Monthly Archives: May 2013

Anthropologist behind story of Manhattan moms who hire disabled tour guides to bypass Disney lines

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Lost a bit in the story about Manhattan moms who hire disabled tour guides to avoid lines at Disney is how the story came out: from the research of an anthropologist.

“It’s insider knowledge that very few have and share carefully,” said social anthropologist Dr. Wednesday Martin, who caught wind of the underground network while doing research for her upcoming book “Primates of Park Avenue.”

“Who wants a speed pass when you can use your black-market handicapped guide to circumvent the lines all together?” she said.

“So when you’re doing it, you’re affirming that you are one of the privileged insiders who has and shares this information.”

A win for social science? Perhaps not – Wednesday Martin was trained in comparative literature. I imagine there is some more backstory to this including how Martin found out about this practice and how this information made it to the media. Here is more about the book with an intriguing title which is to be released next year:

What happens when an anthropologist from the Midwest moves to Manhattan’s most prestigious zip code…and raises her children there? Primates of Park Avenue is an anthropological memoir of Manhattan motherhood by Dr. Wednesday Martin, author of Stepmonster: A New Look at Why Real Stepmothers Think, Feel and Act the Way We Do (Houghton Mifflin, 2009).  By turns hilarious, touching and insightful, Primates of Park Avenue reveals the pressures, conundrums and competition that make mothers and mothering in Manhattan unique. From a deconstruction of the exercise and self-care practices of the caste of women with children she calls “Manhattan Geishas” to the lurid details of her own crazed pursuit of a Birkin bag; to an analysis of the rites of passage like the coop board interview, the gut renovation, bed bug battles and “ongoing” school applications that brought her to her knees; to an exploration of what she calls “the world’s most complicated, fraught, and misrepresented relationship, the dance between mothers and the nannies they hire to help them raise their children”; to an inside view of the galas, benefits, kiddie birthday parties and other extravaganzas of conspicuous consumption that define her adopted tribe, Martin spares no detail in exploring what makes Uptown motherhood strange, exotic and utterly foreign and fascinating. At the same time, Primates of Park Avenue illuminates the quests, anxieties and ambitions–for a healthy, happy child, a good night’s sleep, sexual satisfaction, financial security and a concealer that actually works–that connect women with children all across the country and all over the world.

An “anthropological memoir” – this might be easier for the general public to understand than saying it is a personal ethnography. It sounds like the book, in the words of one of my colleagues, will take the familiar, the wealthy in New York City, and make it exotic.

Continued lack of affordable housing in Chicago’s northern suburbs

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Affordable housing is a problem throughout the Chicago region but here is a closer look at the current state of affordable housing in Chicago’s North Shore suburbs:

Under the law, the Illinois Housing Development Authority in 2004 identified 49 communities where less than 10 percent of the housing was deemed affordable. At least nine of them are on the North Shore, including Winnetka, Wilmette, Highland Park, Deerfield, Northbrook, and Lake Forest.

Reactions to the law varied in those communities. Highland Park aggressively pursued ways to make affordable housing available. Northbrook took a more casual approach and set general goals. In Winnetka, after years of heated debate, officials voted in 2011 to just stop talking about the issue…

But over the last ten years, the affordable housing that has been added “is a drop in a bucket,” she said.

“The economy is bouncing back, but a lot of these communities are still catering to the rich,” said Schechter.

A significant barrier for affordable housing in the North Shore is the lack of undeveloped land and the high price of properties, said Richard Koenig, executive director of the Housing Opportunity Development Corporation.

It doesn’t look to me like much has changed. The 2004 Illinois law hasn’t done much as many communities already met the requirements (based on a formula that may then be too lax), it has little ability to enforce anything, and there are still continuing issues of affordable housing. I think there is also some disconnect about who the affordable housing is supposed to serve. In my experience, when suburbs like those on the North Shore talk about affordable housing, they are more willing to do something when they are talking about public servants, like teachers, police officers, and firefighters, or people who have been in the community before, like kids who grew up in the suburb or retired residents, who have difficulty living there on limited incomes. These suburbs are not thinking as much about the retail or service industry or laborers that might work in their communities.

This shouldn’t be too surprising: given the opportunity, most wealthier suburbs will zone land in such a way that the housing prices and options cater to a wealthier crowd. Affordable housing is an issue that should be taken care of by other suburbs, such as more working- or lower-class communities.

