Category Archives: Sociology

Arcade Fire and recalling growing up in the suburbs

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In 2010, Arcade Fire released the single “The Suburbs” which shared the same name as their third album. This song references growing up in the suburbs – here is what is in verse two:

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The kids want to be so hard
But in my dreams, we’re still screaming
And running through the yard
And all of the walls that they built in the seventies finally fall
And all of the houses they built in the seventies finally fall
Meant nothing at all
Meant nothing at all, it meant nothing

By the early 2000s, millions of Americans had grown up in suburbs. What was that childhood like? How could it be put into music?

Whether related to their artistry or their view of the suburbs decades later, The Suburbs may be the most decorated music album about suburbia:

The album debuted at No. 1 on the Irish Albums Chart, the UK Albums Chart, the US Billboard 200 chart,[4] and the Canadian Albums Chart.[5] It won Album of the Year at the 2011 Grammy Awards, Best International Album at the 2011 BRIT Awards, Album of the Year at the 2011 Juno Awards, and the 2011 Polaris Music Prize for best Canadian album. Two weeks after winning Grammy’s Album of the Year, the album jumped from No. 52 to No. 12 on the Billboard 200, the album’s highest ranking since August 2010.[6]

One interesting note: the group is Canadian but The Suburbs is based on growing up outside of Houston. How does this mixing of experiences change their interpretation of suburbia?

Folk music about the “little boxes” of suburbia

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The folk song “Little Boxes” written by Malvina Reynolds in 1962 and popularized by a Pete Seeger recording released in 1963 captured some of the concerns about growing suburbs in the United States. The first verse speaks to the song’s message:

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Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same

The rest of the song then describes the people who live in these homes and the ways they follow the same paths.

This song borrows the imagery of new suburban construction – a lot of similar looking homes (“little boxes”) emerging out of open spaces outside cities – to argue the communities and people within are falling into patterns of conformity. This was a common argument in the 1950s and 1960s: suburbanites thought they were achieving the American Dream but they were really getting a dull and common life. Instead of becoming individuals or households that had made it, they were sold a bill of goods.

Even as Seeger’s song became a hit (reaching #70 on the charts), many Americans did not appear to be swayed by this song. They continued to move to the suburbs in large numbers for subsequent decades. Perhaps they might even admit there is conformity in the suburbs in the houses and social life – and they might be okay with that.

The Beatles on Penny Lane and the Liverpool suburbs

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In their 1967 single “Penny Lane,” the Beatles described life on a suburban street. The word “suburban” comes up in the first chorus and the last choruses in the song:

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Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes
Wet beneath the blue suburban skies
I sit and meanwhile back in

What suburbia were they thinking about? Here is a discussion of the street from Wikipedia:

Penny Lane is a road in the south Liverpool suburb of Mossley Hill. The name also applies to the area surrounding its junction with Smithdown Road and Allerton Road, and to the roundabout at Smithdown Place that was the location for a major bus terminus, originally an important tram junction of Liverpool Corporation Tramways.[8] The roundabout was a frequent stopping place for John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison during their years as schoolchildren and students.[8] Bus journeys via Penny Lane and the area itself subsequently became familiar elements in the early years of the Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership.[9]

This area just a few minutes from downtown Liverpool is not quite the sprawling suburbia of the United States. It might be akin to a residential neighborhood in a major American city or part of an inner-ring suburb. Yet it invokes some similar sentiments with its emphasis on everyday life, blue skies, and upbeat music.

Outside of this one song, the Beatles do not say much about suburbs. They discuss other places – see this video here – but the growing suburbs of the United States and other places do not draw much attention. Their childhood experiences in the Liverpool suburbs live on as one contribution to popular music about suburbs.

Olivia Rodrigo and driving through the American suburbs

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In the first single she released, Olivia Rodrigo describes driving in the suburbs three times:

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But today I drove through the suburbs / Cryin’ ’cause you weren’t around

Yeah, today I drove through the suburbs / ‘Cause how could I ever love someone else?

Today I drove through the suburbs / And pictured I was driving home to you

These lyrics put together some themes about the American suburbs. The need to drive around as this is the preferred and often only mode of transportation in sprawling areas. The expectation of living in a suburban house or living in suburban settings as a couple or family. And being a teenager in the American suburbs with the ability to focus on relationships and driving, amid everything else that is going on in the world.

