Category Archives: Sociology

Suburban video doorbell surveillance and race

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Suburbanites have more electronic “eyes on the street” with video doorbells and other devices. Comments from sociologist Simone Brown about surveillance and race provide context for this shift:

police blue sky security surveillance

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If you think about TV, like Cops being taken off the air or Gone With the Wind or whatever it is, there are all these ways black life is framed that shapes people’s viewing. I think it’s what Judith Butler calls a “racially saturated field of visibility,” where these stereotypes form our field of our vision. So, Rodney King bracing himself from the hits from the police, that video gets read by some folks as an act of aggression by him, as an act of violence because black men’s bodies are always figured as potentially violent…

It’s policing, but it’s like policing that now is mediated through these platforms, like Instagram and Facebook and other things. That’s not literal police, but it still is about the governing of black life and black resistance by the state or state-adjacent entities. And we know that Facebook is hand in hand with the Trump administration. So how do we then reconcile the seeming necessity of these technologies?…

That’s part of why I have this reaction when people say technology isn’t neutral, technology is biased. The fact that that needs to be said just shows you how comfortable people are with even the concept of neutral.

Exactly. And that requires like an entire upending of a lot of white folks’ ways of seeing that whiteness isn’t a neutral, police aren’t neutral. All of these things are framed by their histories. To let go of the idea of a technology, and perhaps the technology being used in the exercise of white supremacy of misogynoir or transphobia or being trans-antagonistic is a lot for many people to see. It’s an easy alibi, I think, to say that the technology made me do it.

What exactly is behind the move to install more personal cameras (and share that information with police and others on social media)? Fear of crime, intruders, destruction of personal property? Over recent decades crime rates have dropped yet the perceived need for safety at home has increased. The suburbs in general have a history of exclusion, a fear of the other, looking to avoid “urban” issues. Cameras provide the opportunity to constantly view who is around the sacred single-family home. Even if someone is just walking by on the public sidewalk or driving on the public street, these home cameras could pick them up.

Put together the racialized history of suburbs, assumptions about crime and danger in the United States, and the increase in cameras and this connects with what Browne says above. Who are the suburban cameras there to watch?

Taking protests for racial justice to the suburbs

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Data collected over the last few years hints at new venues for protests in the United States:

woman holding a sign in protest

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The engagement of Brown and others also represents one of the most striking aspects of the current protests against police violence in the U.S., compared with previous ones. They’re everywhere, in suburbs and small towns as well as major cities. Count Love, a data-collecting effort launched in 2016 to document protest activity in the U.S., has cataloged more than 1,500 distinct racial justice events since George Floyd was killed on May 25, and the site’s founders, Tommy Leung and Nathan Perkins, expect to add many more, since they have an extensive backlog of local media and reports to review. Even in the wake of the 2017 Women’s March and widespread anti-gun actions in 2018, the physical scale of these Black Lives Matter protests is striking.

While it’s challenging to generalize, given the sheer number of events that have and continue to take place, conversations with eight protest organizers, as well as historians and researchers, suggest some commonalities amid the vibrant, multiracial, and predominantly peaceful demonstrations taking place outside of large cities. They’re often led by first-time organizers in their teens and 20s, often women, who have adapted the traditional models of urban-style political demonstrations to suburban sprawl or rural areas. And they’ve done so at incredible speeds by leveraging social media.

“One of the reasons we’re seeing these protests in suburban and exurban places is because organizers don’t need connections to movements or Black institutions or churches,” says Ashley Howard, a historian and professor at the University of Iowa working on a book about urban rebellions of the ’60s. “They already have networks in place through social media.”

These protests also reflect the demographic shifts and diversification of U.S. suburbs and exurbs in recent decades, a challenge to the stereotype of a monochromatic suburbia. While much has been said about how unexpected it may be for the current wave of protests to have moved beyond urban centers, many organizers and activists say the suburbs — where many residents may not believe there are issues of systemic racism — are exactly where these protests belong.

And Naperville, wealthy suburb home to recent racist events and protests in the last decade, gets a mention.

See my own recent thoughts on the spread of protests to wealthy suburbs. As noted above, the combination of more racially diverse suburbs, the high status of numerous suburbs, and political change in suburbs means suburban protests are more normal. Whether this translates into (1) changed suburban communities – reduced residential segregation? – and (2) changed state and national politics – led by suburban voters? – remains to be seen.

