Category Archives: Sociology

When a mall needs reviving, add residences, mixed-use places, dining, and entertainment

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As shopping malls face difficulties, there is now a common script for how to revive them. Aurora, Illinois is discussing what to do to help Fox Valley Mall and the proposed playbook exemplifies the new script:

That plan, unveiled last fall, called the Route 59 corridor “tired.” It noted that two of the four anchor spaces at the mall are vacant, with the departure of Sears and the closing of Carson Pirie Scott. People’s shopping habits have changed, it says, with people buying more of their items online instead of in person.

The plan suggests adding multifamily housing and “Main Street” mixed-use developments, with smaller stores in a pedestrian-friendly environment around the mall. That would beef up the mall’s potential customer base.

Market studies suggest adding more restaurants, particularly high-end ones. Entertainment venues, such as a theater and a public plaza several acres large, could be added.

Build it and they will come! Seriously, though, each of these proposed elements is intended to bring a different element to a flagging mall: more people, a different scale and harkening back to traditional shopping areas, and giving people more reasons to come to shopping areas through food and entertainment. Put these all together and it might create a new kind of synergy around the clock.

Of course, none of these are guarantees. And plenty of other shopping areas are trying this (just a few examples here, here, and here). Perhaps the best thing going for the proposed changes at Fox Valley Mall is its location just west of Naperville and plenty of nearby wealthy residents. While some shopping malls will not be able to be revived with these techniques, the Fox Valley Mall will likely change some and continue to do okay or even thrive.

Linking Microsoft giving $500 million for Seattle area housing to tech companies and declining gov’t support for housing

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Microsoft is pledging a substantial amount to address the important issue of housing in Seattle:

Microsoft plans to lend $225 million at subsidized rates to preserve and build middle-income housing in six cities near its Redmond headquarters. It will put an additional $250 million into low-income housing across the region. Some of those loans may be made through the federal programs that provide tax breaks for low-income housing.

The company plans to invest the money within three years, and expects most of it to go to Seattle’s suburbs.

The loans could go to private or nonprofit developers, or to governmental groups like the King County Housing Authority. As the loans are repaid, Mr. Smith said, Microsoft plans to lend the money out again to support additional projects.

This article frames the giving as part of the housing issues wrought by the actions of tech companies:

Microsoft’s money represents the most ambitious effort by a tech company to directly address the inequality that has spread in areas where the industry is concentrated, particularly on the West Coast. It will fund construction for homes affordable not only to the company’s own non-tech workers, but also for teachers, firefighters and other middle- and low-income residents.

From this point of view, the health of a region matters for companies. If workers, whether ones employed by a particular company or organization or others, cannot find affordable housing, it will be harder for the region to find and hold on to workers. Whereas businesses often focus on a good business climate (low taxes, tax breaks, business-friendly governments, etc.), housing is a big factor in finding a strong work force. Additionally, Microsoft can help show through these actions that they care about local conditions in ways that tech companies are often said to ignore because of their global status. Would Microsoft be the same if it were not in the Seattle region?

Another way to view this is that private companies are now taking on what the federal government should address:

The government spent about three times as much on housing programs in the 1970s as it does today, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. In the years since, the government has gotten out of the business of building public housing. And capital funds to repair the remaining public housing stock have been cut in half over the last 15 years.

Over this time, federal resources have increasingly shifted away from subsidizing the construction of affordable housing to subsidizing renters who find housing in the private market. And now most new below-market-rate housing is built not by public agencies, but by nonprofit developers leveraging tax credits. The value of those credits has declined recently as well, as a result of changes in the tax bill passed in 2017.

In a sense, Microsoft’s proposal is an extension of this story, as private actors continue to step in where the government once stood.

Ed Goetz, a professor at the University of Minnesota who has studied the history of public housing in America, said: “I don’t want to diminish the magnitude of what they’re doing. I think it’s important, and it will help. But it won’t solve Seattle’s problem.”

