Monthly Archives: June 2014

Low-income women evicted more often than men partly because of gender dynamics with landlords

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A recent analysis of evictions in Milwaukee shows the gender of a landlord and a tenant influences who is more likely to be evicted:

It’s an all-too-common story. Low-income women are evicted at much higher rates than men. The reasons are varied, including lower wages and children, but one rarely discussed reason is the gender dynamics between largely male landlords and female tenants…

But the interactions between predominantly male landlords and female tenants is also a culprit, and it often turns on gender dynamics. Men who fall behind on rent, for example, often went directly to the landlord. When Jerry was served an eviction notice, he promptly balled up and threw it in the face of his landlord. The two commenced yelling at each other until Jerry stomped back to his trailer.

Meanwhile, Larraine, who had also been served notice, recoiled from conflict. “I couldn’t deal with it. I was terrified by it, just terrified,” she told the researcher. After Jerry calmed down, he returned and offered to work off his rent by cleaning up the trailer park and doing some maintenance work, something men often offer to do, I found. The landlord accepted his offer. The outcome for Larraine was different. After avoiding her landlord, she would eventually come up with the rent, borrowing from her brother. But by that time, her landlord had had enough. He felt that Lorraine had taken advantage of him. In keeping with women’s generally non-confrontational approach, Larraine, like many other women renters facing eviction, engaged in “ducking and dodging” landlords often put it.

This dynamic has long-term implications. An eviction record can make it extremely difficult for them to find housing again. Evictions can ban a person from affordable housing programs. And many landlords will not rent to someone who’s been evicted. As they like to say, “I’ll rent to you as long as you don’t have an eviction or a conviction.” These twinned processes—eviction and conviction—work together to propagate economic disadvantage in the inner city.

This sounds like a confluence of race, class, gender. Being non-white and having a lower income leads to fewer housing opportunities and then gender compounds the particulars of interacting with male landlords. The difficulty in finding decent affordable housing then affects what neighborhoods people can live in, influencing social networks, collective efficacy, exposure to violence and crime, differences in educational systems, and access to economic opportunities.

Desmond’s brief report suggests the best solution is to help avoid evictions:

The most important policy solution, however, would be to ensure that low-income families do not end up in eviction court in the first place. Stopgap measures that provide emergency funds for families in a jam – those who have lost a job, experienced a family death, or suffered a medical emergency – could help thousands stay in their homes…

More fundamentally, making housing more affordable could prevent many evictions.

A tough issue to address in a country that tends to accept residential segregation as well as the prevalence of market forces in the housing industry.

The need for “the endangered art of ethnography”

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To highlight a new award for ethnography, a British sociologist explains what ethnography brings to the table:

Day after day, we are bombarded with survey evidence about the lives and the times of our fellow citizens. This, we are told, is how the unemployed regard benefit fraud, how the Scottish middle class react to the idea of independence, what black youths feel about the police’s use of stop and search. But much of this evidence is collected over a short period of time by professional pollsters who have little sense of the context in which they ask their tick-box questions.

Ethnography is a necessary supplement and often an important antidote to this form of research. It takes time: several of the researchers on our shortlist, for example, had spent two to three years studying, and often living within, a specific culture or subculture. It also allows questions to arise during the course of the research rather than being pre-programmed. So when Howard Parker embarked on his classic ethnographic study of delinquent youth in Liverpool (View from the Boys: A Sociology of Downtown Adolescents, 1974), he was faced by the official assumption that the young people in his sample were persistent offenders, hardened and even dangerous delinquents. Only after two years of hanging around with the boys was Parker able to conclude that this was far from the case. The boys’ offending was “mundane, trivial, petty, occasional, and very little of a threat to anyone except themselves”.

In a very similar manner, Heidi Hoefinger’s Sex, Love and Money in Cambodia: Professional Girlfriends and Transactional Relationships (2013), one of the studies shortlisted for the award, began from the common belief that encounters in the so-called “sex bars” of Cambodia would be entirely cash-based and essentially sleazy. Only after spending long periods of time talking to the women who worked in the bars and their male clients was she able to show that the relationships fashioned in the bars also had an important emotional component. Another stereotype had been exploded…

But the award is not only an affirmation of the significance of ethnography. What also prompted the five-year agreement between the BBC and the BSA was a wish to recognise the personal qualities that are needed in someone who is prepared to leave their family and friends to spend extended periods of time in a culture that will be uncomfortable, alien and, at times, downright dangerous. We all happily dip into different cultures: watch the skateboarders going through their paces under the Royal Festival Hall, check out the street style of the Rastas at the Notting Hill Carnival, wander through Chinatown during the New Year celebrations. But this is a far cry from suspending our own cherished values and embracing those of others for months and even years.

