Category Archives: Sociology

Data centers as the largest construction project ever in Indiana

Posted on by

Amazon plans to construct large data center facilities in northwest Indiana:

Photo by Life Of Pix on Pexels.com

Amazon plans to spend $15 billion for the largest construction project in Indiana history, building data center campuses in Northwest Indiana and creating 1,100 new jobs, officials said…

Sites for them have not yet been finalized, although AWS is in negotiations with multiple communities, he said Monday…

Not too many years ago, BP’s $3.8 billion Whiting Refinery expansion was considered the largest construction project in state history. The work at the refinery kept tradespeople working through the Great Recession, Ennis noted. Building data centers will keep tradespeople working in the region for years to come…

This project’s impact on the communities’ tax base can’t be calculated until the communities are chosen and incentives are finalized, but the impact will be huge. When Microsoft chose LaPorte for a $1 billion data center, Mayor Tom Dermody said it would effectively double the city’s tax base.

Indiana is not the largest state in size or population but it is not the smallest either: it is 38th in land area and 17th in population. So I think it means something that this would be the largest project in the state’s history. The amount of money, work, and land is worth noting.

The article mentions briefly that some Indiana communities have said no to data centers. Others seem interested (as noted above). I wonder if data centers and less desirable land uses will cluster in red states or certain communities where they are seen more as business opportunities rather than community liabilities. If tech companies say they need data centers, presumably some places will approve their construction.

In this particular case, what if some of the data center activity that could go in the Chicago suburbs located in Illinois ends up in northwest Indiana? Will some Illinois and Indiana communities look back and think they missed an opportunity or will they be grateful they had the foresight to say no?

An airport as an economic engine, Pittsburgh edition

Posted on by

Reflecting on the opening of a new terminal at Pittsburgh International Airport, one writer looks back at what the city and region expected the airport to be:

Photo by Enes Tu00fcrkou011flu on Pexels.com

The airport was to be a driver and symbol of the whole region’s evolution. “Planners hope the terminal, with its vaulted ceilings and driverless underground trains, will complete an image transformation begun decades ago,” the Times story said. “Once known as a gritty old steel town of blue-collar workers, Pittsburgh has become a commercial center of office towers and high-technology industries.” That reinvention has continued apace in the 33 years since the terminal opened. But even as a tech, robotics, and health care hub, the area has three-fourths the population that it did in 1970. And no place was a worse reminder of what Pittsburgh had lost than this airport 20 minutes west of downtown…

As a major airline’s biggest hub, Pittsburgh would be taking a piece out of millions of travelers who weren’t even staying in Pittsburgh, and it would also get a tourist boom from people who suddenly had an ultra-easy way of visiting. Before Sept. 11, 2001, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported, USAir was running 542 daily flights in or out of Pittsburgh. As airline-airport relationships go, this was a huge one. (Today, for example, Delta peaks with about 330 daily flights leaving Minneapolis, its No. 2 city.)…

But the oversized airport was a bleak metaphor for a city that was once more bustling and then got let down—first by the shriveling of the steel business, then by USAir itself. The cavernous, quiet terminal created a bad feeling upon landing at home, like you had just entered a place that wasn’t what it used to be. It wasn’t a good way to be welcomed to a city, whether you lived there or not.

It can’t be overstated how much the point of the new airport is to simply move Pittsburgh past this corporate pantsing by US Airways. Yeah, there are practical logistics reasons for an update. As the airport authority chairman said in announcing the project back in 2017, airlines would face lower costs, and the facility would be “very efficient and modern.” But then he got to the point: “And, finally, this is most important for me, the people of Pittsburgh finally get an airport that is built for them, and not USAir.”…

A major city needs a decent airport. It offers travel opportunities to residents and businesses. It connects a place to other places. It is what people see when they arrive in or leave a city.

Can an airport be an economic engine on its own? Pittsburgh is a smaller big city. According to Wikipedia, it is the 67th largest city in the United States with over 307,000 residents and it is the 28th largest metropolitan area. How much air traffic can be expected to go through an airport in such a city?

The story of this airport seems tied up with the fate of the city. It once thought it could be an airline hub. It has a proud history of industry. But the world changed: industry jobs went elsewhere, the airline industry changed, and the large airport did not live up to its potential.

Having effective and inspiring infrastructure is helpful in many ways. It enables other important activity. Pittsburgh may not have a large airline hub or a standalone economic powerhouse but perhaps it now has an airport that serves the region well for decades.

