Author Archives: legallysociable

Locating Trump supporters and fascists in the suburbs

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One columnist explores possible connections between Trump supporters and where they live:

But scapegoating poor whites keeps the conversation away from fascism’s real base: the petite bourgeoisie. This is a piece of jargon used mostly by Marxists to denote small-property owners, whose nearest equivalents these days may be the “upper middle class” or “small-business owners.” FiveThirtyEight reported last May that “the median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000,” or roughly 130 percent of the national median. Trump’s real base, the actual backbone of fascism, isn’t poor and working-class voters, but middle-class and affluent whites. Often self-employed, possessed of a retirement account and a home as a nest egg, this is the stratum taken in by Horatio Alger stories. They can envision playing the market well enough to become the next Trump. They haven’t won “big-league,” but they’ve won enough to be invested in the hierarchy they aspire to climb. If only America were made great again, they could become the haute 
bourgeoisie—the storied “1 percent.”
…

Their material security bound up in the value of their real-estate assets, suburban white people had powerful incentives to keep their neighborhoods white. Just by their very proximity, black people would make their neighborhoods less desirable to future white home-buyers, thereby depreciating the value of the location. Location being the first rule of real estate, suburban homeowners nurtured racist attitudes, while deluding themselves that they weren’t excluding black people for reasons beyond their pocketbooks.

In recent decades, rising urban rents have been pushing lower-income people to more peripheral locations. As suburbia has grown poorer, the more affluent homeowners have fled for the even greener pastures of exurbia. Everywhere they turn, their economic anxiety 
follows them…

If you’re looking for Trump’s implacable support, Texas trailer parks and Kentucky cabins are the wrong places to find it. Fascism develops over hands of poker in furnished basements, over the grill by the backyard pool, over beers on the commuter-rail ride back from the ball game—and in police stations and squad cars.

Linking the suburbs to right-wing politics is nothing new. And it is certainly true that the formation of American suburbs is heavily influenced by race and class. Still, I’m a bit surprised I haven’t seen much data yet on the geography of Trump and Clinton support. In recent presidential elections, candidates have been fighting over middle suburban votes: cities and inner-ring suburbs vote Democratic, exurbs vote Republican, and suburbanites in the middle could go either way. Indeed, you can even find narratives that suburban voters are breaking for Democrats.

And fascism forming in the suburbs…I’d like to see a lot more evidence.

Why Canadian communities may not have an incentive to avoid flood plains

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If the costs for rebuilding in flood plains is covered by the provincial and national governments, why would communities limit building on those flood plains?

As the battle to protect homes from flooding continues across the country, questions are being asked about whether it’s time to reconsider regulations that allow developers to build on flood plains.

Jason Thistlethwaite, an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo’s faculty of environment, says the problem is that municipalities set zoning regulations and collect property tax revenue but do not pay for rebuilding costs after natural disasters.

“The municipality really doesn’t have an incentive to go in and use land-use planning and building codes and communications strategies to tell people that they are at risk of flooding, particularly given that most of the revenue comes from development, it comes from property taxes.” Thistlethwaite said. “So they face a real conflict of interest…

Last February, the Parliamentary Budget Office released a report estimating that over the next five years the federal government will dole out an estimated $902 million a year in disaster-related relief to provinces and territories.

I could see at least two good arguments against building in flood plains:

  1. The financial costs in the long run. Of course, the suggestion here is that local communities don’t bear the costs. But, even if they are paid at higher levels, the costs are going to get passed down eventually. Additionally, communities might benefit from property taxes but the reconstruction times and costs also would limit the property taxes they can collect.
  2. Environmental reasons: it can’t be good to have buildings and other debris from the built environment consistently washed into waterways. Limiting development on floodplains also allows for rivers and other waterways to go through natural cycles.

Either could be a good enough reason. However, as noted above, it is very difficult for communities to pass up on allowing development on desirable properties. There are similar situations in the United States.

One of the better options I’ve seen in some suburbs is to convert these flood areas to parks. This accomplishes two purposes: (1) when flooding does occur, the damage is reduced since it affects fewer buildings and (2) having a park nearby can enhance property values and the quality of life.

On the failure of the High Line

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Even as cities around the world attempt to emulate New York City’s High Line (earlier posts here and here), the creator discusses why he thinks the original failed:

But by one critical metric, it is not. Locals aren’t the ones overloading the park, nor are locals all benefiting from its economic windfall. The High Line is bookended by two large public housing projects; nearly one third of residents in its neighborhood, Chelsea, are people of color. Yet anyone who’s ever strolled among the High Line’s native plants and cold-brew vendors knows its foot traffic is, as a recent City University of New York study found, “overwhelmingly white.” And most visitors are tourists, not locals.

