Category Archives: Sociology

DeSean Jackson illustrates how black Americans often retain ties to poorer neighborhoods, regardless of class

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Jamelle Bouie highlights sociological research that shows blacks in America tend to live closer to and have ongoing social ties with poorer neighborhoods compared to whites:

The key fact is this: Even after you adjust for income and education, black Americans are more likely than any other group to live in neighborhoods with substantial pockets of poverty.

As sociologist Patrick Sharkey shows in his book Stuck in Place, 62 percent of black adults born between 1955 and 1970 lived in neighborhoods that were at least 20 percent poor, a fact that’s true of their children as well. An astounding 66 percent of blacks born between 1985 and 2000 live in neighborhoods as poor or poorer as those of their parents…

How does this stack up to white families? Here, Sharkey is indispensable: Among white children born through 1955 and 1970, just 4 percent live in high poverty neighborhoods. Or, put another way, black Americans live with a level of poverty that is simply unknown to the vast majority of whites…

“When white families advance in economic status,” writes Sharkey, “they are able to translate this economic advantage into spatial advantage by buying into communities that provide quality schools and healthy environments for children.” The same isn’t true for black Americans, and some of the answer has to include present and ongoing housing discrimination. For example, in one study—conducted by the Department of Housing and the Urban Institute—black renters learned about fewer rental units and fewer homes than their white counterparts…

This can have serious consequences. Youthful experimentation for a white teenager in a suburb might be smoking a joint in a friend’s attic. Youthful experimentation for a black teenager might be hanging out with gang members. As Mary Pattillo-McCoy writes in her book Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class, “Youth walk a fine line between preparing for success and youthful delinquent experimentation, the consequences of which can be especially serious for black youth.”

Even as the details of the DeSean Jackson situation trickle out, the overall point is clear: blacks and whites in America continue to live in different neighborhoods and this has consequences for adult life. One consequence is that blacks tend to live in poorer neighborhoods, regardless of class, and a second is that social ties between wealthier and poorer neighborhoods often continue even when economic opportunity allows one to move elsewhere (see the work of Robert Sampson in Great American City for his social network analysis of social ties of residents who leave poorer neighborhoods – and also where they tend to end up).

All together, the impact of on-going residential segregation is not as simple as living in different places. The social conditions of different places is related to all sorts of disparate outcomes including housing options, educational attainment, safety and crime rates, economic opportunities, and life expectancy. We should not be surprised if we see this play out in arenas like the NFL which apparently has some divided opinions about how it should be addressed (one team releases a good player, another eagerly signs him).

Want more Chicago area mass transit? Have to find more tax dollars

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More mass transit may be good for the Chicago region but it will cost taxpayers:

A coalition of transportation advocates supported by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle has recommended raising new tax money in Cook County to help pay for billions of dollars of mass transit improvements…

In a meeting with the Tribune’s editorial board, coalition leaders said that the board could potentially raise property, sales, or gasoline taxes for the local share. The money would help pay for such big-ticket projects in Chicago and Cook County as the long-sought extension of the CTA’s Red Line to the far South Side.

The Red Line extension and other billion-dollar projects like suburb-to-suburb Metra STAR Line have languished in recent years because federal funding for major transit endeavors has all but disappeared…

The coalition’s campaign comes on the heels of a Northeastern Illinois Public Transit Task Force report released Monday which concluded that current funding levels are insufficient to maintain current service, much less expand it.

I suspect it will be difficult to raise such funds when there are plenty of other needs for money in Chicago and Illinois. At the same time, I have little doubt that there are a number of mass transit projects that would be helpful in the Chicago area. Such projects could help limit road traffic, provide needed transportation options to places where driving cars (a relatively expensive task) is not as viable, and even potentially spur development around new mass transit options. But, the short-term cost is quite high.

Advice for how to stop your neighbor from building a McMansion next door

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McMansions can be opposed in a variety of ways but one poster suggests the way to go is to be an undesirable neighbor:

Paint your house bright pink. Put several cars on cinderblocks in the front yard. Have 20 people move in with you. Stop cutting the grass. Park junk cars on the street in front of the vacant house. Blast loud music 24/7. Tie up a pit bull in your front yard. Get someone with a huge gut to hang out in your front yard without a shirt while drinking beer. All of these together may work, but you’ll probably make yourself miserable in the process.

