Category Archives: Sociology

Chicago rated worst city for parking – but this could have some benefits

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Nerdwallet named Chicago the worst city for parking based on the factors of price and number of car thefts:

Takeaways:

  • Chicago is the worst city for parking — and also the most controversial. Parking prices skyrocketed in 2009 after the city made a deal for a group of investors, organized by Morgan Stanley, to operate its meters for 75 years.
  • Though you’ll probably enjoy Hawaii’s capital, Honolulu is an extremely expensive city to park in; it’ll run you $42 a day.
  • There are a lot of car thefts in Oakland — 124.59% more per capita than the national average.

1. Chicago, Ill.

This city is known for its parking woes—especially the controversial privatization of the parking meters, which led to a dramatic increase in parking fees in 2009. A consortium called Chicago Parking Meters LLC operates the meters. You’ll drop $35 a day to park in the city and $289 per month. The city lists the fines you’ll receive for various parking violations on their website.

This spring, Chicago will test its new ParkChicago app, which allows drivers to pay for parking via an app rather than a meter. There are various websites that help you find the cheapest parking in the city. Chicago is one of the cities supported by SpotHero.com, which helps you find parking and prepay. However, if you want to ditch driving altogether, the city has multiple public transportation options. Bus and “L” riders will soon be able to use their phones to pay for rides.

Unfortunately, Chicago also has 33.4% more motor vehicle thefts per capita than the national average. And if you get a citation, you must contest it within seven days of receiving it or pay the fine online.

Parking is heavily dependent on the number of people and amount of space available. In other words, urban density. If you look at the bottom of the list, or “the best cities for parking your car,” they are all sprawling Sunbelt cities. Presumably, they have much more space and are less dense, driving down parking prices.

Of course, there are positives to having bad parking. Such urban densities that make parking more expensive can lead to:

1. Vibrant mixed-use neighborhoods with plenty of housing as well as businesses, stores, public spaces, and culture. Lots of people in a small amount of space can lead to some exciting urban scenes.

2. Plentiful and efficient mass transit. This is difficult to provide when there are a limited number of riders and the transit has to cover a lot of ground.

3. A lot more people walking and riding bikes. This is good for health, limiting pollution, and livelier streets.

4. The space that might be devoted to cars (wider streets, on-street parking, parking lots and garages) can be devoted to other things. For example, see this analysis of snow plowing on Philadelphia city streets that reveals the potential space.

Better to own or rent? Cost not the only factor

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As we live in the aftermath of the burst housing bubble, is it better to own or rent? While individual circumstances differ, some experts advise owning is cheaper:

One year ago, Trulia’s Rent vs. Buy Report, released by online real estate aggregator Trulia, found it was 44% cheaper to buy a house than to rent. Today, the gap has narrowed, due in part to rising interest rates and home prices. The newest edition of the report finds that buying a home is now 38% cheaper than renting. The report compares costs for a seven-year period using five calculations…

Peggy Jennings, a Broker/Realtor with Prudential Great Smokys Realty in Sylva, North Carolina, cites favorable interest rates, good inventory and relaxed loan requirements as good reasons to buy now. “Interest rates are still good. The inventory is improving as more people are deciding it’s time to sell. There’s going to be a lot of good inventory coming up, especially since the foreclosures from a couple years ago are now rehabbed and ready to sell,” says Jennings…

Even though it is a buyer’s market in many areas, homeownership is not the right choice for everyone. A primary consideration is how long you plan on being in an area. “I tell people if they are planning on living in an area for at least three to five years, then it makes sense to buy versus rent,” says Jennings. “When you go to buy,” Jennings says, “you have to pay quite a bit of closing costs. For a typical sale of $150,000 or $200,000, you’re looking at somewhere between $3,500 to $5,000 in closing costs. So it doesn’t necessarily make sense to buy a house and then within two years try to sell it, unless it’s a really awesome market and you think you’ll be able to sell at a good price.”…

Low interest rates, better inventory and relaxed lending standards make now a good time buy a home. In many markets, it is considerably cheaper to buy than rent. Although the Trulia report finds it is 38% cheaper to buy than rent nationwide, it’s important to note that individual markets can vary greatly. For instance, it’s 66% cheaper to buy in still-struggling Detroit versus only 5% cheaper in Honolulu. Even though the numbers show it is generally better to buy than rent, you should always consider the individual market and your own situation and preferences when making the decision to buy or rent.