“We were from the community. We wanted to do it for the neighborhood,” says Hammond, who is now the executive director of Friends of the High Line, the nonprofit that funds, maintains, programs, and built the space (New York City owns it, and the parks department helps manage it). “Ultimately, we failed.”…

“Instead of asking what the design should look like, I wish we’d asked, ‘What can we do for you?’” says Hammond. “Because people have bigger problems than design.”

His organization finally did launch a series of “listening sessions” with public housing tenants in 2011. What people really needed were jobs, Hammond says, and a more affordable cost of living. Residents also said they staying away from the High Line for three main reasons: They didn’t feel it was built for them; they didn’t see people who looked like them using it; and they didn’t like the park’s mulch-heavy programming.

While it is easy to link such conversations to gentrification, I think this gets at a deeper issue regarding development in urban areas: who ultimately benefits? The short answer is that it is not typically the lower-income resident. Urban sociologists have made this point for decades; for example, the concept of growth machines suggests development decisions are typically made by political and business leaders who are looking to profit. In other words, developments are judged by how much money can be made (whether through the sale of property or buildings as well as through increased tax revenues) rather than by how many members of the local population experience a better quality of life. Or, see the the sociological study Crisis Cities that shows how money to redevelop lower Manhattan after 9/11 or New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina generally went to wealthier actors and made life difficult for the average resident.

Summarizing data visualization errors

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Check out this good quick overview of visualization errors – here are a few good moments:

Everything is relative. You can’t say a town is more dangerous than another because the first one had two robberies and the other only had one. What if the first town has 1,000 times the population that of the first? It is often more useful to think in terms of percentages and rates rather than absolutes and totals…

It’s easy to cherrypick dates and timeframes to fit a specific narrative. So consider history, what usually happens, and proper baselines to compare against…

When you see a three-dimensional chart that is three dimensions for no good reason, question the data, the chart, the maker, and everything based on the chart.

In summary: data visualizations can be very useful for highlighting a particular pattern but they can also be altered to advance an incorrect point. I always wonder with these examples of misleading visualizations whether the maker intentionally made the change to advance their point or whether there was a lack of knowledge about how to do good data analysis. Of course, this issue could arise with any data analysis as there are right and wrong ways to interpret and present data.

The new suburban crisis is…

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According to Richard Florida, the era of cheap growth is over and suburbs will struggle to address important issues:

Suburban sprawl is extremely costly to the economy broadly. Infrastructure and vital services such as water and energy can be 2.5 times more expensive to deliver in the suburbs than in compact urban centers. In total, sprawl costs the U.S. economy roughly $600 billion a year in direct costs related to inefficient land usage and car dependency, and another $400 billion in indirect costs from traffic congestion, pollution, and the like, according to a 2015 study from the London School of Economics. The total bill: a whopping $1 trillion a year…

When all is said and done, the suburban crisis reflects the end of a long era of cheap growth. Building roads and infrastructure and constructing houses on virgin land was and is an incredibly inexpensive way to provide an American Dream to the masses, certainly when compared to what it costs to build new subway lines, tunnels, and high-rise buildings in mature cities. For much of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and on into the 1980s and 1990s, suburbanization was the near-perfect complement to America’s industrial economy. More than the great mobilization effort of World War II or any of the Keynesian stimulus policies that were applied during the 1930s, it was suburban development that propelled the golden era of economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s. As working- and middle-class families settled into suburban houses, their purchases of washers, dryers, television sets, living-room sofas, and automobiles stimulated the manufacturing sector that employed so many of them, creating more jobs and still more homebuyers. Sprawl was driver of the now-fading era of cheap economic growth.

But today, clustering, not dispersal, powers innovation and economic growth. Many people still like living in suburbs, of course, but suburban growth has fallen out of sync with the demands of the urbanized knowledge economy. Too much of our precious national productive capacity and wealth is being squandered on building and maintaining suburban homes with three-car garages, and on the infrastructure that supports them, rather than being invested in the knowledge, technology, and density that are required for sustainable growth. The suburbs aren’t going away, but they are no longer the apotheosis of the American Dream and the engine of economic growth.

Florida is right on a number of counts: (1) many suburbs are long past their period of growth and now having aging infrastructure as well as changing populations; (2) sprawl can be very inefficient for providing basic services (from water to roads to social services); and (3) we are in a different economic era.

At the same time, it is not necessarily clear where the suburbs will go after this. At least a few outcomes are possible:

  1. A decline in interest in suburbs (either a plateauing in population or even decreasing) due to inefficiencies, costs to the environment, and a resurgent interest in urban life (particularly among younger adults). Suburban critics have predicted movement in this direction for several decades.
  2. A retooling of suburbia. This could include: older suburbs adapting to the lack of greenfield growth opportunities; an increase in retrofitting older suburban developments and making them new and exciting; and denser suburban development (from row houses to New Urbanism).
  3. The status quo: enough Americans continue to express a desire for the suburban life despite what critics say. Technology may even help as driverless cars could make commutes more bearable.