I’m glad this data is being collected and I would guess it has a lot of potential for academic research. As previous research has examined, how did these protests diffuse across the United States? What are the patterns in the communities that had protests?

Ascertaining the popularity of the tiny house movement via Twitter

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HomeAdvisor looked at tweets about tiny houses and examined geographic patterns:

Top 10 States for Tiny Living

The best states for #tinyliving living – https://www.homeadvisor.com/r/off-the-grid-capitals/

The methodology:

To create these visualizations, we collected data by “scraping” it. Scraping is a technique that gathers large amounts of data from websites. In this case, we wrote a custom script in Python to get the data for each hashtag. The script collected information including the number of likes, number of comments, location, etc. for posts with each of the three lifestyle hashtags. The python script also collects data that human users can‘t see, like specific location information about where the post was published from.

We didn’t include posts without location information. We also didn’t include posts outside of the United States. We then standardized the city and state data. Then, we grouped the posts by city and by state, tallying the number of posts for each hashtag. This gave us our top locations.

And more details on the state and city level data:

TinyLivingHomeAdvisorJun20

On one hand, this is interesting data. California, in particular, stands out though this may not be that surprising given its size, good weather, and high housing prices. The rest of the top ten seem to match similar characteristics including scenic areas and good weather (New York and possibly Colorado winters excluded). The city level data compared to the state numbers provides some insights – major cities can account for a large percentage of tweets for a whole state –  but there are not many cases in any particular city.

On the other hand, it is hard to know what exactly this Twitter data means. There are multiple issues: how many Americans are on Twitter or are active on Twitter and does this overlap with those who like and have tiny houses? Some of the tweets about tiny houses did not have location data – is the data missing at random or does it intersect with the patterns above? Does the #tinyliving hashtag capture the tiny house movement or a part of it?

Because of these issues, I still do not have a better idea of whether the tiny house movement is sizable or not. Having some denominator would help; of the California tweets, how does this compare to the number of single-family homes or apartments in the state? Portland, Oregon leads the way with 695 cases but over 650,000 people live in the city. How do these tweet numbers compare to people tweeting about HGTV shows or single-family homes?

There is a lot that can be done here and making use of data publicly available on websites and social media is smart. Figuring out which questions can be asked and answered with such data and then collecting good data is a challenging and possibly rewarding task.

Addressing more Chicago traffic when fewer people take mass transit

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With COVID-19, few may be willing to ride mass transit even as everyday life slowly returns to some normalcy. This has consequences for traffic:

man standing beside train

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World Business Chicago, a public-private nonprofit agency that promotes the city, estimates that on a given workday there about 406,000 office workers in downtown Chicago, making it the country’s second-biggest central business district after Manhattan.

Many of those people arrive by trains and buses, with the CTA and Metra providing almost 1.9 million rides combined on an average, pre-coronavirus weekday. That includes 1.6 million total one-way CTA rides and 263,000 Metra trips…

Riders’ hesitation may come in part from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation in May that people drive to work alone. That guidance rankled public transportation advocates and created concerns of major traffic and environmental impacts in densely populated cities…

“We’re hearing stories from New York and (Washington) D.C. about employers saying if you’ve taken public transportation you can’t come in the building,” Lavin said. “We want to be sure there’s nothing against public transportation here. In order to do that, we need to have a dialogue.”

Chicago has heavy traffic even with mass transit use because it is a transportation center with plenty of highways and intermodal facilities.

As noted in an earlier blog post, this does present an opportunity to reduce traffic long-term or make a choice to continue to rely on a sprawling landscape full of drivers in their own private vehicles. There are multiple options to pursue:

1. More people working from home. This would reduce traffic on major roads.

2. Stagger work times more so that “rush hour” is more spread out.

3. Find ways to make sure mass transit is safe and/or people feel confident riding it. This might require more resources or better PR or new ideas.

4. Pushing for more people to be able to work closer to their workplaces (meaning more housing options throughout a metropolitan region).

5. Pushing for denser areas in the city or suburbs. (This might be a hard sell right at the moment due to concerns about COVID-19.)

6. Providing more incentives for fleets of vehicles (electric or otherwise) so that not every household has so many cars.

Any one of these or several of them could be pursued at multiple levels with actions from individuals, local groups and municipalities, states, regions, and the federal government.

