Author Archives: legallysociable

Quick Review: Waiting for Superman

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I recently watched the documentary Waiting for Superman, a film that received a lot of media attention after it was released late last year. It does try to take on an important on-going problem: how to improve American schools? This is an issue that one can hear average citizens, politicians, college professors and others discuss frequently. Here are my quick thoughts about this film’s take on the issue:

1. The framing of the issue in the opening and conclusion of the film is quite effective. Toward the beginning, we meet several students who want to go to the better schools (often a magnet or charter school) in their school districts. But since they are not alone and these schools are attractive to many families, the students have to go through a lottery. At the end, we see the results of the lottery. This is the question that is raised: should a child’s educational opportunities be left to chance in a lottery? Get into one of these elite schools and life will likely be good; not get in, and children can be doomed to terrible schools that are termed “drop-out factories.”

2. While the documentary hits on some possible reasons behind the problems of American schools (No Child Left Behind, bad neighborhoods, tracking), the main emphasis here is on two things:

2a. Teachers are a problem. The idea pushed by the documentary is that the bad teachers need to be replaced and unions resist this process. Michelle Rhee, the attention-getting superintendent of the Washington, D.C. schools is followed as she tries to make a deal with the union involving merit pay for the good teachers. Interestingly, we don’t really see evidence from districts where teachers are not as unionized – does this help improve student performance?

2b. Parents deserve choices in schools. This involves magnet or charter schools within districts plus other operations such as the Harlem Children’s Zone and KIPP schools.

2c. I wish they had put these two ideas together more: so how do teachers operate within these “better” school settings? How are teachers trained and encouraged within these settings? What exactly about these schools boosts student performance – is it just the teachers?

2d. I also wonder how all of this might be scalable. Later, the documentary talks about raising expectations for children and Bill Gates talks on-camera about having the right “culture” in the schools. How might this fit into the idea about American schools being more of a competition-based system versus a country like Finland that pursues more equal outcomes across the spectrum of students?

3. Even though most of the documentary is about inner-city schools, it also follows one “average” suburban girl and the suggestion is made that even suburban schools are not doing that well. This is backed up with data showing that American students are the most confident among a group of OECD nations but their scores are behind those of many nations. Additionally, it is suggested that these suburban schools are not preparing students well for college where a good number find that they need to take remedial courses. Since many Americans likely are influenced by school district performance as they look to move, what exactly is going on in these suburban schools that needs to be fixed? Outside of the exemplar schools held up in the movie (magnets or charters, KIPP, Harlem Children’s Zone), are there any good schools? Is the whole system so broken that no school can really succeed?

Overall, I was a little surprised by the message and who I have seen support it: improve the pool of teachers (and fight the unions!) and offer parents and communities more choices of schools that are more effective in providing educations. Considering what I often see blamed as the problems of schools, No Child Left Behind or funding disparities, this is a change of pace.

At the same time, I wonder about whether these two solutions are really the answer. Are they band-aids to the issue or would they really solve educational problems in America? I keep coming back to the idea of residential segregation, the concept describing how races and social classes live apart from each other. Life chances are better for people growing up in wealthier, more educated settings but of course, these people can buy their way into such settings and avoid others. Would school districts near me, say in Naperville, a suburb that takes great pride in its schools, really go for the idea of charter or magnet schools? Do they even really need them?

At the very least, this documentary raises some interesting issues and a different perspective on a problem for which many wish to find a solution.

(This film was well-received by critics: it is 89% fresh at RottenTomatoes, 99 fresh out of 112 total reviews.)

Acquire the bookstore chain to get the digital reading device

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With the recent bankruptcy of Borders (see some reaction here), who knows how long Barnes & Noble might be able to hold on (and the news wasn’t good last August). But at least one businessman thinks B&N would make for a worthwhile purchase:

Barnes & Noble is well-situated to get a piece of the action: the company claims that the Nook already accounts for one-quarter of the e-book market. (Amazon’s rival Kindle product accounts for over 70 percent, although neither company discloses actual sales figures.)

Candidly, the Nook’s success is important, because more competition in the space will help keep prices in check and spur innovation. Sony also has a credible market entrant with its Reader product.

