Author Archives: legallysociable

Is smart growth inevitable?

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A piece titled “Why Are Developers Still Building Sprawl?” explores the fate of smart growth in American urban areas:

It may be surprising to hear that so little has changed in the homebuilding industry since the recession, especially in Las Vegas, one of the epicenters of the housing bust. After all, low gas prices aside, surveys suggest that both Boomers and younger generations are interested in living in more urban places where they don’t have to spend so much time in the car getting to and from work. They also don’t mind smaller homes, especially if they’re close to public transit or retail or restaurants. And studies have shown that sprawl has negative health impacts: People who live in far-out suburbs walk less, eat more, and exercise less than those who live in urban environments.

Urban planners and “smart growth” advocates argue that builders should eschew the practice of buying empty land further and further out and building on it, and should instead build more compact, walkable communities near public transit, rehabbing existing land to fit new projects. Doing so is important for the environment, they say, and will save valuable resources and money in the long run…

“Exposing” sustainable development might seem laughable, but it points to a growing divide about how different people think Americans want to live in the future. Do they want to continue to live in spread-out, single-family homes with lawns and garages and spare bedrooms? Or do they want smaller, compact houses where they can easily hop on a train or walk to the coffee shop, without even needing a garage, or a car to park in it?…

Other areas may continue to eschew ‘smart growth,’ and just as America is divided politically, it could become a more divided country in the way its residents live. People in cities such as Washington D.C., Boston, and Seattle, will want more walkable developments, while consumers in what Leinberger calls “the laggards,” including Phoenix, Dallas, and Las Vegas, will continue to live in sprawling suburbs.

But it’s also possible that Boomers and Millennials in the laggard cities will come around. After all, even in Las Vegas and Atlanta, some builders are starting to shift their mentality. Zappos founder Tony Hsieh has poured $350 million into downtown Las Vegas, creating a shopping center built from shipping containers, mixed-use residential development, and a host of walkable amenities like a donut shop and a bookstore. And in Atlanta, a developer is in the midst of converting a former Sears building near downtown to a mixed-use community of apartments, restaurants, and retail.

Three major sets of actors are involved here and it is not clear to me that they all will want smart growth:

1. Politicians. All sorts of zoning policies, tax structures, and other things would have to change to adjust to smart growth. If politicians did want more smart growth, they could adjust policies accordingly. However, they do answer (at least nominally) to voters. While some may talk about this as a free market issue, municipal policies always help dictate housing options.

2. Builders/developers. The short answer is that building larger homes right now offers more profit. Denser projects invite headaches like opposition to redevelopment, bureaucratic red tape, and possible selling smaller units or spaces.

3. Consumers. Would they buy denser, smaller housing if this is what builders provided? Maybe but don’t discount the long-standing American commitments to the single-family home in the suburbs. Many Americans like their private spaces and may not be terribly interested in public spaces or sacrificing for the community. Tastes don’t change overnight though new policies and housing choices could steer people in particular directions.

All together, it would take time, coordinated efforts, and decisions from key actors to truly push smart growth policies. Even then, it is not inevitable that Americans would accept this as the desired outcome, even if it has certain positive outcomes.

Homeownership rate at 20 year low

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New data from the Census Bureau shows the homeownership rate continued to decline through the end of 2014:

The homeownership rate in the United States dropped to a 20-year low of 64.5 percent in 2014, according to new data released by the Census Bureau…

In the years since 1984, which is the first year reported on Table 15, homeownership peaked at 69.0 percent in 2004. In the last decade, according to the Census Bureau, the annual homeownership rate has steadily declined…

Among the 75 largest metropolitan statistical areas in the nation, as reported in Table 16 in the Census Bureau’s “Housing Vacancies and Homeownership” data, the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana area had the lowest homeownership rate in 2014. At 49.0 percent, it was the only one of the top 75 metropolitan statistical areas that had a homeownership rate of less than 50 percent.