Growing up in the era of peak suburban shopping malls and movie theaters

Posted on by

Growing up in the 1990s, I and other residents of my suburb did not lack for choices when it came to shopping malls and movie theaters. While our suburb itself was not home to a theater or shopping mall, within a 10 mile drive, we could access at three shopping malls (with several more within a few more miles) and numerous smaller shopping centers and at least five first-run movie theaters and several additional second-run theaters (with more just beyond those 10 mile boundaries).

Photo by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels.com

This provided lots of options. Did we want to see the latest blockbuster (with a good string of these in the mid to late 1990s) at a new 16 or 24 theater location? What kind of store – national chain, anchor department store, local business – did we want to visit at the mall and perhaps we could find food there?

This era is over. There are still shopping malls and movie theaters around. I do not lack for options if I were to look up theaters and malls near me. But, there are fewer within that ten mile radius: two of the three malls closed and multiple movie theaters closed or downsized from megaplex size.

And if I go to these places, the experience is different and the world has changed. Both are often less lively. People have more options, particularly at home. They can shop with their smartphones and computers and order goods and food right to their doorstep. They can skip theaters for movies, streaming them on their own screens. I am guilty of this as well; partly due to being in a different stage of life, partly because I have other options, I do not frequent malls and movie theaters.

Some shopping malls and movie theaters will hang on in the suburbs. They have been around for decades. They are part of the suburban landscape. They continue to offer unique experiences, even if people can shop and watch movies elsewhere. There just will not be as many of them in the future and people may have to drive a little further to find what used to be more plentiful.

Finances, ideal lifestyles, and the push and pull away from cities experienced by young adults

Posted on by

Looking back at residential patterns after the late 2000s economic crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, what motivated younger adults to leave cities and move to suburban or rural communities?

Photo by Kelly on Pexels.com

Later waves that arrived just after the Great Recession, however, had a different type of migrant identity. As luxury housing continued to be built in New York City and affordable areas disappeared, some residents found the big city “inhospitable to their desired urban lifestyle and identity”: “Many of today’s newcomers to Newburgh use the term ‘priced out’…though few actually left in direct response to their rents rising or their landlord pressuring them to move out,” Ocejo writes. “But cost still played an important role in their decision to relocate…. They felt displaced from their own potential and opportunities to thrive as middle-class urbanites living a specific city lifestyle in the metropolis.”

Herein lies the tension between getting “pushed” from a city versus “pulled.” Some contemporary migrants are pushed from a particular lifestyle and pulled by a promise that it can be built elsewhere. Unlike midcentury white flight—which was highly dependent on the construction of suburban housing, racism, and statecraft—middle-class millennials (especially those facing mounting city prices and remote work) find that smaller cities and towns cater to a broader vision for life, one that provides opportunities to buy a house, build a business, or comfortably raise a family…

“When people move from one community to another…they leave behind their old job, connections, identity, and seek out new ones. They force themselves to go meet their neighbors, or to show up at a new church on Sunday, despite the awkwardness,” Appelbaum writes. What this might mean for rural or metro areas is yet to be seen. But for people moving out of large cities, it’s redefining what upward mobility might look like. Building wealth through housing may be unattainable, but it’s being replaced by a search for a new American dream: self-actualization.

What I read in this description is an intertwining of financial matters and what lifestyle people see themselves having. Costs and resources matter; housing is a sizable portion of many budgets. Housing has become more expensive in many American metropolitan areas. But cultural narratives and individual aspirations also matter; what life does someone want to live? What do they see as a good life?

On this first factor, it helps to have more financial resources. The stories told in this article seem to involve people who had enough resources that they had options of where to live. They could make a major move, perhaps by selling a residence in one place to go to another. Or they had careers and job skills that enabled them to live in multiple places.

On this second factor, Americans have developed a lot of narratives over time about desirable lives. They want a single-family home in the suburbs. They want to be individuals who pursue their own path (the self-actualization suggested above). They want to engage community life. And so on.

Perhaps then it would be helpful to think about a two-pole line that demonstrates how people make decisions about where to live and what to pursue. On one side of the line is finances and what is possible in terms of money and resources. On the other side of the line is an image of the life they want to live and what that entails on a day-to-day and long-term basis. Depending on the current situation personally and in society, they might slide a marker more toward one pole than the other.

(Does this describe how young adults make these decisions or is this limited to a certain subset with particular resources and goals?)