The “Big Parade” in Los Angeles really highlights the city’s lack of walkability

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A Los Angeles writer started an event called the “Big Parade” that makes use of a number of staircases in the city. But, this event serves to highlight the city’s overall lack of walkability compared to other big cities around the world:

Koeppel’s early obsession evolved into a piece for Backpacker magazine called “I Climbed Los Angeles” that ran in June 2004. It’s since developed into an annual event called the Big Parade — a two-day, 40-mile urban hike from downtown Los Angeles to the Hollywood sign that covers 100 public stairways along the way. For this year’s parade, the fifth, Koeppel expects several hundred people to join him from around the country…

The parade’s secondary mission is to encourage a sense of community. Koeppel says the parade keeps pace with the slowest walker; he describes it as a simple “walk with neighbors.” The event is free, and Koeppel has even rejected sponsors to keep things as casual as possible. Each day’s walk is divided into segments, with a main loop of five or six miles, and participants are invited to come and go as they please.

“The majority are people who have not walked more than five or six miles in L.A. in the streets in their entire lives,” he says. “Taking them and showing them what L.A. is like on foot — showing them secret passages and landmarks and things they never see from outside the window of their car — has been just really fun.”

Koeppel, who’s known beyond Los Angeles for his celebrated book on the history of bananas, maintains that his purpose in starting the Big Parade isn’t to prove that Los Angeles is a walkable place. He denies the axiom that nobody there walks — rather, he says, nobody seems to walk when you’re looking out from a car window — and sees the city’s infamous sprawl as simply an opportunity for pedestrian exploration. The Big Parade, he says, “is a way to reestablish the presence of individual propulsion within that sprawl.”

So the “Big Parade” is a pedestrian cry in a wilderness of cars and vehicles…

Two things in particular intrigued me in this story:

1. Walking can involve building community. This reminds me of Jane Jacobs’ famous axiom about “eyes on the street” or her thoughts about “public characters” who are out and about and known in neighborhoods. Places like Los Angeles simply don’t allow for much informal encounters on the street level. But, a group of people walking together or near each other can engage in conversations in ways that are very difficult to do in cars. (This also reminds me of an idea my dad had years ago about putting scrolling sign boards in the back windshields of cars so drivers could deliver messages to each other. I imagine the ratio of destructive versus encouraging messages would get high pretty quickly…)

2. The article suggests a number of the staircases were constructed for homeowners who wanted to get off the streetcar and make the trek up to their house. This is a reminder of the extensive streetcar system that Los Angeles once had. How might the city be different today if those streetcars had survived or had been replaced by a similarly spread-out system of mass transit? As historian Kenneth Jackson explains in Crabgrass Frontiers, streetcars had a number of factors working against them. However, these staircases are a suggestion of what Los Angeles might have been.

Combining sociology and journalism

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The efforts of a hyper-local journalism website in Alhambra, California illustrate an intriguing combination: journalism plus sociology.

This fixation on community interaction is part of the site’s DNA. As city newspapers inexorably decline, a smattering of new “hyperlocal” news outlets have sprung up, from Aol’s Patch network to bootstrap start-ups. But the Source has an unusual ingredient: more than a decade of research by University of Southern California communications expert Sandra Ball-Rokeach and her team…

Ball-Rokeach studies what she calls “communication ecologies”—the web of ways in which different communities get and spread information, from Facebook to the grocery-store bulletin board, from the local tabloid to chatting with neighbors. She’s found that these networks can differ dramatically from community to community, ethnic group to ethnic group…

Understanding those differences is crucial for anyone, be they advertisers or political parties, trying to reach specific communities. Ball-Rokeach believes it’s also important for civic engagement. Strong cities with plugged-in citizens tend to have dense “neighborhood storytelling networks”—crisscrossing lines of media outlets, community groups, and other institutions that hold a running conversation about what it means to live there…

Instead of simply sketching out the usual beats—city council, business, sports—they sent out a team of USC researchers who interviewed and held focus groups with residents in all three local languages. Their exploration showed that residents wanted to know more about education, local businesses, dining and entertainment deals, crime, and traffic and parking. “Many of them just said, ‘We don’t know what’s happening in Alhambra,’” says Ball-Rokeach…

Still, even if the Alhambra Source goes the same way, there’s an intriguing idea in this relationship between newspaper and university. What could embattled major dailies from The Boston Globe to the Los Angeles Times learn about their readers by teaming with sociology grad students? Tailoring a news outlet to reflect its community might not always produce the most in-depth journalism—but it might at least help the news business survive.

