Author Archives: legallysociable

The New York Times on a McMansion travel trailer

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The comparisons have been made in the pages of the New York Times before but here is another example: the travel trailer compared to McMansion.

Yet the passing of the Opera hasn’t prevented other trailer companies from trying to break out of the box. Here are five other head-turning trailers…

JAYCO SEISMIC The innovation here is room. A virtual McMansion on wheels, the Seismic has its own garage at the rear, though that space — from 80 to 112 square feet, depending on the model — can be used instead as a spare bedroom or a workshop. The back wall can be swung down to do double duty as a patio.

Seismic prices range from $71,000 to $130,000.

A so-called fifth-wheel trailer, the Seismic is pulled by a pickup using a hitch similar to those used on semitrailers.

So an extra-large trailer is akin to a McMansion. Also, there are some hints here of another characteristic of McMansions that in the past has been used to tie trailers or RVs to McMansions: luxury or excessive consumption. Who exactly needs a Jayco Seismic trailer? Clearly, this trailer is only available to a certain (wealthy) crowd. However, it is unclear from this article whether there are more “refined” or “sophisticated” trailers that could still be large without getting labeled a McMansion.

Sociologist/time management consultant on the rush of Baby Boomers to new homes

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A sociologist and time management consultant offers some thoughts about the upcoming years for many American Baby Boomers:

Jan Yager, a sociologist and time-management consultant, predicts that within the next decade “tens of millions” of baby boomers will sell their current homes and move to different abodes more suitable for retirement.

No matter where they plan to move, boomers who’ve lived in the same home for many years will face the enormous task of sifting through accumulations and upgrading their property for market. And all who try to tackle this project need a strategic plan to manage their time, says Yager, author of “Work Less, Do More,” a time-management book…

If possible, Yager encourages those who need to clear through a vast collection of belongings before selling to allow a full year for this project. But she’s aware that most sellers don’t have this much latitude and that they may need some help to expedite the process.

“It could be a good idea for you to hire a professional organizer,” says Yager, who recommends that home sellers consider seeking a local referral through the National Association of Professional Organizers (www.napo.net).

Four things strike me here:

1. Moving is not made easier after decades of consumption and accumulation. While our houses have gotten larger, our household sizes have gotten smaller, suggesting we need more space for our stuff or like more private space.

2. Is there a lot of potential for contractors and companies to offer remodeling or flipping services to Baby Boomers who don’t have the time to upgrade their own homes? New buyers have their own tastes and there could be a lot of money spent on upgrading homes built during the construction boom after World War II.

3. The potential move of so many Baby Boomers has the potential to have a large effect on demographics and other features of American life such as electoral politics, the housing industry, and advertisers. We’ve already seen some of this in Sunbelt growth in places like Florida and Arizona.

4. Americans have been known for their mobility, their interest in trying out new places and tackling new opportunities. Is this an extension of this spirit, another example of the American can-do spirit? Or more of a recognition that life truly changes as we age?

Uptick in sociology job market?

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Inside Higher Ed summarizes a ASA report that suggests the number of open jobs in 2011 were near 2008 levels:

In 2011, the number of faculty jobs posted either for assistant professors or positions for which any faculty rank is possible was just 4 percent below the level in 2008, the year in which the economic downturn hit in the fall. And so many of the openings announced in 2008 were canceled that it is possible there were more actual openings in 2011. There are among the results in a new job market report issued by the American Sociological Association.

The number of faculty jobs in 2009 fell 35 percent, and the 2010 total was 14 percent below the 2008 level, so the new figures represent a significant rebound in job openings.

The data are based on openings listed with the ASA. Not all departments list positions there, so the totals don’t reflect every opening, but sociologists say that the ASA reports accurately reflect trends in the discipline, even considering positions listed elsewhere.

The top 5 specialties in demand: social control/law/crime deviance, open, race and ethnicity, medicine and health, and work/economy/organizations. The bottom 5 (last being the lowest): comparative and historical approaches, sociology of culture, education, qualitative approaches, and application and practice.