The rise of youth and rock music

Posted on by

A look back at one influential rock album highlights the connection between age and rock music:

Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

In the mid-1950s, the idea that the cutting edge of pop would come to be dominated by relatively young people writing songs for and about people even younger was a revolutionary notion, one that in the next decade would come to be taken for granted.

How much did the music help encourage youth culture or the youth culture encourage the music? This was a period with a growing number of children and teenagers and a different sense of what youths could do and contribute to society.

It would be interesting to compare that time period to today regarding music. Some of those original influential youths from the 1950s and 1960s music scene are still alive. They continue to make new music as well as play their old hits. They are no longer young; but do they continue to carry on a youthful spark or the youth culture of that time? Or do they not matter much as younger people continue to make, remake, and innovate music.

It is hard to imagine otherwise but imagine the purveyors of rock music in the 1950s and 1960s were not young – not Elvis, Chuck Berry, the Beatles, etc. – but rather musicians in their 30s and 40s. What might be different – the sound? The lyrics? The scene? Would rock music be different today based on those changes back then?

Chicago as the epicenter for the creation of American time zones

Posted on by

When Americans decided on time zones in the late 1800s, where did they gather to formalize the boundaries and clocks? Chicago, a railroad center:

Photo by Crono Viento on Pexels.com

Until 1883, a Chicagoan asked to tell what time it was could give more than one answer and still be correct.

There was local time, determined by the position of the sun at high noon at a centrally located spot in town, usually City Hall. There was also railroad time, which put Columbus, Ohio, six minutes faster than Cincinnati and 19 minutes faster than Chicago. Scattered across the country were 100 different local time zones, and the railroads had some 53 zones of their own.

To do away with the inevitable confusion, the railroads took the matter into their own hands, holding a General Time Convention in the fall of 1883 at the Grand Pacific Hotel at LaSalle Street and Jackson Boulevard. (Today, a plaque at the location — which is just north of the Chicago Board of Trade Building — notes its significance).

Its purpose: to develop a better and more uniform system of railroad scheduling. The Standard Time System — based on the mean solar time at the central meridian of each time zone — was formally inaugurated on Nov. 18, 1883, a day that came to be known as the “Day of Two Noons.”

Another summary of the same story ended this way:

But it was an astonishingly rapid and successful shift, syncing up almost the entire country in the space of a week, with all roads leading back to Chicago.

Three interrelated features of Chicago stand out to me as contributing to being the place where time zones were agreed upon:

  1. A railroad center with numerous major railways running in and through the city and region.
  2. Business leaders, specifically railroad leaders, pushing for standard time zones in order to help their commercial activity. Chicago was a center for commerce and industry.
  3. The ease of getting in and out of Chicago – lots of railroads, central location in the United States – helped facilitate a meeting there.

These features of Chicago still hold today. The city continues to be a railroad center with lots of traffic throughout the region. It is still a business center, a leading global city. And it still serves as a transportation hub. Just as the railroad executives found it a good place to gather, see the number of important meetings that take place near O’Hare Airport, in the city, and throughout the region.

Might such a meeting in 1883 taken place elsewhere? Perhaps. If something as consequential as time zones were to be decided in 2025, which American city might we expect to host the discussion: the political center of Washington, D.C.? The leading global city of New York? The tech capital in San Francisco?

Draw a five mile circle around Chicago area shopping malls and do you find the ingredients for a successful mall?

Posted on by

In an era when many shopping malls are struggling, what distinguishes mall properties from each other? One suburban community with a failed mall and stalled redevelopment efforts, Charlestowne in St. Charles, examines what you find if you look what is around a mall:

Photo by Pat Whelen on Pexels.com

Commercial businesses such as retail stores, restaurants, and entertainment venues depend on a strong local population to generate steady sales and foot traffic. The more households that surround a shopping center, the greater the built-in customer base to support those businesses and the more attractive the redevelopment is for a developer. For Charlestowne Mall, the surrounding area has relatively low population density compared to other successful shopping corridors in the region. With fewer nearby residents, there is less day-to-day demand to sustain large-scale retail, making it harder to attract and retain major tenants. The graphic below provides the basic demographic and market data within a five-mile radius of the Charlestowne Mall site. Developers and businesses rely on this data to evaluate the market feasibility of proposed commercial uses and to understand the strength of the local customer base.

From this analysis (which continues for about 10 more malls in addition to the chart above), several features of Charlestowne stand out: the nearby population is relatively small and the mall has no interstate access. It does have a higher median household income than some malls, including the two others on the list that were demolished (but had more residents nearby with one having interstate access and another not).