Malone’s company Liberty Media offered $17 per share Thursday — or about $1 billion — for a 70 percent stake in Barnes & Noble, a 20 percent premium over the Thursday closing price. Investors greeted the news warmly, pushing Barnes & Noble shares up over 30 percent — yes that’s higher than Malone’s bid! — in midday market action Friday. As a result, Malone will likely have to sweeten his offer to at least $20 per share.

In a statement announcing the offer, Liberty described Barnes & Noble as being at the “forefront of the transition to digital.”

While there is a lot of talk about how all of this affects bookstores and reading, I would love to see more about what this might mean for all brick-and-mortar businesses. The saving grace for Barnes & Noble is this particular digital reader which is well-positioned in a burgeoning market. In the near future, the B&N stores might disappear even as corporate name goes on through this device.

More broadly, how many other companies are actually creating digital content or devices rather than simply putting a Facebook page together and slapping the Facebook logo on all of their commercials?

When you don’t like a teardown home, call it a McMansion

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A local official in the Philadelphia suburbs writes about a Lower Merion site where a notable older home was torn down and now a home home is being constructed. What is interesting here is how the official describes how preservationists are using the term “McMansion” as part of their criticism of the new house:

Those who criticize the Kestenbaum residence built in La Ronda’s place are trying to deflect blame for their own failure over many years. Their use of terms such as “McMansion,” “McMonstrosity,” and “cookie cutter” demonstrates ignorance of what Kestenbaum is actually building.

I have toured the construction site and can report that Kestenbaum is building a home befitting the historic traditions of craftsmanship and old-world elegance that are hallmarks of the Main Line estates of yesteryear. The home is made of hand-chiseled stone, with extensive masonry work and important architectural details throughout.

The home bears no resemblance to the cookie-cutter McMansions found in expensive tract housing elsewhere in the Philadelphia region. To so characterize the Kestenbaum residence is insulting, incendiary, and ignorant.

I have met the neighbors of the new Kestenbaum home. I have spoken to property owners with a real interest in what happens in their community and their neighborhood. Their reaction to the new construction is consistent with what I have reported. The responses of so-called neighbors described recently in The Inquirer are in fact those of a few preservationists who are continuing to pursue their one-sided agenda, regardless of whom they hurt in the process or what falsehoods they promote.

It seems that the use of the term “McMansion” is quite effective here, hence the response from this local official. The term suggests that the new home is a “cookie-cutter” home lacking in appropriate architecture. Compared to the older home that was on the site (and you can read a bit more about it here), preservationists see the new home as a travesty (see an example here). Overall, this new home is likely quite different than the suburban McMansions that one might expect to find not too far away. But by using this pejorative term in a teardown situation (an older home replaced with a newer home), preservationists have tied this new home, however nice it may be, to negative images of the exurbs.

This story also provides an example of questions that pop up in communities throughout the United States: what exactly should be done with older homes, particularly well-designed estates?

Finding community at the office

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In a new economy where workers are “free agents” or “portfolio workers” among a relatively high unemployment landscape (at least in the United States), could workers be missing community life at work as well as the regular paycheck?

In the late 1990s the world of work moved away from security and towards freedom.

A job for life was out. Work became splintered, spliced and diced: contract, sub-contract and casual labour, part-time, sessional and seasonal, project-based, freelance and temp work emerged, as the frequencies and rhythms of work became subject to the vagaries of the economy.

Richard Sennett, a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, described it as ”new economy” work – the work of flexible capitalism where ”workers are asked to behave nimbly, to be open to change on short notice, to take risks continually”…

The experience of being a highly mobile new economy worker is as Sennett says: being continuously exposed to risk can eat away at your sense of character. You are always ”starting over”. And just like your employment, your witnesses are not long-term. The writer Karen Blixen (better known by her pen name, Isak Dinesen) used this line for one of her characters: ”I was constantly in flight, an exile everywhere.”

Sometimes flight cannot be helped. But community helps stave off the feeling of being exiled, of drift.

Some interesting thoughts here. As I have talked to college students, the new economy jobs are what they want: they want to be able to use their skills, to flourish (which may be different than being happy), and to be able to set their own pace and priorities. Of course, these goals can be difficult for many to obtain in the early years after college. Additionally, many of them do want to find a community to be a part of, a place where they can fit into and still be somewhat autonomous. So perhaps this commentary is really about a larger issue: how do modern people who seek after individualistic goals also find enough community so that they don’t become alienated from society? And are there groups or companies that do this better than others?