This analysis is primarily about economic costs of owning versus renting. While this is certainly a large factor in housing decisions, it is not only the only factor. I would think that as long as homeownership continues to have some financial benefit over renting (though it would be curious to know what happens when this gap really narrows – or if it even reverses for some period of time), Americans also have a societal preference for owning a home. Renting is viewed in many places as temporary, housing for transient people who can’t get their act together. Ownership, in contrast, connotes stability, sound financial footing, and taking responsibility for your own property. These assumptions aren’t necessarily fair but this is the American milieu behind the bare economic costs of renting versus owning that also influences how many owner or rental units are constructed in the first place.

Claim: end of urban friends TV shows, revival of happy suburban McMansion shows

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With the end of “How I Met Your Mother,” one critic argues TV shows have moved on to happy suburban McMansions and darker shows about urban singles:

The series is among the last of a vanishing breed, the romantic comedy about well-educated, pop culturally attuned young white people trying to find love and sex in the city as they embark on their careers and independent lives. Such sitcoms proliferated after “Friends” became a huge hit for NBC in the 1990s.

But since ABC struck gold with “Modern Family,” networks have traded the urban coffee shops and bars for the suburban McMansion. TV comedies that explore the dating lives of young people now tend to be a lot darker than “How I Met Your Mother.” Take, for instance, HBO’s “Girls,” where the sex is graphic — and often soul-crushing for the characters.

Such a claim might sound true – but where is the data to back this up? Later in the article:

But that distinctive [storytelling] approach may have come at a price. “It’s that kind of innovation that never makes it to huge ratings heights of the good, old-fashioned sitcom,” Thompson said. “They’re very post-modern characters, so steeped in the irony and cynicism of the ’90s they grew up in, that sometimes it’s kind of hard to like them.”

Indeed, “HIMYM” never cracked even the Top 40 in total viewers, consistently averaging around 9 million or so over the course of its run, according to Nielsen. Yet it still occupied an important role for CBS, which is the most-watched network in the U.S. but often has trouble attracting young adults.

So no data on the number of shows with each genre or kind of storyline (young, happy singles vs. suburban McMansion dwelling families vs. unhappy urban singles) and then another knock against HIMYM and “Girls” and similar shows: they often don’t draw big ratings. So, while critics might like these shows (and critics might live in an alternate universe , how many of them are popular? Check out the Nielsen Top 25 for the week ending March 23, 2014: I don’t know all of these shows that well but I don’t see too many suburban McMansions. The suburbs are a common theme on television shows with a long history, dating back to the happy family shows of the 1950s. Yet, they don’t necessarily draw big ratings or the positive attention of critics even if they seem to be fodder for cancellations when the new crop of shows are rolled out each fall.

Sociologist argues every society has jokes about outsiders – including lawyer jokes in the US

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Studying humor across societies reveals the pattern that groups are singled out as simpletons or emblems of stupidity:

For the past several decades, British sociologist and preeminent humor scholar Christie Davies has been collecting examples of an odd phenomenon: Nearly every culture has its own version of the Polish joke. That is, every country likes to make fun of people who’ve been labeled as simpletons and, often, outsiders.

