Category Archives: Sociology

Pushing back against the housing plans of the wealthy in suburban Palo Alto

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One elected local government official wants to limit what wealthy residents can build in suburban Palo Alto:

View Palo Alto, California Eadweard by thegetty is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

The proposed legislation would apply to people who buy three or more homes within a radius of 500 feet, roughly the length of a city block. Any construction project expected to last more than 180 days would need a detailed daily schedule of construction work to prove it can be conducted without double-parking vehicles or blocking driveways or bike lanes.

After finishing one construction project, homeowners would need to wait three years to begin another unless a major emergency occurred. Homes could not be vacant for more than six months in any given year.

The proposal relies on neighbors for enforcement, leaving it up to another homeowner or tenant living within 500 feet to file a lawsuit.

The proposal would place new restrictions on private security guards across Palo Alto, not just those serving wealthy homeowners. All security vehicles would have to be marked and permitted by the city. Security guards would have to identify themselves to the public when asked. They would be prohibited from harassing or intimidating passers-by on public property…

The full Palo Alto City Council is likely to take up Mr. Stone’s proposal in January or February. Mr. Stone said he is confident that a majority of the seven-member council, which has taken a keen interest in housing affordability, would support the general framework but could send it to a committee or city staff member for refinement. It could take six months or longer to reach a final vote, he said.

Three things strike me about this proposal:

  1. It is clearly aimed at particular residents. Not just people with some wealth, who might be found across American suburban communities, but people who are truly wealthy and can afford this kind of construction and property ownership and all that goes with it.
  2. Communities often deal with these concerns at the zoning level. How big can a structure or house be? Are the guidelines in particular areas or in regards to property lines? The proposal above seems to deal with other matters that come along with regular approval of megahouses and properties.
  3. The regulations are about property but local conversations often have to do with local character and community life. Do such homes (and people) fit in the community? Who can live in a place where such properties are common? Who is Palo Alto for? Suburbs often implicitly or explicitly have these discussions while considering development.

Now that this proposal is out there, how do wealthier residents respond and what will the final local regulations be?

McMansions as short-term rentals, fake images of downtown Chicago, and news about housing

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I search regularly for interesting news about McMansions. I recently ran across a headline that seemed plausible: “The Rise of Suburban Tourism: How Empty McMansions Are Redefining Vacation Stays.” But the headline was paired with a particular picture:

Image at link

I am familiar with the Chicago skyline and lakefront. This image is…interesting. It has elements of the Chicago lakefront. A big body of water. Some iconic buildings. The Bean. Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable Lake Shore Drive and parks along the water.

But it is also clearly wrong. The buildings are not where they should be. The lakefront is not in the right pattern. The Bean is not located on a pedestal next to the water. The local highway does not empty onto the lakefront road in that manner. And so on.

So is the McMansion story true? The summary/conclusion:

Empty McMansions in the suburbs of the United States are reshaping tourism patterns, with many tourists now seeking more dynamic urban destinations. However, these empty homes also present new opportunities for suburban areas to adjust and offer new experiences for visitors. Through creative uses of space, a focus on sustainable tourism, and rebranding efforts, suburban regions can continue to evolve as attractive destinations for a new generation of travelers.

Are more McMansions being rented out? Is this changing tourism patterns in metropolitan regions? is there any evidence of this happening? There is little in the story to provide evidence for the argument.

I will keep my eyes open for similar news but the fake image of Chicago does not inspire confidence.

57+ years to build a highway ramp

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A significant construction project means a new interchange will be open between I-294 and North Avenue. It was supposed to happen decades ago:

Photo by Kindel Media on Pexels.com

The tollway collaborated with Cook County on a broader North Avenue interchange project. Along with the ramp, it includes realigning County Farm Road and rebuilding and reconfiguring North Avenue, Lake Street, Northwest Avenue and I-290 Frontage Road.

“I’m surprised (the ramp) was never built originally when they built the tollway seeing as North Avenue is so busy,” Sherwin said.

A major hotel was built in Northlake near the Tri-State in 1968 “on the promise that they were going to get the ramp. The ramp didn’t come (and) the hotel went bust,” Sherwin recounted, adding the site is currently home to Concorde Place seniors residence.

“Here we are 57 years later; we finally got the ramp open.”

The best time for a lot of infrastructure improvements is in the past, before there is significant need now. This particular interchange has always had a weird convergence of roadways. Perhaps a ramp built decades ago could have made traffic flow better.

But this is easy to say in the present. What stopped the ramp from being constructed in the past? Money is often an issue; who will pay for the road improvement? Or the possible money needed to be spent elsewhere on bigger issues. Maybe the issue was land. Highway interchanges can be limited by the space they have. It is easier to construct interchanges when there is plenty of room for ramps and land is cheap.

