Author Archives: legallysociable

Wildfires threaten the vanity of McMansions?

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One journalist suggests it takes events like wildfires to remind us of the frailty of McMansions:

Nature makes a mockery of our vanity. We live in flood and fire zones, nurture stately oaks and take shade under pines holding the best air of the Rocky Mountains. We plant villas next to sandstone spires called the Garden of the Gods, and McMansions in Virginia stocked with people who have the world at their fingertips.

Then, with a clap, a boom and a roar, fire marches through a subdivision on a conveyance of 60 mile an hour winds. A platoon of thunderstorms so loaded with energy it has its own category name — derecho — cuts a swath from east of Chicago to the Atlantic.

The pines flame and hiss, shooting sparks on the house next door, a fortress no more. The oaks tumble and crush roofs. Almost 350 homes burn to the ground, and nearly 5 million people lose all electricity in sweltering heat. Lobbyists and congressmen curse at mute cellphones and sweat through their seersucker. The powerful are powerless.

No home can stand up against fires like that. I wonder if anyone is developing a “wildfire proof home”?

Redesigning the playground to free children and adults

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Here is an interesting example of architecture and design at work: putting together a playground in New York City that will free children and adults rather than burden them.

In Pamela Druckerman’s “Bringing Up Bébé,” the playground forms a fertile backdrop for her pop-sociological observations about child-rearing, French vs. American style. The upper-middle-class Manhattan moms (she can tell by the price of their handbags) follow their kids around the gated toddler playground narrating their activities. The French moms sit on the edge of the sandbox and chat with other adults. The Brooklyn dads follow their children down the slide. The French moms sit on a bench and chat with other adults. Her theory, a bestselling one, is that French parenting consists of more non, more équilibre, and thus more time for adults to be adults.

It never occurs to her that maybe it is the playgrounds that encourage parents to act this way. Most New York playgrounds are designed for the protection of children: padded surfaces, equipment labelled by age appropriateness, and a ban on unaccompanied adults. Frankly, it is hard to see why an adult without a child would want to enter. There’s often little seating, minimal shade, and no place to set down a coffee except in a stroller cup holder. As for those parents who don’t want to helicopter, the perimeter benches can be far from where children play, sight lines blocked by the bulky climbing structures. Standard New York playgrounds are made for a single activity—child’s play—not family socializing or even adult enjoyment.

The planners of New York City’s Governors Island, an ice-cream-cone-shaped piece of land a half mile from the end of Manhattan, see play somewhat differently, and are designing their first thirty acres of park and public space accordingly. “People spend several hours here” on the weekends, says Leslie Koch, president of the Trust for Governors Island. Free ferries from Manhattan and Brooklyn bring visitors in for extended afternoons. “You wander through the island, you have an idea or you may not, the kids run around. There aren’t precedents for that kind of place. It’s different than a beach or an urban park, or even a state park, where you go to barbecue.” She adds, “Early on we said we didn’t want to have playgrounds, but we didn’t say what that meant.”…

“If you create a park-like environment and people feel really free, adults hang out and participate like children do,” Geuze says. Contrast the concept for Liggett Terrace with the experience at Pier 6 at Brooklyn Bridge Park, an access point for the ferry to Governors Island. To date, Pier 6 consists of four landscaped, gated playgrounds, one with swings, one with water, one with sand, and one for climbing. There’s a separate beach-volleyball court, and a separate park building with food. If you aren’t pushing your kid on the swing, narrating every to and fro, the only place to sit is the springy rubber ground.

It would be interesting to hear more about how this new kind of park would change people’s behaviors. The article seems to suggest that certain park designs necessarily lead to certain behaviors; is this always the case? Does it require a critical mass of people

This reminds me of some arguments about parks from earlier days. Take Central Park in New York City as an example. Olmstead and Vaux designed the park to be more natural and take advantage of the natural topography and features. This was contrasted with more formal European parks which often had carefully cultivated gardens and water features. Central Park became beloved even as it is still fairly unusual in big cities as it can be difficult to find that much land and leave it relatively unencumbered.

 

Quick Review: When God Talks Back

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Anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann examines how evangelicals relate to God in this new book titled When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God. Here are a few thoughts about this fascinating read:

1. Luhrmann’s main argument is that evangelicals are trained to perceive the world in particular ways and this reinforces and upholds their belief in a personal God who cares about them. For example: evangelicals learn to pray in such a way that they believe they are interacting with God and can “hear” God. Another example is that evangelicals tend to read the Bible in such a way that every passage has an immediate application or relevance for their current circumstances. This kind of prayer and Bible reading does not necessarily come naturally: people have to be trained and it can take years to learn the process. Luhrmann spent more than four years in Vineyard churches listening to sermons, participating in small groups, and talking with and interviewing evangelicals.