I wonder if ethnography gets less attention these days because we live in an era where:

1. We want research results more quickly. In comparison, surveys can be quickly administered and analyzed.

2. The big data of today allows for broad understandings and patterns. Ethnographies tend to be more particular.

3. We like “scientific” data that appears more readily available in surveys and experiments. Ethnographies appear more dependent on the researcher and subjective as opposed to “scientific.”

At the same time, there are other social forces that would promote ethnographies including more humane and holistic understandings of the world (particularly compared to the sterility of multiple-choice questions and quick numbers) as well as needing more time to study complex social phenomena.

The historical emergence of the category Hispanic in the United States

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A sociologist with a new book titled Making Hispanics discusses how the category came about:

How did this movement start?

It was the activists who first went to the Census Bureau and said, ‘You have got to create a category. You have got to distinguish us from whites.’ Up until that time, the Census Bureau mainly grouped Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans and Cubans in the same category as Irish and Italian, and that became a real problem because it couldn’t show the government the poverty rates between Mexicans and whites. There was pushback on how large and how broad the category could be, but ultimately, a Hispanic category was established.

How was the category sold to Latin Americans?

The Census Bureau asked activists and the Spanish-language media to promote the category. The media created documentaries and commercials. There was even a Telethon where people called in, and were encouraged to identify as Hispanic on the Census form. We can see why the media executives were so happy and so quick to help the Census Bureau because, later on, it became in their interests to help grow that cooperation.

Why was that?

Until that time, Spanish-language media executives had been creating separate television stations and programming for Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans and Cubans. Suddenly they were able to start using some of this broad Census data and go to advertisers like McDonald’s and Coca Cola and say, ‘Look, we’re a national Hispanic community and our consumer needs are different so invest in us and we will get you Hispanic consumer dollars.’ With that strategy, they were able to connect stations across the country, and over time, create a Spanish-language McDonald’s commercial that could broadcast to a national audience…

Weren’t there enough Mexican Americans to warrant their own category?

In the 1970s, this was fine if you wanted to capture the California governor’s attention, but it wasn’t enough for capturing President Nixon or President Ford’s attention, and it certainly wasn’t enough for capturing the attention of East Coast politicians because many of them had never even met a Mexican. But when activists were able to cite the number of Cubans in Florida, Puerto Ricans in New York, Salvadorans in DC and Mexicans in the Southwest, and when they were able to argue that these groups were all connected and were all in need of resources for job training programs and bilingual education, then they were onto something. It was only then that activists could get federal attention – by making Latin American groups seem like part of a national constituency.

Interesting blend of an emerging presence in the United States, developing Census definitions, and new marketing and media opportunities. This is another reminder of the fluidity of racial and ethnic categories in the United States and the various influences shaping those categories.

Chicago to collect big data via light pole sensors

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Chicago is hoping to collect all sorts of information via a new system of sensors along main streets:

The smooth, perforated sheaths of metal are decorative, but their job is to protect and conceal a system of data-collection sensors that will measure air quality, light intensity, sound volume, heat, precipitation, and wind. The sensors will also count people by observing cell phone traffic…

While data-hungry researchers are unabashedly enthusiastic about the project, some experts said that the system’s flexibility and planned partnerships with industry beg to be closely monitored. Questions include whether the sensors are gathering too much personal information about people who may be passing by without giving a second thought to the amount of data that their movements—and the signals from their smartphones—may be giving off.

The first sensor could be in place by mid-July. Researchers hope to start with sensors at eight Michigan Avenue intersections, followed by dozens more around the Loop by year’s end and hundreds more across the city in years to come as the project expands into neighborhoods, Catlett said…

While the benefits of collecting and analyzing giant sets of data from cities are somewhat speculative, there is a growing desire from academic and industrial researchers to have access to the data, said Gary King, director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences at Harvard University.

The sort of data collected here could be quite fascinating, even with the privacy concerns. I wonder if a way around this is for the city to make clear now and down the road how exactly they will use the data to improve the city. To some degree, this may not be possible because this is a new source of data collection and it is not entirely known what might emerge. Yet, collecting big data can be an opaque process that worries some because they are rarely told how the data improves their lives. If this simply is another source of data that the city doesn’t use or uses behind the scenes, is it worth it?

A quick hypothetical. Let’s say the air sensors along Michigan Avenue, one of Chicago prime tourist spots, shows a heavy amount of car exhaust. In response to the data, the city announces a plan to limit congestion on Michigan Avenue or to have clean mass transit. This could be a clear demonstration that the big data helped improve the pedestrian experience.

