Category Archives: Sociology

Look out hallways! You may be on the chopping block

Posted on by

One recent report suggested getting rid of hallways in new homes could reduce square footage and costs:

As homes shrink in size, hallways could be one of the first casualties. Eliminating these liminal spaces would decrease the number of interior walls and allow for more condensed homes, the survey found.

“Essentially, we’re Tetris-ing the functional rooms together, avoiding wasted square footage on non-functional areas like hallways,” the report said.

Other tactics Arroyo has noticed designers employing to save on space include eliminating a formal dining room, adding storage in unused spaces (under the staircase, for example), three-story homes with the living space on the second floor, and tandem garages.

I am trying to imagine a house without hallways. Does this mean that it has one large room – open floor plan great room combining kitchen, dining, and family? – with all the other rooms off of that one?

Could a hallway be expanded a bit and instead be claimed as another room? (I am thinking of the rooms sometimes found on the second floor at the top of stairs where you might fit a small desk or one chair and it is called an “open space” even though it is really a wider hallway.)

If there are not hallways, where will children run back and forth between walls or family members learn to walk past each other in a confined space? Or wonder which room is which when seeing several doorways at the end of the hall?

A championship football game played in a suburban shopping mall = peak American Dream?

Posted on by

The Arena Football League recently played their championship in a New Jersey shopping mall:

As shopping malls seek to add more entertainment options, why not add sports? It could be at the professional level or amateur level. Imagine a high school basketball tournament hosted inside a mall with space for sports. Or a kids baseball tournament. Or a tour pickleball tournament. Sports could help bring in more visitors. It puts more people in proximity to the shops and restaurants.

Even though malls are big, many may not be big enough to do this. The American Dream Meadowlands in East Rutherford Mall, New Jersey is the second-largest mall in the United States and has plenty of entertainment options – a ski slope, a hockey rink, an amusement park, an aquarium, and more – in addition to 450 stores and lots of food options. This complex has sports already in mind. Many malls would need to reconfigure space or add facilities.

Given how much Americans like football and shopping malls (even with their decline), how many events can get more American than this? And held at a place named American Dream?

How many American communities want super big houses?

Posted on by

Americans have large houses. But not every community wants a lot of really big houses:

Photo by Chris Goodwin on Pexels.com

“How big is a house?” mused Jeremy Samuelson, planning director for East Hampton, N.Y., where a working group recently proposed slashing the town’s maximum-allowed house size in half, from 20,000 square feet to 10,000 square feet…

Towns from Aspen to Martha’s Vineyard are in a big-house brouhaha. Critics say mushrooming mansions cramp scenic vistas and local charm, consume excessive energy and inflate prices…

Truro capped new homes at 3,600 square feet in 2017, but then, Shedd says, officials stuck in an amendment allowing bigger builds with special permits. “I’m not saying it was done on the sly,” says Shedd. “Our town meetings drag on. I was probably glazed over.”…

Routt County, Colo.—home to Steamboat Ski Resort—adopted a proposal capping house sizes at 7,500 square feet in June. Debated for months, the hot-button issue packed public meetings…

In Pitkin County—home to Aspen—officials slashed the maximum new home from 15,000 to 9,250 square feet last November, noting that a big house raises “greenhouse gas emissions and increases environmental havoc.”

What strikes me about these discussions is something I first discovered when researching the use of the term McMansion: the size of a big house is relative in terms of size and quantity. In the case of McMansions, a 3,000 square foot new house might be normal in newer neighborhoods but it can be considered a monstrosity next to a 1,100 square foot postwar ranch house. Or is an 8,000 square foot home a McMansion or a mansion? Depends on who is considering the home and where it is located. Or one teardown McMansion might not be a big deal but dozens or hundreds over a decade or two might be considered going too far.

In the cases of these even larger homes, how big is too big or how many is too many? The discussions here do not appear to be taking place within communities where they are contemplating going from no big houses to some. They are considering whether to have no more big houses. Apparently there is some limit to be reached soon or no more might be allowed.

Will such moves push those who desire giant houses to other communities? Will they end up in municipalities just outside these jurisdictions? Are there other communities who would see this as an opportunity rather than a problem?

Starbucks moved away from being a third place, emphasized drive thru and mobile orders

Posted on by

Is Starbucks no longer a gathering place?

