How many children have tried such a line throughout time? And how effective is this blame?
And yet is there some societal or social influence in how kids act? If socialization is an important process in growing up, could society often factor into choices?
How many kids can define society and/or describe it?
This is also a reminder that books for kids offer plenty of social commentary – and are part of the socialization process themselves.
The Glen, a large residential development that was to be built in Elgin 17 years ago, has come back to life with the help of a new builder.
Moda Homes is partnering with Lennar Homes to build the first phase of a project that calls for 83 single-family homes, 54 age-restricted homes, a 150-unit senior assisted living facility and a neighborhood park on 73 acres off Nolan Road, according to plans presented to the Elgin Planning and Zoning Commission.
The unincorporated property was zoned in the early 2000s for a subdivision. Moda Homes is requesting the site be annexed into the city and a preliminary plat for the project be approved, both of which are now headed to the Elgin City Council for approval…
Elgin council members must approve the annexation agreement and the preliminary plans before construction can begin. A meeting date at which the project will reviewed has not been set.
If this is approved, this development may take about 20 years to complete.
This may seem like a long time. But lots of factors can slow down the process. This story does not say but I wonder if the 2007 proposal was shelved by the housing bubble of that era. Developers can face money issues or there can be a decrease in demand. With the current proposal, local officials might have concerns about annexation and the plans. Questions about or changes to the plan might slow or stop the process. And numerous other issues could pop up.
Perhaps a different question to ask is how long a development proposal “normally” takes. Then could such a prediction factor in local conditions (municipalities can vary), economic conditions, and particular developers or builders? If twenty years seems long, is 4-5 years “normal” from start to finish?
Of course, some developments are proposed – some seriously, some not so much – and never get built. In the Chicago area, think of the Burnham Plan or Frank Lloyd Wright’s idea for a one mile high skyscraper. For any development to be completed, lots of things have to go right.
Ever since the pandemic, many landlords, mayors, and bosses have been going through what one might call “the five stages of office grief.” First, in 2020, there was denial that working from home would have any lasting impact. Then, in 2021, there was anger at employees who wouldn’t return, followed by bargaining on the exact number of days people would spend at the office. By 2022, depression had set in, and cities seemed ready to accept the need for radical change. Now, however, the country’s economic rebound provides new ammunition for those who wish to slide back into denial.
Our cities will be better served by embracing the transition to a world that is less centered around offices. That will require diversifying their economic base, streamlining the construction and conversion of new housing and mixed-use neighborhoods, enhancing public services, and doubling down on what makes urban life attractive in its own right—not just as an employment destination. And the effort must start with the recognition that, in good times and bad, the relationship between economic activity and office demand has changed forever.
Even as there are good reasons to have districts of business offices, having fewer offices overall means offices might be better served being more spread out throughout a city and region or having more mixed-use neighborhoods. Americans have long separated land uses but fewer offices presents an opportunity to bring other land use into what once were separate business areas.
This might be a more radical idea but what could be possible if some of those office buildings were not there in the future? Could there be other land uses – not just renovated buildings – that future city residents and property owners would desire?
And could fewer offices mean fewer roads or less emphasis on vehicle traffic? If commuting is not happening at the same rate, what could be possible?
Institutional investors — those with more than 1,000 homes in their portfolios — own about 426,000 of the 14.2 million rental homes today, John Burns Research and Consulting found. Most of those properties are in sunny Southern places like Atlanta or Raleigh. Small-time landlords still dominate the single-family-rental landscape, but these aren’t your mom and pop’s “mom-and-pops.” For one, the industry is vastly more transparent than it was in the early 2000s. If you want to see what comparable homes in your neighborhood are renting for, you can scroll through Zillow or visit the website of one of the institutional investors, such as Tricon Residential, Pretium, or Invitation Homes, all of which publicly list their properties and their asking rents. If even that sounds like too much work, companies including Buildium and Roofstock, known mostly for servicing the largest investors in the space, stand at the ready to offer property management and pricing advice — for a fee, of course…
Data on small landlords’ behavior is notoriously scarce, but the latest John Burns figures show that in cities with little to no institutional presence, the smaller landlords are the ones cranking up the pressure. Chattanooga, Tennessee, for instance, has practically zero homes owned by institutional landlords but one of the country’s highest rates of rent growth for single-family homes, with the typical asking rent for new leases up 10% in April from a year prior. Institutional investors own less than 1% of single-family rentals in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but asking rents there were up 8% year over year. In a similar vein, corporate owners may face the most scrutiny over evictions, but mom-and-pop rental owners are more likely to illegally evict their tenants, advocates for both landlords and tenants told Business Insider as part of a wide-ranging investigation into so-called “lockouts.”
Mom-and-pop landlords may not be required to detail their operations in quarterly calls with stock analysts, but most experts I spoke with agreed that even those who own just a handful of properties are getting more with the times…
There will always be some landlords who seek nothing more than a tenant who pays rent on time, doesn’t leave, and doesn’t pick up the phone to complain when something breaks down. For this subset, the onslaught of proptech companies and landlord software may seem like unnecessary money sucks. But others will recognize the need to compete with the more professionalized newcomers — the landlords, both large and small, who fix things on time, let you pay online, and, yes, raise rents accordingly.
