Category Archives: Places

Latinos in American cities “Latinize” homes and use parks like plazas

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As part of a larger article about Latinos in American cities and suburbs, here is an interesting section about how Latinos adapt American houses and parks:

In 2005, the California State Assembly published a paper by then Senior Legislative Assistant Michael Mendez titled “Latino New Urbanism: Building on Cultural Preferences.” In the paper, Mendez notes that in established Latino communities in California, Latino living preferences are often carryovers or hybrid forms of living preferences typical of Latin America.

For example, Mendez noticed that “the adaptive reuse of homes” in established Latino communities — and in particular, East Los Angeles — was often “neither entirely Mexican, nor Spanish, nor Anglo-American.” Instead, Mendez writes, “the introverted American- style homes are transformed to extroverted, Mexicanized, or Latinized homes.”

Mendez also discusses the role of the public plaza in Latin America as a community’s essential social hub. In Latin America, the plaza is a place for people to gather to talk, play, party, and do business. Citing a 1995 survey of behavioral patterns in California’s public parks, Mendez notes that Latino use of public parks as “a surrogate for the misplaced plaza…is a great contrast to Anglos, who primarily participated in mobile, solitary activities such as jogging, walking, bicycling, or dog walking.”

In 2009, Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty formally dedicated Columbia Heights Plaza. “Before, the plaza was an open lot full of drunks,” Toledo recalls. Now young people gather in the plaza after school and hipsters walk their dogs. During the summer, parents bring their children to play in the fountains surrounded by seating areas for people watching. Despite the decline in the neighborhood’s Latino population, Columbia Heights Plaza acknowledges the Latin American preference for public plazas in urban spaces.

It is too bad there aren’t more examples about residents and cities changing the physical form of space to accommodate Latinos and other groups. How far are cities willing to go to do this? In visiting such neighborhoods, would the average American pick up on the fact that the space has been altered or is used differently?

Illinois’ Kendall County the fastest growing US county between 2000 and 2010

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While digging through some 2010 US Census reports, I came across this table of the most populous and fastest growing counties between 2000 and 2010 (page 9 of this PDF):

Two thoughts came to mind at seeing this list of the fastest growing counties:

1. Kendall and Loudoun are the only two counties in the top ten not in the Sunbelt. While this isn’t a complete list of counties, it does suggest that the most rapid growth continues to take place in the Sunbelt. Similarly, look at the list of the most populous counties: the three non-Sunbelt counties barely grew or even lost population while some of the Sunbelt counties gained quite a few people.

2. Kendall County is at the far southwest edge of the Chicago region and thus, we should not be surprised that it is growing. Just to the east is Plainfield, a rapidly growing suburb. Just to the north is Aurora, now the second largest city in Illinois at nearly 200,000 residents. Additionally, there are three nearby interstates, I-88, I-55, and I-80 that can help residents get to other places.

A Costa Rican explains why the country’s #1 ratings in the Happiness Index is due to its culture

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The Happy Planet Index puts Costa Rica at number one in the world. A Costa Rican first describes what makes up the index and then how Costa Rican culture led to the top ranking:

Have you ever heard of the Happy Planet Index? As a Costa Rican, I hear about it quite a lot. Both the HPI, a project of the New Economics Foundation, and the lesser-known World Database of Happiness, assembled by a Dutch sociologist, put Costa Rica at the top of the rankings. This officially makes Costa Rica the most content country on the planet. (For once, we’re first in the world at something other than potholes per capita.)

The HPI is calculated from a combination of three factors: life expectancy, self-reported well-being, and ecological footprint. Thus, according to its own website, the HPI measures “how many long and happy lives [countries] produce per unit of environmental input.” That sounds like a mouthful at first, but once you think it through for a bit the concept seems to make sense. Traditional measures of wellbeing, such as GDP per capita, simply measure output. They don’t take into account environmental devastation brought about by industrialization or unhappiness stemming from social or economic inequality. The HPI, on the other hand, rewards countries with healthy, satisfied citizens for living within their ecological means. Thus, the HPI tells developing countries they shouldn’t aspire to the living standards of the United States or France, but rather to the smile production of Costa Rica…

My point here is that, in Costa Rica at least, happiness seems to stem partly from culture. It’s not at all controversial from an economic viewpoint to suggest a link between happiness and culture, and this is somewhat validated by the fact that five of the top ten countries in the latest HPI ranking are located in Central America, a relatively small and homogeneous region. One of those, El Salvador, has the highest murder rate in the world, and another, Nicaragua, displays levels of poverty one would expect from a war-ravaged Sub-Saharan nation. Living in either one of those (and I have for a time, in both) actually sounds like a pretty grim prospect to me, yet the HPI would have us believe that these countries are worth emulating.

