Author Archives: legallysociable

Is more Internet use correlated to a decline in religious affiliation?

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A new study suggests using the Internet more is correlated with lower levels of religious affiliation:

Downey analyzed data from the General Social Survey, a well-respected annual research survey carried out by the University of Chicago, to make his findings.

Downey says the single biggest cause of religious affiliation is upbringing: those you are raised in religious households are much more likely to remain in their family’s religion as adults…

By far the largest factor, says Downey, is Internet use.

In the 1980s, Internet use was virtually non-existent, but in 2010, 53 per cent of people spent two hours online a week and 25 per cent spent more than seven hours…

Downey says that his research has controlled for ‘most of the obvious candidates, including income, education, socioeconomic status, and rural/urban environments’ to discount a third factor, one that is responsible both for the rise of Internet use and the drop in religiosity.

Since the full story is behind a subscriber wall, two speculations about the methodology of this study:

1. This sounds like a regression and/or ANOVA analysis based on R-squared changes. In other words, when one explanatory factor is in the model, how much more of the variation in the dependent variable (religiosity) is explained? You can then add or subtract different factors singly or in combination to see how that percent of variation explained changes.

2. Looking at religious affiliation is just one way to measure religiosity. Affiliation is based on self-identification (do you consider yourself a Catholic, mainline Protestant, conservative Protestant, etc.) or what religious congregation you regularly attend or interact with. But, levels of religious affiliation have been falling in recent years even as not all measures of religiosity are falling. Research about the rise of the “religious nones” shows a number of these people still are spiritual or perform religious practices.

If there is a strong causal relationship between increased Internet use and less religiosity, why might this be the case? A few ideas:

1. The Internet opens people up to a whole realm of information beyond themselves. Traditionally, people would look to those around them, whether individuals or institutions, within relatively close proximity. The Internet breaks a lot of these social boundaries and allows people to search for information way beyond themselves.

2. The Internet offers social interactions in a way that religion used to. Instead of going to a religious congregation to meet people, the Internet offers the possibilities of finding like-minded people in all sorts of areas from hobbies and interests, people in the same career field, dating websites, and people you want to sell goods to. In other words, some of the social aspects of religion can now be replicated online.

3. The Internet in its medium and content tends to be individualistic. Anyone with an Internet connection can do all sorts of things without relying on others (outside of having a service provider). This simply feeds into individualistic attitudes that already existed in the United States.

It sounds like there is a lot more here for researchers to explore and unpack.

Demolishing public housing as spectacle in Glasgow

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Glasgow, Scotland is planning to blow up five 29-story public housing high-rises, the tallest buildings in the city, and broadcast the event live on local TV and set up a viewing in a nearby soccer stadium:

Glasgow has a novel plan for grabbing viewers for this summer’s Commonwealth Games opening ceremony: It’s going to blow up the city’s tallest buildings live on television. For the Games opener on July 23, Scotland’s largest city will demolish five towers (most over 290-foot high) in just 15 seconds, screening the explosions at the nearby Celtic Stadium.

This combination of celebration and mass destruction, announced Thursday, would be unusual in any circumstances. What makes Glasgow’s plans even stranger is that the towers being dynamited – part of a huge housing project called the Red Road Flats – were once the city’s pride. By uniting a cheering stadium crowd and TV cameras with explosives, the ceremony might come off as a sort of latter-day Disco Sucks, but for social housing…

Still, the city has been moving on. From the ’80s onwards, Glasgow started an ultimately successful re-branding of itself as a cultural and business center. The Red Road and its ilk became emblems of the run-down Glasgow that the city’s promoters wanted to forget. Demolition of the first few towers started back in 2012. Now the games will dramatize its final transformation in the most eye-catching way possible.

But is it really in good taste? This video, shared by the games organizers themselves, proves that many former residents still remember the place with affection. What’s more, the project isn’t totally uninhabited, as one tower, currently occupied by asylum seekers, will remain. For these people, witnessing a ceremony that enacts their neighborhood’s destruction as unfit for human habitation while leaving them on site, should feel uncomfortable at the least. A petition is going round against the plans, and there’s a sense among locals that they, rather than just the buildings, are the targets of a ritual purge to do away with a side of Glasgow officialdom would rather forget.

