Monthly Archives: September 2013

Lawsuit brought by Bosnian Muslim congregation against Des Plaines

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A Bosnian Muslim group that was turned down by the Des Plaines City Council in regard to converting a building into a mosque has filed a lawsuit against the suburb:

But aldermen say allowing any house of worship in an industrial park would endanger pedestrians and impede neighboring manufacturers.

“I don’t care if they’re Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, whatever. It’s not zoned for that particular area,” said Ald. Mark Walsten, who was named in the suit because he voted against an amendment to accommodate the mosque. “Whenever there are children involved in an industrial area, I will not have that on my conscience.”

Members of the American Islamic Center, who have rented space in a Rolling Meadows mosque since March 2011, had hoped to purchase the vacant building, formerly occupied by an insurance company. Many of the center’s 160 members fled Bosnia in the 1990s to escape war and genocide.

In fact, Bosnian immigrants opened the first mosque in Chicago almost a century ago, Agic said, and Illinois has the nation’s largest Bosnian-born population…

The Des Plaines Plan Commission unanimously recommended a zoning amendment to accommodate the center. But in July, the City Council voted down the proposed amendment.

Classic suburban case: zoning laws against the ability of residents to pursue their interests. And the Des Plaines City Council is appealing to safety and business concerns. There have been several cases in recent years in the Chicago suburbs having to do with requests from Muslim groups being denied by suburban communities. See this case involving DuPage County near Naperville, this case near West Chicago, and and this case in Lombard.

It is not unusual for a Plan Commission to recommend one thing and the City Council to vote the other way but it would still be interesting to hear their different reasons.

Research suggests drug addiction influenced by environmental factors

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New research from a psychologist suggests environmental factors play a large role in drug addiction:

Then, after that sample of crack to start the day, each participant would be offered more opportunities during the day to smoke the same dose of crack. But each time the offer was made, the participants could also opt for a different reward that they could collect when they eventually left the hospital. Sometimes the reward was $5 in cash, and sometimes it was a $5 voucher for merchandise at a store.

When the dose of crack was fairly high, the subject would typically choose to keep smoking crack during the day. But when the dose was smaller, he was more likely to pass it up for the $5 in cash or voucher.

“They didn’t fit the caricature of the drug addict who can’t stop once he gets a taste,” Dr. Hart said. “When they were given an alternative to crack, they made rational economic decisions.”…

“If you’re living in a poor neighborhood deprived of options, there’s a certain rationality to keep taking a drug that will give you some temporary pleasure,” Dr. Hart said in an interview, arguing that the caricature of enslaved crack addicts comes from a misinterpretation of the famous rat experiments.

“The key factor is the environment, whether you’re talking about humans or rats,” Dr. Hart said. “The rats that keep pressing the lever for cocaine are the ones who are stressed out because they’ve been raised in solitary conditions and have no other options. But when you enrich their environment, and give them access to sweets and let them play with other rats, they stop pressing the lever.”

But, might it not be easier as a society to blame individuals for drug addiction, a lack of willpower, a lack of good decision making rather than deal with the deeper underlying issues in impoverished neighborhoods? As a sociologist, I look at a story like this and see the power of the social conditions to influence an individual’s behaviors: if society offers few good options, drugs seem like a more rational alternative. This work might also fit with arguments Sudhir Venkatesh has made in the last decade or so about urban gangs: they are often characterized as blood-thirsty killers but they might be responding more rationally to contexts with few legitimate ways to achieve societal goals. In fact, as The Wire also suggested, these gangs might be set up as business-like structures that happen to use illegal means to reach commonly sought-after social goals like economic comfort and respect.

h/t Instapundit

Transforming a Bell Labs complex into a mixed-use development

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The famous Bell Labs complex in Holmdel, New Jersey is due for a makeover into a mixed-used development:

Developer Somerset Development has tapped Alexander Gorlin Architects to convert the 1.9 million-square-foot facility into a contained island of retail, dining, residential, hotel, performance, and office space—providing new amenities, from a town library to an outdoor sports complex, for the sprawling suburban community. Two New Jersey–based firms, NK Architects and Joshua Zinder Architecture + Design, will also collaborate on the design of the interior tenant space.

“It is almost like the Romans have left the arena. How do you re-inhabit the coliseum? How do you inject new life in a space that is waiting for something to happen?” said Gorlin. “It symbolized America at its post-war peek in 1962.”

The colossal, quarter-mile-long atrium will be the cornerstone of the renovation. Gorlin imagines that this vast, open space will serve a similar function to that of the Armory, and host a variety of events such as large and small-scale performances, a farmer’s market, and pop-up shops…

So far the development has one tenant, Community Healthcare Associates, which plans to take over 400,000 square feet of the building. The developer envisions the complex will house a variety of tenants that meet the needs of the rather affluent surrounding community. “Everything has to mesh and come together: the clientele, the target market. There is room for many different levels,” said Zucker.