There are indeed real issues facing suburbs, the suburban life was never as idyllic as it was portrayed, and suburban communities and outcomes today are varied. But, I believe it is hard to bet against an ongoing interest among Americans for the suburbs.

On the soc undergrad resume: data collection and analysis

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Graduating sociology majors have worked on their resumes and tried to sum up their training for prospective employers. Following up on yesterday’s post on the importance for data in sociology, in my opinion, these graduates should include data collection and analysis in their collection of resume skills. Here are a few reasons why:

  1. From the beginning of their sociology training, we work to help them observe and interpret patterns in the social world. While there is no single class that does this all at once, the path from beginning to end is full of opportunities both to see how sociologists do this as well as try their own hand at developing sociological arguments. Final papers in any class (as well as other assignments) offer opportunities to practice data analysis and interpretation.
  2. Sociology majors do tend to have classes explicitly devoted to Statistics and/or Research Methods. For example, while many people think they can put a survey together, it is in these classes where they learn important basics: what sample do you want? How do you ask good questions? How do you report survey data? At the least, these classes help undergraduates know what questions to ask about data collection and analysis and at their best give them chances to practice these skills.
  3. Organizations – from non-profits to businesses to governments – want people with data collection and analysis skills. Now that it is easier than ever to work with data (though we should not underestimate the value of collecting good data in the first place), how can a prospective employee help the organization understand and communicate what is in the data? In a world awash with data, what do we do with it all?

Undergraduates may be leery of claiming these skills as they do not view themselves as  experts and don’t have years of work experience in data analysis. Yet, these abilities are at the heart of sociology and they are skills that are in demand.

Good data is foundational to doing good sociological work

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I’ve had conversations in recent months with a few colleagues outside the discipline about debates within sociology over the work of ethnographers like Alice Goffman, Matt Desmond, and Sudhir Venkatesh. It is enlightening to hear how outsiders see the disagreements and this has pushed me to consider more fully how I would explain the issues at hand. What follows is my one paragraph response to what is at stake:

In the end, what separates the work of sociologists from perceptive non-academics or journalists? (An aside: many of my favorite journalists often operate like pop sociologists as they try to explain and not just describe social phenomena.) To me, it comes down to data and methods. This is why I enjoy teaching both our Statistics course and our Social Research course: undergraduates rarely come into them excited but they are foundational to who sociologists are. What we want to do is have data that is (1) scientific – reliable and valid – and (2) generalizable – allowing us to see patterns across individuals and cases or settings. I don’t think it is a surprise that the three sociologists under fire above wrote ethnographies where it is perhaps more difficult to fit the method under a scientific rubric. (I do think it can be done but it doesn’t always appear that way to outsiders or even some sociologists.) Sociology is unique in both its methodological pluralism – we do everything from ethnography to historical analysis to statistical models to lab or natural experiments to mass surveys – and we aim to find causal explanations for phenomena rather than just describe what is happening. Ultimately, if you can’t trust a sociologist’s data, why bother considering their conclusions or why would you prioritize their explanations over that of an astute person on the street?

Caveats: I know no data is perfect and sociologists are not in the business of “proving” things but rather we look for patterns. There is also plenty of disagreement within sociology about these issues. In a perfect world, we would have researchers using different methods to examine the same phenomena and develop a more holistic approach. I also don’t mean to exclude the role of theory in my description above; data has to be interpreted. But, if you don’t have good data to start with, the theories are abstractions.

Cities, universities, and their interactions

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A new book looks at the interaction of universities and major cities:

The question of the university’s responsibility to its city goes back to the early 20th century and was the subject of much discussion at the annual meetings of the Association of Urban Universities, founded in 1914. The association’s early members included not only municipal universities like City College, Hunter, Akron, Cincinnati, Louisville and Toledo, but private universities including Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern, Brown, Chicago, Harvard and Vanderbilt, among others. In the years after World War II, however, the term “urban university” increasingly came to be understood as an institution serving working-class, immigrant, minority and commuter students.

I believe that all higher education institutions located in cities should take full advantage of their urban location, which means using the vast resources of the city to support teaching, research and community service. Faculty at research universities should study the city, the metropolitan area, local government, business and economic development, public health, K-12 education, and so much more. Some of this research might be commissioned by government agencies, local business associations or other entities involved in advancing the needs of the city. But much of this research should be conducted independently. All urban institutions have a great opportunity to engage undergraduate, graduate and professional students in city internships and experiential learning, which has become quite popular in recent years. In addition to such instruction-based activities, more and more institutions have embraced a commitment to fostering civic responsibility in students through volunteer service. In short, I would argue that all colleges and universities in cities should engage with their municipality, and that such engagement greatly enhances their mission, whether they are exclusively undergraduate institutions or national research universities….

