Monthly Archives: December 2013

It may be a really ugly house but is there such a thing as a 1956 McMansion?

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I’ve seen pictures of this large Indianapolis house before but here the suggestion is that it may be the ugliest house in America. It is quite unconventional, but I’m more interested in another suggestion: that this is a 1956 McMansion.

Designers with delicate sensibilities, look away. This may be the most hideous McMansion in America. Built in 1956, this is “almost-famous pimp-turned-construction mini-magnate” Jerry A. Hostetler’s Indianapolis Hearst Castle. Minus the architectural prowess. Plus more balconies.

Although the term McMansion didn’t really emerge until the late 1990s, it is sometimes applied to past eras. I usually think this doesn’t work that well because it involves applying modern standards to past styles. In the 1950s, I think this house would have simply been considered a mansion because of its size. The average new house size in the 1950s was roughly 1,000 feet so a home like this would have been quite large. Additionally, the home was built by a successful businessman, someone who would have the means to construct what he wanted, and was not built for the mass market.

The more unusual homes of the 1950s might have been some of the new modern glass and steel homes that some architects built. The mass produced, large, poor quality McMansions of the late 20th century didn’t really exist yet as mass market housing still tended to be quite small.

Who can predict job growth by sector in the next 10 years if the BLS can’t?

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Derek Thompson points out that 2002 predictions by the Bureau of Labor Statistics about job growth by sector for the next ten years turned out to be quite wrong:

What did BLS get right? At least two things: the unstoppable growth in health-care jobs (which it expects to continue) and the steady growth in leisure and hospitality.

What did it miss? Everything else, in particular (a) the boom in mining, led by the natural-gas revolution, (b) the utter collapse of the publishing industry, and (c) the Great Recession, which wiped out half-a-decade of economic growth. BLS thought we’d create 20 million non-farm jobs last decade. We created about six million. That’s a 13-million-job gap. 

Essentially, the BLS failed to anticipate the real-world surprises, which is another way of saying it is not psychic. It extrapolated the recent past (health care was expanding, housing was booming, the economy was recovering from a mild recession), baked in global and demographic trends, and voila, put out a plausible projection of the next ten years. This is a perfectly sensible way to predict the future. But then the real world intervened.

This isn’t supposed to be a post about how the BLS forecasting models are bad. It’s supposed to be a post about how predicting the future is impossible, even though predictions play a starring role in discussions about finance and government.

I think Thompson draws the right conclusions here: it isn’t necessarily about jobs but more about the difficulties governments and other organizations have in predicting even ten years into the future. The world is a complex place and this should push us to think about what we can know moving forward. This would be a great point to inject the writings of Nassim Taleb who has argued in several books that this is a huge problem: there are plenty of people, like on Wall Street or in Washington, who think the future is clear enough to risk a lot. Granted, the BLS isn’t going to lose much if their predictions are wrong but it could have a big effect on others. One example: students looking at what majors to select. In recent years, there are more and more articles that talk about the job fields expected to grow in the future. The argument is that students need to make sure they study for employable careers, particularly with rising college costs. But, they may pick a college or a major based on predictions that aren’t necessarily correct. Perhaps this lack of predictive ability is a good argument for liberal arts schools.

Knowing the difficulties of making long-term predictions, what can the average citizen do? Taleb would suggest hedging our bets, perhaps risking some when the negative effects won’t be that bad. (Taleb lays out this investing strategy in Antifragile: put a good amount of money in safe investments and then risk some in places where the payoff could be huge but you aren’t going to lose much if it doesn’t pan out.)

Limited social mobility: 70% of those born in bottom quintile of income don’t reach the middle

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Social mobility up from the bottom is relatively limited in the United States:

The most exhaustive of these reports is Pew Charitable Trust’s Economic Mobility Project. Since 2006, the public policy organization has studied such movement up and down the socioeconomic ladder, focusing on just how much better or worse adult children are faring in terms of family income and wealth than their parents at the same age.

For the last 35 years, the news has not been good, researchers said, with the inequality gap growing ever wider. Some 43 percent of Americans raised in the bottom quintile remain stuck at the bottom as adults, with household income of less than $28,900 a year. An additional 27 percent have bumped up just one rung, earning less than $44,000 annually. Consequently, a total of 70 percent never reach the middle, the study found.

More and more, the life chances of a child are dependent on the education and income of his parents. The study found that having a college degree, being part of a dual-earning couple and building up savings and home equity were key qualities in climbing the economic ladder.

Even those who have managed to increase their earnings compared with their parents have lost ground, relative to everyone else. Only 4 percent who start in the bottom make it to the top. Access to opportunities is actually better in Scandinavia and western Europe than in the country that invented the Horatio Alger story, experts said.