Photo by Josh Sorenson on Pexels.com

The idea of Starbucks as a third place became part of its corporate mythology. Starbucks aimed to create a welcoming environment for coffee drinkers and employees with comfortable seating, jazz music and the aroma of freshly-brewed coffee. Employees who brewed and served Starbucks coffee, whom Starbucks called baristas, handwrote customers’ names on their drink orders…

Mobile app and drive-thru orders make up more than 70% of Starbucks’ sales at its approximately 9,500 company-operated stores in the United States. In some stores, customers complained online that Starbucks pulled out comfortable chairs and replaced them with hard wooden stools. Starbucks has also built pickup-only stores without seating. Machines that print customers’ names have replaced baristas’ handwriting on cups.

“Third place is a broader definition,” current Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan said last year. The “classic definition of third place — it’s a box where I go to meet someone — it’s frankly not relevant anymore in this context.”…

Starbucks’ changes to its sit-down business model came in response to several trends — demand from customers for ordering coffee from their cars in drive-thru lanes or on their smartphones. The shift from a business serving hot coffee to one in which cold coffees, teas and lemonades make up more than half of sales. The Covid-19 pandemic, which forced cafes to shut indoor seating.

Starbucks shifted to meet Wall Street’s demands, too. Starbucks found it could reduce labor costs and increase order volume by running a mostly drive-thru and take-away coffee business. Starbucks also found difficulties with being America’s third place and did not want to become the public space and bathroom for everyone, including people coming into stores who were homeless or struggling with mental health challenges on city streets. Starbucks has closed some stores and restricted bathroom access over safety concerns.

The shifts make sense: more consumers want quick service and coffee to go, the company and shareholders want to make more money, and serving the public can be difficult.

But this is a different approach to coffee, food, and places more generally. Getting coffee to consumers as cheaply and quickly as possible and when and where they desire it treats place differently. Arguably, you might not even need a location any longer. Can we get Starbucks via drones or by drivers within ten minutes of an order? Why bother going to a location at all? Why not have a huge centralized Starbucks that sends out drinks at light speed in all directions?

The purpose of third places is less about consumption and more about social interaction and conversation. Yes, third places like cafes and pubs have food. But the food helps people talk and relax. All humans need to eat – and they also need social connections. Having a refresher in the car while driving – often a solo experience – is a different experience than sitting with friends for half an hour near other people.

Starbucks is not alone in this. McDonald’s is a gathering place for some. But if coffee and fast food places limit seating and primarily want to serve people who do not stay, where can or will people go? Maybe nowhere else. Perhaps this helps give momentum to sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s argument that public schools and libraries should be designed in ways that encourage social interaction.

Searching through millions of paper records of guns, modern crime fighting, and large scale societies

Posted on by

Key to identifying the man who shot at Donald Trump was a large set of paper records:

Photo by Element5 Digital on Pexels.com

Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives analysts at a facility in West Virginia search through millions of documents by hand every day to try to identify the provenance of guns used in crimes. Typically, the bureau takes around eight days to track a weapon, though for urgent traces that average falls to 24 hours…

In an era of high-tech evidence gathering, including location data and a trove of evidence from cell phones and other electronic devices used by shooting suspects, ATF agents have to search through paper records to find a gun’s history.

In some cases, those records have even been kept on microfiche or were held in shipping containers, sources told CNN, especially for some of the closed business records like in this case.

The outdated records-keeping system stems from congressional laws that prohibit the ATF from creating searchable digital records, in part because gun rights groups for years have fanned fears that the ATF could create a database of firearm owners and that it could eventually lead to confiscation.

But the urgent ATF trace Saturday proved indispensable in identifying the Pennsylvania shooter, giving authorities a key clue toward his identity in less than half an hour.

On one hand, searching through paper records could appear to be inefficient in the third decade of the twenty-first century. In today’s large-scale societies and systems, the ability to quickly search and retrieve digital records is essential in numerous social and economic sectors.

On the other hand, a large set of paper records is a reminder of the relatively recent shift humans have made to adjust to large populations, and in this case, specifically addressing crime. I recently read The Infernal Machine, a story about dynamite, anarchists at the turn of the twentieth century, and developing police efforts to address the threat of political violence. These changes included systems of records to identify suspects, such as having fingerprints or photos on file.

More broadly, the development of databases and filing systems helped people and institutions keep up with the data they wanted to collect and access. To do fairly basic things in our current world, from getting a driver’s license to voting to accessing health care, requires large databases.

