Category Archives: Sociology

Defining middle class in an era of economic uncertainty

Posted on by

Understanding the middle class requires looking not just at resources but also how the middle-class life is lived:

By the 1990s, the world that Mills had documented was coming apart as corporate downsizing and disinvestment upended the neat equation of secure work and praiseworthy home life. Social thinkers writing in that decade, including the sociologist Katherine Newman and the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, followed Mills in charting the social and psychological shape of that in-between class. But they found that loss had replaced dependency as the most conspicuous feeling associated with middling workers’ place in the hierarchy.

Today anguish over lost social standing has, in turn, been replaced by a pervasive sense of insecurity…

Aspiring to stability and respectability today means not only navigating the landscape of eroded and contingent work, but of managing debts. Trying to give children a shot, parents take on financial burdens that can destabilize their own future security.

Class has always been partly about income, but debt is now an equal component of the middle-class story, leading to a central paradox of aspirational lives: Striving for stability and respectability means inhabiting insecurity both socially and psychologically. Economic metrics alone can only tell a shallow story, but at the very least, debt should join income in any attempt at definition.

If this is true, perhaps social class should be accompanied by a different sort of measure. Here are a few options:

  1. Economic security or economic insecurity. Perhaps there would be a certain bar to meet – having a certain amount of savings, the ability to find another job, or something else.
  2. Some measure of anxiety or well-being about current economic conditions.

Two households with similar sets of resources could be quite different on these measures based on the particulars of certain jobs, family situations, debt, etc.

The biggest downsides to such measures could be that they remove the baselines that social class measures often have as well as affect the value judgments made about social class. We know that less income or lower wealth matters; a household with $20,000 of income is going to be different than one with $100,000. (Yes, this could be contextual based on cost of living.) But, if we start including some measures of the lived experience of class, is there a baseline? Similarly, what if financial measures were similar for two groups but one group had a higher level of anxiety or insecurity; would researchers and pundits be quick to judge whether that anxiety is justified?

Of course, if the insecurity/anxiety questions are asked alongside more traditional measures of social class, researchers can look at the relationships and determine what a consistent and valid measure of social class should be.

Teaching how science and research actually works

Posted on by

As a regular instructor of Statistics and Social Research classes, I took note at this paragraph in a recent profile of Bruno Latour:

Latour believes that if scientists were transparent about how science really functions — as a process in which people, politics, institutions, peer review and so forth all play their parts — they would be in a stronger position to convince people of their claims. Climatologists, he says, must recognize that, as nature’s designated representatives, they have always been political actors, and that they are now combatants in a war whose outcome will have planetary ramifications. We would be in a much better situation, he has told scientists, if they stopped pretending that “the others” — the climate-change deniers — “are the ones engaged in politics and that you are engaged ‘only in science.’ ” In certain respects, new efforts like the March for Science, which has sought to underscore the indispensable role that science plays (or ought to play) in policy decisions, and groups like 314 Action, which are supporting the campaigns of scientists and engineers running for public office, represent an important if belated acknowledgment from today’s scientists that they need, as one of the March’s slogans put it, to step out of the lab and into the streets. (To this Latour might add that the lab has never been truly separate from the streets; that it seems to be is merely a result of scientific culture’s attempt to pass itself off as above the fray.)

Textbooks on Statistics and Social Research say there are right ways and wrong ways to do the work. There are steps to follow, guidelines to adhere to, clear cut answers on how to do the work right. It is all presented in a logical and consistent format.

There are hints that this may not happen all the time. Certain known factors as well as unknown issues can push a researcher off track a bit. But, to do a good job, to do work that is scientifically interesting and acceptable to the scientific community, you would want to stick to the guidelines as much as possible.

This provides a Weberian ideal type of how science should operate. Or, perhaps the opposite ideal type occasionally provides a contrast. The researcher who committed outright fraud. The scholar who stepped way over ethical boundaries.