2. The historical argument is interesting but underdeveloped. Luhrmann argues that the more individualized approach to Christian faith common in evangelicalism developed in Vineyard type (more charismatic) churches in the late 1960s and 1970s and then trickled down to all of evangelicalism. I have little doubt that most of this is true; I recently heard a sermon in an Episcopal church that shared many of the same themes of God’s immediacy and power. At the same time, the main mechanism by which Luhrmann suggests this approach spread is Fuller Seminary. While Fuller has had an impact, I wondered about several things: how did all evangelicals respond to this? Was/is there a backlash against this approach? What about evangelicals who wouldn’t claim this Vineyard/Jesus People background?

3. Luhrmann is an anthropologist but intriguingly is a psychological anthropologist. This means that there is a lot in this book about perceptions, thoughts, and how the brain adjusts to different ways of seeing the world. There even is a chapter that involves an experiment Luhrmann conducted on prayer to see if people can be trained to perceive God more vividly (and they could). Throughout the book there is a mix of anthropological observations, psychological experiments and explanations, and historical context.

4. The book is pretty evenhanded about the question of whether evangelicals believe in something real. There is a chapter that suggests that evangelicals (and other religious people) are not crazy for perceiving supernatural forces. I suspect this will help the book gain some traction in the religious world though it will be interesting to see the reactions. At the same time, I wonder if some will see this book as an attempt to explain away religious belief as a psychological trick that people can learn. Additionally, wow would theologians respond?

5. I suspect this book could be one that helps evangelicals understand themselves better.

6. This was not mentioned much in the book: how are children trained in this approach? The book contains a number of stories of teenager or young adult converts to faith who then have to learn this particular approach to God. However, it has little to say about people who grow up with this approach to God and how this affects adult spirituality.

Overall, this book discusses how evangelicals come to see the world in a certain way as they learn to talk to and hear from God and how to interpret events as God’s intervention. This is the value of this text: it goes beyond describing the evangelical viewpoint and argues for how this viewpoint is developed and maintained. This is an example of what good social science can do: explain why things are the way they are.

 

Culture affects how one gives directions

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A new study suggests that Europeans and Americans have different ways to give directions:

The researchers brought test participants into a lab and presented them with a map of a small district containing 17 landmarks and 29 streets. These wayfinders were then assigned a starting point and a destination and asked to provide directions to someone navigating the area. Half the time they were told the navigator was driving; the other half they were told the navigator was just looking at a map.The different navigator conditions were meant to encourage different types of directions. Hund and colleagues believed wayfinders would offer drivers more first-person descriptions (including landmarks) and would offer map-readers more third-person descriptions (including street names and cardinal directions).

These conditions did have some impact, but what really influenced the type of directions was the culture of the wayfinder. Americans were far more likely, across all tests, to give navigators a street name or a cardinal direction (i.e. north, east, south, or west). Dutch wayfinders, on the other hand, provided far more landmarks and left-right turn-descriptors…

The researchers note that many of the Dutch wayfinders became frustrated when asked to give map-readers directions. “They realized there might be a more effective way of describing the route on the map, but never came up with the idea to switch from left-right descriptors to cardinal terms,” Hund and company write. They suppose the Dutch would have improved considerably if given enough time to convert cardinal directions into relative terms — equating “east” with “right,” for instance.

I’ve wondered if it isn’t the culture that matters but rather the spatial arrangement of the places of which someone is familiar. For example, a good number of major Americans cities are laid out in grids. Think of Manhattan: the avenues are north-south, the numbered streets are east-west, and this makes it easy to find a lot of different routes to the same place. In contrast, some older settlements such as some older sections of European cities and several American cities like Boston are more prone to have winding streets that are more aligned to the topography. If you are from a grid area, you are used to giving cardinal directions because they are easy to follow. If operating in a less grid-like format, landmarks matter more as one can remain oriented even if the streets don’t seem to be headed in that direction.

I’ve also wondered how this changes in the suburbs. Are landmarks as easy to identify and utilize? Without as many tall buildings plus a landscape that contains more repetitive features (even if the strip malls and big box stores look different, they are not as distinctive), noteworthy landmarks can be hard to find.

A third option: are Americans used to traveling longer distances for each trip, making it more difficult to use verbal turn-by-turn directions?

