Author Archives: legallysociable

Americans want smaller homes but are still looking online at big ones

Posted on by

There have been several indicators in recent months that Americans are interested in smaller homes. But what if they say they would purchase smaller homes but are still looking at bigger homes? An economist for Trulia.com discusses this:

We asked people to tell us their ideal home size. They’re shunning super-sized homes, the McMansions. Only 6 percent of Americans say their ideal home size is more than 3,200 square feet. Thirty-two percent said they see the ideal home at 1,401 to 2,000 square feet. About 27 percent said 2,001 to 2,600 square feet.

This is partly due to the economic troubles of the recession and recovery. But this could be part of a permanent shift toward smaller homes. And it could reflect baby boomers wanting to downsize and increasing environmental awareness, with some people wanting a smaller environmental footprint.

On the other hand, when we look at the homes that people view on our site — even though only 6 percent of the people in our survey said the McMansion size range was ideal — 27 percent of the property views people are looking at are of that size. So even though people aren’t saying those large homes are their ideal size, they want to see what these homes look like and want to dream big.

This disconnect could be explained in several different ways:

1. Americans look at bigger houses online because it is free. These days, one can look at hundreds of homes and get a good idea what is on the market. Perhaps we would need to ask realtors about what sized homes people actually ask to see.

2. Americans actually do want to buy bigger homes but they know the economic realities and perhaps even the cultural shift and so say they would want a smaller home. As the economist suggests, Americans simply like to dream big. This certainly wouldn’t be the first time that self-reported actions and aspirations don’t match up. If the economy picked up, we could then figure out whether the shift toward smaller homes is real or was a reaction to the economic crisis.

3. Americans want to look at bigger homes because they want the features of the bigger homes in a smaller home.

Time will help us figure out which of these interpretations is most accurate as would more data.

You can read Trulia.com’s press release concerning the survey here and a more  interpretation here. The web survey involved some weighting:

Figures for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, region and household income were weighted where necessary to bring them into line with their actual proportions in the population. Propensity score weighting was used to adjust for respondents’ propensity to be online. These online surveys are not based on a probability sample and therefore no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated. For complete survey methodologies, including weighting variables, click here.

“Not based on a probability sample” is usually a problem for surveys, even if proper weights are assigned to results. I would like to see some more thorough survey data on some of these issues.

The civil rights argument against NCAA Division I football and men’s basketball

Posted on by

The cover story of the latest Atlantic, “The Shame of College Sports,” is provocative and fascinating. The article is mainly about a series of court cases involving the civil rights of “student-athletes” and procuring a share of the NCAA’s football and men’s basketball profits for these “student-athletes.” After reading the full argument, it is difficult to feel much goodwill toward the NCAA.

Facebook moving toward users being able to “treat their life as a 24/7 reality show”

Posted on by

Wired looks at some of Facebook’s recent changes and future plans and summarizes their intentions:

Combined with other Facebook recent announcements — “friend lists” that help you classify your contacts into groups, a Ticker that gives updates from your cohorts as they happen,  and changes in the newsfeed to make it more reflective of what your close friends are doing — Facebook is not so subtly doubling down on its ambitions to enable people to shed the pre-digital cloak of isolation and treat their life as a 24/7 reality show, broadcast to those in their social spheres.

Remember when Time named “you” as the person of the year for 2006, before Facebook had swept across the planet? Here is how the story described the effect of the Internet:

It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

This is a more hopeful vision than what Wired offers where individuals can produce and star in their own reality show.

The fulcrum on which Facebook’s future might hinge is whether it is able to help people forge new connections  or whether people continue to hunker down in their existing social groups. The desire that Facebook users would forge new connections is not surprising if you have read sources like The Facebook Effect that highlighted the company’s goals of opening up the world. While research studies still suggest that the majority of Facebook contact and relationships exist between people who already know each other prior to Facebook, perhaps this will change due to Facebook’s interface changes as well as the growing cultural acceptance of conducting our social lives through this online realm. Or perhaps we are destined to live in a world where our highest goal is to become individual celebrities.

