Category Archives: Sociology

Discussing the dangers of retention ponds in Naperville

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Retention ponds are plentiful in suburban developments as a means to handle excess water. But, officials in Naperville may soon look at regulations for retention ponds after a 6 year old recently drowned:

The pond, near the Glenmuir Luxury Rental Homes complex where Amer lived, reaches about 10 feet at its deepest point and is one of more than 200 bodies of water in Naperville — many of them man-made ponds created in recent decades to ease flooding when subdivisions were built, Naperville Fire Chief Mark Puknaitis said.

“Most of the ponds don’t have fencing or barriers,” Puknaitis said. “It’s highly impractical to do that with every pond. Even if you did, there’s nothing stopping somebody from scaling it.”

Several city council members agree that requiring fencing isn’t the best way to prevent future tragedies.

While fencing may seem an obvious way to prevent children from getting too close to retention ponds or falling in, Novack said there is a stormwater management reason not to install them: they block the flow of water during floods and slow the drainage process.

When single-family homes are constructed in the sprawling American manner, retention ponds are a necessity. Developing land and building homes often involves flattening land and disrupting the natural drainage. This is particularly an issue in swampier or low-lying areas where water already collected. They are so common that they are a ubiquitous “natural” presence that are often used as play areas or places to walk dogs. But while these ponds may seem natural, they are a carefully constructed part of the suburban infrastructure.

However, there are means by which to make retention ponds safer:

She said the recent trend toward letting natural vegetation grow along the shores of ponds helps to keep people — and Canada geese — away from the water and could contribute to increased safety.

So could using streams landscaped with native plants instead of large ponds to store water, Brodhead and Novack said.

In other words, it might take a little extra planning or effort but there are ways to “naturalize” the drainage. Communities could require developers to utilize these methods around retention ponds. And even if accidents in ponds are rare, it is hard to argue against safety in suburban settings.

“Real Housewives” character lives in McMansion only by fraud

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A “Real Housewives of New Jersey” character lived in a McMansion and its accompanying lifestyle – but it was all a fraud:

On TV they live large — in a 10,000-square-foot McMansion full of garish baubles and expensive toys in an ode to the bad taste and excessive spending that has made “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” a Bravo hit.

It’s the lifestyle Joe and Teresa Giudice — who grew up together as working-class Italian-American kids — always hungered for but could never truly afford, sources said, even when they convinced themselves and everyone around them they could.

The Giudices’ shaky facade of massive personal wealth — increasingly fragile since a 2009 Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing — finally imploded in a spectacular way last week when they were hit with a 39-count criminal fraud indictment.

The federal charges range from allegations that the two conspired to forge W-2 forms, tax returns, pay stubs and other documents to trick banks into lending them money, to accusations of perjury and false statements in their bankruptcy proceedings.

This won’t do the reputation of McMansions any good. See the picture of the Giudice’s home about halfway through the news story: it looks like everything McMansion critics would hate including a large wrought-iron fence and gate, an elaborate front door, a roof that looks like a castle, and plenty of rooms. Yet, critics would like the symbolism: the home may have been impressive on the outside or looked good on TV but ultimately, it literally all a fraud.

So if and when they lose the home, who is going to buy it?

Misleading graph of Dyson vacuum suction power?

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The latest edition of Time includes a back cover ad from Dyson with a graph of their vacuum’s suction:

DysonVacuumSuctionGraph

From the graph and the numbers below, it is pretty clear that Dyson has more suction power than the two other pictured vacuums: 160 air watts compared to 68 and 43 air watts. Fair enough, particularly for those who need the most air watts. But, I also wonder if this graph doesn’t represent a common problem with infographics: it is confusing a linear relationship, 160 air watts is more than twice as much as the competing vacuums, with volume. Not only does the Dyson have the most suction power, it is clearly the biggest vacuum in this graph. While I don’t think Dyson wants to sell their vacuum as the largest (in fact, they often pitch its manueverability), it isn’t necessarily bad to show that your product visually dominates the competition.