The whole process sounds similar to the demolition of public housing high-rises in American cities, starting with the Pruitt-Igoe complex in St. Louis in the mid-1970s (a good documentary about it here) and accelerating with the HOPE VI program that began in the mid-1990s. Of course, the buildings tended to get blamed for the problems at the complexes when there was a whole host of other issues involved including deindustrialization and residential segregation.

But, it does seem a bit odd to make this such a spectacle. It is relatively rare to demolish large buildings so I could understand how that might be interesting. In contrast, while the demolition of Chicago’s public housing buildings drew attention (particularly the last high-rises at Cabrini-Green), it seemed like the general public wanted to move on rather than celebrate the demolition. Instead of publicizing the demolition, why not devote some air-time to showing how the city is trying to tackle the larger underlying issues (unless, of course, they are not and the demolition is meant to be a distraction from the true issues)? As the residents at Cabrini-Green who fought the city’s plans argued, what is the point of demolition if there many other options planned down the road?

DeSean Jackson illustrates how black Americans often retain ties to poorer neighborhoods, regardless of class

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Jamelle Bouie highlights sociological research that shows blacks in America tend to live closer to and have ongoing social ties with poorer neighborhoods compared to whites:

The key fact is this: Even after you adjust for income and education, black Americans are more likely than any other group to live in neighborhoods with substantial pockets of poverty.

As sociologist Patrick Sharkey shows in his book Stuck in Place, 62 percent of black adults born between 1955 and 1970 lived in neighborhoods that were at least 20 percent poor, a fact that’s true of their children as well. An astounding 66 percent of blacks born between 1985 and 2000 live in neighborhoods as poor or poorer as those of their parents…

How does this stack up to white families? Here, Sharkey is indispensable: Among white children born through 1955 and 1970, just 4 percent live in high poverty neighborhoods. Or, put another way, black Americans live with a level of poverty that is simply unknown to the vast majority of whites…

“When white families advance in economic status,” writes Sharkey, “they are able to translate this economic advantage into spatial advantage by buying into communities that provide quality schools and healthy environments for children.” The same isn’t true for black Americans, and some of the answer has to include present and ongoing housing discrimination. For example, in one study—conducted by the Department of Housing and the Urban Institute—black renters learned about fewer rental units and fewer homes than their white counterparts…

This can have serious consequences. Youthful experimentation for a white teenager in a suburb might be smoking a joint in a friend’s attic. Youthful experimentation for a black teenager might be hanging out with gang members. As Mary Pattillo-McCoy writes in her book Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class, “Youth walk a fine line between preparing for success and youthful delinquent experimentation, the consequences of which can be especially serious for black youth.”

Even as the details of the DeSean Jackson situation trickle out, the overall point is clear: blacks and whites in America continue to live in different neighborhoods and this has consequences for adult life. One consequence is that blacks tend to live in poorer neighborhoods, regardless of class, and a second is that social ties between wealthier and poorer neighborhoods often continue even when economic opportunity allows one to move elsewhere (see the work of Robert Sampson in Great American City for his social network analysis of social ties of residents who leave poorer neighborhoods – and also where they tend to end up).

All together, the impact of on-going residential segregation is not as simple as living in different places. The social conditions of different places is related to all sorts of disparate outcomes including housing options, educational attainment, safety and crime rates, economic opportunities, and life expectancy. We should not be surprised if we see this play out in arenas like the NFL which apparently has some divided opinions about how it should be addressed (one team releases a good player, another eagerly signs him).

Want more Chicago area mass transit? Have to find more tax dollars

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More mass transit may be good for the Chicago region but it will cost taxpayers:

A coalition of transportation advocates supported by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle has recommended raising new tax money in Cook County to help pay for billions of dollars of mass transit improvements…

In a meeting with the Tribune’s editorial board, coalition leaders said that the board could potentially raise property, sales, or gasoline taxes for the local share. The money would help pay for such big-ticket projects in Chicago and Cook County as the long-sought extension of the CTA’s Red Line to the far South Side.