Overall, this would seem like good information though it will likely take some time to sort through the backlog of candidates who couldn’t find jobs in recent years.

Just a thought: I wonder what exactly the job figures from year to year tell us. Overall, is there a better way to get at whether the discipline is expanding or is doing well? Is it better for big departments to get bigger? For new schools to add sociology undergraduate and graduate programs? For the beginning of new graduate programs? For existing faculty to get more recognition or better salaries? To compare the growth in sociology to other disciplines?

Beware of the exploding McMansion

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Here is a case from San Diego involving a McMansion, a gas explosion, and a successful lawsuit:

Propane leaks and burned down homes? Not here where we all reach out for our piece of the American dream… nice house, white-picket fence, 2.4 children, shiny mini-van driven by the happy wife with the home perm, the corner office at work with a pimped-out Gold Timex wrist watch just waiting for your wrist at retirement. But a propane leak had to go and ruin all that you have worked for. Perhaps Frank Sinatra had it right when he crooned about life and “riding high in April, being shot down in May.” I guess this is where Frank puts you in August.

Such was the case when a Southern California couple’s dream McMansion was completely destroyed by a propane leak that ignited a gargantuan explosion that razed the house down to the ground. Mother Nature then made an unwelcome appearance at the party, finishing off the home with a coup-de-graw in the form of an enormous fire ensuring nothing was left…

Apparently not, as a Trial Judge in San Diego laid the lion-share of the blame at the well-insured feet of SDG&E and a unidentified Plumbing Company and awarded the couple $7.12 million in damages after a hard fought trial in which the defense Lawyers were overwhelmed by the skill and tenacity of the experienced Accident Attorney in San Diego (and when Karma is on your side, I hear it is fairly hard to lose these cases).

Unfortunately, both the husband and the wife were severely injured in the explosion and subsequent fire. SDG&E was assigned to 40% of the liable for causing the “exploding McMansion,” because they apparently failed to warn the couple about the dangers of a gas leak and the importance of installing a gas leak detection alarm that would have warned them about this exact type of leak, presumably saving them from Karmic wrath unleashed by Mother Nature’s most vicious weapon. The plumbing company was found to be 30% at fault because they “nicked” the underground pipeline during routine maintenance, which is what actually caused the leak. The Insurance company for the plumbing company did the right thing and settled out before trial-which was strategically fruitful as they paid much less than they would have had to if they had participated in the trial.

Another possible reason to avoid McMansions: they can be dangerous!

 

Quick Review: Alone Together

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I finally got around to reading Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together after hearing about it from another friend. Here are some thoughts about this book that explores our relationship with technology.

1. I’m generally sympathetic to Turkle’s arguments that we need to think more about what technology does to our lives. If you were to sum up her argument, it would look something like this: we need to make sure we master technology rather than letting it master us. It may offer some benefits but it also has downsides and we have a choice to make.

2. Turkle has a fascinating background in studying human interaction with robots, everything from Furbys and Tamogatchis to robots intended for care for the elderly. I think she does a strong job in her discussion about using robots to care for the elderly: do we want to be a society where fellow humans don’t want to care for people because it is more efficient to use robots? As Turkle suggests, discussions about technology shouldn’t just be about efficiency; we need to weigh the lost human component.

3. Some critiques:

a. Turkle talks about phenomena that don’t apply to everyone and then implies that it could happen to everyone. Take Second Life as an example. Turkle discusses the implications of people creating alternative personas that end up not just providing an outlet for people to try to improve themselves (say by learning to be more assertive) but become preferred alternatives to human interactions. Second Life is indeed a unique space and maybe such spaces could become more common but it has remained relatively limited. According to Wikipedia: “In November 2010, 21.3 million accounts were registered…” Compared to Facebook and other programs, this is a drop in the bucket. And it doesn’t exactly work this way in Facebook – while users clearly have and take advantage of space to present themselves in a certain light, they don’t typically create complete alter egos and their profiles still contain some truth.