New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island had the second lowest homeownership rate at 50.7 percent. Bakersfield was third lowest with 52.8 percent. Las Vegas-Paradise as fourth lowest with 53.2 percent. Fresno was fifth lowest with 53.9 percent…

The Richmond, Va., metropolitan area had the highest homeownership rate at 72.6 percent. Birmingham-Hoover, Ala., was second highest with 71.9 percent. Grand Rapids-Wyoming, Mich., was third highest with 71.6 percent. Detroit-Warren-Livonia was fourth highest with 71.2 percent. And St. Louis, Mo., was fifth highest with 71.1 percent.

Find the full data here.

While it is one thing to track this rate over time, what are the larger implications? How should policy decisions change? Are there some who see this as desirable? How might the housing industry rebound?

Using Google Street View to collect large-scale neighborhood data

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One sociologist has plans to use a new Google Street View app to study neighborhoods:

Michael Bader, a professor of sociology at the American University, revealed the app developed is called Computer Assisted Neighborhood Visual Assessment System (CANVAS). The app rated 150 dissimilar features of neighborhoods in some main metropolitan cities in the U.S. The researchers claim the latest app reduces the cost and time in research.

With the help of Google Street View, the new app connects images and creates panoramic views of the required rural areas as well as cities. Bader explains that without the Google app researchers would have to cover many square miles for data collection, which is a painstaking job…

The app has already received funding of around $250,000 and s also supposed to be the first app that examines the scope and reliability of Google Street View when it comes to rating the neighborhoods in the U.S.

Bader reveals he is currently using CANVAS for a research on the Washington D.C. area. He revealed the population of people who have reached 65 and over in the region will be 15.3 percent by 2030. Bader hopes to understand why elderly people leave their community and what stops them from spending the remainder of the lives in the region. Bader’s research wants to understand the challenges elders face in Washington D.C.

As an urban sociologist, I think this has a lot of potential: Google Street View has an incredible amount of data and offers a lot of potential for visual sociology. While tradition in urban sociology might involve long-term study of a neighborhood (or perhaps a lot of walking within a single city), this offers a way to easily compare street scenes within and across cities.

Building attractive staircases to encourage better health

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Staircases are necessary in many buildings but a new report suggests constructing them in attractive ways would help boost health:

And as ULI’s report argues, there’s more at stake than just aesthetics. A raft of research suggests that more appealing stairways may actually beckon more people to climb, in turn helping to reduce stroke risk, improving cardiovascular health and fighting obesity.

First, the obvious: More exercise, like the kind you get from taking the stairs instead of the elevator, is good for you. A 40-year study of nearly 17,000 (male) Harvard alumni, published in 1986, found that those who walked, took the stairs and played sports were likely to live longer than their more sedentary classmates. The researchers found that by age 80, one to two additional years of life were attributable to exercise. Take the stairs, enjoy a longer life.

And it appears designers and architects really can bait people into doing what’s good for them. A 2004 study saw a 9 percent increase in foot traffic when researchers added motivational signs, artwork, carpeting, new paint and music to a CDC building’s stairwells. A similar 2001 study published in the American Journal of Public Health tested two interventions in the University of Minnesota’s public health building and found that while shaming signs—“Take the stairs for your health”—didn’t motivate stair travel, adding artwork and music to them via a compact disc player (aww, 2001) increased stair traffic by nearly 5 percent. “Buildings should be designed with attractive stairwells that are accessible to the general population,” the researchers concluded.

There are more dramatic intervention options, too. ULI, guided by principles from the Center for Active Design, argues that developers should be thinking seriously about stairways even before the construction crew moves in. The groups recommend placing stairs closer to building entrances than elevators and making them more visible. (A 2007 analysis found stairways’ accessibility and visibility explained 53 percent of their use in 10 university buildings.) Using glass panels as walls instead of concrete and cinderblock also gently guides people toward stairways.

