Category Archives: Sociology

Best American cities for getting to jobs by mass transit

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A new report looks at which American cities and regions offer access to more jobs through public transportation:

The report, by Andrew Owen and David Levinson, defines accessibility as “the ease of reaching valued destinations,” in this case jobs. Simply put, it’s an examination of how easy it is for people to get to work.

Each metro region is ranked by how long it takes people to get to work: Jobs that can be reached within 10 minutes are worth more than those accessible with 20 minutes, and so on, up to 60 minutes. Data for job locations is drawn from the Census Bureau, and the time it takes to get there is measured using “detailed pedestrian networks” and full transit schedules for weekdays between 7 and 9 am.

The method accounts for things like how long it takes to walk from a transit stop to a destination and transfer times from one bus or subway line to another. Importantly, it also factors in service frequency and includes the time people spend waiting for a bus or train to arrive…

The authors offer two approaches for improving accessibility. The first is obvious: Offer more and better service that reaches more people. But where jobs and homes are located matters, too. Atlanta has a heavy rail system comparable to those in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, but because its job centers aren’t as concentrated, that service is less useful, and accessibility suffers. Cities can respond with land-use policies and zoning codes that encourage density around existing transit networks. The height limit on buildings in Washington, D.C., for example, triggers sprawl (away from transit). Oregon’s urban growth boundary laws restrict how much land can be developed, which encourages density. If cities follow the latter example, “encouraging both residents and employers to locate in parts of the city already served by transit,” they can improve accessibility and limit the burden each new residents puts on the transit system.

Given their density, the first two regions in the rankings are not a surprise: New York City and San Francisco. After that, you get a variety of more sprawling cities and regions.

Chicago comes in at number five. Here is the map of the Chicago with redder areas having more jobs accessible by mass transit within 30 minutes.

As the caption notes, the map suggests “Job accessibility in Chicago closely follows the network of the metro region’s rail system.” My interpretation: the rail system built largely on railroad lines from the mid-1800s continues to influence Chicago development and job patterns. Still, most jobs for suburbanites in the Chicago region are not accessible by mass transit, even if you expand the time to 90 minutes.

Ending a long-term relationship can lead to downward mobility in housing

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The end of a long-term relationship can negative influence one’s housing options:

Many (though declining numbers of) marriages end in separation today. Besides the emotional turmoil that the marital separation causes, this event has profound effects on the chances to remain in homeownership for both ex-partners. Generally, at least one, if not both partners, will leave the previously shared dwelling. As separation often involves a loss of financial resources, people may have a hard time re-entering homeownership. After falling out of love and separating, a fall down the housing ladder may follow, as we show in a study recently published in European Sociological Review.

How drastic this fall will be depends very much on the housing market environment (see Figures 1 and 2). In the past in Britain, easy access to housing finance and high supply facilitated (re-)entry into homeownership for ex-partners even under house price inflation in the 1990s and early 2000s. In tight housing markets ex-partners will face more difficulties, and once access to mortgages becomes restricted, as happened in Britain after the recent crash in the housing market, problems may arise. So in the past British ex-partners could return to homeownership at some point in their lives because access to mortgages was easy – and they needed to return because alternatives in the private and social rental sector were and are unattractive. This may no longer work in future. Ex-partners may increasingly face similar problems that new market entrants currently encounter, for which the term generation rent has already been coined.

To better understand what may happen to British ex-partners, we can consider the example of Germany. The German housing market is in many ways different from the British, not the least because private rental accommodation is an attractive alternative to homeownership. Access to mortgages is also more restricted than in Britain, even after the recent tightening of regulations in Britain. High down payments are the rule in Germany. In this market environment, homeownership is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for many, while a considerable share of people will never enter homeownership. After separation, very few Germans will be able to return to homeownership (see Figure 2). Ex-partners will be less likely to be in homeownership through their lives post-separation. This scenario may foreshadow the British situation in the near future.

Being excluded from homeownership in the German context is not as consequential as it may turn out to be in Britain, however. First, more Germans will accept to rent after separation compared to the British, because attractive, and most of all, secure accommodation is available for – internationally seen – reasonable costs. Second, the German public pension system is relatively generous for those who continuously worked throughout their lives. To build up private wealth as a cushion for old age is not as necessary as in Britain. In Britain, where individuals are expected to privately invest in financial products and property to build an individual safety net – an idea called asset-based welfare – people that experience a separation may lose this safety net. This may result in stark disparities between the separated and those remaining married in old life.