This argument suggests that private actors can only do so much to address housing issues. Because so much money is involved and the issue is so widespread, even $500 million may not do much in a single metropolitan region with high land and housing costs. Of course, the government is involved in the housing industry: the federal government for decades has supported single-family homes, primarily in the suburbs. At the same time, the government and the American people have always been more ambivalent about public housing. It is not as if  the housing market is a free market: the United States subsidizes mortgages.

At the least, this will be an interesting experiment: can Microsoft make even a small dent in the housing needs of the Seattle area? Will this help strengthen the metropolitan region or primarily serve as good publicity for the company?

Two-thirds of Chicago area jobs in the suburbs

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The demise of Sears and its suburban headquarters, once famously downtown in a building that was the tallest in the world, does not mean that suburban jobs are disappearing:

Sears’ move to northwest suburban Hoffman Estates symbolized a trend: The economic ascendance of Chicago’s suburbs, which even in the early 1990s accounted for more than 60 percent of the region’s jobs.

At first glance, that dominance appears to be slipping as companies like McDonald’s make headline-grabbing moves back to the city from leafy suburban campuses.

But it would be wrong to point to Sears’ latest struggles, which eased Wednesday when the company’s chairman won a bankruptcy auction that prevented a liquidation of Sears, and conclude that the suburbs are down and out.

People working in the suburbs still provide two out of every three Chicago-area jobs, according to data provided by regional planners.

While the emphasis of this article is on the suburban Sears campus, the suburban jobs numbers stuck out to me. There are (at least) two ways to interpret the number that two-thirds of the jobs in the Chicago region are in the suburbs:

  1. Of course the majority of jobs in the Chicago region are in the suburbs: more than two-thirds of the region’s population lives in the suburbs. All those residents both help generate nearby jobs with their various consumer needs (from retail to food to building and construction) and help fill those jobs.
  2. This is a surprising figure. Chicago is a leading global city; how could so many jobs be in the suburbs when what really matters in the region is the strength of the Loop and nearby neighborhoods? Plus, it would be better if employers started in the city or moved back to the city to help create a strong base for the region as well as take advantage of the city’s economies of scale (including mass transit access) and cultural opportunities.

These figures are part of a larger trend that I think is underappreciated in the rise of American suburbs: the suburbs are jobs centers, not just a collection of bedroom communities. While the stereotypical American suburb is a community of subdivisions with occasional businesses, the suburbs are full of companies and firms doing all sorts of things. And it has been this way for decades.

Confronting and remembering Chicago’s 1919 race riots

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It can be hard for American communities to acknowledge bad moments in their past. Numerous museums in Chicago are planning to help the city and region think about the 1919 race riots one hundred years later:

One hundred years ago this summer, a black teen on a raft crossed an imaginary line into a “white” section of a Lake Michigan beach, was stoned by white bathers and drowned. The interracial battle on city streets that followed caused 38 deaths and set the stage for decades of segregation, discrimination and civic dysfunction.

Yet if you search the city for a commemoration of the Chicago Race Riots, as the events of July 1919 are known, you’ll find just one small marker, according to organizers of an upcoming series of events. Along the lakefront near 29th Street, affixed to a boulder there is a plaque — funded by suburban high school students — that says, “Dedicated to All the Victims of the Race Riot That Began Near This Place.”

The city’s collective neglect of this dark and seminal moment in its history is a topic that the Newberry Library and 13 other Chicago institutions hope to address with the yearlong project “Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots,” an initiative that the partners in the project will announce formally next week.

The goal is to use seminars, film, spoken word performance and even a bicycle tour to help “understand a history that frankly has been forgotten, has purposely not been remembered and certainly has not been commemorated,” said Liesl Olson, director of Chicago studies at the independent research library. “Most historians are kind of appalled by how little is discussed about this moment. There’s a lot of shame in it, really.”