But, I could also imagine that in a year or two the city hasn’t said much about this data and people are unclear what is collected and what happens to it. More transparency and clear action steps could go a long way here.

Study tracking Baltimore kids with hundreds of interviews over 20 years shows rising out of poverty is hard

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A recently published long-term study of Baltimore kids shows that escaping poverty is a difficult task:

First, its impressive length and scope; Alexander and his colleague, Doris Entwisle, devoted their careers to the project, conducting interviews of 790 children and their relatives over more than two decades. Alexander retires this summer as chair of the Hopkins sociology department; Entwisle died last year of cancer. (Linda Olson, a Hopkins instructor and researcher in the School of Education, is the third author of the report, published this month by the Russell Sage Foundation as a book titled “The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood.”)…

Only 4 percent of the children from low-income families ended up with a college degree by the time they were 28. Kids from a middle-class or affluent background did 10 times better than that, with 45 percent getting a diploma.

Nearly half of the 1982 first-graders ended up at the same socioeconomic level as their parents.

By the time they were young adults, only 33 children had moved from low-income families to the high-income bracket. That doesn’t mean they didn’t want to, Alexander told me. It means they faced too many obstacles.

Stories of rising from humble origins may be popular but they are not the common pattern. Indeed, such rags-to-riches examples tend to be based on anecdotes while a project like this highlights large-scale interview data.

Bad suburban architecture that can give you acne

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The BBC TV show Orphan Black features a character who makes occasional humorous observations about the suburbs. Here is one of Felix’s quotes about suburbia from Season One courtesy of a recap:

It’s nine o’clock and Sarah pulls up to Alison’s house as Fee moans in the seat beside her. “You know I would never have gotten in if you said we were going to Suburbia.” He freaks out as she stops the car. “Don’t stop! Someone might speak to us!” Heh. Sarah peers out the window at Alison’s house. Fee frantically checks his complexion in the visor mirror. “You know, my skin just breaks out every time I leave downtown.” He demands Sarah look at his newly developed acne. “Right there! Tiny little suburban stress zits emerging in direct proximity to bad architecture.”

Felix is the classic antithesis of a suburbanite: gay bohemian artist who lives in a loft in a seedy-looking building. He sees suburbia as a bland place of conformity, a place that stifles creativity. This is illustrated by Fee’s quote above: the architecture of single-family home squeezed next to single-family home leads to acne.

Humorous quote but this critique is nothing new in the annals of suburbia. Concerns about conformity and bad architecture truly blossomed after World War II and continue to this day. Canadian subdivisions may often just heighten these concerns: the homes are often even closer together due to an interest in containing sprawl. In fact, these concerns are often reinforced by television shows and other narratives that play up the stereotypes of uptight, stuck-in-the-rat-race suburbanites versus free and uninhibited urban dwellers. While the show Orphan Black may have an unusual storyline, it is perpetuating a common suburban trope.

Changing the measurement of poverty leads to 400 million more in poverty around the world

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Researchers took a new look at global poverty, developed more specific measures, and found a lot more people living in poverty:

So OPHI reconsidered poverty from a new angle: a measure of what the authors term generally as “deprivations.” They relied on three datasets that do more than capture income: the Demographic and Health Survey, the Multiple Indicators Cluster Survey, and the World Health Survey, each of which measures quality of life indicators. Poverty wasn’t just a vague number anymore, but a snapshot of on-the-ground conditions people were facing.

OPHI then created the new index (the MPI) that collected ten needs beyond “the basics” in three broader categories: nutrition and child mortality under Health; years of schooling and school attendance under Education; and cooking fuel, sanitation, water, electricity, floor, and assets under Living Conditions. If a person is deprived of a third or more of the indicators, he or she would be considered poor under the MPI. And degrees of poverty were measures, too: Did your home lack a roof or did you have no home at all?

Perhaps the MPI’s greatest feature is that it can locate poverty. Where the HPI would just tell you where a country stood in comparison to others, the MPI maps poverty at a more granular level. With poverty mapped in greater detail, aid workers and policy makers have the opportunity to be more targeted in their work.

So what did we find out about poverty now that we can measure it better? Sadly, the world is more impoverished than we previously thought. The HPI has put this figure at 1.2 billion people. But under the MPI’s measurements, it’s 1.6 billion people. More than half of the impoverished population in developing countries lives in South Asia, and another 29 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa. Seventy-one percent of MPI’s poor live in what is considered middle income countries—countries where development and modernization in the face of globalization is in full swing, but some are left behind. Niger is home to the highest concentration of multidimensionally poor, with nearly 90 percent of its population lacking in MPI’s socioeconomic indicators. Most of the poor live in rural areas.