The Red Line extension and other billion-dollar projects like suburb-to-suburb Metra STAR Line have languished in recent years because federal funding for major transit endeavors has all but disappeared…

The coalition’s campaign comes on the heels of a Northeastern Illinois Public Transit Task Force report released Monday which concluded that current funding levels are insufficient to maintain current service, much less expand it.

I suspect it will be difficult to raise such funds when there are plenty of other needs for money in Chicago and Illinois. At the same time, I have little doubt that there are a number of mass transit projects that would be helpful in the Chicago area. Such projects could help limit road traffic, provide needed transportation options to places where driving cars (a relatively expensive task) is not as viable, and even potentially spur development around new mass transit options. But, the short-term cost is quite high.

Advice for how to stop your neighbor from building a McMansion next door

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McMansions can be opposed in a variety of ways but one poster suggests the way to go is to be an undesirable neighbor:

Paint your house bright pink. Put several cars on cinderblocks in the front yard. Have 20 people move in with you. Stop cutting the grass. Park junk cars on the street in front of the vacant house. Blast loud music 24/7. Tie up a pit bull in your front yard. Get someone with a huge gut to hang out in your front yard without a shirt while drinking beer. All of these together may work, but you’ll probably make yourself miserable in the process.

These actions may or may not be possible given local laws and neighborhood regulations but they all have a similar goal: drive down property values so that possible McMansion no longer looks financially appealing. As numerous people will tell you, who wants to have the nicest house on the street, particularly compared to your immediate neighbors? If McMansions are about wealthier people upgrading their property regardless of their surroundings, then such actions could undercut their financial basis.

The most and least sprawling US metropolitan areas

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Here are new rankings of the most and least sprawling metropolitan regions:

Measuring Sprawl 2014 [PDF] looks at 221 metropolitan areas and 994 counties around the country, giving them number grades (higher is better) on a “Sprawl Index” by using four factors: density; mix of uses; strength of “activity centers” and downtowns; and accessibility of the street network.

The top 10 “most compact” areas nationally, regardless of metro size, were:

  • New York/White Plains/Wayne, New York/New Jersey
  • San Francisco/San Mateo/Redwood City, California
  • Atlantic City/Hammonton, New Jersey
  • Santa Barbara/Santa Maria/Goleta, California
  • Champaign/Urbana, Illinois
  • Santa Cruz/Watsonville, California
  • Trenton/Ewing, New Jersey
  • Miami/Miami Beach/Kendall, Florida
  • Springfield, Illinois
  • Santa Ana/Anaheim/Irvine, California…

The list of top (or bottom) “most sprawling” areas was dominated by places in the Southeast. In order from lowest scoring (worst) to highest, they were:

  • Hickory/Lenoir/Morganton, North Carolina
  • Atlanta/Sandy Springs/Marietta, Georgia
  • Clarksville, Tennessee/Kentucky
  • Prescott, Arizona
  • Nashville-Davidson/Murfreesboro/Franklin, Tennessee
  • Baton Rouge, Louisiana
  • Riverside-San Bernardino/Ontario, California
  • Greenville/Mauldin-Easley, South Carolina
  • Augusta/Richmond County, Georgia
  • Kingsport/Bristol/Bristol, Tennessee/Virginia

Among large metro areas, “The biggest success story is surprisingly Los Angeles,” says Reid Ewing, a University of Utah professor who was the lead researcher on the study. “Los Angeles has actually densified substantially.” The famously car-dependent California city ranked seventh among metro areas with populations over one million. The report attributes some of L.A.’s high score to development around transit stations and an ordinance that allows developers to build denser projects in exchange for affordable housing.

Interesting to see all of these Sunbelt locales in the most sprawling list, places where a lot of their growth has likely taken place in the last 50 or so years. This likely leads to more suburban (less dense) areas with streets less likely to be on a grid and with very separate land uses. In contrast, the least sprawling cities are more of a hodgepodge including old American cities (New York), a college town amidst cornfields (Champaign-Urbana), and a few Sunbelt cities (including Santa Ana/Irvine/Anaheim).

The article goes on to note that sprawl is linked to a number of negative outcomes:

The researchers found that sprawl correlated with higher rates of obesity, traffic fatalities, ozone pollution, lack of social capital, vehicle miles traveled, physical activity, and residential energy use.