 

Bringing the McMansion float to the July 4th parade

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The July 4th parade in Sudbury, Massachusetts was like many Independence Day parades in that it featured floats. However, this parade included one float about McMansions:

Spectators lined the parade route starting at the corner of Rte. 20 and Union Avenue, with adults waving flags as children scrambled for candy thrown from antique cars, fire engines and military vehicles.

About a dozen groups competed for ribbons awarded for the best floats.

Russell’s Garden Center re-purposed its Santa Claus mannequin into a Father Time display. The Sudbury Savoyards, the local Gilbert and Sullivan group, stuck a mock gondola for its upcoming production of “The Gondoliers” atop a VW bus. And the owners of the old Cutler Farm offered a visual commentary on how town open land has been developed first into “McMansions” and now condos.

For its float, the town chapter of the non-partisan League of Women Voters decorated a trailer with discarded water bottles, taking on a proposed but long-stalled expansion of the state’s bottle bill.

I’d really love to see this float. If I had to guess, I would think this was an anti-McMansion float decrying sprawl and promoting nostalgia for farm land and open land.

Measuring “peak car” in the United States

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With data suggesting congestion, the number of teenagers with driver’s licenses, and the numbers of miles driven has dropped in recent years, Scientific American asks whether we have reached “peak car”:

According to the Federal Highway Administration’s “2011 Urban Congestion Trends” report, there was a 1.2 percent decline in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) last year compared with 2010. The drop follows years of stagnant growth in vehicle travel following a peak in 2007, before the economic downturn…

Her observation is true for the entire country. Rather than maintain the 50-year legacy of a 2 to 4 percent increase in vehicle travel each year, the annual number of VMT in the United States has stalled and even gone into reverse. The total number of miles driven in the United States today is the same as in 2004…

The interesting thing for Roy Kienitz, transportation infrastructure consultant and former undersecretary for policy at the Department of Transportation, is that American drivers actually started changing their individual driving habits years before the recession started.

The overall number of miles traveled by road peaked just before the market collapsed, but the number of VMT per capita peaked in 2004 and declined over the next eight years until today, according to Kienitz’s research, which is based on publicly available data.

Interesting. But I’m not sure this is the best way to measure “peak car.” While miles driven by road may be important to note, there are other factors that matters. Here are a few:

-The number of vehicles bought.

-The number of vehicles licensed.

-The number or % of people with driver’s licenses.

-The average number of trips people make on a daily basis. This gives you different information than the number of miles driven per year.

-Whether travel by other modes has increased or whether overall miles traveled is down. This would help show whether people are using cars less or really all travel is down.

Looking at all of these figures would help provide a more complete picture of whether we are at “peak car.”

Also, even if Americans are driving less overall, this doesn’t necessarily mean that cars are valued less or are less culturally important. Driving less doesn’t automatically mean most or even a significant number of Americans want to get rid of their cars or the freedom and individualism they represent.

Claim: having too many big homes contribute to the housing market downturn

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Several experts suggest that one contributor to the downturn in the housing market is a lack of demand for large houses:

America has too many big houses — 40 million, to be exact — because consumers are shifting preferences to condos, apartments and small homes, experts told the New Partners for Smart Growth Thursday, holding its 11th annual conference in San Diego through Sunday.

Relying on developers’ surveys, Chris Nelson, who heads the Metropolitan Research Center at the University of Utah, said 43 percent of Americans prefer traditional big, suburban homes but the rest don’t.

“That means we are out of balance in terms of where the market is right now, let alone trending toward the future,” he said.

He estimated that this demand suggests a need for 10 million more attached homes and 30 million more small homes on 4,000-square-foot lots or less. By contrast, demand for large-lot homes is 40 million less than currently available.

These experts suggest that older adults and the younger generations are looking for smaller, more urban homes. But how does this line up with recent figures that suggest big homes are being built and sold?

While this sounds like an interesting conference, I wonder how this group might be spinning the recent data and trends. What do you do if 43% of Americans do want “big, suburban homes” but you personally are committed to building and pushing for smaller and denser housing? Presumably you leave the building of those larger structures to others but 43% is still a large number. It would be interesting to see how this group and its experts speak as they see some light at the end of the tunnel (several demographic groups who want smaller homes) versus time periods when it may have seemed more Americans prefer big houses and sprawl (1980s through roughly 2006).

