Author Archives: legallysociable

Not just one national housing recovery

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National figures about the housing market give us an idea of what is happening across the United States. But if all real estate is local, it might be worthwhile to remember that the housing recovery may or may not be happening at different rates in different regions.

It would be interesting to hear housing experts talk about what this means for attempted national policies regarding housing. Would national policies take care of what needs to be done in Fresno, California and also Detroit, Michigan?

Lord Giddens as “Blair guru”

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I occasionally run across stories involving Anthony Giddens, well-known sociologist, speaking about political issues in Britain. Here is another example of the actions of the “Blair guru”:

Labour peer Lord Giddens, who brought the debate on 13 October entitled Universities: Impact of Government Policy, said ministers appeared to be pursuing policies of “ill-considered, untutored radicalism” that were not based in proper research and had “imponderable outcomes”.

The academic, who advised former prime minister Tony Blair and is professor of sociology at LSE, said the reforms would leave England as a “global outrider” with one of the lowest levels of public support for higher education in the industrialised world.

He said the “ideological thrust” of the Browne Review should have been rejected and instead tuition fees only gradually raised alongside the maintenance of direct public support for universities, due to their “massive” beneficial impact on society.

“Universities are not a sort of supermarket where education can be chosen like a washing powder off the shelf. Students are not simply consumers, making day-to-day purchasing decisions. They will make a one-off decision,” he said.

Reading these stories, it seems like Giddens has more political clout than most sociologists. Is this simply a function of having been close to Tony Blair, did Giddens do specific work/research that put him in contact with politicians, or does Britain simply have a different culture regarding public intellectuals and how sociologists can be involved in social and government life?

Finding new ways to store your bike in the city

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With space at a premium in many cities, some people have developed innovative ways to store bicycles:

Fortunately some cities have responded to the challenge with exceptional ingenuity. Japanese engineers have developed a multi-level “cycle tree” — perhaps more appropriately named a “cycle cave” — that stores bikes in an elaborate underground system. Riders feed their bike into a mechanized rut that sends it down into a designated spot, retrieving the bike later with a simple swipe of a card. One “cycle tree” in Tokyo, considered the world’s largest, holds some 6,500 bikes.

A truer bike tree can be found in Geneva, where riders can watch their bike raised high above the hands of thieves while remaining protected from the elements. In that same anti-theft vein, German designers have created a bike lock with inline wheels and a small motor that enables riders to power their bikes high up a street pole. Seoul, Korea, is working toward a system of bike hangers that cling to the site of residential buildings; riders can park for just $15 a year, though they have to pedal to retrieve their bike. A slightly less advanced version of this concept has been implemented already by some riders in the East Village…

Those who don’t mind cramming their bikes into their apartments have a growing number of options as well. These range from basic wooden wall mounts to simple, cheap wall hooks to stylish, colorful hanging nodes to elegant bike storage furniture that, in the words of Freshome, “unite cycling culture with interior design.” A Times slideshow from a few years back showcases some other space-saving solutions. These include a wall device that lifts bikes off the ground with a hydraulic spring, a freestanding rack made of oak, an incredibly compact and sleek wall hook, and a similar structure that, while bulkier, provides space for helmets and other equipment.

Many city dwellers, conscious of their limited apartment space, are now looking for bike storage devices that serve a double purpose. Knife & Saw recently introduced a hanging bike shelf that also acts as a small bookshelf. Less costly variations are starting to appear as well. Those with a balcony might consider a bike-shelf-birdhouse combination that holds a helmet as easily as it holds a helmetshrike. The most innovative, though perhaps also the least comfortable, design goes to Store Muu Design Studio, which conceived a sort of hybrid bike-desk, wherein the bike seat doubles as the office chair.

Some fascinating pictures to look at. You can even find out a little more about what happened to the foldable bicycle.

Home buyers looking for McMansion features

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I’ve highlighted the trend toward granite countertops and stainless steel appliances and here is some more evidence of home buyers looking for McMansion features, this time in the Philadelphia area:

Two couples I know are trying to sell city houses they have owned for more than three decades. The houses are historic, and conventional wisdom when they bought them as shells was to restore them without compromising their architectural integrity.

They bought them when they were young, raised their families in them, and now they are ready to move on.

