Category Archives: Places

Summer heat and society

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The heat of the summer is often equated with positive things: sun, outdoor activities, the beach, and driving with the windows open or convertible top down.

But the heat can also cause and expose issues in a society. In Russia, there has been record heat and a staggering number of deaths:

On Monday, Moscow health authorities announced that the number of deaths each day in the capital had nearly doubled to 700 as most of central Russia entered the seventh week of a heat wave. The high temperatures, hovering around 100 degrees, have destroyed 30% of the nation’s grain crops and triggered massive peat bog and forest fires that alone have killed more than 50 people and devastated dozens of villages.

Andrei Seltsovsky, chief of Moscow’s health department, said the city’s morgues were filled almost to capacity, with 1,300 of the 1,500 slots taken. He suggested that residents, instead of following Russian Orthodox tradition of holding burials on the third day after death, bury loved ones sooner.

This sort of event is not isolated to Moscow. Something similar happened in Chicago in 1995. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg wrote about the summer in the book Heat Wave: Social Autopsy of a Disaster in Chicago. In an interview, Klinenberg discussed the book. There were some controversy over the “official death count.” Cook County’s chief medical examiner reported 465 deaths related to the heat for the hottest week but the numbers were disputed by Mayor Daley.

Additionally, the death rates differed by race:

The actual death tolls for African Americans and whites were almost identical, but those numbers are misleading. There are far more elderly whites than elderly African Americans in Chicago, and when the Chicago Public Health Department considered the age differences, they found that the black/white mortality ratio was 1.5 to 1. Another surprising fact that emerged is that Latinos, who represent about 25 percent of the city population and are disproportionately poor and sick, accounted for only 2 percent of the heat-related deaths.

So heat can help expose the disadvantaged in society, those who have no or little access to air conditioning, are often alone, and have no one to check in on them. Since that summer in Chicago, the city has opened “cooling centers” (which are available now all over the state of Illinois) to provide a place for those who don’t have other options. Measures like these have cut down on heat-related deaths in Chicago – it remains to be seen what Moscow will do to help with this current and future heat waves.

Farming back on the upswing in Massachusetts

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Farming is not a common occupation in the United States today. According to these figures from the EPA, less than 1% of Americans claim farming as an occupation and about 2% of people live on farms.

Yet the Boston Globe reports that farming is on the upswing in Massachusetts. According to the figures:

From 2002 to 2007, the number of farms in Massachusetts jumped by about 27 percent to 7,691, according to the US Department of Agriculture census. That’s a reversal from the previous five years, when there was a 20 percent drop in the number of farms and, presumably, farmers, many of whom sold land to developers.

But the start-up farms are smaller than the family enterprises of the past. The average farm in Massachusetts, 85 acres in 2002, was 67 acres five years later.

American society experienced such a shift away from agriculture from the late 1800s to today that I wonder if this is part of a shift toward a slightly more balanced world between agriculture and other sectors of society. There are plenty of books and pundits talking about how we are disconnected from the land and our food – perhaps a new generation is listening (and the article does make it sound like many of the new farmers are younger) and charting a new course.

(Even after an upswing, the number of farms in Massachusetts is still small. A lot more people would need to go into agriculture to become a movement.)

Getting a new passport to avoid taxes (and other reasons)

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The Financial Times reports an increased number of Americans are looking to turn in their American passports at the UK embassy. The waiting list is growing apparently because Americans are looking to avoid paying taxes on worldwide income and capital gains. As the article notes, the main disadvantage is that a person may not be able to reverse their choice.

It would be interesting to know how many people do this each year. Switching allegiances from one particular country to another seems like a weighty decision.

Selling black market grilled cheese as “seedy sociological phenomenon”

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The New York Post reports on a man “selling grilled cheese on the black market.”

Vanity Fair comments on the story and concludes: “It goes without saying that this seedy sociological phenomenon, like many others, will likely be optioned into a David Simon–HBO series.”