My own research in suburban communities suggests this neglect of certain past events is often deliberate misremembering, particularly when these events involve race. Typically, a community’s history is presented as a collection of high points: the area was settled, the community was founded, good things happened here, here, and here, and all this helped make the great community we have today. Yet, communities are often shaped by negative events, moments involving conflict, disagreement, and even violence. Chicago’s engagement with race involves many of these moments and these exhibits have the ability to suggest much of that later activity – think bombings when blacks moved into white neighborhoods, riots in poor neighborhoods in the 1960s, virulent reactions to MLK marching in Chicago in 1966 – has its roots in the 1919 riots. The true measure of a year of exhibits may be how much the future retellings of Chicago’s history includes the 1919 riots as an important moment.

Food delivery services and restaurants aiming for the unsaturated suburban markets

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Skift Table suggests the suburbs are ripe for increased restaurant and food delivery activity:

Outside the urban cores, things get interesting. Earnest Research shows that in the rest of the U.S. market, it’s a head-to-head battle between DoorDash (31 percent market share) and Uber Eats (with 30 percent). In third place is Grubhub, coming in at 27 percent…

“Many suburban areas tend to have a larger number of chain restaurants than independent mom and pop restaurants, making it advantageous for Grubhub to offer takeout from these familiar chains to local residents who may not be accustomed to the idea of ordering delivery,” says Katie Norris, Senior Manager of Communications at GrubHub…

But not all restaurants need to be located on Main & Main to succeed, thanks to the ever-expanding reach of digital marketing and social media. And raising capital might also be within closer reach than once thought. “To mitigate high rents, many brands are opening in second-tier locations and that’s very attractive to investors,” says Chad Spaulding, Managing Director at the U.S.-based investment firm Capital Spring. “We spend more of our time seeking low-rent, low-investment type opportunities that provide a value to the consumer that you can count on in tougher times in the wider economy.”

Suburban locations not only fit this bill, they also solve the urban issue of oversaturation. There is simply less competition the farther afield you go. And now, you can actually go further than before. Because Uber Eats drivers and DoorDash dashers can soon be there to meet you — in 30 minutes or less.

There may be less competition and cheaper rents but there are certainly other costs such as increased driving distances to deliver food and finding ways to attract suburbanites to a physical location.

In the long run, it would be interesting to consider what it would take to raise the level of suburban food to that of major cities where awards, interest, and big name chefs seem to be much more common. Does fine dining and innovation in food require a density of restaurants, food workers, and well-heeled customers or could this all come together in some way in the suburbs? Could the suburbs of today who are often interested in developing entertainment and cultural districts really go after high-end and innovative food as a strategy to successfully compete against suburban fast food and chain restaurants?

Other cities learned from Chicago’s privatization of parking meters

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Failures in one city can help other cities learn what not to do:

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel aggressively pushed to privatize 311 in 2015, telling journalists it would save the city “about a million dollars a year” to run the system using contractors. Hiring an outside operator would save the city from shouldering the cost of sorely needed improvements to a 20-year-old system, he suggested.

City officials weren’t thrilled at the idea. A famously unpleasant privatization effort was still in people’s minds. About 10 years ago, Chicago made an 80-year deal to pass control over its parking meters to a private firm in exchange for a $1.2 billion lump sum. The firm promptly made more than half that lump sum in revenue for itself—and still has 70 years of returns. (I wrote about this in WIRED last year.)

But that parking meter deal has been remarkably generative: It has dampened enthusiasm for privatization in cities around the country. Left to its own rational profit-making devices, a private company will systematically squeeze services to the bare minimum and avoid additional investments. That’s fine for margins, but not always great for the public.

And so when Emanuel proposed privatizing 311, scores of Chicago aldermen felt emboldened to fight.

At least other cities and Chicago now think twice before privatizing certain services. This could also lead to at least a few interesting interesting research questions:

  1. Part of the pitch for privatization was increased efficiency. Would more reluctance for such deals hold back cities in certain ways?
  2. How have private companies shifted their efforts now that cities may be wiser about making such deals? I assume this means that profit margins on such deals are smaller…

Suburban residents tend to object to new housing near them

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Over the objections of five residents, a portion of a commercial development in Naperville was recently changed to allow medium-density residences. One city council member responded this way to the concerns raised by residents:

Council member Judith Brodhead, a longtime south Naperville resident, said she was not surprised by opposition to new housing.

