Author Archives: legallysociable

SimCity 5 coming soon

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It appears that Maxis plans to reboot the SimCity franchise:

Enter SimCity. No really, just SimCity, like when you remake an old-school movie and crib the name unadorned — simple, straightforward, unambiguous. Only this isn’t a remake, it’s “a true rebirth of the franchise,” according to publisher EA and developer Maxis’ press release.

There’s obviously still going to be a drive to make it as accessible as possible, but EA and Maxis claim the reboot “brings the depth of simulation that has been the series hallmark for more than two decades and marries it with next generation accessibility and a robust multiplayer mode, giving players the power to change a world together.”

The emphasis this time appears to be on multiplayer, judging from the initial info-dump. Imagine building “a world that co-exists alongside friends,” in which the choices you make in your city have “long-lasting repercussions that will extend beyond [your] city limits.” You’ll be grappling with “real global challenges such as climate change, the search for renewable resources and natural disasters,” and have to choose “whether to compete or collaborate” with your fellow metropolitan masons.

“Everything you see in the world we sim,” writes EA/Maxis. “Sims in each city will have jobs or can lose them, buy homes, be prosperous or be an economic drain on the city. SimCity is the city builder in which every choice powers real change that affects the character of your city, the state of your region and fellow players within the entire SimCity world. Original fans and newcomers alike will relish the opportunity to build visually and functionally unique cities that take on the character of their choices.”

You can watch the SimCity 5 trailer at the link above.

I grew up playing a lot of SimCity, particularly SimCity 2000 (though I have played plenty of all the other versions). For my money, that version was a great blend of complexity and gameplay. I think the trick for SimCity in the future is rediscovering or updating this balance: making it fun but also making it realistic. To me, the real genius of SimCity was taking real-life situations that we all know (we all live somewhere) and making an interesting game out of it. Along the way, a player would learn some principles about city planning. At the very least, you would learn about different zones and how to connect basic infrastructure (electricity and roads/trains in the original, later including water/pipes and mass transit) to all of the zones. At a more complex level, you could create intricate arrangements of land uses, mixing in civic structures like schools, city hall, parks, stadiums, marinas, and other goodies while having to balance a city budget. All of this could give a player feelings of creativity and control.

I know that people today talk about the “Madden effect” for football fans. The idea here is that through playing a realistic football game, fans learned about the intricacies of the game in a way that they wouldn’t get by watching games on TV or watching highlights on the news or on SportsCenter. For example, Madden players know the difference between different zone schemes in the defensive secondary or different pass routes. Is there a similar effect from SimCity? Would players know the different between a vibrant city and a disjointed place? (This makes me wonder: how many SimCity players built a whole map of suburban sprawl? You could do this in the game but it wasn’t really the point and the maintenance costs, usually per road piece or square of pipes or losing water pressure if it is pumped too far, would make it costly. Were the makers trying to make a point?) Going even further, are SimCity players better civic and social actors after learning more about how the urban world is put together?

Request from DuPage mosque for 50-60 foot tall structure rejected

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I’ve been tracking the cases of several proposals for mosques in DuPage County and one of the cases was in the news yesterday because of a ruling that did not allow a variance for the 50-60 foot tall structure:

During a heated hearing that included accusations from the public of demagoguery and religious insensitivity, the DuPage County Development Committee failed to endorse the plan on a 3-3 vote. The committee’s ruling followed a rejection of the proposal by the DuPage County Zoning Board of Appeals, said committee Chairman Tony Michelassi, who voted in favor of the project.

The group previously tried to win approval for a 69-foot dome and a 79-foot minaret when the County Board first considered construction of the mosque. Amid fierce opposition, construction of the religious center on 91st Street near Illinois Highway 83 was approved while a waiver to build the higher dome and minaret was denied…

MECCA leaders most recently sought a waiver to construct a dome that would peak 50 feet off the ground and a 60-foot minaret, the tall spire from which the faithful are traditionally called to prayer.

But with a cap on the height of new religious buildings set at 36 feet in residential areas, the group could not realistically construct a dome and minaret that are functional and true to religious custom, Daniel said.

