Author Archives: legallysociable

Some Chicago aldermen, businesses argue they want parking meters to move cars and customers along

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As Chicago debates a parking meter policy, some aldermen and businesses want metered parking on Sunday so they can keep customers moving through the parking spaces:

Some aldermen are saying “no thanks” to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s offer of free Sunday parking when it comes to their commercial districts for fear it would hurt businesses that rely on street parking for their customers…

“As soon as this deal happened, I got a letter from my chamber of commerce, saying … this is going to hurt local businesses,” Ald. Michele Smith, whose 43rd Ward includes most of Lincoln Park, said during a Finance Committee hearing on Tuesday to weigh the mayor’s proposal. Businesses need parkers to move on so others can take their place, several aldermen said…

“In some commercial areas, with some businesses, the businesses actually want the turnover that payment on Sunday gives, because having spots filled by somebody that’s just leaving it there all day hurts business, and that’s the concern that we’re trying to address on a case-by-case basis,” Patton said.

Intriguingly, this puts the aldermen in a tough position between residents/customers and businesses:

But aldermen would have to request it, something Ald. Ameya Pawar, 47th, said could leave council members in a tough spot. “What it ends up setting up is a situation where, ‘Well, whose side are you on — the businesses or the constituents?’ It’s problematic,” Pawar told Patton.

This highlights an advantage of parking meters: they can keep the parked traffic moving so that cars can’t clog up spaces. Without them, city residents and visitors are likely to sit in the spots for a long time. This also is a reminder of the mix of uses often found in urban neighborhoods: both residents and businesses are vying for parking for much of the day. In contrast, parking is more plentiful in suburban shopping areas and many suburban downtown businesses gave up parking meters decades ago to keep customers happy. But, these suburban downtowns rarely have the density and demand for street parking that cities face.

So, if residents in these neighborhoods complained loud enough about wanting free parking on Sundays, would they be able to force an alderman to side with them?

McArdle: real 21st century problem is providing meaningful jobs for all

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Megan McArdle considers the recent rioting in Sweden and suggests developed nations have a long-term problem of finding meaningful jobs for all:

In too many places, for too many people, the modern industrialized democracies are not working. People can live, but they are cut off from the broader society. And the number of these people seems to be increasing. It’s too hard for many people to find a decent job. And taking from the rich to buy them health care and day care and subsidized housing does not repair the hole this leaves in their lives.

It looks to me as if the great task of the next few decades will be to find ways to employ all the people on the margins productively, and with dignity. But this is not, mostly, the question that most public policy debates are engaged in addressing. That question is hard, and no one has a good answer, so instead we debate technical questions about stimulus multipliers and minimum wages, and have the occasional knock down, drag out fight about who has a moral right to how much cash. There’s nothing wrong with those debates, and I myself have been a spirited participant. But the harder questions have much more important answers.

Interesting analysis. Simply providing a safety net may not be enough moving forward. Expectations have changed, both for those receiving government or private aid and those providing the aid. People expect to have an opportunity to make decent money as well as pursue something that interests them.

It boils down to this: what happens if you have developed societies with relatively high unemployment, particularly for disadvantages groups, for decades with little change?

h/t Instapundit

Former downtown Wheaton Jewel store demolished, makes way for medical building

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The closing of the Jewel in downtown Wheaton in 2008 upset a number of residents but the building is being demolished and making way for a new medical building:

Bulldozers have arrived at the former Jewel Osco site in downtown Wheaton, demolishing the building that has been vacant for several years.

It’ll make way for a new DuPage Medical Group building, which is expected to bring in new jobs and more activity into the city’s downtown…

Just south of the site, construction of a new Mariano’s grocery store is ongoing, along with an apartment complex called Wheaton 121 being built a few blocks north. Both are slated to open in the fall.

The DuPage Medical Group building, which will be three stories and span 40,035 square feet at Main Street and Willow Avenue, is expected to be done by April, said Dennis Fine, Chief Operating Officer. The project will relocate 45 employees and 12 physicians from their current location at N. Main Street and W. Cole Avenue.

Fine expects to add at least 15 jobs and three to five more physicians to accommodate the services being added at the new location.

The city has been looking for years for a way to utilize this site and help the part of downtown south of the railroad tracks. It doesn’t sound like this new building will be a huge source of jobs but it does reinforce the image that downtown Wheaton is a place to be. Medical offices fit the image downtown Wheaton is looking for: more upscale residences, offices, and business establishments. Plus, the new grocery store will provide a more upscale business so the downtown will have gained a better grocery store plus this new medical office. I would guess that a lot of downtowns in the Chicago area would be happy if a medical facility redeveloped a vacant retail site.