Chicago helped lead the way in northern residential segregation

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A blog post from Chicago magazine tells part of the story of how Chicago helped lead the way for northern segregation:

In his new book Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities, Carl H. Nightingale traces the phenomenon back to Sumer, but narrows down to a focus on Johannesburg and Chicago. In the former, segregation was explicit. In the latter, it couldn’t be; in 1917, the NAACP challenged a segregation ordinance in Louisville, leading to the decision in Buchanan v. Warley, in which “a multiracial team of attorneys led by a black professional had forced a white supremacist judiciary to choose between racism and a basic premise of laissez-faire capitalism—and property rights won out, at least in the case of neighborhood segregation.” But there was profit to be had in racism, and it would soon find ways around “laissez-faire capitalism,” with curious allies in the Progressive movement.

About a decade before Buchanan, the National Association of Real Estate Boards grew out of the Chicago Real Estate Board; it would coin the term realtor, and set professional standards for the sale of real estate (now the National Association of Realtors, it remains one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in the country). In the 1920s, its general counsel was Nathan William MacChesney, a former president of the Illinois Bar and a co-founder of Northwestern’s Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. MacChesney was considered a progressive; in the words of David Roediger, “the principal figure in the ‘progressive’ reform of real estate.”

The NAREB, and MacChesney, had a powerful progressive ally in Richard T. Ely, then an economist at the University of Wisconsin; in the mid-’20s, he moved to Northwestern. Ely, a proponent of the Social Gospel, had ties to Chicago progressives—he was the first president of the American Association of Labor Legislation, a “useful synechodoche for progressive economics,” which had Jane Addams on its board.

But Ely and MacChesney also represented troubling strains in the Progressive movement, as Nightingale writes:

Though neither elaborated a full-fledged theory of race in print, both had swum in a similar soup of racialized and imperialist reform politics for most of their careers…. several times [Ely] advocated measures to slow down the reproduction of people he deemed part of the “sad human rubbish-heap”—the “feeble-minded,” welfare recipients, and criminals…. MacChesney, whose list of board memberships in reform organizations was legendary, likewise wrote a eugenical tract advocating sterilization programs for the mentally ill and for prisoners…

The Great Migration continued to increase Chicago’s black population, but the city now had a powerful tool to control it. By 1940, according to historian Beryl Satter, Chicago had more racial-deed restrictions than any other city in the country; half the city was covered by such covenants. Nor was it limited to Chicago, Satter writes: “Real estate boards across the nation recognized CREB’s pioneering work in maintaining all-white communities and looked to CREB for advice as they crafted their own racially restrictive plans.” The fear that Johnson—himself a child of the Great Migration—and his colleagues had warned about in 1922 came to fruition, encoded into law.

Chicago is a global city but also has a checkered past. I don’t think many Chicagoans today would like the comparison to Johannesburg.

This history should be familiar to those who know America’s past: real estate interests and others, including the federal and local governments, developed a system of racially-restrictive covenants, discriminatory mortgage lending practices, and other practices like blockbusting in order to limit where blacks and other minorities could live. When these techniques were struck down and fair housing laws became common by the late 1960s, whites responded by leaving many urban neighborhoods and moving to the suburbs.

No, Chicago really is a global city

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Aaron Renn writes in City Journal that the global city of Chicago faces several really tough issues:

The idea was to portray Chicago as a “global city,” and it was successful, to judge from the responses in the national media. As Millennium Park opened (a few years late) in the mid-2000s, The Economist celebrated Chicago as “a city buzzing with life, humming with prosperity, sparkling with new buildings, new sculptures, new parks, and generally exuding vitality.” The Washington Post dubbed Chicago “the Milan of the Midwest.” Newsweek added, “From a music scene powered by the underground footwork energy of juke to adventurous three-star restaurants, high-stepping fashion, and hot artists, Chicago is not only ‘the city that works,’ in Mayor Daley’s slogan, but also an exciting, excited city in which all these glittery worlds shine.”

But despite the chorus of praise, it’s becoming evident that the city took a serious turn for the worse during the first decade of the new century. The gleaming towers, swank restaurants, and smart shops remain, but Chicago is experiencing a steep decline quite different from that of many other large cities. It is a deeply troubled place, one increasingly falling behind its large urban brethren and presenting a host of challenges for new mayor Rahm Emanuel…

Chicago also needs something even harder to achieve: wholesale cultural change. It needs to end its obsession with being solely a global city, look for ways to reinvigorate its role as capital of the Midwest, and provide opportunities for its neglected middle and working classes, not just the elites. This means more focus on the basics of good governance and less focus on glamour. Chicago must also forge a culture of greater civic participation and debate. You can’t address your problems if everyone is terrified of stepping out of line and admitting that they exist. Here, at least, Emanuel can set the tone. In March, he publicly admitted that Chicago had suffered a “lost decade,” a promisingly candid assessment, and he has tapped former D.C. transportation chief Gabe Klein to run Chicago’s transportation department, rather than picking a Chicago insider. Continuing to welcome outsiders and dissident voices will help dilute the culture of clout.

