Author Archives: legallysociable

Making something out of hundreds of unfinished subdivisions

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The economic crisis of recent years had broad effects including stalling the construction of hundreds of suburban subdivisions across the United States:

There are hundreds of zombie subdivisions like this one scattered across the country. They’re one of the most visible reminders of the housing boom and bust, planned and paved in the heady days where it seemed that everybody wanted a home in the suburbs, and could afford it, too. But when the economy tanked, many of the developers behind these subdivisions went belly-up, and construction stopped. In some cases, a few people have moved into homes in these half-built subdivisions, requiring services to be delivered there. In others, the land is empty, except for roads, sidewalks, and the few street signs that haven’t been stolen yet. In some counties in the West, anywhere from 15 to 33 percent of all subdivision lots are vacant, according to the Sonoran Institute…

But if roads have been paved or a developer has installed infrastructure improvements, it’s very hard to just revert the space back to farmland. Local governments who try to stop building—even if there is little demand—can be sued for preventing development where it had once been approved…Still, some developers  have come up with creative ways to turn zombie subdivisions into something other than rows upon rows of empty McMansions.

Maricopa, Arizona, for instance, had issued about 600 residential building permits a month during the boom, and then saw many of these developments stall. Rather than just wait to see if demand would ever return, the city hooked up a Catholic church with the owners of an empty development. The church had been looking to erect a new building, and was searching for a site with existing water and infrastructure services. The developer had been looking for someone willing to build. With a little bit of rezoning help from the city, the church could start building on the land…

And in Teton County, Idaho, population around 11,000, where the Sonoran Institute estimates that 68 percent of land parceled into subdivisions was undeveloped, local officials passed ordinances that would allow subdivisions to be rezoned. One development, called Canyon Creek Ranch, changed its plans from a resort with 350 lots to a community project with only 21 lots, shrinking the infrastructure price tag by 97 percent and reducing the environmental impacts.

From zombie pedestrians to zombie subdivisions. It sounds like communities have to hope that someone wants the land – whether a residential developers or some other user – so they can do something with it. As noted, communities might be able to speed that up by rezoning the land for other uses. Perhaps this might lead to some ultra-flexible zoning where these spaces could be residential, commercial, industrial, or other as long as somebody has a plan.

I do wonder how many of these subdivisions would have legitimately filled up. Where were all the people going to come from? If they moved to the new homes, they opened up other units. Are there so many people rooming together or living with family to create the demand for all these new houses?

My suggestion for what these settings can be used for: sets for all of the post-apocalyptic or dystopian TV shows and movies. Studios could likely get cheap long-term deals on these properties and use them however they wish.

The first McMansion nursery rhyme?

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I see a lot of material about McMansions but have never read a nursery rhyme about such homes. Here is the first I’ve seen:

As I was trading up on spouses, I became a man with SEVEN houses
Each house has seven acres,
Each acre has seven servants,
Each servant makes $7,
Acres, servants, dollars and spouses,
Why are the underclass such grouses?

There is not a whole lot here regarding the specifics of McMansions outside of vague ideas about wealth and seeing such homes as deserved. These are ideas often tied to McMansions but could apply to a broad range of big houses (such as mansions rather than McMansions) or even big-ticket consumption items.

I’m not the one to write such things but I imagine someone could come up with a better nursery rhyme involving McMansions…

Black congregation in Seattle follows its members to the suburbs

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Here is one illustration of the demographic changes in American suburbs: an African-American church heads for Seattle’s suburbs.

The Rev. Leslie David Braxton saw the writing on the wall in 1999. Members of his former congregation at Mount Zion Baptist Church in the Central District were moving south, and in Seattle, the black middle class was already starting to shrink…

A data junkie and sociologist by training, the reverend rattles off statistics effortlessly. In 1999, he gleaned that in 20 years, the Central District wouldn’t be the epicenter of the black community…

He pushed for Mount Zion to open a satellite campus south of the city. After some internal conflicts, he resigned and, in 2005 started his own church, New Beginnings Christian Fellowship, south of Seattle…

“We’re sitting on 8½ acres. There’s no way you’d be able to get that kind of property in the city.” And, if a similar building existed, he said, “it certainly wouldn’t be affordable.”

To Braxton, there’s an upside, however. For many black families, the suburbs offer an opportunity to live out the American dream — good schools, the house with a two-car garage and a spacious yard — far more easily than the city. It’s a reversal, he says, of white flight, common in the East Coast.

