Category Archives: Sociology

Why is Chicago building a new roadway between the Loop and Chinatown?

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The Chicago Tribune presented this headline yesterday: “Mayor proposes new roadway between downtown, Chinatown.” When I first saw this, I thought this might be something along the lines of the Crosstown Expressway, a major new arterial roadway connecting two areas. However, the article seems to emphasize the importance of safety:

The $62 million project, called the Wells-Wentworth Connector, would also realign Wentworth Avenue between Archer and Cermak roads to bring this section of Wentworth in line with the portion of Wentworth south of Cermak, according to the Chicago Department of Transportation.

The Wentworth-Cermak intersection, which jogs in an offset alignment, contributes to a high number of crashes, according to a city analysis…

In Chinatown, the southern end of the new arterial road would offer access to the Dan Ryan Expressway, according to the city’s Central Area Action Plan, a list of proposals and specific projects, along with their construction timetables and estimated costs…

The city has slowly been planning improvements for more than a decade to boost safety and reduce traffic congestion in the area, especially among vehicles exiting the Ryan ramps at Cermak. In April 2008, a semitrailer truck that had just exited the Ryan barreled through a crowded intersection and slammed into the Cermak-Chinatown station, killing two people and injuring 21.

Improving a dangerous intersection, particularly in a higher-pedestrian area, would be helpful. It sounds like Wells and Wentworth could be connected between Roosevelt and 18th Street, providing another north-south route. Yet, the city’s explanation of the rationales for this change hint at another important factor:

1. Improved safety for vehicles, pedestrians and bicyclists. Within a wide study area, the offset intersection at Wentworth and Cermak had the highest number of crashes of any other intersection. In comparison, the number was almost double the number of crashes occuring at the intersection of the Dan Ryan off-ramps with Cermak. The realignment of Wentworth at Cermak is required to facilitate safer connections for all modes of traffic.

2. Construction of a new north-south collector street (Wells Wentworth) . This will allow for improved traffic flow throughout both TIF Redevelopment Areas by creating a coordinated series of intersections, as well as provide or improve pedestrian connectivity within the two project areas and to nearby destinations such as the new Ping Tom Park Fieldhouse, the proposed new Chinatown Library, the existing commercial areas, and transit stops.

3. Significant redevelopment opportunities. Improved connectivity between the Loop, the two TIF Redevelopment Areas, and the surrounding communities will promote the redevelopment of vacant land and expand economic development opportunites.

So the real reason may not be safety or providing another north-south thoroughfare to help relieve traffic. The primary reason, as it often is with urban changes, is development which means money and profits. Safety is good but safety plus new developments that bring in new money are even better. There is money to be made with a new street.

US homeownership rate drops in first quarter of 2014

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The homeownership rate in the United States dropped again in the beginning of 2014:

The homeownership rate in the U.S. declined to the lowest in almost 19 years as rising property prices and mortgage rates held back demand.

The share of Americans who own their homes was 64.8 percent in the first quarter, down from 65.2 percent in the previous three months, the Census Bureau said in a report today. The rate is the lowest since the second quarter of 1995, when it was 64.7 percent…

“The homeownership rate is held back by slow job growth, tight mortgage credit and declining affordability,” Jed Kolko, chief economist of San Francisco-based property-listing service Trulia Inc., said in an interview before the report was released. “We’ll see it stay around this level for some time.”

Sam Zell, chairman of apartment landlord Equity Residential (EQR), said yesterday that the rate will fall to as low as 55 percent because more Americans are choosing to rent as they postpone getting married and having children. As of 2010, about 54 percent of adults were married, down from 57 percent a decade earlier, according to Census Bureau data.

Interesting to hear economists and those in real estate suggest there are a variety of social factors affecting homeownership. Beyond the troubles of the housing market, the issues include family formation and possibly different preferences among younger Americans for where they want to live and how they want to do it.

Another interesting tidbit from this article: the homeownership peak was June 2004. This predates the housing crash by several years and is now almost 10 years ago.

