Monthly Archives: October 2013

Wheaton joins other communities in zoning medical marijuana dispensaries in manufacturing and industrial zones

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Similar to Naperville, Wheaton wants to restrict medical dispensaries to manufacturing and industrial zones, near the city’s downtown:

City council members Monday gave their preliminary approval of zoning changes that would limit any dispensing operations to the industrial and manufacturing zones immediately south and west of the city’s downtown…

“[State law] pretty much excludes all property in Wheaton from having a cultivation center. The dispensing organizations have slightly different restrictions,” said James Kozik, director of planning and economic development. “It seems to be the trend that the locations where a community is permitting them seems to be in the manufacturing or industrial area.”

The state also prohibits businesses that will dispense medical marijuana from being within 1,000 feet of the property line of a school or day care, from opening in any type of residence or residential area, and from referring patients to a physician.

Under the state statute, Kozik said, without city action, dispensing operations could also be located in the Danada shopping area, East Roosevelt Road, portions of the Wheaton College campus and portions of the DuPage County Complex along County Farm Road.

City Manager Don Rose said he believes law enforcement officials would prefer to have dispensing facilities limited to the manufacturing district. Most council members agreed.

It will be interesting to watch how this plays out in Wheaton, given the community’s conservative political and religious character, as well as in other suburban communities.

Study: white flight led to increased homeownership rates for blacks

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A new study suggests one positive outcome of white flight from American cities: more opportunities to purchase homes for blacks.

Historic data suggests, however, that the mass exodus of the white middle class from central cities had one positive result for the people left behind: Suburban white flight helped boost black homeownership in America. And the extent of the effect is striking. Economists Leah Boustan of UCLA and Robert Margo of Boston University have estimated that for every 1,000 white households that moved out of central cities for the suburbs between 1940 and 1980, about 100 black households became homeowners.

In a fascinating paper published in the Journal of Urban Economics, the researchers argue that the two trends didn’t simply occur in tandem. One directly helped cause the other. Between 1940 and 1980, a period during which Boustan and Margo examined data in 98 cities, the share of white metropolitan households in the U.S. living in the suburbs nearly doubled from 35 percent to 68 percent. Over that same time, the homeownership rate among black metropolitan households rose from 19 percent to 46 percent – a jump of 27 percentage points that had been unprecedented in American history…

By their calculation, 26 percent of the nationwide increase in black homeownership between 1940 and 1980 can be attributed to the white exodus to the suburbs. As white families left for newly created housing – following newly paved highways into the suburbs – demand (and prices) dropped for single-family homes in the city. As the cost of homeownership then declined, more blacks who had previously been renters – a group that now made up a much larger share of would-be home-buyers – were able to buy a home for the first time.

The effect was particularly strong in cities that had a large stock of existing single-family homes conducive to ownership, and in those central cities that had a relatively large black population. In New York City, for example, only 15 percent of the housing stock was owner-occupied in 1940. As a result, Boustan and Margo model that every 1,000 white household departures led to just 50 new black homeowners. But in Birmingham, Alabama, with its large black population and numerous detached single-family homes, 1,000 white departures generated 450 new black homeowners.

Interesting claims though it sounds like white flight only accounts for 26% of the rise in black homeownership. What were the other factors?

Also, this article says little about how we might reassess white flight. Does this suggest white flight was partly okay because it led to new homeownership opportunities? Even if blacks were able to purchase these homes, wasn’t it still the case that a massive amount of wealth, financial and social, left urban neighborhoods? It seems like this research could be used to highlight the paradoxes of homeownership – it isn’t a perfect good even if it is a American social ideal.

The most used subways in the world and American complaints about crowded mass transit

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Check out this list of the subways with the most riders. This is the top 10: Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing/Moscow (tied), Shanghai, Guangzhou, New York City, Mexico City, Paris, and Hong Kong. Here is how the story describes these subways:

While vital to both big-city residents and visitors, subway systems can inspire a love-hate relationship, with overcrowding blamed for much of the frustration. While we may not love riding in sardine-like train cars, we do appreciate the efficiency and even beauty of many of the world’s most popular subway stations.