Goodbye dining rooms in American residences

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Hello great rooms, goodbye dining rooms:

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But in many new apartments, even a space to put a table and chairs is absent. Eating is relegated to couches and bedrooms, and hosting a meal has become virtually impossible. This isn’t simply a response to consumer preferences. The housing crisis—and the arbitrary regulations that fuel it—is killing off places to eat whether we like it or not, designing loneliness into American floor plans. If dining space keeps dying, the U.S. might not have a chance to get it back…

According to surveys in 2015 and 2016 by the National Association of Home Builders, 86 percent of households want a combined kitchen and dining room—a preference accommodated by only 75 percent of new homes. If anything, the classic dining room isn’t dying fast enough for most people’s taste…

“For the most part, apartments are built for Netflix and chill,” Bobby Fijan, a real-estate developer and floor-plan expert, told me. “The reason the dining room is disappearing is that we are allocating [our] limited space to bedrooms and walk-in closets.” Even though we’re dining at home more and more—going to restaurants peaked in 2000—many new apartments offer only a kitchen island as an obvious place to eat.

The article does a nice job laying out some of the reasons for these shifts. Builders and consumers have reasons for moving away from dining rooms.

Another way to think about this: sitting down an eating is now a secondary task to other matters including watching screens and being near kitchen activity (food preparation, socializing). Having a dedicated spot to sit and eat – which then can lead to conversation and togetherness – is less of a priority.

Does having a dining room lead to more meals eaten together? Does having a dining room lead people to spend more time there or does the dining room get put to other uses?

Costs rising for owning and maintaining a home

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A new report suggests owning a home has become more expensive in recent years:

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US homeowners are now paying an average of $18,118 a year on property taxes, homeowners’ insurance, maintenance, energy and various other expenses linked to owning a home, according to a new Bankrate study.

That’s nearly the cost to buy a used car and represents a 26% increase from four years ago when it cost $14,428 annually to own and maintain a home…

The per-month cost of owning and maintaining a home has gone from $1,202 a month in 2020 to $1,510 now, Bankrate found…

Of course, the silver lining for homeowners is the fact that home values have gone up significantly since 2020.

Those gains have padded the net worth of millions of Americans. Median inflation-adjusted net worth swelled by 37% between 2019 to 2022, according to the Federal Reserve.

These two trends above might be hard to reconcile: having a home costs more but the value of that home keeps going up. So a homeowner can feel crunched at the moment as they can anticipate a strong return on investment. Which one will they feel more – what feels like a loss in expenses or anticipated value down the road?

Argument: you cannot understand the attachment to smartphones and social media today without accounting for the decline in community life starting in the 1960s

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Jonathan Haidt, author of the recent book The Anxious Generation, argued the recent development of a phone-based childhood was preceded by a decline in childhood play. He now wants to add to this argument: both of these followed a decline in local community.

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When I was writing The Anxious Generation, I thought of it as a tragedy in two acts: In Act I, we took away the play-based childhood (1990-2010), and in Act II, we gave kids the phone-based childhood (2010-2015). Teen mental health plunged in the middle of Act II. 

But as Zach and I were finishing up the revisions of the book in the fall of 2023, and Zach was running additional analyses and making additional graphs, we began to realize that there was a third act, which predated Act I and caused it: the decline of local community, trust, and social capital. That’s the long process charted in Robert Putnam’s 2000 masterpiece Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community and updated in his more recent book, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.

This is an argument about historical change and processes emerging from existing conditions. Put in other words, the United States had close-knit local communities and many local organizations which then declined which led parents and communities to pull back on children playing which created a vacuum into which smartphones and social media stepped into.

In Bowling Alone, Putnam describes multiple factors at work in the decline of community and local organizations. This includes the expansion of suburbs and the spread of television. And in The Upswing, Putnam argues civic participation and community life of the mid-twentieth century arose from lower levels earlier in the twentieth century.

All this suggests social capital and community life can rise and fall over longer periods with numerous social forces at work. What is going on now may not be what is happening in 20 years or 50 years and these future permutations may not look like the past. With smartphones, the emergence of artificial intelligence, and all the other social conditions of today, what kind of community life might emerge?

From railroad easement to tax deduction during railroad merger to Millennium Park

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Where did the land for Chicago’s Millennium Park come from?

In 1993, I went to work with Forrest Claypool in the Chicago Park District. I was responsible for the lakefront district. It always made no sense to me that there was this muddy, ugly hole right off Michigan Avenue. It also made no sense that if the Illinois Central Railroad owned that land, they would use it as a surface parking lot. You would think they would do something else with it. The other thing that stood out was that there was one track on the eastern edge with a single boxcar on it. It was just an eyesore. For a century, city and parks groups would try to buy the land, and the railroad would never sell it…

I did a title search. I just wanted to get to the bottom of it. I was sort of a zealot about the use of public land. I found out that the railroad didn’t own the land after all. It was always the city’s land. What the railroad had was an easement. So they could use the land for rail purposes, but they couldn’t build a building. They had no air rights. And to maintain the fiction of rail purposes, they kept the single track and the single boxcar. The railroad was happy to make some ancillary revenue as a parking operation. At this point, Forrest and I advised the mayor of what we had found. And [in 1996] the park district and the city Law Department together sued the railroad.