Thus, we approach the core problem with the Happy Planet Index: Happiness and wellbeing are inextricably linked, but they cannot be reduced to the same thing. If Costa Rica got its act together and built better infrastructure (even at the expense of causing a little bit of damage to the environment) our wellbeing would be much higher—we would no longer have to endure endless traffic jams brought about by rock slides or sinkholes, for instance. Yet—here’s the key—our happiness wouldn’t change that much, because it’s largely a consequence of who we are as a people. Improved infrastructure is precisely the sort of advancement that shows up in measures like GDP per capita, and which the HPI ignores completely—forms of progress that undoubtedly change us for the better, though we remain as content as ever.

I’ve written about measuring happiness before (see here and here) but I don’t remember seeing this argument before about the Happy Planet Index: it is more dependent on culture than measures of material conditions. If you carry this argument to its conclusion, then great changes for the better or worse in Costa Rica wouldn’t affect people much.

I suspect it doesn’t exactly work this way. There are probably some thresholds that would affect happiness in Costa Rica and a lot of other countries. These would be similar to findings in the US that above a certain point, having more income doesn’t really change people’s happiness or well-being. There is an interplay between culture and material conditions; Marx may have suggested that culture is derived from those who control the means of production but others, including Weber, would argue that there is more of a back and forth. If the conditions changed a lot, the culture would have to respond and might change quite a bit as well.

Old New York law says each community must have a historian

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Strange laws that are still on the books are occasionally rediscovered and make headlines. For example, here is an interesting 93 year old law from New York:

Back in 1919, the New York state legislature mandated that every “city, town, or village” must have an official historian. It’s a regulation that’s unique among the 50 states, and basically unenforceable. Towns are not required to pay these record-keepers, who are appointed by a town mayor or manager. Municipalities that fail to find a volunteer are sent a strongly worded letter, but little else can be done.

But this law could tell us a lot about American culture and our quest to preserve and understand our own history:

The phenomenon of local historians came of age in the early days of the Industrial age. As Americans began populating “the frontier,” they struggled to define themselves and their role in the places they called home. “In the late 19th century, you see a local history rush,” says James Grossman, Executive Director of the American Historical Association.

This fascination with ourselves was fueled by commercial firms that drafted early town histories, books that resemble the Who’s Who franchise of today. For a couple of dollars, anyone could contribute a piece about their own place in the history of their town, be it the story of their family, their house, or their autobiography.

It was around this time that city historians also became part-time urban boosters. “Cities began using history as an economic asset,” Grossman says. Many early historians were “people who had relationships with commercial interests, trying to promote city growth.”

A couple of reasons are given here: Americans wanted to understand themselves and there was money to be made in this business of local history. This second reason would fit right in with the growth machine model of urban growth: local boosters, leaders, and businesspeople promote development in order to make more money.

One might wonder how much this boosterism affects the actual reporting and interpretation of history. I suspect it influences things quite a bit. This doesn’t necessarily mean a local historian gets the facts wrong but it is more about how the story is told and what parts of local history are revealed. I have read a lot of local history for research projects and several features of local histories stood out across communities:

1. The local histories are often most interested in big and exciting facts and less about day to day life in the community or how these big changes occurred. We might call this the “peak view” of history – you only see the highest or noteworthy points.

2. Tied to the first observation, these histories tend to report only positives about the community. The histories leave out some of the most formative elements about a community if it doesn’t paint the community in a positive light. For example, I’ve uncovered information about racial prejudice in action in some suburban communities but based on the “official” histories, you would never know there was even any tension.

3. It is suggested later in the article that local historians need some training before they are set loose to collect and tell local history. From what I have seen, many local historians got the job because they wanted it, not because they necessarily had qualifications. This person might have had a particular interest in the community and so had done a lot of research or perhaps they knew a lot of people in the community. This has changed somewhat in recent decades with the rise of museums and degrees regarding operating museums as there are now often “official” keepers of a community’s history.

Using social media to commemorate September 11th

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In recent decades, cultural sociologists have spent more time examining how people today create and experience newer memorials like the Vietnam Wall. But the nature of memorials changes quickly; here is a sociologist discussing how 9/11 is remembered on social media.

Brian Monahan, a sociology professor at Pennsylvania’s Marywood University, said social media helps Americans remember 9/11 in an anniversary year that is not a milestone 10th, 20th or 25th.

It also provides ways to remember events other than the structured process of scheduled memorials, said Monahan, who has studied coverage of 9/11. There was a proscribed way before of how to be solemn. The symbolism went through official channels.

“It was an informal process but it was structured,” he said.

