The data above helps provides details on this population change. The net migration data shows the region gained nearly 200,000 residents via international migration. If you rank all of the MSAs over the decade, Chicago was #10 on the list of international migrants. Chicago continues to be an important center for immigrants (even as it lags behind New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Houston, Washington, Boston, Dallas, San Francisco, and Seattle).
This means that if the Chicago area had fewer international immigrants, it would have lost a lot more people. If international migration was more like San Diego or Tampa or Minneapolis, the region would have lost more than 50,000 people. While I suspect few in the Chicago region would like to lose any residents over a decade, the situation would be much worse without the city and region continuing to attract immigrants.
I recently finished the large tome Recording the Beatles. This is a very detailed book about the recording process the group went through with information on all of the equipment (from mixing boards to microphones to studio spaces to echo chambers to instruments and so on) and the recording studio staff and infrastructure the group had throughout their career.
There are a number of sociological connections to make based on this work. Here is the one that sticks out the most to me: the “art world” of The Beatles, which includes what this book describes as the equipment and the people at Abbey Road (with a few other studios thrown in at different times), both constrained and empowered The Beatles. The story of their music and the group would be incomplete without reckoning with this. Let me explain further what I mean.
In some ways, the structure of EMI and Abbey Road constrained the Beatles. EMI was already a successful company ahead of signing the Beatles in 1962 and had particular ways of going about things. The space and personnel had a particular structure. EMI made a lot of their own audio equipment and equipment from other manufacturers was often modified in house. There was a clear division of labor between the producer, engineer, and sound technicians (symbolized by the white coats worn in the studio).
Rock music was something new for EMI and the Abbey Road studios and it took some time to catch up to new music trends as well as to what the Beatles wanted to do. At the beginning, recording was more of a live affair where groups came in and recorded songs in a few takes. An album would take just a few days. For much of their career, the Beatles recorded on four-track boards and machines, limiting recording opportunities or making certain tasks more difficult. Getting access to new equipment required formal requests and testing. The Beatles producer, George Martin, was not trained as much in rock music. Much of the Beatles catalog was originally only made available in mono, rather than stereo, sound.
Despite these constraints, or, more accurately, partly because of these constraints, the Beatles became successful. The band had to work hard in the early days to hone their sound for the studio. They had to act professional in front of George Martin and the experienced staff. The equipment pushed them to be extra creative in getting new sounds and techniques to tape.
Indeed, the infrastructure was also empowering. With a team of professionals, the Beatles were guided in the early days and gradually took on more responsibility for producing their own music. George Martin’s training proved very useful in arranging music, adding orchestral or horn parts, and encouraging new ways of doing things. Even if the equipment was outdated or lacking, the professionalism of the staff was not in question and all labored to translate the increasing creativity of the group to records. Abbey Road had almost everything that was needed including cavernous studios to record large groups and multiple spaces where the group and staff could work. The weight of EMI with all of its resources could help support the most popular band on earth.
While a common story of the Beatles is that they grew to chafe at the restrictions of conventional recording, this infrastructure – this technical art world – helped make their music what it became. If Decca had signed the group when they had a chance and put the Beatles into their infrastructure, the outcome could have been different. And the Beatles story within EMI is one echoed by countless other groups who then took rock music more broadly into studios, produced songs and albums, and influenced cultural life and societies. This infrastructure still exists, as does a more individualized and mobile setup where artists can record themselves in home studios or on the road with impressive quality.
Ultimately, this is a reminder that the creation of cultural objects is often a collective affair. Music groups can have great ideas or amazing musical talent or a particular charisma but this is channeled through and operates within a broader artistic context. The Beatles are what they are because of John, Paul, George, and Ringo but also because of EMI and Abbey Road.
A big drop in rental prices appears to be luring new, younger renters back to the city, even as office workers and wealthy New Yorkers remain in the suburbs and more rural resort towns. New leases in Manhattan increased 33% in October, making it the best October in 12 years, according to a report from Douglas Elliman and Miller Samuel.
The typical rent paid for apartments including discounts, or the median net effective rent, fell 19% from a year ago to $2,868 — a record decline. Smaller apartments, which cater to younger renters, fell the most. The price of studio apartments was down 21%, and one-bedroom apartment prices dropped 19%.
“I think we’re at a tipping point where the consumer starts coming back to the city,” said Jonathan Miller, CEO of Miller Samuel. “Sellers are slowly recalibrating what the values are, and the lower pricing is beginning to bring more people in.”…
And with the average rental price for a one-bedroom apartment still over $3,200 — more than twice the national average — Manhattan is still far from affordable for many young renters. Still, experts say the October increases could begin a long, slow recovery for the nation’s largest real estate market.
Manhattan is an important real estate market. It is part of the leading city in the United States and one of the most important global cities in the world. Housing is desirable there for multiple reasons.
But, Manhattan’s prices are unusual. There is a limited amount of land. Few other places in the United States have a similar local economy and cultural scene. Prices will remain high because they have been high for a while. There is a lot of capital tied up in buildings and land.
