Author Archives: legallysociable

Three graphics showing more non-whites in the American suburbs

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William Frey discusses the increase of non-whites in American suburbs with three graphics:

These findings are not new though the trend continues: the suburban populations of the three largest minority groups have increased in recent decades. William Frey and others at the Brookings Institution have been tracking these findings quite effectively. Yet, as Frey notes, population growth doesn’t mean that non-whites are evenly spread throughout the suburbs:

While Hispanics, Asians and blacks are now main players in suburbanization, they do not yet have a substantial presence in the outer suburbs and show some clustering in same-race communities, in many cases as a result of quasi-legal exclusionary practices.

Thus, the headline of this piece – “The Suburbs: Not Just for White People Anymore” – might be a bit misleading. This does not mean that wealthier whites and non-whites are living in the same places even if more non-whites live in suburban areas. Given the role of social class in the suburbs where more wealth and money means living in more exclusive communities, many non-whites haven’t exactly attained the same suburban life.

Gas prices down? Some SUVs still big? Back to connecting McMansions and SUVs

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Here is a review of the 2015 Chevy Suburban that clearly ties the large SUV with McMansions. The headline? “Suburban: McMansion on Wheels.”

2015 Chevrolet Suburban 4WD ½ Ton LTZ: The all-new King of the Road.

Price: $72,835 as tested ($64,700 base).

Marketer’s pitch: “Built for everything and everyone.”

Conventional wisdom: A McMansion on wheels.

Reality: Ginormous on the outside. But the inside? Debatable…

The big fella: This is it, the beast, the mother (or father; the Suburban is all masculinity) of all family vehicles. With seating for up to nine and plenty of room for storage, they don’t offer more space than the Suburban, right?…
In the end: Sorry, Suburban lovers and minivan haters. Unless you’re towing or foraging through the muddy hills of the Dark Forest – or if you want something that lots of people will notice – a Sienna is a more versatile people mover. Still, the caché of the Suburban will keep this monster popular for years to come, I’m certain.

The main emphasis in this review is on the size of the vehicle: quite large. The reviewer compares this vehicle several times to his family’s Sienna which also offers a lot of cargo space but has some other features (even if the minivan is not as cool, it less like a “box truck” and has more flexibility with the middle seats). I have to wonder how much the recent story that SUVs have regained some popularity with decreasing gas prices influenced the connection here to McMansions. SUVs are large, McMansions are large – why not connect these two common items of large size as well as symbols of excessive consumption? The headline illustrates a journalistic shorthand: big consumer items are comparable to super-size houses.

Interestingly, yearly sales of the Suburban fluctuated quite a bit in the last 15 years. Sales peaked just over 150,000 in 2001-2002 but then bottomed out at 41,055 in 2009 before rising slightly to 51,260 in 2013.

Designing an “eco-elegant home”

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Interior designer Trudy Dujardin discusses what it takes to have an “eco-elegant home”:

Q. What is an eco-elegant interior?

A. I’m glad you asked! Our favorite saying at Dujardin Design is “A healthy home is the ultimate luxury.” All of us spend most of our time in containers — a house, office, school, bus, car, museum, restaurant. We feel strongly that all of these spaces/containers should support one’s health and well-being. They can be beautifully designed, but if they are not also “eco,” meaning having excellent indoor air quality, to me it’s a contradiction in terms. With every project we do, we strive to show that you can have a beautiful home that is also healthful for you, your family and the planet.

Q. My home is probably the opposite of eco-friendly, but I want to change that. What are some easy things I can do and where should I start?

A. Here are my top five suggestions to make your home eco-friendly: First, try to eliminate as many chemicals, insecticides, pesticides, etc., as possible. When chemicals are used on your lawn, they are tracked into your living space. Second is energy conservation. We can all begin to switch to LED lights over time. Caution: If you are using compact fluorescent bulbs, which is what we have all been told to do for energy conservation, dispose of them with extreme care. They need to be separated and sent to the dump as hazardous waste. Third, use water-based, latex-free, no-VOC paints and floor finishes, such as Benjamin Moore’s Natura and Basic Coatings’ StreetShoes floor finish. Even though it’s water-based, it’s highly durable and is used on basketball courts. Fourth, recycle. Fifth, check on your insulation, to reduce fuel consumption in the winter months.

Greener homes have some appeal these days, particularly for those who want to cut costs (energy is a big issue) or those with health concerns. It remains to be seen how much appeal all of this would have for the general public if they had to pay more for it. Perhaps the best way to do it is to simply build it into the house in the first place rather than having to make expensive retrofits.