These actions may or may not be possible given local laws and neighborhood regulations but they all have a similar goal: drive down property values so that possible McMansion no longer looks financially appealing. As numerous people will tell you, who wants to have the nicest house on the street, particularly compared to your immediate neighbors? If McMansions are about wealthier people upgrading their property regardless of their surroundings, then such actions could undercut their financial basis.

The most and least sprawling US metropolitan areas

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Here are new rankings of the most and least sprawling metropolitan regions:

Measuring Sprawl 2014 [PDF] looks at 221 metropolitan areas and 994 counties around the country, giving them number grades (higher is better) on a “Sprawl Index” by using four factors: density; mix of uses; strength of “activity centers” and downtowns; and accessibility of the street network.

The top 10 “most compact” areas nationally, regardless of metro size, were:

  • New York/White Plains/Wayne, New York/New Jersey
  • San Francisco/San Mateo/Redwood City, California
  • Atlantic City/Hammonton, New Jersey
  • Santa Barbara/Santa Maria/Goleta, California
  • Champaign/Urbana, Illinois
  • Santa Cruz/Watsonville, California
  • Trenton/Ewing, New Jersey
  • Miami/Miami Beach/Kendall, Florida
  • Springfield, Illinois
  • Santa Ana/Anaheim/Irvine, California…

The list of top (or bottom) “most sprawling” areas was dominated by places in the Southeast. In order from lowest scoring (worst) to highest, they were:

  • Hickory/Lenoir/Morganton, North Carolina
  • Atlanta/Sandy Springs/Marietta, Georgia
  • Clarksville, Tennessee/Kentucky
  • Prescott, Arizona
  • Nashville-Davidson/Murfreesboro/Franklin, Tennessee
  • Baton Rouge, Louisiana
  • Riverside-San Bernardino/Ontario, California
  • Greenville/Mauldin-Easley, South Carolina
  • Augusta/Richmond County, Georgia
  • Kingsport/Bristol/Bristol, Tennessee/Virginia

Among large metro areas, “The biggest success story is surprisingly Los Angeles,” says Reid Ewing, a University of Utah professor who was the lead researcher on the study. “Los Angeles has actually densified substantially.” The famously car-dependent California city ranked seventh among metro areas with populations over one million. The report attributes some of L.A.’s high score to development around transit stations and an ordinance that allows developers to build denser projects in exchange for affordable housing.

Interesting to see all of these Sunbelt locales in the most sprawling list, places where a lot of their growth has likely taken place in the last 50 or so years. This likely leads to more suburban (less dense) areas with streets less likely to be on a grid and with very separate land uses. In contrast, the least sprawling cities are more of a hodgepodge including old American cities (New York), a college town amidst cornfields (Champaign-Urbana), and a few Sunbelt cities (including Santa Ana/Irvine/Anaheim).

The article goes on to note that sprawl is linked to a number of negative outcomes:

The researchers found that sprawl correlated with higher rates of obesity, traffic fatalities, ozone pollution, lack of social capital, vehicle miles traveled, physical activity, and residential energy use.

While the full report shows the scores for each metro area on the four criteria, it’s too bad it doesn’t show how these different life outcomes differ across metro areas.

Analyze big data better when computer scientists and social scientists share knowledge

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Part of the “big-data struggle” is to have more computer scientists interacting with social scientists:

The emerging problems highlight another challenge: bridging the “Grand Canyon,” as Mr. Lazer calls it, between “social scientists who aren’t computationally talented and computer scientists who aren’t social-scientifically talented.” As universities are set up now, he says, “it would be very weird” for a computer scientist to teach courses to social-science doctoral students, or for a social scientist to teach research methods to information-science students. Both, he says, should be happening.