Opponents of the mosque have said, among other things, that the structure would be obtrusive. The faith of future MECCA congregants has nothing to do with their opposition, nearby residents say. They noted that six churches of different denominations peacefully coexist in the neighborhood.

This continues to be a very interesting case: 50-60 feet tall is roughly 5 to 6 stories. This is considerably taller than many suburban buildings (where apartment buildings over a few stories are generally rare) but perhaps more in line with a tall traditional church steeple (though fewer churches desire steeples these days).

This case hinges on new zoning laws regarding religious structures passed by DuPage County in 2011. Here is some of the debate about this zoning change as recorded by the Daily Herald in October 2011:

DuPage officials say the zoning changes are needed because unincorporated residential areas don’t have the infrastructure needed to support new places of assembly. Existing roads, sewers, and septic and well systems weren’t designed for the uses, they argue.

However, DuPage officials dropped a controversial idea to prohibit new places of assembly in residential neighborhoods. The existing proposal allows new places of assembly in residential areas as long as certain requirements are met.

County board member Grant Eckhoff said the goal is to balance the rights of property owners and their neighbors. The proposed regulations give groups the opportunity to seek construction projects while protecting “the essential character” neighborhoods, he said…

The new rules also place greater restrictions on the size of religious buildings. Another suggestion is to prohibit organizations from converting an existing single-family house into a place of worship.

I noted the final 16-0 vote in favor of these limits on religious congregations that took place shortly after the above Daily Herald article. These new regulations seem to be primarily on the side of existing residents as it is the religious group that must prove that their structure does not put a hardship on the neighborhood. In other words, the religious group must have the support of the neighborhood at the very least to get a variance to the regulations approved.

Why two media sources ranking the world’s wealthiest people is a good thing

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While Forbes had the corner on the market for years in compiling a ranking of the world’s richest people, there is now another option: this week Bloomberg released its Billionaires Index. One commentator thinks we don’t need both Forbes and Bloomberg examining this topic:

The Forbes list, available online today, is published every March. (Its companion, the “Forbes 400” list of richest Americans published in September.) It’s hard to not feel that Bloomberg’s outing takes some of the air out of Forbes usually-hyped cover story on who are the world’s richest people. This year’s edition proves unexciting not only because there were few shake-ups in the top spots from 2011’s list, but also because these rankings don’t appear all that different from Bloomberg’s.

Highlights from 2012’s version: With $69 billion, Mexico’s Carlos Slim Helu ranks No. 1 again for the third year in the row. (The magazine also profiled him.) Helu was followed by another 1,225 billionaires, starting with Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Bernard Arnault (of Louis Vuitton fame), who were also two through four last year. But beside no one being knocked off the top of this year’s Forbes list, it’s markedly similar to how rich Bloomberg News told us these folks were. Here’s a side-by-side comparison, with Forbes on the left and Bloomberg on the right.

So there are slight differences. Bloomberg has Arnault one spot lower and places fashion mogul Amancio Ortega down to seventh. Bloomberg puts the Koch brothers in the top 10, whereas Forbes had them both pegged at 12th. But isn’t this hair-splitting? If anything, the discrepancies show how hard it is to measure rich people’s riches.

What today’s Forbes list shows more than anything is that we don’t need two billionaires lists reminding us how wealthy the wealthy are. If we had to choose one, we’d go with Bloomberg’s, since it’s updated daily instead of once a year. But we doubt that will stop Forbes from producing its longstanding annual issue as long folks keep buying it.

I disagree. Here is why: I think that having two media sources looking at this topic will actually give readers better information. With two publications tackling the subject, I hope this improves their measurement of wealth for both publications. Perhaps we could average the rankings across the publications to get a more accurate assessment of what is going on. In the end, two sets of people looking at the data is better than one. Because Bloomberg is updating this list daily, perhaps this will push Forbes to update their lists more frequently and move away from a magazine era schedule to an Internet era schedule. The two lists do have some differences and this is not inconsequential. Lots of people are interested in this list and I’m sure some of the people at the top of the list have some interest in where they rank. Of course, these differences can indicate “how hard it is to measure rich people’s riches” but this doesn’t mean we should just throw up our hands and go with one list. Just because these people are really wealthy doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have more fine-grained analysis of their financial holdings. (This sometimes seems to happen quite a bit in sociology: we assume we know about the elites and so spend more time studying marginalized groups but we have fewer in-depth studies of the elites who do have a lot of influence in society.)