Many (though declining numbers of) marriages end in separation today. Besides the emotional turmoil that the marital separation causes, this event has profound effects on the chances to remain in homeownership for both ex-partners. Generally, at least one, if not both partners, will leave the previously shared dwelling. As separation often involves a loss of financial resources, people may have a hard time re-entering homeownership. After falling out of love and separating, a fall down the housing ladder may follow, as we show in a study recently published in European Sociological Review. – See more at: http://blog.oup.com/2014/10/home-ownership-marriage-separation/#sthash.bcXULRwJ.dpuf
Many (though declining numbers of) marriages end in separation today. Besides the emotional turmoil that the marital separation causes, this event has profound effects on the chances to remain in homeownership for both ex-partners. Generally, at least one, if not both partners, will leave the previously shared dwelling. As separation often involves a loss of financial resources, people may have a hard time re-entering homeownership. After falling out of love and separating, a fall down the housing ladder may follow, as we show in a study recently published in European Sociological Review. – See more at: http://blog.oup.com/2014/10/home-ownership-marriage-separation/#sthash.bcXULRwJ.dpuf

The authors conclude that changes in family structures over the past few decades mean that housing policy primarily built around families and stable relationships just won’t work. In other words, we need more housing options for smaller, changing families and people who live alone.

I wonder if the same findings would hold in the United States. Perhaps it might be particularly problematic in higher-priced markets where buying homes and renting can be difficult even for stable, middle-class families.

“Ugliest new build McMansion ever”?

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Take a look at this McMansion in Vienna, Virginia:

A quick analysis of the home based on the four traits of McMansions:

1. Absolute size. This home seems to have at least 3,000 square feet.

2. Relative size. Quite a difference between this home and the mid-20th century ranch home next door. It is hard to know for sure from the picture but this new home could be a teardown.

3. Poor architectural design and quality. The home has some interesting proportions, ranging from the relatively bland sided area above the front doorway to the popping-out balconies at each corner of the front. It is bulging in all the wrong places. (I would be interested to know whether these two second-story corners mean that these are separate suites, each with their own balcony.)

4. Tied to other social issues like consumption and sprawl. The suburban aspect is clearly implied by this picture, particularly with the looming water tower in the background. (The water tower is reminiscent of this famous photo from Plano, Texas.) Compared to the home next door, this new McMansion does look excessive. Sadly, the same angle that helps invite comparison to the home next door and the water tower also blocks our view of the likely large garage in the back.

Is this the worst designed McMansion ever? There are a good number of contenders for this crown. Just look at these 10 McMansions from New Jersey…

The New York Times has compared many places to Brooklyn

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The New York Times has been fond of comparing Brooklyn to all sorts of places including Oakland, Beijing, New Orleans, The Hudson Valley, and Everywhere. What might be the effect of doing this?

Beyond beards and Girls (or why NYT trend pieces are problematic), I always wonder how the residents these cities feel about being deemed a Brooklyn-like place. I also wonder what it’s going to do to their property prices.

There are two reasons: First, studies show that a prestigious sounding name adds value to a neighborhood. For example, researchers found that buyers were willing to pay a 4.2 percent premium for the term “country.” The Brooklyn dream branding has become a certain kind of prestige to young professionals looking for housing. They loosely know what real estate being “Brooklyn” means: cool neighbors, artisanal food shops, Zagat-rated restaurants and bars. It’s the stylish land of Blue Bottle coffee and No.6 clogs. The sell is: It has places you want to be and people you want to be around.

This narrative is problematic because it is unfairly discounting vast parts of the borough that’s not being gentrified in this specific way, which is why so many Brooklynites hate Brooklyn trend pieces. But it’s also just another way of saying it has a specific set of amenities that are appealing to a certain group—Brooklyn has become a euphemism for a kind of urbanism that millennials like.

Interesting that both reasons above deal with the hip, cool side of Brooklyn that appeals to young people. They imply that Brooklyn has become a trendy brand, even if many of its residents don’t see these benefits. Being a trendy brand also likely means that the frequent comparisons will stop at some point as Brooklyn (1) becomes less cool and (2) other neighborhoods, perhaps in New York City and perhaps elsewhere, become the places to be.

At the same time, I wonder why the Times has to make such comparisons at all. Is it because it helps their readers understand unfamiliar and foreign places? Or is it because New Yorkers think they have the best places (New York exceptionalism) so they impose their vision on other contexts?

Can “everyone win” in the culture wars now fought in a fragmented pop culture landscape?

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One writer suggests the fragmented pop culture of today allows opportunities for culture warriors of all sides to find their niche:

Now we are in the midst of a new culture war, in which fans and creators battle each other and sometimes themselves. It is being waged over whether or not culture is political, and if so, what its politics ought to be and how they might be expressed. That conflict has also diffused beyond the academic, religious and political institutions who were major players in earlier convulsions. Today it is wildly fragmented in a way that suggests vigorous and ongoing debates rather than an easy resolution.

The fierce arguments of today often center on whether culture is changing fast enough, and whether change means chucking out old ideas, storytelling tropes and character types...