Quick Review: The Field Museum

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My wife and I recently visited the Field Museum in Chicago. She had never been there and while I have been there a number of times, my most recent visit was about 10 years ago. We didn’t see everything but there was a lot of variety in our five hours. Some quick thoughts about one of the major museums in Chicago:

1. The museum has a range of exhibits, from ancient Egypt to modern Africa to animals to dinosaurs to gemstones to plants. There is a lot to take in and hold the interest of a variety of people.

2. We both agreed on the best exhibit: a temporary exhibit titled “Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age.” While the main attraction here was a recently discovered young mammoth named Lyuba, the whole exhibit was informative and interesting. We saw plenty of tusks, video presentations about different kinds of research involving these animals, bone and tooth casts we could touch, and more. This exhibit it well worth seeing.

3. We both felt some exhibits were much more interesting (and modern) than others. The exhibit “The Ancient Americas” was great from early peoples through Northwest and Arctic peoples. However, the displays for Native Americans was stuck in the 1960s (or perhaps earlier) and is lacking compared to the others. The gemstone exhibit had been updated since I last saw it and both the modern Africa and Pacific Spirits galleries were interesting. The stuffed animals on the first floor from Africa and Asia look dated plus a number of the animals are in local zoos. Overall, it looks like the museum has worked hard to update a number of exhibits but some still need some work.

4. The price seems to be getting out of hand. We paid $22 a person for the Discovery Pass, a ticket that allows you into one special exhibit (and we choose the Mammoths and Mastodons). Even the Basic Admission is $15. If one were taking the family of four to the museum, it would cost at $60 for tickets (up to $116 for four All Access tickets) plus $19 for parking in one of the museum’s lots. Add in a quick meal at the Corner Bakery or McDonald’s (both inside the museum) and this is an expensive day at the museum.

For those looking to learn more about other cultures, animals, and nature, the Field Museum is an enjoyable place to visit.

Saving the auto industry in Detroit?

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President Obama spoke in Detroit on Friday and The Atlantic examines four viewpoints about whether recent policies helped save the auto industry. Opinions are mixed.

The two more negative opinions are from Detroit journalists.

How race effects chosing a house

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The Houston Chronicle contains an interview with sociologist Michael Emerson about a forthcoming study (to be published in Social Forces) regarding housing choice and race.

First, a bit about the methodology of the study:

Researchers for the Institute for Urban Research at Rice University asked that question to 1,000 whites, 1,000 African-Americans and 1,000 Hispanics in Harris County to determine whether race makes a difference when they select homes and neighborhoods, independent of crime, housing prices and schools…

The housing questions were part of 30-minute interviews conducted for the annual Houston Area Survey. Respondents were asked to imagine they were looking for a house and found one they liked in their price range. They then were presented with computer-generated, random scenarios of school quality, property values, crime rate and racial makeup, and asked the likelihood that they would buy the house.

By using hypothetical situations, researchers were able to isolate the effect of certain factors, such as the racial composition of a neighborhood or the crime rate.

Here is a quick summary of the findings, according to Emerson:

For whites, the percentage of African-American or Hispanic matters significantly. They’re more and more averse to buying a house in a neighborhood as the percentage of African-Americans or Hispanics increases, even when crime is low, property values are increasing, and the local schools are of high quality.

The other result we found was for African-Americans in the Houston area, they’re sensitive to the percent Asian. So as the percent Asian increases, the less likely they are to say they want to buy the house.

And for Hispanics, the racial composition did not impact their preference for buying the home.

One other way to understand how strong the impact is, for whites: The likelihood they wouldn’t want to buy the house when there was racial diversity was equal to the likelihood they wouldn’t want to buy when the crime rate was high.