In this country, we mock the poor, put-upon Poles: “How many Polish guys does it take to screw in a light bulb? Five: One to hold the bulb and four to turn the chair.” (Polish-Americans became the butt of jokes after millions fled persecution in their own country in the 18th and 19th centuries, often taking up menial jobs in their new American home.) But that’s just one example of what Davies calls the “stupidity joke.” People all over the world and throughout history have differentiated themselves from those they see as inferior and foreign by making fun of them. Take the oldest-known joke book in the world: Philogelos, Greek for “The Laughter Lover,” compiled from several manuscripts dating from the 11th to 15th centuries but believed to have been penned in the 4th century A.D. by the otherwise unknown scribes Hierokles and Philagrios. Of the 265 jokes in the book, nearly a quarter concern people from cities renowned for their idiocy, like Cyme in modern-day Turkey and Abdera in Thrace. Later, in medieval England, people cracked jokes about the dunces who lived in the village of Gotham. (New York’s nickname, “Gotham,” doesn’t sound so impressive when you learn that author Washington Irving coined it to suggest the place was a city of fools.)

The phenomenon is truly global. According to Davies’ research, Uzbeks get made fun of in Tajikistan while in France, it’s the French-speaking Swiss. Israelis rib Kurdish Jews; Finns knock the Karelians, an ethnic group residing in northwestern Russia and eastern Finland. The Irish, it turns out, have a particularly bad lot. Dumb-Irish jokes are equally common in England, Wales, Scotland, and Australia. Although it could be worse: If you happen to be an Irishman from County Kerry, you even get made fun of by your fellow Irishmen as well. The model even extends to the work world: Orthopedic surgery might be a highly competitive field, but other surgeons deride such rough-and-tumble musculoskeletal work as inferior. (“What’s the difference between an orthopedic surgeon and a carpenter? The carpenter knows more than one antibiotic.”)…

Each country’s particular brand of comedy is so intertwined with its social and cultural baggage, in fact, that enterprising academics are using the birth and spread of specific kinds of jokes to uncover hidden quirks of various societies’ cultural DNA. Davies has proven especially proficient at this. He traced the spread of dumb-blonde jokes, for example, from their origins in the United States in the mid-20th century to Croatia, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Brazil, deducing the zingers emerged as women shook up gender roles by entering high-skilled professions. When the so-called Great American Lawyer Joke Cycle of the 1980s didn’t spread anywhere beyond the United States, Davies concluded the jokes were a uniquely American phenomenon because no other country is so rooted in the sanctity of law—and in no other country are those who practice it so reviled.

I wonder if these patterns don’t reveal two common sociological ideas as pertaining to some humor:

1. In-groups and out-groups. We tend to consider our close friends/family/ethnic or cultural group as the in-group while people in other groups are outsiders. Jokes help establish the symbolic boundaries between who is in our group (and who we like) and who is not (and who we don’t know about). This may help build solidarity within groups but probably doesn’t do much to build weaker ties across groups.

2. Threats other people might present – whether they are competitors for similar resources or immigrants – can be revealed in humor. While a group might write off another group and make them the butt of the joke, it could indicate the group making the joke feels threatened.

How might this fit with the rise of lawyer jokes? Perhaps it has to do with a more visible presence of lawsuits, particularly ones deemed more frivolous by the public. Or perhaps it has to do with more visible lawyers who started showing up more on TV and were perceived as grandstanding.

Sociologist explains why her course “The Sociology of Miley Cyrus” is needed

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The new class “The Sociology of Miley Cyrus” at Skidmore College has garnered a lot of attention and the sociologist behind the course explains why it is needed:

With all the very real problems we’re facing as a nation, right — violence against women and children in communities of color, the collapse of the public education system, ongoing poverty and wealth stratification — it’s a convenient distraction to say that a barely post-teen girl or woman is a moral apocalypse. So on one hand, it’s a convenient distraction.