A fascinating building where much technological progress took place will be converted into another sort of lifestyle center for wealthy suburban residents. On one hand, it is a good idea to use the building for something the community can utilize now rather than let it fall into disrepair. On the other hand, the building could be treated like any other big box facility. There is potential here to market the new offices and uses as part of technological history – but this may not fit the theme of farmers markets, pop-up shops, and boutiques.

As the article notes, this building may just symbolize America at its post-war peak: big business, modern architecture, technology, all in a bucolic suburban (median household income over $140k) office campus setting. Perhaps after its redesign it will symbolize America of the 2010s: consumption, entrepreneurship, mixed-income developments, still in a bucolic suburban setting.

Chicago Tribune: President Obama should name Pullman a national park to jumpstart economic development

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The Chicago Tribune editorializes that economic development in Chicago’s Pullman neighborhood would get a huge boost from being designated as a national park:

Pullman needs swift, decisive action via executive order to jump-start economic development. Damaged by the death of manufacturing, Chicago’s Southeast Side and Pullman need exactly this type of federal nudge. The local residents can’t do it. The city can’t do it. The state can’t do it. You can do it.

The dainty row houses of Pullman remain a testament to the one-of-a-kind development George Pullman brought to Chicago. From the wisps of a prairie, he built and then owned one of the country’s first factory towns. The workers who built his upscale passenger rail cars lived in housing on the property. Most of that housing remains in its original dollhouse state.

Designating Pullman a national park would make the Pullman campus a tourist and train enthusiasts’ destination and spur entrepreneurs to open businesses in the surrounding area.

Mr. President, show us another neighborhood like Pullman. Show us another community with its rich history — the site of a major labor strike and the birthplace of the first recognized black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

If you won’t award it national park status, then show us another way to save Pullman. Tell us you plan to build your presidential library there, one of many locations courting you.

This is an interesting appeal for economic development: only making a historic site within a downtrodden urban neighborhood a national park can help. Tourism and history can be big business today. Additionally, this park would be close to the 9 million plus people in the Chicago metropolitan region who don’t have many other nearby choices in national parks.

Still, it strikes me as a bit of an odd appeal. A national park should be designated as such because of the site’s merit or because of the surrounding neighborhood which needs some help?

“Why do we believe North America’s biggest cities are dangerous when they are, in fact, among the safest places in the world?”

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Just how dangerous are North American cities?

Why do we believe North America’s biggest cities are dangerous when they are, in fact, among the safest places in the world? In large part, because it was once true: For most of the 20th century (and a good part of the 19th), our big cities really were dangerous. Murders, muggings, armed robberies and sexual assaults were big-city phenomena, and the way to escape physical danger was to move away. Today, the opposite is true.

If you really want to find murder city, you need to get out of North America. The most violent cities in the world are places that used to be small and peaceful, but have very recently become huge cities. And no wonder: The cities of the Southern and Eastern hemispheres are doing today what our cities did a century ago: Absorbing huge, formerly rural populations. In 50 years, Kinshasa has grown from 500,000 to 8 million people; Istanbul from 900,000 to 12 million…

“The twenty-first century,” it concludes, “is witness to a crisis of urban violence.” The two billion people becoming city-dwellers are facing the “urban dilemma” – they realize that moving to the city is an improvement in their lives by most known measures, but it does expose them to greater risk and danger. So while urbanization has cut world poverty in half and lifted billions out of starvation, the hives of crime and danger in the city are preventing the next step into prosperity: “This dark side of urbanization threatens to erase its potential to stimulate growth, productivity and economic dividends.”

By no means is this inevitable. Cities are not naturally more violent: Yes, Caracas and Cape Town have horrendous murder rates. On the other hand, very densely-populated cities such as Dhaka and Mumbai have rates below their national averages – they are actually safer places to live than the villages migrants are leaving behind. In poor countries, and here in the West, the really huge cities are often much safer than the small and medium-sized ones, where the real corruption and danger lie. In India, which has been galvanized by a rape crisis in the fast-urbanizing north, new research shows that rates of sexual assault and rape remain higher in rural areas. And we have learned from Brazil and South Africa that big, bold interventions can make dangerous cities safer.

It is helpful to keep a global perspective on this issue. What counts as violent is relative: Americans tend to compare their cities to other American big cities, perhaps within regions or to the biggest cities in the country.

Another reason our big cities are seen as violent: urban violence is a consistent media story, even as violent crime rates have dropped in many cities.