I’m not sure why there is consternation about the crowded nature of these subways: are there more efficient ways to move millions of people in some of the densest areas humans have every known? If everyone could have their personal space, like in cars which Americans prefer, it becomes really hard to have cities with densities like those in the top 10. If we operate with the assumption that all humans would prefer to be in less crowded spaces if they could afford to, then this might make sense.

I wonder if such complaints in the United States about crowded mass transit betrays American sensibilities for privacy and space. While people in other countries might choose mass transit over the costs of cars (and they are expensive to operate, in addition to the space, infrastructure, and resources they require), Americans work in the opposite direction: they would prefer a car until it becomes too difficult. For example, see this discussion about getting wealthier Americans to ride buses.

One way to avoid teardown McMansions nearby: just buy all the properties yourself

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Mark Zuckerberg has a way to avoid annoying teardown McMansions next door:

Facebook chief and founder Mark Zuckerberg bought four homes adjacent to his own tony Palo Alto house to prevent a developer from building a McMansion capitalizing on being next to the creator of Facebook.

Zuckerberg paid more than $30 million for the four properties next door and behind his home, and is now leasing them back to the owners, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

The 29-year-old billionaire reportedly bought the houses to prevent a developer from building a McMansion and marketing it as “being next door to Mark Zuckerberg,” according to an unnamed source.

According to public records, the home behind Zuckerberg’s was sold last December to a legal entity affiliated with Iconiq Capital, a San Francisco company that handles Zuckerberg’s finances. Last month, two more properties behind his home and one next door were also bought by associated entities of Iconiq. One of the properties sold for $14 million.

The irony of this is that defeating teardown McMansions requires having more money than the possible property owners. Have less money and residents can often have a fight on their hands.

Another issue: who would pay more money for a home just because it is next to Mark Zuckerberg? Rather than offering opportunities to spy on Zuckerberg, I wonder if this is more of a halo effect for the neighborhood: it’s such a good neighborhood that one of the world’s best-known people live here.

Stores have cash registers, give receipts to prevent cashier theft

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Megan McArdle explains that businesses don’t have cash registers or receipts for the good of consumers; it is to prevent cashiers from taking money.

The great innovation of the National Cash Register company was to market registers not so much as adding machines but as devices for preventing theft. Here’s Walter Friedman’s “Birth of a Salesman” on how these machines were made ubiquitous:

Because of the high price of NCR cash registers, sales agents had to convince proprietors that the machine would eventually pay for itself. NCR’s early advertisements resembled the contemporary flyers of life-insurance. In both, the aim was to heighten customer fear and uncertainty. In the cash-register trade, the fear centered on stolen revenue. One of Patterson’s advertisements, proclaiming “Stop the Leaks,” depicted shop owners ruined by clerks who stole from their cash drawers. This marketing strategy posed problems for NCR, because clerks and bartenders resented the implication that a mechanical “thief-catcher” was a necessary coworker. Some even organized protective associations to keep the product out.

In instances of intense opposition by clerks to newly installed registers, Patterson sent detectives to supervise the machine’s operation. NCR for June 1888 printed a letter from a merchant in Detroit whose store had been watched by an NCR-hired detective. “Your operative’s report relative to my man not registering is at hand. I was very much surprised, as it caught a man, above all others, I have relied upon, not only in the bar but in other matters in the house.”That’s why cash registers ring loudly when the cash drawer opens — so that a clerk with decent mental arithmetic skills can’t pretend to register your sale and then pocket the cash. And that’s why you get a physical receipt — so that the clerk can’t ring up part of your sale, and then siphon the rest into his own pocket.

In other words, NCR helped create the market for their goods by playing up certain fears. Friedman’s link to life insurance is an interesting one; sociologist Viviana Zelizer has written about how life insurance was once viewed as morbid but came to be viewed in the 1800s as a necessary provision for one’s family. This is like the cash register as the good businessperson has to have a cash register. It also sets up an interesting new source of alienation between companies and workers: the basic retail employee can’t be trusted with money.

One reason to look at the social history of products is to note how they are not objects humans inherently need. They are social constructions.

