Monthly Archives: August 2018

If my efficient neighbors use 300 kWh less electricity in a month, they must be…

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ComEd now sends me a Home Energy Report each month. The latest has this comparison:

comedenergyefficiency.jpg

Who are these neighbors, the most efficient 20%, that can use so much less electricity? Some guesses at their lives:

-single-person or two-person households (and no kids)

-very little to no air conditioner use

-no DVRs

-no kitchen appliances above the bare minimum or very few

-perhaps not home very much

I know the goal of such reports is to nudge people toward the actions of their most efficient neighbors. The comparison between households is supposed to incentivize me to change my behaviors. However, given the composition of my household plus some creature comforts we have, can we ever really aspire to get to those most efficient neighbors?

Additionally, the chart suggests I am below average in my electricity use. Some might read this and take comfort in knowing what their doing is already put them ahead of others. The smiley face next to the bars reinforces this idea. Should this report ultimately communicate to me that I do not need to change anything?

What might be more useful – and difficult for the electric companies to get their hands on – is data they could report about electricity use for particular home features. Perhaps even presenting a profile of the “average efficient neighbor” might make joining that group seem more possible. Do they live in a house with no AC and no lights? If not, what are they allowed and how do they keep their use so low? This would also help educate consumers on how much electricity items use. It is hard to know this and there are devices that use much more energy than people would expect.

The finding that Chicago suburbs pay more than get from the state feeds which narrative?

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A new study looks at how much Illinois counties contribute to the state versus how much they receive. The results are lopsided:

For every dollar DuPage County taxpayers send to Springfield, the state returns 31 cents…

Cook County receives 80 cents for every dollar contributed, Lake County gets back 39 cents, Kane County sees 76 cents come back for every dollar, McHenry County sees 42 cents returned and Will County receives 68 cents for every dollar sent to Springfield.

“We have in this state a long-standing legend that downstate is supporting Cook County and Chicago. The farther south you drive, the more virulent that narrative becomes,” said John Jackson, one of the report’s two authors. “The biggest theme of this whole paper is that we make the case that facts are better than fiction in terms of public discourse on this topic.”…

“It’s just because geographic politics are powerful, so it’s in the interest of people running for office downstate to say we’re exporting money to fat cats in Chicago and the suburbs,” Martire said.

Finding evidence that counters one common narrative can be powerful. Narratives develop over time and take on a life of their own. The downstate versus Chicago narrative – probably more accurately given the realities of metropolitan economies, downstate versus the large Chicago region – has existed for a long time. Arguably, this goes back to the opening decades of the state where much of the population and power existed in the southern and central regions before the opening of the northern part of Illinois to settlement in the 1830s and 1840s.

At the same time, this data could be used to promote a different narrative: the Chicago counties are unfairly treated by the state. These counties generate a lot of wealth and are penalized by the state. Why are the good, hard-working taxpayers of these counties penalized for their success? Why can’t the state keep the money generated there to help address the numerous issues present in the Chicago region? Just based on the data, the situation looks pretty unequal. In the long run, this narrative (with evidence) with the sides switched better for Illinois?

More broadly, these kinds of analyses of geographic disparities in funding present some really thorny issues for larger governmental bodies such as states and the United States as a whole. Balancing urban versus rural interests also goes back to the founding of our country resulting in key ideas like the Senate being the more powerful chamber with two votes per state regardless of population and the electoral college as opposed to a popular vote.

Justin Bieber’s new McMansion (or mansion?)

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Justin Bieber is reportedly the new owner of a large and expensive home in Canada:

Per a report from TMZ, Canada’s native son just put down $5 million on a new mansion in Ontario.

The 24-year-old reportedly closed on the 101-acre property on Monday. The living space is 9,000 square feet, with four bedrooms, six baths, three fireplaces, a game room, a movie theater, and a three-car garage. In addition, the home features access to a private lake, a two-story, temperature-controlled wine room, a gym, and heated floors. Oh, and it has its own horse-racing track.