These findings are similar to those of other studies: Whites prefer not to choose a neighborhood with a certain number of African-Americans and Hispanics, even if the neighborhood has other positive features. The findings about other races are interesting as well – a lot of the housing literature focuses on the preferences of whites which makes sense as they are still the largest group and historically and today tend to have more wealth. But it is important to know the preferences of African-Americans and Hispanics, particularly as the Hispanic population grows.

Interestingly, the racial composition of the neighborhood does not appear to matter to Hispanics. I am curious to see what Emerson and his co-authors suggest is behind this.

The first Target arrives in Manhattan

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Ariel Kaminer writes in the New York Times about shopping at the first Target in Manhattan which is located in East Harlem:

It is a sharp contrast to hopping from store to store for kitchen tools here, socks there, electronics in yet another place… That dominant New York shopping model has its charms, but really, remind me what they are. I like local merchants as much as the next New York nostalgist, but on a torpid summer day there is much to be said for the suburban efficiency of one-stop shopping…

It all seems so convenient (and cheap) that you start to think you should just buy everything then and there, to have on hand when you need it.

But what did I need? … Four Riedel wine glasses ($39.99)? (When the same brand is available at Target and Tiffany, it’s time to re-evaluate the distinction between mass and class.)…

After several hours, I found myself wandering through the aisles with my shopping cart, glassy-eyed from the sheer glut of choices, idly reaching for things that I felt no special connection to. It was time to go.

Kaminer appears to be thinking through the implications of  of big box shopping stores that offers consumers many cheap options (and even some high-end fare). Granted, this one-stop shopping has not just been the domain of suburbanites: it has been available in department stores for a long time. But the experience of going to a downtown Macy’s or Marshall Field’s still seems quite different than going to Target. Those department stores were and still are more of an experience and you pay for that experience as opposed to a Target or Wal-Mart or Home Depot where the goal is primarily efficiency and low prices.

Additionally, the construction of urban malls and shopping centers (but usually lacking the abundant parking lots) really lowers the walls between the urban and suburban shopping experience. This Target is located in “the first retail power center in Manhattan” that also features Best Buy, Old Navy, and Costco. Though it is mainly accessible by subway, the dominant world of American shopping – malls and big box stores – is now available to Manhattanites.

The results of incentives for movie production

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Michigan Avenue has been a battleground for several recent weekends as Transformers 3 filmed scenes. According to the Chicago Tribune, the producers were partly drawn by the financial incentives offered by the state of Illinois. Though the film will spend more than $20 million in six weeks in the local economy, the state will offer at least a $6 million tax credit.

Illinois is not the only state playing this game:

Illinois is among 45 jobs-hungry states tripping over each other to financially woo movies and television shows. About half, including Illinois, offer tax credits, which cut producers’ costs by tens of millions of dollars at the expense of state budgets.

The pool of rivals has doubled in the past four years, and the lures, for the most part, are getting fancier, with only a handful of states pulling back, either due to recessionary pressures or local scandals. A just-released study by the Milken Institute indicates that aggressive plays, by states as well as overseas locales, are cutting into California’s historical grip on the business.

The rest of the article contains arguments for and against such aggressive tax credits. Regardless, it seems that the tax credit game may become a race to the bottom where states eventually find there is little economic benefit to having filming in their backyard.

Even if the filming doesn’t bring in many jobs (as opposed to short-term work) or other lasting benefits, filming can certainly draw attention. The filming of Transformers 3 has attracted a lot of local media attention, perhaps raising the profile of Chicago and Michigan Avenue for viewers.

Unique planned communities in America

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CNN Money takes a quick look at a few of “the most unusual planned communities” in the United States. From a large town for active retirees to a Martha Stewart designed community to a community built around a new Catholic university, these places certainly are interesting.

Celebration, Florida also makes this list. Celebration was developed by Disney and is the subject of several interesting books that focus on the early years of the community:

–Celebration, U.S.A.: Living in Disney’s Brave New Town, Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, 2000

–The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town, Andrew Ross, 2000