One couple have had their house on the market since April. One of the owners told me prospective buyers seem to want marble bathrooms and gourmet kitchens, which are more suburban McMansion phenomena than urban trends.

“They can go to the home center and get those things,” she said, blaming TV reality shows for the attitude.

Today’s numbers reflect an impasse: Few people are buying, and those who do are paying bottom dollar; most sellers aren’t willing to take less.

Buyers want the best features but want the cheaper price while home sellers have to wrestle with not spending too much money to update in a down market when housing values have dropped.

Can we solely blame TV reality shows for this phenomenon? Here are three other reasons this might be happening:

1. Tastes have gone up and people expect better features in their home. This isn’t just from reality TV: advertising plays a role (similar pitches from the 1950s to today) as do reference groups.

2. More than in the past, home owners don’t have the home repair skills or will to do these repairs. Therefore, they want the sellers to have done this work for them and then don’t want to have to deal with it for a while.

3. It is a buyer’s market and so buyers tend to ask for everything. Many home sellers don’t have much leverage.

Ten ways to bring about more open/park space to Chicago

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After a report last week that Chicago was lacking in open space compared to other major American cities, architecture critic Blair Kamin proposes ten ways that Chicago could help rectify the problem:

The open space shortage is pervasive, with 32 of 77 community areas, home to half of Chicago’s 2.7 million people, failing to meet the city’s own modest requirement of two acres of open space for every 1,000 residents. And the stakes associated with relieving it are huge. Parks can help the city’s neighborhoods attract and retain residents, promote public health, boost real estate values and draw together people from different walks of life…

Although Emanuel has thrown his support behind a grab bag of open space initiatives, such as boathouses on the Chicago River and a new park in an unused area of Rosehill Cemetery, he has yet to produce the visionary plan he promised in his transition report.

In the absence of such a vision, here are 10 ideas that show what architects and the architects of public policy can do to relieve Chicago’s chronic open space shortage.

There are some interesting ideas here and many sounds relatively simply to institute.

When I saw the earlier story, I had a thought: should people have a right to public space? In the suburbs, perhaps this doesn’t matter as much as the common American goal is to purchase your own land. But in the city, where the population density increases and residents expect to be outside of their dwelling, should people have a guaranteed amount of public space? Do people have a human right to parks, to open land?

This question also is pertinent in light of the Occupy Wall Street protestors in Zuccotti Park in New York City. This is a weird sort of public space: it is privately owned but the owners have an agreement with the city to operate it as public space. This sort of arrangement is spreading to other cities: San Francisco has a number “privately owned public spaces” (POPOS) that few residents or tourists would ever know are actually privately owned. This might be helpful in that cities don’t have to do all the maintenance for these spaces but what happens when the private owners don’t like what is taking place on supposedly public property?

How to rank the luckiest cities in the United States

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Perhaps we have taken these rankings lists too far: Men’s Health has ranked the luckiest cities in the United States.

Luck is like that dark matter stuff scientists have spent billions of dollars trying to find with the Large Hadron Collider—a powerful presence that people surmise exists but no one has actually seen. The difference is that we found luck. Using statistics instead of protons, we pinpointed the location of a large supply in, of all places, San Diego.

Wondering how Vegas didn’t hit this jackpot? Here’s our definition of good luck: the most winners of Powerball, Mega Millions, and Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes; most hole-in-ones (PGA); fewest lightning strikes (including the fatal kind) and deaths from falling objects (Vaisala Inc., National Climatic Data Center, CDC); and least money lost on lottery tickets and race betting (Bureau of Labor Statistics).

San Diego is number one on the list with Baltimore, Phoenix, Wilmington (Delaware), and Richmond rounding out the top five. Chicago is #36. The bottom five: Sioux Falls, Memphis, Jackson (Mississippi), Tampa, and Charleston (West Virginia).

What I like about this is that they are straightforward with what factors went into the rankings (though they might have been weighted). These are what we might consider “very rare” and cultural conditioned lucky events. The lottery is perhaps the poster child for this. If someone wins more than once, some suspicions might surface (see a story about a four-time Texas winner here). What about lesser luck, such as avoiding a car accident at the last minute or local sports teams coming up with miraculous plays at the end of a game or avoiding natural disasters? Such things would be much more difficult to measure and it might always be an open statistical question of whether strange occurrences could be explained by some other unmeasured or unknown factor.

