Author Archives: legallysociable

The limits of GPS in the West

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Technology can be a good thing but it can also lead people astray. Hence, a warning out West regarding using GPS in certain areas:

Travelers in the western U.S. should not rely solely on technology such as GPS for navigation, authorities said, after a Canadian couple were lost in the Nevada wilderness for 48 days.

Albert Chretien, 59, and his wife Rita Chretien, 56, sought a shorter route between Boise, Idaho and Jackpot, Nevada during a road trip from British Columbia to Las Vegas…

Sheriff’s offices in remote, high-elevation parts of Idaho, Nevada and Wyoming report the past two years have brought a rise in the number of GPS-guided travelers driving off marked and paved highways and into trouble.

The spike has prompted Death Valley National Park in California to caution on its web site that “GPS navigation to sites to remote locations like Death Valley are notoriously unreliable.”

When two roads diverge in Western lands, take the one more traveled, authorities said.

Perhaps this could be read as a warning about over-reliance on technology: it is not infallible.You can occasionally find stories of people driving into retention ponds or crashing into things because the GPS told them to turn. At the same time, how bad are these GPS maps that people can get lost so easily? This would seem to be bad news for GPS makers if they don’t cover certain areas very well. Could a GPS maker ever have any liability for any of these unpleasant occurrences? Additionally, I wonder how many GPS owners also carry around a map of some kind in their vehicle or on their person.

More broadly, this is a reminder that one doesn’t have to travel very far to leave the comforts of the modern world and get lost in nature.

Witold Rybczynski on McMansions, American housing, suburbs

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With the continued housing slump (and a story going around that the $8,000 homebuyer credit of recent years only masked the issues of the housing market), a number of commentators have shared their thoughts about the future of housing in America. Witold Rybczynski weighs in with his prediction for the near future in a piece with the headline of “McMansions dead at last?“:

Owning single-family houses represents a long-established tradition that the U.S. shares with many countries (Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway), but 10 years is long enough for traditions and behavior to change. It is likely that in the future multifamily housing will represent a larger share of the American housing market than the one-in-five new dwellings that has been the historic norm.

What about single-family houses, which will still remain for many people the home of choice? There is some evidence that urban townhomes and infill housing are more popular, as rising gas prices increase the cost of commuting. Higher energy costs also affect heating and air conditioning, which may have the effect of discouraging homebuyers from purchasing large houses with soaring entryways and expansive family rooms. While the evidence is fragmentary—the current reduction in average new house sizes has more to do with the preponderance of first-time buyers than an overall shift in demand—it is clear that the long recessionary cold-shower will dampen the exuberance that characterized the boom years of 2000 to 2005. That will mean smaller houses closer together on smaller lots in inner suburbs, fewer McMansions, and fewer planned communities in the distant hinterland. An alternative scenario is that American optimism will prevail and it will be business as usual, as happened during the boom of the 1950s following the Great Depression, or during the period following the Energy Crisis of 1973, when car buyers, after a brief flirtation with Japanese compact cars, embraced minivans and SUVs. But I wouldn’t count on it.

It sounds like Rybczynski thinks the American housing market will be denser and smaller in the future as a reaction to the last few years. He also makes the point that one big issue plaguing the housing market is more demographic in nature: household formation has slowed down as more people are living with other people rather than starting their own households that require a separate home.

Two other things also seem noteworthy:

1. Rybczynski suggests the reduction in home size is more due to having more first-time buyers than anything else. What about downsizers, particularly Baby Boomers who are retiring or whose children have left the house, that others have talked about?

2. Rybczynski also suggests that we will have fewer planned communities. I assume he is referring to larger planned communities/suburbs that simply may not be possible with low housing demand. But what about a possible uptick in smaller planned developments done by New Urbanists and others who can offer a denser form of suburbia?

Perhaps the fun part about reading pieces like this now is that we likely have years before we can really assess whether something has changed. In the meantime, we can wonder how low home values might go.

Architect discusses Bin Laden’s McMansion

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I’ve continued to track the meme of Bin Laden’s Abbottabad house being a McMansion and a new mentions trickle in each day. Here is an explanation of the Bin Laden-McMansion connection from an architect at Architect magazine:

It may be unfair to tar your typical New Jersey Neo-Colonial with the brush of a Pakistani compound, especially since Bin Laden’s crib seemed to be home to a multigeneration community of interest and family. It made better use of sprawling space than most nuclear family–inhabited American homes, and I hate to say that it looks from the photographs to be more honestly modern than most of our fake palazzos and palaces.