LA to have the worst traffic on Thanksgiving getaway day

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Add in more drivers this Thanksgiving and one firm says Los Angeles will have the worst getaway traffic on Wednesday:

Trips on Wednesday—deceptively nicknamed “getaway day”—are expected to take 36 percent longer on average, with peak times from 3 to 5 in the afternoon. Perhaps it would be more efficient for everyone to just Skype their family members while eating meals at home.

A rep for Inrix tells the LA Times that leaving either before or after the late afternoon peak times might spare drivers a little road pain, but that leaving the morning of Thanksgiving would be even better. The unfortunate folks picking up at LAX on Wednesday and traveling on the 110 south can expect the worst delays on their trip between 7 and 8 a.m., with delays of up to 15 minutes, which actually just sounds like regular holiday traffic at the airport.

Some interesting info – the data we have these days is pretty amazing – but this is such a limited issue. The two hour window in Los Angeles between 3 and 5 PM is expected to be worse and some of the other cities on the list have only one hour windows. If this is the case, then people should take note and try to leave at other times. Many people may not be able to help it given plane or work schedules but the traffic doesn’t have be as bad as suggested if people use the information well.

Watch for more personal appeals from home sellers

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Personal appeals from home sellers may be the next big thing in real estate:

Watch for this to take off in home listings: Sometimes, in a bidding war, you hear about homebuyers writing love letters about themselves — words that explain what wonderful families they have, how they’re crazy about the house, etc., in order to persuade sellers to choose them over other bidders.

Now comes a vaguely comparable feature for sellers: Coldwell Banker Real Estate recently revised its listings to allow home sellers to post personal stories, photos and videos about their homes, with the aim of making their listings stand out. Among the first to take up the offer were actors William Macy and Felicity Huffman, who explained their affection for the house they’re aiming to sell in Colorado: “Felicity and I love to hike up toward Sopris Mountain, right out the back door. … We put a secret door between the kids’ bedrooms, which has been a huge hit.” The brokerage says that all of its seller-clients can add their own content to their listing pages, although it must be approved by their agents.

Positive emotions seem to be the key to such appeals. If the opposite party is touched, the home can be sold for more or bought for less. It all may seem cheesy but selling and buying a home can be a very emotional process. As economic sociologists and others have found in recent decades, such decisions are not just about dollars and cents but often include complex emotional reactions. Buying and selling certainly counts as an emotionally fraught process from the amount of money involved to the transitions involved (changing communities, jobs, etc.) to the commonly-invoked American ideals of “making it.”

I would love to see some data on this: how much does an effective letter change the price? And, on the flip side, how might a poorly worded letter damage the party who wrote it?

“Milan’s ‘Vertical Forest’ Declared 2014’s Coolest High-Rise”

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The winner of an international high-rise award is a “vertical forest” in Milan:

Milan’s “vertical forest” has been named the winner of the 2014 International Highrise Award. Rising above a shortlist of towers by Rem Koolhass, Jean Nouvel, and Steven Holl, Boeri Studio’s Bosco Verticale was selected for being an “expression of the human need for contact with nature.”

“It is a radical and daring idea for the cities of tomorrow, and without a doubt represents a model for the development of densely populated urban areas in other European countries,” continued jury president Christoph Ingenhoven. It’s got like 900 trees on it.

Not exactly pristine nature here but an innovative way to include a lot of trees. Here is more on the benefits of the trees:

Said Boeri Studio in a statement, “this is a kind of biological architecture that refuses to adopt a strictly technological and mechanical approach to environmental sustainability.” Along with the saplings, some 5,000 shrubs and 11,000 floral plants are planted on the balcony of each apartment, with the aim of creating a microclimate of sorts able to filter out pollutants and oxygenate the area, fed only with the tower’s wastewater.

What if these trees were fruit trees or other kinds of plants? I suppose this could cause problems with falling objects but they could also provide food in addition to providing more nature.

Urban planning for the billions who will live in global megacities

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A new MoMA exhibit features different urban planning visions for how to plan for the billions of people who will live in megacities within the next few decades:

Gadanho invited six teams of architects, urban planners, and researchers to propose tactical urbanisms, or urban planning solutions that draw on existing (and not always legal) infrastructure and patterns in human settlement. Each team spent 14 months on scenarios for one of six cities: New York, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Lagos, Hong Kong, and Istanbul. Each city is growing rapidly, and each has tremendous inequality. The teams were selected based on their work and methodology. “I cherry picked practices that were already on the terrain, doing their own take on the idea of tactical urbanism. So they were already working with committees, researching how people were appropriating space, and proposing models for a different kind of city,” Gadanho says. “Many of these proposals are based on the idea that top-down planning has been failing people in many aspects.”

