“Not one police (officer) came in the 16 hours we were stuck,” she said. “No one came. It was just shocking. Being in the most advanced country in the world, no one knew how to even clear one lane for all of us to get out of that mess?”
I have seen some version of this quote in numerous contexts in recent months. It could reference:
-health care
-US military and political involvement in Afghanistan
-infrastructure issues
-conducting elections
-responding to natural disasters
-passing basic legislation
The expectation is that the United States is highly advanced or the most advanced country in the world. The country boasts a history of innovation and pragmatism, a powerful military, and an influential set of ideals. If all of this is true, why then can the United States not address such basic issues (in the eyes of the questioner)?
Implicit in this question is whether the United States exists amid a massive contradiction. For all of those markers of success, perhaps the country is not as advanced as its people think. Perhaps there are difficult issues to solve, complex concerns that we do not know how to or do not have the will to address.
Take the above example of unexpected bad weather. Large highway backups during snowstorms are not unknown in the United States. They occur even in areas more accustomed to cold and snow. Sure, local responses can differ. But, these systems are complex with natural forces, hundreds of autonomous drivers, governments and private actors responding, and the relatively long distances Americans are used to traveling on a daily basis.
All of the issues mentioned above as something an advanced country should be able to address are not simple. The expectation that a country should always easily get it right might be unrealistic. Even so, if a large number of people think the issue should be easily solvable, this quickly becomes a problem when it is not.
Parents define for their children the role that religious faith and practice ought to play in life, whether important or not, which most children roughly adopt. Parents set a “glass ceiling” of religious commitment above which their children rarely rise. Parental religious investment and involvement is in almost all cases the necessary and even sometimes sufficient condition for children’s religious investment and involvement.
This parental primacy in religious transmission is significant because, even though most parents do realize it when they think about it, their crucial role often runs in the background of their busy lives; it is not a conscious, daily, strategic matter. Furthermore, many children do not recognize the power that their parents have in shaping their religious lives but instead view themselves as autonomous information processors making independent, self-directing decisions. Widespread cultural scripts also consistently say that the influence of parents over their children recedes starting with the onset of puberty, while the influence of peers, music, and social media takes over.
Other common and influential cultural scripts operate to disempower parents by telling them that they are not qualified to care for their children in many ways, so they should turn their children over to experts. Further, the perceptions of at least some (frustrated) staff at religious congregations is that more than a few parents assume that others besides themselves (the staff) are responsible for forming their children religiously (in Sunday school, youth group, confirmation, catechism, etc.).
Yet all empirical data tell us that for intergenerational religious transmission today, the key agents are parents, not clergy or other religious professionals. The key location is the home, not religious congregations. And the key mechanisms of socialization are the formation of ordinary life practices and identities, not programs, preaching, or formal rites of passage.
There are multiple implications of these findings. I’ll briefly consider one hinted at above. In the United States, religion is often considered an individual matter. A believer is one who has consciously made a choice in their religious beliefs, behaviors, and belonging. In the American religious system, there is plenty of freedom to make such choices, whether one is identifying with a different religious tradition, putting together multiple pieces from different traditions, or citing no religiosity at all.
But, sociology as a discipline suggests no one is a complete free agent. This applies in all areas of life, including religion. We are pressured – a negative connotation often in the American context but social pressure can be positive or negative – by society and its parts.
If a religious tradition then emphasizes agency and authenticity regarding faith, it has the possibility of ignoring or downplaying social forces at work. Take evangelicals. According to the Bebbington Quadrilateral, one feature of this group is conversionism. This emphasis on a religious conversion often refers to an individual moment when a believer made a decision and/or had a definable conversion experience. This helps establish that this is a true and authentic faith, in comparison to being a cultural Christian or adopting the faith of one’s family or people.
The excerpt above does not suggest that the actions of a parent – or other social actors or institutions – always leads to a certain outcome but rather that how parents interact with religion increases or decreases the likelihood of religious faith of their kids. It is not deterministic but it is a demonstrable pattern where social forces – parents – influence individuals regarding religiosity.
If parents influence the faith of a teenager, is that teenager’s faith less real? Or, is this how human life works: we are influenced by social forces around us and we have the ability to exercise some agency?
Yes, public transit ridership dropped like a stone after many places instituted stay-at-home orders. Americans took 186 million transit rides in the last week of February 2020, according to data compiled by the American Public Transit Association; a month later, that number had fallen by 72 percent, to 52.4 million. At the Port Authority of Allegheny County, which operates in the Pittsburgh area, ridership fell 68 percent.
