Author Archives: legallysociable

McMansions are not necessarily in gated communities

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One writer suggests both McMansions and gated communities are alive and well in the United States:

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the real estate market saw an explosion of “McMansions” and sprawling estates across the nation. The economic downturn toward the end of the decade brought the country back to earth and shifted the trend in new housing from giant luxury homes back to moderately sized residences.

While many have claimed that the McMansion boom is over, others beg to differ…

While the tiny house trend has been intriguing to observe, it’s not terribly indicative of where the country is headed in general. For every house that’s being built on wheels, at least one other is moving into a luxurious gated community.

To be honest, experts who voiced a death sentence on McMansions, estates, and gated communities probably spoke too soon.

This piece seems to suggest that homes in luxurious gated communities are necessarily McMansions. However, I’ve never seen evidence that would suggest this is the case. There is little doubt that these two trends were occurring around the same time with gated communities picking up steam in the 1970s and 1980s and the term McMansions arriving by the late 1990s even if the homes started growing in number in the 1980s. But, not all gated communities necessarily include large houses. From what I can recall from the 1997 book Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States, gated communities can often include middle-class or more average homes as can even be in urban neighborhoods with smaller homes. Gates may project the image of exclusivity but this can be relative or as Blakely and Snyder point out in the book, the gates are often just ornamental rather than serving as real barriers.

At the same time, it would be interesting to look at some data on this. Yet, it is relatively hard from survey data to define a McMansion beyond basic features like square footage and number of rooms.

Anthropologists used to convince Americans to eat organ meats during WWII

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Need to get Americans to eat organ meats so beef can be sent to soldiers during World War II? Bring in anthropologists:

To head the committee, the NRC recruited anthropologist Margaret Mead, along with German-born psychologist Kurt Lewin (considered to be one of the founders of social psychology). At the top of their agenda: addressing the looming meat shortage. More specifically, they needed to devise a way to convince Americans to abandon their steaks, pork chops, and other familiar cuts in favor of the meats that the soldiers wouldn’t eat—the hearts, livers, and other organs that remained plentiful stateside.

The committee members had their work cut out for them. Organ meats at the time were largely shunned by all but the poorest Americans, considered a marker of low social status or a rural, unsophisticated upbringing—and of all the social taboos, those related to food are among the most difficult to dispel, said Barrett Brenton, a nutritional anthropologist at St. John’s University…

One of the major reasons, they soon found through their research, was organs’ unfamiliarity—people balked at the idea of serving something without knowing its taste or even how best to prepare it. In response, the committee urged the government to produce materials that couched the new meats in more comfortable terms…

And thus, “variety meats” were born. Butchers, who already sold organ meats for fewer ration points than premium cuts, were encouraged to adopt the new term with their customers; so were reporters with their readers…

The effect, though, lasted barely longer than the war itself.

Not quite the glamor of Indiana Jones but still fighting the Nazis by replacing beef with lesser cuts of meat. This also hints of American’s long interest in beef, not just an invention of fast food or post-World War II prosperity.

Would leading anthropologists be willing to join such a war cause today?

 

Selection bias with Derek Jeter’s fielding: bad stats, memorable moments

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As Derek Jeter’s career winds down, one baseball pundit wrestles with how Jeter’s defense numbers are so bad even as we remember some of his great fielding moments:

Data-mindful observers couldn’t figure out why the decorated Yankee kept winning those Gold Gloves and garnering raves for his defense. Stats such as Ultimate Zone Rating and Defensive Runs Saved didn’t merely suggest that Jeter was overrated; they pegged him as downright terrible. Even the best glovemen lose range as they age, which means Jeter actually hurt himself by playing past his 40th birthday and seeing his career defensive totals dip as a result, but the figures are unnerving regardless. Based on Baseball-Reference’s Runs From Fielding, which is based on DRS, Jeter’s combination of subpar defense and exceptional longevity don’t merely make him a defensive liability; they make him the worst defensive player relative to others at his position in baseball history.

That ranking is incredibly hard to fathom because of a very human weakness: selection bias. People remember a few extraordinary events, then ignore or even repress the information that might contradict that initial impression. With Jeter in particular, it’s nearly impossible to make the visceral reactions agree with the data, because Jeter has pulled off some of the most incredible defensive plays we’ve ever seen.

How to put this all together?

So really, it’s OK to agree in part with both sides of the argument. Even if we acknowledge the flaws of advanced defensive stats that aren’t yet based on play-by-play data or dispute the claim that Jeter was the worst ever, we can comfortably say he was overrated defensively by many people for many years, and cost the Yankees their share of outs. But we can also say that every huge-leverage play like The Flip negated a handful of squibbers through the infield during random April games in Cleveland, even if they left him as a net-negative defender on the leaderboards. Jeter might not have deserved five Gold Gloves, but he does deserve credit for crafting memorable plays that can’t simply be chalked up to coincidence or luck.