The top US cities for Fortune 500 company headquarters, COVID-19 edition

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In an article about working remotely, the Wall Street Journal included this graphic about the locations of the headquarters of Fortune 500 companies:

Fortune500HQLocations

This is an interesting topic to raise as more workers are laboring away from the office. What will happen to headquarters?

One option would be that headquarters remain even as organizational workforces scatter. There will always be a need to at least occasionally hold meetings or access resources or project a presence in a major city. Cities would like this as headquarters are a status symbol.

Another option is that headquarters move to locations more central to their workers or more attractive for workers. This is more unlikely but the same factors pushing workers away from major cities – high housing costs, traffic and congestion, density with threats of pandemics – could affect headquarters as well. It could be a big strategic move to follow workers to a city not on the list above.

The effects of either could be big for cities. Consider New York. It is the clear leader in terms of headquarters, it is a leading global city, and it is not just a center for business but also for news, entertainment, the arts, and other spheres. Even if the headquarters stay, the loss of high-status employees hurts. If the headquarters leave or become shells of themselves, there could be a loss of status.

Will the suburbs be more appealing moving forward because of COVID-19?

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With discussion of COVID-19 in cities plus urban residents leaving for suburbs, does this mean people will view suburbs differently going forward? Ian Bogost suggests this will be the case:

photo of roadway during daytime

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But after the anxious spring of 2020, these defects seem like new luxuries. There was always comfort to be found in a big house on a plot of land that’s your own. The relief is even more soothing with a pandemic bearing down on you. And as the novel coronavirus graduates from acute terror to long-term malaise, urbanites are trapped in small apartments with little or no outdoor space, reliant on mass transit that now seems less like a public service and more like a rolling petri dish. Meanwhile, suburbanites have protected their families amid the solace of sprawling homes on large, private plots, separated from the neighbors, and reachable only by the safety of private cars. Sheltered from the virus in their many bedrooms, they sleep soundly, dreaming the American dream with new confidence.

Safety has always warmed the suburban soul. The American dream is sometimes equated with property ownership and the nuclear families such properties house—but really, they are just hulls for a more fundamental suburban aspiration: individualism, which the suburban home demarcates and then protects…

The pandemic will improve suburban life, perhaps in lasting ways. Take the automobile commute: The exodus from the office has dramatically decreased traffic and pollution, a trend that will continue in some form if even a fraction of the people who abandoned their commutes continue to work from home. Dunham-Jones, who is also my colleague in Georgia Tech’s college of design, thinks that even a modest rise in telecommuting could also increase the appeal of local walking and bike trips. Families have two cars, but nowhere to go. They are rediscovering the pleasures of pedestrianism…

The suburbs were never as bad as their stereotypes. The little boxes might have been all the same, but the ’50s suburban plots also flowed continuously into one another, with unobstructed front and backyards, forming unified communities. And those communities were in some ways far less homogeneous than their legacy recalls, even despite the scourge of redlining and its serious, long-term effects.

There is a lot to consider here. A few categories of thoughts in response:

  1. There is an underlying contrast between how elites and urbanites viewed suburbs versus how many Americans have viewed suburbs for decades. Even as majorities of Americans now live in suburbs, there is a well-established line of suburban critiques. Is the individualism Bogost discusses a feature of suburban life or a terrible thing to promote? Do suburbanites really have individualism or does it end up looking the same across suburban single-family homes?
  2. The suburbs are aspirational. This reminds me of the argument by historian Jon Teaford in The American Suburb: The Basics: “Suburbs are an expression of the American desire for freedom and the right to pursue one’s own destiny.” (219) At the same time, the path taken to pursue these aspirations involved exclusion. Can these two competing interests – private freedom in a single-family home yet excluding who can access this – be reconciled in the future, let alone in assessments of the past?
  3. It is hard to know exactly what suburbia is under discussion. Complex suburbia is here. Bogost mentions at least a few visions of suburbia today including New Urbanist communities and neighborhoods of McMansions but we could also consider ethnoburbs, working-class suburbs, suburban job centers, and more. Which suburbia is the preferred one in the minds of Americans or which one should policy try to promote or is a varied suburban landscape more ideal?
  4. COVID-19 is theoretically a temporary issue to face. Once it passes or is controlled or societies learn to live with it, it is hard to know what consensus regarding places might emerge.