DuPage County looks to consolidate more than 400 taxing bodies

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Illinois is known for its plethora of taxing bodies but a new state law gives DuPage County the power to consolidate some of these bodies:

Under the new law, the county will be able to dissolve non-elected government agencies deemed outdated or inefficient following a full analysis and public review process…

“Frequently we find there’s another unit of government that could do the same thing,” said DuPage County Board Chairman Dan Cronin, who had pushed for the legislation. “Why don’t we just figure out who is going to be the odd man out?”

The narrowly written law currently applies only to DuPage County, which has more than 400 taxing bodies. State officials say they hope DuPage will serve as a model for other counties…

Cronin said his office will analyze each entity individually to determine whether there is the potential to save money and come up with a plan for how those services would still be provided. Residents would be able to weigh in during public hearings and could put together a referendum to fight a proposed dissolution.

The article mentions a few taxing bodies that are ripe for elimination but it will get more interesting when the County Board comes across ones that people want to defend and maintain. These local taxing bodies are all about local control and being able to spend tax dollars on one’s own interests or neighborhood. Pitting this suburban value, perhaps the guiding value for many suburbanites, versus wanting to have more efficient local government presents an interesting conflict.

Plus, how many taxing bodies will be eliminated under this new law? Is this law intended to get rid of just a few taxing bodies or does it involve a significant reduction from say over 400 to 300?

Don’t be worried about dating a leftist sociologist

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A recent wedding story in the New York Times included this bit about getting to know a leftist sociologist:

Ms. Levine, 61, is keeping her name. She is a sociology professor at Colgate University who has written six books, including “Class, Networks and Identity: Replanting Jewish Lives From Nazi Germany to Rural New York.” She graduated from Michigan State and received a master’s in sociology from McGill. She also holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the State University at Binghamton. She is a daughter of Rae Levy Levine of Peabody, Mass., and the late Frank Levine…

At the time, he did not care to know her name. But in February 2011, after his relationship ended, he changed his opinion. Once he found out she was Ms. Levine, he looked her up on the Internet.

“I saw titles,” he said. “I saw she was a leftist sociologist. So what?”…

He soon called with an invitation for dinner at his house, where they became so caught up in conversation that “the tuna steaks were way overcooked on the grill,” he said. While there, she scanned his bookshelf, and drew comfort from the fact he had books by Barbara Ehrenreich and so many other left-leaning authors she uses in her classroom. “It turned out we were much more compatible than I thought,” she said.

If sociologists can teach courses on love, they can also get married, sociological commitments notwithstanding.

Two minutes to sum up Le Corbusier, Bauhaus, and Herman Miller

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Refresh your architectural knowledge with these short videos on the influential works of Le Corbusier, Bauhaus, and Herman Miller.

I’ve asked this before: where in a K-college curriculum does a typical American student learn about modern architecture and design? I remember learning about Greek and Roman architecture in Western Civilization in high school. But, I don’t remember ever formally learning about more modern developments. I suppose some of this could be taught in art classes at older ages or in history courses. For example, it is hard to ignore the development of the skyscraper in American history in the late 1800s and early 1900s but this could easily be taught more from an angle about industry and progress rather than aesthetics and urban planning.

Because of this question, my urban sociology course this past spring semester spent several weeks discussing architecture and urban planning. All together, we read Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, talked about New Urbanism, took a Chicago Architecture Foundation walking tour titled “Modern Skyscrapers (1950s-present),” and watched several episodes about sustainable design and development in the PBS e2 series. This led to some good discussions about the social life and role of buildings and urban design.

h/t Curbed National

More Chicago area houses purchased with cash

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In perhaps another sign of the bifurcated housing market, more and more buyers are purchasing Chicago area homes with cash:

Some people actually pay cash to buy a house. In fact, it happens more than you’d probably expect—in the first half of 2013, cash paid for 34 percent of all homes bought in the Chicago area, according to data that RealtyTrac released exclusively to Chicago. For the month of June, cash bought 30 percent of local homes, which was even with the national average in data the company released last week.

