Monthly Archives: March 2013

A boom in “mega basements” in London draw ire

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The London neighborhood of Kensington is discussing rules to ban “mega basements” being constructed under the home and property of the wealthy:

The “iceberg home” mega basements dug three or four storeys into the ground with private cinemas, spas and swimming pools are set to be banned in one of London’s most affluent areas.

New draft rules that will limit basements to a single storey and impose much tighter limits on how far they can extend under a garden were today published by Kensington and Chelsea council.

The move follows a huge surge in applications for basements over recent years as wealthy owners have sought to by-pass planning restrictions on changes to their homes above ground by massively extending their living space underneath.

The subterranean extensions have often outraged local residents because of the noise, dust and disruption caused by digging them out, which can last for up to two years…

One of the most notorious applications was by former Foxtons estate agency owner Jon Hunt who successfully submitted plans for a cavernous basement under his home in Kensington Palace Gardens that included a tennis court and a showroom for his collection of Ferraris.

This sounds very similar to anti-McMansion ordinances with outcry over the disturbance to the neighborhood and restrictions on how big these basements can be. But, on the other hand, there is a big difference: these underground basements are hidden out of view and theoretically shouldn’t change the visible character of the neighborhood much. In some ways, the basements are genius: why not make use of underground space that is less disruptive and doesn’t alter the neighborhood’s appearance? I wonder if this is really just about construction inconvenience or it is more of a reaction to rich newcomers making changes.

Fastest growing American cities between 2000 and 2012 still bunched in the Sunbelt

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Joel Kotkin discusses the recent release of data about the fastest- and slowest-growing cities in the United States:

An analysis of population data by demographer Wendell Cox, including the Census report for the most recent year released late last week, shows that since 2000, virtually all the 10 fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the United States are located in Sun Belt states. The population of the Raleigh, N.C., metropolitan statistical area has expanded a remarkable 47.8% since 2000, tops among the nation’s 52 metro areas with over 1 million residents. That is more than three times the overall 12.7% growth of those 52 metro areas.

Austin, Texas, and Las Vegas also expanded more than 40%, putting them second and third on our list. The populations of the other metro areas in the top 10 all expanded by at least 25%, or twice the national average. This jibes nicely with domestic migration trends and growth in the foreign-born population, both of which have been strongest in many of these same cities…

So what do these trends tell us about the demographic evolution of our major metropolitan areas? Certainly sustained economic growth, low density and more affordable housing all clearly continue to push the center of population gravity toward certain Sun Belt cities, primarily in the Southeast and Texas. It turns out that neither the Great Recession, the housing bust or a much hyped preference for dense urbanity is turning this around.

Kotkin wants to use this data to show that Americans are not flocking to denser cities in the Northeast and Midwest as much as some pundits want to claim. Regardless of the debate over which cities are better for Americans, the data seems to suggest that the Sunbelt is still growing the fastest.

I have another idea of why these Sunbelt cities are growing faster compared to the more established Midwest and Northeast cities. What if there is some tipping point, perhaps a particular population or the space available for development in a region, where urban growth slows? Regions can only grow so much before suburban commuters on the edge are not willing to go too far – megacommuters are not too common.

Using algorithms for better realignment in the NHL?

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The NHL recently announced realignment plans. However, a group of West Point mathematicians developed an algorithm they argue provides a better realignment:

Well, a team of mathematicians at West Point set out to find an algorithm that could solve some of these problems. In their article posted on the arXiv titled Realignment in the NHL, MLB, the NFL, and the NBA, they explore how to easily construct different team divisions. For example, with the relatively recent move of Atlanta’s hockey team to Winnipeg, the current team alignment is pretty weird (below left), and the NHL has proposed a new 4-division configuration (below right):

Here’s how it works. First, they use a rough approximation for distance traveled by each team (which is correlated with actual travel distances), and then examine all the different ways to divide the cities in a league into geographic halves. You then can subdivide those portions until you get the division sizes you want. However, only certain types of divisions will work, such as not wanting to make teams travel too laterally, due to time zone differences…

Anyway, using this method, here are two ways of dividing the NHL into six different divisions that are found to be optimal:

My first thought when looking at the algorithm realignment plans is that it is based less on time zones and more on regions like the Southwest, Northwest, Central, Southeast, North, and Northeast.