A second issue: Bloomberg obviously thinks there is a market for another list that is updated daily and so this is a market decision as well as a journalistic interest in updating this information more frequently. The Forbes list always gets a lot of attention and Bloomberg probably wants to draw away some of that market. I imagine there is enough room in the market for both lists to survive, particularly as the two could serve different markets. However, it will be interesting to see how the rest of the media responds to changes in the Bloomberg list: if someone moves up from #3 to #2 in the next few days, will there be news stories about it? Will journalists providing background information about the wealthy reference the Forbes or the Bloomberg list?

Preserving “authentic” spaces can lead to more “contrived and uniform places”

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While I haven’t read the book, I was intrigued by this one paragraph that describes sociologist Sharon Zukin’s argument in her recent book Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Spaces.

Sharon Zukin’s Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places signals its ambivalent relationship to Jacobs’s work in its subtitle, which both echoes Jacobs and argues with her legacy. Zukin’s argument is that Jacobs’s city is as much an artificial construct as any other, and that its imposition on living cities has tended to create mummified museums of urbanism rather than vibrant and authentic centres of human life: above all, it has unleashed the wave of middle-class-friendly gentrification that has made the special into the commonplace, the characterful into the bland, the human into the corporate. It seems that the more people insist on authenticity and individuality, the more contrived and uniform places become. Zukin uses New York to illustrate the problem: if you don’t know the city, you will definitely be at a disadvantage, as she wanders through streets and districts providing a sometimes illuminating, sometimes irritating commentary showing the ways in which the city has lost — or rather sold — its soul.

Authenticity: something that many people want but it is hard to find in places and perhaps even harder to maintain.

This reminds me of some ideas I’ve run into in recent years. One ASA presentation I saw a few years ago addressed this very issue by looking at a neighborhood that was just on the edge of gentrification in Chicago. This means the neighborhood hadn’t quite yet been overrun by wealthier, white residents but it had enough artists and wealthier residents to be clearly on the rise. The argument was that soon this place was going to tip into gentrification, meaning the true grittiness of the neighborhood would be scrubbed away as people moved in looking for “authentic” urban living.

Additionally, you could argue that wanting to preserve authenticity is behind many NIMBY efforts. Once having moved into a place, residents want to preserve what they liked in the first place, sometimes going so far that it seems like they wish they could have frozen that place in time. In these cases, residents are often fighting against outsiders and trying to promote their own vision of an authentic neighborhoods. In the end, few, if any, places can really be frozen in time except maybe corporatized spaces like Main Street U.S.A. at DisneyWorld. Places change and might go through cycles when they are authentic and then become inauthentic.

So how exactly do you get authentic places? This particular reviewer doesn’t like Zukin’s suggestion that government should help guide this process. I might chime in that government in the past has been known to promote its own interests or the interests of wealthy businesspeople over residents. At the same time, if we leave everything up to an unfettered market, authentic spaces tend to get commodified, taken over by wealthy residents, and influenced by corporations. I would guess that Zukin prefers to have places where residents have a say in what happens in the neighborhood, that everything isn’t decided by outside forces and that government can act as a referee to look out for the interests of current residents.

A reminder: there are plenty of people who have a stake in whether a place is authentic or not and this complicates everything.

Not much of a price premium for net-zero-energy homes

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As more homebuyers seek out green homes and want to reduce energy bills, they can purchase a net-zero-energy home for a price that may not be as high as you think:

The Spencer’s new home is part of a niche, though growing, segment of the U.S. housing market — net-zero-energy homes, many of which use solar energy to achieve net-zero-energy use vs. consumption. In the sun-sparse days of winter, energy consumption often exceeds generation, but in the sunny days of summer, energy generation often far exceeds consumption.