American, Australian leaders face vermin, possums in their residences

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Even some of the most powerful leaders have to deal with infestations in their houses: the White House has vermin and the official house of the Australian prime minister has a problem with possums. First, the White House:

It is, of course, not the first time bugs or vermin have done battle with the humans who work in the 213-year-old building. Humans have not always prevailed easily – much to the deep frustration sometimes of the president of the United States. None was more frustrated than Jimmy Carter, who battled mice from the start of his administration. To his dismay, he found the bureaucracy unresponsive. GSA, responsible for inside the White House, insisted it had eliminated all “inside” mice and contended any new mice must have come from the outside, meaning, the New York Times reported at the time, they were “the responsibility of the Interior Department.” But Interior, wrote the Times, “demurred” because the mice were now inside the White House…

His fury was captured in his diary entry for Sept. 9, 1977. Carter that day summoned top officials from the White House, the Department of Interior and the GSA to the Oval Office to unload on them about the mice overrunning the executive offices – including the dead ones rotting away inside the walls of the Oval Office and giving his office a very unpleasant odor. “For two or three months now I’ve been telling them to get rid of the mice,” Carter wrote. “They still seem to be growing in numbers, and I am determined either to fire somebody or get the mice cleared out – or both.”

Now more scared for their jobs than at any possible reaction from humane groups, the bureaucracy responded. According to the Associated Press, daily battle updates were sent to the highest levels of the White House, complete with body counts and descriptions of the weapons being deployed. On Sept. 12 – three days after the meeting with Carter – GSA reported 48 spring traps in the White House, including five in the Oval Office and four in Carter’s study. Six more “Ketch All” traps were placed in the crawl space under the Oval Office. Peanut butter, bacon and cheese were the favored baits. By Sept. 13, the number of traps deployed in the West Wing was up to 114. On Sept. 15, the body count was up to 24. By Sept. 19, it was 30; then 38 by the end of the month…

Other presidents have had their own battles with White House vermin. First Lady Barbara Bush once was taking her daily swim in the pool on the South Lawn when she was joined by a rat that “did not look like a Walt Disney friend, I’ll tell you that.” She told reporters “it was enormous.” She credited her springer spaniel, Millie, and her husband, the president, with rescuing her and drowning the rat.

And in Australia:

Australia’s official prime ministerial residence, The Lodge, a 1920s colonial-style 40-room mansion in Canberra, was intended to be a temporary lodging until a permanent “monumental” residence was constructed. It is in a state of serious disrepair and has given successive leaders problems.

Former prime minister Julia Gillard once recalled an embarrassing dinner with a visiting foreign leader in 2012 which was interrupted by possum urine dribbling from the roof towards a valuable painting.

It sounds like these both of these houses have their own unique and tortured histories, leaving plenty of opportunities for nature to intrude on human politics. Frankly, I’m not sure most people would want to know how many critters are in and around their property. What exactly goes on around that foundation or within the walls? Perhaps this might be another selling point for passive houses: they are so sealed up that nature is effectively kept at bay.

The End of the Suburbs – again?

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The author of a new book titled The End of the Suburbs suggests the American suburbs will change in response to several threats:

Q: So which demons are breathing down suburbia’s neck?

A: There’s a lot. To begin with, the nuclear family, which filled our suburban houses, is no longer the norm — marriage and birthrates are steadily declining, while the number of single-person households is growing rapidly. If the demand for good schools and family-friendly lifestyles has historically been the main selling point of suburban life, those things aren’t going to matter so much in the future.

Another thing is that Americans are just sick of driving. They’re sick of commuting. The number of miles driven per year is in decline. And the cost of gasoline has meant that homes on the suburban fringe are not such a bargain.

At the same time, cities, in general, are making a comeback, especially among young adults and even among families with children.

Q: Among the factors you write about in the book, which one is the biggest influence?

A: One of the things that’s the most potent of all of these factors is the demographic situation — the birthrate is falling, the marriage rate is falling, the nuclear family is rapidly becoming a minority household type in this country — 70 percent of households won’t have any children in them by 2025. When you look at those figures and the way our population is changing so dramatically, it hits home — we have built all these houses for a type of household that isn’t going to exist anymore.

But on the question of what happens to the suburbs, the author then goes on to suggest they won’t completely disappear as they will still appeal to a segment of the market.

A few things to note:

1. Critics have suggested the end of the suburbs for decades now. That doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t decline or disappear in the future; it just means plenty of people have made this prediction.

2. Perhaps the most important thing for the future of the suburbs is whether the adaptations to these threats take place within the suburbs or in cities. For example, there is already a push to more density within suburbs that might approximate more urban conditions without having to actually be in cities. These denser pockets would limit driving and also possibly provide different kinds of housing.

3. Her suggestion about the changing household composition is intriguing: see this earlier post about Going Solo in the suburbs.

