Monthly Archives: October 2012

Summarizing sociological theories in 140 characters or less

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A sociology instructor is having his students tweet criminal-justice theories:

“They have all these theories to learn,” Atherton said. “Some of them are very dense, and complex. What I try to get them to do, and I tie some extra credit to it, is see if they can boil the theory down, the essence of it, to 140 characters.”…

In a recent class session, Atherton shared tweets from a lesson on a theory of social disorganization, displaying the tweets under Twitter’s signature bluebird.

“Social disorganization refers to communities as a whole not coming together for common goals, ultimately causing a disruption,” the first tweet stated.

Another tweet on the topic read: “theory suggests criminal activity comes from the neighborhood where someone lives and how it shapes them living there.”

If the American Sociological Association is working on a Wikipedia initiative, why not also start a Twitter push? Since it looks like Karl Marx’s Das Kapital is being tweeted (over 41,000 tweets and counting), there is work to be done.

While I think this could be an interesting pedagogical exercise as it allows students to use a current medium as well as put complex theories into their own terms, I wonder if this doesn’t perfectly illustrate the issues with Twitter. Sociological theories are often messy and complex, taking some time to explain and think through. For a very basic understanding, 140 characters could work but if this is all students know about sociological theories, is this worthwhile in the long run?

Would you rather have $10 land in rural Canada or houses for under $100 in Detroit?

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I saw a story about a small rural town in Canada trying to lure in new residents by offering land for $10:

In an effort to jump on the oil boom in that part of the country, officials are once again selling undeveloped land for a mere $10, an initiative they first started in 2010. Back then they had 14 lots for sale, 11 of which have houses built on them today, economic development officer Tanis Chalmers told ABC News .

That plan was so successful that in September the Rural Municipality of Pipestone, of which Reston is the biggest town (population: 550), decided to put up an additional 10 lots for sale, along with the three left from 2010. Nine remain, “But I’ve had offers on them already from both Canada and the U.S,” said Chalmers, adding that the initiative has been so effective that the local school finally “has a standalone kindergarten class.”…

The plan is pretty straightforward: To purchase a property, wannabe homeowners have to sign an agreement and put down a $1,000 deposit. Once a lot is purchased, owners have 90 days to begin construction, and 12 months to complete it. As soon as the town receives your occupancy permit, they will refund $990 of the original down payment…

As further incentive, the town is offering a $6,000 grant to people who’ve built a new house or purchased an existing home in the rural municipality. The grant, mind you, can be used for anything from home upgrades to a new car. Chalmers says taxes hover around $1,500 to $2,500 per year.

This reminded me of stories in recent years about cheap houses in Detroit. Here is one example:

“I was living in Chicago and a friend told me that houses in Detroit could be had for $500,” said Brumit, a financially strapped artist who thought he had little prospect of owning his own property. “I said if you hear of anything just a little cheaper let me know. Within a week he emails me a photo of a house for $100. I thought that’s just crazy. Why not? It’s a way to cut our expenses way down and kind of open up a lot of time for creative projects because we’re not working to pay the rent.”…A third of the population are unemployed. Property prices have fallen 80% or more in large parts of Detroit over the last three years. The average price of a home sold in the city last year has been put at $7,500 (£4,900)…

Banks are selling off properties in the worst neighbourhoods, which are usually surrounded by empty and wrecked housing, for a few dollars each. But even better houses can be had at a fraction of their former value.

Technically, Brumit paid $95 for the land and $5 for the house on Lawley Street – which fitted what estate agents euphemistically call an opportunity.

I suspect more people would jump at the rural opportunity. While there might be more amenities nearby in Detroit (you mean those winning Tigers can’t boost home prices like winning NFLteams  supposedly can?), the idea of living in Detroit itself would scare a lot of people. What might happen in the neighborhood? Can the city provide basic services? On the other hand, the rural property might be a long way from anything worthwhile but it could offer some access to nature, there probably aren’t as many worries about neighbors, and there is some appeal to starting from scratch. If we wanted to stretch this explanation out even further, this could be a sign of the urban/rural divide in the United States; economically similar opportunities in the big city and the country don’t attract the same level of cultural and residential interest.