In other words, memorable plays that lead to key victories can go a long way to wiping out more objective data over a longer period of time. Of course, this is true across a broad range of contexts beyond baseball; showing unusual urban crimes and police responses as “normal” could have a similar effect on television viewers. In the long run, perceptions may have less of a shelf life as people who witnessed those events – like “The Flip” – stop remembering them or die and the data lives on.

Chicago’s O’Hare set to become world’s busiest airport again?

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Officials suggested O’Hare Airport is on pace this year to become the world’s busiest airport:

O’Hare International Airport is on pace to again be the world’s busiest airport, a designation it lost a decade ago, Chicago city officials noted Wednesday.

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport wrestled the top honor away from O’Hare in 2005 and has held onto it since, according to the official flight count by the Federal Aviation Administration. Before that, O’Hare had bragging rights to the title since the dawn of the Jet Age, when it surpassed the number of flights at Midway Airport, which had been the leader.

From January to August of this year, more than 580,000 flights departed or landed at O’Hare, according to the FAA. City officials say part of the growth is due to international passenger volume, which through the first half of the year rose 8 percent at O’Hare, to 5.2 million passengers, and rose 15 percent at Midway, to 289,300 passengers. In the last 18 months, O’Hare and Midway International Airports welcomed six new international airlines and added dozens of new destinations.

“O’Hare isn’t just the busiest airport in the world, it’s an asset for the City of Chicago,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in a statement. “These new gains will help us attract new businesses and solidify our place as the best connected city in the U.S. and around the world.”

A distressing lack of data here as we get some numbers about the flights at O’Hare but no data about Hartsfield. But, if true, this would give something Chicago to brag about again (reinforces Chicago’s position as a transportation hub which is part geography in the middle of the country and located near the southern end of one of the Great Lakes as well as the construction of transportation infrastructure) though I suspect frequent fliers will be less thrilled.

Additionally, is there any correlation with this data and the recent rise in complaints about noise from O’Hare?

Some conservatives dislike suburbs too

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Critiques of American suburbs are not just limited to Democrats; some conservatives also don’t like suburbs.

Less well-noticed is that opposition to suburbs – usually characterized as “sprawl” – has been spreading to the conservative movement. Old-style Tories like author-philosopher Roger Scruton do not conceal their detestation of suburbia and favor, instead, European-style planning laws that force people to live “side by side.” Densely packed Paris and London, he points out, are clearly better places to visit for well-heeled tourists than Atlanta, Houston or Dallas.

There may be more than a bit of class prejudice at work here. British Tories long have disliked suburbs and their denizens. In a 1905 book, “The Suburbans,” the poet T.W.H. Crossland launched a vitriolic attack on the “low and inferior species,” the “soulless” class of “clerks” who were spreading into the new, comfortable houses in the suburbs, mucking up the aesthetics of the British countryside.

Not surprisingly, many British conservatives, like Scruton, and his American counterparts frequently live in bucolic settings, and understandably want these crass suburbanites and their homes as far away as possible. Yet, there is precious little concern that – in their zeal to protect their property – they have also embraced policies that have engendered huge housing inflation, in places like greater London or the San Francisco Bay Area, that is among the most extreme in the high-income world.

Of course, the conservative critique of suburbia does not rest only on aesthetic disdain for suburbs, but is usually linked to stated social and environmental concerns. “There’s no telling how many marriages were broken up over the stress of suburb-to-city commutes,” opines conservative author Matt Lewis in a recent article in The Week. In his mind, suburbs are not only aesthetically displeasing but also anti-family…

Yet, there remains a great opportunity for either party that will appeal to, and appreciate, the suburban base. Conservative figures such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher understood the connection between democracy and property ownership and upward mobility. Much the same could be said for traditional Democrats, from Roosevelt and Harry Truman, all the way to Bill Clinton.

Considering that a majority of Americans live in suburbs plus the long presence of suburban critiques, it is not too surprising that this crosses political parties. As Kotkin points out, a good number of conservatives and liberals live in suburbs and either party could (and has in the past) appeal to suburbanites, even if recent elections have tended to fall along urban/Democrat and exurbs/Republican fault lines.