“If it were up to residents, most of the subdivisions you live in would never have been built because there were protests or objections to those as well,” Brodhead told residents who voiced concerns. “I’m not too worried about something that is small and is this size.

In my study of suburban growth and development, residents living near the location of a proposed subdivision or housing units can often raise objections including: increased traffic and noise; water issues; lost open or green space; effects on property values; and increased pressure on local services. Of course, these same residents often lived in developments that could have provoked similar concerns from earlier residents. Brodhead’s suggestion rings true to some degree (though I have not systematically analyzed opposition to nearby suburban developments) as suburban residents can oppose the opportunities of others to move into their community.

More broadly, this could hint at a deeper issue: people who move into a neighborhood or community can act as if those places should be frozen in time. They moved to that particular location because of certain features and if those change, particularly if that change is perceived negatively, then some will fight hard against the new proposal.

This is something for homeowners and others to keep in mind if they move: is the new location likely to be subject to such changes in the future? If you move into a new subdivision that is next to a corn field, how likely is it that suburban development will soon continue into that corn field? If you purchase an older home in a neighborhood where teardowns are common, what are the odds that adjacent homes are torn down and replaced? Some of this can be hard to predict but it is worth remembering that neighborhoods and communities do indeed change over time.

Pass through “Viadoom” for a better Seattle waterfront

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A number of projects are underway at Seattle’s waterfront and while they are all intended to help the city in the long run, they may lead to short-term transportation issues:

The Washington State Department of Transportation will demolish the viaduct, freeing up 26 blocks of urban land. It will be replaced with a street-level boulevard and 20 acres of waterfront public space designed by James Corner Field Operations. Soon, Highway 99 will traverse Seattle below ground in a long-delayed bi-level tunnel dug by the world’s longest boring machine after a prolonged political fight pitting governor against mayor that made Seattle the laggard in a trio of major urban highway teardowns, alongside Boston’s Big Dig and San Francisco’s Embarcadero.

But this transformation stands to be a painful one. The highway closure kicks off a two-year stretch that City Hall calls the Period of Maximum Constraint and everyone else calls the Seattle Squeeze. The viaduct’s 90,000 cars are losing their north-south waterfront right of way. There’s mass-transit help on the way, in the form of Seattle’s massive light rail expansion, which is set to open a key northern extension in 2021. In between, downtown commuters and residents will contend with a ferry terminal rebuild, a convention center expansion, 600 daily buses moving from the downtown transit tunnel onto surface streets, a streetcar missing link on hiatus, and street closures related to the construction of the city’s second-tallest building.

The first three weeks of the Squeeze—known, somewhat apocalyptically, as Viadoom—are expected to be the worst, until the new State Route 99 tunnel opens on February 4. In anticipation of V-Day, local TV news has been running countdown clocks, and city officials are urging anyone who can to work from home, switch up hours, or take time off. Further amping up the state-of-emergency vibe, Mayor Jenny Durkan hired Mike Worden, a retired Air Force major general, to oversee the city’s response to the Squeeze. (His office did not return a request for an interview.)…

As with marquee waterfront-highway removals in Boston and San Francisco, the hope is that the viaduct’s demise can give downtown a waterfront worthy of Seattle’s setting. The design for the redeveloped space, by James Corner Field Operations, aims to string together several of the city’s major attractions, though some of the bells-and-whistles in the competition-winning design, like a swimming-pool barge and a downtown pocket beach, have been toned down.

It sounds like this will be a win for the city in the long-run. A few years ago, I was some of the locations mentioned in the article and I could see how these changes would benefit both residents and visitors.

At the same time, I could imagine many residents would want to know why this all seems to be happening at once. This is a complaint I have heard regularly in the Chicago area: why is there construction on multiple major roads at the same time that then makes it very hard to find alternatives? People can get the idea about the long-term benefits and still experience frustration at the day to day difficulties these projects pose.

Additionally, what are the odds that all the projects finish on time and on budget? Major infrastructure projects in American cities can end up with significantly larger price tags and seem to last forever as circumstances (and budgets) change. Again, these projects often need to happen but residents may perceive that officials and those involved in the construction do not care much for their time or pocketbooks.