Donald Sterling and residential segregation

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ESPN host Bomani Jones suggests the Donald Sterling affair is less about his recorded comments and more about his contribution to a large issue in the United States that fewer people pay attention to: residential segregation. While others have noted Sterling’s tainted past, particularly his historic $2.725 million settlement in a housing discrimination case, Sterling is part of a bigger system where white people have generally moved out of neighborhoods that blacks and others have moved into. Jones ties Sterling’s past with the problems facing poor neighborhoods in Chicago that have a lack of economic resources and opportunities after whites left for the suburbs. As noted in American Apartheid and numerous other sociological works, the disparities in where people live affect a wide range of outcomes including jobs, social networks, educational opportunities, political power, crime rates, and health.

Of course, tackling residential segregation is much harder to address. As I noted earlier this week, whites tend to argue they should be able to move where they want and take advantage of their economic power. Others don’t have such options. Various efforts to limit some of these geographic disparities – like busing to schools or moving poor urban residents to suburbs – tend not to be met with favor with suburbanites who see such moves as intrusions on their self-rule. It is one thing for whites to tolerate other racial and ethnic groups in society but a much different thing to live in close proximity, share local institutions, and interact regularly with others.

High-powered lawyer to help sell the Milwaukee Bucks wants public money even as he lives in a McMansion

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Here is an example of how looking at the personal McMansion of a wealthy individual can be pulled into commentary regarding that person’s public actions:

Marotta will certainly not be on the sidelines as a new arena is sought and fought over. He will be faced with the task of assembling a suitable building parcel as well as financing its purchase and the construction of a new facility. The $200 million promised by the seller and the new owners will not be enough to foot the bill.

Mayor Barrett and others have called for a regional tax to help pay for the stadium. If Marotta has to help this pass, he will get a taste of the struggle ahead by reading the Resolution Opposing a Tax to Fund a New Sports Arena in Downtown Milwaukee that was passed by the Executive Committee of the Ozaukee County Board of Supervisors in September 2013. Ozaukee County contributes to the 0.1 per cent Miller Park tax, and wants no part of another…

The first task is probably to find them in this cavernous dwelling, built in 2010. It has 17 rooms, of which 7 are bedrooms. There are 6 full baths and 3 half-baths in the home, along with “5 add’l fixtures”

Oh, we’ll find them later — off to the 5,605 square foot basement, of which 4,926 square feet is a finished rec room. That is a lot of recreating. Above is a first floor with 4,623 square feet of living space, surmounted by a more modestly sized 3,821 square foot second floor. Maybe it’s time to search around the 982 square foot attached garage with lake views and see if the kids are there, transfixed by the waves below…

By contrast, the visitor is encouraged to look at the orange structure to the south of the Marotta home. It could easily be overlooked, but upon closer inspection you can see a modern full-sized home dwarfed by the giant shadow cast by its neighboring McMansion.

This argument appears similar to the critique of McMansions offered by Thomas Frank several weeks ago: how can someone who has done well in life even think of asking for public money for a sports stadium? On top of this, studies suggest public tax dollars used for stadiums tend to benefit owners, not taxpayers. The McMansion discussed here (and it could be a mansion at over 10,000 square feet with the basement) is held up as an emblem of excess: it is very large, it is a teardown, it is an expensive house (in a nice location), and it is architecturally compromised. But, this analysis goes beyond speaking in generalities and links the negative qualities of the home to a particular person.

New bill would allow states to turn interstates into toll roads

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With funding for highway repairs harder to find, the new transportation bill from the White House would give states more room to add tolls to interstates:

With pressure mounting to avert a transportation funding crisis this summer, the Obama administration Tuesday opened the door for states to collect tolls on interstate highways to raise revenue for roadway repairs.

The proposal, contained in a four-year, $302 billion White House transportation bill, would reverse a long-standing federal prohibition on most interstate tolling…

“We believe that this is an area where the states have to make their own decisions,” said Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. “We want to open the aperture, if you will, to allow more states to choose to make broader use of tolling, to have that option available.”…

Foxx said the highway trust fund would face a $63 billion shortfall over the next four years.