Explaining phantom cellphone vibrations

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Some recent studies suggest phantom cellphone vibrations are common and here are some possible explanations for why they happen:

A handful of studies in recent years have examined the prevalence of phantom cellphone vibrations, and they’ve come up with impressive numbers, from 68 percent of the medical staff at a Massachusetts hospital to 89 percent of undergraduates at a midwestern university, to more than 90 percent of Taiwanese doctors-in-training in the middle of their internships…

Hallucination may not be the most appropriate term, according to Laramie. “You’re misinterpreting something, but there is this external cue. You’re not totally making it up.” A compelling alternative, he suggests, is pareidolia. “That’s the phenomenon where you see a face in the clouds or hear ‘Paul is dead’ when you listen to the Beatles backwards.” (Or see the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich). Essentially, it’s your brain getting a little bit carried away with its normally very useful talent for finding patterns in the world around you…

In his thesis research, he found the two biggest predictors of phantom vibrations and ringing were age (young people experienced them more) and the extent to which people relied on their phone to regulate their emotional state—checking their phone when they wanted to calm down, for example, or get an emotional boost. “My hunch is at this point it’s a generational thing,” Laramie said. Twenty- and thirty-somethings who grew up with cellphones and have them ingrained in their daily lives probably experience the effect more than older people or technophobes, he says…

Like Laramie, Bensmaia thinks phantom vibrations are a result of the brain’s penchant for filling in the gaps to find patterns. A visual equivalent, he suggests, is seeing the outlines of furniture when you walk through your house in near-total darkness, or seeing the image of a Dalmatian in a field of black and white dots (it’s hard to see at first, but once you detect the pattern it’s almost impossible not to see it)…

“What happens, I think, is that because your clothes are rubbing against your skin, you cause activity in the same receptors, and that activity is just similar enough to the activity caused by a vibrating phone that it triggers the learned association and the perception of a vibrating phone,” he said. It’s not clear exactly where in the brain that occurs, Bensmaia says, but it probably involves the primary somatosensory cortex and other higher-level areas that process the sense of touch.

Is it then too far of a leap to suggest that phones are rewiring our brains in certain ways? Granted, lots of objects or behaviors might prompt rewiring but I suspect a good number of people would recoil at this idea as they normally don’t think the connections between objects and actions and the brain.

Chicago P.D. promotes untruths about urban police work

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Gregg Easterbrook points out that the TV show Chicago P.D. takes numerous liberties in depicting urban police and crime:

NBC promotes Chicago P.D. by implying it shows the gritty, realistic truth of urban police work, much as the network promoted Hill Street Blues a generation ago. But Chicago P.D. isn’t vaguely realistic. The 15-episode first season depicted half-dozen machine-gun battles on Chicago streets. Gunfire is distressingly common in Chicago, but nothing like what the show presents. Mass murders, explosions and jailbreaks are presented as everyday events in the Windy City. A dozen cops have been gunned down in the series so far; that’s more than the total killed on-duty by gunfire in actual during the current decade. (Look on the left for Chicago; the right is the national figure.) Officers on Chicago P.D. obtain in minutes the sort of information that takes real law enforcement months to compile. A detective barks, “Get me a list of all gang-affiliated males in this neighborhood.” A moment later, she’s holding the info.

The antihero protagonist is said to have been in prison for corruption but released “by order of the police chief.” This really is not how the justice system works. Then a cop-killer also is released “by order of the police chief,” which sets up a plot arc in which the good guys seek vengeance. In the real Chicago — or any big city — a convicted cop-killer would never see sunlight again.

Okay, it’s television. But what’s disturbing about Chicago P.D. is audiences are manipulated to think torture is a regrettable necessity for protecting the public. Three times in the first season, the antihero tortures suspects — a severe beating and threats to cut off an ear and shove a hand down a running garbage disposal. Each time, torture immediately results in information that saves innocent lives. Each time, viewers know, from prior scenes, the antihero caught the right man. That manipulates the viewer into thinking, “He deserves whatever he gets.”…

NBC executives don’t want to live in a country where police have the green light to torture suspects. So why do they extol on primetime the notion that torture by the police saves lives? Don’t say to make the show realistic. Nothing about “Chicago P.D.” is realistic — except the scenery.

One excuse is that this is just TV. At the same time, shows like this perpetuate myths about urban crime and police. While crime is down in cities in recent decades, shows like this suggest worse things are happening: it’s not just gun violence but open use of machine guns, not just some crooked cops but consistently crooked cops in a crooked system, and prisoners are routinely tortured. There may be a little truth in all of these things but consistently showing them leads to incorrect perceptions which then affect people’s actions (voting, whether they visit the city, who they blame for social problems, etc.).

