Author Archives: legallysociable

Hit by the recession: “Architecture revenue down 40% since 2008”

Posted on by

Amongst those hit hard by the economic crisis and the downturn in the housing and building industries, don’t overlook architects:

Between 2008 and 2011, gross revenue at architecture firms fell from over $44 billion to $26 billion. More than 28 percent of positions disappeared…

Architecture is dependent on construction, which is notoriously cyclical – usually three or four times more volatile than the market, says Kermit Baker, the AIA’s chief economist and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. “It’s been devastating,” he says. “Construction activity has been down 50 or 60 percent – architecture has a long tradition of trying to survive the construction cycle, and it’s extremely challenging because architecture firms are by and large small- and medium-size firms.”…

But the highly competitive market has also encouraged innovation. The percentage of architectural firms that employ LEED-accredited professionals has doubled since 2008, from one-third of all firms to two-thirds. Baker, who helped prepare the report, says sustainable design is a way for firms to distinguish themselves in a crowded field. But it also demonstrates a larger, permanent shift toward environmental awareness…

Particularly in small practices, architecture firms are expanding their range, fostering talents in interior design, construction, or environmental planning. Again, this multidisciplinary shift reflects a desire to compete in a crowded market, but it also speaks to a larger trend toward “one-stop-shop” firms where clients can find everything they need. Progressives have been advocating closer contact between design professionals for ages, and the recession has made it pay off.

Even before the recession, relatively few homes were constructed with the aid of architects.

Thinking more broadly, economic prosperity and hardship leads to changes in the more cultural aspects of society. In response to these changes, architects have expanded into two areas, sustainability and design, which could lead to different kinds of buildings in the years to come.

Sociological concepts that help explain why some companies are telling employees to avoid work email at home

Posted on by

Some companies are telling their employees to not check their work email at home:

In recent years, one in four companies have created similar rules on e-mail, both formal and informal, according to a recent survey by the Society for Human Resource Management. Firms trying out these policies include Volkswagen, some divisions of PricewaterhouseCoopers and shipping company PBD Worldwide.

For the vast majority of companies and federal offices, the muddying of work and personal time has had financial advantages. Corporations and agencies, unable to hire, are more productive than ever thanks in part to work-issued smartphones, tablets and other mobile technology, economists say…

“There is no question e-mail is an important tool, but it’s just gone overboard and encroached in our lives in a way where employees were feeling like it was harder and harder to achieve a good balance,” said Robert Musslewhite, chief executive of the Advisory Board, a health and education research and software-services firm.

Official numbers show just one in 10 people brings work home, according to a Labor Department report in 2010. But economists say that figure is wildly conservative because it counts only those who are clocking in those hours for extra pay.

Three sociological ideas shed some light on this:

1. This increased level of stress might be due to the mixing of the front-stage and back-stage performances of employees. Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote about these two settings, the first where we play a role, in this case as employee, and this requires emotional and physical energy. In the latter setting, we can let down our guard. Checking work email at home means this back-stage setting is interrupted.

2. This reminds me of the work by sociologist Christena Nippert-Eng on the symbolic boundaries between home and work. We place home and work in certain mental categories and so crossing these boundaries can create some difficulties. Sociologist Ray Oldenberg suggested another way around these two symbolic boundaries: we need “third places” like coffee shops and pubs where workers can relax and interact with other citizens in settings distinct from work and home.

3. A few centuries ago, more average citizens may have mixed home and work as people worked in their homes or very near by. It wasn’t until the industrial era that more employees had to travel further to their workplaces, creating a larger physical difference between home and work that also translated into more symbolic difference. Perhaps this story about email is a reminder that at this point in history we are swinging back to mixing  home and work because of technology that transcends physical boundaries.

Response to economic crisis: Irish government cutting support of homeownership

Posted on by

A conference on housing in Ireland suggests the Irish government is reversing course and will no longer be supporting homeownership:

STATE SUPPORT for the principle of home ownership is at an end after almost 100 years, a national housing conference has heard.