Health includes social and behavioral dimensions

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There may be privacy concerns about the government having behavioral and social data as part of medical records but that doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t important factors when looking at health:

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) wants to require health care providers to include “social and behavioral” data in Electronic Health Records (EHR) and to link patient’s records to public health departments, it was announced last week.

Health care experts say the proposal raises additional privacy concerns over Americans’ personal health information, on top of worries that the Obamacare “data hub” could lead to abuse by bureaucrats and identify theft…

The “meaningful use” program already requires doctors and hospitals to report the demographics of a patient and if he smokes to qualify for its first step. The second stage, planned for 2014, will require recording a patient’s family health history.

The National Academy of Sciences will make recommendations for adding social and behavioral data for stage three, which will be unveiled in 2016.

Maybe these are separate concerns: one might argue such data is worthwhile but they don’t trust he government with it. But, I suspect there are some who don’t like the collection of social and behavioral data at all. They would argue it is too intrusive. People have made similar complaints about the Census: why exactly does the government need this data anyway?

However, we know that health is not just a physical outcome. You can’t separate health from behavior and social interactions. There is a lot of potential here for new understandings of health and its multidimensionality. Take something like stress. There are physical reactions to it but this is an issue strongly influenced by context. Solutions to it could include pills or medicine but that is only dealing with the physical outcomes rather than limiting or addressing stressful situations.

We’ll see how this plays out. I suspect, federal government involvement or not, medical professionals will be looking more at the whole person when addressing physical concerns.

Chicago Tribune editorial against “survey mania”

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The Chicago Tribune takes a strong stance against “survey mania.”

Question 1: Do you find that being pelted by survey requests from your bank, cable company, doctor, insurance agent, landlord, airline, phone company — and so on — is annoying and intrusive?

Question 2: Do you ignore all online and phone requests for survey responses because, well, your brief encounter with a bank teller doesn’t really warrant a 15-minute exegesis on the endearing time you spent together?

Question 3: Don’t you wish that virtually every company in America hadn’t succumbed to survey mania at the same time, so that you’d feel, well, a little more special when each request for your precious thoughts pings into your email?

Question 4: Do you wish that companies would spend a little less on surveys and a little more on customer service staff, so that callers would not be held captive by soul-sucking, brain-scorching, automated answering systems in which a chirpy-voiced robot only grudgingly ushers your call — “which is very important to us, which is still very important to us” — to a human being?

Question 5: Do you agree that blogger Greg Reinacker laid out some reasonable guidelines for companies that send surveys to customers: “Tell me how long it’s going to take. Even better, tell me exactly how many questions there will be. … Don’t ask me the same question three different ways just to see if I’m consistent. … If you really, really want me to take the survey, offer me something. I’m a sucker for free stuff. And a drawing probably won’t do it.”

Question 6: Do you think companies should be aware that a pleasant experience — a flight, a hotel stay, a cruise — can be retroactively tainted by an exhausting survey and all those nagging email reminders that you haven’t yet filled it out?

Question 7: Do you find it irritating when a salesperson tries to game the system by reminding you over and over that only an excellent rating for his or her service will suffice … before said service has been rendered to you?

Question 8: Do you agree that there are ample opportunities to put in a good word for, say, an excellent waiter or sales clerk or customer service agent (just ask to speak to his or her supervisor!), which is much more sincere than you unhappily trudging through a long multiple-choice online questionnaire?

Question 9: Are you aware that marketing professors tell us that these surveys can be vitally important for companies to improve their service and that employee bonuses and other incentives hinge on whether you rate their service highly or not? We’re dubious, too, but just in case it’s true … would you please tell our boss how great you think this editorial is? Use all the space you need.

We get it – some people think they are being asked to do too many surveys. At the same time, this hints at some larger issues with surveys:

1. Companies and organizations would love to have more data. This reminds me of part of the genius of Facebook – people voluntarily give up their data because they get something out of it (the chance to maintain relationships with people they know).

2. Some of these problems listed above could be fixed easily. Take #7. Salespeople can be too pushy in trying to get data.

3. Some things in #5 could be done while others listed there are harder. It should be common practice to tell survey takers how long the survey might take. But, asking about a topic multiple times is often important to see if people are consistent. This is called testing the validity of the data.

4. I think more consumers would like to receive more for participating in surveys. This could be in the form of incentives, everything from free or cheaper products or special opportunities. At the least, they don’t want to feel used or to feel like just another data point.

5. Survey fatigue is a growing problem. This makes collecting data more difficult for everyone, including academic researchers.

All together, I don’t think the quest for survey data is going to end soon because customer or consumer info is so valuable for businesses and organizations. But, approaching consumers for data can be done in better or worse ways. To get good data – not just some data – organizations need to offer consumers something worthwhile in return.