It sounds like what sociology and social science bring to the table in this combination is the ability to collect and analyze data. However, it still sounds like this social science research is more about marketing or targeting an audience than anything else. In an era of difficulty for newspapers and other news sources, this is not to be underestimated. But, this still puts the social science in more of a marketing role: what do we need to address in order to attract readers? At the same time, I could envision a stronger combination of these two disciplines where the journalism is much more informed and shaped by research and data rather than anecdotes and single cases and the sociologists then have another outlet to share their findings and explanations about the social world.

Mapping Chicago area income inequality by Metra route

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Crain’s Chicago Business put together an interactive map that shows income levels by Metra train stop:

The geographic disparity in Chicago’s wealth can be seen by tracking household income in the ZIP codes of Metra train stations. The Union Pacific North and Milwaukee District North lines pass through some of the wealthiest ZIP codes, while the Metra Electric and Rock Island lines go through some of the poorest.

Several quick thoughts:

1. This reflects historic settlement patterns in the Chicago region.

2. I wish there was another set of data layered on top of this: daily ridership from each stop. This way, we could see if income is related to ridership. Could these mass transit lines primarily benefit people from wealthier areas in the Chicago region? In other words, do these commuter lines reinforce income differences? Are these train lines generally a boon for communities compared to Chicago suburbs without commuter train stations?

3. Of course, looking at ZIP codes of the train stations is inexact. Depending on the location of the station, people might drive from other zip codes. What we really need is more exact information from riders themselves: where do they live, what is their income, why do they utilize this particular stop, etc.

4. Also, why use average household incomes rather than median household incomes? Using the average likely increases the variation among train stations but also allows outliers in income to have more influence in the data.

h/t Curbed Chicago

Defining what makes for a luxury home

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Here is how one data firm defines what it means to be a luxury housing unit:

Although upscale housing is selling better in some cities than in others, a monthly analysis by the Altos Research data firm for the Institute for Luxury Home Marketing says that overall, that segment of the market is gaining momentum and prices are rising…

Q: “Luxury home” is probably one of the most abused phrases in real estate-ese. How do you define it?

A: A price range that’s considered the high end of the market in one place might be something that’s average in another. So, “luxury” is local: Our organization generally defines it as the top 10 percent of an area’s sales in the past 12 months. But for the purposes of the research that we do with Altos for our monthly Luxury Market Report, we’ve taken the ZIP codes within each of 31 markets that have the highest median prices, and for about five years we’ve tracked the sales of homes in those (areas) that are $500,000 and above.

There are two techniques proposed here:

1. The highest 10 percent of a local housing market. Thus, the prices are all relative and the data is based on the highest end in each place. So, there could be some major differences in luxury prices across zip codes or metropolitan regions.

2. Breaking it down first by geography to the wealthiest places (so this is based on geographic clustering) and then setting a clear cut point at $500,000. In these wealthiest zip codes, wouldn’t most of the units be over $500,000? Why the 31 wealthiest markets and not 20 or 40?

Each of these approaches have strengths and weaknesses but I imagine the data here could change quite a bit based on what operationalization is utilized.

Interestingly, the firm found that luxury sales rebounded quicker than the rest of the market:

The interesting thing about this recovery is that the luxury segment, that group of affluent households, was able to recover fairly quickly. They shifted their assets around, and a lot of them were able to see opportunities in the down market. By 2010, there were almost as many high-end households as before the downturn, not just in the United States, but internationally, as well. This group focused on residential real estate as a pretty desirable asset — for them, a second or third home turned out to be a portfolio play.

This shouldn’t be too surprising – when an economic crisis hits, the wealthier members of society have more of a cushion. While the upper end is doing all right, others have argued the bottom end, those looking for starter homes, are having a tougher time.

Australian expert says McMansions should be divided into apartments

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An Australian expert tackles the problem of McMansions and affordable housing:

Western suburbs “McMansions” should be converted into apartments to help deal with Perth’s population growth, an expert says.

Leading WA environmental scientist David Kaesehagen said walls or divisions could be built within big properties in the most affluent suburbs to add to housing stock in a rapidly growing market…

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has forecast Perth’s population will grow from 1.8 million to 4.2 million in the next four decades…

Mr Kaesehagen said with the right laws and incentives, owners of large mansions could be persuaded to divide their properties. “This is a way of using existing built form to increase density without introducing high-rise or changing the aesthetic of these established suburbs,” he said.