So while 30% are able to move from the bottom quintile to the middle, the majority do not. Yet, the narrative in the United States is that everyone can make this move, particularly if they work hard and take advantage of the opportunities available to them.

Natural gas bus commercial misses that riding the bus is already helping the environment

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This commercial from America’s Natural Gas Alliance highlights natural gas buses in Los Angeles. The message is that the natural gas buses are better for the environment. They may be – but it misses the point that individuals using mass transit are already helping the environment (let alone traffic congestion). So having a natural gas bus is a bonus. Perhaps we would all be better off if more people were willing to ride any kind of bus in the first place.

However, given that it is difficult to get wealthier people to ride buses, we should then ask when we might have cars powered by natural gas. If natural gas is cleaner to burn, why not reduce the emissions from cars rather than focusing on the limited number of Americans who regularly ride the bus?

(I realize the natural gas buses may just be a marketing ploy. However, it is really about helping the environment, not good PR or trying to sell more natural gas, why not use natural gas to power more things?)

Are micro-apartments bad for your health?

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Micro-apartments might be a popular idea these days but some experts suggest they might be bad for the health of certain groups:

“Sure, these micro-apartments may be fantastic for young professionals in their 20’s,” says Dak Kopec, director of design for human health at Boston Architectural College and author of Environmental Psychology for Design. “But they definitely can be unhealthy for older people , say in their 30’s and 40’s, who face different stress factors that can make tight living conditions a problem.”

Home is supposed to be a safe haven, and a resident with a demanding job may feel trapped in a claustrophobic apartment at night—forced to choose between the physical crowding of furniture and belongings in his unit, and social crowding, caused by other residents, in the building’s common spaces. Research, Kopec says, has shown that crowding-related stress can increase rates of domestic violence and substance abuse…

Susan Saegert, professor of environmental psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center and director of the Housing Environments Research Group, agrees that the micro-apartments will likely be a welcome choice for young New Yorkers who would probably otherwise share cramped space with friends. But she warns that tiny living conditions can be terrible for other residents—particularly if a couple or a parent and child squeeze into 300 square feet for the long term, no matter how well a unit is designed…

“When we think about micro-living, we have a tendency to focus on functional things, like is there enough room for the fridge,” explained University of Texas psychology professor Samuel Gosling, who studies the connection between people and their possessions “But an apartment has to fill other psychological needs as well, such as self-expression and relaxation, that might not be as easily met in a highly cramped space.”

While this is largely framed in terms of negative consequences for mental health, it strikes me that a lot of these concerns are built around social expectations about private space. In modern America, people expect a certain amount of space, whether in public or at home. This reminds me of the findings in Going Solo where more and more Americans want home spaces where they can get away from relationships. But, just how much space do they need? Is the ability to handle small spaces proportional to the space in an average new house (around 2,500 square feet in the United States) or to the large living spaces usually portrayed on TV?

It seems like there should be comparative data from other countries. For examples, some European countries as well as Japan have had smaller spaces for decades. Do they have higher rates of stress and other negative outcomes?

What a sociologist learned about giving Christmas gifts from Middletown

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Middletown (Muncie, Indiana) holds a special place in American sociology though the findings of two 1970s studies (ASR and AJS) about giving Christmas gifts based on the community are not as well known. Here are a few selections from the two articles:

“The 110 respondents in the sample gave 2,969 gifts and received 1,378 gifts, a mean of 27 given and 13 received. Participants in this gift system should give (individually or jointly) at least one Christmas gift every year to their mothers, fathers, sons, daughters; to the current spouses of these persons; and to their own spouses. By the operation of this rule, participants expect to receive at least one gift in return from each of these persons excepting infants…Gifts to grandparents and grandchildren seem to be equally obligatory if these live in the same community or nearby, but not at greater distances. Christmas gifts to siblings are not required.

Parents expect to give more valuable and more numerous gifts to their minor children and to their adult children living at home than they receive in return. This imbalance is central to the entire ritual. The iconography of Middletown’s secular Christmas emphasizes unreciprocated giving to children by the emblematic figure of Santa Claus, and the theme of unreciprocated giving provides one of the few connections between the secular and religious iconography of the festival-the Three Wise Men coming from a distant land to bring unreciprocated gifts to a child.”…

“Most of Middletown’s gift giving occurs between close kin…the pattern it displays shows up the two principal points of stress in the contemporary American family. The first point of stress is the insecurity of the spousal relationship. Viewed cross-culturally, the contemporary American family is unusual in exhibiting a very high level of interaction between spouses while permitting easy, almost penalty-free divorce at the initiative of either spouse at any point in the life cycle. Since divorce is always more than a remote possibility in a Middletown marriage, the relationship with affinal relatives [in-laws] is always a little uneasy.