I see one of my jobs of teaching these classes as providing how these steps work out in actuality. You want to follow those guidelines but here is what can often happen. I regularly talk about the constraints of time and money: researchers often want to answer big questions with ideal data and that does not always happen. You make mistakes, such as in collecting data or analyzing results. You send the manuscript off for review and people offer all sorts of suggestions of how to fix it. The focus of the project and the hypothesis changes, perhaps even multiple times. It takes years to see everything through to publication.

On one hand, students often want the black and white presentation because it offers clear guidelines. If this happens, do this. On the other hand, presenting the cleaner version is an incomplete education into how research works. Students need to know how to respond when the process does not go as planned and know that this does not necessarily mean their work is doomed.

Scientific research is not easy nor is it always clear cut. Coming back to the ideal type concept, perhaps we should present it as we aspire to certain standards and particular matters may be non-negotiable but there are parts of the process, sometimes small and sometimes large, that are more flexible depending on circumstances.

HGTV cashes in on the popularity of the suburban Brady Bunch home

Posted on by

The iconic home of the Brady family on The Brady Bunch may have a number of confusing features but it is still popular: HGTV is working on a show about the renovation of the home.

The Studio City, Calif., residence was pictured in each episode before the camera took viewers inside the family’s abode. Those scenes, which featured, for example, the kitchen where housekeeper Alice (the late Ann B. Davis) dished out jokes or the girls’ bedroom, where Marcia Brady brushed her hair, were shot on a soundstage.

The house changed hands over the summer, when the network snapped up the property for an unknown price. (Former ‘N Sync member and Brady Bunch die-hard fan Lance Bass narrowly missed out on the place in a bidding war.)

HGTV revealed in August that it had placed the winning bid and would restore the home “to its 1970s glory” as part of a new show.

On Thursday, the network announced that A Very Brady Renovation is set to premiere in September 2019. Home renovation pros from HGTV will “reimagine the popular show’s interior set design, working to ensure that the final renovation results stay true to the spirit of the Brady Bunch family home that everyone loves and remembers,” according to a press release. In other words, the iconic staircase and the retro hues used in the home will remain.

Perhaps this is what nostalgia about postwar suburban life looks like: it is filtered through television. Instead of having a show about updating postwar suburban homes (imagine an HGTV show solely devoted to the iconic Levittown and other mass produced suburbs), a network banks on a fictional suburban home. If this Brady Bunch renovation show works, I imagine more shows featuring famous TV homes could occur.

This whole concept makes some sense. Television emerged at the same time as the suburbs. Certain shows, including the Brady Bunch, became associated with suburban America. Some have argued the depictions of suburbs on television helped encourage suburban development – I’m not sure there is much evidence for that. Still, the suburban TV show following the exploits of a nuclear family and kids developed in this time and is still a genre today.

But, I could also imagine some alternative ways that a home like that of the Brady Bunch could enter the realm of nostalgia:

  1. Becoming a museum. Imagine either someone purchasing the property and turning it into a museum or a local government acquiring the property. Put a little money into the home to set up some displays, charge a manageable entrance fee, and the facility is up and running.
  2. Since the first option might cause some zoning issues, move the whole home to a place – museum, theme park, TV studio – better suited to host visitors to the home. What if there was a theme park built around TV buildings or even just around depicted suburban homes?

 

Would less door-to-door trick-or-treating and more community Halloween events decrease or increase social interactions?

Posted on by

If Halloween is indeed evolving away from neighborhood trick-or-treating (good discussion here), are the replacement or alternative or additional events in downtowns, at churches, and activities organized by other groups leading to more or less community and social interactions? Thinking out loud:

-Going door-to-door often involves interacting with people who are near you in physical proximity. Even if neighborhood interactions are declining, people would be more likely to run into each other at other times just because they live near each other.

-Going to centralized Halloween events in other locations means more people might gather together. But, their interactions might be limited. Perhaps it depends on what commonalities people at the event may share – a church event could involve a number of core community members as could a downtown event where local luminaries or figures are involved. On the other hand, community or organized events could involve more people just dropping in and out after acquiring candy and a lower likelihood of later interactions.