This reminds me of what one might hear from college faculty: the job of a professor offers a balance between these two goals. We enjoy our jobs because it offers freedom (to study what we want, to have some say over our own schedules) but also places us within an academic context that runs on a very predictable calendar with regular interaction with others.

The commentary also notes the role technology can play: we can be apart from others but are seemingly connected through devices like cell phones or platforms like Facebook. But these seem less like “true” community and more like community of our own choosing, calling whom we want or making “friends” with whom we want. This is quite different than what might go on in an office:

Yet there can be a joyous, awful, wonderful cacophony when you don’t get to choose – the possibility of a richer, messier, wider community; a mosaic of quirks, histories, personalities. Look around your office – they are all there.

This not getting to choose, however, seems to go against all modern sensibilities: it is one thing to put up with others but it is another to do this without any other options.

The quick reference to television show The Office is intriguing. Throughout the course of the show, there is little indication that the employees want to leave. At the same time, there are very few (if any?) moments where the workers make a conscious decision to stay because they really like the community of people there (versus liking one or two people). It is too bad we don’t see more of these characters given options where they could leave but they choose not to because they realize who they are living behind. Perhaps this is too much to ask: if workers are given brighter opportunities elsewhere (money, benefits, chance for advancement, etc.), perhaps they will always go for that over any community ties.

Study human flourishing rather than happiness

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A well-known psychologist suggests we should study human flourishing rather than just happiness:

In theory, life satisfaction might include the various elements of well-being. But in practice, Dr. Seligman says, people’s answers to that question are largely — more than 70 percent — determined by how they’re feeling at the moment of the survey, not how they judge their lives over all.

“Life satisfaction essentially measures cheerful moods, so it is not entitled to a central place in any theory that aims to be more than a happiology,” he writes in “Flourish.” By that standard, he notes, a government could improve its numbers just by handing out the kind of euphoriant drugs that Aldous Huxley described in “Brave New World.”

So what should be measured instead? The best gauge so far of flourishing, Dr. Seligman says, comes from a study of 23 European countries by Felicia Huppert and Timothy So of the University of Cambridge. Besides asking respondents about their moods, the researchers asked about their relationships with others and their sense that they were accomplishing something worthwhile.

Denmark and Switzerland ranked highest in Europe, with more than a quarter of their citizens meeting the definition of flourishing. Near the bottom, with fewer than 10 percent flourishing, were France, Hungary, Portugal and Russia.

Studiers of happiness tend to ask about two areas: immediate happiness and longer-term happiness, typically referred to as “life satisfaction.” But Seligman is suggesting that these questions about satisfaction don’t really move beyond the immediate mood of the respondent. Additionally, the questions need to be adjusted to account for relationships and whether the respondent feels a sense of accomplishment in life.

It is interesting to see some of the cross-country comparisons. How might national or smaller cultures influence how individuals feel about life satisfaction? In the long run, do people actually have to be accomplishing something satisfying or is it more about perceptions? Can living a decent life in the American suburbs be ultimately satisfying for Americans or do they just think that it should be?

I wonder how these findings line up with earlier findings that religion leads to higher levels of life satisfaction.

(I also wonder if people think that the language of “flourishing” seems archaic or overly humanistic.)

Attempting to set up an American style home lending system in Russia

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Housing and mortgage industries can be quite different across countries. While many Americans might be quite used to our system (even though the system of 30 year mortgages we know now was a product of the mid-twentieth century), what happens when you try to apply the American system to another context? A sociologist looked at how this worked out in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union:

The new government tried to create a housing market by replicating the American housing system, essentially using the Federal National Mortgage Association, or Fannie Mae, as a template to encourage Russians to take out mortgage loans.

“This was all designed by USAID, one of their biggest foreign aid programs ever,” Zavisca said. “It was an American model of what a housing market is: home ownership and securitized mortgages.”

Supposedly all of that privatized housing and wealth would spur the natural development of a housing market. Those who felt they had more housing than they needed would look to trade down and use the leftover money for other things. The private sector would emerge to produce housing for those who had been left out.

“That didn’t really happen,” Zavisca said.

Housing construction declined by 70 percent from 1992 to 2002, the first decade after the Soviet era. The construction industry in Russia has evolved to cater to wealthy and well-to-do middle class clients who could pay with cash, but there is a lack of trust by both contractors and consumers. No one wants to pay up front and wait, or deal with credit.