This debate which stretches at least to the early 1900s is not over even as COVID-19 changes the terms.

If workers can live anywhere, does this increase or decrease placelessness?

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A theme is emerging: today’s workers with technology and COVID-19 might be able to avoid going to an office. But, if they can live anywhere, what does this do for a sense of community and connecting to a particular place?

young male taking boxes out of luggage boot of car

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The coronavirus is challenging the assumption that Americans must stay physically tethered to traditionally hot job markets—and the high costs and small spaces that often come with them—to access the best work opportunities. Three months into the pandemic, many workers find themselves in jobs that, at least for now, will let them work anywhere, creating a wave of movement across the country.

Recessions tend to damp migration. Americans typically move with a new job already in hand, and hiring plummets during downturns. The 2008 financial crisis limited Americans’ mobility because millions of homeowners found themselves underwater on their homes, unable to sell without taking a loss.

But this time might be different. Home prices haven’t yet taken a major hit. And the forces at play are novel. Confronted with the prospect of not being able to easily fly in for a visit with an elderly parent, grown children are suddenly questioning why they live so far away in the first place.

Many newly remote workers are finding they prefer somewhere closer to family or fresh air. Others are giving up on leases they can’t afford, chasing opportunities in states that are reopening faster or heading back to hometowns.

On the side of more community and rootedness:

1. People can live in places they want to live rather than choosing a place for a job. Whether they live somewhere to be near family, find housing, enjoy the outdoors, or some other reason, workers will be inclined to invest more locally.

2. Working from home schedules can offer more flexibility, freeing people up to participate more in local activities.

3. The commute is eliminated, freeing up time as well as getting rid of the illusion that driving through an area is the same as knowing it.

4. People might stay longer in places if they can simply change jobs from afar rather than having to move when they switch jobs or careers.

On the side of less community and rootedness:

1. Spending time at a workplace can build community, both in the building as well as outside the workplace.

2. Corporate actions at the local level will connect less with employees who are not physically there and involved.

3. More businesses may have headquarters in one place (often desirable for big cities and high-status suburbs) but workforces – and all the benefits that come with it such as their spending or jobs numbers local politicians like – will be elsewhere.

On the whole, this could be good for employees who can invest more time in places of their choosing while businesses then have more tenuous connections to the places where they are officially located. In a country of suburbia (often considered non-places) and relatively easy travel, anchoring employees in places for longer could help lead to more rootedness.

Remember the suburban voters in 2020

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As COVID-19 and police brutality pushed the 2020 presidential election off the front pages for months, recent poll data suggests suburban voters are breaking one way in national polls:

And while Trump has an edge with rural voters, Biden crushes him in the suburbs – which often decide how swing states swing.

Fifty per cent of suburban registered voters told the pollster they planned to vote for Biden, while 36 per cent said they’d vote for Trump.

And in Texas metropolitan areas:

A Quinnipiac University survey released last week found Trump leading Biden by 1 point in Texas. Trump leads by 2.2 points in the RealClearPolitics average.

Texas Republicans are primarily worried about their standing in the suburbs, where women and independents have steadily gravitated away from the GOP since Trump took office.

Republican support has eroded in the areas surrounding Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio, four of the nation’s largest and fastest growing metro areas. Democrats defeated longtime GOP incumbents in Houston and Dallas in 2018.

More background on trying to find a suburban “silent majority”:

The suburbs — not the red, but sparsely populated rural areas of the country most often associated with Trump — are where Trump found the majority of his support in 2016. Yet it was in the suburbs that Democrats built their House majority two years ago in a dramatic midterm repudiation of the Republican president.

Now, Trump’s approach to the violence and unrest that have gripped the nation’s big cities seems calibrated toward winning back those places, in the hopes that voters will recoil at the current images of chaos and looting — as they did in the late 1960s — and look to the White House for stability…

Five months before the general election, according to national polls, the political landscape for Trump is bleak. But there is a clear window of opportunity: Trump remains popular in rural America, and he won the suburbs by 4 percentage points in 2016 — largely on the backs of non-college-educated whites.

There are millions more potential voters where those came from — people who fit in Trump’s demographic sweet spot but did not vote. They live in rural and exurban areas, but also in working class suburbs like Macomb County, outside Detroit. They are who Republicans are referring to when they talk about a new “silent majority” — the kind of potential voters who, even if disgusted by police violence, are not joining in protest.