This is not the first time this has been suggested but I have yet to see a community or significant number of people push for this. I suspect it would be really difficult to do this kind of retrofitting in suburbs often so concerned about property values and density: who would want to be the first resident to have your house subdivided as your neighbors look on and wonder about their housing values? How much would it cost to convert larger homes into multiple units when they were originally intended for single families? This might work best in McMansion neighborhoods that are abandoned or not yet opened (each of these would pose their own set of problems) so there would be no community members in opposition. But, then why not build higher density developments in the first place?

Is Miami more of a global city because of a booming real estate market?

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The Financial Times looks at the increasing prices in the Miami housing market and suggests this is related to the city’s rising status as a global city. This leads to an interesting question: does an in-demand housing market mean that a city is necessarily a global city or does it simply make it more popular than before? I would tend to lean toward the second – being a global city is related more to a city’s role in global finance and status as a cultural center. Miami may be a regional financial center but is it really on the scale of the major cities in the United States? Check out the 2012 Global Cities Index from AT Kearney where Miami is #36. Miami may be popular these days but it has a long ways to go…

 

Argument: “Why more McMansions are bad news for first-time home buyers”

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McMansions may be good for builders but not so much for people looking to purchase their first house:

Home building has been steadily picking up this past year after taking a sharp nosedive during the recession, although production is still far below historical norms. Orr said home builders are moving forward with cautious optimism, being wary of their pre-recession mistake of overbuilding.

So to help make up for the slowdown, builders are now making homes larger once again. Bigger homes means bigger sales revenue — and for only a minimal bump in construction costs, Orr said.

The trend has been to the detriment of first-time and lower-income buyers, who are finding both the new and existing home markets offer them very few options today.

“They (home builders) have kind of abandoned that sector,” Orr said.

The existing home market nationwide — but particularly in Phoenix — has been facing a chronic shortage of homes for sale, and the problem is most severe in price ranges below $200,000.

Many buyers have thus turned to new construction out of frustration. But given the sharp price hikes of new homes recently, lower-income buyers aren’t finding the same relief, Orr said.

In other words, builders can make more money on the bigger homes for those who still have money to play with. But is this just about builders? I wonder if there are two other things going on here:

1. The article hints at a depressed existing house market, suggesting that there isn’t enough movement in the housing market for these older smaller homes, what might be called “starter homes,” to become available in large numbers.

2. In addition to not much existing inventory opening up, perhaps there simply aren’t enough buyers for smaller houses for builders to take notice. What numbers are we talking about – how many first-time home buyers in the Phoenix are not able to find a home they want? This reminds me of recent data from the Chicago area: while housing starts may be up a large percent, the housing market is still not operating at normal.

That all said, if people want to get into purchasing a home can’t do so or are delayed, this could contribute to more long-term problems for the US housing market.

Targeting Santa Monica homeowners in order to build mini-mansions

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The housing market in Santa Monica, California is apparently in good shape: homeowners are being targeted by those who want to tear down their smaller homes and build bigger ones.

Santa Monicans are being targeted by real estate agents representing developers looking to turn small homes in desirable neighborhoods into mini-mansions that can be sold for double the original asking price.

The agents tend to single out older homes, often taking up a relatively small portion of the parcel on which they sit, offering a cash purchase and a promise by the buyer to take care of normal closing costs, provided the homeowner does not broadcast their intent to sell.

Residents report notes left on their doors, direct mail bearing a picture of their own home and even direct phone calls soliciting sales.

That practice is called by many names, including off-market listing, pocket listing or quiet listing, and while it is completely legal, it often is a bad deal for sellers in hot markets like Santa Monica, said Don Faught, president of the California Association of Realtors…

Sosin led the charge in the late 1990s against “McMansions,” homes built to the margins of their property lines. They overshadowed neighboring properties, and led to the death of many mature trees that had to be removed so that the home could be built out.

Her work resulted in new rules around single-family homes, requiring set backs and imposing controls over how much of a parcel can be covered.

The attempts to build to even those restricted maximums are unwelcome, she said, because they only succeed in making neighborhoods more expensive to move in to and replace quaint, well-loved homes with larger versions.

It sounds like the resident quoted above is ready for a teardown battle, should one develop, but the article makes it sound like people are generally unhappy with this approach. The real question in my mind is whether these sorts of real estate tactics are successful. Does this suggest developers are worried about how the community will react to more public plans to build bigger teardowns or is this primarily a way to get real estate at a cheaper price before it hits the open market? Either way, I would want to know how many homeowners actually sell their homes in such a way and how they negotiate the peer pressure in the neighborhood versus the offer from developers.

Also, is the use of the term “mini-mansion” intended to avoid using the term McMansion? I would expect McMansion in this sort of situation, particularly from unhappy residents…

h/t Curbed