Would you rather have been a European or Native American in 1491?

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A 2002 article from The Atlantic about pre-Columbian North and South America includes this fascinating paragraph:

I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would rather have been a typical Indian or a typical European in 1491. None was delighted by the question, because it required judging the past by the standards of today—a fallacy disparaged as “presentism” by social scientists. But every one chose to be an Indian. Some early colonists gave the same answer. Horrifying the leaders of Jamestown and Plymouth, scores of English ran off to live with the Indians. My ancestor shared their desire, which is what led to the trumped-up murder charges against him—or that’s what my grandfather told me, anyway.

Some of reasons for making this choice:

Back home in the Americas, Indian agriculture long sustained some of the world’s largest cities. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán dazzled Hernán Cortés in 1519; it was bigger than Paris, Europe’s greatest metropolis. The Spaniards gawped like hayseeds at the wide streets, ornately carved buildings, and markets bright with goods from hundreds of miles away. They had never before seen a city with botanical gardens, for the excellent reason that none existed in Europe. The same novelty attended the force of a thousand men that kept the crowded streets immaculate. (Streets that weren’t ankle-deep in sewage! The conquistadors had never heard of such a thing.) Central America was not the only locus of prosperity. Thousands of miles north, John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, visited Massachusetts in 1614, before it was emptied by disease, and declared that the land was “so planted with Gardens and Corne fields, and so well inhabited with a goodly, strong and well proportioned people … [that] I would rather live here than any where.”

Smith was promoting colonization, and so had reason to exaggerate. But he also knew the hunger, sickness, and oppression of European life. France—”by any standards a privileged country,” according to its great historian, Fernand Braudel—experienced seven nationwide famines in the fifteenth century and thirteen in the sixteenth. Disease was hunger’s constant companion. During epidemics in London the dead were heaped onto carts “like common dung” (the simile is Daniel Defoe’s) and trundled through the streets. The infant death rate in London orphanages, according to one contemporary source, was 88 percent. Governments were harsh, the rule of law arbitrary. The gibbets poking up in the background of so many old paintings were, Braudel observed, “merely a realistic detail.”

The Earth Shall Weep, James Wilson’s history of Indian America, puts the comparison bluntly: “the western hemisphere was larger, richer, and more populous than Europe.” Much of it was freer, too. Europeans, accustomed to the serfdom that thrived from Naples to the Baltic Sea, were puzzled and alarmed by the democratic spirit and respect for human rights in many Indian societies, especially those in North America. In theory, the sachems of New England Indian groups were absolute monarchs. In practice, the colonial leader Roger Williams wrote, “they will not conclude of ought … unto which the people are averse.”

Much to take in.

Bankrate.com asks “What is a McMansion?”

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Bankrate.com defines financial terms and recently look at the term McMansion:

The Bankrate.com financial term of the day is: “McMansion”

“McMansion” is a disparaging term used to describe homes that are oversized and opulent, but also without a whole lot of uniqueness. McMansions are loosely defined as houses between 5,000 and 10,000 square feet with soaring, grandiose entryways and multicar garages, often shoehorned onto relatively small lots.

McMansions are giant homes that have sprouted up in the suburbs the way fast-food restaurants have — hence the name.

Three features of this definition stand out: (1) marking the term as a disparaging one – it is rarely used positively and can be used effectively when criticizing others; (2) it highlights their mass-produced nature (not very unique, sprouted up); and (3) sets some square footage limits so that McMansions are larger than most American homes but don’t run into mansion territory. Several other parts of the definition, including common design features and small lots, may be common but are not part of all McMansions. However, the video is disappointing. I was hoping for some classic images of McMansions…

I also wonder if this is Bankrate’s definition of a McMansion as Americans see them or as a financial publisher? Here is a little bit about Bankrate.com:

We at Bankrate, Inc. have over three decades’ experience in financial publishing. Bankrate was born in 1976 as “Bank Rate Monitor,” a print publisher for the banking industry…

Today, Bankrate, Inc. is the Web’s leading aggregator of financial rate information, offering an unparalleled depth and breadth of rate data and financial content. Bankrate continually surveys approximately 4,800 financial institutions in all 50 states in order to provide clear, objective, and unbiased rates to consumers. Our flagship Web site, Bankrate.com, provides free rate information to consumers on more than 300 financial products, including mortgages, credit cards, new and used automobile loans, money market accounts, certificates of deposit, checking and ATM fees, home equity loans and online banking fees.