Both groups could learn quite a bit from each other. Arguably, programming skills would be very useful in a lot of disciplines in a world gaga over technology, apps, and big data. Arguably, more rigorous methodologies to find and interpret patterns are needed across a wide range of disciplines interested in human behavior and social interaction. Somebody has to be doing this already, perhaps even within individuals who have training to both areas. But, joining the two academic bodies together on a more formal and institutionalized basis could take quite a bit of work.

How to define “high-speed” rail in the United States

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High-speed rail may be expanding in the United States – but it is not be “high-speed” according to European definitions.

Does that make the new trains high speed? It depends on who you ask. According to the European Union’s definition, high speed trains must be able to travel above 124 mph on conventional tracks, and at speeds over 155 mph on tracks specifically upgraded for high-speed rail.

Although the Charger locomotives feature the latest technology, with emission controls and on-board diagnostics, they’re relatively conventional. The “new” trains are based on a popular European design, and top out at 125 mph. That’s as fast as the Metroliner that ran between New York and Washington D.C. in 1969. By that definition, the new Siemens trains don’t qualify as “high speed.”…

“It is also necessary to take into account those railways which are making laudable efforts to provide high speed despite a basis of old infrastructure and technology which is far removed from that employed by the railways of western Europe.”

In other words, because the American passenger rail system is so far behind the rest of the world, any improvement whatsoever could be considered high speed. It’s an important step forward, despite the appearance that the U.S. is rejecting HSR.

Maybe we should add a modifier: these are American high-speed trains, not high-speed trains by global standards. So much for American exceptionalism…

The article goes on to note how high-speed rail isn’t proving too popular to taxpayers in several states where it has been proposed. Proponents say this may not be too much of a problem: once Americans see the capabilities of truly high-speed rail, they would avidly use it. But, this is a difficult chicken and egg problem: people don’t want to devote millions/billions to a new project that may or may not succeed but they can’t truly know the possibilities until one is built. Perhaps everyone would benefit from seeing one really popular, speedy, and consistent spoke of a system (outside of the dense Washington-to-Boston megapolis served by the Acela Express – which can go over 150 mph but averages more like 80 mph) before trying to build numerous links?

Patterns amongst borders between suburban yards

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An artist noticed that her neighbors in an older Sacramento suburb follow some patterns in the borders between their yards:

“There are definite patterns of cohesiveness,” says Neidigh of her series Property Line. She says it’s possible to observe “the layering of planting trends over 50, 60 years, or even older.”A Midwest transplant who’s settled in California’s capitol city, Neidigh set out to document the “groomed landscapes” of the city, drilling down past the Pleasantville-type conformity to reveal the unique personailties expressed in seemingly cookie-cutter borders. Her earlier series, With Great Care, focuses on the tightly groomed mulberry trees found in Sacramento neighborhoods. She’s intrigued by the tension of perennially pruning these plants that outgrow their accceptable bounds.

“It has that inherited design, where they’re maintaining this thing that’s been planted so long ago, and just keeping it in bounds,” Neidigh says.

Here is my favorite of the online pictures:

Land lines can be quite contested with different ideas about landscaping as well as determining the exact line. The picture above offers a great contrast: a driveway on the right with an extra parking space on the lot line with the yard on the left going for some minimalist landscaping amongst brick pavers. The right side offers function, the left side wants to have a little piece of nature. Why don’t the people on the left create a larger hedge if they want to have plants along the line?

It’s too bad we don’t get to see the neighbors interacting across these lot lines. Of course, that assumes they do have much interaction in their front yards or that they even interact much at all…

The relatively narrow geographic boundaries of TV sitcoms

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TV shows often don’t have a very wide geographic scope as the characters interact in a limited physical space:

Most shows define their social universes geographically: They are populated by people whom circumstance has thrown together, physically. The throwing could take place in a bar (Cheers), in a coffee shop (Friends), in an apartment (New Girl), in an office (The Office), at a taxi dispatch service (Taxi), at a TV studio (30 Rock), or, of course, in a house (pretty much every other sitcom ever). Regardless, in the social—and, you could say, moral—cosmology of the typical sitcom, it is spatial connection that leads to social connection.