Assembling your own furniture benefits you through “the Ikea effect”

Posted on by

Ikea may be able to have lower prices because consumers have to put together their own furniture but there could be another benefit as well for consumers: they will value their assembled purchased product more.

“When labor leads to love,” a paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology experimentally tests “the Ikea effect” that leads to people valuing things that they assemble, customize or build themselves more highly than premade, finished goods. We’ve all heard the story of how cake-mixes didn’t sell until they were reformulated to require the “cook” to stir in a fresh egg, but most of what we know about this effect is marketing lore, not research. It’s fascinating stuff.

The abstract of the paper:

In four studies in which consumers assembled IKEA boxes, folded origami, and built sets of Legos, we demonstrate and investigate boundary conditions for the IKEA effect—the increase in valuation of self-made products. Participants saw their amateurish creations as similar in value to experts’ creations, and expected others to share their opinions. We show that labor leads to love only when labor results in successful completion of tasks; when participants built and then destroyed their creations, or failed to complete them, the IKEA effect dissipated. Finally, we show that labor increases valuation for both “do-it-yourselfers” and novices.

I suspected there may not be much positive effect when the consumer can’t assemble their purchase.

While this is interesting in itself, it leads me to another question: were companies like Ikea and others aware of this effect and therefore required assembly for more items so that consumers would have more positive feelings for certain products?

Poor in the suburbs: a growing plurality in the United States

Posted on by

After a headline earlier this week about a “suburban depression,” more data shows the suburbs contain a growing plurality of the poor in the United States:

Significantly, the 2000s also marked a turning point in the geography of American poverty. The 2010 data confirm that poor populations continued their decade-long shift toward suburban areas. From 2000 to 2010, the number of poor people in major-metro suburbs grew 53 percent (5.3 million people), compared to 23 percent in cities (2.4 million people). By 2010, suburbs were home to one-third of the nation’s poor population—outranking cities (27.5 percent), small metro areas (20.5 percent), and non-metropolitan communities (18.7 percent)…

The magnitude and pace of growth in the suburban poor population over the past decade caught many communities unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with the growing need. In many suburbs, the safety net is patchy and stretched thin to begin with. The suburban social services infrastructure is not as developed or robust as in urban centers with a longer track record of addressing the challenges of poverty, nor is it as funded. And as governments continue to tighten their belts and philanthropic resources dwindle, safety net service providers are increasingly asked to do much more with significantly less.

There is also an interesting map showing the differing rates of growth in the suburban poor population across major metropolitan regions in the United States.

What’s the long-term solution to this? From what politicians seem to be suggesting, middle-class suburbanites need help keeping/buying a home, middle-class tax breaks, and good jobs. How exactly can the typical suburban communities provide services in this era of economic crisis? I wonder how much politicians and suburban communities are willing to truly deal with this or whether the ones that can afford to (or think they will afford to) will act like the issue doesn’t really exist and can’t be allowed to threaten the image of prosperous suburbs.

Sociologists join the Census Bureau Scientific Advisory Committee

Posted on by

While sociologists may not be terribly influential on the whole within the American government, there is at least one area where they are quite involved: the Census Bureau (see an earlier story here).

U.S. Census Bureau Director Robert Groves has named 10 new members and a chairwoman to the Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee, which provides advice on the design and implementation of Census Bureau programs.

In addition to the director being a sociologist, of the 11 new members (out of 20 total), 5 are sociologists, 3 are statisticians, and the other three have different backgrounds.

When the Bureau director has not been a sociologist, does this mean the Census Bureau and this particular committee had fewer sociologists involved?

Are there any other posts within the government that sociologists hold and then also have the ability to appoint other sociologists to certain positions?

How the recession is affecting American society

Posted on by

USA Today looks at “the sociology of recession” – how the economic crisis is changing some key features of American society. A quick overview: Americans are getting married later, the birth rate for 20 to 34 year olds has dropped, the divorce rate has dropped, more Americans are now living with relatives, the home vacancy rate is up, driving alone more, and fewer children are attending private schools.