The bin Laden compound was also not like a true McMansion because it was not about flash. There were no fancy cars in evidence, no landscaping that was put in place every spring and ripped up again in the winter, no garish colors. There was, for heaven’s sake, not even an Internet connection–how did they play games? How did they get onto Groupon?

We have made Osama Bin Laden everything we are afraid of. It is fitting that evil turns out not to lurk in caves, which would be so last millennium, or live in a tent, which would be so the millennium before that. It lives in the suburbs. It turns out that our fear of cities and our distaste of others was something he shared while fostering the paranoia that we might be in danger if we leave our cocoon through his and his cohorts’ murderous programs. So we, or at least the government that many of us do not want to pay for, swooped in, surgically extracting the emblem of that fear. I note that, unlike in so many other operations against our enemies, we left the McMansion standing.

A few things stick out:

1. There are a number of jabs here at McMansions. So we don’t like Bin Laden and we don’t like McMansions – why not put the two together? Seriously, the argument here is that McMansions are emblematic of sprawl, have poor architecture/design, are full of tacky people (who use Groupon! and have garish landscaping!), and they are all about flash.

2. There is another story referred to here: Bin Laden was found in the suburbs, the last place Americans would expect and one that goes against all our fears of people who live in caves or cities. I’ve already written about this and still find it a bit strange to claim that Bin Laden was living a suburban lifestyle in a suburban home when this particular community seems somewhat unique as a miltary community.

3. Additionally, it is claimed that Bin Laden, like Americans, was afraid of cities and others, hence, the need to live in a compound/McMansion in a suburb. Americans do have quite an anti-urban bias and occasional fear of others. There is likely some truth to this but I wonder how the average American might respond to being equated to Bin Laden.

4. Is it safe to presume that the last sentence indicates that the author would have preferred that this particular raid have destroyed the Bin Laden McMansion? If so, is it more because it was home to Bin Laden or because it is a McMansion?

Overall, this a good piece for illustrating the common critiques of McMansions.

Just how many McMansions have actually collapsed like Trump’s polling figures?

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One common critique of the McMansion is that they are poorly built. The story continues that because they are mass-produced, the materials are bottom of the line so builders don’t have to do anything more than necessary  in the search for big profits. This idea was found in a recent story about the decline of Donald Trump’s polling figures:

Public Policy Polling finds Donald Trump’s numbers collapsing like a poorly-built McMansion.

Might some people find this phrase redundant and ask whether McMansions are poorly-built by definition?

Perhaps I am being too literal here but this gets me thinking about how many McMansions have actually collapsed. I would guess that not too many have collapsed on their own so perhaps the more appropriate figures to search for would measure how many McMansions needed major renovations or fixes and then how this data compares to other kinds of homes. Would HGTV, the network always on the search for homes that need help, be a good source for figures? This is probably not the kind of data builders would want to keep and it would be difficult to collate the information from millions of individual homeowners.

And what would be a better metaphor for the collapse of Donald Trump’s polling numbers?

Indicators of suburban poverty at food banks

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Amidst recent news and research that more poor residents are moving to and living in the suburbs compared to previous decades and the typical image of wealthy suburban communities, use of suburban food banks may also be an indicator of these trends:

Vicki Escarra, president and CEO of Feeding America, the nation’s largest hunger-relief charity with a network of more than 200 food bank partners, says there is a growing problem with suburban poverty, “where new clients are individuals who have never needed to rely on the charitable food system.”…

At the end of the economic boom in 2007, 13 million people or about 11% of all households were considered “food insecure,” the official term used by the government to define one’s inability to access an adequate amount of nutritious food at times during the year.

“Not everyone who is food insecure is literally going hungry,” says Mark Nord, sociologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. “Some are able to head off hunger by reducing the quality and variety of their diets. But if food insecurity is severe or prolonged, it is likely to result in hunger.”…

With that has come the increase in need among groups that were historically less vulnerable to hunger, according to the USDA’s Household Food Security in the United States annual report.