However, this does lead to a newly vacant building on the north side of Wheaton in a more commercialized corridor. What might go at this site at Main and Cole?

The most profitable song is “Margaritaville”

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Copyrighting the words of “Margaritaville” as well as trademarking the name has been quite lucrative for Jimmy Buffett:

To think that all of this poured forth from a goofy, three-chord song—a mere 208 words, roughly half the length of this article—written about being lazy and getting drunk. But as Buffett’s Parrothead empire continues to spread, one can’t help but wonder whether a more lucrative song exists. “If there is anything on the same scale as a Margaritaville, it’s not a song—it’s a motion picture,” says Robert Brauneis, a professor of intellectual property at the George Washington University Law School and author of a research paper on Happy Birthday to You, which continues to generate upwards of $2 million a year. “When you’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, you have to think in terms of Star Wars, Winnie the Pooh, or Transformers. That’s probably in the same order of magnitude.”

As a recording, Margaritaville doesn’t post stratospheric numbers. After debuting on Buffett’s 1977 album Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude, it peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard 100 charts. According to the 2012 BBC documentary The Richest Songs in the World, Margaritaville doesn’t crack the top 10, which is populated by three Christmas songs. The two highest-ranking pop songs are You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling, by the Righteous Brothers, and Yesterday, by the Beatles. (No. 1 was Happy Birthday to You.) “If you want to get technical, there are two Margaritavilles,” says Brauneis. “There’s the copyright that protects the song, which is valuable because of the stream of income. Then there’s the trademark that has developed out of the song’s title, and legally that’s a different piece of intellectual property.”

Of course, this means the song and the brand are separate legal entities and could, in theory, be sold separately. But this isn’t the case. If you want to check Buffett’s tour dates, there’s no JimmyBuffett.com—there’s only Margaritaville.com, where his music career and the rest of his empire are seamlessly melded into one site.

“From a larger business perspective, when you combine the two and look at what the song stands for as a lifestyle and as a branding vehicle,” says Brauneis, “it’s worth far more than Happy Birthday. I can’t think of another example of a song that has that total impact.”

The key here is not really the song itself but the business opportunities the song has led to. This is spectacular branding: Buffett and others have created a sellable lifestyle out of the song and there has been a willing set of consumers willing to eat at the restaurant, buy merchandise, and go to concerts. It is hard to imagine a “Yesterday” themed restaurant – the song is really sort of sad – or one centered around “Happy Birthday” as this is an event that only comes around once a year. Indeed, it would be interesting to see how other artists have tried to capitalize on individual songs and the outcomes of those ventures. Is there any other song that could potentially lead to such financial opportunities? Is this a future source of income for musical artists?

Where emerging adults live tends to perpetuate residential segregation

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A new study suggests mobility patterns of emerging adults tend to reinforce existing patterns of residential segregation:

“We were interested in this idea that this stage of the life-course could be a potentially really important juncture for breaking down these kinds of very long-established patterns of residential segregation and all of the inequalities that go with them,” says Marcus Britton, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who has studied the question. “Unfortunately, our results are not tremendously encouraging on that score.”

Britton and Pat Goldsmith, a sociologist at Texas A&M, examined records from the National Education Longitudinal Study of more than 7,000 students who were eighth-graders in 1988. That study followed these students through 2000, when most of them were 26. Britton and Goldsmith, in research published in the journal Urban Studies, compared their home zip codes and other characteristics at various points along this timeline with census data collected in 1990 and 2000 about the racial makeup of those neighborhoods.

Blacks and Hispanics who migrated to new metropolitan areas were, in fact, more likely to live in zip codes with greater exposure to whites, unlike minorities who moved within their own city. But few minorities actually made such long-distance moves. This means that segregation persists in part because many minorities have limited exposure to integrated neighborhoods as children, but also because they have limited mobility as they age to relocate somewhere entirely new.

Britton has conducted other research that suggests that minorities are also much more likely to live at home as young adults than whites are. And given patterns that we’ve seen more recently during the recession – when young twentysomethings of all races have been stuck at home – these trends bode particularly poorly for integration.

This is a clever research design: emerging adults, who may be more interested in diversity compared to older generations and who are also in a period of transition where they can try out some new kinds of places, might break out of patterns of residential segregation. But, this description of the research findings suggests it is difficult to move beyond past residential segregation patterns. This sounds like a basic sociological finding, people are strongly influenced by past conditions, but also adds the element that even a younger generation who has heard more about diversity and may be more interested in living in urban areas is also not willing or able to move in large numbers to more diverse places.