This article suggests these features could become “the new normal,” particularly for younger generations who are facing more uncertain futures, but I’m not so sure. If the economy turns around, which of these would continue to decline and which ones would reverse direction? I suspect the marriage age and birth rate would still decline – these are longer term trends in the United States that also mirror patterns in other industrialized nations. The divorce rate was declining prior to the economic recession, at least according to the 2011 Statistical Abstract (see Table 1335), so perhaps this would continue. The last four I suspect would change course with a better economy.

“Zoning bigots” holding Americans back from how they really want to live?

Posted on by

It is not too often that one sees opinion pieces about the current state of zoning in America. But here is some provocative commentary (“zoning bigots”?) based on zoning in the Los Angeles area:

You could make a decent case that the campaign to harass and remove property owners is no less bigoted than Mayor Mahool’s quarantine proposal. Although blacks, whites, and Latinos have all been targeted for nuisance abatement raids, these folks share one characteristic: They don’t meet the standards of respectability set by the political class and large urban landowners. In some cases the county’s lifestyle demands shade into bias on religious grounds. Oscar Castaneda, a mechanic and Seventh Day Adventist minister who was ordered to tear down his entire property, lives in the high desert because his faith impels him to a rural, self-sufficient life.

Los Angeles zoning practice is bigoted in other ways that are often overt. A city (not county) ordinance preventing residents from keeping more than one rooster on a property is clearly aimed at Latino homeowners. A maze of restrictions on convenience stores and fast food joints applies in South L.A. but not in tonier areas. During the jihad against “McMansions” a few years ago, the popular term for large properties was “Persian Palaces”—a swipe at L.A.’s Iranian-American community.

“There’s definitely an attempt to squeeze out of Angelenos the very things that make them Angelenos and not New Yorkers or Bostonians,” says Chapman University urban theorist Joel Kotkin. “There are two forces at work: One is the effort to re-engineer people into wards of the state. The other is urban land interests who want to force people to live in ways they don’t want to live.”

Or to live somewhere else. Many of the Antelope Valley homeowners we spoke with for a recent reason.tv report have given up the struggle and are planning to leave California. What Antonovich (who refused requests for an interview) has in mind for their vacated properties is not clear. Educated guesses include a plan for massive wind-power generation and a scheme to turn the half-horse town of Palmdale into a high-density, smart-growth hub for the California high-speed rail project. If you know Palmdale you know that the notion of turning it into a hipster paradise would be funny—except that this pipe dream is destroying the lives of real people. They’re just not the right sort of people.

A few thoughts while trying to sort out this argument:

1. Good point: zoning can be a tool used by the powerful (politicians, those with money, etc.) to control development. The political economy model in urban sociology is based on this idea: the elite are able to push development that helps make them money.

2. Odd point: this argument about “bigoted zoning” is somewhat different from a more common argument about “exclusionary zoning.” This argument is predicated on the idea that zoning takes away the rights of all individuals, regardless of race/ethnicity or social class. It is simply a tool of the upper classes, interestingly, a Marxist type argument. Exclusionary zoning, the subject of a number of court cases, argues that zoning takes place to exclude certain groups of people, typically minorities and the lower class from suburbs. So all individuals who are not the upper class are being discriminated against in this Marxist/populist argument?

3. Somewhat intriguing argument: these zoning guidelines limit people from doing what they really want to do, like buy McMansions and raise chickens. In this line of thinking, Americans all want the suburban lifestyle where their home is their castle and they have a little bit of land to play around with. The government is a bogeyman, trying to force people into denser developments (like nice New Urbanist developments or high-rises downtown?) and generally trying to squelch suburban life.

This argument misses some of why the suburbs even exist in the United States today. On one hand, there is some cultural impetus to this all: from the beginning, Americans have had debates about urban vs. rural life, the Thomas Jefferson’s who wanted “gentlemen farmers” versus the Alexander Hamilton’s who wanted to live in thriving cities. Americans like open space and retained the British emphasis on property rights. This cultural spirit is still with us today: we love cars and our big homes.