Twin Cities’ Metropolitan Council tries to project 30 years into the urban future

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The Metropolitan Council for the Twin Cities region in Minnesota is working on a new plan that tries to project urban changes in the next 30 years:

For example, he noted, the Twin Cities region will have 900,000 more people, with twice as many elderly. Also, by 2040, 43 percent of the region’s population will be people of color, up from today’s 24 percent.

Big changes are already being seen in housing patterns. The share of building permits issued in developing suburbs has been declining since 2008, when they had 66 percent of the total. But by 2011, less than half were issued in the second- and third-ring suburbs for the first time in a decade…

“But what we’ve seen in the few years is that employment did not increase between 2000 and 2010. Employment dropped in the seven-county area, so growth management isn’t the issue it was before,” she said.

Instead, the new plan will likely focus more on “what the transit system means for our region, thinking out how new light-rail lines will influence new development and thinking about water supplies.”

A quick summary of these predicted changes: a more diverse population, slower or less growth on the suburban fringe, a struggle to create good-paying jobs, preserving local natural resources, and looking to build more effective mass transit that might also boost local development efforts. I suspect a lot of regions, particularly ones without high levels of growth, will have similar concerns. As cities and communities age, infrastructure will cost more, regions will continue to compete with each other for high-tech and white-collar jobs, and new populations might challenge the existing character of places and regions.

A note: if you have read the work of Myron Orfield (for example, see American Metropolitics), you will have heard of the Metropolitan Council. Compared to other metropolitan regions, the Twin Cities has a metropolitan agency with some teeth:

The Metropolitan Council or Met Council is the regional governmental agency and metropolitan planning organization in Minnesota serving the Twin Cities seven-county metropolitan area. The Met Council is granted regional authority powers in state statutes by the Minnesota Legislature. These powers can supersede decisions and actions of local governments. The legislature entrusts the Council to maintain public services and oversee growth of the state’s largest metro area. This agency is similar to Metro in Portland, Oregon in that both agencies administer an urban growth boundary…

In 1967 the Minnesota Legislature created the Metropolitan Council in response to growing issues of septic tank wastewater contamination. During that time, it was recognized there were systematic problems which transcended coordination of any one agency. There were more than 200 municipal agencies in existence then.

Additional acts of the legislature passed in 1974, 1976, and 1994 expanded the role and powers of the Met Council, merging it with transit and waste control commissions to become a unified regional authority.

In other words, the planning being done could have a big impact on the next few decades in the region.

Why New Yorkers and pigeons get along

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A sociologist explains the social interaction New Yorkers have with pigeons:

For more than three years, Jerolmack observed the ways in which people interact with pigeons in cities. His forthcoming book, The Global Pigeon, which, as he put it, seeks to examine “our social experience of animals,” draws from that research. Yesterday evening he spoke about our own city’s rather vexed relationship to the birds.

In the 1960s, for instance, Thomas P.F. Hoving, the former city parks commissioner and longtime director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (not to mention the subject of a famed John McPhee New Yorker profile from 1967), called pigeons “rats with wings,” an epithet—often wrongly attributed to Woody Allen—that really stuck. Hoving cited the species, along with litterers and vandals, as a plague on Bryant Park. The park’s supervisor at the time, Andrew Petrochko, told the New York Times that “the homosexuals … make faces at people [and] once the winos are dried out at Bellevue, they make a beeline for Bryant Park.”…

Despite their bad reputation, though, Jerolmack noted that our urban encounters with pigeons “are profoundly social.”

“The impulse to feed pigeons is not so different from wanting to chat with strangers,” Jerolmack said, speaking about one of the subjects for his book, Anna, the elderly pigeon lady who regularly feeds the birds at Father Demo Square, the tiny enclave in the West Village where Jerolmack’s research began.

This sounds like it could be a testable hypothesis: do city dwellers have more positive, social relationships with wildlife (not including pets or animals connected to a household) than people who live in suburbs or rural areas? Cities aren’t typically known for their wildlife but perhaps this could be tied to Simmel’s arguments in his piece “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” He suggested there were too many people for individuals to interact with in big cities so they would have to develop blase attitudes to protect themselves. But what if they could interact safely with pigeons (and even ducks and squirrels)? Or perhaps this is tied to romanticized (or real?) notions residents have about needing to connect with nature in the middle of the “concrete jungle.”