Should anyone move to the luckier cities to really improve their chances? No, the statistical odds of any of these things happening is still quite small. In fact, it would be interesting to see how much really separates the luckiest cities from the unluckiest – are we talking a difference of 1 in a million? Ten in a million?

In the end, I think these rankings don’t really tell us much about anything. People shouldn’t use them as a guide and measuring luck is fraught with difficulty. Take the lottery winnings: could this simply reflect the fact that people in certain cities buy more tickets or their states have bigger lottery jackpots which encourages more participation? This is a story that uses real numbers to make a nebulous point in order to gain website clicks (guilty as charged) and sell magazines.

The widespread (yet sometimes controversial) use of tax rebates for development in Illinois

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It is common practice in Illinois for communities to give tax rebates to firms and companies to locate within their community. The primary reason: it ends up bringing in more sales tax revenue.

Communities throughout the region and the state share sales tax revenues to woo retailers — and they are within their rights to do so under Illinois law. In fact, rebate researcher Geoffrey Propheter found the rebate programs to be more heavily used in Illinois than elsewhere around the country.

For the most part, these programs have flown under the radar until this summer, when the Regional Transportation Authority, the city of Chicago and Cook County legally challenged a variation on their use. In lawsuits, they alleged Channahon and Kankakee used sales tax rebate agreements to divert sales tax collections unfairly from metro Chicago to small “sham offices” in their lower-tax towns — allegations denied by both communities.

With a spotlight now directed at sales-tax rebate programs, some observers are quick to say they stand behind the more common use of rebate programs to attract big-box stores and auto dealers…

But other observers say the programs can skew economic development efforts toward retail. This can be effective in filling city coffers but may not produce as much regional economic growth as office or manufacturing developments, which tend to have higher-paying jobs and an ability to sell products over a much wider geographic range.

The rebate programs also tend to foster bidding wars between towns, with taxpayers picking up the tab. Propheter, a research assistant at the George Washington Institute of Public Policy, found the rebate offers have been used in border skirmishes around the state, from Belleville, outside St. Louis, to southwest suburban Joliet.

This is not a new story: states and communities across the United States have been engaging in such battles for years. In most places, governments are looking out for themselves and have little incentive to participate in regional planning or cooperation. Particularly today, in an era when many municipalities are desperate to find some extra money, providing incentives for developments likely looks attractive.

It would be interesting to know why this has become such a popular tool in Illinois.

Critics of sprawl argue that this helps feed sprawl. Communities look for ways to bring in easy money and big box stores and strip malls are relatively cheap to build. It is also interesting to see what happens when sprawl moves past these communities and the big box stores become less attractive and the new ones are even further out from the city. Shopping malls and big box stores tend not to age well.

Several examples of this come to mind:

1. Some of the verbal back-and-forth between Illinois and several other states, including Wisconsin, Indiana, and New Jersey, over the increasing tax rate in Illinois and casino revenues.

2. The story of how the Fox Valley Mall came to be in Aurora. The story is that the developer played Aurora and Naperville off each other in order to get a better deal for developing land on either the east or west side of Illinois Route 59. Naperville was not as willing to negotiate – and things were looking relatively good for them with the relocation of Bell Labs and a Amoco research facility along I-88 in the 1960s – and the developer picked Aurora. Naperville knew that it had lost a significant source of revenue. To compensate, city leaders turned quickly to drawing up plans to revitalize their downtown, putting into action a plan that suggested building a park along the river (put together a few years later as the Riverwalk), grouping municipal buildings in the downtown (new City Hall, new downtown library), and beautifying some of the streets (see Jefferson Avenue and Jackson Avenue between Main Street and Washington Street). I wonder how the story would be told today in Naperville if their downtown hadn’t become a destination.

Naomi Klein may often be considered “radical” but she is not a “sociologist”

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Naomi Klein is a popular journalist (most popular book: No Logo) but is she really a “radical sociologist”?

WHEN RADICAL sociologist Naomi Klein addressed the Occupy Wall Street camp in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan last week, she echoed in a rhetorical question what many have asked of Ireland’s passivity in the face of the recent economic crisis. The baffled TV pundits ask why they are protesting, she said. “Meanwhile, the rest of the world asks: ‘What took you so long?’”