Churches can often go where a majority of their members go. The pattern described here sounds similar to that of numerous white urban churches after World War II: as whites moved to the suburbs, so did a number of the congregations. Such moves weren’t necessarily immediate; it took time for some established institutions to leave buildings and neighborhoods where they may have been for decades and/or served multiple waves of white immigrants.

But, the suburbs today have a wider range of residents including more non-whites, immigrants, and lower- and working-class people. Suburban religious congregations already reflect some of these changes and will likely demonstrate these further in the future.

Teaching student tech designers to treat users more humanely

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Here are a few college classes intended to help future tech designers keep the well-being of users in mind:

The class, which she taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and the MIT Media Lab, attempted to teach a sense of responsibility to technology inventors through science fiction, a genre in which writers have been thinking deeply about the impact of today’s technologies for decades. “It encourages people to have that long-term version that I think is missing in the world of innovation right now,” she says, “What happens when your idea scales to millions of people? What happens when people are using your product hundreds of times a day? I think the people who are developing new technologies need to be thinking about that.”

Students in Brueckner’s class built functional prototypes of technologies depicted by science fiction texts. One group created a “sensory fiction” book and wearable gadget that, in addition to adding lights and sounds to a story, constricts the body through air pressure bags, changing temperature and vibrating “to influence the heart” depending on how the narrative’s protagonist feels. Another group was inspired by a dating technology in Dave Eggers’s The Circle that uses information scraped from the Internet about a date to give suggestions about how to impress him or her. They created an interactive website about a friend using his public information to see how he would react to the idea. A third group imagined how a material that could transition from liquid to solid on command like the killing material “ice-nine” from Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle could be used as a prototyping tool…

Neema Moraveji, the founding director of Standford’s Calming Technology Lab and a cofounder of breath-tracking company Spire, has a different approach for teaching students to consider the human impact of what they are designing. His classes teach students to create technology that actively promotes a calm or focused state of mind, and he co-authored a paper that laid out several suggestions for technology designers, including:

  • Letting users control or temporarily disable interruptions, the way that TweetDeck allows users to control from whom to receive notifications on Twitter.
  • Avoiding overload through the number of features available and the way information is presented. For instance, a Twitter app that opens to the least-recent tweet, “gives users the sense that they must read through all the tweets before they are done.”
  • Using a human tone or humor
  • Providing positive feedback such as “Thanks for filling out the form” and “You successfully updated the application” in addition to error alerts
  • Including easy ways to interact socially, such as Likes and Retweets, which allow people to interact without worrying about how they appear to others.
  • Avoiding time pressure when not necessary.
  • Incorporating natural elements like “soothing error tones, naturalistic animations, and desktop wallpapers taken from the natural world.”

These sound like interesting ideas that may just help designers think not just about the end goals of a product but also consider the user experience. Yet, I still wonder about the ability of tech designers to resist the pressure their employers might put on them. For example, putting these more humane options into practice could be easier when working for your own startup but would be more difficult if a big corporation is breathing down your neck to push the bottom line or end product. Think the Milgram experiment: can individual designers follow the ethical path? Perhaps some of this training also needs to happen at the executive and managerial levels so that the emphasis on protecting the user is pervasive throughout organizations.

“A giant boxy McMansion is something you know when you see it”

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A Los Angeles councilman who has taken the lead on regulating teardown McMansions describes such homes:

Los Angeles does not do what other cities like West Hollywood do, which is an extensive design review by any means, but a giant boxy McMansion is something you know when you see it, and when they are next to smaller, historic homes they have a negative impact.

I’m sure there is more to his opinion as to how McMansions should be defined. Indeed, earlier he says to those who want to sell their property and make money or who do want bigger homes that “I think [new regulations] will be a reasonable compromise.” Yet, this is an oddly flippant or shorthand way to describe a class of homes that can often look quite different. Part of the reason such regulations take time to work out is that there are a multitude of ways of restrict large houses including working with the home’s footprint on the property, setbacks from the street and property lines, height restrictions, and/or particular architectural features.

An interesting side note: this councilman gained some popular support a few years ago for banning puppy mills. His take on it:

It’s one of those issues that seem to be very positive. It’s very cool. The last time that happened to me was when I [created] regulations that said you couldn’t operate a puppy mill or purchase a puppy mill animal in the city of Los Angeles. Wherever I was in the city, people said good things about it, and this ordinance seems to be getting that same kind of response.