Century 21 says winning NFL teams boost housing prices

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A new study from Century 21suggests housing values rise when NFL teams win:

The question was this: What is the impact on a city when the hometown team does well or doesn’t do well? Century 21 looked at teams’ successes, population growth from census numbers, home value appreciation and attendance rates. And the correlation between on-the-field success and real estate prices was evident:Four of the five cities with teams that went from a losing record in 2010 to a winning record in 2011 saw average home sales prices increase between 2010 and 2011.

After winning the Super Bowl, Green Bay, Wis., saw a population growth of 1.7 percent in 2011, compared with runner-up Pittsburgh’s 0.6 percent growth.

Going from a record of 10-6 in 2010 to 2-14 in 2011, Indianapolis, the home of the Colts, saw a 19.8 percent decrease in home sales.

Eight of the nine cities with a team that had attendance rates of 100 percent or more in 2011 saw average home sales prices rise that year.

Here is the original Century 21 blog post with this information.

The NFL is a powerful entity but does it have this much power? Is this due to a small sample size (this article mentions only one year of data)? Are there other factors behind this correlation? If I had to guess at what is going on here, I suspect this is too small of a sample and that 2011 prices in certain cities happened to coincide with NFL results. Why not look at the housing crisis years and see the relationship between records and housing values?

I’m generally skeptical of sports fans and others that claim sports are important for the civic pride of a community or that new stadiums need to be funded by taxpayers because the loss of a team will hurt the local economy. However, this could be pure genius from Century 21. What better way to boost business than to hook your services to the popular NFL? Hey, there was even a Century 21 2012 Super Bowl ad!

How Republicans became the party against cities

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After noting Republicans barely mentioned the word “city” at the Republican National Convention, the rest of a review piece in the New York Times looks at how Republicans became anti-urban:

IT could hardly be otherwise. The Republican Party is, more than ever before in its history, an anti-urban party, its support gleaned overwhelmingly from suburban and rural districts — especially in presidential elections.

This wasn’t always the case. During the heyday of the urban political machines, from the Civil War to the Great Depression, Republicans used to hold their own in our nation’s great cities. Philadelphia was dominated for decades by a Republican machine. In Chicago — naturally — both parties had highly competitive, wildly corrupt machines, with a buffoonish Republican mayor, “Big Bill” Thompson, presiding over the city during the ascent of Al Capone. In the 1928 presidential election, the Republican Herbert Hoover swept to victory while carrying cities all across the country: Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Chicago; Detroit; Atlanta; Birmingham, Ala.; Houston; Dallas; Omaha and Los Angeles…

FOR Republicans, cities now became object lessons on the shortcomings of activist government and the welfare state — sinkholes of crime and social dysfunction, where Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” cavorted in their Cadillacs. The very idea of the city seemed to be a thing of the past, an archaic concept — so much so that Gerald R. Ford seriously considered letting New York go bankrupt in 1975…

In short, they promise to rip and tear at the immensely complex fabric of city life while sneering at the entire “urban vision of dense housing and government transit.” There is a terrible arrogance here that has ramifications well beyond the Republicans’ electoral prospects.

Fascinating.  A sociologist adds an addendum through a letter to the editor several days later:

While I agree with much of Kevin Baker’s article, his statement that in the postwar years “newly prosperous whites and eventually blacks pursued the American dream out to the suburbs” suggests that postwar urban America became the bastion of the poor and minorities.

Mostly true. But in cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston, many members of the black middle class continue to live in proximity to their poor and working-class counterparts.

Indeed, in the postwar and post-civil-rights era, blacks have been inheriting urban America, hence the rise of black mayors and other elected officials across all levels of government. Mr. Baker’s analysis of the concerted turn away from urban America by the G.O.P. reveals that a major consequence of this strategy is not just a forsaking of cities but also the alienation of a large swath of poor, working-class and minority voters.

This has all led to the situation today where both parties try to cater to middle-class suburbanites as more exurban and rural voters are in the Republican camp and more urban dwellers are in the Democratic camp.

I have three other ideas about this:

1. Republicans have shifted over the years toward protecting “traditional” American life which sounds often like it can best be lived out in small towns. While the country may still hold on to some small town values (think of President Obama’s talk about Wall Street versus Main Street), the era of Main Street, even in suburbs and towns that have real Main Streets as opposed to the shopping mall kinds (see here and here), is over.

2. This is a bit odd considering that cities and metropolitan regions are massive economic engines. Aren’t Republicans for markets and a growing economy? Most of this is not happening in rural areas but rather in cities.