Stairs can be an exciting architectural feature as well as a health boon. In contrast, elevators in large buildings don’t present many benefits for health or architecture. The typical lobby of a modern high-rise includes a spacious room with ill-defined sections with banks of elevators somewhere to the side or back. Stairs, if done well, can present an interesting focal point and help define the space. However, I wonder if these findings primarily apply to low-rise buildings where the stairs could be used as the primary means of traveling between floors.

Fighting the “McMansion Wars” in Toronto

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The fourth-largest city in North America has its own issues with McMansions. Here is the latest cover of Toronto Life:

That’s quite the house on the cover. Watch a video here with the writer behind the cover story. It sounds like a lot of the same issues with McMansions teardowns as found in many wealthier American neighborhoods: disagreements about taste; new residents wanting new things; existing residents not liking the change in character; desirable neighborhoods close to downtown; lots of money being thrown around in an expensive market.

One strategy against McMansions as explained in the video: if you have lots of money, you can just buy up the homes around you and demolish the houses to make sure you have a sizable yard around you.

The reasons behind and consequences of the possible extinction of the starter home

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Why are fewer builders constructing smaller starter homes that first came to prominence after World War II?

It’s several things. Land is too expensive to put the more modest house on it. Municipalities’ fees are another reason. And then there’s this phenomenon: Entry-level buyers just don’t want a starter home — they want something fancier…

From the time that high-production builders gained traction in the ’40s and ’50s and into the last part of the last decade, they were able to access inexpensive land and get labor and materials in ways that allowed them to produce an accessible and affordable entry-level home. But the Great Recession didn’t cause land to decline in value the way that houses did, and the lots aren’t widely available. When they are available, there are multiple bidders for them, which pushes the price up. Builders also downsized during the recession, and they don’t have the same capacity to build in volume that they once had. Today, if you’re building a $300,000 or $400,000 house, you’re going to make more money than if you were building two or three $150,000 houses.

Some of the sticker shock for buyers of entry-level homes comes from the local entitlement and permit fees that effectively ward off entry-level neighborhoods from established communities. These fees get baked into the cost and may add 20 to 25 percent to the cost of the home, for schools, infrastructure and support services. Municipalities seem to be doing everything they can to prevent lower-cost housing from being developed. They want property values and, in turn, property taxes, to be higher…

The startup of household formations is lagging the generation earlier by a few years. They’re becoming couples later and having children later. In some seismic way, we’re seeing that age group that we call the millennials buying their first homes at age 35, 36, 37. Because that generation grew up in what are really the nicest homes that ever existed in any society, they’re not going to want to go back to a very modest first home that will set them back, in terms of what they’re used to. They have a whole different mindset about that than we did. Certainly, some percentage of this group is going to want (the simple starter), but most will want what they’ve become used to — even in student housing, it’s like major apartment amenities. “Modest” is not what they have in mind.

It sounds like there are issues on both the supply and demand sides:

1. Consumers now expect more from their first homes. With demographic shifts (later marriage and kids) plus higher standards of living over time, homebuyers want more. This is something that also works against downsizing arguments: once people have a standard (and in this case, it comes from their earlier years and not even from something they have owned yet), it is hard to step back from those features.

2. Builders just can’t make as much money off of starter homes. Land is more valuable – think of all those suburbs that have expanded in recent decades – and fees have gone up so they need to construct more expensive homes to make up the difference. How many established communities, particularly wealthier ones, want cheaper starter homes constructed which might lower their own housing values as well as contribute more children to the school system and possibly require more funding?

A few side effects that might emerge:

1. Those who do want starter homes will likely have to go to less wealthy and older communities with older housing stocks.

2. This might limit particular groups, such as lower-income workers, from buying a home as they will have a harder time making the leap to a more expensive new home.

3. This could keep rental prices higher if people have to save larger amounts for more expensive first homes.

4. Those same communities that want to protect their housing values may find they have precious few places for people they might want in the community – such as recent college graduates or downsizing older adults – to own homes.