And what happens if the ramp is a success and more and more people use it? Building more lanes and road capacity can lead to more use. Those who got on and off the highway elsewhere or who used alternate roads may now choose this improved interchange. The new interchange will alter the dynamic traffic conditions…hopefully for the better.

Letters to editor share why they like the suburbs

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The Washington Post recently published several letters from people explaining why they like their suburban lives. A few excerpts:

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But having lived in a suburban setting for 30-plus years, I don’t recognize any of those assumptions. My neighborhood, on the fringe of a city of 560,000, is multicultural, interconnected and solar-friendly. Everyone knows each other and finds ways to help with any need. We can walk to grocers, restaurants and other basic services. Many neighborhood groups meet regularly to play poker, discuss books or just go to lunch.

Ours is a planned community, but houses were built by different builders at different times. Thus no “little boxes made of ticky-tacky” all in a row. Just opening up areas to be developed without good planning produces the negative view of suburbs. It doesn’t have to be that way — suburban living can be as good as it gets…

Forty years later, we realize that’s not going to happen. Daily life is simply easier here. For food shopping and medical care, there are abundant choices with abundant free parking. The logistics of taking our two toddlers to preschool programs was much simpler than my struggles navigating strollers on buses or in the subway. Connections with our community have been literally lifesaving, and the scale of life is small enough that local officials are responsive. When we moved here and our garbage wasn’t collected one day, a neighbor told us to call the town’s highway department. A supervisor came by, and rang our bell to apologize. The post office took checks; the clerk remarked with a smile, “We know where you live.”…

I love the old custom architecture and charm of my city friends’ homes. But it sure is nice to be able to just go to Home Depot and buy a door or window that fits instead of needing custom everything. All that special old brick and special old stained glass comes with a hefty dose of special pain in the you-know-what.

While the writers do not exactly go through the seven reasons why Americans love suburbs, there are some patterns in this small selection of letters: the suburbs are not necessarily what outsiders might think, life in the suburbs can be pretty good, and there are certain conveniences to suburban life.

Another observation one letter writer hinted at: people are shaped by their environments. Making a major move from one place to another can require a lot of work and change. People have some flexibility and they can also get very used to where they are. With millions of Americans having grown up in the suburbs and millions living there now, the suburbs are known, if not preferred by some.

This also reminds me of an ongoing question I have about places: how exactly do people learn about their own community and communities that are not their own? People have only so much time and ability to see or hear about other places. How does a suburbanite find out what it is like living in a big city or a rural area and all the different possibilities in either of those? There are common narratives and assumptions made about all of these places they might be hard to dispel without direct experiences in other settings.

How many data centers does the United States have, want, and need?

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Datacentermap.com says there are 4,287 data centers in the United States.

Photo by Brett Sayles on Pexels.com

How do they know how many data centers are in the country? Their explanation:

Our data originates from multiple sources, primarily:

  • Operators: Data center operators and service providers use Data Center Map as a marketing tool, to promote their data centers, networks and services to potential clients. They have direct access to add and update listings.
  • External sources: We monitor multiple external databases, to identify missing or changed listings. They are automatically queued for manual review.
  • Manual sourcing: We manually identify operators that we are missing and manually add them to our database.
  • End-users: End-users send us tips and requests, about missing or outdated listings, that we manually handle…

As there are no regulatory requirements to register data centers in a central database, there are no complete resources available. All databases are based on voluntary data submissions and/or collecting data from providers or other sources.

How many data centers are needed for the United States? From what I have read, data centers are under construction in order to meet the current and future needs of AI technology. The future needs might be hard to forecast. Within a few years, what newer tech and AI products will be considered essential?

How many data centers are wanted? I am thinking of two possible scenarios. First, tech companies might want a certain number of data centers to meet needs and have extra capacity. But, they can only build so many and they can meet needs and maybe only a little more.. Second, communities and residents may not want some of these data centers. While this opposition often occurs community by community, this could add up to limit the number of data centers throughout the country.

It will be interesting to see where this number ends up. And if the number keeps going up, how many people living around them or driving by them will know and/or care they are there?

Analyzing what Americans value by examining lots of obituaries

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How are people remembered? One team of researchers analyzed millions of obituaries. Here is the abstract from the recently published study:

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How societies remember the dead can reveal what people value in life. We analyzed 38 million obituaries from the United States to examine how personal values are encoded in individual and collective legacies. Using Schwartz’s theory of basic human values, we found that tradition and benevolence dominated legacy reflections, while values like power and stimulation appeared less frequently. Major cultural events—the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the 2008 financial crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic—were systematically linked to changes in legacy reflections about personal values, with security declining after 9/11, achievement declining after the financial crisis, and benevolence declining for years after COVID-19 began and, to date, not yet returning to baseline. Gender and age of the deceased were also linked to differences in legacy: Men were remembered more for achievement, power, and conformity, while women were remembered more for benevolence and hedonism. Older people were remembered more for tradition and conformity than younger people. These patterns shifted dynamically across the lifespan, with obituaries for men showing more age-related variation than legacies for women. Our findings reveal how obituaries serve as psychological and cultural time capsules, preserving not just individual legacies, but also indicating what US society values collectively regarding a life well lived.