One expert suggests otherwise in this story but I imagine there are a lot of drivers who will not like this. Yet, roads are not free; they are a public service that have to be paid for. And the all-around costs of driving are not cheap: gas, insurance, car repairs, car purchases, road construction and maintenance, and then the host of other industries and business that exists on top of an automobile-driven culture.

While there will be a lot of debate over how roads can be funded (raising the gas tax which hasn’t changed since 1993, finding new revenue sources for roads like corporate taxes, or charging drivers per mile driven), this all hints at a larger issue: driving in America could change quite a bit in the coming decades. Some of the impetus is economic; who is going to pay for these roads which are expensive to maintain and repair? Some of the impetus is on the technology side: driverless cars may not be that far away since such vehicles could be much safer and more efficient on the road and other innovations could make cars and roads more efficient. Some of it may be cultural: Americans may be interested in driving less and living in sorts of places that require fewer individual trips by car. Some of it is environmental: improving the efficiency of cars and advocating for development that limits single-person car trips. This doesn’t mean the car will disappear from American life; it is an engrained part of American culture. Yet, how Americans view cars and driving might look different several decades from now.

Chicago again named #7 global city

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Curbed Chicago highlights the 2014 A.T. Kearney rankings which again have Chicago at #7 in its Global Cities Index:

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Chicago has recently been named the 7th most globally integrated city in the world according to management consulting firm A.T. Kearney’s latest Global Cities Index. Five North American cities made the list, including New York (1), Los Angeles (6), Washington (10) and Toronto (13).

As the article notes, Chicago has been roughly in the same position for a number of years. But, I’m not sure I agree with this:

It appears that Chicago has played it safe, maintaining a solid position over the last few years, and not making any major changes in position.

What is the evidence for this? Perhaps the important question to ask is how much a city might realistically be able to move up or down the rankings within a year or a few years. Major changes that would heavily impact the five criteria happen infrequently, some change takes quite a bit of time, and the other cities are doing things as well even as things are happening in Chicago. Also, we might ask whether it is valuable for a big city to chase such rankings versus do the things that are best for the city and its citizens.

Just how much damage can an exploding McMansion cause?

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Investigators are looking into what caused the massive explosion of a large Long Grove home:

The scene on the Trenton Court cul-de-sac and surrounding neighborhood in Long Grove after an explosion Friday night obliterated a home was something Jeff Steingart has not experienced in 32 years of firefighting…

The force of the blast, which damaged an estimated 50 homes within a quarter mile and was heard and felt several miles away, could make finding the specific cause difficult.

“She didn’t smell it. She was in her master bathroom brushing her teeth, heard a pop and saw a fire outside her bathroom window,” he said. The woman called 911 and was walking across the street to a neighbor’s house when the explosion occurred…

About a half dozen nearby homes were severely damaged, he added, and the overall damage likely is “in the millions” of dollars. About six homes are uninhabitable.

This was quite the explosion – other reports suggested people were calling 911 from miles around. I wonder if the size of the explosion is directly related to the size of the house. In other words, a larger home has more space for a gas leak to build up so that when something sets off the explosion, there is a lot more gas and home to blow up. Even in a neighborhood with sizable yards (a Zillow listing for a recently-sold home on the same short street says the home has 0.77 acre lot), this can lead to lots of damage.

One odd thought: given the odor of natural gas, couldn’t someone design some sort of ventilation system that would detect the smell, automatically vent the home, and alert the authorities? We have smoke and radon detectors so why not natural gas? Perhaps it would be easier to build this into passive homes where the air has to be ventilated. How much cost could this really add to a million-dollar home?