It would be interesting to see more specific data about the claims this article is trying to make: just how prevalent are hunger, food insecurity, and food stamps in the suburbs versus other areas? Without this data, this article is more about hunger in America and the already widely-reported statistic about food stamp usage. Ultimately, the article is just able to hint a possibly interesting story that would shed light on the changing nature of American suburbs.

Of course, one could go look at the USDA report cited in the article. With a quick search for the word “suburb,” here is what turns up in the 2 mentions:

Food insecurity was more common in large cities than in rural areas and in suburbs and other outlying areas around large cities. (p.6)

Across the metropolitan area classifications, the prevalence of food insecurity was higher for households located in principal cities of metropolitan areas (17.2 percent), than for those in nonmetropolitan areas (14.2 percent), and in suburbs and other metropolitan areas outside principal cities (13.2 percent).  Regionally, the prevalence of food insecurity was highest in the South (15.9 percent) and West (15.5 percent), intermediate in the Midwest (13.9 percent), and lowest in the Northeast (12.2 percent). (p.17)

Here are the figures about food pantry use:

Use of food pantries was higher in principal cities of metropolitan areas (5.0 percent) and in nonmetropolitan areas (5.9 percent) than in metropolitan areas outside of central cities (3.9 percent). The percentage of households that used food pantries was higher in the Midwest and West than in the  Northeast and South. (p.43)

It would be helpful to have comparisons to past data to see whether these figure for the suburbs has risen over the years. And while the percentages are lower for the suburbs, since more Americans live in the suburbs, there are probably larger absolute numbers of people dealing with food insecurity in the suburbs. (Quick calculations with a rough population estimate of 300 million: since at least 50% of Americans live in suburbs vs. 30% in cities, the food insecurity figures would translate into roughly 15.5 million in the cities and 19.8 million in the suburbs).

Studying the declining use of nicknames in sports

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Nicknames for professional athletes are on the decline – and there are academics to prove it:

But most famous athletes are now best known by their given name. The Yankees won generations of championships with men known as Babe, Iron Horse, Joltin’ Joe, Scooter, Yogi, Catfish and Mr. October. More recently, they won with players named Derek, Mariano and Andy. Alex Rodriguez — A-Rod — has what passes for a nickname these days.

The sociologist James Skipper, author of “Baseball Nicknames: A Dictionary of Origins and Meanings,” found that the use of nicknames peaked before 1920. It has since been in steady decline, dropping quickly in the 1950s.

Using a baseball encyclopedia listing all major league players from 1871 to 1968, Skipper found that 28.1 percent of players had nicknames not derived from their given names. (Lefty, Red and Doc were most popular.) No doubt the percentage has since dipped precipitously.

“The era of the colorful nickname may be over,” Skipper concluded about 30 years ago…

“Their own names now act as brand names,” said Frank Neussel, editor of Names: A Journal of Onomastics, and a University of Louisville professor of modern language and linguistics. “Your identity is not your nickname. It’s your stats.”

I’ve always heard old-timers talk about this downturn in sports nicknames and I have found it difficult to understand what the big fuss is about.

Based on what is said here, here is one possible sociological explanation for this trend: athlete’s names have become McDonaldized in the interest of efficiency and marketing. Single given names, like Shaq or Tiger, seem to be best. More whimsical nicknames might detract from what really is important now: endorsements and championships (which also happen to lead to more endorsements).

Perhaps the litmus test for the average sports fan today is what they think of Chris Berman’s insistence on using crazy nicknames. Since I tend to find him bearable, perhaps this indicates I’m not ready just yet to give up on the more joyful side of sports.

And what do the athletes themselves think of this shift?

Durkheim discussed “suicide viruses”?

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I was reading a recent edition of Newsweek at the gym and ran across a story about a Russian model who committed suicide. Toward the end of the article, the writer tries to explain higher suicide rates in Russia and invokes Emile Durkheim:

Young women from the former Soviet bloc are particularly fragile. Six of the top seven countries worldwide for suicide rates among young females are former Soviet republics: Russia is sixth in the list, Kazakhstan second. The sociologist Emile Durkheim argued that suicide viruses occur at civilizational breaks, when the parents have no traditions, no value systems to pass on to their children. Thus there is no deep-lying ideology to support them when they are under emotional stress. Ruslana’s and Anastasia’s parents were brought up in the Soviet Union; their children lived in a completely different world.

