Monthly Archives: December 2014

The American Dream and how Chicago magazine determined “Chicago’s Best Places to Live”

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Chicago has a new list of the best places to live that includes 12 Chicago neighborhoods and 12 Chicago suburbs. Here are the factors the magazine used to identify these communities

First we looked at the factor that tends to be uppermost in the minds of families these days: safety. We eliminated from contention all community areas that notched violent crime rates higher than 7.0 offenses per 1,000 inhabitants last year (the city average: 9.3 per 1,000). That meant tossing out the Loop (9.9 per 1,000) and the historic South Side neighborhood of Pullman (11.2 per 1,000), for example. And we eliminated suburbs with violent crime rates above their county’s average—which removed from contention such otherwise appealing places as Evanston (2.2 per 1,000) and Oak Park (2.7 per 1,000), both in Cook County (2.1 per 1,000).

Then we turned to education. If a town or community lacks a public school whose students score above average on standardized tests, we dinged it. And because raising kids in an area that’s at least somewhat diverse is a goal of most parents, we nixed spots where more than 92 percent of residents are of any one race. (Bye-bye, Kenilworth, Western Springs, and Winnetka.)

For the places that remained, we looked at ease of transportation downtown, giving extra points to those that have several el stops and at least one Metra stop. (Places with outstanding schools and low rates of property crime also got bonus points.) And we considered how home prices in these places have fared in recent years compared with prices in neighboring areas, as well as whether buyers there can get good value for their money—which is not the same thing as paying the smallest amount. (For detailed price charts covering all Chicago suburbs and neighborhoods with at least 20 home sales in 2013, see this page with all the housing data.)

Finally, I hit the pavement to assess which spots possess those hard-to-define qualities that matter hugely when you’re looking for somewhere to live. Things like vibrancy (are there lots of bustling restaurants and shops?). Beauty (are there architecturally interesting buildings or just cookie-cutter developments?). Friendliness (does the community have a natural center that brings people together?). Is it, quite simply, a great place to call home?

So it boils down to safety, good schools, good transportation, higher than average housing values, and quality of life. Such measures are not uncommon on Best Places to Live lists.

However, it struck me upon reading this list that these traits tend to match a particular vision of a good community. If I may put it this way, it is a middle to upper-class ideal where kids are safe and nurtured and communities are protected from the difficulties of the world. It roughly matches the American Dream where people can live in small-town type places (even though most Americans do not live in such areas, they harbor the ideal of living in a tight-knit community – even if they may not want to contribute much to it) in relative comfort.

Just to take the two examples from DuPage County, Wheaton and Hinsdale, these communities partly derive their ranking from protecting this particular vision over the decades. Not everyone can move into these communities; it requires a certain amount of money as the affordable housing the communities discuss has much more to do with allowing senior citizens and recent college graduates to have somewhere to live rather than truly addressing low-income residents.

Maybe this methodology does reflect what many Americans want. The suburbs on the list are nice and the Chicago neighborhoods, while having more diversity, tend to be the more sought-after ones. At the same time, such lists could reinforce the notion that protected and wealthy places are the best ones, the ones we should all aspire to live.

California doesn’t know what safety standards to adopt with driverless cars

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Who should certify the safety of driverless cars? California is considering this question:

DMV officials say they won’t let the public get self-driving cars until someone can certify that they don’t pose an undue risk. The problem is that the technology remains so new there are no accepted standards to verify its safety. Absent standards, certifying safety would be like grading a test without an answer key.Broadly, the department has three options: It could follow the current U.S. system, in which manufacturers self-certify their vehicles; it could opt for a European system, in which independent companies verify safety; or the state could (implausibly) get into the testing business…

Manufacturers generally would prefer self-certification. That may be where California ends up, but for now the DMV is exploring independent certification — something that doesn’t exist for driverless cars.

In July, the DMV asked third-party testers whether they’d be interested in getting into the game. The department doesn’t have the expertise to create a safety standard and testing framework, so “the department wanted to get a very good sense of what is out there in the market,” according to Russia Chavis, a deputy secretary at the California State Transportation Agency, which oversees the DMV and requested a deeper exploration of third-party alternatives to self-certification.

 

I can’t imagine California or another US state allowing corporations to do this on their own. Perhaps it would be allowed if they agreed to provide generous payouts if their products failed? Yet, given the hubbub about Toyota and its stuck pedals as well as the Takata air bag scares, this is a public safety issue.

I wonder what the public would want. Americans like progress and like cars. But, there would be some fear regarding the safety of driverless cars until they have some sort of independent certification. And how would Google’s reputation these days affect perceptions of these cars?