Without Randy Mehrberg’s discovery, none of this happens. Daley was in action mode almost immediately. As in: “Let’s go through the legal process here to get this thing done.” It was not until this sort of virgin land in the middle of the city became available that he saw that this was the chance.

The railroad was not terribly happy or receptive. But a funny thing happened: The Illinois Central was in the process of being sold to the Canadian National Railway. And I suggested to the railroad that instead of litigating with us, they make a donation to the city of all of their title and interest rights from Randolph Street to McCormick Place. They would get a nice tax deduction, and it would enhance their merger, because the purchase price was based on a multiple of earnings, and a large tax deduction would improve their earnings. We were able to negotiate that.

The area around the Chicago River and the lakefront was a shipping area with railroads converging and boats coming in and out. Yet, it sounds like it took a while to figure out what to do with all this space once transportation activity moved elsewhere. It is not as if Chicago stopped being a transportation center; the action shifted and this area eventually became a park.

Having been in Millennium Park many times, I do not recall seeing any documentation of the previous history of the land. If it is not marked, why not tell some of the story of railroads and other lakefront uses in the past to what the park is today? I am in favor of more resources for residents and visitors to learn and visualize what used to be where they are standing or looking. (Some of this could come from virtual reality or augmented reality devices but we are not there yet.)

What it might take for the Supreme Court to limit exclusionary zoning

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Two law professors argue that the Supreme Court could utilize the Fifth Amendment to make exclusionary zoning less common:

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No one simple solution to this problem exists. But a crucial tool may lie in the Constitution: the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment. The clause requires that, when the government takes “private property,” it must pay “just compensation” (usually the fair market value of the property rights taken). As we argue in a forthcoming Texas Law Review article, because exclusionary zoning severely restricts property owners’ right to use their land, we believe that it qualifies as such a taking, and is therefore unconstitutional unless the government pays compensation. Consistent enforcement of this interpretation would severely constrain exclusionary zoning, limiting it to cases where policy makers believe the benefits are worth the costs of paying compensation—and where they have the resources to do so.

Here is what the authors conclude with regarding what would be required to lead to a Supreme Court decision:

Historically, successful constitutional-reform movements have combined legal and political action, and have not relied on one to the exclusion of the other. That was true for the civil-rights movement, the women’s-rights movement, advocates of same-sex marriage, gun-rights advocates, and others. The cross-ideological YIMBY movement should do the same.

What steps might this involve? Some thoughts:

  1. At least several states make significant shifts at the state level.
  2. Sustained political and judicial attention to the issue of exclusionary zoning (competing with other issues that attract more attention).
  3. At least one, if not a few, compelling cases where making such a ruling makes sense given the parties involved and local and historical circumstances.
  4. Public support for a change to exclusionary zoning. I do not know where polling stands on this issue or even if the public is asked about this issue.
  5. Coordinated advocacy efforts across organizations and locations.
  6. Different members of the Supreme Court?

I have argued before that it is difficult to address housing at the national level in the United States. That does not mean laws and policies cannot change but it will require a lot of effort.

The Home Alone house as one of the most newsworthy houses in America?

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I saw the news: the Home Alone house has been sold.

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The red brick Georgian Revival mansion in Winnetka made famous by the 1990 film “Home Alone” garnered much attention when it was listed on May 24 for $5.25 million — more than three times what it had sold for in 2012 to its current owners — and in a testament both to the condition of the home and the popularity of Winnetka, the mansion found a buyer just one week later.

How many houses generate this much interest when they are on the market or even when they are not? The same story above noted the number of visitors to the fictional home of the McCallisters:

A 1992 Chicago Tribune headline for a story about the home being placed on a local house walk called the mansion “a “home that’s never left alone.” Then-owner Cynthia Abendshien told the Tribune even back then that “there are a lot of people, especially children, that will knock on the door and ask to see the house.”

It’s not much different today, although the mansion now is set behind a wrought iron fence and gate. On a nice day, a visitor showing up to gawk at the mansion soon will discover that there’s company — other visitors there for the same purpose.

There are historic mansions that get a lot of visitors. Think Hearst Castle, Biltmore. Lots of communities have preserved older homes or historic preservation districts. Homes designed by well-known architects, like Frank Lloyd Wright, draw the attention of visitors.

But homes made famous by a movie? Particularly a movie aimed at kids? That when it goes on sale prompts articles by the New York Times, Architectural Digest, and the Today Show? It may be an particular confluence of when the movie was made, the way news outlets today report similar stories, and the interest people have in famous or celebrity houses. I am sure the home will be back in the news at some point, though the movie is now over 30 years old and real estate markets change.