So—traditional housing and puppies are your things.
It’s an interesting agenda. Cats and dogs and home seem to go together.

A populist man of the people.

Smartphones can turn urban dwellers into zombie pedestrians

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What happens when urban residents and visitors are engrossed in their smartphones? It can lead to zombie pedestrians.

But the growing ranks of these cellphone addicts are turning cities like Tokyo, London, New York and Hong Kong into increasingly hazardous hotspots, where zombified shoppers appear to be part of vast games of human pinball…

Tokyo Fire Department, which runs the ambulance service in the megalopolis, says that in the four years to 2013, 122 people had to be rushed to hospital after accidents caused by pedestrians using cellphones.

As well as the vaguely comedic incidents of businessmen smacking into lamp-posts or tripping over dogs, this total also included a middle-aged man who died after straying onto a railway crossing while looking at his phone…

Phone fidgeters dawdling along at snail’s pace, forcing cyclists and pram-pushing mums to swerve out of the way have become such an irritant in Tokyo that public notices have started to appear warning offenders to expect “icy stares”, appealing to the Japanese sense of social harmony — assuming people look up from their phones in the first place.

Smartphone apps activated by sensors that flash warning signs or display the pavement on the screen have also been developed in response to the problem.

An unintended side effect of technological advancement. Walking in a big city can be a dangerous task, particularly given the emphasis in many places on helping cars get to their destinations faster. Things that distract pedestrians – just like things that can distract drivers – can lead to negative outcomes.

It is interesting to note the last piece above that tries to solve a problem created by technology with a technological advancement: just have an app that alerts people. It’s technology all the way down! Would something like Google Glass help get rid of these issues since people would still have their eyes facing forward?

Curbed readers push change to “mansion” from “McMansion”

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Curbed Chicago reports that Frank Thomas’ former home is for sale and two readers in the comments section successfully for labeling the home a “mansion” and not a “McMansion”:

CurbedChicagoComments

I agree! The home has the size and features of a real mansion (and was owned by a legitimate celebrity athlete):

Thomas built the 25,000 square foot home in the mid-’90s at a cost of around $8 million. It first hit the market in 2000 for $11 million and Thomas ended up selling it in 2003 to a real estate developer for $7.95 million. However, in 2012, Bank of America filed a foreclosure suit on the developer and took possession of the home earlier this year. In its excessive nature, the home features a basketball court, home gym, beauty salon, bar area, and a home theater with a marquee that reads “Hurtland Theaters”.

I wonder if a dedicated team of commenters could push for such changes across the Internet. Yet, it is difficult for news sites to resist the lure of invoking the connotations of McMansions in a clickbait headline.

Gas prices go down, SUVs and Hummers return. Could the same idea hold for McMansions?

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SUV sales have picked up in recent months as gas prices dropped across the United States:

Over the last month, auto analysts say, consumers have shown a fresh interest in the kind of SUVs — Hummers, Lincoln Navigators, Ford Explorers — that typified America’s bigger-is-better mindset of twenty years ago. The new mindset among some car buyers is one of the most unexpected consequences of a domestic oil boom that has helped cause global crude prices to plummet in recent months, with the cost of a gallon of gas now below $3.

As oil prices hit a three-year low, Americans are starting to see price changes that could ultimately influence everything from their grocery shopping to their heating bills to their travel. The lower prices — should they be sustained, as expected, for the next few months — have the potential to nudge the U.S. further away from its dreary post-recession mindset, leaving instead a nation with more affordable air and road transportation options, higher consumer confidence, and yes, a few more gas guzzlers driving around…

One measure is the share of “trucks” — including pick-ups, SUVs and crossovers — among total vehicles sold. Before the financial crisis, trucks almost always outsold cars, in some months grabbing as much as 59 percent of the market. Post-recession, the industry has flip-flopped; cars are more popular.

But not in recent months. In September, the truck market share was 53.5 percent. In October, it was 53.6. That is the best sustained two-month stretch since 2005.

As for those Hummers? Autotrader.com said interest in Hummer H1s on its site rose 11 percent last month, making it the fastest-growing older model among all vehicles.

As gas prices drop, Americans are returning to some of their consumption patterns from the late 1990s and early 2000s when the economy was doing better. Even though they have seen higher gas prices (which could return soon), gone through a great recession, and government regulations encourage more MPGs across all vehicles in the coming years, some Americans want bigger vehicles that require more gas.