The “particle” rules governing human interactions in crowds

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A group of physicists suggests humans follow particular rules while interacting in crowds:

Skinner and his coauthors, a pair of computer scientists at the University of Minnesota, looked at six data sets that capture individual movements in crowded places: four from natural settings, like video footage of pedestrians on a college campus, and two from laboratory experiments, in which participants were tracked with cameras as they navigated a corridor that narrowed into a bottleneck. Such data sets have become available only in the last five years, as improvements in camera technology and the field of computer vision have made large-scale pedestrian tracking possible.

Initially the researchers assumed they would find a “repulsive force” between people, like the one that pushes charged particles apart. As they looked closer, they realized it wasn’t that simple: There was a repulsive force between individuals, but it only operated sometimes. “Two people walking head first into each other have a strong interaction,” Skinner says, “but people walking side-by-side have almost no interaction.”

So the researchers went looking for a new rule. They found it in a variable they called “time to collision,” which explained many of the course adjustments they observed. The closer two people get to colliding, the more energy they expend getting out of each other’s way. To be technical, they found that the interaction between individuals in a crowd could be described as 1 over the square of the time to collision: As a collision becomes more imminent, the energy you apply to avoiding it goes up drastically.

Unlike with particles, the mechanism that produces these adjustments is an instinctive mental calculation rather than any kind of physical force. There’s also a limit to how far out we can—or need—to account for other people’s movement. When the time to collision was more than three seconds, the researchers found that the interaction energy between two pedestrians fell to zero, meaning people weren’t taking each other into account at all.

This seems to apply mainly to areas where people are going opposite directions, whether in an open concourse at a stadium or a crowded city crosswalk with two masses of people trying to get past each other. In these situations, there is usually an area of stronger flow on each side but then in the middle – between the two larger flows – is a zone where such collisions are imminent. I know because I often walk in such zones when in a hurry. It can be difficult in those situations to avoid people and not everyone likes to walk in such high-stakes areas where there is a higher probability of bumping into people.

The article goes on to talk about applications of these findings. I would guess that means having more clearly marked traffic flows and trying to avoid the weaker flows or neutral areas that I mentioned.

Keeping track of speeding in E-Z Pass lanes – but not enforcing it?

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Some states monitor speeding through open road tolling:

Several states, including New York, Maryland and Pennsylvania, say they monitor speeds through the fast pass toll lanes and will suspend your E-Z Pass for multiple speeding violations.

In all, five of the 15 E-Z Pass states have some kind of rules on the books for breaking the speed limit in the convenience lanes.

This makes some sense. Yet, the states don’t consistently enforce these rules. Here are two examples:

“You can lose your E-Z Pass privileges if you speed through E-Z Pass lanes,” says Dan Weiller, director of communications for the New York State Thruway Authority. “You get a couple of warnings. We don’t have the power to give a ticket, but we do have to power to revoke your E-Z Pass, which we will.”…

In Pennsylvania, a warning usually suffices for lead-footed drivers, says Carl DeFebo, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission. “If a collector spots an E-Z Pass customer blasting through at a high rate of speed, they’ll get a license plate,” he says. “We do have the ability to send a warning letter to the customer, and that has proven effective. If the customer doesn’t heed the warning we have the ability to suspend their E-Z Pass privileges but we haven’t done that recently.”

My interpretation: states have had the ability to monitor speeding at these open toll lanes. Theoretically, they could even calculate the time it takes to drive between points and could track speeding on the open highway. But, widely ticketing people in these open toll lanes would be unpopular and seen as heavy-handed so they don’t crack down on everyone.

I want to know: is this strategy effective? Does the threat of a ticket (whether it is on posted signs before the tolls or is in the user agreement) actually slow people down? If this is really a safety issue, shouldn’t this be enforced consistently? It sounds like the speeding on Chicago highways that takes place among most drivers but the state won’t raise the 55 mph speed limit near Chicago.

The difficulties in finding out the most popular street name in the United States

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FiveThirtyEight tries to find out the most common street name in the US and this leads to comparing Census information from 1993 with a Reddit user’s work:

The chart on Reddit that sparked your question looks very different from the 1993 list of most common street names from the Census Bureau.

Why, for example are there 3,238 extra Main streets in that chart compared with the census records in 1993? To find out, I got in touch with “darinhq,” whose name is Darin Hawley when he’s not producing charts on Reddit. After speaking to him, I think there are three explanations for the difference between his chart and the official data.

First, some new streets may have been built over the past 20 years (Hawley used 2013 census data to make his chart). Second, some streets may have changed their names: If a little town grows, it might change the name of its principal street from Tumbleweed Lane to Main Street.