On the other hand, I think that the things that get people so incensed about Miley are the same reasons that I’m trying to teach this course — to help people deconstruct and better understand media, systems of representation, and ideas of power and privilege in the contemporary U.S…

All the best, most inflammatory stuff — all of the pearl-clutching about “Oh, the liberal arts are a cesspool; oh the social sciences are a cesspool! Can you believe that someone would do something so silly!” — is more grist for the mill. It’s more data about why we need to rigorously study media and representation. If you look at the flyer for my class that got tweeted, and if you look at the content of that, this is, you know,  serious sociology. This is rigorous stuff, looking at understanding the world. So in some senses, all of the hubbub in the blogosphere sort of proves the need for a class like this…

I mean, officially, anything that lets me remind people why sociology as a discipline is a rigorous and relevant, why this is useful, why what happens in a liberal arts school is helpful to society? That’s great. I can talk about that all the live-long day.

This is not new criticism – courses about Jay-Z and other parts of popular culture draw similar attention – but it misses the point. Sociologists study social behavior and interaction so theoretically anything is fair game for sociological instruction. Classes can work even better when using current examples, like the attention Miley Cyrus gets for her actions, to illustrate important sociological points. In this case, it sounds like the course will look at how the media presents celebrities and women, to think about how all that media (roughly 11 hours a day for American adults) affect our viewpoints of the world and reflect power dynamics between different groups. The purpose of a sociology course isn’t to psychoanalyze Miley Cyrus or to judge the morality of her actions but rather to think through what she represents and what it reveals about American society.

Answering suburban critiques by firing back at educated urban elites

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After one professor suggests strip malls are closely tied to the ills of global capitalism, one conservative’s response is to fire back at urban, educated elites:

Because Deneen cannot wring meaning from big-box stores and six-lane roads, we are meant to assume that no one can. But this elision of any distinction between personal aesthetic preferences and objective universal laws is as empirically false as it is politically problematic. As a happy son of the suburban Midwest, I can personally attest that plenty of good people have little difficulty finding much to worship and be thankful for, no matter what they drive or where their kids’ toys were constructed.

Erudite, comfortable people are always so bemused that middle-income Americans could possibly opt for a suburban life of cars, backyards, and affordable goods. The alternative, of course, is an urban life spent waiting for buses and watching the erudite, comfortable people enjoy boutique brunches that they will never be able to sample. For millions of our brothers and sisters without PhDs, the parking lots and mini-malls that Deneen dismisses are sites of real grace and meaning. They are places where paychecks are earned, conversations are shared, and the sanctification of even mundane work can transpire.

While there are some interesting conversations to have about how spaces shape social life (think of the differences between the strip mall and the urban street with mixed uses), this particular response simply falls into an argument pattern that has been around at least 60 years. When a critic attacks the suburbs, someone is bound to respond that middle Americans seem to like the suburbs and the pretentious of the elites prevents them from seeing the good side of suburbs. And, this often devolves into name-calling and generalizations, elites versus average Americans, city dwellers against suburbanites, about morality and community life. Does this get anybody anywhere?

In other words, this is nothing new.

The beauty of highway over ramps

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A sample of photographer Alex MacLean’s aerial photography includes this picture of a highway intersection in Albuquerque.

Alex MacLean 2008

Beautiful. There are several dimensions to this:

1. The interplay of light and dark both from the sunlight as well as the darker roadway and the lighter desert.

2. The modernist twists of the highway ramps.

3. The smallness of the cars, a reminder of the limited lives we lead.

I know highways are concrete entities that lead to traffic and air pollution but I’ve always enjoyed seeing them from above.

The flying odds are (but may not feel like they are) ever in your favor

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James Fallows points out that the saga of Flight MH370 reinforces ideas about the dangers of flying, even though plane crashes are quite rare:

First-world commercial air travel has become so extremely safe that when something does go wrong, figuring it out can be a huge challenge — which heightens the mystery and, for many people, the terror of these episodes, by making them seem so random. You’re sitting there grumbling about the discomforts of modern flight — and then, for no apparent reason, your plane is the one headed into the sea…

I remember that when the 777 was introduced it was such a sales success and was expected to live such a long service life that some people speculated the fleet could actually make a billion flights. Of course, you don’t need to make a billion flights to draw the magic short one-in-a-billion straw. But it is something to think about. Transport flying is now so safe that the long time standard of 10 to the minus 9th may not satisfy the public.