In scale and ambition, the results run the gamut. For instance, 85 percent of Hong Kong is surrounded by water, yet the city’s population is expected swell by 50 percent. MAP Office, Hong Kong Network Architecture Lab, and New York’s Columbia University reasoned that with so little land, the city has three options: develop sanctioned natural parks, extended the shoreline further into the water, or building artificial islands near the coastline. They ultimately proposed building eight new islands, each dedicated to an economic or social activity unique to Hong Kong, like fishing. Naturally, building these would create jobs.

In Istanbul, housing development in the 1970s led to a city where the middle class mostly inhabits TOKI buildings, or clusters of towers in gated communities. For the people of Istanbul, acquiring a TOKI apartment is part of a middle class dream, one that also includes owning a car, and the latest gadgets. As Superpool and Istanbul Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée see it, that consumer-driven culture could soon become a society in debt. They propose a new kind of utopia, where the TOKI clusters get retrofitted with micro-farms, solar panels, and shared car services. Called R-Urban, the services would be open-source and connected through a series of apps. It builds a sharing economy layer on top of the TOKI clusters, which reinforces, rather than destroys, the sense of community that drew inhabitants there in the first place.

After 14 months of gestation, each project is still highly hypothetical and probably only viable under a certain set of circumstances, like municipal cooperation, or the availability of funds for construction. They’re all pie-in-the-sky utopian ideals. In that light, the exhibit is a mental exercise, one that considers how to build according to what people are already doing. Governments might want to eradicate favela housing, because they can’t control it, but that improvisational style of living exists in part because of the skills and community values that already live in a city. That’s an opportunity, not an obstacle.

There will be a lot of urban planning opportunities in the future in major cities. However, there are also some major issues at play:

1. How much redevelopment is possible? This typically requires displacing people and this is difficult on a mass scale.

2. Related to #1, how much undeveloped land is available for new ideas? One of the projects at MoMA goes so far as to create new land off the coast of Hong Kong.

3. Who gets to make decisions about these new urban planning ideas? Top-down approaches from governments will not always be met with happiness. How connected are planners and others to people on the ground?

4. How are such major projects going to be funded? Even if change is desirable, the costs of major redevelopment or new land creation could be steep.

These issues aren’t insurmountable and I suspect that would be tackled uniquely in different places. Yet, going from the design stage to implementation to completion can be quite the process.

Threatening to cut off the NSA’s water supply in Utah

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Here’s one way to fight a political battle against the NSA: consider stopping the flow of water to a facility you don’t like.

Lawmakers are considering a bill that would shut off the water spigot to the massive data center operated by the National Security Agency in Bluffdale, Utah.

The legislation, proposed by Utah lawmaker Marc Roberts, is due to go to the floor of the Utah House of Representatives early next year, but it was debated in a Public Utilities and Technology Interim Committee meeting on Wednesday. The bill, H.B. 161, directs municipalities like Bluffdale to “refuse support to any federal agency which collects electronic data within this state.”

The NSA brought its Bluffdale data center online about a year ago, taking advantage Utah’s cheap power and a cut-rate deal for millions of gallons of local water, used to cool the 1-million-square-foot building’s servers. Roberts’ bill, however, would prohibit the NSA from negotiating new water deals when its current Bluffdale agreement runs out in 2021.

The law seems like a long-shot to clear legislative hurdles when Utah’s legislature re-convenes next year, but Wednesday’s committee hearing was remarkable, nonetheless, says Nate Carlisle, a reporter with the Salt Lake Tribune who has waged a fight with the NSA and Bluffdale officials to determine how much water the data center is actually using. “What’s noteworthy is no one on the panel said: ‘Hey, wait a minute, we can’t do this,’” he says. “They had some specific concerns about the language of the bill, but there was no outright opposition.”

All of this does suggest an interesting tactic in the arsenal of local governments yet I have a hard time imagining the possible outcomes. The federal government finds an independent water supply? There is a massive lawsuit about whether a local government can limit the water supply to a federal agency? The threat pushes the federal government to move their facilities elsewhere? The federal government ensures any new facility has much longer contracts for basic services? Regardless, I would guess this situation wouldn’t be resolved quickly.

Related thought: given serious droughts – like the one in California – could the government require a larger share of water to maintain “critical” functions over the needs of other users?

