suspect they are infrequently challenged and even more rarely overturned.

Discussing height limits of skyscrapers

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Is there a limit to the height of buildings?

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, a group interested in and focused on the phenomenon of skyscrapers, recently asked a group of leading skyscraper architects and designers about some of the limitations of tall buildings. They wondered, “What do you think is the single biggest limiting factor that would prevent humanity creating a mile-high tower or higher?” The responses are compiled in this video, and tend to focus on the pragmatic technicalities of dealing with funding and the real estate market or the lack of natural light in wide-based buildings.

“The predominant problem is in the elevator and transportation system,” says Adrian Smith, the architect behind the current tallest building in the world and the one that will soon outrank it, the kilometer-tall Kingdom Tower in Jeddah…

One idea for a new system would be buildings with hollowed bases. Think of the Eiffel Tower, says Tim Johnson. He’s chairman at the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat and a partner at the architecture firm NBBJ, and he says any really, really tall building would have to be like a supersized version of the Parisian icon, otherwise the lower floors required to support the gradually narrowing structure would be way too big to even fill up.

For a Middle East-based client he’s not allowed to identify, Johnson worked on a project back in the late 2000s designing a building that would have been a mile-and-a-half tall, with 500 stories. Somewhat of a theoretical practice, the design team identified between 8 and 10 inventions that would have had to take place to build a building that tall. Not innovations, Johnson says, but inventions, as in completely new technologies and materials. “One of the client’s requirements was to push human ingenuity,” he says. Consider them pushed.

So perhaps Frank Lloyd Wright wasn’t so crazy with his idea of a mile high building.

I would raise other questions:

1. Who has the funds/resources they want to devote to building such an edifice? Presumably someone might want to make a name for themselves.

2. Would anyone want to work or live at such a height? If not, what do you do with the building besides show off your accomplishment and perhaps hide television and other technological equipment?

3. Would it be “worth it” in the long run?

Stark demographic figures for Japan

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A post at New Geography lays out several population figures for Japan:

In 2007, Japan’s population reached a tipping point. It was the first year in its history (excluding 1945) where the number of deaths exceeded the number of births. In 2007 there were 2,000 more deaths than births. In 2011 that figure rose to approximately 204,000, and it’s a figure that is accelerating. Indeed, at 23.1%, Japan has the highest proportion of over-65s in the world, and at 13.2%, the world’s lowest proportion of under 14s. Japan’s population peaked at 127.7 million in 2007, and is forecast to shrink to a mere 47 million by 2100.

While the topic of declining fertility rates in many industrialized nations has been discussed for a while now, I’m still not sure we are prepared to deal with the idea of declining populations. Particularly in the United States, we associate population increases with progress. An example: cities that lose population are seen as doing something wrong while cities that are growing are successes. A similar mindset exists with religious congregations. Japan is clearly an advanced nation yet what happens if it loses more than half of its population in the period of a century? And what happens if this is done by choice? Throughout human history, population loss is typically tied to factors like disease, ecological conditions, and war, not by a populace who isn’t interested in having more children.

A thought: what if we end up in a Children of Men type world that is brought about because humans simply don’t want to have children anymore?

Saudi Arabia’s women-only city within a city

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Saudi Arabia is doing something unusual by creating women-only portions of big cities.

How will this all-female city work?
The inaugural one in Hofuf is essentially a female-only industrial zone that’s expected to employ about 5,000 Saudi women in the textile, pharmaceutical, and food-processing industries. Women will run the companies and factories. “I’m sure that women can demonstrate their efficiency in many aspects and clarify the industries that best suit their interests, nature, and ability,” says Saleh al-Rasheed, deputy director general of the Saudi Industrial Property Authority (Modon), which is in charge of the project. The women will live in adjacent neighborhoods.