Klein may use some sociological ideas and be liked by many sociologists, but I can’t find any evidence she has much of a background in sociology itself. Here is what the biography on her website says about her background:

Naomi Klein is a contributing editor for Harper’s and reporter for Rolling Stone, and writes a regular column for The Nation and The Guardian that is syndicated internationally by The New York Times Syndicate. In 2004, her reporting from Iraq for Harper’s won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. Additionally, her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Globe and Mail, El Pais, L’Espresso and The New Statesman, among many other publications.

She is a former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics and holds an honorary Doctor of Civil Laws from the University of King’s College, Nova Scotia.

In a 2009 interview, Klein says that she did not finish her undergraduate studies in philosophy and literature at the University of Toronto before beginning her journalism career:

LAMB: Did you get a degree from…

KLEIN: Then I went to the University of Toronto.

LAMB: And your degree is in what?

KLEIN: I studied philosophy and literature, but I actually left when I got offered this job at the Globe and Mail. It was an election – I went as a summer intern, and I had a couple of credits left. And then there was an election campaign, pretty sort of hot election campaign, and they asked me to stay on. And I never actually made it back to school. So yes.

This reminds me of a plenary session I attended at the 2007 American Sociological Association meetings in New York City that featured Klein. The session on globalization featured Klein and well-known economist Jeffrey Sachs (along with two others). See video of this ASA session here (Klein starts speaking at about 46:52). Klein was, to put it mildly, well-received by the crowd of sociologists (applause from 1:20:42 to 1:21:12). On the other hand, Sachs sent in a video, which was probably a smart move on his part as he probably would have not been so warmly received. Here is an example of how the story was spun by those more favorable to Klein’s point of view:

One of the most highly anticipated sessions was to feature Jeffrey Sachs, an internationally known economist and a former special advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, versus Naomi Klein, the Canadian journalist and author. But shortly before the ASA conference opened, Sachs pulled out. Unclear if it was related to the fact that Naomi Klein takes him on in her forthcoming book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.”

How long until Klein wins the ASA’s “Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues Award“?

But, just to repeat, Klein is not a sociologist herself.

No sociological explanations for “the year of the sitcom”?

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A critic suggests we don’t need big sociological explanations to understand why television viewers have returned to sitcoms:

For the Chinese, this is the Year of the Rabbit; to the Jews, it’s 5772. And for journalists covering the TV business? That’s simple: It’s the Year of the Sitcom! Early coverage of the 2011–12 small screen season’s winners and losers has understandably focused on the fact that comedies such as New Girl, Suburgatory, and 2 Broke Girls seem to be doing far better than other kinds of programming this fall. This is what those of us who cover entertainment call a “trend,” and as such, we feel a profound professional responsibility to dig deep and search our souls for the answers: Why laughter? Why now? This will almost certainly result in a dramatic uptick in articles featuring sprawling sociological theories supported by quotes from ubiquitous TV historian Robert J. Thompson and all manner of Hollywood insiders: People want to laugh in a down economy! Comedies only take 30 minutes to watch, and we’re all too busy for dramas! We’ve found a funnier, totally new way to make comedies that’s unlike anything you’ve seen before! But no matter how intelligently the stories are written, or how wise the talking heads doing the explaining might be, the bottom line about TV’s alleged sitcom renaissance is much simpler. It’s just not nearly as interesting…

To understand what’s happening with comedies right now, consider how things often work in the movie business. After X-Men hit big in 2000, Hollywood decided to make Spider-Man and many, many more superhero movies. After audiences demonstrated a willingness to watch girls be gross in Bridesmaids, you could almost hear studio bosses shouting from their offices, “Get me the next Kristen Wiig!” TV is no different; it can just react to trends more quickly. And so, when ABC’s Modern Family rocketed on to TV in 2009, networks suddenly started feeling sitcoms might be worth the risk again, as co-creator Steve Levitan told Variety last summer. “My guess is that programmers see the success of a show like Modern Family and it gives them the impetus, the appetite to program more comedies,” he told the industry trade. This is why, post-MF, CBS decided to roll the dice and try half-hours on Thursdays; Fox chose to double down its efforts at finding live-action laughers by launching an hour-long post-Glee sitcom block; and this fall, new sitcom blocks have popped up on both Tuesdays (ABC) and Wednesdays (NBC). All told, that’s eight new half-hour slots for comedy to try to gain a foothold with viewers. Since TV types love talking in sports metaphors, put it this way: More at-bats generally result in more runners getting on base, and with a little luck, more runs scored. Likewise, while producing lots and lots of comedies is no guarantee of success (NBC once programmed a massive eighteen sitcoms one fall), you’re almost certainly going to up the odds of finding worthwhile new comedies by aggressively playing the game rather than sitting on the bench and hoping reality shows get you the win…