As of February 2012, 37 homes have been rated net-zero-energy or better on the industry-standard Home Energy Rating System e-scale of the U.S.-standard auditor. This number could grow 1,000 percent or more in 2012 if projects continue as planned.

“Interest has been off the charts,” said Todd Louis, vice-president of Tommy Williams Homes, the Florida-based building company that built the Spencers’ home. So far, the company has built and sold four, and has plans to build 35 to 40 more in 2012. The price of their net-zero-energy homes are still $30,000 to $40,000 higher than those that are not net-zero-energy, said Williams, but that margin is dropping with a decline in photovoltaic costs. The Spencers paid $250,000 for their home…

Shea Homes has long featured extremely energy-efficient designs, though the upgrade to solar panels could be costly — around $30,000, said Asay. He and his wife were considering the upgrade, but when the announcement was made that the new net-zero homes, with solar, were only $7,000 more than the previous base model, they jumped: “Sign us up.”

This approach is different than another housing approach that has generated buzz: passive houses are homes that are so insulated that they use a ventilator to move air from inside to outside (and vice versa – see some diagrams here). The energy costs in these homes are very low. In contrast, net-zero-energy homes have higher energy costs than passive homes but then offset the energy usage. In this article, the homes have solar panels (I wonder if this could be done in other ways – wind turbines on the roof?) which also means that the homes have to be in climates and locations with more sunlight. If the costs for doing this are reasonable and introduced completely at the beginning (meaning it can be spread out across the life of a mortgage), I could see how this is attractive for homebuyers.

I expect that we will see more homes like this in the future: beyond wanting to reduce energy bills, more homeowners appear to be interested in green homes. The housing industry is starting to warm to this idea and there are a number of ways that new homes can adapt: more sustainable materials, being a passive house or a net-zero-energy house, downsizing or right-sizing, and being in denser neighborhoods where homeowners can drive less and use less land.

“Peer to peer” car sharing ramps up

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I’ve talked before about how car sharing service Zipcar has freed my wife and me from needing to own a car.  Unfortunately, similar non-ownership options aren’t available to most Americans for the simple reason that Zipcar’s fleet is mostly concentrated in urban centers and around college campuses.  For many suburbanites, the prospect of an inexpensive, on-demand, by-the-hour car rental hasn’t been an actual prospect.

With RelayRides rolling out nationwide this week, however, that may be changing:

Companies like RelayRides…offer a different take on carsharing than the one established by Zipcar and its competitors. While those companies own fleets of cars, RelayRides is entirely peer-to-peer — if you have a car, then you can make it available for rental when you’re not using it. RelayRides says the average car owner makes $250 a month from the program.

Since it takes advantage of the cars already on the road, founder and chief community officer Shelby Clark argues that peer-to-peer carsharing can have a big impact — after all, a fleet-based company couldn’t simply declare one day that it’s launching nationally.

This is potentially very disruptive of Zipcar’s business model.  RelayRides (and other challengers like Getaround) don’t have to go head-to-head with Zipcar in many parts of the country because those markets are utterly unserved.  And even where RelayRides has to go head-to-head with Zipcar, their prices seem comparable.  So long as the reservation process and pickup hassle is roughly the same, I know I would have no problem booking cars through RelayRides.  My purchases within an active market for by-the-hour car rentals would simply be driven by normal consumer considerations like price, convenience, customer service, etc.

Indeed, this is the beauty of the free market, as Leigh Beadon over at Techdirt reminds us:

Nobody is immune—not even the last disruptor. Companies like Zipcar changed the game with their car-sharing services, but they are already facing new challengers….How big and how successful [RelayRides’] approach will become remains to be seen, but it’s a creative idea that makes a clear point: disruption can happen anywhere, to anyone. As the entertainment industry continues to fight progress, experts from every side of the debate love to make profound-sounding statements about how the internet has changed our media consumption habits, but that’s old news. From mobile-based taxi & limo services to the coming era of 3D printers and things like the Pirate Bay’s Physibles site, digital technologies are disrupting a lot of things, not just media.