In both cases, the practice of getting candy could do little to build community if (1) candy is the only goal and (2) the likelihood of subsequent interactions is limited. It would be easy to turn Halloween into an exercise is gathering a commodity with few opportunities to interact with people.

And more broadly, how much is Halloween a family or community holiday compared to other big celebrations like Christmas, Thanksgiving, and July 4th?

Drawing artistic inspiration from growing up around McMansions

Posted on by

Artist Katherine Vetne builds upon a childhood spent around McMansions:

Vetne says her interests in exploring (and subverting) objects of status and consumerism started when she was growing up in Newburyport, Mass. She observed the differences between established “old money” and the newly affluent: A lot of the newer families built “McMansion” houses that looked like new versions of the town’s historic homes in an attempt to emulate that status.

Those experiences led to a unique form of art:

Vetne, 31, of San Francisco, has been building a reputation as a sculptor who works in an unusual medium: destruction. Vetne’s best-known work during the past three years has been a series of sculptures made from kiln-melted housewares crystal, which takes a distinctive, puddle-like shape when heated.

She then “mirrors” the melted crystal mass in a chemical process that turns the blobs into reflective objects. The pieces are presented individually or in big groups, like in her “Guilty Pleasures” installation that was part of the Catharine Clark Gallery’s summer show, “We tell ourselves stories … In order to live.” Ford and Vetne took the shopping trip at Clark’s invitation to find the raw material for a piece Ford recently commissioned from Vetne.

The idea of working with crystal, whether it’s fine Baccarat or more mass-market Avon, appeals to Vetne, who is interested in exploring issues of class, gender and materialism. “At the crux of my practice is the more middle-class people with some amount of resources trying to look ‘higher class’ than they are through the objects they acquire. I am interested in concepts of visual excess and how they’re supposed to communicate something. Usually, it’s ‘I have a lot of money.’”

Given the general reputation of McMansions, this is not surprising: take objects by which aspiring people try to build up their status and then destroy them to show what those objects are really about. Perhaps it would even be more shocking if an artist celebrated McMansions.

I’m also trying to imagine this destruction process applied to actual McMansions or parts of McMansions. Could a piece of performance art involve taking a wrecking ball to a McMansion? Or, imagine taking a two story foyer to a museum and showing it falling apart every so often, like the way “Concert for Anarchy” displays a piano in an unusual form. Or, take granite countertops and stainless steel appliances and destroy them.

Homeownership rate up, driven by millennials

Posted on by

Millennials buying homes helped push the national homeownership rate higher:

The homeownership rate for Americans under 35 jumped to 36.8 percent in the third quarter, highest in five years, the Census Bureau said Tuesday. The share of millennial homeowners was up sharply, from 36.5 percent in the second quarter and 35.6 percent a year earlier. That’s still below the historically normal 40 percent-plus share for Americans that age.

But the young adults, largely first-time homebuyers, drove the national homeownership rate to 64.4 percent – highest since 2014 – from 64.3 percent the prior quarter…

Skylar Olsen, director of economic research for real estate site Zillow, says the slowing housing market actually has aided millennials who are facing somewhat less competition as they hunt for their first home…

The surge in millennial homeownership is a sign the recent housing slowdown is likely temporary, McLaughlin says. “Because that group is so big, it can help support the U.S. housing market indefinitely,” he says.

Millennials are good for something! Someone has to want to buy all those homes that Baby Boomers will soon make available.

Seriously though, two thoughts based on this data:

  1. Even with this news, expect the increasing ability of millennials to buy homes to lead to steady progress, not huge changes in homeownership (which had reached record low rates).
  2. Even with their economic troubles, millennials would prefer not to rent in the long run and would like to own homes, preferably in the suburbs.

For the housing market to really take off, both millennials and Baby Boomers need to want to and be able to move into homes they want.