The individual message [of a gift] says, “I value you according to the degree of our relationship” and anticipates the response, “I value you in the same way.” But the compound message that emerges from the unwrapping of gifts in the presence of the whole gathering allows more subtle meanings to be conveyed. It permits the husband to say to the wife, “I value you more than my parents” or the mother to say to the daughter-in-law, “I value you as much as my son so long as you are married to him” or the brother to say to the brother, “I value you more than our absent brothers, but less than our parents and much less than my children.” These statements, taken together, would define and sustain a social structure, if only because, by their gift messages, both parties to each dyadic relationship confirm that they have the same understanding of the relationship and the bystanders, who are interested parties, endorse that understanding by tacit approval.”

This is not the first time the media has discussed these studies but I do give credit for actually let the sociological studies speak for themselves. However, there should be a demerit for titling the web page “Christmas gift exchange: The anthropological rules beneath it.” This is based on sociological studies – these disciplines are not the same thing!

I suppose this could be a case where someone would read this and say this is all obvious. Isn’t sociology just common sense? Yet, even these small excerpts reveal some interesting findings. Physical distance matters, particularly when you get beyond the nuclear family. Additionally, Caplow notes that gift-giving between spouses is laden with meaning that can either support or undermine a marriage. While I suspect the kinds of gifts exchanged in the late 1970s might have shifted today, Caplow found money could generally be given one-way from older family members to younger family members, but not in reverse.

Considering all the hoopla surrounding Christmas in the United States and elsewhere around the world, it is a little surprising more sociologists don’t study Christmas behaviors and patterns…

Gallup to start surveying college graduates to find if their college degree led to “a great life”

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Gallup is working on a new initiative to measure a wider range of life outcomes for college graduates:

As the old saying goes, money can’t buy happiness. And yet, in measuring alumni success and satisfaction, colleges – often prodded by those seeking to hold them accountable – typically look at two things: whether their former students are gainfully employed, and whether they’re making a decent salary.

A new project announced today, led by Gallup and debuting at Purdue University, aims to change that. Focusing on a set of factors that are shown to correlate with “a great life,” the survey of 30,000 graduates annually will provide data on how alumni of groups of colleges (public or private institutions in certain states, for instance, or athletic conferences) are faring and how they compare to national averages. The final product will be a benchmark for student success against which any campus can measure its own graduates, if it works with Gallup individually…

The survey’s line of questioning goes beyond job placement and salary, also inquiring about work place and community engagement, personal relationships, physical fitness, sense of purpose and happiness, and economic management and stress…

“No one is going to suggest that colleges and universities are responsible for 100 percent of your great job and great life,” Busteed admitted, “but obviously, if you go to college and you get a degree, the odds are you increase the probability of having a good outcome.”

Given the arguments about the cost of college, I’m not surprised efforts like this are quickly moving forward. And, as the article notes, there are lots of methodological questions in play: what exactly is “a great life”? How many years after college should people be asked these questions? How can the effects of college be separated out from other life experiences (though people’s perceptions about whether college mattered is important as well)?

At the same time, I’m not opposed to trying to get at these life outcomes after college. Colleges often make the argument they improve the lives of their graduates from earning more to training for careers to giving students room to start living to critical thinking to a broader understanding of the world. Is some of the concern about measuring these things that colleges might not be able to live up to lofty claims? For example, given the findings of Academically Adrift from a few years ago, not all college students are benefiting. Once findings start trickling out, it will then be imperative to see what gets counted as “success” for colleges.

Experts suggest Illinois has no chance of landing Boeing plant

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The State of Illinois may be putting on a hopeful face but experts suggest Illinois has little to no chance of enticing Boeing to open a new plant in the state:

But Richard Aboulafia, a longtime aircraft industry analyst, is among industry watchers who don’t believe Illinois has a chance.

“Zero, zilch, nada. Worst (possible location) I’ve heard yet, apologies to Illinois,” he said.

The state, he said, has almost no aerospace production or workforce with industry experience and has a heavy, strong union presence unlikely to appeal to Boeing as it goes through tense labor negotiations in Washington.

Illinois is also short on several requirements Boeing wants any new home to provide, aerospace industry consultant Scott Hamilton of Leeham Co. said…

Those requirements include a site adjacent to a “major international airport,” one with a runway at least 9,000 feet long, according to a copy of the company’s site selection criteria obtained by The Associated Press…

The area around O’Hare has almost no available land, said Brent Pollina, vice president of Pollina Corporate Real Estate in suburban Chicago.

Boeing also wants 300-400 acres of land “at no cost, or very low cost,” and buildings totaling several million square feet under the same or similar terms.

Without offering details, the company says it would like its corporate income tax, property tax and other taxes to be “significantly reduced.”

While Boeing is asking a lot (leading to a very good question of how much states or local governments should give up to entice companies), it doesn’t sound like Illinois has much to offer for this new plant. In a global age, the headquarters of Boeing may be in Chicago but that doesn’t mean a new plant has to be anywhere near it.