The most recent wave of Irish pubs in Chicago

Posted on by

If early Irish pubs in Chicago functioned more like “social service agencies,” some of the more recent ones in the city have different roots:

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

In 1986, Kitty O’Shea’s opened on the ground level of the Chicago Hilton with the mission of creating an “authentic Irish pub experience” in downtown Chicago. Its owners paid careful attention to detail, traveling to Dublin to research the look and feel of some of its treasured pubs. They flew in Irish bartenders with authentic brogues and offered nightly Irish entertainment. It quickly became the most successful Hilton hotel restaurant in the world, according to news reports…

Chief among them is the Irish Pub Concept, creators of the Fadó franchise. They offer consulting and resources for prospective pub owners, with several templates to choose from (including Celtic, English and country-style bars). The company says it helped launch upwards of 6,500 Irish pubs across the world. They provide everything — down to the brick-a-brack and employee training manuals.

These mass-produced Irish pubs have been criticized for offering a caricaturized, Disneyfied version of Irish culture — an Irish “pub in a box,” if you will. But they are also hugely popular.

Chicago still has its share of Irish pubs that grew organically and are owned and operated by Irish emigrants and their descendants. They include Shinnick’s Pub, which has been in Bridgeport for 80 years; Chief O’Neill’s, named in honor of an Irish-born Chicago police chief and opened by Irish emigrants in the ’90s; and the Fifth Province in the Irish-American Heritage Center. These places didn’t need to consult anyone on authenticity. And they continue to draw Irish emigrants, locals and people like me — the descendants of those early arrivals.

Presumably, some of these locations serve as “third places,” settings where people can go between work and home to socialize, eat, and talk. Sociologists and others have noted that Americans have relatively few places like this and this limits social interaction and civic engagement.

But other locations may serve more like consumer spaces where people visit, enjoy, and leave having had a good time. There are plenty of these in American communities where people seek out a particular experience they like with less concern for community-building and longer-term relationships.

Could online or virtual spaces ever replicate these settings? I am skeptical. Could online or virtual spaces drive people back to pubs and other gathering spots to converse and interact in person with other humans? Maybe.

Transportation advantage: Illinois has the third most interstate miles in the country

Posted on by

Among states, Illinois is 25th in area and and 6th in population but has the 3rd most interstate miles. Here are the top 5 states:

Photo by Chris Duan on Pexels.com
  • Texas – 3,233 miles
  • California – 2,456 miles
  • Illinois – 2,169 miles
  • Pennsylvania – 1,759 miles
  • Ohio – 1,572 miles

Illinois has the third-largest region in the country by population but its next largest cities are relatively small. Interstates connect all of these population centers, connect to big cities not far beyond the borders of the state (like St. Louis and Milwaukee), and link to places far away. Here is how the Illinois Department of Transportation describes the interstates:

Illinois is at the heart of the country’s interstate highway system. This vast system consists of coast-to-coast interstates I-80 and I-90, along with I-70 that extends from the east coast to Utah. These major corridors are joined by multiple north – south corridors including I-39, I-55, and I-57 and additional east – west corridors such as I-24, I-64, and I-74.

This is in part due to geographic advantages – a particular location along the Great Lakes, connections to major rivers like the Mississippi and the Ohio, and in-between other places – plus developing transportation infrastructure – highways and roads plus railroads and air options in addition to the early water transport.

Indiana may have the state motto of “The Crossroads of America” but would Illinois have a better claim to this? I am not sure it could replace the state slogan “Land of Lincoln” but it may speak more to the current state of Illinois economic and social life.

Post pandemic evictions up in some cities, down in others

Posted on by

Looking at evictions across American cities and regions after the pandemic shows differences:

Photo by Artem Podrez on Pexels.com

Eviction filings over the past year in a half-dozen cities and surrounding metropolitan areas are up 35% or more compared with pre-2020 norms, according to the Eviction Lab, a research unit at Princeton University.

This includes Las Vegas, Houston, and in Phoenix, where landlords filed more than 8,000 eviction notices in January. That was the most ever in a single month for the county that includes the Arizona capital. Phoenix eviction-court hearings often run for less than a minute. One judge signed off on an eviction after the tenant admitted to missing two rent payments…

Overall, eviction notices were up 15% or more compared with the period before the pandemic for 10 of the 33 cities tracked by the Eviction Lab, which looked at filings over the past 12 months…

Even with the higher eviction rates in several major cities, evictions more broadly have settled to roughly where they were before the pandemic. The first five months of the year had about 422,000 filings for eviction across the 33 cities and an additional 10 states tracked, down slightly from prepandemic norms in those same places. 