Many of the flash points in the new culture wars are the same issues of identity politics that roiled universities in earlier decades. But rather than slugging it out in academic presses through works like Martin Bernal’s “Black Athena,” which situated classical civilization’s roots in Africa, or polemics like Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind,” the battlefields are low culture and the combatants are consumers, mass media critics and creators…

But for those who are fighting for a culture in which all stories have a chance to be told, though, the prospects are decidedly sweeter…

As we consume and discuss everything that is available to us now, we might not settle our big questions about art and politics and which values are best and how best to present them. The wonderful thing about this moment of technological and economic evolution and cultural proliferation is that we do not actually have to. The present culture war is the rare conflict in which almost everyone has a chance to win.

As noted, fragmentation is good if the goal is a lot of options and everyone getting a chance to present their perspectives. Yet, if the goal is one side or the other “winning” or even some measure of moral consensus, fragmentation is not so good.

At the same time, the idea that the culture wars are now playing out in pop culture also suggests that the average consumer is paying attention to these issues. Maybe they are moreso than in the past. However, I would guess there are still a lot of media consumers who aren’t thinking about these flashpoints as they consume. With an average consumption of 11 hours of media a day, layering the culture wars on top of that is a whole new ballgame.

Spain’s global lead in elevators tied to housing policies

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Spain leads the world in elevators per 1,000 people and this is the result of certain housing policies:

Compared to other countries, Spain’s elevator supply looks remarkably, well, elevated.
Spain Has Risen to the Top of Global Elevator Rankings
Quartz

At face value, there’s a pretty simple reason why. Spaniards are some of the world’s pre-eminent apartment-dwellers. In 2012, roughly 65 percent of the population lived in apartment buildings, much higher than the euro-area average of 46 percent. (The only other European countries that compare to Spain in terms of apartment-living are Latvia and Estonia, which are both also around 65 percent.)…

Top-down planning gave rise to relatively high-density urban building, often by politically connected construction companies in a building boom that stretched from the 1960s into the late 1970s.

“The dominant form of this housing was estates (apartment complexes) with over 1,000 dwellings,” wrote then Harvard academic Eric Belsky and colleague Nicolas Retsinas, in a paper on the Spanish housing market back in 2004. “These estates replaced many of the shantytowns that developed near cities like Barcelona and Madrid in the late 1940s and early 1950s.”

Thus was the modern Spanish city born.

With the emphasis on agricultural land in the Franco regime, dense cities and elevators were the result.

Given all this, what are the implications?

1. Do all those elevators detract from or enhance walking (taking the stairs versus having denser communities where walking is the norm)?

2. Are there any unique features of Spanish elevator culture?

3. Do the Spanish any sort of edge in elevator technology or maintenance?

Suggested: We need to think more about the sociology of aliens

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One analyst suggests we are ignoring a big feature about aliens: what would their society be like?

“We keep complaining about the fact that we know so little about extraterrestrials in general, and even though sociology is mentioned in the Drake Equation, it is generally agreed that is the most difficult aspect to address,” said Morris Jones, an Australian who describes himself as an independent space analyst.

The Drake Equation is a set of variables proposed by astronomer Frank Drake that estimates how many intelligent, communicating civilizations there are in the universe. While speaking at the International Astronautical Congress Wednesday (Oct. 1), Jones pointed out that most talk about alien communications focuses on the basics – how they transmit, and where to search, and whether we can hear them. But to fully understand the message, we have to understand how their society works.

How a society functions is partly a function of biology, Jones argued. So if humans decided to incorporate machine intelligence in their bodies, it would be reasonable to assume that society would change because of that. “Machine society is an entirely different sociology, and that we cannot predict,” Jones said. An extraterrestrial civilization could use machines, drugs, genetic engineering or surgery to alter their basic nature (something that is used also with humans.)

Class systems could also be in place that are similar to the animal kingdom. Herd and hive sociology covers how animals behave. Pigeons, for example, flock together for mutual protection. In the insect world, beings such as ants tend to be born in specific physiological roles that prepare them for different functions — such as the queen ant that is the mother of other ants in the colony.

These are societies that we could predict, perhaps, but more intriguing are those that are difficult to extrapolate from human experience or observation. Jones is particularly interested in cryptosociology. That’s the concept that because we can’t predict yet how alien civilizations will behave, we can speculate what they are capable of.

Sounds like a potentially interesting topic but how is anyone supposed to do anything definitive?

Do you want a “McMansion of Micro-Houses”?

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A new 900-square foot home in New Haven, Connecticut drew some conflicting reviews:

A micro-home debuted in town, a possible solution to New Haven’s pressing absence of affordable housing.