If this argument is correct, then it sounds like the information now available to potential landlords and property investors – including for a fee – puts the potential resident at a disadvantage regarding price. Are there tools and information now available on the Internet and social media that help potential renters level the playing field? The potential democratization of information in this sphere may not have benefited everyone in the same way.
I also wonder at the role of expectations about returns on investment among smaller landlords. How much profit should they get? Are they providing a community good or are they hoping to cash out big and/or finance a particular lifestyle? As Americans as a whole expect more money from their houses, how have small-time landlords responded to this?
As homes shrink in size, hallways could be one of the first casualties. Eliminating these liminal spaces would decrease the number of interior walls and allow for more condensed homes, the survey found.
“Essentially, we’re Tetris-ing the functional rooms together, avoiding wasted square footage on non-functional areas like hallways,” the report said.
Other tactics Arroyo has noticed designers employing to save on space include eliminating a formal dining room, adding storage in unused spaces (under the staircase, for example), three-story homes with the living space on the second floor, and tandem garages.
Could a hallway be expanded a bit and instead be claimed as another room? (I am thinking of the rooms sometimes found on the second floor at the top of stairs where you might fit a small desk or one chair and it is called an “open space” even though it is really a wider hallway.)
If there are not hallways, where will children run back and forth between walls or family members learn to walk past each other in a confined space? Or wonder which room is which when seeing several doorways at the end of the hall?
As shopping malls seek to add more entertainment options, why not add sports? It could be at the professional level or amateur level. Imagine a high school basketball tournament hosted inside a mall with space for sports. Or a kids baseball tournament. Or a tour pickleball tournament. Sports could help bring in more visitors. It puts more people in proximity to the shops and restaurants.
Even though malls are big, many may not be big enough to do this. The American Dream Meadowlands in East Rutherford Mall, New Jersey is the second-largest mall in the United States and has plenty of entertainment options – a ski slope, a hockey rink, an amusement park, an aquarium, and more – in addition to 450 stores and lots of food options. This complex has sports already in mind. Many malls would need to reconfigure space or add facilities.
Given how much Americans like football and shopping malls (even with their decline), how many events can get more American than this? And held at a place named American Dream?
“How big is a house?” mused Jeremy Samuelson, planning director for East Hampton, N.Y., where a working group recently proposed slashing the town’s maximum-allowed house size in half, from 20,000 square feet to 10,000 square feet…
Towns from Aspen to Martha’s Vineyard are in a big-house brouhaha. Critics say mushrooming mansions cramp scenic vistas and local charm, consume excessive energy and inflate prices…
Truro capped new homes at 3,600 square feet in 2017, but then, Shedd says, officials stuck in an amendment allowing bigger builds with special permits. “I’m not saying it was done on the sly,” says Shedd. “Our town meetings drag on. I was probably glazed over.”…
Routt County, Colo.—home to Steamboat Ski Resort—adopted a proposal capping house sizes at 7,500 square feet in June. Debated for months, the hot-button issue packed public meetings…
In Pitkin County—home to Aspen—officials slashed the maximum new home from 15,000 to 9,250 square feet last November, noting that a big house raises “greenhouse gas emissions and increases environmental havoc.”
What strikes me about these discussions is something I first discovered when researching the use of the term McMansion: the size of a big house is relative in terms of size and quantity. In the case of McMansions, a 3,000 square foot new house might be normal in newer neighborhoods but it can be considered a monstrosity next to a 1,100 square foot postwar ranch house. Or is an 8,000 square foot home a McMansion or a mansion? Depends on who is considering the home and where it is located. Or one teardown McMansion might not be a big deal but dozens or hundreds over a decade or two might be considered going too far.
In the cases of these even larger homes, how big is too big or how many is too many? The discussions here do not appear to be taking place within communities where they are contemplating going from no big houses to some. They are considering whether to have no more big houses. Apparently there is some limit to be reached soon or no more might be allowed.
Will such moves push those who desire giant houses to other communities? Will they end up in municipalities just outside these jurisdictions? Are there other communities who would see this as an opportunity rather than a problem?
The idea of Starbucks as a third place became part of its corporate mythology. Starbucks aimed to create a welcoming environment for coffee drinkers and employees with comfortable seating, jazz music and the aroma of freshly-brewed coffee. Employees who brewed and served Starbucks coffee, whom Starbucks called baristas, handwrote customers’ names on their drink orders…
Mobile app and drive-thru orders make up more than 70% of Starbucks’ sales at its approximately 9,500 company-operated stores in the United States. In some stores, customers complained online that Starbucks pulled out comfortable chairs and replaced them with hard wooden stools. Starbucks has also built pickup-only stores without seating. Machines that print customers’ names have replaced baristas’ handwriting on cups.