This sounds like a novel means by which to examine American cultural values. Obituaries are regularly published and are often accessible to many readers. But to collect and analyze millions of obituaries requires particular skills. This is a big data approach.

The study could also raise multiple additional research questions:

  1. How many of these obituaries were written by the deceased or decided upon before death? Does this change the content?
  2. What is the process by which people writing the obituary after death decide on the words to use and values to emphasize?
  3. How much do these values in obituaries match what people say they value in life at different stages before they die?

The role of housing in the unsettled lives of American 30 to 45 year olds

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Where does owning a home fit in the changing lives of adults after emerging adulthood and in “established adulthood”? Here are some hints:

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels.com

When Mehta appeared on camera bouncing her newborn in her lap, that professor started laughing sympathetically. She’d just read Mehta’s 2020 paper on the life phase from age 30 to 45, which described it as a hurricane of major changes and responsibilities. Career advances, marriage, parenthood, homeownership, care for aging parents—for many people these days, the paper had argued, all of those milestones fall in a short and furious chunk of time. And here Mehta was, embodying that point.

The connection between Mehta’s circumstances and her academic focus wasn’t a coincidence. Mehta was in her 30s when she started noticing that no one seemed to be studying her own age group. Her colleague Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, the author of Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late Teens Through the Twenties, had become an expert in ages 18 to 29. Psychologists of middle age, meanwhile, were usually observing those in their 50s and early 60s. She’d reached a part of life that was anything but quiet, yet when she looked to her field for answers, she heard relative silence.

Now, at 45, she has interviewed many, many people in this stage, which she named “established adulthood.” She believes that life for the youngish—especially for women—is getting only more hectic. The average man is parenting (a little) more than he used to, and the average woman is working outside the home (a lot) more than she used to. And compared with eras past, people today tend to be older when they begin hitting the classic landmarks of adulthood. A typical young person might once have, say, met a partner in their teens, married and started a family at 20-something, then taken on more career responsibility or begun caring for an ailing parent while in their 30s. Now all of these formative experiences are getting compressed. Many people do cherish this time, Mehta told me. But the fact remains that they’re in the “rush hour of life”—and they may be dealing with a milestone pileup…

Recently, this period of uncertainty has been getting longer: Many young people are saddled with debt, searching for work in a brutal job market, unable to afford buying a house. Building a career, a home, or lasting relationships—all things that can help shape a person’s sense of self—have become more difficult. And as emerging adulthood expands, it eats into the next stage of life.

From what I have seen of different surveys and published work, a majority of adults still want to pursue homeownership. Buying a residence is still an important part of adulthood and achieving the American Dream.

But this summary above and other work also suggests that this may be delayed and/or more difficult than in the past. The expectation in the postwar decades that young adults could buy a home in their 20s and perhaps on one family salary is hard to live up to today. A variety of social factors mean that homeownership is now delayed. This means more years of other living arrangements plus potential changes to how people feel about homeownership.

Given this increased difficulty, it would not surprise me if in the next decade or two fewer adults ages 18-45 say they want a home. When faced with obstacles, some people will turn to other priorities or adapt to the possibilities they do have. And it would get interesting if less than a majority of adults say they to own their residence; how does this change individuals, communities, the housing industry, and more?

McMansions are now just another established housing style in the United States

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There are a number of established residential architectural styles in the United States. Victorian. Colonial. Ranch. Split-level. And the McMansion.

According to this Ngram viewer result, the term McMansion entered use in the late 1990s and then its use went up a lot between 2002 and 2011.

This roughly fits with what I found in my 2012 article on defining McMansions. The multi-faceted term described a newer wave of houses in a particular cultural moment.

What the Ngram above shows since 2011 matches what I have informally seen about McMansions since 2011: they are now just part of the landscape. They are not new. Americans build, sell, and buy them. They still are derided. There are dips up and down in the Ngram viewer but it has not changed much since 2011.

New residential styles will come in the future. Changes to society, the economy, housing, and preferences will lead to new designs that will then be assessed and critiqued. Perhaps they will bear some resemblance to McMansions, perhaps they go in completely different directions. The McMansion will live on among existing and new housing styles.