In New York City, Philadelphia and some other cities, filings have stayed down due in part to increased protections for renters.

The article does not list all the cities involved but it looks like those with higher evictions post-pandemic are growing Sunbelt cities. The article suggests the differences are due to more protections for renters in some places than others. I wonder if this goes along with several other factors:

  1. These regions are growing at faster rates than some other regions, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest.
  2. Different political regimes in different regions. Are the different levels of renter protections about whether the region (and the state it is in) leans more conservative or liberal?
  3. Different regional histories.
  4. How much did the pandemic affect local eviction policies? It could have led to more protections in some places.

It is cool to now have this data over time. I recommend reading the work – Evicted – that helped make this work possible.

“Stars – They’re Just Like Us!” and reflecting on those experiences

Posted on by

US Weekly since 2002 has featured normal life moments of celebrities:

Photo by Fox on Pexels.com

At the daily late-morning editorial meeting, the photo editor brought in images, many taken by paparazzi, that had come in over the wires overnight. He spread the color print-outs of celebrities all over the table: movie premieres, vacations, nights on the town. Bonnie sifted through them and focused on a photo of Drew Barrymore leaning over to fetch a coin off the sidewalk.

“Look at Drew Barrymore picking up a penny,” she said. “It’s like, stars, they’re just like us.”

Drew Barrymore picking up that penny went on to change Us Weekly, tabloid media, the paparazzi economy, and the celebrity ecosystem as a whole. A photo of an actress casually bending over on the street was suddenly interesting to readers and valuable to editors, which incentivized photographers to capture more everyday moments, and ultimately nudged celebrities to become willing participants in the process. A penny shot quickly turned into a money shot.

How do those experiences line up with not being a celebrity? Kevin Bacon recently tried this in Los Angeles:

The 65-year-old actor told the magazine that he wore his custom camouflage getup to The Grove LA, a popular outdoor mall in Los Angeles. Amongst all the visitors, he blended in. 

“Nobody recognized me,” he said.

But, living out his dream wasn’t what he imagined. 

“People were kind of pushing past me, not being nice,” he recalled. “Nobody said, ‘I love you.’ I had to wait in line to, I don’t know, buy a f––ing coffee or whatever.” 

He swiftly realized he wanted to return to his A-list status. 

“I was like, ‘This sucks. I want to go back to being famous,’” he added. 

This is just one experience. But once you are at some level of social status – whether the leader of a known organization or a Hollywood star or a member of the 1% – how possible is it to live a “normal” life, whether judged from one’s own experiences or by those around you?

Government-developed skyscrapers, World Trade Center edition

Posted on by

Skyscrapers do not emerge only from private sector. The former World Trade Center in lower Manhattan is one example (with quotes below from pages 198-199 of Cities in the Sky by economist James Barr):

Photo by Thomas Svensson on Pexels.com

Despite the destruction on September 11, 2001, the legacy of the Twin Towers remains strong. it was the first time that an American government agency – or likely any government agency the world over – directly developed and managed supertall skyscrapers meant to compete with the private sector. Historically, governments built tall buildings for their own needs. City halls competed with houses of worship to be the tallest in each city. But here was a regional governmental entity producing building space to earn a profit.

More importantly, it showed, over time, that placemaking via record-breaking skyscrapers was a viable option for cities, as the Twin Towers became instant icons of the Manhattan skyline. Just as important was their economic success, which created a new model: Build a record breaker with state support. If need be, fill it up with government agencies (or state-owned businesses outside the United States), give it time for neighborhood growth to kick in, and reap the returns.

This model later spread:

Photo by Matteo Parisi on Pexels.com

That it took till 1998 for this strategy to surface in Asia – starting with the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur – was due to the time Asia needed to catch up with its economic development and infrastructure. That it wasn’t replicated in the United States after that was because by the end of the 1970s America’s era of big government-funded urban renewal projects was over, while in Asia government-funded projects were just beginning.

Might this happen again in the future in the United States? Leaders seem quite open to public-private partnerships when it is deemed necessary to boost development and growth.