I find this idea of  “suicide viruses” to be somewhat strange as it makes suicide sound like a contagion or a disease. Durkheim himself suggested in Suicide that suicides were the result of anomie, the idea that individuals in a society need to be integrated into the surrounding or they may feel disconnected and take drastic action. Imitation was not much of a social cause (see this summary here); rather, suicides are driven by a normlessness that one can experience if not properly integrated into society.

I think this paragraph referring to Durkheim could be better executed by talking about how young women in these former Soviet Republics have a difficult time finding their place in society. In this particular story, it sounds like the model was destabilized by this particular group/cult and didn’t know where to turn. The socialization process between parents and children might play a role in this but there could be other factors as well. The suggestion in the story is that parents have little ideology to pass on to their children and this is more of a society-wide concern than simply the responsibility of individual families.

Federal government looking into redlining practices

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During the economic crisis of recent years, mortgages have been more difficult to obtain for many compared to what was available in the mid 2000s. With these tighter lending practices, the US government is looking deeper into possible redlining practices by lenders:

At the Justice Dept., a new 20-person unit dedicated to fair lending issues received a record number of discrimination referrals from regulators in 2010 and has dozens of open cases, according to a recent agency report. Potential penalties can reach into the millions of dollars. “We are using every tool in our arsenal to combat lending discrimination,” Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Div., told a conference of community development advocates in Washington in April.

To some banks the crackdown has come as a surprise, say consultants and lawyers representing financial institutions in discussions with regulators. Like Midwest BankCentre, some lenders are being cited for failing to operate in minority and low-income census tracts near their branches, even when they have never done business there before. “If you put your branches only in upper-income areas, the regulators are not accepting that anymore,” says Warren W. Traiger, a lawyer at BuckleySandler in New York, which advises banks on fair lending issues.

Mortgage refinancing activity doubled in white neighborhoods but dropped sharply in minority neighborhoods in a sample of major U.S. cities in 2008 and 2009, according to Paying More for the American Dream, an April study by a group of seven community development nonprofits. “The pendulum has swung back too far the other way,” says Kevin Stein, associate director of the California Reinvestment Coalition in San Francisco, one of the report’s authors.

Several things strike me as interesting about this:

1. As the article notes, this oversight goes back to the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). I wonder how the HMDA data, data lenders must report every time someone applies for a mortgage (including factors like race), has been a part of these government efforts. With this data, regulators (and others) can get an idea of who lenders approve for loans and who they do not.

2. The Drudge Report headline about this article,  “Obama admin pushing banks to offer subprimes again…,” seems somewhat misleading. There is little to indicate in this article that the government is telling lenders they should make subprime loans. Rather, it sounds like the government is suggesting that lenders need to make their products available to all people. One adaptation to this in order to account for worse credit scores or other factors might be for the lenders to offer subprime loans in order to protect some of their investment. But there is little indication the government is saying that lenders have to offer subprime loans.

3. Access to credit really is an important issue. If it is not widely available or limited to certain groups, the purchasing power of consumers for goods like houses or cars can be severely limited. And this can then have a large impact on the greater economy.

The important step taken toward American interstates on May 7, 1930

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I am a few days behind in celebrating anniversaries in American transportation history but this post from The Infrastructurist highlights an important highway commission that was founded on May 7, 1930:

This past Saturday marked a little-known anniversary in the long-running contest between American highway and train establishments. On May 7, 1930, the U.S. Senate passed legislation to form the United States Motorways Commission, a twelve-person group — two Senators, two Congressmen, and eight presidential appointees — whose job was to consider a proposal for a national road network strikingly similar to the Interstate Highway System that emerged decades later.

The concept of a truly national road system was, at this point in American history, truly novel. The particular idea to be considered by the motorways commission sprang from the mercurial mind of an engineer named Lester Barlow. The Union Highway, as Barlow first called his system, would be a four-track expressway stretching from Boston to San Francisco. It would have fast lanes and slow lanes, access ramps to eliminate grade crossings, a partition between traffic flows to prevent U-turns, special sections devoted to gas stations and food stands — in short, all the definitive markers of expressways as we know them…

All seemed to be going well after the Senate voted to create the motorways commission on May 7, 1930. Then suddenly the legislation ran into problems. The House of Representatives trapped its version of the bill in a committee, and New York lawmakers did the same. Attempts to revive the plan in subsequent sessions, both federal and local, failed again and again, until the idea faded away.