Unlike Americans who for decades have willingly taken on 30-year mortgages to buy housing, Russians have largely balked at the notion. Even when young families were offered a $10,000 credit, roughly a year’s wages and the equivalent of $60,000 in the U.S., toward the down payment for a house, Zavisca said there was little interest.

“Few Russians are willing to take out mortgages because the risk of foreclosure is unacceptable, and because they view interest payments – which they call overpayments – as unfair. As one Russian put it: ‘To enter into a mortgage is to become a slave for 30 years, with the bank as your master.'”

That hasn’t stopped Russians from going into debt, though. They may be averse to mortgages but they love credit cards, small consumer loans and point-of-purchase store credit.

“In my interviews, people there often compared credit card debt favorably to mortgages, the inverse of here in the U.S., where mortgages are viewed as virtuous and responsible.

“Russia is completely the opposite. It may be a legacy of Soviet entitlement to housing, where housing is viewed as a right to them. Even thought the Soviet government owned the housing, people thought of it as their own and had the right to pass it down to their children, or swap with someone who wanted to trade with you.

“It was a kind of quasi-marketplace. It just wasn’t financialized.”

She said Russians find it odd that Americans call themselves “homeowners” from the day they close on a mortgage loan. For Russians, ownership only begins after all debts are paid off.

This suggests that our system may be more cultural than anything else. It goes beyond just being used to a particular set of economic and financial tools regarding homeownership; these instruments are backed by a particular set of cultural values that sees mortgages, and working hard to reach the point where one can afford a mortgage, as acceptable. The Russians may have a point here: one doesn’t technically own a home until the mortgage is paid and with the high rates of American mobility (moving roughly every 5-6 years on average), many homes are never truly owned.

It would be interesting to hear how Americans, in USAID or elsewhere, explained why this didn’t work in Russia. Have we tried implementing similar policies elsewhere and if so, how did those situations work out?

An architect places the McMansion in a box of mirrors

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An architect recently spoke at Dartmouth and discussed his thoughts about McMansions:

Cruz showed the audience his representation of “McMansions,” or luxury suburban residences, which have become a large part of the ideal American home. Cruz’s “McMansion,” exhibited at museums throughout the nation, is a small plastic model home placed in a box of mirrors. The image repeats into infinite space, epitomizing the monotony of traditional suburban landscapes.

Alternatively, citizens can come together to create new plans for their neighborhoods, Cruz said.

“The mythology of the American dream of ownership has become unsustainable,” Cruz said. “We need to rethink ownership, and rethink how a small house can become a small village.”

Cruz is well-known for his research on the Tijuana-San Diego border and most recently received the Ford Foundation Visionaries Award, which recognizes leaders’ efforts to improve economic opportunities. He is currently a public culture and urbanism professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he co-founded the Center for Urban Ecologies.

It sounds like Cruz defines McMansion in these ways: they are luxury homes, meaning they are expensive and have a lot of features, and they are monotonous (“cookie-cutter”) when placed with a bunch of similar houses in a neighborhood.

Here is a little more about Cruz’s 2008 work titled “McMansion Retrofitted” at the San Francisco Art Institute that emphasizes the spaces created in the suburbs by recent Mexican immigrants:

McMansion Retrofitted, 2008
Plastic model, pedestal with mirrors, and two videos
Courtesy of Estudio Teddy Cruz…

The areas of San Diego that have been most impacted by this nonconforming urbanism are concentrated in its first ring of suburbanization. At a moment when developers and city officials are still focusing on two main areas of development—on one end, the redevelopment and gentrification of the downtown area and, on the other, the increasingly expansive suburban sprawl resulting from an equally high-priced real estate project supported by an oil hungry infrastructure—it is the older neighborhoods of San Diego’s midcity that remain depressed and ignored. It is here in the first ring of suburbanization that immigrants have been settling in recent years, unable to afford the high rents of the downtown area’s luxury condos or the expensive “McMansions” of the new suburbs, though providing cheap labor for both.

Interesting – Cruz’s preferred neighborhoods sound quite vibrant and diverse. You can read more here about Cruz’s thoughts on how immigrants are changing neighborhoods in San Diego. Also, Cruz has in the past been involved with converting McMansions to multi-family housing (though this home is 70,000 square feet – more of a mansion or a castle).