 

Turning “Property Brothers” into a sitcom

Posted on by

The rise of Jonathan and Drew Scott may be both improbable and humorous enough for a sitcom:

The series is titled “It Takes Two,” based on the Scott brothers’ memoir of the same name. The show follows two entrepreneurial twin brothers who decide to join forces in the real estate business when they realize they are stronger together than apart. Fox has given the project a script commitment with a penalty attached.

The Scotts rose to fame with their hit TV series “Property Brothers,” which is broadcast on HGTV in the U.S. The show proved so successful that it inspired multiple spinoffs, including “Brother vs. Brother” and “Property Brothers: At Home.”

Brothers Jon and Josh Silberman will write and executive produce the series. The duo’s previous TV credits include “Living Biblically” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” They are also writing the screenplay for the upcoming Wile E. Coyote movie.

Given the popularity of the HGTV show with its combination of real estate and renovation plus friendly zaniness, this could easily lead to the land of TV sitcoms.

At the same time, it would be very interesting to see how different the sitcom is from the scripted reality presented on Property Brothers. What details about the Scott’s will be shared on the sitcom? Will the sitcom maintain the general positivity and wholesomeness that marks HGTV shows? Will the sitcom parody what happens on HGTV or will those be the serious moments on the show?

I suspect the sitcom will tread lightly on what actually happens on HGTV or in revealing the “dark sides” of the brothers. This may not be the case if the brothers are hoping to go a new direction or if their HGTV contracts are coming due soon. But, could the Scott’s reinvent themselves with this sitcom or is it another avenue for burnishing their brand and bringing in revenue?

(Final note: if this is successful, how far away is HGTV from running its own sitcoms or dramas? Given the heavy editing and scripting already, perhaps the network is not that far off.)

Who owns large apartment complexes in downtown Wheaton?

Posted on by

The national and international flow of capital in real estate is a well-established phenomena in the biggest cities but it is recognized less in suburbs. Here is an example of this in Wheaton, Illinois:

In the bigger deal, San Francisco-based FPA Multifamily acquired Wheaton Center, a 758-unit property in downtown Wheaton, from Edge Principal Advisors of New York, according to a statement from HFF, the brokerage that arranged the sale.

It’s unclear how much FPA paid—the statement did not include a price and FPA and Edge representatives did not return calls—but the property was expected to fetch about $135 million, according to Real Estate Alert, a trade publication. At that price, the sale would generate a big profit for Edge, which paid $44 million for Wheaton Center in 2014 and invested about $40 million in a major renovation.

The seller of the other property might want to forget about Wheaton altogether. Invesco, an Atlanta-based pension fund adviser, sold Wheaton 121, a 306-unit apartment complex that opened in 2014, for $72 million, according to Connor Group, the Ohio investment firm that bought the property. That’s nearly 25 percent less than the $95.8 million Invesco paid in 2015 for the complex, 121 N. Cross St.

The main culprit: property taxes. Wheaton 121’s taxes rose so much after Invesco bought it that the added expense significantly depressed the property’s value, according to people familiar with the complex. A jump in the property’s assessed value pushed Invesco’s 2018 tax bill up to $2.0 million, a whopping 47 percent increase from 2016, according to DuPage County records.

I suspect most suburbanites know little about who owns major pieces of land in their community, let alone who owns large apartment buildings (which may be more or less common depending on the suburb). Unless the owner makes a big deal of their ownership with signs or presence in the community, daily life just moves on.

But, this infusion of money from far away could have a significant influence on a suburb. Local developers may not be interested in sizable projects or may not be able to access the same amounts of capital. At the same time, a local developer may be more attuned to local conditions. Presumably, all the owners of nicer properties want to be seen as good actors in the suburb but they may have varying levels of involvement and commitment to the exact community.

Naperville train parking permits require 7 year wait yet parking lots are 88-90% full

Posted on by

Long waits – seven years or so – for a parking permit at the busy downtown Naperville train station are not new but recent data hints that those parking lots are not full every day:

Of the 1,681 spaces at the Naperville station, 918 are dedicated to quarterly permit holders but those spaces generally don’t fill up. Because about 10 percent to 20 percent of permit spaces are left empty on average, Naperville oversells the number of permits for each of the three dedicated lots.