3. Tied to #2, suburbs are in part made possible by cities. On one hand, suburbs are more independent than ever before but they are still tied to cities for things like major cultural institutions, major financial institutions, airports and other transportation facilities, and sports teams. Additionally, we should be thinking more about metropolitan regions anyway rather than cities versus suburbs

Overall, we aren’t going back to a United States that is primarily small town or rural. The percent of Americans living in non-metropolitan areas in 1910 was 71.6% while over 80% of American live in metropolitan areas today – a complete switch. The population density of the country tripled from 25.7 to 79.6 people per square mile between 1900 and 2000. The United States of today is an urban nation – and both Republicans and Democrats have to adapt to this.

How powerful is the distrust of Facebook among its 900 million plus users?

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A commentator who praises Facebook tries to get at why so many users are suspicious about Facebook and willing to believe rumors like the recent one that Facebook was revealing private messages on walls:

The problem is that when technologists talk about data and privacy, for many of us it is still in the abstract. For technologists and computer scientists, data is a thing that lives somewhere, it has a logic and can be parsed, made sense of, organized into databases. It can be searched and ultimately sold. But as Nathan Jurgenson, a social-media theorist, points out, for most people “data is this weird nebulous concept that somebody knows something about me, but I don’t know what they know.”…

A Democratic candidate for the Maine State Senate was attacked recently by her Republican opponent for her playing of the multiplayer online game “World of Warcraft.” According to her critics, the politician playing a “rogue orc assassin” was unbecoming. This collision of two seemingly different personalities — on the one hand, a social worker and moderate politician, and on the other, a violent assassin (online) who likes stabbing things — is what sociologists have called “role strain.”

“Identities that were cultivated in little tide pools, that were conceived to be separate, come clashing together,” says Marc A. Smith, a sociologist and social-media expert. “The issue now is that all of these other identities, the idea that we can perform them on separate stages and that they had separate audiences, that is collapsing and the sound of its collapse is the sound of people squealing.”

In his 1959 “Presentation of Self In Everyday Life,” the sociologist Erving Goffman wrote about the idea of “front stage” and “back stage.” In Goffman’s theory, when they’re “front stage,” people engage in “impression management,” choosing their clothing, speech, and adapting the way they present themselves to their audience. “Back stage” they can be more themselves, which might mean shedding their societal role. In the era of social media, Smith says that “we live in a culture where the back stage keeps disappearing.” We think the conversations we are having are in private, but, in fact, they are publicly accessible and data has a long half-life. When U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney spoke to a select audience about the “47 percent,” he was, in fact, speaking to everyone. What happens in “World of Warcraft” doesn’t always stay in “World of Warcraft.”…

Or perhaps front stage there is a deep sense of unease about Facebook, but back stage we are not half as worried as we seem.

The suggestion here is that the world of audience segregation and impression management, where we can and do craft our actions, words, and behaviors to a particular audience, is slowly fading away. By doing more things online, these different parts of life are coming together in new ways. And I tend to agree with this journalist: there are over 900 million Facebook users, many of whom have calculated that they are willing to at least put a little information out there in return for the benefits that Facebook like keeping in touch with friends, being able to access information about others that was previously unavailable, or even acquiring the status that comes with keeping up with everyone else. A good number of users express complaints or features of Facebook that make them uneasy but relatively few are willing to give it up all together.

Indeed, we might be in the middle of a very important era where slowly individuals are thinking about and practicing new ways to present themselves and see others through mediums like Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg has expressed the goal of Facebook being a more open society where even less information on Facebook would be private, hidden, or restricted to friends. We could also look at this from the other angle: isn’t it remarkable that millions of people around the world in a span of less than 10 years have voluntarily put out information about themselves? One key might be that Facebook doesn’t force them to reveal everything; users can still practice impression management by crafting a profile. However, these are not “fake” or “untrue” profiles; rather the information is an approximation of the user’s true self.

Not what you want to advertise: Naperville to add more police downtown

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Naperville is a big suburb that has been known in the past for being wealthy and safe. However, some recent events are leading to a change: more police presence in its lively downtown.