So is the real story about this property about mall overdevelopment? As the number of shopping malls expanded in the growing suburbs of the end of the twentieth century, how many were doomed from the beginning? Or perhaps developers and communities were too optimistic about how many people malls might draw or projected more nearby residents than ended up living nearby. Did anyone foresee the rise of online shopping or the shifts in consumption habits?

The trend in recent years is to try to save malls with new features that will continue to pull people to the property. But the malls that are already closed – such as Charlestowne – can struggle to replace them with something local residents and leaders want. This property still has fewer people nearby and no interstate. Even if the mall building is closed, it is hard to lose the dream of the mall and all that went with it including local revenue and a local gathering spot.

Where “forgotten Americans” might live

Posted on by

In a discussion of what to do with the new ballroom under construction at the White House, one politician said the new part of the White House should represent “forgotten Americans”:

Photo by Eugenio Felix on Pexels.com

“We need a White House that is not for the tech billionaires, but for forgotten Americans,” he said.

“In that spirit, we should ask Americans — in rural communities, urban centers and hollowed-out factory towns — for their ideas of what to do with the space,” Khanna said.

This is an interesting comment as it contrasts that who have a lot versus those who are forgotten. Rather than note what these forgotten Americans do or do not have, they are instead linked to geographic areas. Three in particular: rural areas, the centers of big cities, and factory towns.

The primary residential and business space left out of this list is the suburbs. These areas are often assumed to be wealthy, full of people who have made it in American life. They have at least some major control of their own destiny. They may not be tech billionaires but they are not forgotten.

There are communities in the suburbs not doing well. There are suburbs that are more rural than urban, suburbs that experience similar issues facing urban centers, and suburbs that have lost important jobs ad have limited business activity. These struggling suburbs can sometimes be near wealthy suburbs.

And it could be interesting to see how such designations line up with survey responses from Americans regarding whether they feel forgotten and where they live.

Zillow, realtors, and who can be a “neighborhood savant”

Posted on by

A Zillow commercial refers to their agents as a “neighborhood savant.” Are Zillow agents or realtors the best people to claim this title?

A real estate agent might know a lot about neighborhoods or communities. Looking at the local marketing realtors do, I see that they claim to know about different suburbs. In particular, they have knowledge about the local housing market through what has sold and what has not. They can also talk about other aspects of the community, such as schools and nearby amenities.

If I go to websites like Zillow or Realtors.com, they offer neighborhood information with each property listing. This includes a map, walkability scores, ratings of local schools, other nearby listings and recent sales, and more.

But what does it take to know about a neighborhood? Who can accurately describe what it is like to live there or how the character of a place plays out? Does anyone offer insights from local residents? Do real estate agents live in the communities they sell in or have secondhand information from local residents and organizations?

This reminds me of two posts I put together years ago on how to learn about a suburb. There are lots of sources of information about communities and some of it is available online. But some of it is not. Talking to people or walking through a community or reading local histories can provide some insights that are harder to intuit online.

Who else might be a “neighborhood savant”? A local journalist, where they are still available. A local political official or a longstanding member of a community institution. A local historian. Residents who take an interest in and actively participate in their neighborhood.

Filming in a real place but not calling it that place in the movie

Posted on by

A new streaming romantic comedy features a Chicago suburb:

Photo by Ron Lach on Pexels.com

“Libertyville will be featured quite a bit,” he said. All the business names were kept as is and some of the shopkeepers appear in the film, he added.

The village was to have been one of the locations for another of his holiday films, Charles said. That was delayed but filming for “Christmas at the Zoo” has been approved by the village and is planned for December.

“Libertyville has been on our radar for some time,” he said. “Having had a great experience shooting ‘Exes’ there, we’re happy to be coming back.”…

Local actors will be used in the film and Libertyville will be listed as an official filming location on the IMDb website.

With all these real shots of Libertyville, it appears the film does not say it takes place in Libertyville. From one Facebook post and a brief shot in the movie trailer, it appears the community in the film is named “Mill Creek.” According to Wikipedia, there are at least a few communities in the United States named “Mill Creek.”

I have wondered about whether filming in real locations matters for those watching a film or TV show. Couldn’t they just have found some establishing shots or used a studio to film? This is commonly done so how much does it matter that this was set in a real place that the film’s creators were familiar with? Perhaps the residents of Libertyville can watch and discuss and then compare what people who watch from elsewhere think.