Third, I don’t know how the Census Bureau produced its 1993 list (I asked, and a spokesperson told me the researcher who made it can’t recall his methodology), so Hawley might have simply used a different methodology to produce his chart. Because I wasn’t able to find any data on the frequency that American streets are renamed or the rate at which new streets are being built, I’m going to stake my money on this third explanation. Hawley told me that he counted “Main St N” and “N Main St” as two separate streets in his data. If the Census Bureau counted them as just one street, that could account for the difference.

That’s not the only executive decision Hawley made when he was summarizing this data. He set a minimum of how far away one Elm Street in Maine had to be from another Elm Street in Maine to qualify as two separate streets. That’s a problem because streets can break and resume in unexpected ways.

In other words, getting an answer requires making some judgment calls with the available data. While this is the sort of question that exemplifies the intriguing things we can all learn from the Internet, it is also a question that likely isn’t important enough to spend a lot of time with it. As an urban sociologist, this is an interesting question but what would I learn from the frequencies of street names? What hypothesis could I test? It might roughly tell us the names that Americans give to roads. What we value may just be reflected in these road names. For example, the Census data suggests that numbered streets and references to nature dominate the top 20. Does this mean we like order (a pragmatic approach) and idyllic yet vague nature terms (park, view, lake, tree names) over other things? Yet, the list has limitations as these communities and roads were built at different times, roads can be renamed, and we do have to make judgment calls about what specifies separate streets.

Two other thoughts:

1. The Census researcher who did this back in the early 1990s can’t remember the methodology. Why wasn’t it part of the report?

2. Is this something that would be best left up to marketers (who might find some advertising value in this) or GIS firms (who have access to comprehensive map data)?

Creating the “mobile-ghetto” in major cities

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Affordable housing is scarce in many major global cities so one architect has a design for the “mobile-ghetto”:

So as Malka sees it, Parisians need a way to “reclaim” the city. His idea is a modular micro-city consisting of rooms that attach to scaffolding built around existing infrastructure, like barnacles clinging to a ship. He calls it the P9 Mobile-Ghetto, and has imagined them here hanging off the side of the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris.

“In a time when we are getting more and more mobile, not only regarding our phone and laptop devices, but also…the increasing number of freelancers or homeworkers, mobile-cities would totally change the uses and the morphology of the city,” Malka says. In practice, this means that the idea of a third space—in which city dwellers inhabit coffee shops and parks the way others gather in their living rooms, or regard shared bicycle programs as their own bikes—extends to include a smattering of rooms or event spaces created for the public, and run by the public. The bridge can become your meditation center; an out-of-use monument could become an art gallery.

Obvious complications with zoning and historical preservationists aside, Malka says the Voluntary Ghetto is technically plausible, and would just require using scaffolding to support shipping container-sized rooms. That said, this (conceptual) new layer of infrastructure says more about urban lifestyles than it does about feats of architecture. Would Parisians (or New Yorkers, or Londoners, or any city residents) delight in finding more intimate, indoor, spaces, or would it feel like a brash paint job on a historic city? “If there is an utopia in this project,” Malka says, “it’s more in its social dimension than its architectural aspect.”

Two quick thoughts:

1. Shipping container type structures are popular these days since they are relatively available and have a standard size. Yet, I wonder how communities would respond to the architecture that is often made with them. For lack of a better descriptor, it is boxy. It is one thing to supply affordable housing; it is another to put these sorts of designs on the Pont Neuf. Add that to the barnacle type image and it doesn’t necessarily look pretty.

2. A design like this or other recent innovations like tiny houses really can be limited by zoning laws. Major cities are often mazes of zoning regulations. While these zones exist for a reason, they can often make true innovation quite difficult. How much would cities be willing to revisit their zoning laws to allow spaces for these sorts of designs that are smaller and more flexible? I’m not imagine an overlay district – that is simply putting a temporary or permanent zoning change or exception over existing zones – but rather revisiting the whole thing to adapt to buildings and spaces in the 2010s.

Reminder: shopping malls are clearly not public spaces

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An effort to hold a protest at the Mall of America this Saturday was met with a predictable response: the mall is not a public space and the protest is not welcome.

The organizers, who are calling for a protest as part of the national “Black Lives Matter” movement responding to recent police shootings of unarmed black men, vow they will carry on as planned in the mall’s rotunda.

The protest had drawn 2,000 confirmations on its Facebook page as of Wednesday afternoon. Saturday also is one of the busiest shopping days of the holiday season.

Mall representatives have said that a demonstration at the mall would violate policy, and protesters could be removed, arrested and banned…

“Mall of America is a commercial retail and entertainment center. We respect the right to free speech, but Mall of America is private property and not a forum for protests, demonstrations or public debates,” mall management said in a statement.