Encouraging people to buy their homes had been seen by the State as a social good, as well as an economic one, but there was now a definite shift in policy, UCD sociology professor Tony Fahey said.

Tenant purchase schemes were dying out and local authorities were no longer offering loans to private buyers. The policy now is households need to be assisted by the State if they can’t afford to rent, not if they can’t afford to buy.

“It had been an article of faith for almost 100 years that home ownership was a social good and should be supported by the State . . . The historic roll the State played in putting up capital for housing won’t be repeated.”

Americans tend to think we are a nation of homeowners but there are several countries that have higher rates of homeownership. Ireland is one such country:

The highest home ownership is in Romania (96pc), followed by Lithuania (91pc), Hungary (89pc), Slovakia (89pc), Estonia (87pc), Latvia (87pc), Bulgaria (87pc), Norway (85pc), Iceland (84pc), Spain (83pc), Slovenia (81pc), Malta (79pc), Czech Republic (77pc) and Greece (76pc).

Ireland comes in at 73.7pc, while 70pc of people in the UK own their own homes.

Irish home ownership levels have dropped from a high of 79pc in the 1990s to just short of 74pc at the start of this century, according to a new book on the economy, ‘Sins Of The Father’ by Conor McCabe.

Ireland is now facing the consequences of a burst housing bubble in the last few years.

While Ireland is facing their own issues, I wonder if the US government might make a similar shift or at least pull back from supporting homeownership through public policy and government rhetoric. Thus far, it doesn’t look like this has happened much. But, if the mortgage interest deduction disappears and/or younger Americans continued to avoid buying homes, perhaps things could change quite a bit here as well.

However, even if the policies changed, this doesn’t necessarily mean the cultural value of homeownership will change quickly.

Americans react to economic prosperity by moving more?

Posted on by

Amidst a number of supposed indicators of economic recovery, I found one to be particularly interesting: there was a slight uptick in mobility in 2011.

As a whole, Americans were slowly finding ways to get back on the move. About 12 percent of the nation’s population, or 36.5 million, moved to a new home, up from a record low of 11.6 percent in 2011.

Among young adults 25 to 29, the most mobile age group, moves also increased to 24.6 percent from a low of 24.1 percent in the previous year. Longer-distance moves, typically for those seeking new careers in other regions of the country, rose modestly from 3.4 percent to 3.8 percent.

I have always found American mobility numbers fascinating. In a record low year for mobility (2011), more than 1 in 10 Americans moved. Even though longer-distance moves are less frequent, even moving between residences can often be a big task.

And this story hints that some of this mobility is due to choice; when economic times are bad like in recent years, mobility is decreased but when the economy improves, people have more opportunities to move. If this is indeed the case and we take the argument further, could we suggest Americans celebrate economic prosperity and success by being less rooted and moving more?

With the rise of single-person households, why would Money magazine report family income for their best places to live?

Posted on by

I was recently looking at Money‘s 2012 list of the 2012 Best Places To Live and noticed something strange: they report family income and not household income. For example, look at the figures for Naperville, Illinois, #53 on the list (how Naperville has fallen so far on this list after being very near the top less than 10 years ago is another topic for another day): the median family income is $123,511.

Why does this matter? The median family income is generally higher than the median household income because the first only counts households with relatives living together while the second can include single-person households (as well as households with roommates and non-relatives.) This is not a small issue: tied for the most common household type in the United States today is the single-person household.

According to 2011 census data, people who live alone–nearly 33 million Americans–make up 28% of all U.S. households, which means they are now tied with childless couples as the most prominent residential type, more common than the nuclear family, the multigenerational family and the roommate or group home. These aren’t just transitional living situations: over a five-year period, people who live alone are more likely to remain in their current state than anyone else except married couples with children.

Perhaps Money‘s readers are primarily in family households but this still skews the data for the best place to live. Perhaps the feature should really be called the “Best Places for Families to Live”?