High rents and the lack of politics

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Forbes recently published a two part interview with law professor David Schleicher discussing his recent paper City Unplanning.  Schleicher discusses the perversity of zoning restrictions and begins by noting that, in many cases, rents and rental units available have nothing to do with each other:

In a number of big cities, new housing starts seem uncorrelated or only weakly correlated with housing prices and the result of increasing demand while holding supply steady is that price went up fast. The average cost of a Manhattan apartment is now over $1.4 million and the average monthly rent is over $3,300.

The only explanation is that zoning rules stop supply from increasing in the face of rising demand.

Effectively, Schleicher argues that new developments in big cities are subject to a form of NIMBYism which is effective to the extent it is apolitical:

Local legislators may prefer more development than we have now to less, but have stronger preferences for stopping development in their districts because these projects would hurt homeowners in their neighborhoods—either directly through things like increased traffic or indirectly through increasing the supply of housing, harming the value of existing houses.

This is a prisoner’s dilemma and absent a political party to organize the vote in local legislatures, one-by-one votes on projects will result in “defect” results, or situations where every legislator builds coalitions to block projects in their own district and nothing gets built [emphasis added].

I couldn’t quite understand Schleicher’s point from the interview, but it is much better explained in the full paper:

Importantly, most cities do not have competitive party politics – they either have formally nonpartisan elections and/or are entirely dominated by one party that rarely takes local-issue specific stances. Absent partisan competition, there is little debate over citywide issues in local legislative races and there is no party leadership to organize the legislature, making the procedural rules governing the manner in which the legislature considers land use issues far more important. The content of the land use procedure generates what one might call “localist” policy-making: seriatim [i.e., one-off] decisions about individual developments or rezonings in which the preferences of the most affected local residents are privileged against more weakly-held citywide preferences about housing.

It’s an intriguing thesis positively, but I’m not sure what I think of Schleicher’s point normatively.  Local voters generally do seem to prefer NIMBY outcomes in order to avoid threats (e.g., increased traffic, lowered property values) to their existing assets (i.e., homes and businesses).  But if local voters achieve this result through the mechanics of “weak” local politics, isn’t that an example of the political system “working”?

Put another way, high rents may be undesirable, but they are largely an outsider problem.  Current residents (insiders who can vote) first and foremost want to protect themselves from the problematic vicissitudes of new development (which will, if it is built, be populated with outsiders who obviously cannot vote unless it is built and they take up residence).  If current residents/voters achieve this goal through voting for “apolitical” council members, (1) isn’t this actually a highly political choice, and (2) isn’t this precisely how voting and elections are designed to work?

Lots of sociological themes in Time’s “10 ideas that are changing your life”

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I enjoy reading magazines and other media sources that are willing to consider the world of ideas and what new thinking we all need to know about. Thus, Time’s “10 ideas that are changing your life” are not only interesting – there is a lot of sociological material in these ten ideas. Here are a few sociological musings about four of these ideas:

1. “Living Alone is the New Norm.” I’ve highlighted some of the recent reviews of the new research from sociologist Eric Klinenberg (see here and here) that shows that Americans living alone “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 roommate or group home.” Another interesting line: “Living alone helps us pursue sacred modern values – individual freedom, personal control and self-realization.” That is an interesting trio of values to mull over.

3. “The Rise of the Nones.” Sixteen percent of Americans claim to be non-religious but this group is particularly interesting because 4% claim to be agnostic or atheist. Thus, many of the “nones” are spiritual or religious but dissatisfied with organized religion. This group can be examined as part of a larger debate about whether American religion is declining or not. This also presents a challenge for organized religion: how do you get these religious or spiritual “nones” to buy into established houses of worship?

7. “High-Status Stress.” New findings suggest that people in charge or in the higher classes experience more stress: “In fact, research indicates that as you near the top, life stress increases so dramatically that its toxic effects essentially cancel out many positive aspects of succeeding.” It may not be easy to be at the top even if you have the power and ability to do more of what you want. I’m not sure how this would affect the class struggles between the upper and lower classes but it is interesting information nonetheless.