This would be something interesting to keep track of in the future: could we envision a United States in several decades where most people support diversity and fighting inequality based on race/ethnicity, class, and gender but few people are willing to actually change where they or others live?

Determining how Illinois road money should be split between Chicago area, downstate

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The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning argues Illinois needs to change its formula for how it apportions road money between the Chicago area and downstate:

A deal hammered out by the state’s top politicians in the 1980s means that 45 percent of all transportation revenues go to the Chicago metropolitan area and 55 percent is allocated to downstate Illinois.

CMAP wants to change the status quo with a performance-based system using population, congestion, pollution and economic impact as criteria when it comes to doling out dollars for significant projects such as new highways, bridges and interchanges or additional lanes…

The agency points out that the metropolitan region comprises 65 percent of the population and contributes about 70 percent of the state’s income tax and 65 percent of its sales tax revenues.

Yet, in IDOT’s 2014-2019 multimodal transportation improvement program, about $3.1 billion — or 45 percent — out of $6.9 billion goes to District 1 including Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry and Will counties, CMAP planners said…

“It’s a very bad idea,” said Republican Rep. Dwight Kay of Glen Carbon. “The needs of southern Illinois in terms of total miles is far greater than in the suburbs or in Chicago. I would be somewhat dismayed if not shocked to think anyone would propose changes. We have hundreds of bridges that either need to be replaced or are older and in disrepair.”

My first question is how lawmakers came to a 55/45 split in the first place. I would hope this agreement was based on some hard numbers but perhaps they were the only figures that everyone could agree on?

It sounds like the current debate would shape up like this: downstate lawmakers argue they have plenty of road miles and infrastructure to maintain while Chicago area politicians argue they put in a majority of the money and have a majority of the population. Do Illinois lawmakers even have the ability to discuss something like this even in the midst of other major money woes? Wouldn’t this simply inflame the ongoing Chicago versus downstate debate? I suspect this won’t be on the front burner even if infrastructure is a growing conversation piece around the country.

Poor Chicago neighborhoods have fewer businesses compared to the average American poor neighborhood

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Chicago’s poor neighborhoods aren’t just lacking businesses. These Chicago neighborhoods have significantly lower numbers of businesses compared to poor neighborhoods in other American cities.

Translated: that means Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods are tremendously business-poor, even compared to other cities’ poorest neighborhoods. As the author, Marco Luis Small, puts it: “In some cases, the difference is stark. Chicago has 82% fewer small restaurants, 95% fewer small banks, and 72% fewer small convenience stores than a black poor ghetto in the average city…. The average black poor neighborhood in the U.S. does not look at all like the South Side of Chicago.”

The effects go beyond mere economic loss. In Heat Wave, Eric Klinenberg notes the differences between North and South Lawndale and their effects on the death rate during the 1995 heat wave:

“In North Lawndale, the dangerous ecology of abandoned buildings, open spaces, commercial depletion, violent crime, degraded infrastructure, low population density, and family dispersion undermines the viability of public life and the strength of local support systems,” he writes. “In Little Village, though, the busy streets, heavy commercial activity, residential concentration, and relatively low crime promote social contact, collective life, and public engagement in general and provide particular benefits for the elderly, who are more likely to leave home when they are drawn out by nearby amenities.”…

What struck Small when he moved to Chicago was this absence of activity—compared to, say, Harlem, which is poor but tremendously vibrant: “What I first noticed, and what took me months to get used to, was the utter lack of density, the surprising preponderance of empty spaces, vacant lots, and desolate streets, even as late as 2006. Repeatedly, I asked myself, where is everyone?”

This is part of Chicago’s exceptionalism: gleaming downtown and struggling poor neighborhoods amidst residential segregation (as discussed by Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton in American Apartheid and others). One strange aspect of all of this is the lack of conversation within the Chicago area itself about these disparities. Plenty of people are willing to discuss murders and crime rates. But, while sociologists like Mario Luis Small, Sudhir Venkatesh, Robert Sampson, Eric Klinenberg, and others have provided clear data about the lack of economic opportunities (as well as other kinds of opportunities) in poor Chicago neighborhoods, this is rarely discussed in public.