(Note: there is another issue for Naperville. The population in Money is listed at 152,600 while the Census reports a 2011 estimate of 142,773.)

Selecting a 4 digit pin code is hardly random

Posted on by

There are 10,000 possible pin codes that could be made with four digits (0-9) but what pins we select to use are hardly random:

What he found, he says, was a “staggering lack of imagination” when it comes to selecting passwords. Nearly 11% of the 3.4 million four-digit passwords he analyzed are 1234. The second most popular PIN in is 1111 (6% of passwords), followed by 0000 (2%). (Last year SplashData compiled a list of the most common numerical and word-based passwords and found that the “password” and “123456” topped the list.)

Berry says that a whopping 26.83% of all passwords could be guessed by attempting just 20 combinations of four-digit numbers (see first table). “It’s amazing how predictable people are,” he says…

Many of the commonly used passwords are, of course, dates: birthdays, anniversaries, the year you were born, etc. Indeed, using a year, starting with 19__ helps people remember their code, but it also increases its predictability, Berry says. His analysis shows that every single 19__ combination be found in the top 20% of the dataset…

Somewhat intriguing was #22 on the most common password list: 2580. It seems random, but if you look at a telephone keypad (or ATM keypad) you’ll see those numbers are straight down the middle — yet another sign we’re uncreative and lazy password makers…

The least-used PIN is 8068, Berry found, with just 25 occurrences in the 3.4 million set, which equates to 0.000744%. (See the second table for the least popular passwords.) Why this set of numbers? Berry guesses, “It’s not repeating pattern, it’s not a birthday, it’s not the year Columbus discovered America, it’s not 1776.” At a certain point, these numbers at the bottom of the list are all kind of “the lowest of the low, they’re all noise,” he says.

This is a great example of two things:

1. There are often patterns among supposedly “random” numbers.

2. Humans don’t particularly like to use “random” numbers but instead prefer numbers that are meaningful to them (which corresponds with them being able to remember their codes).

Moving poor families to better neighborhoods doesn’t improve jobs, education but does boost happiness

Posted on by

A new study suggests happiness is one of the primary benefits of poor families moving to better neighborhoods:

When thousands of poor families were given federal housing subsidies in the early 1990s to move out of impoverished neighborhoods, social scientists expected the experience of living in more prosperous communities would pay off in better jobs, higher incomes and more education.

That did not happen. But more than 10 years later, the families’ lives had improved in another way: They reported being much happier than a comparison group of poor families who were not offered subsidies to move, a finding that was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

And using the gold standard of social surveys — the General Social Survey, in which researchers have questioned thousands of Americans of all income levels going back to the 1970s — researchers even quantified how much happier the families were. The improvement was equal to the level of life satisfaction of someone whose annual income was $13,000 more a year, said Jens Ludwig, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago and the lead author of the study…

“Mental health and subjective well-being are very important,” said William Julius Wilson, a sociology professor at Harvard whose 1987 book “The Truly Disadvantaged” pioneered theory about concentrated poverty. “If you are not feeling well, it’s going to affect everything — your employment, relations with your family.”

This seems to fit with findings from other studies looking at programs like the Gautreaux Program in Chicago or the Moving to Opportunity program that took place in a few big cities. The children of these movers/participants may have better jobs, incomes, and educations down the road but there is not much of an immediate payoff in these areas.

It is too bad Wilson doesn’t go further with his comments. What exactly does better well-being translate into? Improved or more stable family life? Better social relations? Could improved well-being translate into better jobs and higher education down the road?

In 2011, poverty continued to increase in the suburbs

Posted on by

Here is some data about how poverty is growing in a number of American suburbs:

By 2011, 30 million residents in the nation’s 100 largest metro areas lived below the federal poverty line. That represents an increase of 1.7 million people over 2010, or a growth rate of 5.9 percent. As in previous years, that growth skewed toward suburbs. Suburban communities in the nation’s largest metro areas saw the poor population grow by 6.8 percent compared to a 4.7 uptick in cities, and accounted for almost two-thirds of the increase in the metropolitan poor population (63.4 percent). As was the case in 2010, 55 percent of the metropolitan poor lived in suburbs in 2011, which translates to 2.6 million more poor residents in suburbs than in cities.