The three-floor, 900-square-foot ski chalet-looking home on a fine elegantly landscaped setback on Scranton Street in West River received generally rave reviews at the debut Thursday afternoon. It also drew a critique: That it’s still too large, too expensive, not a cool enough interior or replicable enough, yet a fine experiment and first step.

That critique came from the guy whose idea the house was. He called it the “McMansion of micro-houses.”…

The house was designed and built by first-year Yale School of Architecture students such as Katie Stege (pictured with her teacher Avi Forman) as part of their required coursework. The work is done under the Jim Vlock First-Year Building Project.

The home – which features some interesting design – is going for $155,000.

The general idea of the new house makes sense: the goal is to build relatively cheap new housing in New Haven yet this home is a bit too big and expensive to fit that bill. But, pairing the negative term McMansion with ideas that are generally lauded – affordable housing and micro-homes – is an odd approach, particularly coming from the funder of the project. It is like saying, “Thank you to the professors and students for the efforts but this home is like the poorly-constructed, overly-large mass produced suburban tract homes built across America.” If you are trying to build good affordable housing that the public will accept, it would behoove you to not apply the McMansion label to it.

Using social media data to predict traits about users

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Here is a summary of research that uses algorithms and “concepts from psychology and sociology” to uncover traits of social media users through what they make available:

One study in this space, published in 2013 by researchers at the University of Cambridge and their colleagues, gathered data from 60,000 Facebook users and, with their Facebook “likes” alone, predicted a wide range of personal traits. The researchers could predict attributes like a person’s gender, religion, sexual orientation, and substance use (drugs, alcohol, smoking)…

How could liking curly fries be predictive? The reasoning relies on a few insights from sociology. Imagine one of the first people to like the page happened to be smart. Once she liked it, her friends saw it. A social science concept called homophily tells us that people tend to be friends with people like themselves. Smart people tend to be friends with smart people. Liberals are friends with other liberals. Rich people hang out with other rich people…

On the first site, YouAreWhatYouLike, the algorithms will tell you about your personality. This includes openness to new ideas, extraversion and introversion, your emotional stability, your warmth or competitiveness, and your organizational levels.

The second site, Apply Magic Sauce, predicts your politics, relationship status, sexual orientation, gender, and more. You can try it on yourself, but be forewarned that the data is in a machine-readable format. You’ll be able to figure it out, but it’s not as pretty as YouAreWhatYouLike.

These aren’t the only tools that do this. AnalyzeWords leverages linguistics to discover the personality you portray on Twitter. It does not look at the topics you discuss in your tweets, but rather at things like how often you say “I” vs. “we,” how frequently you curse, and how many anxiety-related words you use. The interesting thing about this tool is that you can analyze anyone, not just yourself.

The author then goes on to say that she purges her social media accounts to not include much old content so third parties can’t use the information against them. That is one response. However, before I go do this, I would want to know a few things:

1. Just how good are these predictions? It is one thing to suggest they are 60% accurate but another to say they are 90% accurate.

2. How much data do these algorithms need to make good predictions?

3. How are social media companies responding to such moves? While I’m sure they are doing some of this themselves, what are they planning to do if someone wants to use this data in a harmful way (say, affecting people’s credit score)? Why not set limits for this now rather than after the fact?

More cities consider tearing down highways

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A recent article highlights efforts in Syracuse and other cities to tear down highways in dense urban areas:

“It seems like it’s gaining popularity,” said Ted Shelton, a professor of architecture at the University of Tennessee who studies urban highway removal. “For so long, we’ve thought when a highway gets to capacity, we need to add a lane. But what we’ve learned is there’s no way you can build enough capacity.”More cities — including Long Beach, Dallas, New Orleans, Nashville and Hartford, Conn. — are debating the idea of tearing down highways and creating something designed to keep people in the city, not send people out. In Seattle, a double-decker highway is slated to come down, although a giant machine called Big Bertha has run into trouble excavating the 2-mile-long tunnel for the new roadway.

In most cases, tearing down freeways would create “rich urban fabric that supports complex cultures and economies in a way that it can’t right now,” Shelton said…

“There’s not been a single city in the world that’s taken a freeway out and things haven’t gotten better for everybody,” said Peter J. Park, who ran the project to tear down the Park East Freeway in Milwaukee several years ago.

Still, in many cities where Americans are accustomed to using their cars to get places quickly and cheaply, urban planners might have a tough road ahead of them. For many Americans, urban highways are as essential to day-to-day life as washing machines or light bulbs.

At the least, getting rid of an urban highway opens up space and eliminates the noise, pollution, and congestion generated by the highways. At the better end, innovative projects can use that space for parks or new projects that help beautify spaces and jumpstart economic development. As noted, this is counterintuitive: building more roads is not the answer and alternative plans of action can actually reduce traffic while enhancing space. This is a reminder that cities don’t have to revolve around providing automobile access.