Housing bubble pushed more whites to leave mixed-race neighborhoods

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A recent study suggests that American housing bubble influenced racial segregation:

In a paper released earlier this year, researchers Amine Ouazad and Romain Rancière show how the credit boom affected the racial makeup of U.S. neighborhoods. Expanded credit led some black households to leave mostly black neighborhoods for more racially mixed neighborhoods, a move consistent with buying larger or newer homes in areas with better schools or more amenities. Yet at the same time, their report finds that the credit boom led still more white households to leave racially mixed neighborhoods for mostly white neighborhoods—meaning greater isolation for black households…

Given easier access to credit, black households moved into more mixed neighborhoods—but not at the rates that whites households were leaving them. And black households found little purchase in mostly white neighborhoods, Ouazad explains…

“Empirically, what we observe is that black households tend to become homeowners in their own neighborhoods or in mixed neighborhoods,” Ouazad says, “whereas white households used their mortgage credit to move into mostly white neighborhoods.”

The researchers say they were surprised by these findings. Yet, this fits the longer-term patterns in American life: when they are able to, whites tend to move away from blacks. While we may not be in the era of racial covenants, restricted deeds, and redlining (early 1900s) or blockbusting and white flight (post-World War II), whites still express their preference to live in mostly white neighborhoods rather than live with blacks.

It would be worthwhile to then track these neighborhoods that have experienced significant racial change just before and after the housing bubble. What happens in the long-term? Once whites leave, do the neighborhoods (often suburbs) become majority black or do they also offer space for other non-whites? And do those attractive amenities blacks sought continue to exist, thrive, or decline over time?

Americans drive more this summer for the first time since 2008

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American driving was up this summer:

For the first six months of 2014, vehicle miles traveled, the FHA measuring stick, were the highest since 2008, before the outbreak of the financial crisis.

Low-interest financing has helped spur new car sales to the highest levels in more than a decade, encouraging more drivers to hit the roads, according to AAA spokesman Robert Sinclair.

“Most new cars get good fuel economy and gas prices are falling. Combine that with an economy that’s slowly coming back and we see lots of road trips. Our travel projections for Labor Day showed a willingness of travelers to use credit cards to finance a trip, which could be a general trend,” Sinclair said.”…

“Before the 2007 peak, travel behavior in the United States tracked closely with economic growth,” the agency noted in a report. “Since 2007, trends in U.S. [driving] have not followed the trends in economic indicators such as income and employment as closely.”

This is double-edged news. On one hand, this could be evidence that more Americans have money to drive, buy cars, and spend money on travel. On the other hand, more driving leads to more traffic and increased environmental impacts of driving (though miles per gallon are up). And, some might see this as a sign that Americans do really want to drive more but the conditions have to be right.

David Brooks: American cities and suburbs are better than they have ever been

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David Brooks argues that despite pessimism and a lack of leadership, American communities are in good shape:

I’ve been living in and visiting New York for almost a half-century now. One thought occurs as I walk around these days: The city has never been better.

There has never been a time when there were so many interesting places to visit, shop and eat, when the rivers and the parks were so beautiful, when there were so many vibrant neighborhoods across all boroughs, with immigrants and hipsters and new businesses and experimental schools. I suppose New York isn’t as artistically or intellectually rich as it was in the 1940s and 1950s, but daily life is immeasurably better.

And when I think about the 15 or 20 largest American cities, the same thought applies. Compared with all past periods, American cities and suburbs are sweeter and more interesting places. Of course there are the problems of inequality and poverty that we all know about, but there hasn’t been a time in American history when so many global cultures percolated in the mainstream, when there was so much tolerance for diverse ethnicities, lifestyles and the complex directions of the heart, when there was so little tolerance for disorder, domestic violence and prejudice.

Widening the lens, we’re living in an era with the greatest reduction in global poverty ever — across Asia and Africa. We’re seeing a decline in civil wars and warfare generally.

The scope of the problems we face are way below historic averages. We face nothing like the slavery fights of the 1860s, the brutality of child labor and industrialization of the 1880s, or a civilization-threatening crisis like World War I, the Great Depression, World War II or the Cold War. Even next to the 1970s — which witnessed Watergate, stagflation, social decay and rising crime — we are living in a golden age.

Brooks isn’t the only person to make such a general suggestion about our world. For example, Stephen Pinker notes the reduction in violence and war in The Better Angels of Our Nature. Gregg Easterbrook wrote The Progress Paradox. Yet, Brooks is one of the few public figures who have applied these ideas to American cities and suburbs. The public perceptions about cities are usually pretty bad even as the nicer parts of these communities are perhaps nicer than they have ever been. Critics argue suburbs may look nice but are lacking in genuine community as well as diversity.

Perhaps this is one of those situations where Brooks may just be right but perceptions matter as well. As W. I. Thomas famously said, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” The number of murders in big cities may be down over 50%, shopping districts are booming, numerous gleaming condo buildings are going up, and still the average person might be worried.