As an alternative, the mall and the city of Bloomington urged protesters to use the former Alpha Business Center lot, which is public property adjacent to the mall, according to a letter from the mall posted on the Black Lives Matter Minneapolis Facebook page.

The number one function of a shopping mall is to make money and protests can distract from that. Yet, shopping malls are one of the rare spaces in American suburban sprawl that you can find large numbers of people. One of the downsides of sprawl is that there are few public gathering places in centralized locations surrounded by population density. Sure, there are parks, public parking lots, and other public facilities but they tend to be spread out, often require driving, and don’t necessarily attract the attention of many other people.

Given the spread of protests along highways, I wonder if protestors could move instead to the public roads leading into the mall. There are likely restrictions on using these spaces as well but at least the protestors would be on public property.

$1 million plus homes continue to sell well

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The top end of the real estate market is still going strong:

Across the map, the strongest growth in the residential real estate market lately is in high-end homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. In October, sales of homes at $1 million and above surged by 16.2 percent from the year before, while overall sales of homes were up by just 4.7 percent, the trade group said…

In the Chicago area, home sales in the million-and-up category were up 8 percent from January through September, with a median price (in that bracket) of $1.35 million, according to Re/Max Northern Illinois.

In Manatee and Sarasota counties in Florida (one of the leaders of the Bubble Country pack during the boom), 485 homes in the $1 million-plus category sold from January to the end of November, according to the Bradenton Herald…

His theory, apparently, is that the surging Dow has inspired confidence in average investors and has made them comfortable about putting their (other) money in real estate again, given that their savings are growing only incrementally within traditional investments.

The wealthy are still doing well in the real estate market while the rest of the market is still sluggish. How long can this trend last? In other words, could the top end of the market do well for years or longer while the bottom and middle struggle along?

A picket line against McMansions

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McMansions may be unpopular in Los Angeles but they rarely attract picket lines:

Residents in the Melrose District Sunday protested what they’re calling mega-mansions in Los Angeles.

A picket line was set-up outside of a new home in the 700 block of N. Vista Street which some claim towers over much smaller residences nearby and isn’t energy-efficient.

Demonstrators say they timed their protest to coincide with the realtor’s open-house of the residence…

The owner of the home being picketed was not available for comment.

I am guessing this doesn’t build goodwill among neighbors. Imagine you are trying to sell a home (or buy that same home) that attracts a picket line…I’m not sure there is a good outcome for that seller. I assume the people in the picket line hope this (1) draws attention to their cause and (2) tells other owners in the neighborhood that they will be unhappy with similar teardowns. Yet, I wonder if this truly acts as a deterrent and instead affects their own property values. Directly protesting the actions of one homeowner tends to violate neighborhood friendliness or at least the suburban moral minimalism (a term from The Moral Order of a Suburb by Baumgarner) of leaving each other alone that marks many sprawling communities.

Radio will be saved – by the lack of NSA monitoring, zombie apocalypse

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Slate has an interesting set of articles about podcasts but one article notes the persistence of terrestrial radio. Among the reasons given for its ongoing influence includes operating outside of NSA control and zombie apocalypses:

  • Most of us don’t feel the cost of the data we’re using when we stream online content. But this could be changing. “Half the public still has no idea what data metering is,” says Smulyan, “but we find it changes consumption completely when people see what they’re paying for the data they use.”
  • Due to some complex legislation, it can be less onerous to pay artist royalties when you play music over the airwaves than when you send it over the Internet. For this reason, last year Pandora bought an FM station in South Dakota, in an effort to qualify as a terrestrial broadcaster.
  • When the revolution comes, radio will be vital for the propagation of seditious content. It leaves no digital footprints. And the NSA is unlikely to hack into your transistor boom box and track what you listen to.
  • When the zombie apocalypse arrives, radio will save your hide. Anyone with a generator and an antenna can broadcast radio, and everyone listening hears the same key information in real time.

The first two reasons have to do with finances: radio can be relatively cheap for operators and listeners. These are important considerations today: can media conglomerates and music artists still make money?

The last two have some different rationales. Radio can’t be controlled as easily, even with the complex rules regarding licenses and broadcasting though perhaps listeners have even more freedom as they can tune in to what they want (as long as they aren’t recording what they listened to for ratings purposes). In times of disasters – and there is a lower likelihood of facing zombies compared to being in a natural disaster – radio provides an easy way to broadcast and hear information. Does the Internet work well in those situations? The argument here is that the infrastructure for the Internet is more complicated than that for radio, thus, radio will win in times of trouble.

I suspect the second pair of reasons will prove less influential in the long run than the first pair regarding money. But, if money wins out and broadcasting moves to the Internet, might that completely wipe out the presence of radio for the last two purposes?