This is interesting in itself but I wonder if the same general concept could apply to McMansions. One argument about reducing purchases of SUVs and McMansions, often paired symbols of excessive consumption, is that Americans needed to be shocked by high gas prices and hard economic times before they would change their behavior. Yet, the recent data about gas prices suggests Americans might just return to their spending patterns once things look better. (And, with the gas prices, it is not like they are likely returning to the $1.20-$2.00 range of not that long ago.) Might the same apply to McMansions? Even with all the fanfare about smaller homes, more reasonable debt loads (whether through mortgages or car loans), and critiques of the kind of sprawling communities in which communities are often built, will Americans return to McMansions once the economy picks up?

I, for one, wouldn’t be surprised. Even during the recession, people with money continued to purchase and build large homes. Homes do require a larger financial commitment than SUVs but they also are highly symbolic and linked to suburbs, all dealing with the American Dream. Perhaps the best hope for fighting these consumerist impulses is pervasive generational shifts, particularly kids, teenagers, and young adults who don’t want cars and suburban houses in the same way over time.

“A Font Made Entirely of Satellite Imagery of Buildings”

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A new font makes use of depictions of buildings from above:

Benedikt Gross, a data visualization designer, and Joey Lee, a geographer, spend a lot of time looking at satellite imagery. The duo met at MIT’s Senseable City Lab a few years ago and after realizing their mutual enthusiasm for maps—or, more exactly, strange patterns in the Earth’s surface—decided to collaborate on a dataset called The Big Atlas of LA Pools, inspired by the many shapes of pools in Los Angeles.

Gross and Lee are now onto their new project, Aerial Bold. Once completed, it will be the first typeface created from shapes and patterns from the planet’s topology. Whereas The Big Atlas of LA Pools began as a mission to compare pools per capita with other datasets (like neighborhood crime), Aerial Bold was born from a few errant observations. “Basically we spend so much time looking at satellite images, that we realized there are some letters in them,” Gross says. As is often the case with noticing an oddity for the first time, once they saw a few letters, “suddenly letters were all over the place.”…

First, they synthesize satellite imagery and prep it so an algorithm can read it. This involves cranking up the contrast and blocking out distinct shapes in red. Their software can read those blocks of color and extract letters. So far Gross and Lee have scanned images of Germany, Turkey, Paris, Denmark, Switzerland, California, and New York. Gross says that letters made mostly of right angles, like I and H, have shown up most frequently…

Besides creating the promised font out of satellite images, Gross says Aerial Bold could have any number of creative uses for artists. He and Lee have been approached by publishers interested in flipping the typology into a children’s book on the ABCs—something that Gross mentions could live in a digital format. They also want to share their image-detection methods with the public.

As someone who enjoys cities as well as overhead satellite views, this is quite clever. Such a project also produces a font for the covers of all the new books about cities as well as college campus posters about classes and lectures having to do with urban areas or buildings.

Building for and selling real estate to more diverse suburbs

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Builders and real estate agents are trying new approaches to match Houston’s diversifying suburbs:

Houston homebuilders, developers and Realtors are now trying to cater to this changing suburban demographic.

Realtors are taking classes in feng shui to appeal to Asian homebuyers. Local homebuilders are adding “mother-in-law” suites and casitas to their floor plans to attract Latin American buyers accustomed to multigenerational living.

Last month, Partners in Building, a Houston-based builder, announced plans to construct Mediterranean-style homes with domed roofs, Arabic-style arches and optional prayer rooms in a Sugar Land community.

“The suburbs are going to have to adapt,” Klineberg said. “These big McMansions are going to be less attractive. We need to provide more choices for people.”

Some interesting changes are likely underfoot in suburban real estate. Yet, the proposed changes may not be that large. For example, the sociologist cited at the end suggests McMansions won’t be such hot items. Maybe. McMansions could continue to thrive if they can incorporate some new styles (Mediterranean architecture) as well as new home features (prayer rooms, in-law suites). I’m guessing Klineberg means housing that is more flexible and cheaper to better suit working-class to middle-class residents who can’t afford the big suburban home yet need to be somewhat close to their suburban jobs. Again, that could go different directions: does that automatically mean more apartments and rental units or does it mean more affordable small houses, condos, and townhomes in denser neighborhoods? All together, will such changes be spread evenly throughout suburbs or will they be centered by class and race? I would guess a strong yes given the residential and class segregation present across suburban communities.