Who came up with the idea?
A group of Saudi businesswomen, according to the business newspaper Al Eqtisadiah. But Saudi Arabia’s ruling monarchy embraced the concept as a way to lower female unemployment while staying “consistent with the privacy of women according to Islamic guidelines and regulations,” Modon said in a statement. The government had little choice, says Sarah Goodyear at The Atlantic. “Restrictions on women’s lives and productivity there are so extreme — Saudi women need a male guardian’s permission to travel, seek employment, or marry — that the country is in effect letting a potentially huge sector of the productive economy sit idle.” About 60 percent of college graduates in the country are women, and 78 percent of them are unemployed, according to recent surveys; only 15 percent of the Saudi workforce is female…

Will this city work as intended?
Some women who work in these new cities “will no doubt distinguish themselves, but they will still be laboring in segregation,” says The Atlantic‘s Goodyear. If the goal is unleashing the female workforce, “a segregated city will never be as productive or creative as one where the free exchange of ideas among diverse converging people is allowed.” Actually, I think “Hofuf will be exceedingly productive,” says Zoe Williams at Britain’s The Guardian. For one thing, “as an industrial town with no men in it, it will presumably contain none of those mini-impediments to productivity known as ‘children.'” In a few years, these Saudi women will be South Korea to their male counterparts’ North. These cities will either fail or they’ll succeed in further segregating women from the public sphere, says Homa Khaleeli at The Guardian. Maybe women should “flock to them, close the doors, and refuse to leave until the kingdom’s rulers understand just what it is like to live without women.”

Is this a step forward for women?
That’s a tough question, says The Guardian‘s Williams. It’s not really “a move forward in women’s liberation, not unless you think apartheid was a good system for black people because they got their own swimming pools,” but at the same time, we can’t know yet that “Ladytown won’t boost women in unintended ways.” As I suspect the Saudis will soon learn, “when you educate people, refuse to let them work, and then suddenly unleash them, en masse, into economic productivity,” that’s a recipe for change. Look, in this kingdom, this is the only opportunity for women “to have an income, be financially independent,” at least for now, Saudi radio host Samar Fatany tells ABC News. Putting women to work feels inevitable, even in Saudi Arabia, says Doug Barry at Jezebel. And “everyone should have the right to fall into the daily grind, because only then can all people truly appreciate how awesome it will be when robots do all our work for us.”

“Ladytown” sounds like it could be an odd title for a film…

It would be interesting to hear how these new developments will look and be experienced differently. In other words, does a city planned for women look and feel different than a city designed for men or both genders? For example, do women desire more parks?

The descriptions of operations in Hofuf make it sound like many of the jobs will be low-trust, relatively low-wage jobs in fields like textiles and food processing. Are there plans for more white collar positions or will these remain concentrated in the “male sections” of the city?

“What is it like to live in a rich McMansion suburban neighbourhood?”

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A post on the site Quora asks this question: “What is it like to live in a rich McMansion suburban neighbourhood?”

Here is what critics might suggest:

1. The homeowners care much more about how their home looks or what it signifies about them rather than the quality of the home.

2. People have little social interaction as their well-appointed McMansions provide plenty of space for their entertainment and private needs.

3. Because the neighborhood is auto-dependent (this is true of many suburban neighborhoods, not just ones with McMansions), people rarely walk or could even walk anywhere interesting.

4. Residents have little interest in residential diversity as the relatively higher prices of McMansions price out a lot of potential residents.

5. Homeowners don’t care about environment as these homes waste energy, are unnecessary large, and are tied to sprawl.

Indeed, I wonder if there is anyone extolling the virtues of McMansion neighborhoods in books, movies, music, television, and art as I have discussed a number of examples of negative portrayals throughout the cultural sphere. I do doubt all children and adults in McMansion suburban neighborhoods are maladjusted sociopaths…

Chicago to grant 900 more camping permits on Northerly Island per year

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Yesterday, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel discussed further plans the city has for Northerly Island which includes more opportunities for camping:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Thursday endorsed predecessor Richard Daley’s infamous late night bulldozing of the runway at Meigs Field on the grounds the destruction of the airport opened Northerly Island to use by many more Chicagoans…

With Chicago Park District Superintendent Michael Kelly and a representative of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on hand Thursday, Emanuel talked at the Field Museum about the next steps in the evolution.

In the short term, camping permits will be increased by 900 per year starting next year, which the mayor said will give more children in some of Chicago’s hard-scrabble neighborhoods a chance to experience nature.

A pond and a savanna area will also be developed on the 91-acre peninsula.

Camping on this location sounds like a very interesting experience: Lake Michigan on one side, skyline of Chicago in the other direction.

I know some people may still be upset by Daley’s midnight destruction of Meigs Field but this is a reminder of how Chicago continues to develop its lakefront as a park while other cities lag far behind in developing land along their waterways.