In part, these physical spaces are plot devices that explain to audiences why this small group of people seems to be always together, and always so insulated in their togetherness. In HIMYM, the friends’ go-to bar, MacLaren’s—conveniently located in the basement of the building where three of the five characters live—functions in the same way that Monica’s apartment (and Mindy Lahiri’s ob-gyn practice, and Greendale Community College) do: They allow the audience to suspend disbelief. They sacrifice the inevitable frictions of real-world social relationships—the vagaries of distance, the misalignments of schedules—at the altar of sitcomic convenience.

There are obvious production-side reasons for that social narrowness, too, of course: Actors are expensive. Contracts are a pain. TV programs, even in the age of the DVR and the stream and the binge-watch, need to offer their audiences some sense of stability, episode after episode. But what those constraints amount to, ultimately, are shows that embrace an eponymous approach to family itself: According to the most basic logic of the sitcom, one’s family is “the group of people that situation has thrown together, comedically.” So we get The Office‘s ironized treatment of the workplace family. And The Big Bang Theory‘s haphazard fusion of work life and home. And Modern Family‘s casual confidence that an entire TV show can be premised on demographics alone…

HIMYM may have done this for the same reason that, say, Sex and the City often treated its male characters as expendable—that reason being that that’s just how sitcoms are—but it amounted, in context, to a premise that was often misaligned with the realities of friendship as its audience was experiencing them. It’s worth noting that the show, which premiered in September 2005, came of age in the age of social media. (Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook in 2004.) At a time when many members of its audience were experiencing friendship as newly expansive, and newly transcendent of geography, HIMYM‘s five characters hunkered down at MacLaren’s. They hung out in a single apartment. They dated one another. They married one another. And they used and/or ignored the people who existed beyond their tiny social circle. It was Central Perk all over again.

Sitcoms are bounded in numerous ways (limited number of characters, fairly formulaic storylines, similar kinds of jokes) but this analysis of space is quite interesting: for convenience and forced interaction, characters keep gathering in a public/private space. One question would be whether this geographic narrowness on TV matches reality for average Americans. At the least, they would have more knowledge about the outside world, whether current events or sports or celebrity news that simply isn’t included in most sitcoms (the info would be dated by the time it airs, etc.). Yet, good portions of our lives are spent in bounded areas like work and home. Meeting in third places like bars and coffee shops? Not so much.

Access to cars helps poorer residents achieve better life outcomes

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Cars are expensive to own and operate yet a new study suggests they can help poorer residents:

Housing voucher recipients with cars tended to live and remain in higher-opportunity neighborhoods—places with lower poverty rates, higher social status, stronger housing markets, and lower health risks. Cars are also associated with improved neighborhood satisfaction and better employment outcomes. Among Moving to Opportunity families, those with cars were twice as likely to find a job and four times as likely to remain employed.

The importance of automobiles arises not due to the inherent superiority of driving, but because public transit systems in most metropolitan areas are slow, inconvenient, and lack sufficient metropolitan-wide coverage to rival the automobile.

More research is needed to determine if the relationship is causal or associative, that is, whether the car is the catalyst or if there is something deeper at work, of which the car is simply one manifestation. Cars are expensive to purchase and to maintain, even more so for families with severely limited resources. A low-income household that is somehow able, inclined, or afforded the opportunity to buy a car might also do many other things to get ahead. Motivation, opportunity, or both could be key.

Yet our current findings are enough to raise important questions.

For example, should government welfare programs facilitate automobile access or ownership? In some states, a car would push families over the asset limit for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, making those families ineligible for help.

In a society that often structures space around cars, this is not too surprising, particularly for poorer residents in suburbs and more sprawling areas. Yet, as this summary notes, providing cars is not necessarily easy (expensive) or desirable in the long run (perpetuating problems with cars like pollution and sprawl).

This could lead to some interesting consequences for poorer Americans. If they are increasingly in suburbs or are pushed out of walkable urban neighborhoods by gentrifiers, having to have a car is another barrier to moving up the economic ladder. In other words, walkable neighborhoods – think New Urbanism –  are the rage amongst urban millennials and others who want vibrant mixed-use neighborhoods. But, their quest for such spaces may not leave much room who would really benefit the most from cheaper transportation through walkability and mass transit.