This offer to Boeing should also lead to broader conversations about what Illinois does offer, not including tax breaks and financial deals, compared to other states. Chicago and the surrounding region is likely the biggest asset with a global city (particularly financially), plenty of educated employees, other important companies and organizations, and a central location in the United States with the necessary transportation infrastructure (airports, railroads, highways, and water access). Illinois has lots of space outside the Chicago area and some rich farmland. The whole state is centrally located and has access both to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. But, is Illinois perceived as good for business? How do its assets line up with those of other states?

From studying San Diego, five features cities need to grow

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A new study of San Diego’s development suggests five factors that lead to city growth:

According to Walshok and Shragge, five major characteristics of civic culture are necessary to move forward:

1) A risk-oriented culture adept at managing uncertainty. A central feature of San Diego’s experimental history and prevalence of small industries is a civic culture and business community that embraces risk.
2) Entrepreneurial talent: Civic leaders, scientists, business professional. San Diego’s long history of creating opportunities for people who want to challenge the status quo or create something new has resulted in an unusually large aggregation of entrepreneurial civic, business, and scientific leaders.
3) Integrative civic platforms. San Diego’s civic culture is highly inclusive, cross-functional and interdisciplinary. Institutions that span the boundaries between communities of ideas and practice have proliferated; in many other regions such entities continue to be siloed.
4) Multiple gateways through which ideas and opportunities can be developed. There is no one Establishment, Inc., in San Diego. There are actually many centers of gravity vis-a-vis leadership and access to resources. San Diego is characterized by an open innovation environment that allows people to easily move among social groups and within hierarchies.
5) A culture of reinvestment: Time and money. The absence of multinational corporations until recently, the century-long reliance on the federal government as a key customer, and the lack of accumulated family wealth have required a civic culture characterized by people investing significant amounts of personal time and resources to achieve civic goals. This is enhanced by the fact that those who come to San Diego stay because of their attachment to the place.

Sounds interesting for two reasons:

1. This sounds like a combination of the creative class bringing in new talent, ideas, and business and a committed growth machine of business and civic leaders. If this works in San Diego, the next question to ask is whether this particular combination and set of circumstances is generalizable to other cities.

2. San Diego doesn’t get much attention in urban sociology. Although it has the 8th largest population in the United States (and 17th largest metropolitan area), it is dwarfed by nearby Los Angeles, is all the way at the corner of the country, and doesn’t stand out for any particular reason outside of fantastic weather.

We had a chance to spend a few days in San Diego a few years ago and enjoyed some of the sights including the San Diego Zoo, Sea World, and the USS Midway. Here is the view toward the city from the deck of the USS Midway:

SanDiegoFromUSSMidway

We enjoyed our visit though it required a lot of driving around.

New tool from HUD to estimate combined commuting and housing costs

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Opponents of sprawl argue too many people buy cheaper homes further from the city without considering the added transportation costs. Here is a new tool to help address this issue:

More than 3 in 4 home buyers polled in the National Assn. of Realtors’ latest Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers said commuting costs are either “very” or “somewhat” important to their ultimate purchase decisions. After all, the combined cost of housing and transportation consumes close to half of the typical working family’s monthly budget…

The Location Affordability Portal from the Housing and Urban Development Department and Transportation Department enables users to estimate the combined housing and transportation costs for a specific region, neighborhood and even street.

LAP is actually two tools: one, a map-based Location Affordability Index, is a database that predicts annual housing and transportation costs for a particular area. The other, My Transportation Cost Calculator, enables users to customize data for their own household and potential residential locations.

LAP includes diverse household profiles — which vary by income, size and number of commuters — and shows the affordability landscape for each one across an entire region. It was designed to help renters and homeowners — plus planners, policymakers, developers and researchers — get a more complete understanding of the costs of living in a location given the differences between households, neighborhoods and regions, all of which affect affordability. The data covers 94% of the U.S. population.

Use the tool here. Some good info here. I plugged in some quick numbers of our housing and transportation costs and the yearly transportation costs were about 57% of annual housing costs. Driving, even with commutes that aren’t that far, add up quickly. Here is what the Location Affordability Index looks like for much of the Chicago region:

LocationAffordabilityPortalChicagoArea2

On this map with combined housing and transportation costs, I feel like you can quickly see places where the housing is more expensive (some places on the North Shore) and other places where transportation costs are higher (and where there may be fewer jobs – Will County, western DuPage County).

The idea here is that more people need more information about commuting costs when making housing decisions. If they had the commuting costs, they would choose differently. For how many people would this be true? I suspect some Americans would place more emphasis on a cheaper house, even if the commuting costs are higher. In other words, these aren’t equal considerations when Americans, particularly of certain incomes, have to make a choice.