The sobering point here is again that the very safety of modern air travel makes these episodes both intellectually and emotionally even more difficult.

Why does flying seem so threatening when driving is a much much more dangerous daily activity?

1. Passengers on an airplane have no or little control over their circumstances. Car drivers, in contrast, feel like they have a lot of control though is is part illusion: they can’t control the people around them or the conditions.

2. Plane crashes can involve dozens or hundreds of deaths. A larger death toll from a single event seems far worse than the amalgamation of lots of individual deaths. Think about the difference about the murder toll in Chicago on a yearly basis (spread throughout the calendar) versus the Newtown shootings (one event, worsened because the children couldn’t do anything about it).

3. The media grabs on to tragic events like this and keeps them in public view for weeks. In contrast, single deaths or smaller incidents get short mentions unless they involve unusual circumstances.

All together, the odds of dying in a plane crash are very small. That doesn’t mean those odds carry the same emotional and social weight.

The migration patterns of the world’s millionaires

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Here are the top destinations for the world’s millionaires:

According to a report from New World Wealth, the U.K. was the top destination in the world for migrating millionaires over the past decade. Between 2003 and 2013, the U.K. had a net inflow of 114,100 millionaires (people with $1 million or more excluding their primary residence)…

Singapore, with its tax-friendly policies and security, ranked second in attracting the world’s wandering wealthy. It gained 45,000 millionaires between 2003 and 2013. The U.S. ranked third, gaining 42,400 millionaires.

So where were all these millionaires moving from? Mostly China. According to the report, China had a net outflow of 76,200 millionaires during the 10-year period. India was the next largest loser, with a net outflow of 43,400, followed by France, Italy and Russia…

The study said that overall, London has the most millionaires of any city, with 339,300. New York ranks second with 300,100, followed by Tokyo (226,500) and Singapore (225,000).

Follow the money. Even as these millionaires then move to certain cities, there are certainly patterns within these cities as to where they move and with whom they associate. All of these top urban destinations for millionaires have strong finance sectors as well as some of the world’s most expensive housing even as some of them also have relatively poor areas, sizable immigrant populations, and numerous social problems within a short distance from the residences of some of the wealthiest people in the world.

Tiny houses may be missing TVs, other modern technologies

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Tiny houses differ from McMansions in their size but perhaps also in another feature: a lack of TVs and other modern media technologies.

As I browsed the pages of both company’s full color, Robb Report-quality catalogs, one thing really stood out: In no picture of a fully furnished room did I see a single television. That can’t be a coincidence.

These are not the “Jewel Box” new homes filled with automation and electronics Gordon Gekko and his minions are supposedly building as all Baby Boomers are forced to downsize. Jewel Boxes? More like thumb drives if we are making an accurate size comparison.

There are clearly challenges to designing relevant A/V, home theater, whole house entertainment/convenience and security for a tiny home. Multi-purpose structures and thoughtful use of hydraulics just begin the scratch the surface. An exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York has a full size working model of a mini apartment that shows all sorts of folding and sliding stuff including a television. It almost looks like two different apartments, literally day and night.

This could suggest tiny houses are not just about having smaller houses: it is part of a larger lifestyle package away from consumerism that includes restricting television consumption. However, these two things don’t necessarily have to go together: tiny house or micro-apartment dwellers may have strong interests in different media including streaming TV and video games. I would suspect many tiny house owners have a laptop, tablet, and/or smartphone but I would also guess they don’t want their small homes to be dominated by things like large TVs that are often the focal points of social spaces in McMansions.