What suburban residents notice about their neighbors

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Reading through some of the coverage of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the child he had with his mistress, I found a common explanation of what suburban neighbors know about each other in one account:

As TV satellite trucks gridlocked the block and spilled over to an adjacent street, residents sat in their homes, stunned. Some worried about the effect the news would have on the polite 13-year-old boy who they say often walked a white poodle named Sugar through the neighborhood when he wasn’t swimming in his backyard pool or playing basketball…

Residents said the family was friendly and, like other homeowners on the block of fashionable houses with red-tiled roofs and two- and three-car garages, they kept up their house and its neatly trimmed lawn and palm trees.

While the boy was a fixture in the neighborhood, residents say, they rarely saw his mother until she retired 2 1/2 months ago. Until then, she told them, she had been working for Schwarzenegger’s family and had kept an apartment near Schwarzenegger’s Los Angeles home, 100 miles away.

I realize that this is simply one news report so perhaps the information is condensed in order to tell other important parts of the story but several things stuck out to me:

1. The boy was seen walking the dog, swimming, and playing basketball in the neighborhood. If a suburban resident doesn’t do these things outside of the home, they may not be noticed at all.

2. This family maintained their home to the same standards as everyone else. This is a key marker of suburban civility: do you help insure the property values of everyone else by keeping your yard neat and your home maintained? If not, I don’t think most suburban neighbors would have a favorable impression.

3. The mother was rarely seen. Again an emphasis on what neighbors saw rather than what they experienced in interaction with the family.

4. “The family was friendly.” What exactly does this mean? They didn’t yell at kids in the neighborhood to stay off their lawn? They frequently talked to neighbors? They had backyard barbeques with other families?

On the whole, since most of the descriptors are based on what people saw rather than what they experienced in interaction, I would guess these impressions from the neighbors are based more on appearances and perceived status than anything else. Based on what we are presented, it sounds like the family kept up suburban appearances: they walked the dog, kept their home and yard neat, and were friendly. This is more than enough to get a favorable review from suburban neighbors. If some of the information was changed, such as the family let their grass grow long or no one in the family ever walked a pet, I imagine we might hear some different thoughts along the lines of “the family kept to themselves.”

A cynical take on this would be that this is typical suburban living: it is all about appearances, most neighbors don’t really know each other, and suburban neighborhoods are superficial and lack true community. Some of this may be true though I doubt any of the neighbors are replicas of Gladys Kravitz. But how many suburban residents would or could share more specifics about their neighbors if approached by an outsider?

A “children at play” sign as a symptom of a larger issue rather than the solution

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In Traffic, Tom Vanderbilt argues that Americans rely on a lot of road signs even though there is little to no evidence that having more signs increases the safety of drivers and pedestrians. As an example, Vanderbilt looks at the “children at play” signs:

Despite the continued preponderance of “Children at Play” on streets across the land, it is no secret in the world of traffic engineering that “Children at Play” signs—termed, with subtle condescension, “advisory signs”—have been proven neither to change driver behavior nor to do anything to improve the safety of children in a traffic setting. The National Cooperative Highway Research Program, in its “Synthesis of Highway Practice No. 139,” sternly advises that “non-uniform signs such as “CAUTION—CHILDREN AT PLAY,” “SLOW—CHILDREN,” or similar legends should not be permitted on any roadway at any time.” Moreover, it warns that “the removal of any nonstandard signs should carry a high priority.”…

If the sign is so disliked by the profession charged with maintaining order and safety on our streets, why do we seem to see so many of them? In a word: Parents. Talk to a town engineer, and you’ll often get the sense it’s easier to put up a sign than to explain to local residents why the sign shouldn’t be put up. (This official notes that “Children at Play” signs are the second-most-common question he’s asked about at town meetings.) Residents have also been known to put up their own signs, perhaps using the DIY instructions provided by eHow (which notes, in a baseless assertion typical of the whole discussion, that “Notifying these drivers there are children at play may reduce your child’s risk”). States and municipalities are also free to sanction their own signs (hence the rise of “autistic child” traffic signs)…

One of the things that is known, thanks to peer-reviewed science, is that increased traffic speeds (and volumes) increase the risk of children’s injuries. But “Children at Play” signs are a symptom, rather than a cure—a sign of something larger that is out of whack, whether the lack of a pervasive safety culture in driving, a system that puts vehicular mobility ahead of neighborhood livability, or non-contextual street design. After all, it’s roads, not signs, that tell people how to drive. People clamoring for “Children at Play” signs are often living on residential streets that are inordinately wide, lacking any kind of calming obstacles (from trees to “bulb-outs”), perhaps having unnecessary center-line markings—three factors that will boost vehicle speed more than any sign will lower them.