In addition to rate data, we publish original and objective personal finance stories to help consumers make informed financial decisions.

What exactly does Bankrate think about McMansions?

 

Determining whether concrete buildings in LA are endangered by earthquakes

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The Los Angeles Times looks at a number of concrete buildings in LA that could be at serious risk in an earthquake:

Despite their sturdy appearance, many older concrete buildings are vulnerable to the sideways movement of a major earthquake because they don’t have enough steel reinforcing bars to hold columns in place.

Los Angeles officials have known about the dangers for more than 40 years but have failed to force owners to make their properties safer. The city has even rejected calls to make a list of concrete buildings.

In the absence of city action, university scientists compiled the first comprehensive inventory of potentially dangerous concrete buildings in Los Angeles.

The scientists, however, have declined to make the information public. They said they are willing to share it with L.A. officials, but only if the city requests a copy. The city has not done so, the scientists said.

Pretty interesting look at how concrete buildings can be built to withstand earthquakes. The key issue here seems to be retrofitting: should it be required and if so, how much would property owners complain about the cost? As the article notes:

Earthquake safety has rarely been an issue that draws deep public passions and outrage. Most seismic regulations are approved in the wake of destructive earthquakes, but there hasn’t been one in California in nearly 20 years.

In other words, occasional disasters allows room for complacency. When the events are rare, people will question whether the money should be better spent elsewhere. This is part of the debate over other disasters as well like: how should buildings in Tornado Alley be constructed if tornadoes might occur? Should New York be protected from hurricanes and rising water levels by constructing gates and barriers? How much should be spent on levees in New Orleans to avoid situations like that after Hurricane Katrina?

When Dominick’s stores close, suburbs lose tax dollars, gathering places

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Amidst the news stories detailing the closing of Dominick’s stores in the Chicago area, one article highlights its effects on suburban communities:

Bruce Evensen, a DePaul University journalism professor, compared the news with the closing of Marshall Field’s in 2006. He said he has been a longtime Dominick’s shopper after living in the Arlington Heights and Mount Prospect area for the past 20 years.

“It’s a sad day,” said Evensen, 62. “To see it close is not just the closing of a store but the closing of an experience. After years of checking out, you get to know the staff, their families and their dreams. It’s the ending of that part of their lives.”…

Naperville City Manager Doug Krieger called the stores significant sales tax contributors, and expressed hope that new tenants would fill the locations.

Michael Cassa, president of the Downers Grove Economic Development Corp., said that it’s too early to know the potential effect, but the village’s only Dominick’s sits in a busy commercial complex along the main business corridor.

There are two arguments as to how closed stores will affect suburbs:

1. They will lose out on tax dollars. Grocery stores are the sort of businesses that have regular consumers – we all have to eat. Additionally, it can be hard to refill big box stores that close down. New businesses might want to construct new buildings and it would be hard for a single large company to take over all of the closed stores. That means individual suburbs will have to try to attract new businesses into large buildings.

2. In suburbs which are marked by fragmentation and more home-centered social life, persistent social institutions are limited. Local schools and religious congregations help fill that void but grocery stores could also play that role. Again, since people have to eat, customers are likely to be in and out regularly. They may even be there enough to know a lot of the details about the store as well as get to know employees and fellow customers. Interestingly, the same claims are rarely made about Walmarts or Targets – but perhaps similar arguments will be made in the future once these stores have been in communities for decades.

It is interesting to watch the sadness over Dominick’s closing. There are certainly lots of workers affected and it is unclear where they will all end up. However, this cycle of corporate merging and sell-offs seems fairly normal to me. Perhaps that is because I grew up in the Chicago area going to other grocery stores. Or perhaps it is because I’m used to our times where companies are viewed less as community institutions and more of places providing services that could be here one year and not the next.