This reminds me of Bill Gates’ suggestion a few years ago that one of the best ways to help address global issues is to set goals and collect better data. Based on this, the world could use more people who can work at collecting and analyzing data. If poverty is at least somewhat relative (beyond the basic needs of absolute poverty) and multidimensional, then defining it is an important ongoing task.

Tremendous amount of concrete used in China between 2011 and 2013

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Here is another metric regarding the amazing pace of construction and growth in China: Bill Gates references a graphic showing China using 6.6 gigatons of concrete between 2011 and 2013, more than 2 gigatons over what was used in the United States between 1901 and 2001. I’m not sure why you would want to but all this concrete in China would build a giant concrete cube that would dominate the Chicago skyline.

While this is clearly a lot of concrete, it would be interesting to know where it has all gone. Is China using a lot of concrete as opposed to other building materials that might be more expensive or take more time to gather?

Hard to measure school shootings

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It is difficult to decide on how to measure school shootings and gun violence:

What constitutes a school shooting?

That five-word question has no simple answer, a fact underscored by the backlash to an advocacy group’s recent list of school shootings. The list, maintained by Everytown, a group that backs policies to limit gun violence, was updated last week to reflect what it identified as the 74 school shootings since the massacre in Newtown, Conn., a massacre that sparked a national debate over gun control.

Multiple news outlets, including this one, reported on Everytown’s data, prompting a backlash over the broad methodology used. As we wrote in our original post, the group considered any instance of a firearm discharging on school property as a shooting — thus casting a broad net that includes homicides, suicides, accidental discharges and, in a handful of cases, shootings that had no relation to the schools themselves and occurred with no students apparently present.

None of the incidents rise to the level of the massacre that left 27 victims, mostly children, dead in suburban Connecticut roughly 18 months ago, but multiple reviews of the list show how difficult quantifying gun violence can be. Researcher Charles C. Johnson posted a flurry of tweets taking issue with incidents on Everytown’s list. A Hartford Courant review found 52 incidents involving at least one student on a school campus. (We found the same, when considering students or staff.) CNN identified 15 shootings that were similar to the violence in Newtown — in which a minor or adult was actively shooting inside or near a school — while Politifact identified 10.

Clearly, there’s no clean-cut way to quantify gun violence in the nation’s schools, but in the interest of transparency, we’re throwing open our review of the list, based on multiple news reports per incident. For each, we’ve summarized the incident and included casualty data where available.

This is a good example of the problems of conceptualization and operationalization. The idea of a “school shooting” seems obvious until you start looking at a variety of incidents and have to decide whether they hang together as one definable phenomenon. It is interesting here that the Washington Post then goes on to provide more information about each case but doesn’t come down on any side.

So how might this problem be solved? In the academic or scientific world, scholars would debate this through publications, conferences, and public discussions until some consensus (or at least some agreement about the contours of the argument) emerges. This takes time, a lot of thinking, and data analysis. This runs counter to more media or political-driven approaches that want quick, sound bite answers to complex social problems.

“Which [Chicago] suburbs are income tax givers and takers?”

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The Daily Herald looks at income tax info to figure out which Chicago suburbs are giving or getting more money:

As a whole, the suburbs are more giving than Chicago and much of downstate when it comes to redistribution of income taxes, but individually the suburbs are a mixed bag, based on a Daily Herald analysis of Illinois Department of Revenue and U.S. Census Bureau data.

That’s because taxes are paid to the state based on wages earned, but the amount returned from the state is a fixed amount per resident…

This state’s income tax redistribution policy means some suburban areas like parts of Aurora got back more than 25 percent of what residents paid in income taxes, while other areas like Oak Brook and Barrington received less than 2 percent of the income taxes workers there paid…

Taxes on higher incomes cover not only the local share but also a bigger portion of the cost of operating the state. The distribution of the income taxes helps ensure all parts of the state have the resources to operate effectively, experts said.

The article makes it sound as if the experts generally agree that this is the way it should work: income taxes are paid and then the money redistributed to help provide services for others. Yet, isn’t this sort of analysis suggesting that this may not be “equitable”? The real question lurking here is what would be equitable and whether people should be getting back in services exactly or close to what they paid in. There is some disagreement here, illustrated by one Oak Brook official:

“Every municipality hopes to receive more than it currently does,” said Art Osten, Oak Brook’s interim village manager. “The reality is that the distribution of taxes collected by the state is a political question. We hope the determination of need and reallocation is done in a reasonable and equitable manner and that Oak Brook receives its fair share of what its residents contribute.”

On one hand, communities all want more tax money back and discussions in Illinois to lower the amount returned to municipalities would be met with resistance. On the other hand, Oak Brook wants its “fair share.”