Thus, it is hard to know what to do with an article like this in regards to housing. The suggestion is a 20% price drop may be enough to attract new renters who are interested in Manhattan and have the resources to move in. Most people, and perhaps even most residents of the New York City region, do not have the interest or the resources. At the least, this is a reminder that real estate is a very local affair.
But, at the same time, housing is a city-wide, region-wide, and a national concern. The Manhattan market has unique traits but many people face housing challenges, particularly during COVID-19. Manhattan may be a bellwether or it could be more of a curiosity of how a small slice of people think about housing. The bigger question from a story like this could be: have housing costs dropped elsewhere in the United States? Since few markets are like Manhattan, perhaps not. How does this affect people? What are the long-term housing price prospects across different kinds of markets and for more typical residents?
As I prepare to present research tonight on suburbs and race, specifically in Wheaton, Illinois, I reflected on my methodological approach. In sociology and the social sciences, we often seek data that is both generalizable and detailed. In my research, I have largely worked to study suburbs through comparisons with other suburbs. I believe this has some distinct advantages, even as it also presents limitations.
One approach to studying suburbs would consider them as a whole: suburbia. Even though there are thousands of suburbs, they share common characteristics. Suburbs are distinct from other settings and their geography, density, physical arrangements, and social and cultural life separate them from big cities and rural areas.
Instead of focusing on the whole, a study could go another direction: focus on one specific suburban community. Perhaps it is a suburb that exemplifies suburbs as a whole, perhaps it is a more unusual suburb. Studying the history and particulars in depth could provide rich details about suburban communities and life.
My research thus far has tried to take a middle approach. This involves finding a small set of suburban cases to compare and contrast. I studied each of these cases in a good amount of detail. The comparison between cases helps me assess whether patterns in one community are unusual or not. The detail I have about each community helps me know whether these suburbs fit broader patterns.
Selecting the right suburban cases can be difficult. Among all the suburbs, it is better to choose ones that share certain traits or better to find more different ones? All the detail about specific places may not be that useful if the cases cannot relate to suburbs.
Another downside of the historical/comparative method is the amount of time it requires. Gathering details on specific suburbs can take time. Going through the data and finding patterns can take time.
And, the study of American suburbs benefits from all of the approaches I mentioned above: broad patterns in all suburbs, case studies of particular communities, and historical/comparative work among sets of suburbs. Even as my initial study of suburbs took this middle approach, I have also written in the other veins considering suburbs as a whole and focusing in more on a specific community. With complex suburbia and many suburbs to consider, there is plenty to study from multiple angles.
DuPage County, once known as one of the most solidly Republican areas in the country, appears to have given Democrats control of the County Board for the first time since the 1930s. Two more Democrats are leading their races for countywide office, and could be joined by another when the final votes are tallied.
DuPage voters also backed Democrats in every federal race from president to U.S. representative, as well as every state senator and nine of 13 state representatives.
It’s a stunning turn of fortune two decades in the making, observers say, the result of shifting demographics, shrewd campaigning and the divisive reign of President Donald Trump.
The article above tells of recent changes in DuPage County with new residents and a desire for a new party in charge.
But, as the article also notes, this is not the first time such a shift has happened in DuPage County. I do not know much about what happened in the 1930s – I assume the Great Depression and the New Deal were involved – but I have read more about what happened in the 1850s.
This Democrat hold on DuPage politics lasted about two decades. Schmidt concludes her book with the changes that came with the first Republican party candidates in the 1856 elections.
In “Free Soil, Free Labor, and Free Men: The Origins of the Republican Party in DuPage County, Illinois,” Stephen Buck synthesizes many of the widely accepted explanations for the Republican Party’s emergence in the 1850s, including the powerful ideal of free-soil in the trans-Mississippi West; opposition to the political clout of the “Slave Power” nationally; and genuine moral commitments to the abolition of Slavery. DuPage County, in Buck’s retelling, serves as a sort of case study in the steady growth of free-soil principles in northern Illinois beginning in the 1840s. Buck finds that by the time of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, the sectional crisis was so encompassing that it deeply inscribed party identification, even in elections to town and county offices.
This work builds on Buck’s 1992 dissertation where he goes into detail regarding the changes. The issue of slavery and free soil was important in DuPage County and when the Republican Party started in 1854, it quickly attracted support in northern Illinois. In the 1856 elections, Republicans convincingly beat Democrats in local races. And this trend continued in subsequent elections.
Comparing the current shift toward the Democrat party in DuPage County to past shifts, this one seems to be longer in the making. It takes time for suburban populations to change dramatically as different communities attract different residents and national and state politics and forces interact with local conditions. Yet, DuPage residents of the future may well look to the elections of 2016 and 2020 where DuPage turned to the hands of Democrats.
While there was much attention paid to late-counted mail ballots in urban areas that put Biden over the top in states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the bigger shift was in the suburbs. In fact, there’s evidence that Trump actually improved his lot slightly in urban areas, which made the suburbs crucial for Biden.