Who kept riding? In a country where race is tied to economic opportunity and geography, transit riders have long been disproportionately low-income and people of color. Maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise, but they were the riders who stuck around. An analysis from the APTA found that white men were more likely to have given up transit during the pandemic; people of color, people who spoke Spanish, and women did not…
But US public transit has generally focused on commuters, especially those with traditional 9-to-5 schedules, who travel between city fringes and downtown business districts—riders who are less likely to be low-income and more likely to be white. That’s despite the fact that, even in the biggest cities, where transit use is more common, just half of pre-pandemic trips were to and from work. In smaller systems, the share is even less. The Port Authority of Allegheny County isn’t an exception. “Our system is very downtown centric, and it has historically relied very much on the commuter,” says Brandolph, the spokesperson. As a result, service within cities, serving people with less-regular work schedules or who took transit for other purposes, got short shrift.
That age may be over, says Alex Karner, who studies transportation equity as an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Architecture. “The pandemic really exposed the truth that there are people for whom public transit is a vitally important public service,” he says. He says agencies now realize they will no longer be able to rely on peak-period commuters. When Urban Institute researchers surveyed 73 US and Canadian agencies on what service might look like in a “post-pandemic” era, more than half said they thought “peak period” travel would decrease. Nearly 70 percent said white-collar workers would take fewer rides. So transit agencies must decide what the new normal will be—and who it will serve.
In the long run, when wealthier residents are asked to devote more funds to mass transit for equity and those who need it, will they agree? In Chicago, this has manifest in limited mass transit service in some areas compared to others. The new federal money means the Red Line can be extended on the South side. How far can efforts go? In other metro areas in recent years, wealthier suburbanites (see Nashville) have rejected efforts to expand mass transit. When suburbs are increasingly diverse and home to poorer residents, is there will to have consistent mass transit service?
The central message sent from the history of the future is that it’s not helpful to think about “theFuture.” A much more productive strategy is to think about futures; rather than “prediction,” it pays to think probabilistically about a range of potential outcomes and evaluate them against a range of different sources. Technology has a significant role to play here, but it’s critical to bear in mind the lessons from World3 and Limits to Growth about the impact that assumptions have on eventual outcomes. The danger is that modern predictions with an AI imprint are considered more scientific, and hence more likely to be accurate, than those produced by older systems of divination. But the assumptions underpinning the algorithms that forecast criminal activity, or identify potential customer disloyalty, often reflect the expectations of their coders in much the same way as earlier methods of prediction did.
Social scientists have long hoped to contribute to accurate predictions. We want to both better understand what is happening now as well as provide insights into what will come after.
The idea of thinking probabilistically is a key part of the Statistics course I teach each fall semester. We can easily fall into using language that suggests we “prove” things or relationships. This implies certainty and we often think science leads to certainty, laws, and cause and effect. However, when using statistics we are usually making estimates about the population from the samples and information we have in front of us. Instead of “proving” things, we can speak to the likelihood of something happening or the degree to which one variable affects another. Our certainty of these relationships or outcomes might be higher or lower, depending on the information we are working with.
All of this relates to predictions. We can work to improve our current models to better understand current or past conditions but the future involves changes that are harder to know. Like inferential statistics, making predictions involves using certain information we have now to come to conclusions.
The idea of thinking both (1) probabilistically and (2) plural futures can help us understand our limitations in considering the future. In regards to probabilities, we can higher or lower likelihoods regarding our predictions of what will happen. In thinking of plural futures, we can work with multiple options or pathways that may occur. All of this should be accompanied by humility and creativity as it is difficult to predict the future, even with great information today.
When it comes to housing, it might be better to think about the U.S. as a country of 384 metro areas (plus 50 million Americans who don’t live in places big enough to qualify as a metro area) rather than one continuous country. In 2021, the U.S. population grew just 0.1% – the lowest annual expansion rate since our nation’s founding. But housing dynamics are best viewed through the different metro areas that are growing and shrinking. Of the 384 metro areas, 72 had declining populations in the decade leading to 2020, according to the Census.
The general argument makes some sense: supply and demand for housing depends on the metropolitan region. I have lived in one of these regions that has very limited demand for housing and experienced numerous foreclosures in the late 2000s. In places such as these, housing is cheap and plentiful – but there are relatively few people who want to move there and, if they do, there is limited desire to rehab older homes. On the other hand, the activity in particular housing markets – such as the coverage of housing and population in Manhattan and San Francisco during COVID-19 – draws all sorts of attention because of the prices and demand. All of this contributes to why housing is difficult to address at a national level.
More broadly, seeing the United States as a collection of metropolitan regions (or expanded citystates?) may make some sense. For example, the 9+ million people in the Chicago region may see themselves as more of a collective than describing people from Illinois or people from the Midwest. These people share a particular housing and jobs market, common sources of information, entertainment options, a transportation network, and regional forces.
Of course, some regions may be more like other regions. Scholars have examined some of these broader collections, such as Rust Belt or Sunbelt regions or immigrant gateways, or used particular cities as models – particularly Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles – by which we can better understand all cities and regions. Yet, even these regions that share common characteristics have particular histories and current realities that would help set them apart from other.