This tension between neighborhood improvement and gentrification has a long history. Both perspectives are appropriate. In 1958, an official of the Ford Foundation described “the plight of the urban university,” which he said has been “left behind to inherit a neighborhood growing steadily less desirable.” Under these circumstances, he argued, these institutions “will be sorely tempted to join the flight from the city,” but he insisted that to do so would “deny the purpose and potential of the urban university.” Retaining middle-class people in cities was widely viewed as an important national goal reflected in federal funding for urban renewal, begun in 1949.

The U.S. Housing Act of 1959 greatly expanded support for university-based urban renewal, providing that for every dollar an educational institution spent for land acquisition, demolition, building rehabilitation or relocation of occupants of demolished buildings adjacent to or in the vicinity of an urban renewal project, the city could receive two to three dollars of federal urban renewal money. By 1964, 120 colleges and university renewal projects had received federal funding. Keeping middle-class people in cities remained a major feature of liberal urban policy through the end of the century. But displacement of low-income residents has also been inconsistent with liberal policy goals. In recent years, many universities have found ways to work closely with neighborhood organizations in improving neighborhood conditions and meeting university expansion needs. I would argue that today, neighborhood-community collaboration is crucial.

There is much to explore here, particularly with the rise in recent decades of cities looking to use colleges and universities as tools for economic development.

Just thinking off the top of my head, it is interesting to connect the top schools in the United States and their location. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the case that highly regarded schools are in major cities or just outside them yet there does seem to be numerous connections. Additionally, campuses and cities can have a feedback loop where they influence each other’s status and presentation to the rest of the world.

Is the Naperville diamond interchange working?

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The relatively rare concept of a diamond interchange opened at the Naperville intersection of I-88 and Route 59 in September 2015. Was the effort to reconstruct the interchange worth it?

The short answer: there has not been an official pronouncement. Proponents suggested the design has several advantages: fewer accidents since drivers are not making left turns onto or off of highway ramps, improved efficiency since cars can merge onto ramps on red lights, and less space needed. Here some pieces of evidence regarding the matter:

–The Illinois Tollway is constructing another diamond interchange at I-90 and Elmhurst Road. Would they do this if their first attempt was unsuccessful?

–Crashes at the intersection were down between 2015 (73) and 2016 (53).

-Since it is a busy intersection – over 180,000 vehicles a day – wouldn’t drivers and officials gone public if there were major issues with the new design? Some drivers still thought it odd as of April 2016 but Naperville issues said they were pleased.

–According to DivergingDiamond.com, there are a number of diamond interchanges in the planning or construction stages across the United States.

The evidence seems to suggest the diamond interchange in Naperville is working. It still may be worthwhile to see when officials are willing to take credit or take a victory lap for their decision.

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Mixing walkability with other concerns like inequality and building community

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The concept of walkability can be tied to a number of other important urban concerns as illustrated by this conversation with a member of Chicago Community Trust:

Q: What’s driving the desire to make neighborhoods more walkable?

A: There are a number of factors but I think there’s more interest in being able to be in the community. It’s not just about walking. It’s about basic, human interactions, the surprise of bumping into people.

As we look to 2050 and see the increased reliance on technology and the diminishing opportunities for basic face-to face-interactions, walkable communities are going to become increasingly important as an essential pathway to building community. Neighborhoods and walkable communities — and the community infrastructure that supports them — will become even more important to facilitate the kind of neighborly interactions, chance meetings, and civic and community building that are so vital to our lives today…

I’ve lived here since 2003 and came from outside of the region. What a surprise it was that many suburbs don’t look like strip malls and housing subdivisions. You have really well-established communities like Oak Park, Aurora, Arlington Heights and Evanston, cities with important bones of more walkable neighborhoods or communities. That’s what Chicago and the region has going for it.

The challenge here is that in neighborhoods and suburbs, the patterns of development and reinvestment have been very uneven. You have haves and have-nots. The south suburbs have struggled with reinvestment for many years and the south and west sides of Chicago have grappled with it. When the Metropolitan Planning Council and the Urban Institute did a study on Chicago segregation, compared to the 100 largest regions we’re the fifth-most economically and racially segregated region. That, to me, is the biggest challenge.

This is a lot to ask of walkable communities. Does a walkable setup necessarily lead to such positive outcomes? Indeed, the last paragraph quoted above hints at this: the real difficult may not be walkability but rather uneven patterns of development and persistent residential segregation.