But here is where I think the demands of the NHL don’t quite line up with the goals of the algorithm to minimize travel. The grouping of sports teams is often dependent on historic patterns, rivalries, and when teams entered the league. For example, the NHL realignment plans generated a lot of discussion in Chicago because it meant that the long rivalry between the Chicago Blackhawks and the Detroit Red Wings would end. In other words, there is cultural baggage to realignment that can’t only be solved with statistics. Data loses out to narratives.

Another way an algorithm could redraw the boundaries: spread out the winning teams across the league. What teams are really good tends to be cyclical but occasionally leagues end up with multiple good teams in a single division or an imbalance of power between conferences. Why not spread out teams by records which then gives teams a better chance to meet in the finals or other teams in those stacked divisions or conferences a chance to make the playoffs?b

Show your knowledge of US metro areas with the US Census “Population Bracketology”

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Even the United States Census Bureau is getting into brackets and bracketology. Go here to play “Population Bracketology” which shows your knowledge of the population of metropolitan areas in the United States.

Yes, it should be easy to select the winner. But, I like that a lot of the initial pairings matched Sunbelt versus Rust Belt cities. Some of these were hard to choose. On the other hand, the Los Angeles-New York City matchup in the first round knocked out a contender…

Will Nate Silver ruin his brand with NCAA predictions?

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Statistical guru Nate Silver, known for his 2012 election predictions, has been branching out into other areas recently on the New York Times site. Check out his 2013 NCAA predictions. Or look at his 2013 Oscar predictions.

While Silver has a background in sports statistics, I wonder if these forays into new areas with the imprimatur of the New York Times will eventually backfire. In many ways, these new areas have less data than presidential elections and thus, Silver has to step further out on a limb. For example, look at these predictions for the 2013 NCAA bracket:

The top pick for 2013, Louisville, only has a 22.7% chance of winning. If Silver goes with this pick of Louisville, and he does, then he by his own figures will be wrong 77.3% of the time. These are not good odds.

I’m not sure Silver can really win much by predicting the NCAA champion or the Oscars because the odds of making a wrong prediction are higher. What happens if he is wrong a number of times in a row? Will people still listen to him in the same way? What happens when the 2016 presidential election comes along? Of course, Silver could continue to develop better models and make more accurate picks but even this takes attention away from his political predictions.

How the megarich live in London: in the shadows

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A profile of a newer housing development in London suggests the megarich live in secrecy:

The secrecy extends to the media, many of whose members, including myself and the London Sunday Times’s and Vanity Fair’s A. A. Gill, have tried but failed to gain entry to the building. “The vibe is junior Arab dictator,” says Peter York, co-author of The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, the riotous 1982 style guide documenting the shopping and mating rituals of a certain striving class of Brits, who claimed Knightsbridge’s high-end shopping area, which stretches from Harrods to Sloane Square, as their urban heartland…The really curious aspect of One Hyde Park can be appreciated only at night. Walk past the complex then and you notice nearly every window is dark. As John Arlidge wrote in The Sunday Times, “It’s dark. Not just a bit dark—darker, say, than the surrounding buildings—but black dark. Only the odd light is on. . . . Seems like nobody’s home.”

That’s not because the apartments haven’t sold. London land-registry records say that 76 had been by January 2013 for a total of $2.7 billion—but, of these, only 12 were registered in the names of warm-blooded humans, including Christian Candy, in a sixth-floor penthouse. The remaining 64 are held in the names of unfamiliar corporations: three based in London; one, called One Unique L.L.C., in California; and one, Smooth E Co., in Thailand. The other 59—with such names as Giant Bloom International Limited, Rose of Sharon 7 Limited, and Stag Holdings Limited—belong to corporations registered in well-known offshore tax havens, such as the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, Liechtenstein, and the Isle of Man.