The McMansion is not the first extravagant home where Bieber has taken residence. As Architectural Digest noted last year, his history with expansive rental properties dates back to at least 2014, when he got in a good amount of legal trouble for damaging the exterior of a neighbor’s home in Calabasas, California. He sold his home there to Khloé Kardashian for $7.2 million. After that, he moved to Lake Hollywood to pay close to $30,000 per month for a rental home. Since then, according to A.D., he’s lived in at least five other high-end rentals in the past few years.

A picture of the home from TMZ:

BieberHouseTMZ.png

This home might be considered either a mansion or a McMansion. On the mansion side, the house is 9,000 square feet, the property has 101 acres, and features like a private lake and horse track are outside the reach of the typical McMansion. On the McMansion side, the home looks like a newer build with some unique architectural features. Typically, in these situations where a megacelebrity is involved, I would lean toward the McMansion side because their homes and properties tend to have traits far beyond what is offered in a common suburban McMansion.

A research idea: it could be interesting to see how many and which celebrities live in expensive properties that could be considered more suburban (large single-family homes, large lots, a bit further from urban centers) versus those who live in denser, more urban housing units.

Reasons why five south Chicago suburbs lead the way in black homeownership rates

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A report from Pew Charitable Trusts ranks five suburbs south of Chicago – Olympia Fields, South Holland, Flossmoor, Matteson, and Lynwood – in the top ten nationally for homeownership rates for blacks. Here is how this happened:

“We took a strong approach to diversity back in the 1970s and 1980s,” De Graff said. “We passed the strongest fair housing ordinance in the nation.”…

Flossmoor and South Holland are among towns where policies embrace values of diversity. On Aug. 20, the Flossmoor Village Board adopted a set of “Guiding Principals for Diversity & Inclusion.”…

“The white population of this area shrank dramatically from a majority of 62.6 percent in 1990 to 37.6 percent in 2000,” his report said…

Mayors offered other analysis about the Pew report that sheds light on why several south suburbs lead the nation in black homeownership rates. Burke and De Graff said Olympia Fields and South Holland have few multi-family housing units and that their communities consist mostly of single-family homes.

On one hand, this would seem to signal progress. Many suburbs were closed to blacks and other minorities for decades. Only in the last few decades decades have blacks been able to move into more communities and the population shift has picked up in recent years. On the whole, the suburbs are now more non-white.

On the other hand, the story hints at ongoing difficulties. The homeownership rate for blacks on the whole in the United States is still low: 41%. The suburbs just to the west of these suburbs – categorized in the story as southwest suburbs – have a very low percentage of black residents. Finally, the white population dropped in these suburbs in the 1990s as blacks moved in. White flight continues.

Does this all represent success – access to the suburban American Dream for blacks – or an ongoing story of exclusion as whites flee and limit black homeownership to a relatively small portion of a large metropolitan area?

Suburban schools (“institutions that are supposed to be the best”) and race (“the deeper systematic issues of race in this country”)

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The new documentary America To Me looks at race in a well-funded suburban high school in the Chicago area:

“When you look at institutions that are supposed to be the best, and look at where they fail, you get a deeper understanding of where we’re failing as a whole, everywhere,” James said in a telephone interview.

James and three segment directors spent the 2015-16 academic year embedded inside the high school to follow 12 students in what appears to be a challenging, model educational environment for a highly diverse student body…

“What I hope people take away is a much more complete and full understanding of some of the deeper systematic issues of race in this country,” James said, “even in liberal communities like Oak Park. Even in well-funded school systems like Oak Park’s.”…

“Just because you live in suburban America,” James said, “if you’re black or biracial, it doesn’t mean everything’s cool.”

The setup is a good one: the suburbs are supposed to the places where the residents who live there can together share in amenities like nice single-family homes and local institutions, including schools, that help their children get ahead. If you live in the suburbs, many might assume you have a pretty good life.

But, of course, race and ethnicity matters in the suburbs as well. Historically and today, suburbs can work to exclude certain kinds of residents, often along race and class lines. Suburbs can have some of the same residential segregation issues as big cities. This means that students may be near each other in schools but may not necessarily live near each other or share other settings. Suburban poverty is up in recent decades. All together, just because someone lives in the suburbs does not guarantee a good job or a white middle-class lifestyle.