“Our spaces that are dedicated for quarterly permit holders, the utilization there is significantly lower than what we see for our daily fee spaces. Our daily fee spaces are generally fully occupied by about 6:30 (a.m.),” Louden said…

Naperville issues 850 quarterly permits for the 526 spots in the Burlington lot, which sees an average utilization rate of 89 percent, according to a presentation from city staff. The city issues 185 permits for the Parkview lot’s 110 spaces and sees an 88 percent utilization rate. And 474 permits are issued for the 282 quarterly spaces in the Kroehler lot, which sees a 90 percent utilization rate…

“For a lot of communities, what we would recommend at CMAP is to better manage the parking supply by using pricing as you would with any other economic good,” Bayley said. “It’s about incentives as well as disincentives, and really the disincentive is going to be the cost and the wait list.”

Parking can be a difficult commodity to manage. In suburban areas, it is often expected to be plentiful and free. Americans love to drive. Yet, keeping parking prices low and having a good amount of availability can influence behavior. If parking is easy, there is little incentive to do something else instead. Plus, there is a bigger picture to keep in mind. As the article asks, it is good in the long run to provide spaces that enable driving or is it better to develop and promote alternative forms of transportation?

There are numerous ways Naperville could get creative in promoting higher utilization rates. The article mentions raising prices but they could also notify certain permit holders about their spots being empty and talk about the possibility of reducing permit spots and replacing them with daily fees.

I wonder if there is are two other groups the Naperville needs to hear from:

(1) those who do not buy quarterly permits yet are unsuccessful when they try to find a daily spot. What do they do – then drive into the city? Take another form of transportation? What about the people who are not daily commuters but who might occasionally want to ride the train into the city – can they access a spot?

(2) people who do not purchase a quarterly permit but instead rely on day-to-day parking. Why are they willing to do this and can they always get daily spots

 

Contested House races in educated suburban districts

Posted on by

The road to political success for the national parties continues to run through middle suburbs:

On one side of that divide is growing Democratic strength in white-collar suburbs recoiling from Trump; on the other is continued Republican dominance in rural places and blue-collar communities that flocked to Trump in 2016 and haven’t wavered much since. These divergent forces explain why Democratic opportunities are expanding in well-educated suburban districts around major metropolitan areas all over the country while the party is still facing an uphill climb in almost all the House seats outside metropolitan areas that it hoped to contest this year.

The Washington race between first-time Democratic candidate Kim Schrier, a pediatrician, and Republican Dino Rossi, a three-time GOP nominee for statewide office, is one of several contests that capture both of those dynamics inside the same district. Democrats this year are mounting serious challenges for Republican-held seats that sprawl from suburban into rural areas around Richmond, Virginia; Lexington, Kentucky; Charlotte and Raleigh, North Carolina; Cedar Rapids and Des Moines, Iowa; Topeka, Kansas; Columbus, Ohio; Springfield, Illinois; and parts of upstate New York, among other places.

Republicans have controlled each of these districts for years, typically posting comfortable margins in both their rural and suburban areas. But the results in them this fall will pressure-test the electoral trade that Trump is imposing on his party: growing strength in small-town and rural communities offset by growing skepticism and resistance in many white-collar suburbs, particularly among women. The intensely divisive confirmation battle over Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh appears poised to magnify the trends on both sides of that line.

The main contours of the political battle continues to hold: Democrats get votes from big cities and close suburbs, Republicans get votes from rural areas and exurbs, and the two parties fight over the middle suburbs characterized by relatively educated and wealthy residents with some pockets of poorer residents as well as various levels of racial and ethnic diversity. This was the pattern in 2016 (see earlier posts about Clinton winning in the Chicago suburbs, Trump losing ground in suburbs, and changes in suburban voting patterns) and it appears to be true in the 2018 elections (see recent posts here and here).