However, this was all made possible and encouraged by some other factors. To start, developing technologies, from the railroad to the electric streetcar to the automobile, opened up areas for development. More importantly, developers and businessmen saw these transportation lines and the adjacent land as opportunities so they sold homes and land to make money. Then, particularly between the 1930s and 1960s, the government made a concerted push to promote the suburban lifestyle, privileging highway construction and longer-term mortgages that helped make the suburban dream possible. Without this profit seeking and government support, would the suburbs have still happened? Perhaps. But not likely to the scale we know now.

To argue now that generally government is opposed to the suburban life is silly. Most of the policies, even during this time of economic crisis, have been about maintaining the suburban middle-class lifestyle: limiting their tax burden, helping them keep their homes, ensuring a quality education and a college degree, etc. Yes, this current administration has suggested some new ideas like high-speed rail but this isn’t a total assault on the suburbs. Indeed, it would be tough for any party right now to assault the suburbs too strongly: they probably can’t win without suburban voters, particularly independents.

4. Flip this around: what might happen if there is no zoning? Does this really empower individual land owners? Zoning helps ensure that certain uses are not next to other uses. For example, zoning for a suburban subdivision typically means that a single-family home will not end up next to a coal power plant. Or a school next to a sewage treatment plant. Yes, zoning can be draconian and it can be used by people in power but it can also be used well.

There are cities that have less or no zoning. Houston is a classic example in urban sociology and as one might suspect, its development patterns look a bit different than other major cities.

Is no zoning really the answer? While homeowners might not like some of the plans in the Los Angeles region, doesn’t it also protect them at other times? In a world with no zoning, wouldn’t the more powerful actors almost always win out over the average homeowner? How would homeowners protect themselves from other homeowners?

One way to retain zoning but turn it toward different ends would be for citizens to get themselves on zoning boards and then starting voting how they like. Zoning boards may not be flashy and it can be difficult to get on them, particularly in places where it is about political connections, but this would be the place to start fighting back if one was inclined to do so.

Sociologist suggests celebrity chefs can help limit food waste by promoting uses for leftovers

Posted on by

It is common to find food waste demonstrations in college cafeterias where students fill large receptacles with their leftover food. A sociologist argues that people need better models for how to use leftover food to limit food waste:

Sociologist Dr David Evans, from The Sustainable Consumption Institute at the University of Manchester, says the pressure to cook meals from scratch using fresh ingredients while enjoying a variety of dishes throughout the week can actually lead to waste.

His qualitative study – in which he went into the homes of 19 Manchester households – helps explain why Britain throws away enough food each year to fill Wembley stadium ten times over…

Current levels of food waste, he argues, should be viewed as the fall-out of households negotiating the complex and contradictory demands of their day-to-day lives.

For example the pressure to cook and eat in the ways that celebrity chefs advise means that a lot of food is already at risk of getting thrown out.

He said: “A lot of so-called proper food is perishable and so needs to be eaten within a pretty narrow timeframe. Our erratic working hours and leisure schedules make it hard to keep on top of the food that we have in our fridges and cupboards…

People with influence – like celebrity chefs – he says, should acknowledge these issues and think about ways of making it socially acceptable or even desirable for us to eat the same meal several nights in a row or use frozen vegetables.

It sounds like this sociologist is suggesting that it is unfashionable and unreasonable right now for most consumers to eat all of the food that they have prepared.

1. I assume the fashionable aspect has to do with the image that food needs to be prepared fresh for every meal. This is what cooking shows typically demonstrate but it would be rare that home cooks could cook an exact amount at each meal. Could the Food Network really sell a show solely built around dressing up or using leftovers?

2. The second part of the argument is that life is too hectic for consumers to really eat all of their food. Couldn’t meal planning help here? (Or perhaps they need Ziploc bags to limit waste as an ad I just saw on TV suggested.)