Social media takes all the barriers away.

The conversation about 9/11 is also different now on Twitter and Facebook, especially after the killing of Osama bin Laden, Monahan said.

“There was only one way to talk about 9/11 and that was tragedy,’ Monahan said. “But now it’s about core American values.”

Maybe we are headed toward a world where physical memorials simply don’t matter as much. Existing and new memorials may still attract a lot of visitors and certain locations, such as government centers or big cities, might still be expected to commission and maintain memorials. For example, the 9/11 Memorial in New York City which I had a chance to see in July, may still be important because it is rooted in a certain space. Here is one picture from the site (with the to-be-completed museum in the background):

The collective memory may be rooted in the World Trade Center site but it is now more diffuse. Public commemoration can now be done from anywhere. The 9/11 site can be experienced through websites and Google Street View. Videos can be watched online. People can share their memories from that day and where they were when they heard the news. Now participants can more widely share their memories and opinions rather than just relying on the “big narrative” to which memorials often point.

Perhaps these social media expressions were in part foretold by these new memorials themselves which encourage reflection and having viewers read their own interpretation into display. The classic example is the Vietnam Wall in Washington, D.C. which was deliberately designed to move around controversial views of the war and allow people to reflect on the lives lost. See this classic 1991 piece in the American Journal of Sociology by Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz titled “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past.” Social media simply furthers this process but also possibly gives interpretations from individuals the potential to reach wider audiences.

Claim: McMansions are part of what defines Austin, Texas

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This was interesting to see: a columnist argues Austin, Texas is partly defined by its McMansions.

Various quirks are used as examples of what makes Austin special: all those waiters who have Ph.D.s, the amazing number of restaurants on wheels, the traffic jams on Interstate 35 that can run for miles, the nose rings, the iPhone people texting each other from across the room, the McMansions, the California transplants, the allergies, the sneezing … name your favorite.

The doesn’t seem to fit the common story about Austin which has a reputation as a cool and up and coming city. It is home to SXSW, the creative class, the flagship campus of the University of Texas system, and a number of tech companies. So who let in the poorly designed, possibly Republican, neighborhood-destroying McMansions? (These are just some of the critiques leveled

Interestingly, Austin has had some public discussions about McMansions. For example, Austin passed a “McMansion ordinance” which I blogged about last year. Perhaps this has been driven by the influx of new (and wealthier?) residents who want to partake of Austin’s older neighborhoods but also want modern homes.

Oddity of Illinois Home Rule allows municipalities to get into a lot of debt

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The Chicago Tribune has an interesting piece of how the Illinois oddity of granting Home Rule powers to municipalities starting in 1970 can lead to overborrowing:

The state used to cap how much towns could borrow on the backs of taxpayers. Even for loans under the cap, the state forced cities and villages to put many “general obligation” borrowing deals before voters. The intent was to protect taxpayers from massive debt.

But local officials complained they needed easier ways to borrow. Chicago’s first Mayor Richard Daley led the charge for municipalities to set their own rules. The result was the 1970 Illinois Constitution and a concept that transformed how the city and suburbs are governed: home rule.

It has let towns borrow as much as they want, and raise many taxes, all without direct voter input. Any town with at least 25,000 residents gets the power. Smaller towns can vote it in via a referendum measure…

The vast majority of states — including all of the largest ones — do not offer municipalities such blank checks.

Ken Small of the Florida League of Cities said he would worry if his state had Illinois’ loose rules.

Read on for details on how several Chicago suburbs have accumulated massive amounts of debt.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen any municipal leaders denounce or reject Home Rule powers. Indeed, they tend to accentuate the positive sides of the powers as they allow municipalities more local control and the ability to finance projects on their own rather than having to rely on outside funding. And this would seem to fit with what many suburban residents tend to want as well: more local control, meaning that “big government” doesn’t control everything.

But, as this article suggests, local government officials aren’t necessarily any better at handling financing and borrowing. I was struck by reading this piece and an earlier one featuring the plight of Bridgeview, Illinois that a number of these borrowing situations arose when smaller communities wanted to jumpstart economic development. Struggling to do things on their own, they borrowed lots of money for retail, residential, and entertainment projects intended to bring in more tax dollars through property and sales taxes. A number of these projects didn’t pan out, possibly because of unrealistic hopes and also because the economic crisis made it difficult even for established and more financially stable communities to pursue larger developments. The lesson here? Perhaps slow and steady really is better here as big change for small communities is difficult to attain.

Another issue: the article suggests Chicago led the way to get the 1970 legislative act passed. Were some communities opposed to this or did they get behind Chicago as this could also benefit them?

Portland so progressive that it ignores issues of race?