b. I felt Turkle could stress the positives of technology more. It is interesting that she admits that she too has given in to these things such as using Skype to communicate with her daughter who goes abroad for a gap year. She tends to talk about what could go wrong without discussing what usually does happen. For example, she talks about what can go wrong with Facebook without discussing why people continue to use the site. Indeed, my own research shows that teenagers are well aware of the dark sides of Facebook and take some steps to minimize issues like privacy concerns or who they become friends with. Sure, users could become friends with strangers or completely misrepresent themselves in their profile but many do not.

c. I was continually struck by Turkle’s psychological and personal approach. A number of the chapters end with Turkle expressing her own misgivings about technology and asking if it has to be this way. While she hints at this throughout the book, I kept hoping she would expand her vision and talk about the bigger implications for society. What happens if we have new generations that accept all technology without questions? What happens if we care for all of our elderly with robots? How will institutions like schools or governments change because of pervasive technology? I suppose this is the sociologist in me. Also, she relies a lot on interviews and personal observations and there is little in the way of large-scale data.

d. This is tied to my comment about the big picture; Turkle suggests at the end that we all need to make individual choices about technology as we can’t stop it all. She is correct…but there are certainly larger-scale things that could be done to make sure we remain the masters of technology.

All in all, this is a thought-provoking book that left me somewhat depressed about our future with technology. At the least, we should heed Turkle’s admonition to slow down and think about the implications of technology before wholeheartedly jumping in.

Obama, the suburbs, higher education, and HENRYs

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Peter Wood ties Stanley Kurtz’s new book about Obama and the suburbs to another interesting issue: the higher education bubble.

I have argued that among the factors most likely to precipitate the crash is the disaffection of families earning over $100,000 a year. Many of these families have seen the value of their home equity fall but have, with hard effort, kept their noses above water during the recession. The income bracket of $100,000 to $250,000—called “HENRYs” in marketing parlance, for High Earners who are Not Rich Yet—are a key sector for colleges and universities. These are the folks who borrow to the hilt to afford overpriced college tuitions. The bracket above the HENRYs, those earning over $250,000, are another key to higher-education finance. There are only about two million such families, but they are the top-end consumers of expensive colleges. Their willingness to pay top dollar is what signals to the HENRYs that the tuitions must be worth it.

These high income families—$100,000 and above—are concentrated in the suburbs. I have already written (Helium, Part 2) on the likelihood that these families will be forced to rethink their longstanding assumptions about the value of expensive colleges in light of the huge tax increases set to kick in after the 2012 presidential election. In the “ecology of higher education,” we are about to see what happens when we torch the canopy.

Kurtz’s book suggests that the assault on the HENRYs and the $250 K plus crowd goes beyond income and capital-gains taxes. We are in an era of emergent policy aimed at deconstructing what makes the suburbs attractive to the affluent. The “regionalists” advocate something called “regional tax base sharing,” which essentially means using state legislative power to take tax receipts from the suburbs to pay for services in the cities. The suburbanites will be faced with the unpleasant choice between lower levels of service for their own communities or raising their own taxes still higher to make up for the money they will “share” with their urban neighbors…

These are matters that faculty members, even those who enjoy life on campuses idyllically tucked away in verdant suburbs, will probably weigh lightly. But the regionalists are, in effect, working hard to diminish the attractions of the communities that form the social base for the prestige-oriented upscale colleges and universities that have for the last sixty or seventy years defined the aspirational goals of the American middle class. The war on the suburbs combined with the large increase in the tax burden may be the pincers that pop the bubble.

America is a suburban country so it makes sense that HENRYs and some of the colleges that appeal to them are located in the suburbs.

There are larger issues here. College is tied to a key foundation of suburban life: children should be cared for and given the opportunities that will help them get ahead in life. Particularly in the post-World War II era, going to college is a necessary suburban rite of passage that insures a middle-class or higher lifestyle. If college becomes too expensive for this group, it will be fascinating to see how they adjust.

Sociologist: “one-year change in test results doesn’t make a trend”

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A sociologist provides some insights into how firms “norm” test scores from year to year and what this means about how to interpret the results:

The most challenging part of this process, though, is trying to place this year’s test results on the same scale as last year’s results, so that a score of 650 on this year’s test represents the same level of performance as a score of 650 on last year’s test. It’s this process of equating the tests from one year to the next which allows us to judge whether scores this year went up, declined or stayed the same.But it’s not straightforward, because the test questions change from one year to the next, and even the format and content coverage of the test may change.