While the full report shows the scores for each metro area on the four criteria, it’s too bad it doesn’t show how these different life outcomes differ across metro areas.

Analyze big data better when computer scientists and social scientists share knowledge

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Part of the “big-data struggle” is to have more computer scientists interacting with social scientists:

The emerging problems highlight another challenge: bridging the “Grand Canyon,” as Mr. Lazer calls it, between “social scientists who aren’t computationally talented and computer scientists who aren’t social-scientifically talented.” As universities are set up now, he says, “it would be very weird” for a computer scientist to teach courses to social-science doctoral students, or for a social scientist to teach research methods to information-science students. Both, he says, should be happening.

Both groups could learn quite a bit from each other. Arguably, programming skills would be very useful in a lot of disciplines in a world gaga over technology, apps, and big data. Arguably, more rigorous methodologies to find and interpret patterns are needed across a wide range of disciplines interested in human behavior and social interaction. Somebody has to be doing this already, perhaps even within individuals who have training to both areas. But, joining the two academic bodies together on a more formal and institutionalized basis could take quite a bit of work.

How to define “high-speed” rail in the United States

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High-speed rail may be expanding in the United States – but it is not be “high-speed” according to European definitions.

Does that make the new trains high speed? It depends on who you ask. According to the European Union’s definition, high speed trains must be able to travel above 124 mph on conventional tracks, and at speeds over 155 mph on tracks specifically upgraded for high-speed rail.

Although the Charger locomotives feature the latest technology, with emission controls and on-board diagnostics, they’re relatively conventional. The “new” trains are based on a popular European design, and top out at 125 mph. That’s as fast as the Metroliner that ran between New York and Washington D.C. in 1969. By that definition, the new Siemens trains don’t qualify as “high speed.”…

“It is also necessary to take into account those railways which are making laudable efforts to provide high speed despite a basis of old infrastructure and technology which is far removed from that employed by the railways of western Europe.”

In other words, because the American passenger rail system is so far behind the rest of the world, any improvement whatsoever could be considered high speed. It’s an important step forward, despite the appearance that the U.S. is rejecting HSR.

Maybe we should add a modifier: these are American high-speed trains, not high-speed trains by global standards. So much for American exceptionalism…

The article goes on to note how high-speed rail isn’t proving too popular to taxpayers in several states where it has been proposed. Proponents say this may not be too much of a problem: once Americans see the capabilities of truly high-speed rail, they would avidly use it. But, this is a difficult chicken and egg problem: people don’t want to devote millions/billions to a new project that may or may not succeed but they can’t truly know the possibilities until one is built. Perhaps everyone would benefit from seeing one really popular, speedy, and consistent spoke of a system (outside of the dense Washington-to-Boston megapolis served by the Acela Express – which can go over 150 mph but averages more like 80 mph) before trying to build numerous links?

Patterns amongst borders between suburban yards

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An artist noticed that her neighbors in an older Sacramento suburb follow some patterns in the borders between their yards:

“There are definite patterns of cohesiveness,” says Neidigh of her series Property Line. She says it’s possible to observe “the layering of planting trends over 50, 60 years, or even older.”A Midwest transplant who’s settled in California’s capitol city, Neidigh set out to document the “groomed landscapes” of the city, drilling down past the Pleasantville-type conformity to reveal the unique personailties expressed in seemingly cookie-cutter borders. Her earlier series, With Great Care, focuses on the tightly groomed mulberry trees found in Sacramento neighborhoods. She’s intrigued by the tension of perennially pruning these plants that outgrow their accceptable bounds.

“It has that inherited design, where they’re maintaining this thing that’s been planted so long ago, and just keeping it in bounds,” Neidigh says.

Here is my favorite of the online pictures:

Land lines can be quite contested with different ideas about landscaping as well as determining the exact line. The picture above offers a great contrast: a driveway on the right with an extra parking space on the lot line with the yard on the left going for some minimalist landscaping amongst brick pavers. The right side offers function, the left side wants to have a little piece of nature. Why don’t the people on the left create a larger hedge if they want to have plants along the line?

It’s too bad we don’t get to see the neighbors interacting across these lot lines. Of course, that assumes they do have much interaction in their front yards or that they even interact much at all…