Tilson later revealed to Barlow the real reason for legislative inaction on the proposal for a national highway system: it had been blocked by the mighty railroad lobby, which feared the loss of passengers and freight to road travel. This reason was confirmed to Barlow at a gathering of New Haven Railroad officials in the fall of 1930. As Barlow later recalled, John J. Pelley, then president of the New Haven, told those in attendance that a poor highway system was in the railroad’s best interest, and that it should do whatever it “practically” could to prevent the development of expressways in America.

This is an important story as it sounds like this commission laid the framework for the Federal Interstate system that began in the mid 1950s. As sociologists, historians, and others would tell you, this Federal shift toward highway construction had a profound impact on suburban development after World War II.

It would be interesting to hear more about the gap between this commission and the Federal Interstate Act of 1956. Of course, there was a Depression and a massive war. But during this time period, a number of government agencies started planning and building roads. The Pennsylvania Turnpike was built in this gap and the states of Ohio and Indiana started constructing connections to this Turnpike. In the Chicago region, a number of highways were under construction by the mid 1950s as the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago recognized the need for such roads. Beyond historical circumstances, was it primarily the railroad lobby that held up Federal support of interstate construction prior to 1956? If so, what was the state of the railroad industry in 1956 and was the Federal government actually behind the times in funding the Interstate system?

The conservative musical selections at Chicago Bulls games

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While I think this Chicago Tribune piece about the DJs at Chicago Bulls games was supposed to provide a behind-the-scenes look at how musical selections are made, the real crux of the story seems to be that the music selections are quite conservative:

Every Bulls game at the United Center has its own soundtrack. Just as each game is different, roller coasters of emotions and shifting fortunes, the music and sound effects roll with the changes. A team of about 20 technicians plays DJ each night at the United Center, accenting the ebbs and surges on the floor.

The head DJ is Jeff Wohlschlaeger, the Bulls’ senior director of game operations, who sits courtside and communicates on a headset to music and scoreboard operators to wed sounds and game action. There are cavalry-charge bugle calls and countless ways of imploring “De-Fense,” but there are also more than 1,000 songs and song snippets available to enhance every movement and mood…

When the home team has the ball, just about anything goes. Nothing is explicitly banned, but all teams know they’re programming for a family-friendly event, so songs deemed the least bit salacious or provocative won’t be tolerated, the NBA says. Teams that bend the rules often end up paying for it. The NBA’s “Game Operations” department monitors every game; one source in the office said that at least two NBA franchises were fined in the last month for inappropriate sound and video while the visiting team was on offense.

The Bulls don’t push the envelope by design, Wohlschlaeger says. The music selections are “conservative,” reflecting a mix of classic rock and contemporary pop hits that is determined by audience surveys. During Game 2 of the Hawks series, songs leading out of timeouts designed to get the crowd pumped included the Beastie Boys’ “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!),” AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck,” John Mellencamp’s “Authority Song” and Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels’ “Devil With a Blue Dress On.”…

Mostly, it’s about what the paying customers want, Wohlschlaeger says, “tried and true stuff that you or I would never listen to in a car, but that gets a positive reaction from the fans.”

On one hand, the article suggests that the DJs have a lot of music and sound effects at their disposal and try to respond to the action on the floor. On the other hand, it sounds clear that the actual music/effects played is quite limited in order to please the NBA and the fans. I can’t quite say why I find this depressing: it still sounds like an intriguing job but at the same time, much of it sounds scripted. For example, the article mentions the playing of U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” which every Bulls fan who has watched a game this year or in recent years knows is played during a timeout with about 4-6 minutes left in the game. So all of this is simply canned, fan-friendly entertainment?

I wonder if there are any pro sports teams who are known for pushing the envelope a bit more in their musical selections. Does everyone play the same stuff that the DJs “would never listen to in a car” but they think is safe for fans? Having attended a number of San Francisco Giants games over the last 10 years or so, I know they play a lot more salsa music, fitting in with the atmosphere of the Bay Area. Some baseball stadiums have music for individual home team players when they come up to the plate. There may not be the same opportunities for other sports though perhaps music could be introduced in situations when they make a reception or step up to the free throw line or at other points.

Of course, perhaps this is just good business: don’t alienate your fan base that can afford to go to NBA basketball games. Change up the music too much or make it too edgy