Many of those cash buyers were investors, either the big corporate type or the smaller individual type. But real estate agents and others say the number of end-users buying homes for their own use and paying cash has risen steeply this year. (I could not find data that breaks down which cash buyers are end users and which are investors.)

And the reasons this is happening more?

-They want to be the sharpest competitor in a multiple-bid situation. A cash offer is “the cleanest offer,” Whelan says. It assures the seller that the deal won’t fall through for lack of financing, and it typically offers a faster closing because it eliminates the wait for the mortgage process.

-They know that sellers sometimes will accept a lower-priced cash offer over a higher-priced offer that will be financed, to avoid the hassle.

-They may believe that the value of the home they want is above what an appraiser would calculate based on comps from the recent past. Paying cash instead of getting a mortgage leaps over a mortgage lender’s requirement of an appraisal, Kawabata points out.

-Although it’s been easing recently, jumbo loans—mortgages for more than $417,000 in the Chicago area—were difficult to get for the past few years so buyers of higher-priced homes had been lining up cash for the home purchases they wanted to make this year.

In other words, if you have the cash on hand, it can give you a leg up on big real estate purchases. But, this option isn’t available to most people. So, it seems like this helps those with wealth to continue to rack up the wealth through larger and/or more valuable real estate portfolios.

A simple definition of McMansions: big and “decorated to the hilt”

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Another look at the supposed McMansion comeback has a pretty simple definition of McMansions:

The go-go days of the late 90s and early 2000’s gave us the McMansion, those 5,000-square-foot homes decorated to the hilt.

This keeps McMansions at the simplest level. To start, they are big homes. With the average new home at 2,500 square feet, 5,000 square feet is double the size. Second, I think “decorated to the hilt” refers not to the interior decor but rather to the garish or impressive features of the home such as large entryways, roofs with many gables, and a whole range of stone/stucco/wrought iron/glitzy features on the front.

Observed in Manhattan: online shopping leads to more traffic

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A graduate student in Manhattan argues that more online shopping leads to more traffic issues on the dense island:

Consider it this way: people around the world seem to have a travel time budget of a little over an hour each day. Before the rise of e-commerce, part of that time would have been spent in the service of purchasing goods. But if that budget remains fixed, then people today may simply buy something online, then hop in a car and go visit a friend across town. In that scenario, personal travel stays constant while commercial travel increases — a net gain of people and goods on the road…

Woodard’s case studies of the Gehry and three other residential apartments in Manhattan found the answer to those questions may very well be yes. Surveying the buildings for several hours at a time in the middle of the day, Woodard found that, on average, delivery trucks stayed parked for 21 minutes at a time, and two-thirds of them were double-parked. Extrapolating the data over a full day, in the case of the Gehry, that means delivery trucks alone occupy road space that’s not a true parking space for seven full hours…

Though Woodard’s case studies were never supposed to paint an exhaustive portrait of the urban e-commerce problem, they do underscore how little is known about it. One study from way back in 2004 estimated that delivery trucks cause nearly a million hours of vehicle delay each year, but the stunning grown in online shopping since then (and the fact that companies like Amazon are reluctant to release their data) makes any precise estimate difficult. Many experts consider this process of moving freight that final mile to be one of the biggest forgotten problems facing modern cities.

At the core of the problem is street parking. In a dense urban area like Manhattan, where few buildings have the luxury of freight docks or loading zones, delivery trucks have little choice but to park at the curb. That leaves passenger vehicles and delivery trucks to duke it out for precious street-parking space, which in turn leads to double-parking, which in turn leads to general congestion.

Interesting question and findings. How much do they apply beyond Manhattan, a dense place?

One issue not addressed here: how much do commerce companies bear responsibility for this congestion? Shopping online is often viewed as cheaper and more convenient but this analysis suggests there are some hidden costs that someone has to pay for. Roads are public goods paid for with tax dollars. If they are causing more congestion, could they bear some of this cost?

President Obama wants to turn American suburbs into Manhattan?