“Third place is a broader definition,” current Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan said last year. The “classic definition of third place — it’s a box where I go to meet someone — it’s frankly not relevant anymore in this context.”…
Starbucks’ changes to its sit-down business model came in response to several trends — demand from customers for ordering coffee from their cars in drive-thru lanes or on their smartphones. The shift from a business serving hot coffee to one in which cold coffees, teas and lemonades make up more than half of sales. The Covid-19 pandemic, which forced cafes to shut indoor seating.
Starbucks shifted to meet Wall Street’s demands, too. Starbucks found it could reduce labor costs and increase order volume by running a mostly drive-thru and take-away coffee business. Starbucks also found difficulties with being America’s third place and did not want to become the public space and bathroom for everyone, including people coming into stores who were homeless or struggling with mental health challenges on city streets. Starbucks has closed some stores and restricted bathroom access over safety concerns.
The shifts make sense: more consumers want quick service and coffee to go, the company and shareholders want to make more money, and serving the public can be difficult.
But this is a different approach to coffee, food, and places more generally. Getting coffee to consumers as cheaply and quickly as possible and when and where they desire it treats place differently. Arguably, you might not even need a location any longer. Can we get Starbucks via drones or by drivers within ten minutes of an order? Why bother going to a location at all? Why not have a huge centralized Starbucks that sends out drinks at light speed in all directions?
The purpose of third places is less about consumption and more about social interaction and conversation. Yes, third places like cafes and pubs have food. But the food helps people talk and relax. All humans need to eat – and they also need social connections. Having a refresher in the car while driving – often a solo experience – is a different experience than sitting with friends for half an hour near other people.
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives analysts at a facility in West Virginia search through millions of documents by hand every day to try to identify the provenance of guns used in crimes. Typically, the bureau takes around eight days to track a weapon, though for urgent traces that average falls to 24 hours…
In an era of high-tech evidence gathering, including location data and a trove of evidence from cell phones and other electronic devices used by shooting suspects, ATF agents have to search through paper records to find a gun’s history.
In some cases, those records have even been kept on microfiche or were held in shipping containers, sources told CNN, especially for some of the closed business records like in this case.
The outdated records-keeping system stems from congressional laws that prohibit the ATF from creating searchable digital records, in part because gun rights groups for years have fanned fears that the ATF could create a database of firearm owners and that it could eventually lead to confiscation.
But the urgent ATF trace Saturday proved indispensable in identifying the Pennsylvania shooter, giving authorities a key clue toward his identity in less than half an hour.
On one hand, searching through paper records could appear to be inefficient in the third decade of the twenty-first century. In today’s large-scale societies and systems, the ability to quickly search and retrieve digital records is essential in numerous social and economic sectors.
On the other hand, a large set of paper records is a reminder of the relatively recent shift humans have made to adjust to large populations, and in this case, specifically addressing crime. I recently read The Infernal Machine, a story about dynamite, anarchists at the turn of the twentieth century, and developing police efforts to address the threat of political violence. These changes included systems of records to identify suspects, such as having fingerprints or photos on file.
More broadly, the development of databases and filing systems helped people and institutions keep up with the data they wanted to collect and access. To do fairly basic things in our current world, from getting a driver’s license to voting to accessing health care, requires large databases.
In 1986, Kitty O’Shea’s opened on the ground level of the Chicago Hilton with the mission of creating an “authentic Irish pub experience” in downtown Chicago. Its owners paid careful attention to detail, traveling to Dublin to research the look and feel of some of its treasured pubs. They flew in Irish bartenders with authentic brogues and offered nightly Irish entertainment. It quickly became the most successful Hilton hotel restaurant in the world, according to news reports…
Chief among them is the Irish Pub Concept, creators of the Fadó franchise. They offer consulting and resources for prospective pub owners, with several templates to choose from (including Celtic, English and country-style bars). The company says it helped launch upwards of 6,500 Irish pubs across the world. They provide everything — down to the brick-a-brack and employee training manuals.
These mass-produced Irish pubs have been criticized for offering a caricaturized, Disneyfied version of Irish culture — an Irish “pub in a box,” if you will. But they are also hugely popular.
Chicago still has its share of Irish pubs that grew organically and are owned and operated by Irish emigrants and their descendants. They include Shinnick’s Pub, which has been in Bridgeport for 80 years; Chief O’Neill’s, named in honor of an Irish-born Chicago police chief and opened by Irish emigrants in the ’90s; and the Fifth Province in the Irish-American Heritage Center. These places didn’t need to consult anyone on authenticity. And they continue to draw Irish emigrants, locals and people like me — the descendants of those early arrivals.
Presumably, some of these locations serve as “third places,” settings where people can go between work and home to socialize, eat, and talk. Sociologists and others have noted that Americans have relatively few places like this and this limits social interaction and civic engagement.
But other locations may serve more like consumer spaces where people visit, enjoy, and leave having had a good time. There are plenty of these in American communities where people seek out a particular experience they like with less concern for community-building and longer-term relationships.
Could online or virtual spaces ever replicate these settings? I am skeptical. Could online or virtual spaces drive people back to pubs and other gathering spots to converse and interact in person with other humans? Maybe.
Legally Sociable 