Different test companies even have different computer programs and statistical techniques to estimate a student’s score and, hence, the overall picture of how a student, school or state is performing. (Teachers too, but that’s a subject for another day.)

All of these variables – different test questions from year to year; variations in test length, difficulty and content coverage; and different statistical procedures to calculate the scores – introduce some uncertainty about what the “true” results are…

In testing, every year is like changing labs, in somewhat unpredictable ways, even if a state hires the same testing contractor from one year to the next. For this reason, I urge readers to not react too strongly to changes from last year to this year, or to consider them a referendum on whether a particular set of education policies – or worse, a particular initiative – is working.

One-year changes have many uncertainties built into them; if there’s a real positive trend, it will persist over a period of several years. Schooling is a long-term process, the collective and sustained work of students, teachers and administrators; and there are few “silver bullets” that can be counted on to elevate scores over the period of a single school year.

Overall, this piece gives us some important things to remember: one data point is hard to put into context. You can draw a trend line between two data points. Having more data points gives you a better indication of what is happening over time. However, just having statistics isn’t enough; we also need to consider the reliability and validity of the data. Politicians and administrators seem to like test scores because they offer concrete numbers which can help them point out progress or suggest that changes need to be made. Yet, just because these are numbers doesn’t mean that there isn’t a process that goes into them or that we need to understand exactly what the numbers involve.

San Francisco neighbors of Twitter founder don’t want his teardown house

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Even people with lots of money can run into problems when they want to build a teardown McMansion:

Williams bought the $2.9m property – hardwood floors, an open plan salon and four bedrooms with breathtaking views over three storeys – last year. It was built in 1915 by the architect Louis Christian Mullgardt and was listed in city records as a “potential historic resource”.

Earlier this year Williams, 40, and his wife Sara revealed plans to demolish the house and, with the help of architectural firm Lundberg Design, build a 7,700 sq ft successor into a slope. It would be 20ft lower than its predecessor and be a “zero net energy” home using solar panels, a green roof and sun-friendly windows.

Even before the application was submitted to city planners, neighbours and critics from as far afield as Canada had filed form letters of protest, a backlash which in another medium might have been called trending. “This is such a unique property and it adds diversity of architectural interest to the neighborhood,” wrote one neighbour, Elizabeth Wang. “It would be criminal to demolish it.”

Some accused Williams of plotting to erect a McMansion. “A complete teardown of such a home would … set the stage for numerous future demolitions that will alter the character of our beloved SF Neighborhoods,” one group, Friends of Parnassus Heights, wrote to the real estate blog SocketSite…

Not all agree. Williams’s defenders, such as property site Sfcurbed.com, said Mullgardt was an “architectural footnote” and that in any case his original design was ruined by a 1970s remodelling. “It may have once been charming, but … has been stripped of its dignity and details over the decades, subdivided into apartments and then rebuilt by architect Thomas Eden in what’s best described as faux-Frank Lloyd Wright with trapezoidal windows.”

Is it still NIMBY if a person in Canada is objecting to a possible house in San Francisco?

It appears that even the green features of the home will not mollify some of the neighbors. If the house can’t/won’t be saved, is there anything Williams could do to make the new home palatable to the neighbors? I wonder if Williams has made any efforts to reach out to the neighborhood. What about an ultra-green house that is built in a similar style to the existing homes?

Of course, one way to avoid these situations or to at least make more clear the process by which changes to homes can be made is to declare the area a historic preservation district. If a majority of neighbors are indeed against new houses, perhaps this is the way to go.