Regardless of where the documentary ends up at the end, perhaps it can help show what the suburbs of today often look like. The image of white, postwar suburban homes may match a few communities but many others are more diverse and face occasional or more persistent issues.

Quick Review: my favorite novel to reread, The Winter of our Discontent

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I have over the years read many “classic” works of literature. There is one to which I keep returning: The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck. While it is not as widely read or discussed as his works like The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and Of Mice and Men (and I enjoy all three of these), it is the first one I think of when I look at my bookshelf of classics with the aim of rereading something. Here are the reasons why:

  1. Many key features of American life today are captured in this book. Steinbeck suggests as much with a single sentence on a page before the story begins: “Readers seeking to identify the fictional people and places here described would do better to inspect their own communities and search their own hearts, for this book is about a large part of American today.” The narrative involves these plot points: the downfall of a once high-status family, looking for the next way to become wealthy and keep up with the Joneses, the main character tries to get ahead as a hardworking grocery store manager (suffering the indignity of a lower status job to help his family) while also pondering whether there are ways to shortcut the system (should he be skimming off the top? Should he turn in his boss?), and teenagers who want fame and fortune without a lot of hard work. In some ways, the story seems a bit unusual today: a white family with a long history in a community tries to regain their status. At the same time, the concerns motivating the family are very similar to those seeking fame today on social media or the many who are trying to weigh hard work versus getting ahead faster.
  2. Particularly compared to some of his other classic works, there is a good amount of humor in the main character Ethan Allen Hawley.  It may be bleak or black humor but Hawley has a way of using humor to help him navigate tough situations.
  3. The story involves connections to my sociological research. One of the key plot points is that local officials are looking to become wealthy from the development of land. In an older community, selling and developing land amidst suburbanization offers a new way to generate wealth as well as transform the character of the small town. This story is the one of numerous small communities outside major American cities from roughly the late 1800s through today. Similarly, local growth machines of politicians and business leaders can profit tremendously from these changes.
  4. I have no problem reading longer novels: I have read such texts like Les Miserables and War and Peace and enjoyed them. But, it does help that this Steinbeck text is a bit shorter. On the whole, Steinbeck was pretty good at working in shorter and longer mediums ranging.

Ultimately, in my mind the themes of The Winter of our Discontent still ring true for American society today. Delivered in a relatively concise format with some humor and tragedy, this is a worthwhile read over and over.

When considering redevelopment projects, balancing concerns of neighbors and “market demand”

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A recent meeting in Naperville about redevelopment plans for 5th Avenue involved interested parties with two different perspectives. These two views are extremely common in debates about development and redevelopment. The Daily Herald encapsulates the issue in two sentences toward the end of the article:

Resident Sandee Whited said she thinks Ryan Companies is “ignoring what we want” in terms of building height.

McDonald said the company is listening to residents’ wishes but balancing them with market demand.

When opposing redevelopment, the argument of neighbors often revolves around this idea: the new structure or land use is out of tune with the surrounding properties. People bought single-family homes because they liked the residential character (single-family homes, lots, quieter, safer, etc.). Multi-family housing or a larger structure disrupts this character. In this Naperville case, concerns about the larger structure include changes to traffic and light.

When promoting redevelopment, developers and local leaders will argue – not always explicitly – that growth is good. Here, it is phrased in terms of “market demand.” In other words, there are possible businesses and residents who would be willing to pay good money to be located in the structure. Naperville is a desirable place to locate: certain businesses could generate a lot of money with a location near the train station and downtown while residents would enjoy the high quality of life, the status of the community, and the access to the train station. The new development will generate profits for the developers and perhaps more tax revenues and an increased status for the city.

Balancing these two perspectives is not easy. At times, neighbors might be able to rally the whole community with the implied threat that a single development could change what is possible in the community and more single-family homes will be under threat. This claim is a little harder to make in Naperville given its downtown and size but the city does have relatively few tall structures near single-family homes. The developers and the city may be able to convince the community that this redevelopment project is a good asset for everyone, even if a few neighbors are inconvenienced.