Overall, this sociologist is arguing that we need a cultural shift regarding leftover food and the place to start is with important cultural figures/gatekeepers who can make it cool to not waste food. This is an interesting solution compared to the work of someone like Michael Pollan who suggests the answer to food issues lies more in rethinking our relationship to food and slowing down when we make and eat food.

Building intermodal facilities to relieve traffic congestion

Posted on by

After examining a new report that Chicago has some of the worst traffic bottlenecks in the country, the suggestion is made not to add lanes to the highways but rather to build more intermodal facilities:

“This is a roadway that has 1950s technology that we are using for 2011 traffic,” said Don Schaefer, executive vice president of the Mid-West Truckers Association. “Aside from a few locations on the Illinois Tollway, there are very few roadways in the Chicago area that are engineered to handle 2011 traffic volumes.”

Adding highway lanes is unlikely to produce the capacity necessary to ease congestion, experts said. A partial solution involves building more intermodal facilities where truck trailers are loaded onto flatbed train cars and transported long distance by rail, then transferred to trucks for the last segment of trips.

One such facility is the sprawling CenterPoint Intermodal Center near Joliet, on the site of the former Joliet Arsenal. But even there, truck traffic is a problem on Arsenal Road leading to Interstate Highway 55.

“The state is building a new interchange to relieve traffic, but today truck traffic trying to get off I-55 southbound is backed up on to the highway,” Schaefer said.

While adding lanes may seem like “common sense,” studies consistently show that this simply encourages more traffic. Think about places have kept adding lanes like downtown Atlanta (I-75 corridor in particular) or the Los Angeles region. Traffic is still an issue during peak times and those roads are already at six or more lanes in each direction.

Intermodal facilities are an intriguing solution. A few thoughts about these:

1. Do most Americans even know what they are? If not, they should as many of their consumer items are routed through these facilities.

2. Part of the reason this article caught my attention is that just last week I drove right by the Centerpoint Intermodal Center which is just east of I-55 and just south of the Des Plaines River. The area was an interesting one: the large facility itself is surrounded by a number of warehouses and distribution centers, including Wal-Mart. When driving a car through such places, I tend to feel out of place as everything is a little bigger: the buildings, the space, the trucks. And yes, the ramp to get on I-55 northbound at Arsenal Road had a long backup of trucks.

Here is some more information on the CenterPoint Facility that just opened in 2010:

The facility will be a central spot where train containers from California, Texas and the Pacific Rim will be delivered for pick-up by trucks moving goods to warehouses and distribution centers throughout the Midwest.

CenterPoint already has an international intermodal facility in nearby Elwood. Combined, the sites will be the country’s largest inland port. In an era of high fuel costs and declining numbers of cross-country truck drivers, the facility is expected to be a more efficient, environmentally-friendly mode of hauling.

A third CenterPoint facility also is planned for Crete.

The $2 billion Joliet development – located on 3,800 acres south of Laraway Road between Brandon and Patterson roads – is the largest construction project in Will County.  It has created about 1,000 construction jobs.

3. What would it take to build more of these? One obvious question is where to put them. This one near Joliet is just outside the Chicago region and there is not much around it: an oil refinery and the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery. Most importantly, there are not a lot of houses nearby. If you tried to build these closer to cities, I’m sure there would be NIMBY issues. Imagine if someone wanted to build a new one near the Circle Interchange in Chicago – residents would complain and the price of land would likely be prohibitive. There are some older facilities embedded in the Chicago region; for example, there is one in Chicago just south of Midway Airport between 65th and 73rd Streets. You can see Union Pacific’s Chicago region facilities here.

But these facilities are needed, particularly in the Chicago region with its radial railroad system and many at-grade crossings. In recent years, the goal has been to relieve some of the rail traffic closer to the city which was behind the fight over whether Canadian National should be allowed to purchase the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern beltline railroad that runs around the city and on which CN wanted to run more freight trains.