The artificial constructs of the French Republican Calendar and the metric system

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The first French Republic introduced two new ideas – a new calendar and the metric system – but only one of them stuck.

The Republican Calendar lasted a meager twelve years before Napoleon reinstated the Gregorian on January 1, 1805. It was, in a way, perhaps a victim of its own success, as Eviatar Zerubavel suggests. “One of the most remarkable accomplishments of the calendar reformers was exposing people to the naked truth, that their traditional calendar, whose absolute validity they had probably taken for granted, was a mere social artifact and by no means unalterable,” Zerubavel writes. However, this truth works both ways, and what the French reformers found was that “it was impossible to expose the conventionality and artificiality of the traditional calendar without exposing those of any other calendar, including the new one, at the same time.” While the Earth’s orbit is not a fiction, any attempt to organize that orbit’s movement into a rigid order is as arbitrary as any other.

It’s not entirely a fluke that the Republican Calendar failed while another of the Revolutionaries’ great projects — the Metric system — was a wild success. Unlike Metric-standard conversions, or, for that matter, Gregorian-Julian conversions, there was no way to translate the days of the Republican Calendar to the Gregorian calendar, which meant that France found itself isolated from other nations. But more importantly, the Metric system did not, in itself, threaten social order, and the natural diurnal rhythms of human lived experience that have evolved over millennia. By suddenly asserting a ten-day work week, with one day of rest for nine days’ work, the Republicans completely up-ended the ergonomics of the day, and this — more so than the religious function of the old calendar — was what was irreplaceable. The Metric system of weights and measurements marks a triumph of sense over tradition — it’s just plain easier to work with multiples of tens than the odd figures of the Standard measurement system. But in the case of calendars and time, convention wins out over sense.

Pretty fascinating to think how parts of social life that we often take for granted – the calendar and time, measurement – have complicated social histories. It didn’t necessarily have to turn out this way, as the rest of the discussion of the calendar demonstrates. Yet, once we are socialized into a particular system and may even passionately defend the way it is constructed without really knowing the reasons behind it, it can be very hard to conceive of a different way of doing things.

Play explores idea of a proposed mosque for downtown Naperville

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Inspired by reactions to a proposed mosque in Naperville several years ago (and another proposed mosque received opposition), a playwright has put together a script that involves a proposed mosque in downtown Naperville:

Khoury said he’s seen the same response elsewhere, including in unincorporated land near Naperville. The Irshad Learning Center in 2010 took to court its attempt to win DuPage County’s approval of the needed conditional use permit for a worship center on property it owns on 75th Street east of Naper Boulevard, just across the city border.

Neighbors of the 3-acre parcel had ardently opposed the center, voicing concerns about traffic, lighting and noise, with support from the Naperville Tea Patriots and the anti-Islamic organization Act! for America. After a divided County Board in January 2010 denied the request, the matter wound up in federal court, with Irshad claiming its Constitutional guarantees of religious freedom and equal protection had been denied. Northern Illinois District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer ruled in March 2013 that the county improperly withheld the permit, in part citing the outside groups’ role in the process. The Irshad board is preparing to open the center later this year…

The play centers on a proposal from a ficticious group called Al Ulama, which has prayer space in a Naperville neighborhood but wants to move to headquarters on the actual site of the downtown Naperville Nichols Library, property owned in the play by Truth Lutheran Church. The plan calls for razing the church annex and building a new 100,000-square-foot structure on the same footprint, an Islamic worship site that’s taller than the previous building. In the play a town hall meeting has been scheduled to present the plans…

“The fear really is of Muslims: What’s this going to do to our downtown? Is it going to scare people away?” he said.

While fictional, this does present an intriguing hypothetical. Would any religious group be allowed to utilize valuable downtown land for a religious building? Downtown Naperville is a business and civic center but communities can sometimes protect properties in order to keep them on the tax rolls. There are churches within several blocks of downtown Naperville but I can’t think of any immediately within the business and civic district.