From this we can conclude at least two things with certainty about the tenants of One Hyde Park: they are extremely wealthy, and most of them don’t want you to know who they are and how they got their money.

This reminds me of Veblen’s idea of conspicuous consumption where the rich spend or waste money to show that they can. In other words, the rich often want people to take notice of their wealth and status. But, this London development suggests the opposite: some of the megarich today want to stay hidden. Why is this? I wonder if it has to do with modern society where having lots of money is not always viewed positively, particularly when tied to particular industries or practices such as storing money in tax havens.

Scholars suggest switch from urban studies to urban science and the DNA of cities

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Several scholars recently called for pursuing urban science:

William Solecki compares the current study of cities to natural history in the 19th century. Back then most natural scientists were content to explore and document the extent of biological and behavioral differences in the world. Only recently has science moved from cataloguing life to understanding the genetic code that forms its very basis.

It’s time for urban studies to evolve the same way, says Solecki, a geographer at Hunter College who’s also director of the C.U.N.Y. Institute for Sustainable Cities. Scholars from any number of disciplines — economics and history to ecology and psychology — have explored and documented various aspects of city life through their own unique lenses. What’s needed now, Solecki contends, is a new science of urbanization that looks beyond the surface of cities to the fundamental laws that form their very basis too…

In Environment, the researchers outline three basic research goals for their proposed science of urbanization:

  1. To define the basic components of urbanization across time, space, and place.
  2. To identify the universal laws of city-building, presenting urbanization as a natural system.
  3. To link this new system of urbanization with other fundamental processes that occur in the world.

The result, Solecki believes, will be a stronger understanding of the “DNA” of cities — and, by extension, an improved ability to address urban problems in a systemic manner. Right now, for instance, urban transport scholars respond to the problem of sprawl and congestion with ideas like bike lanes or bus-rapid transit lines. Those programs can be great for cities, but in a way they fix a symptom of a problem that still lingers. An improved science of urbanization would isolate the underlying processes that caused this unsustainable development in the first place.

Three quick thoughts:

1. I think this assumes we have the kind of data and methodology that could get at the “DNA of cities.” Presumably, this is big data collected in innovative ways. To use the natural science metaphor, it is one thing to know about the existence of DNA and it is another thing to collect and analyze it. With this new kind of data, cities can then be viewed as complex systems with lots of moving pieces.

2. Are there necessarily universal laws underlying cities? We are currently in an academic world where there are a variety of theories about urban growth but they tend to be idiosyncratic to particular cities, apply to particular time periods, and emphasize different aspects of social, economic, and political life. Is this because no one has really put it all together yet or because it is really hard to find universal laws?

3.

“Being White in Philly”

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Philadelphia magazine recently published a piece titled “Being White in Philly.” Here is the argument of the article:

I’ve shared my view of North Broad Street with people—white friends and colleagues—who see something else there: New buildings. Progress. Gentrification. They’re sunny about the area around Temple. I think they’re blind, that they’ve stopped looking. Indeed, I’ve begun to think that most white people stopped looking around at large segments of our city, at our poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods, a long time ago. One of the reasons, plainly put, is queasiness over race. Many of those neighborhoods are predominantly African-American. And if you’re white, you don’t merely avoid them—you do your best to erase them from your thoughts.

At the same time, white Philadelphians think a great deal about race. Begin to talk to people, and it’s clear it’s a dominant motif in and around our city. Everyone seems to have a story, often an uncomfortable story, about how white and black people relate…

Fifty years after the height of the civil rights movement, more than 25 years after electing its first African-American mayor, Philadelphia remains a largely segregated city, with uneasy boundaries in culture and understanding. And also in well-being. There is a black middle class, certainly, and blacks are well-represented in our power structure, but there remains a vast and seemingly permanent black underclass. Thirty-one percent of Philadelphia’s more than 600,000 black residents live below the poverty line. Blacks are more likely than whites to be victims of a crime or commit one, to drop out of school and to be unemployed.