So the signs are more of a band-aid to a larger problem which Vanderbilt discusses more in his book: streets and roads are generally designed in America for cars to go fast rather than as structures that also accommodate pedestrians and other neighborhood activities. Signs can’t do a whole lot to reduce the effects of this structure even though citizens, local officials, and some traffic engineers continue to aid their proliferation. In a car-obsessed culture, perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised by all of this: people want to be able to move quickly from place to place.

This all reminds me of the efforts of groups like the New Urbanists who suggest the solution is to redesign the streetscape so that the automobile is given a less prominent place. By putting houses and sidewalks closer to the street, planting trees near the roadway, allowing parking on the sides of streets, and narrowing the width of streets can reduce the speed of drivers and reduce accidents. Of course, one could go even further and remove all traffic signs altogether (see here and text plus pictures and video here).

I wonder if we could use Vanderbilt’s examples as evidence of a larger public discussion about the role of science versus other kinds of evidence. There may be a lot of research that suggests signs don’t help much but how does that science reach the typical suburban resident who is concerned about their kids playing near the street? If confronted with the sort of evidence that Vanderbilt provides, how would the typical suburban resident or official respond?

Increasing numbers of blacks moving to the suburbs

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One of the important shifts revealed in the 2010 Census is the increasing number of minorities in the American suburbs (also see the thoughts of the 2010 Census director here). This is particularly true of blacks who have moved from the city to the suburbs and this raises some concerns about the future of the neighborhoods they are leaving behind:

Taylor’s decision to live outside Chicago makes him part of a shift tracked by the 2010 Census that surprised many demographers and urban planners: He is among hundreds of thousands of blacks who moved away from cities with long histories as centers of African-American life, including Chicago, Oakland, Washington, New Orleans and Detroit…

Chicago’s population fell by 200,418 from 2000 to 2010, and blacks accounted for almost 89% of that drop. Hispanics surpassed blacks as the city’s largest minority group. Meanwhile, Plainfield grew by 204% overall, and its black population soared by more than 2,000%, the fastest rate in the region…

The trend has broad policy implications: As blacks who can afford to live in the suburbs depart, will cities have enough resources to help the low-income blacks left behind? Will the demand for housing be strong enough to support the revitalization of traditionally black inner-city neighborhoods? How will black churches, businesses and cultural institutions be affected? Will traffic congestion worsen because blacks moving to the suburbs keep their jobs in the city?

Roderick Harrison, a sociologist at Howard University in Washington and a former chief of the racial statistics branch of the Census Bureau, says the changes reflect the improving economic status of some African Americans.

Traffic seems to be a lesser issue compared to some of these bigger questions. And these questions are not new: at least since the 1980s, commentators have been asking about what may happen to urban neighborhoods and institutions when middle-class Blacks leave for the suburbs.

We could also ask about how this might change the suburbs. Are we at the point as a society where suburban residents really just care about social class, i.e. being able to buy into the suburbs and maintain a middle-class lifestyle? Or will whites leave suburban neighborhoods when Blacks move in just as they did in urban neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s? I wrote earlier about how minorities were fitting into Schaumburg, a noted edge city outside of the Chicago, and a noted historian, Thomas Sugrue, suggested that the move of Blacks to the suburbs in the Detroit region may not be all that positive. I suspect there will be a lot of discussions in suburbs about these changes, often couched in terms of issues like affordable housing (see this example from the wealthy Chicago suburb of Winnetka), property values, and the quality of schools.

It is interesting to note that Plainfield is cited in this particular story: Joliet, Plainfield, Aurora, and the suburban region far southwest of Chicago is a booming area. And if you were curious about the African-American growth in Plainfield, it was 0.8% Black in 2000 (110 out of 13,038) and is roughly 6% Black in 2010 (out of 39,581).