Police Chief Bob Marshall told the City Council Tuesday he has seen “a trend of relatively serious crimes,” in the past few months since officers who were helping patrol the downtown over the summer returned to their regular duties in area schools. Incidents have included two violent fights and an armed robbery in addition to last February’s fatal stabbing of 24-year-old Naperville teacher Shaun Wild at a downtown bar.

Marshall said he is taking a more proactive approach to weekend patrols by adding police officers to the beat as well as both uniformed and plain-clothes investigators…

Councilman Bob Fieseler said he does not believe most Naperville residents are partaking in the late-night activity they are paying police to monitor, and the city may want to consider closing bars an hour earlier, which would mean midnight on weeknights and 1 a.m. on weekends…

Councilman Joe McElroy called shortening hours “the nuclear option,” but agreed the city may eventually have to look at doing so as a last resort. He also would like to see more activities like theater and live music offered in the downtown as an alternative to getting drunk.

This highlights two suburban conundrums. First, lots of suburbs would like to have downtowns like Naperville that include national retail stores, local businesses, and plenty of restaurants and bars. These businesses bring in visitors and, more importantly, money to the city’s coffers. Yet, bars can also bring about a different kind of atmosphere that is less family-friendly. Second, Naperville says it has small-town charm and yet its size, which could be related to perceptions about crime and the presence of multiple bars, suggests the city has some qualities of bigger cities. What is Naperville really: an idyllic single-family home community or a thriving jobs and suburban cultural center?

My guess is that Naperville would prefer to keep this increase police preference as unobtrusive as possible. A very visible presence might be bad for business but more incidents could also be bad for business.

Failed interactive graphic comparing American houses to homes around the world

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I was hoping for more when I saw this interactive graphic about homes around the world. Alas, this offers more style than substance. When you click on a country, you see a picture of one house, the average family income, the average household size, and an “odd” fact about the country. Indeed, I suspect this is more of a marketing ploy by the company sponsoring the graphic than anything else…

Here is what I would want to see if I could have my way:

1. Pictures of multiple “average” houses.

2. The average square footage of homes. Compared to other statistics available about countries around the world, it can be quite difficult to find good information on the average square footage of existing or new homes.

3. The average amenities of homes. Even if houses look different or are different sizes, this might be more interesting to a lot of people.

4. The average cost of homes or some measure of how much people in different countries pay for housing.

These four pieces of information would provide a lot better comparison to American homes.

Using the newer measure of population-weighted density

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Richard Florida writes about how the Census Bureau is using a new measure of population density:

A new report from the U.S. Census Bureau helps to fill the gap, providing detailed estimates of different types of density for America’s metros. This includes new data on “population-weighted density” as well as of density at various distances from the city center. Population-weighted density, which essentially measures the actual concentration of people within a metro, is an important improvement on the standard measure of density. For this reason, I like to think of it as a measure of concentrated density. The Census calculates population-weighted density based on the average densities of the separate census tracts that make up a metro.

The differences in the two density measures are striking. The overall density across all 366 U.S. metro areas is 283 people per square mile. Concentrated or population-weighted density for all metros is over 20 times higher, at 6,321 people per square mile.

This Census report is not the first to use population-weighted density. A 2001 study by Gary Barnes of the University of Minnesota developed such a measure to examine sprawl and commuting patterns. In 2008, Jordan Rappaport of the Kansas City Fed published an intriguing study in the Journal of Urban Economics (non-gated version here), which looked at the relationship between density (including population-weighted density) and the productivity of regions. Christopher Bradford, who blogs at his Austin Contrarian, has also advocated for using population-weighted density to better understand urban development…

New York and Los Angeles are good examples of the differences between these two density measures. While they are close in the average density — 2,826 for New York versus 2,646 for L.A. — the New York metro has much higher levels of concentrated or population-weighted density, 31,251 versus 12,114 people per square mile. San Francisco, which has lower average density than L.A. (1,755 people per square mile), tops L.A. on population-weighted density with 12,145 people per square mile.

It sounds like the new density measure uses the average densities of Census tracts which then limits the effect of sprawl as these less dense tracts, of which there are necessarily more in burgeoning metropolitan regions, are averaged out by the denser tracts. In other words, the effects of sprawl are less pronounced in this newer measure.

This reminds me of an interesting density fact: if you use the basic measure of density (total population of metro land divided by land in the metro area), the Los Angeles metro region has a higher density than New York City. But, of course, New York City is much more dense at its core while LA is more known for its sprawl.