In 2016 exit polls, Trump won the suburbs by four points, 49 to 45. This time, Biden won them 51 to 48 — a seven-point shift in the margin. Biden also joins Obama as the only Democratic presidential candidate to carry the suburbs since 1992, if the exit polls don’t shift from now. The New York Times has a great visualization of the shift from 2016.
Democrats’ suburban edge was also slightly bigger than in the 2018 election in which they won the House, when those areas split about evenly. And given that the suburbs account for about half the votes these days — and growing — Democrats will want to keep that going.
The only problem for them — and it’s a big split between the presidential race and down-ballot — was that this performance didn’t stretch to the conservative-leaning suburban seats Democrats were hoping to take from Republicans. So Democrats need to ask themselves whether this is really about the new reality or whether it was just about Trump, who underperformed his party in many ways, but particularly in these areas.
Two takeaways from these four paragraphs:
The suburbs will continue to be a battleground in presidential, congressional, state, and local races.
There appears to be a shift in 2020 compared to 2016 but this was a relatively minor shift. What happens in subsequent elections will help indicate whether a suburban shift is longer-lasting.
Rather than flipping more Obama-Trump counties, Biden instead exceeded previous Democratic win margins in Wisconsin’s two biggest cities, Milwaukee and Madison.
That pattern extended to Michigan and other battleground states, with Biden building upon Democrats’ dominance in urban and suburban jurisdictions but Trump leaving most of exurban and rural America awash in red.
The urban-rural divide illustrates the pronounced polarization evident in preliminary 2020 election results. The split underscores fundamental disagreements among Americans about how to control the coronavirus pandemic or whether to even try; how to revitalize the economy and restore jobs; how to combat climate change or whether it is an emergency at all; and the roles of morality, empathy and the rule of law in the body politic.
Four thoughts in reaction to this.
The urban/rural divide is described in an interesting way above: it is cities and suburbs for Democrats and exurbs and rural areas for Republicans. This matches the patterns of this and recent elections. However, is separating the suburbs and exurbs worthwhile? Here is where county level analysis may not be fine-grained enough to see the patterns. Another way to put it might be this: there is a gradient in voting by party as the distance from the big city increases. Does it shade over to Republicans only in exurbs – which are suburbs on the outer edges? Is the 50/50 split a little before exurbs? A concentric circles approach could help though there still could be pockets that break with the overall pattern.
Suburbs might just be too broad of a term to be useful in such analysis. The exurb/suburb split it one way to put it. Might it help to also think of different types of suburbs (wealthier bedroom communities, ethnoburbs/majority-minority communities, working-class suburbs, industrial suburbs, etc.)?
Explaining the differences as urban/rural has a nice short ring to it and it fits the data. Introducing more categories in the middle is interesting to campaigns, pundits, and researchers but is harder to quickly describe. Perhaps the urban/suburban versus exurban/rural divide?
Is the urban/rural divide one of the most fundamental aspects of polarization? Or, is it a symptom? In this story, the divide leads off the discussion of polarization on a number of fronts. But, what leads to these spatial patterns in the first place? While the geography is helpful to think about, are the real issues behind the urban/rural divide about race/ethnicity and class? Given residential segregation patterns in the United States, using the spatial patterns as an explanation covers up a lot of important social forces that led to those patterns in the first place.
This chart moves beyond many of the other takeaways which suggest majorities of Americans are skeptical about the intertwining of social media companies and politics. The responses to this particular question suggests the effect of social media is beyond politics: it affects “the way things are going in the country today.”
Since the other questions are about politics and government regulation, it is a little hard to know exactly what this means. Is it bad for young people? Families? Communities? Education? Public spaces? Physical health? It takes up a lot of time? Social media is too powerful compared to other institutions that should be leading the way?
All of these could be very interesting to explore. But, it is also worth examining how this question about social media and the direction of the country is related to the social media use of individual users. Does this mean that more people are not participating in social media? Are accounts being deactivated or deleted? Are people curtailing their time on social media? Is there interest in and movement toward more conversation outside of social media?
One finding of research I have conducted with sociologist Peter Mundey is that young adult social media users can articulate some of the problems with social media. And they modify their social media behavior to try to avoid negative interactions.
But, this does not necessarily mean that they drop out of social media or do not join in the first place. These young adults could also explain the advantages of social media, particularly the ability to maintain connections with people. Some of the connections may not always require effort but they are available. Other connections, say with family and close friends, are worth engaging in through social media. Plus, if they are not on social media, they might be missing out on social connections and events that are hard to access in other ways.
This might lead to a bit of an impasse. Americans think social media and politics is not a good mix. Social media could be bad for the country. But, withdrawing completely from social media might be a lot to ask. In many ways, it could work for individuals, particularly through providing connections to people and information.
Perhaps individual users will continue try to find ways to do both: engage with social media on a limited or focused basis. Or, avoid politics on social media. Maximize the good portions, minimize the negatives. Participate at arm’s length.
Only time will tell. Social media has had a meteoric rise but it is not guaranteed to last. Social media platforms can evolve. New opportunities can arise and social conditions are dynamic. We need to continue to look at how users engage social media. And if we see a steady trend of users leaving social media platforms, that will be worth noting.
Legally Sociable 