 

The (in)action that results when 54% of teenagers are worried about spending too much time on their smartphones

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A new Pew report suggests just over half of teenagers are concerned about smartphone use:

Teens hold mixed opinions about whether they spend too much time in front of screens …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The initial headline finding about the 54% could be interpreted two ways:

  1. Only 54% of teenagers are worried about this???
  2. This is great that at least half of teenagers are worried about this!!!

But, the additional detail in the survey responses suggests the devil is in the details:

Interestingly, there is little association between teens’ views of how much time they spend on various screens and whether or not they have tried to limit their time on those devices. For instance, 53% of teens who say they spend too much time on their cellphone have ever cut back the amount of time they spend on their phone. That is nearly identical to the 55% of teens who say they spend about the right amount or too little time on their phone who have tried to limit their mobile usage.

In other words, a slight majority of teenagers are worried about their smartphone use but roughly half of that group has “ever” tried to limit their use. Their concerns are not necessarily translating into action. This could be for multiple reasons:

  1. Smartphone use is just so ubiquitous. Cutting back or not using the smartphone is tantamount to not being part of the 21st century.
  2. Peer pressure. If they do not participate as much, their social world passes them by.
  3. They do not have good models to look to as to how to limit their use. (This is where the data from the same report on parental concerns is interesting.)

This seems to be consistent with some of the work my colleagues and I have done regarding social network site use. Users may be able to articulate problems they face using social media and smartphones but very few of them opt out of the realm altogether because there are clear benefits to continuing.

How exactly teenagers and other smartphone and social media users will learn to employ what they would consider appropriate boundaries in using these devices and platforms is an open question.

The joint spread of McMansions and apartments in Charlotte

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Rarely are the evils of McMansions and apartment complexes joined together but one observer in Charlotte suggests this is exactly the case:

As a 20-year resident of Charlotte, I’ve long observed that shoehorning apartment complexes and oversized homes in and around uptown does not prevent sprawl. Apartment complexes and McMansions are popping up like mushrooms in our historic uptown neighborhoods, yet sprawl has accelerated.

I strongly suspect we’re being sold a bill of goods by elected officials who are firmly under the thumbs of developers. Developers need us to believe they’re doing something for the greater good so we’ll allow them to destroy the character and design of our historic neighborhoods.

At first glance, these are two very different kinds of development. Apartments bring density and certain kinds of residents (whether lower-status residents in the eyes of neighbors or wealthy renters who are gentrifying places). They may include tall buildings or a lot of buildings. In contrast, McMansions are large ostentatious homes that may be teardowns (replacing smaller, older homes). They may not loom over surrounding area like apartments and generally McMansion residents are well off but the change in housing unit may be just as stark.

What appears to be the common thread of concern from this one resident is that both kinds of development are different than what is currently there. If I had to guess, these “historic uptown neighborhoods” are filled with well-kept, single-family homes with decent sized lots built decades ago. Both the McMansions and apartments, in their own ways, present very different kinds of structures. The same concerns might be leveled against an ultra-modernist home or a block of row houses: they are not like what is already in the neighborhood.

Often, McMansions or apartments are restricted to areas of similar structures. This is typically the purpose of zoning: keeping single-family homes away from land uses that residents fear might disturb the neighborhood’s character, and, ultimately, their property values. When developers or local officials start mixing uses, particularly in established areas, this may not go well at the beginning.

Speculating on why sociology is less relevant to the media and public than economics

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In calling for more sociological insight into economics, a journalist who attended the recent ASA meetings in Philadelphia provides two reasons why sociology lags behind economics in public attention:

Economists, you see, put draft versions of their papers online seemingly as soon as they’ve finished typing. Attend their big annual meeting, as I have several times, and virtually every paper discussed is available beforehand for download and perusal. In fact, they’re available even if you don’t go to the meeting. I wrote a column two years ago arguing that this openness had given economists a big leg up over the other social sciences in media attention and political influence, and noting that a few sociologists agreed and were trying to nudge their discipline — which disseminates its research mainly through paywalled academic journals and university-press books — in that direction with a new open repository for papers called SocArxiv. Now that I’ve experienced the ASA annual meeting for the first time, I can report that (1) things haven’t progressed much since 2016, and (2) I have a bit more sympathy for sociologists’ reticence to act like economists, although I continue to think it’s holding them back.