Exposing Americans to passive houses

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A Chicago Tribune article suggests more Americans would like passive houses if they knew about them:

The idea of passive house design isn’t new. It was first promoted in the early 1990s…

Torres Moskovitz estimates there may be 40,000 certified passive house buildings in the world, but probably fewer than 50 projects in the United States…

The stringent passive house — or Passivhaus — standards and the Passive House Planning Package software were developed by the Passive House Institute in Germany. The U.S.-based Passive House Institute is currently formulating its own standards. The PHPP software incorporates a designer’s calculations and helps design a passive house.

A passive house saves up to 90 percent of space heating costs and 75 percent of overall energy costs, though some European studies indicate the numbers may be even higher…

“People learning about it are so into it, maybe it becomes a bottoms-up approach, comes from the public and then the government has to react to our demand,” Torres Moskovitz says. “There’s definitely interest in the building community, but it has a way to go before everyone understands.”

I think a lot of Americans would be very interested in the cost savings of passive houses. But, they would want to know: if I pay more upfront for such a home, what is the payoff in reduced utility costs down the road? Even if there are significant savings, I imagine these houses are going to be part of a niche market for a long time as more people learn about them and builders learn to see them as profitable options. Perhaps passive houses need some sort of public relations push like a recent initiative regarding public housing?

Housing recovery more than just the McMansions of Toll Brothers?

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One analyst suggests the housing recovery in recent months is more than just an uptick in McMansions and big homes:

The housing market appears to have recovered from the depth of its decline. Toll Brothers (TOL) reported a whopping 46% jump in its latest earnings report and Home Depot’s (HD) earnings soared 18%. Today the National Association of Realtors reported that April existing home sales surged to their highest level in more than three years…

Michael Santoli, senior columnist for Yahoo! Finance, says the housing recovery seems to have a new leg based on a scarcity of supply coupled with low interest rates and growing demand.

“This can feed on itself for a while,” says Santoli, “not just with regard to Toll Brothers, which makes higher end McMansion-type houses, but across the industry.”

Santoli says not to expect a steep rise in prices from here despite a “bottleneck of demand.” And don’t expect all housing-related stocks to surge.

It would be helpful to see more exact housing figures at different levels of the market. Big homes seem to be doing okay as evidenced by the strength of Toll Brothers. But, the lower ends of the market don’t seem to be recovering as much as underwater mortgages lead to limited supply and hold the housing market back. When the housing market is truly recovering, shouldn’t a broad swath of Americans benefit? Or, are we seeing a fundamental shift in American housing where middle and lower-class residents have continuing difficulty in purchasing homes?

Sociology professor who taught class on Lady Gaga becomes “Gaga sensei” and celebrity himself

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Read about the fame a sociology professor who taught a class titled “Lady Gaga and the Sociology of Fame” has himself found:

Deflem’s entry into the world of celebrity began quietly enough. He had an idea for a course looking at Lady Gaga’s rise to fame – and examining it from a sociological point of view – in the summer of 2010 and got the go-ahead to design it. In October, 2010, the course was announced to the university newspaper. From there – to the astonishment of many – the course suddenly became news across the globe.

In the weeks that followed, Deflem was swamped by interview requests and media appearances to discuss the course. They came from the New York Times, the BBC, the Washington Post, MTV, Billboard, Elle and USA Today. Media from countries including Italy, Germany, Ireland, Slovenia, India, Vietnam, Lebanon, Oman and even Zambia ran pieces about it. He fended off accusations that he had cynically designed the course and its title just to get such attention. “There is no way I could have planned this. I am not that smart,” he said.

But that was just the beginning. Soon he got an avalanche of criticism from figures like conservative firebrand Ann Coulter as well as Christian fundamentalists. His course even became an answer on the game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

Lady Gaga herself noticed the course and talked about it on radio interviews and a chat with broadcast journalist Anderson Cooper on the flagship news programme 60 Minutes. Saturday Night Live did a skit about Lady Gaga featuring a fan of the star who was dressed to look like Deflem…

He was also amazed at the lack of agency he had over his own fate and image as it spiralled out of control in the hands of hundreds of journalists. “You kind of undergo it. You experience it. You do not really have any control,” he said.

Does this then count as participant observation?

The course did indeed get a lot of attention, see an earlier post here, but it sounds like it has been worthwhile in the end: it allowed a sociology professor to take a current topic and use it to teach sociology as well as learn on the inside about the nature of celebrity.

I still think it would be interesting to hear sociologists discuss their opinions about courses like this or Michael Eric Dyson’s courses on hip-hop. The names and subject matter of the course can stir up controversy but it helps draw attention to a discipline that doesn’t generally receive much. Plus, what is the difference between giving a course a provocative name and then using it to teach sociology well versus the current events and examples lots of sociology professors use in the classroom?