All of this gets at an ongoing issue in sociology and other disciplines: at what point is it worthwhile to group phenomena together because of common traits or is it better to leave them as distinct entities because of their differences? There are both common traits in and a lot of variation among the 384 metro areas (plus all the other people living outside metro areas). At least for housing, it is tempting to treat each market as unique even as there are common patterns.
The difficulties of living alone tend to lie more on a societal level, outside the realm of personal decision making. For one thing, having a partner makes big and small expenditures much more affordable, whether it’s a down payment on a house, rent, day care, utility bills, or other overhead costs of daily life. One recent study estimated that, for a couple, living separately is about 28 percent more expensive than living together.
These efficiencies are an inherent feature of sharing costs with other people, but the barriers to living alone, for those who want to, would be much lower if housing (and health care, and education) weren’t so expensive. Moreover, the types of housing that are most commonly available for one person typically privilege privacy over togetherness, but the two don’t need to be mutually exclusive. DePaulo has studied communities where single residents have their own spaces, but also plentiful shared areas with “the possibility of running into other people.” If you need to, say, move heavy furniture or get a ride somewhere in an emergency, your neighbors are easy to reach. More such options would make solo life easier.
With the rise in housing prices, the barrier to entering the housing market keeps increasing. A single-person household has fewer potential resources to draw upon.
Additionally, a good portion of housing is geared toward families or larger households. While some locations have plenty of smaller units – think studios to two bedroom units – other locations have larger residences. For example, suburbs are often full of single-family homes with 3+ bedrooms and more square feet.
Finally, housing in the United States is often tied to ideas of familial bliss. Those same private suburban homes are meant to enhance family life. Residences provide private spaces for nuclear families. They may have outdoor space for kids to play in and adults to use. Homes are a symbol of success and can provide a good long-term return on investment. Can a single person still enjoy and benefit from a house? Yes, but this may not be the typical image of life in a single-family home.
Rather, changes in home price growth, the supply of homes for sale and upticks in rock-bottom interest rates are more likely to stabilize the market after an unpredictable 2021, they said. That likely won’t mean an end to competition or high prices — and it doesn’t bode well for first-time homebuyers — but the market could ease up compared with 2021…
In the nine-county Chicago metro area, the median home sale price from January to November was $300,000, up nearly 12% over the same months in 2020, according to the Illinois Association of Realtors…
Prices are likely to rise next year, but won’t continue the exponential growth of 2021, said Daniel McMillen, head of the Stuart Handler Department of Real Estate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Without an influx of new residents to the area or big increases in incomes, that growth will become unsustainable, he said…
Homebuyers are continuing to look for amenities like home offices and workout areas, Melbourne said. Kitchens are a priority. Condo-buyers are looking for bigger units, rather than one-bedrooms.
The pressure from COVID-19 moves will hopefully subside. Then, the more regular patterns in Chicago area real estate might take over again. There are at least several interrelated factors:
Uneven development within the region where some neighborhoods and suburbs will be popular and others not. Prices will go up in desirable places.
Construction of new residences has been down. What kind of units will be built? If recent trends hold, it will be housing aimed more at wealthier residents. Additionally, these units will be constructed in some locations and not others.
On one hand, this is a set of popular posts covering a range of topics from affordable housing to transportation to online real estate to marketing suburbs to community reactions to a proposal from a religious group regarding their property. COVID-19 did not dominate the top of the list nor did politics.
On the other hand, like in 2020, these most popular posts all had to do with place. In particular, four of the five had to do with the Chicago region. Several touched on topics on which I have published research. I vowed at the beginning of 2021 to continue to publish posts about places and this will continue in 2022. I continue to be convinced that place is understudied and not discussed enough as an critical factor in many of the questions facing the United States (and other societies as well).
The streetcar system is no more with numerous works discussing how it was dismantled amid a push for cars and highways. But, the video is a reminder that cars and streetcars operated together for at least a while as the city and region grew quickly. Both provided opportunities to travel throughout the area and utilized the same roadways.
It is also interesting how such altered videos – here with color and sound added – have the opportunity to change perceptions of the past. When even relatively recent history is displayed in black and white, it seems less vibrant and real. Throw in approximate sound and such video could help viewers feel as if they are back in Los Angeles nearly a century ago.
Analyzing before and after images of 349 teardowns between 2008 and 2017 in the wealthy and sprawling suburb of Naperville, Illinois, shows patterns in aesthetic choices and their fit in older neighbourhoods. First, the teardowns are significantly larger and have different features including larger garages and more windows. Second, over 60% of the teardowns feature Victorian styling. Third, the teardowns are often next to other teardowns in desirable neighbourhoods near the suburb’s vibrant downtown. These visual findings show how teardowns that add to the housing stock often imitate common architectural styles yet exhibit disparate features compared to older neighbouring homes.
All three of these streams helped lead to this project. And there is a lot more that could be done in this area as teardowns affect numerous neighborhoods and communities in the United States.
Legally Sociable 