SocArxiv’s collection of open-access papers is growing steadily if not spectacularly, and Sociological Science, an open-access journal founded in 2014, is carving out a respected role as, among other things, a place to quickly publish articles of public interest. “Unions and Nonunion Pay in the United States, 1977-2015” by Patrick Denice of the University of Western Ontario and Jake Rosenfeld of Washington University in St. Louis, for example, was submitted June 12, accepted July 10 and published on Wednesday, the day after it was presented at the ASA meeting. These dissemination tools are used by only a small minority of sociologists, though, and the most sparsely attended session I attended in three-plus days at their annual meeting was the one on “Open Scholarship in Sociology” organized by the University of Maryland’s Philip Cohen, the founder of SocArxiv and one of the discipline’s most prominent social-media voices. This despite the fact that it was great, featuring compelling presentations by Cohen, Sociological Review deputy editor Kim Weeden of Cornell University and higher-education expert Elizabeth Popp Berman of the State University of New York at Albany, and free SocArxiv pens for all.

As I made the rounds of other sessions, I did come to a better understanding of why sociologists might be more reticent than economists to put their drafts online. The ASA welcomes journalists to its annual meeting and says they can attend all sessions where research is presented, but few reporters show up and it’s clear that most of those presenting research don’t consider themselves to be speaking in public. The most dramatic example of this in Philadelphia came about halfway through a presentation involving a particular corporation. The speaker paused, then asked the 50-plus people in the room not to mention the name of said corporation to anybody because she was about to return to an undercover job there. That was a bit ridiculous, given that there were sociologists live-tweeting some of the sessions. But there was something charming and probably healthy about the willingness of the sociologists at the ASA meeting to discuss still-far-from-complete work with their peers. When a paper is presented at an economics conference, many of the discussant’s comments and audience questions are attempts to poke holes in the reasoning or methodology. At the ASA meeting, it was usually, “This is great. Have you thought about adding …?” Also charming and probably healthy was the high number of graduate students presenting research alongside the professors, which you don’t see so much at the economists’ equivalent gathering.

All in all — and I’m sure there are sociological terms to describe this, but I’m not familiar with them — sociology seems more focused on internal cohesion than economics is. This may be partly because it’s what Popp Berman calls a “low-consensus discipline,” with lots of different methodological approaches and greatly varying standards of quality and rigor. Economists can be mean to each other in public yet still present a semi-united face to the world because they use a widely shared set of tools to arrive at answers. Sociologists may feel that they don’t have that luxury.

Disciplinary differences can be mystifying at times.

I wonder about a third possible difference in addition to the two provided: different conceptions in sociology and economics about what constitutes good arguments and data (hinted at above with the idea of “lots of different methodological approaches and greatly varying standards of quality and rigor.”) Both disciplines do aspire to the idea of social science where empirical data is used to test hypotheses about human behavior, usually in collectives, works. But, this is tricky to do as there are numerous pitfalls along the way. For example, accurate measurement is difficult even when a researcher has clearly identified a concept. Additionally, it is my sense that sociologists as a whole may be more open to qualitative and quantitative data (even with occasional flare-ups between researchers studying the same topic yet falling in different methodological camps). With these methodological questions, sociologists may feel they need more time to connect their methods to a convincing causal and scientific argument

A fourth possible reason behind the differences (also hinted at above with the idea of economists having a “semi-united face” to present): sociology has a reputation as a more left-leaning discipline. Some researchers may prefer to have all their ducks in a row before they expose their work to full public scrutiny. The work of economists is more generally accepted by the public and some leaders while sociology regularly has to work against some backlash. (As an example, see conservative leaders complain about sociology excusing poor behavior when the job of the discipline is to explain human behavior.) Why expose your work to a less welcoming public earlier when you could take a little more time to polish the argument?