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Conservatives continue to worry that President Obama is opposed to suburbs:

The most obvious new element of the president’s regionalist policy initiative is the July 19 publication of a Department of Housing and Urban Development regulation broadening the obligation of recipients of federal aid to “affirmatively further fair housing.” The apparent purpose of this rule change is to force suburban neighborhoods with no record of housing discrimination to build more public housing targeted to ethnic and racial minorities. Several administration critics noticed the change and challenged it, while the mainstream press has simply declined to cover the story.

Yet even critics have missed the real thrust of HUD’s revolutionary rule change. That’s understandable, since the Obama administration is at pains to downplay the regionalist philosophy behind its new directive. The truth is, HUD’s new rule is about a great deal more than forcing racial and ethnic diversity on the suburbs. (Regionalism, by the way, is actually highly controversial among minority groups. There are many ways in which both middle-class minorities in suburbs, and less well-off minorities in cities, can be hurt by regionalist policies–another reason those plans are seldom discussed.)

The new HUD rule is really about changing the way Americans live. It is part of a broader suite of initiatives designed to block suburban development, press Americans into hyper-dense cities, and force us out of our cars. Government-mandated ethnic and racial diversification plays a role in this scheme, yet the broader goal is forced “economic integration.” The ultimate vision is to make all neighborhoods more or less alike, turning traditional cities into ultra-dense Manhattans, while making suburbs look more like cities do now. In this centrally-planned utopia, steadily increasing numbers will live cheek-by-jowl in “stack and pack” high-rises close to public transportation, while automobiles fall into relative disuse. To understand how HUD’s new rule will help enact this vision, we need to turn to a less-well-known example of the Obama administration’s regionalist interventionism…

The Plan Bay Area precedent makes it clear that HUD will use data on access to housing, jobs, and transportation to press densification on both urban and suburban jurisdictions. With the new HUD rule in place, municipalities will be under heavy pressure to allow multifamily developments in areas previously zoned for single-family housing. The new counting scheme, which measures access to housing, jobs, and transportation, will simultaneously create pressures to push businesses into the newly densified areas, and to locate those centers near transportation hubs. In effect, HUD’s new rule gives the federal government a tool to press ultra-dense Plan Bay Area-style “priority development areas” on regions across the country.

Housing discrimination is a real issue as is the lack of affordable housing. Leaving it to “the market” to sort this all out isn’t really working.

Also, there is some hyperbole going on here. See similar claims from conservatives about the US joining with the United Nations to push urban density. Pushing denser suburbs does not necessarily mean that all suburbs are going to be Manhattan. In fact, Manhattan is very unusual even among American cities for its density. Interestingly, the thriving cities of today are Sunbelt cities like Houston that tend to be less dense than traditional big cities in the Northeast or Midwest. Kurtz seems to be defending unmitigated sprawl, the idea that suburbs should have as little density as they like. This tends to be linked to greater local control as well as wealth – it is more expensive to have big lots/pieces of land. Additionally, less dense sprawl is viewed as the opposite of city life with its forced interactions with people different than you, less space, dirtiness, and urban problems (this perspective tends to ignores the benefits of urban life).

There are problems with unmitigated sprawl, even if people with means may desire it. Like any kind of development, there are tradeoffs involved. It is can be costly environmentally, tied to issues of land use and water runoff, among others. It leads to more driving which can be viewed as the ultimate expression of American independence but which also involves longer commutes, less walking, more traffic, and the expensive actions of owning and operating a car. It can be related to weaker communities and social relationships – see the discussion about sprawl in Bowling Alone. Its infrastructure is costly as roads, electric lines, gas lines, and local services are more spread out. Additionally, the fate of suburbs are linked to cities – the two areas are not independent (though they may appear to be so, say, when comparing Detroit with some of its wealthier suburbs) and problems in one area affect the other.

Having denser suburbs does not mean the American suburban way of life will disappear. It may mean smaller lots and less driving plus more mixed uses and new people in the suburbs but this does not necessarily equal Manhattan.