This probably bears repeating: the American suburbs of today are not solely populated by wealthy, white, conservative voters. This is the era of complex suburbia where different racial and ethnic groups as well as varied social classes live throughout metropolitan regions.

Relatively little media coverage has examined how COVID-19 or police brutality has affected suburbs or how suburbanites feel about all the change. While just over 50% of Americans live in suburbs, coverage emphasized urban areas. And what do suburbanites think when they see these images of urban life, policing, and protest that they may or not understand on an experiential or deeper level?

“The Great Reshuffling,” “extension cords” to suburban living

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New terms are arising to describe the possibility of more people moving to the suburbs with remote work becoming more popular:

green rectangular corded machine on grey wall during daytime

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Zillow Chief Executive Rich Barton has coined the coming changes in where and how workers live their lives “the great reshuffling.” Redfin’s lead economist Taylor Marr says his company is registering stronger demand in terms of homes under contract in places like Seattle and Austin, Texas, where there has been spillover from bigger cities. These are tech hubs where a lot of remote work was already happening and they have been more insulated in terms of layoffs, he said.

Zillow’s chief economist, Svenja Gudell, says she doesn’t expect residents to cut the cord entirely from their cities, but that they may opt for an “extension cord” into the suburbs where they can get more space, more outdoor areas and, of course, a home office.

To be honest, I’m not sure I like either term that much. “The Great Reshuffling” could apply to all sorts of population changes. Suburbs as “extension cord” implies that suburbs could not exist without cities; this has some truth to it but is also open to some scholarly debate.

All of this is fairly speculative at this point. Yet, given the tendencies of Americans toward the suburbs, it may not take much to push people out of cities and to more property for their money. Cities appeal to many Americans but the suburbs are the places many default to.

It is also interesting to consider what cities might benefit the most from people fleeing high prices in particular places. If the residents of Manhattan or the Bay Area or Seattle could go anywhere, where would they go? Would other locations in those metro areas prove attractive (people get to maintain their connections, access culture and familiar places) or would they leave for cheaper housing markets, family elsewhere, or locations with other kinds of amenities (warm weather, access to nature, etc.)? The ultimate winner here might the ever-expanding Sunbelt.

Connecting urban planning and coping with COVID-19

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McMansions might provide a lot of space for sheltering in space but an urban planner in Australia says neighborhoods of McMansions did not do as well during COVID-19:

bird s eye view of town

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McMansion-dwellers in suburbs far from jobs and services and uninviting to pedestrians fared badly during shutdowns, says a prominent Perth urban planner; meanwhile, residents in self-sufficient neighbourhoods with compact homes were much better equipped…

“Those in low-density neighbourhoods find it easier to stay at home, but they are forced to leave regularly in their cars for essential services and goods,” he said…

“For just $80,000, a home owner can build a 40-square-metre micro-workspace or granny flat that could assist a business to start up, or house essential workers – nurses, teachers or police – who often cannot afford to live in a McMansion,” he said…

Communities needed well-connected, shaded, pedestrian-friendly streets, front porches facilitating casual social exchanges while allowing social distancing, and walkable town centres with offices, restaurants, beach facilities and apartments.

It is interesting to compare this assessment to discussions in the United States. In places like New York City and San Francisco, journalists have reported on the move of wealthier residents away from density and to the suburbs. In these narratives, suburban homes and communities provide larger residences and more distance from others.

Yet, in the argument above, it sounds like the urban planner is arguing for New Urbanist-style suburbs as the middle ground: walkable places that offer some density and local community are better for dealing with COVID-19 that either really dense places or isolated suburban communities.

This might depend on what the highest priority is during COVID-19. If the goal is avoiding other people, public places, and mass transit all together so as not to catch the coronavirus, then neighborhoods of suburban McMansions could make sense. People today can have all sorts of goods delivered. And if suburban life is about moral minimalism, McMansions allow everyone lots of space. If the goal is to balance interacting with people and society alongside practicing social distancing, traditionally-designed suburbs could make more sense. Isolation takes a toll on people, COVID-19 or not.

Arguments like the one above are common among some urban planners, architects, and urbanists: neighborhoods full of suburban tract homes do not provide for community life and social interaction, depend on cars and limit opportunities for other forms of transportation, and waste resources. Whether COVID-19 helps advance this perspective remains to be seen.