 

What it takes to approach a rate of zero traffic fatalities

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An expert discusses Sweden’s efforts to get to zero traffic fatalities:

But in Vision Zero, the accident is not the major problem. The problem is that people get killed or seriously injured. And the reason that people get serious injuries is mainly because people have a certain threshold where we can tolerate external violence, kinetic energy. And we know quite well now how much violence we can tolerate.One of the major things with Vision Zero now is to put that more explicitly on the table. It’s like if we’re talking about the environment, and you know you have a certain threshold when it comes to poison, or whatever. You can tolerate up to a certain level. So it’s not just to stop the traffic. You can actually allow traffic. But if you have places in your system where you have unprotected road users and protected road users, according to Vision Zero you can’t allow a higher speed than 30 kilometers per hour [18.6 mph]…

I will say that enforcement plays of course a role in Sweden, but not so much. We are going much more for engineering than enforcement. If you have a very dedicated police staff and they think it’s the most important thing, then you can be quite effective working with police. But I don’t think you will get a safe system. You will reduce risk, but you will not achieve a safe system.

What about camera enforcement?

We are doing it, but in a different way. First of all, it is a national policy. We have both rural and urban areas, and we work with both. And when it comes to safety cameras, which is what we call them, we have put them on most rural roads. We have one of the largest safety camera systems in the world, per population.

But they are not catching people — it’s nudging people. So we put up the cameras on a stretch, and we tell everyone, OK, now you’re going in this area, and in a friendly but firm way we say you have to keep the speed in this area because we have a history of crashes.

It sounds like this would create some interesting discussions in the United States: do we really want to nudge drivers in such directions or do we truly think cars and vehicles should the rulers of the road? Right now, many of our roads are geared toward helping drivers get from Point A to Point B as fast as they can. But, safety is an important issue and one that concerns a lot of people given the number of vehicle deaths.

A sociologist discusses the political leanings of Katniss Everdeen

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Would Katniss fit in with political progressives, the Tea Party, or libertarians? One sociologist weighs in:

“I was convinced to read them by a vegan radical historian I knew from Japanese camp,” she says. While reading it in the context of the growing income gap, and the frustration that was causing, in the States, Armstrong-Hough recalls that it was impossible not to notice the social commentary, nor to untie the strands of it from the plot. And yet, particularly given the flipped switch of Mockingjay, wherein the revolutionaries show their own capacity for cruelty and depravity, she says, “I don’t think the franchise is promoting any particular kind of society.”Instead, according to Armstrong-Hough, it’s a model of total resistance. “We see politicking, corruption, and unjustified violence from both the guardians of the status quo in the Capitol and the architects of the rebellion,” she says. “Katniss, whom we naturally align ourselves with, rejects both these systems.”

This double rejection feels timely, Armstrong-Hough notes. “So many Americans are disenchanted with politics itself, not just one side of the aisle or the other.”

“What I did see, though, was a sort of theory of social change that I found surprisingly sophisticated,” she says, adding that the books remind her of the ideas of James C. Scott, a Yale-based social and political theorist. An influential, self-described “crude Marxist” professor who lives on a farm and raises animals in between publishing tomes about anarchism, Scott is a figure of interest to people on both ends of the ideological spectrum. The New York Times called one of Scott’s books “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning that has been cited, and debated, by the free-market libertarians of the Cato Institute… development economists and partisans of Occupy Wall Street alike.”…

Beyond just advocating personal resistance to forces of political control, she says the books put forth the idea that “violence breeds docility.” “I don’t mean that threatening people with violence makes them docile, because it doesn’t. I mean that teaching people to be violent and consume violence makes them docile,” she explains. “The Games institutionalize a political docility not so much because they threaten violence to the districts’ children, but because they create a society in which people think they must choose survival over solidarity. I think a lot of people, regardless of their political affiliation, feel like there has been a lot of being forced to choose survival over solidarity going around in the US.”

So The Hunger Games is a Marxist critique where the games distract everyone from the oppression from the Capitol? Or is it at the end primarily about not giving into revenge and instead establishing a stable society (since Katniss shoots Coin rather than Snow)?

The book ends like a lot of these kinds of stories often do: the heroine returns home, troubled by all the conflict, settled into “normal” family life. In fact, there isn’t much vision at the end of what Panem has become. We are told that kids are taught about the Hunger Games. But, what kind of government do they have? How do all the districts get along? The story isn’t terribly concerned with all of this; much of the energy of the series is about fighting the long battle, not about depicting the better society.