Of course, an easy solution to all of this is to simply pursue these projects far before they become such boondoggles. That, however, is far easier said than done.

Kotkin argues both political parties want to destroy single-family home suburbia

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The single-family home may be the bedrock of the American suburbs and Joel Kotkin suggests both political parties ignore this at their own peril:

However much they might detest Trump , suburbanites are not likely to rally long-term to a party that seeks to wipe out their way of life. The assault on suburbia, both from the ultra-capitalist right and socialist-minded left, neglects the very reasons—space and privacy—people of all ethnicities move to suburbia. Just as Republicans can ignore the unintended consequences of ultra-free market policies, Democrats ignore the aspirations of their own voters.

More important still, the anti-single-family campaign undermines the foundation of our democracy. The essence of American civilization has been the pursuit of a better life for oneself and one’s family. Take away the ability to own one’s home and we are well on our road to a neo-feudal society where the masses will need to rely on the state not only for housing but, without meaningful assets, to finance their retirement.

The clamor to restrict single-family homes and thus push the American dream further out of many Americans’ reach, represents an assault on what both parties once espoused. An America without widespread homeownership is no longer an aspirational country, but a place where people remain imprisoned by their class and unable to pursue what they perceive as a better quality of life.

Kotkin’s argument seems to go like this:

  1. The suburbs are the way they are because the American people wanted to live in suburbia. Both political parties supported this mission for much of the 20th century through monies and programs.
  2. Unless Democrats and Republicans cater to suburban voters, they will have a difficult future as political parties.

But, this seems to assume that this suburban way of life based around a home and emphasis on family will always continue this way. To some degree, Americans did desire land and privacy from the beginning yet the suburban experience was really made available to the masses first around the turn of the twentieth century and then even more so after World War II. Younger or future Americans could decide they would prefer cities and denser areas or even rural areas and the political parties could help lead them in that direction.

All that to say, I think Kotkin is right in that a majority of Americans continue to profess interest in living in suburbia. At the same time, this could change in the future and one or both of the political parties could start leading in that direction. Not all Americans want to be suburbanites so there is political room to suggest alternatives.

Home value algorithms show consumers data with outliers, mortgage companies take the outliers out

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A homeowner can look online to get an estimate of the value of their home but that number may not match what a lender computes:

Different AVMs are designed to deliver different types of valuations. And therein lies confusion.

Consumers don’t realize that there’s an AVM for nearly any purpose, which explains why different algorithms serve up different results, said Ann Regan, an executive product manager with real estate analytic firm CoreLogic. “The scores presented to consumers are not the same version that is being used by lenders to make decisions,” she said. “The consumer-facing AVMs are designed for consumer marketing purposes.”

For instance, more accurate models used by lenders do not include outliers — properties that sold for extremely high or low prices and that consequently would skew the averages and the comparable sales for a particular house, like yours. But models used by consumer websites, such as brokers’ sites and national listing sites, scoop in as much “sold” data as possible when concocting a valuation, because then they can claim to include all available data. That’s true, said Regan, but it’s more accurate to weed out misleading data.

AVMs used by lenders send along “confidence scores” that indicate how firm the estimate is. That is a factor typically not included alongside consumer AVMs, she added.

This is an interesting trade-off. The assumption is the consumer wants to see that all the data is accounted for, which makes it seem that the estimate is more worthwhile. More data = more accuracy. On the other hand, those that work with data know that measures of central tendency and variability can be thrown off by unusual cases, often known as outliers. If the value of a home is too high or too low, and there are many reasons why this could be the case, the rest of the data can be thrown off. If there are significant outliers, more data does not equal more accuracy.

Since this knowledge is out there (at least printed in a major newspaper), does this mean consumers will be informed of these algorithm features when they look at websites like Zillow? I imagine it could be tricky to easily explain how removing some of the housing comparison data is actually a good thing but if the long-term goal is better numeracy for the public, this could be a good addition to such websites.