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A sociologist who teaches about race at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon suggests the city is comfortable discussing and dealing with a lot of issues but not so much when it comes to race:

Miller, who is writing a book tentatively titled “Blacklandia” about the racial awkwardness she’s observed in Portland, says the small black population in Multnomah County (5.7 percent) has made it too easy for white people to avoid ever having to mix with blacks, much less become comfortable with them…

Miller’s point isn’t that Portland is a particularly racist city. In fact, she doesn’t think that at all. But people here are so satisfied with their progressive self-images, she says, that they are neglecting issues that affect the black community. As a result, she says, Portland becomes a less livable city for everybody.

Miller says she’s constantly being reminded that whites here have a lot of bottled up feelings about race they’d like to get out of their system. But they don’t know how.

She spends a lot of time alone at local bars. Miller says they are great places to do sociological research. Often, white people in Portland who start chatting with her in bars learn she has a Ph.D. Invariably after that, Miller says, all they want to talk about is race, as if after a lifetime of searching they’ve finally found an educated black person to whom they can talk.

“I feel like Oprah,” Miller says. “I can’t even sit there and have a cocktail.”

I don’t think Portland, Oregon is the only place where it is difficult to have conversations about race. This is an American issue not just limited to places with relatively lower percentages of minorities.

Honduras moving forward with the construction of three private cities

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Honduras is moving forward in allowing three private cities to be built though some have voiced objections:

The “model cities” will have their own judiciary, laws, governments and police forces. They also will be empowered to sign international agreements on trade and investment and set their own immigration policy.

Congress president Juan Hernandez said the investment group MGK will invest $15 million to begin building basic infrastructure for the first model city near Puerto Castilla on the Caribbean coast. That first city would create 5,000 jobs over the next six months and up to 200,000 jobs in the future, Hernandez said. South Korea has given Honduras $4 million to conduct a feasibility study, he said…

The project is opposed by civic groups as well as the indigenous Garifuna people, who say they don’t want their land near Puerto Castilla on the Caribbean coast to be used for the project. Living along Central America’s Caribbean coast, the Garifuna are descendants of the Amazon’s Arawak Indians, the Caribbean’s Caribes and escaped West African slaves…

The president of Honduras will appoint “globally respected international figures” without financial interests in the projects to nine-member independent boards that will oversee the running of the cities, whose daily operations will be administered by a board-appointed governor. Future appointments to the board will be decided by votes by standing board members, Strong said.

I could understand how this would be alluring for governments that are struggling to attract foreign capital and create jobs. However, privatization on this scale sounds daunting and possible problematic. It is one thing to have developers own and run neighborhoods or particular projects; but a whole city? With separate international powers and not having to follow Honduran law? With a future promise of allowing citizens to vote? I could imagine some of the responses from urban sociologists who write about the privatization of public space. What happens when these developers run afoul of citizens or Honduran law and conventions? What kind of free speech rights will citizens have and will they have any say in what happens? It is one thing to have to follow the rules of corporations in private-public spaces in American cities (see these examples in San Francisco) but another when the whole city follows the guidelines of developers or “respected international figures.”

Assuming this moves forward and the cities are built, it will be fascinating to see what happens.

McMansions being built in the wildland urban interface

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Here is an argument that more McMansions are being built in the wildland urban interface and this is leading to problems with forest fires:

But in go-go America, these scientific truisms were no match for McMansion fantasies. As coastal folk headed to the Rocky Mountain frontier with visions of big-but-inexpensive castles far away from the inner city, the term “zoning” became an even more despised epithet than it already had been in cowboy country.

Rangeland and foothill frontiers subsequently became expansive low-density subdivisions, and carbon-belching SUVs chugged onto new roads being built farther and farther away from the urban core. That is, farther and farther into what the federal government calls the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) and what fire experts call the dangerous “red zone.”

The numbers are stark: According to The Denver Post, between 1990 and 2000, 40 percent of all homes built in the nation were built in the WUI — and “a Colorado State University analysis expects a 300 percent increase in WUI acreage in the next couple decades.”

In the last two decades in fire-scorched Colorado alone, I-News Network reports that “a quarter million people have moved into red zones,” meaning that today “one of every four Colorado homes is in a red zone.”

I had never heard of the wildland urban interface before. To put it in other terms, it sounds like many new homes are being built in exurban areas, the leading edges of metropolitan areas. There are advantages and disadvantages to this: the land is likely quite cheaper and people can have bigger pieces of property and newer homes. But, there are negative consequences such as having to drive further to get places and the environmental impact.

Here is more information on the wildland urban interface in Colorado from Colorado State University. And here is an interesting opinion piece in the Denver Post about how to improve the narratives about WUI fires.