9. “Nature is Over.” Humans have altered the earth in many ways, doing so much so that our conception of nature might need to change: “The reality is that in the Anthropocene, there may simply be no room for nature, at least not nature as we’ve known and celebrated it – something separate from human beings – something pristine. There’s no getting back to the Garden [of Eden], assuming it ever existed.” This reminds me of the romanticism of nature in the mid 1800s that influenced how early American suburbs were created (designing winding streets to preserve pastoral views) and how Central Park was created (meant to preserve a piece of nature in the midst of the big city). More realistically, neither city parks or most suburbs really present much of nature – based on an idea in James Howard Kunstler’s TED talk about suburbs, these are more elaborate “nature band-aids.”

Several of the other ideas have sociological implications as well.

Reading through this list, it reminds me of how much I enjoy reading and talking about new ideas and where society might be going. If I could get all of my students to share this enthusiasm and develop a capacity to seek out and interact with ideas on their own (using the critical thinking skills and other tools they have picked up in college), it would make me happy.

Characters on GCB have taste because they don’t live in McMansions

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I was amused to run across this description of the homes for the new ABC series GCB. While the women may be gossipers, at least they have good taste and don’t live in McMansions:

The production team spent four days scouting historic and modern houses in Texas, soaking up local color in the tony Dallas enclaves of Highland Park, Preston Hollow and University Park. “We visited homes, churches, country clubs, offices, stores, etc., and immersed ourselves in everything Dallas,” says Dugally, an Emmy nominee in 2004 for Arrested Development. The pilot was shot on location, though Los Angeles doubles for Dallas in the series. “It was not an easy task as Dallas is known for its large expanses of property, many without high fences or security and lots of brick architecture,” she adds. “Los Angeles is full of palm trees that don’t do well in Dallas. We were able to find several wonderful houses and a great church in the L.A. basin that serve as the exteriors for our show.”

Although Dallas certainly earns its bigger-is-better notoriety — Aspen’s housewife character has a French Country-style kitchen with a countertop deep fryer and three double ovens — Dugally notes that the houses they saw there weren’t McMansions. “Dallas is the most cosmopolitan city in Texas. Most of the money is old money,” says the designer. “I said, ‘Let’s give our characters taste.’ We made a very conscious decision that the look be over-the-top but still elegant.”

For the home of Amanda’s colorful mother Gigi (Potts), production designer Dugally wanted the interiors “to remain very upscale but traditional.” Front and center is the ornate, winding staircase with a landing topped by a gold leafed dome. Asian accents, custom-designed wallpapers by Astek in Los Angeles and white wainscoting are just a few of the design elements used for the warm gold- and cream-toned decor.

Gun-toting Gigi gets her own rifle-display room. “It’s completely taken from memory from a house I saw in Dallas,” says Dugally. Among the animal trophies is a mounted javelina. In high school, Bibb’s Amanda character had branded ugly-duckling Carlene as one of the creatures, a relative of the pig that’s native to the Southwest. Says Dugally, “Our executive producer Robert Harling wanted a javelina wherever we could get one, and he was so thrilled we found it. It’s so ugly.”

Read on for descriptions of some of the other houses.

Perhaps the characters on the show have some reason to have more taste – perhaps they are educated and/or have money. The inspiration for the fictional Hillside Park is supposedly Highland Park, a well-known Dallas suburb that is quite monied (a median household income of about $150k). If you have enough money, you don’t need a “traditional McMansion” to impress people because you don’t want to look like the nouveau riche and would prefer to show your wealth through refined and expensive accoutrements.

But the decision to have them avoid McMansions is still intriguing, particularly if they wanted the houses to be over-the-top. Even diva or “sassy” characters on TV can’t have McMansions because this would reflect badly on them.

NASA on Vegas and sprawl

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NASA recently posted a video on Flikr showing 28 years of development in Las Vegas as seen from space:

When Landsat 5 launched on March 1, 1972, Las Vegas was a smaller city. This image series, done in honor of the satellite’s 28th birthday, shows the desert city’s massive growth spurt since 1972. The outward expansion of the city is shown in a false-color [i.e., red = green space like parks and golf courses] time lapse of data from all the Landsat satellites.