The end of the article says there will be public readings of the play in Naperville in the next month or so. It will be interesting to hear about reactions…

Gentrification limited in Chicago; should worry more about neighborhoods in severe decline

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Gentrification may get a lot of attention in big cities but one journalist suggests the more influential issue in Chicago is the number of neighborhoods that have undergone severe declines.

At WBEZ, a Chicago public radio station, our neighborhood bureau reporters produced a package of stories, “There Goes the Neighborhood” (found here) in December, about the changing conditions of neighborhoods in racially segregated Chicago. We partnered with the University of Illinois at Chicago, which created a gentrification index for understanding how to measure neighborhood change in the city, for better or worse. The index measures 13 indicators of neighborhood conditions, including race, income, house values, education, and even the percentage of kids attending private schools. The findings confirmed and challenged some of our own notions, but the main takeaway is that gentrification is not as pervasive throughout Chicago as conventional wisdom might suggest.

Scoring neighborhoods based on the index, Chicago’s 77 neighborhoods were grouped into nine categories ranging from “stable upper/middle class,” meaning index scores remained high since the 1970s, to “severe declines,” meaning those scores dropped significantly since the ’70s. The “gentrification” category captured neighborhoods that had low index scores in the 1970s, but grew significantly higher by 2010. There were only nine neighborhoods that fit that “gentrifying” classification, almost all of them in downtown Chicago (“The Loop”) or just north of it, areas that have been historically white. These places were basically immune to the housing crash, but meanwhile a glut of luxury high rises cast shadows over Lake Michigan.

The category you want to pay attention to, though is “severe decline” — 14 neighborhoods found mostly in South and West Chicago have populations that are, on average, two-thirds African American. Add those to the 12 neighborhoods that have remained in extreme poverty since the ’70s, of which 94.5 percent of residents are African American…

Policymakers, hence, must address the concerns of inequitable development across neighborhoods and income inequality, which are both also national issues. According to a City Observatory report examining urban poverty released last year, the problem over the past four decades is not wealthy whites infiltrating black and Latino neighborhoods with designer Pulaski hatchets and vegan cupcake shops. Governing magazine came to similar conclusions, showing low percentages of gentrified Census tracts in Chicago since 1990.

Gentrification might be the sexy topic but addressing the pressing issues in persistently disadvantaged neighborhoods would likely help more people in the long run. Of course, addressing the issues in poor neighborhoods is complex and not change may not come as quickly as it does through gentrification. Given Chicago’s long history of residential segregation, many of these poor neighborhoods – which are often heavily non-white – are not in any danger of gentrification anytime soon because they are far removed from the edges of wealthier white neighborhoods where good real estate deals or trendy spaces appealing to young, white, creative types might be found.

 

What should a sociology journal do if it found a 1 million pound surplus?

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I don’t know how much money many sociology journals have on hand but one British journal recently discovered a sizable surplus:

A prominent journal accumulated a surplus of more than £1 million unbeknown to most of its board, a former board member has revealed.

The Sociological Review is one of the UK’s top sociology journals. The fees paid by Wiley-Blackwell for the rights to publish it led it to amass funds in excess of £1.2 million by 2013. However, according to Pnina Werbner, emeritus professor of anthropology at Keele University, she was unaware of this during her time on the board between 2008 and 2013…

Professor Savage said that the journal had “an ambitious plan” to use its surplus to “better support the discipline of sociology, as well as the journal itself”. But he warned that tax liabilities might reduce that surplus “significantly” if the journal’s application for charitable status were rejected.

For some reason, this reminds me of local governmental bodies that sometimes debate returning surpluses to their constituents. I don’t imagine reviewers or subscribers will be getting bonus checks anytime soon. But, it does appear to be an opportunity for an influential journal to do something unique.