Renn is rehashing issues that Chicago has faced for decade: corruption, clout, unions and pensions, aldermen, population loss, and fiscal concerns. Throw in the recent issues with crime (it’s worse than Afghanistan!) and things look bad.

But I would argue a bit with Renn’s premise: Chicago’s image as a global city is more than just an image or a veneer. For example, AT Kearney named Chicago the #7 global city in the world (five different dimensions) in 2011. When the premier of China came over to the US in 2011, he went two places: Washington, D.C. and Chicago to meet with Mayor Daley about business. A lot of this is tied to Chicago’s historic role as the finance capital of the heartland, the place where futures were invented and developed. It is also tied to Chicago’s ongoing transportation importance: as I’ve blogged about, something like 70% of Class I freight traffic in the US moves through the region (and there are multiple large intermodal facilities), it has many major highways, and the second busiest airport in the US. Chicago is known for its architecture (one of the homes of the International Style), its museums, and its place in American history as the first real boom city (later duplicated by Sunbelt cities).  Add in the beautiful lakefront parks (and I’m still surprised more big cities haven’t developed their waterfront space in similar ways), being a leader in rooftop green spaces, several world-class universities, and dozens of interesting neighborhoods. This doesn’t discount what Renn said about the city having financial difficulty but Chicago isn’t the only place with these concerns. There has been plenty of commentary lately about blue vs. red social models and places like California, NYC, and many other Rust Belt cities face similar concerns: how to balance large-scale social programs with pro-business attitudes. As I’ve suggested on the blog, I think Emanuel is more pro-business than many Republicans would give him credit for and he is definitely in the Clintonian mold: promote traditional Democratic interests but also push for big business and jobs.

Cities can rise and fall over time and perhaps Chicago is at a turning point. However, it is has weathered issues in the past, being perhaps the only Rust Belt city that did okay between 1960 and 2000, and may weather new problems in the future.

Demographics suggest don’t invest in McMansions; invest in group homes

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Looking at the demographic trends in the United States, one analyst suggests investors shouldn’t look to McMansions but rather group homes:

A large majority of older Americans want to remain in their homes, and more importantly, in their communities. The homes they raised their families in might not suit their purposes any longer, so what are their options? In 2005 (before the housing crises) a survey was taken by AARP of adults over the age of 50, and they reported that the homes they currently lived in wouldn’t accommodate them “very well” as they aged. So these seniors have a push-pull of wanting to “age in place” but their homes aren’t suitable for them to remain independent.

Seniors in the early stage of making a housing transition will remain in owner-occupied or rental housing and live independently. Only about 4.7 percent live in a group home and 7-10 percent live in a senior facility.

I see group homes as an area of opportunity. Group homes could become the answer for many seniors. I have been preaching for the last year or two that new homeowners aren’t looking for McMansions. New buyers (Echo Boomers and younger) want something simpler that gives them more flexibility. So what will happen to these McMansions? Group homes could be perfect. Many of these homes were built with private baths attached to each bedroom, large kitchens and great rooms. These homes can be adapted for disabilities by adding lifts and rails in bathrooms, for example. Then these homes can operate very well as group homes. This can give seniors the option to stay within their community, but not be isolated. Not to mention it’s a cash cow for investors, I’ve seen these kind of properties create a 100% positive cash flow (this would include covering the debt service).

As seniors make the enevitable change they will release much more housing than they absorb, but it will be absorbed by newly formed households. For example, between 2000 and 2010, people who began the decade age 55+ moved out of 10.5 million housing units. Most of these were owner-occupied dwellings. During the same period households grew (under the age of 55) by 21.8 million. Thus leaving about 11.2 million new households needing housing. Take into consideration that forty percent of this time was during a major recession where we saw much slower household formation.

I can see two quick issues with group homes. First, some of these places today are very expensive as they can require residents to buy a unit and pay extra fees on top of this. Second, communities would have to approve the zoning necessary for these homes.

This reminds me of Kate Bollick’s Atlantic cover story “All the Single Ladies.” She ends the story by discussing a “dormitory” for women in Amsterdam that helps provide community while giving adults some individual space. Bollick suggests this sort of living space could be the wave of the future but I think it might take some time to catch on in the United States.