What it took for a successful suburban musician to push against their suburb’s push to go to college

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A look back at the life of musician Justin Baren, member of The Redwalls, highlights how they forged a path to music success from their suburban upbringing:

Along with his older brother, Logan, Baren was an obsessive fan of the British Invasion sound of the 1960s, which he channeled into the band the brothers formed while students at Deerfield High School. Jordan Kozer, the band’s first drummer, recounted how the brothers studied Beatles albums like holy scripture; Justin would record rehearsals and require the others to spend hours listening to their mistakes to get their parts right the next time.

“He didn’t know anything else. He didn’t try anything else. Deerfield was pushing people to go to college. He and Logan didn’t care anything at all about that. They were laser focused on making this happen. There was no backup plan,” Kozer said.

The perseverance worked. On the same day of their high school graduation, the band was in Los Angeles signing a contract with Capitol Records, the U.S. label of the Beatles. Two years later, the Redwalls opened shows for Oasis in U.K. soccer stadiums…

“From a very early age, we knew the kids in high school weren’t going to be our scene,” Justin told this writer in 2005. “We wanted to get into the real music scene and not be limited by what other kids were saying or doing. We wanted to be Downtown where it was happening.”…

Despite their age, their hard work, sophisticated musical sensibilities, confidence and charisma impressed the network of music professionals in the city. The Redwalls, which included guitarist Andrew Langer, solicited the help of Mitch Marlow, then the talent buyer for a music club in Evanston, by blindly handing him a cassette tape of their music. “What nerve, they put Beatles outtakes on a cassette and are saying it’s their band,” Marlow first thought, until realizing days later the recordings were contemporary…

Marlow ended up managing the group. He booked headlining shows for them at Double Door, the Hideout and Metro. He recorded them, encouraged them to keep writing original songs and introduced them to Bob Andrews, co-founder of Champaign indie label Undertow Music, a collaboration that resulted in “Universal Blues,” the band’s 2003 debut. They were high school seniors.

To become a professional in many fields requires focus and practice. To do this by the end of high school is impressive.

It is interesting to hear that Baren and the band did this while pushing against what was expected of them in their suburban high school. Deerfield High School is a highly rated institution and like many such schools encourages students to go to college. What would parents say to students in similar schools who say they want to pursue music rather than going to college? How many high school musicians are able to secure a record deal and open for a major rock group? Is this a good life path?

And then the path toward music success moved away from their suburban community to Chicago. They played in music venues utilized by numerous music groups, small and big. They got into the music networks of promoters and venues and labels that are based in big cities.

Was there anything in their music or performances that would belie their suburban roots? Maybe not. But the story of suburban high school to major record label is rare even as there must be plenty of suburbanites among successful music artists in the United States.

Schwinn once an important Chicago company but the industry and the world changed

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A look at a new documentary on the bicycle company Schwinn tells of how it was once a Chicago company and then it was not:

Photo by Jess Loiterton on Pexels.com

The story starts in 1895, when German immigrants Ignaz Schwinn and Adolph Arnold founded Arnold, Schwinn & Co. in Chicago. Schwinn would subsequently buy out his partner and build an enduring family business that would reign over the bicycle industry for generations, surviving the rise of the automobile, the Depression and two world wars.

In fact, the original six-story Schwinn factory at Lake and Peoria streets in Fulton Market still stands as a monument to Chicago’s erstwhile bike company, with plans to redevelop the now-vacant building into office space…

As market share dwindled, Schwinn began outsourcing production. By 1983, Schwinn ceased its Chicago manufacturing, laying off 1,800 employees and moving most of its production overseas to Taiwan.

In 1992, struggling with debt, the storied Chicago company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy under fourth-generation owner Ed Schwinn…

The bike company has rolled on under a succession of new owners and is now part of Dutch conglomerate Pon, with Schwinn based in Madison, Wisconsin. But the movie focuses on the Chicago glory years, when the Schwinn brand ruled the sidewalks, schoolyards and bike lanes.

This might be the story of a number of companies over the years. They had success with lots of work and new ideas. They rose to become a known and popular brand. But then industries and places changed. People no longer wanted the product in the same way. They moved manufacturing overseas. They hit hard financial times and even though the brand name lives on, it has done so under the ownership of different companies and the company is now based in another city.

And this could also be the story of places. Chicago, like a number of American cities, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, were centers for manufacturing. American companies produced a lot for decades. And much of that went elsewhere by the end of the twentieth century. Sociologist William Julius Wilson describes these shifts and their effects on neighborhoods in When Work Disappears. The loss of tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs was a hard blow to many cities who struggled to pursue or grow other businesses or industries in subsequent years.

In the big picture, both companies and places go through cycles and lifespans. They do not necessarily continue as they have been, even when they are successful. We tend to like the stories of their rise and it can be harder to wrestle with their falls. But both are part of the human experience.