 

Naperville planning and zoning commission approves “game-changing” Water Street development

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Naperville is moving forward with plans for an important downtown development on Water Street:

Commissioners voted 5-2 early Thursday morning to recommend approval of Marquette Companies’ MP Water Street District LLC project, which calls for a 130-room Holiday Inn Express and Suites, a 551-space parking garage, 63 rental apartments and 16,000 square feet of separate office space. The proposal next goes to the city council…

Several residents, however, pleaded for the commission to deny the plan, saying seven-story buildings don’t fit the character of downtown and will add to traffic and parking problems…

“It’s almost like taking a big white elephant and putting it next to our little, historical village commercial center. It doesn’t compute,” O’Hale said. “It’s not in the spirit of our village. It’s a big, white, monolithic, monstrous elephant and it flies in the face of everything we value in our city.”…

But supporters argued a hotel is the only thing missing from downtown and could pump life and dollars back into the central business district.

In the end, a majority of commissioners said the time has come to change the face of downtown.

It is hard to tell at the time but this development has the makings of something big for downtown Naperville. Because it includes moving the downtown south across the DuPage River in a major way plus adding a hotel to the downtown and another parking garage, this suggests Naperville is serious about continuing to expand the downtown as well as make it more dense. It sounds like some spectators also think this is an important moment. The comments by O’Hale are intriguing; I wouldn’t classify Naperville’s downtown as a “little, historical village commercial center.” The downtown has several parking garages, parking and congestion issues, and a number of restaurants and stores. That horse was out of the barn a few decades ago. Yet, the spirit of the downtown could indeed change in the years ahead as Naperville figures out how it wants to mature.

It will be interesting to see how the discussion with the City Council goes.

Sociological views of the village in India

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A review of a new volume on the Indian village provides some insights into how the village is viewed:

AT a time when the general disenchantment with village life appears to be the spirit of new India, the editing of a volume on village society is definitely an act of intellectual courage and professional commitment. We keep hearing scholarly pronouncements on the declining sociological significance of the village and village studies. We are told that the Indian village is no longer a site where future can be planned. Rather, it is an area of darkness – full of despair, indignation, filth and squalor, and mindless violence…

Interestingly, for the urban Indian, the village has always been more than a simple social morphological other to a town or a city. The village has not merely been despised for its lack of electricity and other modern amenities; it has also been perceived as a burden on the national conscience because of its abstract moralised qualities of backwardness, bigotry, illiteracy, superstition, and a general lack of civilisation and culture. For the children and grandchildren of “Midnight’s Children”, the village continues to be emblematic of the rustic world of thumb-impression (angutha-chaap) country bumpkins. At any rate, unparh gavar (illiterate yokel) can hardly be a worthy role model for a nation as aspiring as ours. In a way, the decline of the village in the creative imagination of Indians in recent decades is almost complete…

Put differently, it is time we treated the village as an explanandum in sociological research. We cannot go on assuming the village as the container par excellence of the larger processes of rural-agrarian social change. It never was. The introduction brings out in lucid prose the historicity of the study of rural society. It demonstrates that, for long, the study of the village has been an abiding preoccupation of sociologists/social anthropologists in India. So much so that “village studies” came to stand for Indian sociology in the initial decades of its growth and development as an academic discipline.

In course of time, the village attained paradigmatic status as a template of indigenous society and economy, and village studies very often came to be projected as a shorthand for knowing and understanding Indian society by both professional sociologists and the intelligentsia. The efflorescence of village studies, as a distinctive disciplinary tradition of inquiry, is testimony to the considerable analytical and theoretical significance that the village and the studies of the village enjoyed for more than a century and a half.

Three thoughts:

1. It would be interesting to know how the view of the village in India compares to how villages are viewed in other developing cultures. In places where mass urbanization is currently taking place, are there countries where the village is viewed more positively?

2. I was asked a while back about rural sociology. This subfield has really declined and only a few schools still specialize in it. I assume this is partly because the United States has become an urban nation (80% of Americans live in urban areas). Yet, rural places are still important, particularly in other countries (like India) where rapid changes are taking place.

3. This is a reminder that big city life (living in places with more than a million people) is a relatively recent development in human history. Even in developed countries, this has only become common in the last 120 years or so. We may like our cities but most humans have lived in smaller settings. This change was so remarkable during the Industrial Revolution that it helped give rise to the discipline of sociology.