Bottom line? There may be no grand logic behind why sometimes we watch a lot of comedies and other times we waste our time on reality shows or obsess over the personal lives of melodramatic medical practitioners. And often it’s just a matter of finding the right balance of numbers of shows (a glut is a glut) and networks figuring out the best way to schedule them. So let’s all resist the urge to make up sociological or economic explanations for the sitcom’s resurgence. (Thereby freeing up Robert J. Thompson’s day: Hey, Bob, why don’t you and Paul Dergarabedian go whale watching? You deserve a break from all the quoting!) Yes, these are tough times, but they do not necessarily make people more eager to laugh: In boom times, do people come home and say, “I’ve been smiling all day and I’m tired of it: give me something dour to balance me out!” They do not. And viewers are not being lured back by new innovations in comedy: Sure, Zooey Deschanel is a unique personality, but Two and a Half Men remains top-rated, and that’s just The Odd Couple with more erection jokes. (Though who could forget the Odd Couple classic, “Felix gets his junk caught in his tie-clip case”?) As ever, trends are just another way of saying that success breeds imitation, whether it’s comedies, dramas, movies, or Angus hamburgers — available for a limited time only!

A few thoughts:

1. So the best explanation is that TV networks have simply put more sitcoms out there and several have caught on? This Moneyball-esque explanation (you are bound to have more hit shows if you simply put more out there!) could have some merit. Think about the music, movie, book publishing, and TV industries. The companies behind the products have little idea which particular products will prove successful and so they throw all sorts of options at the public. To have a successful year within each industry, only a few of these products have to have spectacular success. Essentially, these few popular ones can subsidize the rest of the industry. There is no magic formula for writing a successful sitcom, movie, book, or album so companies throw a lot of products at the wall and see what sticks.

2. A note: those people peddling “sprawling sociological theories” sound like they are not sociologists but rather “pop sociologists.” To really get at this issue, we would have to compare success of different genres over time to try to see if there is a relationship between genre and social circumstances at the time. Yes, I agree that people can be quick to find big explanations for new phenomena…and do so without consulting any data. Knee-jerk reactions are not too helpful.

3. At the same time, one might argue that the tastes of the public guided or at least prompted by some of these sociological factors. While there are no set formulas, won’t “good shows” win out? Not in all circumstances – think of the “critical darlings” versus those that end up being popular. Perhaps we need to ask a different question: how do shows become popular? What kind of marketing campaigns pull people in and how does effective “word of mouth” spread?

Award-winning sociological rapping about Marxism and feminism

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Teachers are often looking for new ways to present material so that students will learn the material better. How about this technique: sociology teachers rapping about Marxism and feminism:

TWO teachers have won £60,000 for inventing rhymes to help pupils learn about weighty issues such as Marxism and feminism.

Claire Corrigan and Salim Rahman got students at Oldham Sixth Form College to rap alternative words to songs by stars including Dolly Parton and Shania Twain.

The sociology teachers landed the windfall in a national contest after producing an eight-minute video featuring their tunes…

One song explains Marx’s thoughts with the lines: “Capitalism is a system that keeps you subdued/ Using education as a tool that keeps you fooled/ Making you docile is the ultimate aim/Keeping you obedient for the employment game.”…

Claire added: “We used rap to talk about Marxism because it was associated with working class and the struggle against authority. For another idea, like functionalism, which is quite conservative and middle-class, we set it to the tune of The Snowman, which is quite formal.”

Does this make Marxism sound cooler than functionalism? It sounds like it was set up that way…

I would be interested to see if there was any formal assessment in these classes that showed that these raps improved student performance. When it came down to tests or projects, were these songs helpful for students?

This is a news story that simply requires a link to the original video.