How Google’s driverless car navigates city streets, construction, and urban traffic

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Eric Jaffe provides some info on how driverless cars navigate more complex urban roads:

Boiled down, the Google car goes through six steps to make each decision on the road. The first is to locate itself — broadly in the world via GPS, and more precisely on the street via special maps embedded with detailed data on lane width, traffic light formation, crosswalks, lane curvature, and so on. Urmson says the value of maps is one of the key insights that emerged from the DARPA challenges. They give the car a baseline expectation of its environment; they’re the difference between the car opening its eyes in a completely new place and having some prior idea what’s going on around it.Next the car collects sensor data from its radar, lasers, and cameras. That helps track all the moving parts of a city no map can know about ahead of time. The third step is to classify this information as actual objects that might have an impact on the car’s route — other cars, pedestrians, cyclists, etc. — and to estimate their size, speed, and trajectory. That information then enters a probabilistic prediction model that considers what these objects have been doing and estimates what they will do next. For step five, the car weighs those predictions against its own speed and trajectory and plans its next move.

That leads to the sixth and final step: turning the wheel this much (if at all), and braking or accelerating this much (if at all). It’s the entirety of human progress distilled to two actions…

The Google car is programmed to be the prototype defensive driver on city streets. It won’t go above the speed limit and avoids driving in a blind spot if possible. It gives a wide berth to trucks and construction zones by shifting in its lane, a process called “nudging.” It’s extremely cautious crossing double yellows and won’t cross railroad tracks until the car ahead clears them. It hesitates for a moment after a light turns green, because studies have shown that red-light runners tend to strike just after the signal changes. It turns very slowly in general, accounting for everything in the area, and won’t turn right on red at all — at least for now. Many of the car’s capabilities remain locked in test mode before they’re brought out live.

Quite a process to account for all of the potential variables including other drivers, pedestrians and cyclists, weather conditions, and other objects on the road like construction or double-parked vehicles. I imagine this is some intense code that has to provide a lot of flexibility.

This also reminds me of some of my early experiences driving. It took some time to adapt to everything – watch your speed, check all those mirrors, what are the other cars doing, what is coming up ahead – and I remember wondering how people could even carry on conversations with others in the car while trying to drive. But, with practice and adaptation, driving today seems like second nature. And, I suspect from my own experience that drivers are not 100% vigilant (maybe 80% is more accurate?) while driving as they generally think they have things under control.

All that said, driving is a remarkable cognitive task and replicating this and improving on it in a 100% vigilant system requires lots of work.

NBC: social media use driven by popular TV shows, not the other way around

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The Financial Times reports that after studying media habits related to its Olympic coverage, NBC found less social media activity linked to television broadcasts than might have been expected. In other words, it isn’t apparent that people tune into television programs because they see activity about it on social media. At stake is a lot of advertising money.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. From its early days, one of the major critiques of television was that it encouraged passivity: people generally sat on the couch in their private homes watching a screen. While they may have had conversations about TV with others (and a lot of this has moved online – just see how many sites have Game of Thrones recaps each week), television watching was a limited social activity practiced alone, with family, or close friends. Whether social media changes this fundamental posture in watching television remains to be seen.

Sociologist: China to have the most Christians in the world by 2030

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In another indicator of the shift of Christianity from the West, one sociologist predicts China will be home to the largest number of Christians by 2030:

“By my calculations China is destined to become the largest Christian country in the world very soon,” said Fenggang Yang, a professor of sociology at Purdue University and author of Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule…China’s Protestant community, which had just one million members in 1949, has already overtaken those of countries more commonly associated with an evangelical boom. In 2010 there were more than 58 million Protestants in China compared to 40 million in Brazil and 36 million in South Africa, according to the Pew Research Centre’s Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Prof Yang, a leading expert on religion in China, believes that number will swell to around 160 million by 2025. That would likely put China ahead even of the United States, which had around 159 million Protestants in 2010 but whose congregations are in decline.

By 2030, China’s total Christian population, including Catholics, would exceed 247 million, placing it above Mexico, Brazil and the United States as the largest Christian congregation in the world, he predicted.

This could lead to a lot of change in China – and change in the United States where many Christians see China as a less-than-Christian country as well as consider their own country to be a (the?) leading Christian nation. Of course, there is some time before this prediction can be assessed and a lot could happen between now and then…