The slowing of poverty’s upward trajectory signals a promising—if stubbornly slow—response to the recovery that began to take hold in the wake of the Great Recession, though the soft job market that has prevailed since the recession ended and the unevenness of that recovery can be seen in other troubling income trends. Between 2010 and 2011, 25 of the nation’s largest metro areas experienced a significant increase in income inequality (as measured by the Gini index), compared to 11 regions the year before. Increasing inequality affected a diverse array of regions, from metropolitan Atlanta, Chicago, and San Francisco to Kansas City, St. Louis, and Louisville. In each of these regions, inequality grew alongside rising poverty and falling incomes.

I am most interested in one trend mentioned above: the growing poverty numbers in suburbs. Not only did the poverty rate increase more in suburbs than in cities, there now over 2.5 million more poor residents in suburbs than in cities.

Of course, the growing number of poor people in suburbs are probably not evenly distributed across suburbs (or perhaps even metropolitan regions). I would guess that inner-ring suburbs have higher poverty as do working-class suburbs. How much have declining incomes and persistent unemployment hurt wealthy suburbs?

More micro-apartments being built in American cities

Posted on by

New York City isn’t apparently the only place looking into micro housing units; micro-apartments are apparently popping up in other major citiesb.

Micro-unit apartments range from 300-square-foot studios being built in San Francisco, where studios average 510 square feet, to New York’s pilot for a building with studios of 275 to 300 square feet, vs. an average studio size of 517 square feet. In Boston, the units are as small as 354 square feet, vs. an average studio size of 492 square feet, says real estate research firm Reis.

These small spaces, McIlwain says, are particularly well suited for the influx of young professionals moving to high-rent cities like New York and San Francisco. If they’re priced right, the tiny apartments make it more affordable for members of the younger crowd to have their own space, vs. roommates…

Kennedy expects his studios to go for $1,500 to $2,000 a month. That would be somewhat less than the $2,075 a month average rent for a San Francisco studio — an average of 493 square feet, according to SFGate.com, citing data from real estate service RealFacts.

Tiny typically means cheaper — but just to a certain extent, McIlwain notes. Total construction cost for an apartment drops as you make it smaller, he adds, but cost per square foot rises.

It will be interesting to see how many of these units are built. There may be demand but I wonder if these are long-term units, meaning young people may not stay here long (housing more for a particular stage of life) or the economy could improve.

Portland: the city where the young retire/are underemployed

Posted on by

Researchers have found that Portland, Oregon is indeed a place where young workers are often underemployed:

Portland may not be “a city where young people go to retire,” but it’s the place they go to be underemployed, a new study found.

A famous quip by Fred Armisen on the television show “Portlandia” led Portland State University researchers to investigate the reality behind the comment. The quirky IFC network series pokes fun at the Oregon city’s many eccentricities.

The researchers’ review found that Portland is a magnet for the young and college educated from across the country, even though a disproportionate share of them are working part-time or holding jobs that don’t require a degree.

In short, young college grads are moving here, and staying, because they like the city’s amenities and culture, not because they’re chasing jobs. Their participation in the labor force tracks with other cities, but they make 84 cents on the dollar when compared to the average of the 50 largest metropolitan areas, the research found.

Not exactly a shining place for the “creative class.” I don’t remember Richard Florida talking much about the employment or economic struggles of the creative class; rather, such cities are often depicted as tech hubs with lots of exciting companies and opportunities. A city may be a cultural magnet but it also has to have enough jobs so that people can stay.

What is most interesting to me about this is that it appears the migration of young adults to Portland has continued in the last few decades even when there are not enough full-time jobs. Is there a threshold point when people will stop going to Portland? At what point do economic realities trump the cultural vibrancy of Portland?