What gets examined publicly about race is generally one-dimensional, looked at almost exclusively from the perspective of people of color. Of course, it is black people who have faced generations of discrimination and who deal with it still. But our public discourse ignores the fact that race—particularly in a place like Philadelphia—is also an issue for white people. Though white people never talk about it.

Everyone might have a race story, but few whites risk the third-rail danger of speaking publicly about race, given the long, troubled history of race relations in this country and even more so in this city. Race is only talked about in a sanitized form, when it’s talked about at all, with actual thoughts and feelings buried, which only ups the ante. Race remains the elephant in the room, even on the absurd level of who holds the door to enter a convenience store.

My first thought after quickly reading through the article was that the writer ignores the privileged positions of whites vis a vis minorities in Philadelphia and the United States. Part of what makes it difficult for whites to talk about race is they then have to acknowledge that currently and historically whites have been advantaged and don’t face the same kind of discrimination that blacks and others have faced. Without being willing to tackle these power dynamics and the larger structural inequalities at hand, it is difficult to have a conversation.

Bad logic: stories of successful college dropouts obscure advantages of going to college

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The president of the University of Chicago writes that holding up successful college dropouts as models takes away attention from the advantages of a college degree:

Names like Jobs, Gates, Dell, and others lend star power to the myth of the wildly successful college dropout. One recent New York Times homage to the phenomenon compared dropping out to “lighting out for the territories to strike gold,” with one young executive describing it as “almost a badge of honor” among startup entrepreneurs. Like any myth, this story has a kernel of truth: There are exceptional individuals whose hard work, determination, and intelligence make up for the lack of a college degree. If they could do it, one might think, why can’t everybody?

Such a question ignores the outlier status of these exceptional drop-out entrepreneurs and innovators.

Those who are able to achieve such success often rely on a set of skills already developed before they get to college. They know how to educate themselves, get a bank loan, and manage their time and their money. They may benefit from a network of family, friends and acquaintances who open doors and provide a safety net.

But what happens to young people without access to these important resources? For them, skipping college to pursue business success is like investing their savings in lottery tickets in the hopes they will be a multimillion-dollar winner, or failing to pursue an education because they expect to be an NBA superstar. The reality is that the next college dropout will not be LeBron James, James Cameron, or Mark Zuckerberg. He will likely belong to the millions of college drop-outs you don’t hear the press singing about. These are the 34 million Americans over 25 with some college credits but no diploma. Nearly as large as the state of California, this group is 71 percent more likely to be unemployed and four times more likely to default on student loans. Far from being millionaires, they earn 32 percent less than college graduates, on average.

I’ve seen this logic used in arguments about not having to spend lots of money on college or from those who see college as liberal indoctrination. As Zimmer argues, using outliers to build a theory is just not a good idea. These famous cases are held up partly because they are so rare, not because this is necessarily a good path to pursue. This is similar to the logic used in holding up rages to riches stories; while it is true that social mobility, upward and downward, occurs in the United States, a phenomenal change in position over one lifetime is more rare.

I’ve used this very example with my Introduction to Sociology class when talking about why people go to college. I ask them if they are aware of wealthy college dropouts like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. They say yes. I then ask if they dropped out of college, would their parents accept these stories as good rationale? They answer no. I then tell them a little of the Bill Gates story as relayed by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers. Gates attended a pretty good high school that through one student’s parent who worked for a computer company was able to purchase a used mainframe computer. Gates then had a rare opportunity at the time for a high school student to spend hours with the mainframe and learn about it. He was then able to build on this background and later founded Microsoft with Paul Allen. Gladwell uses this as an example of the Matthew effect where those who come from more advantaged backgrounds (or who happened to be the oldest hockey players) tend to get more opportunities later in life.