Category Archives: Sociology

Sociologist discusses why the BBC’s “class calculator” can help the field of sociology

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Check out the BBC’s class calculator and this argument from a sociologist about how the calculator matters for sociology:

As an academic sociologist, this take-up, while exciting, is also disconcerting. I am more used to debating social class with my academic peers than seeing the topic taken up so actively in the public arena, and it has been subject to much biting comment. We are deluged by emails complaining about how the calculator puts you in the wrong class, with the wrong labels. Eminent sociologists such as David Rose are concerned with the quality of the social science lying behind the work (do we really need Bourdieu rather than Weber?). Guy Standing is not convinced about our use of his “precariat” (precarious proletariat) term as the label for the most disadvantaged class that we uncover. There are already numerous spoofs and take-offs of the class model and its measurement. Given this furore, I want to explain what we are trying to achieve sociologically with this project. Is this a model of a new kind of accessible social science? Or is it a worrying case of pandering to media headlines?

We are relaxed about people having fun “placing” themselves and discussing this with family and friends, and arguing with us sociologists along the way. It has led to a wider collective discussion on Twitter and Facebook, which we see as a desirable resource for a public-facing sociology in a digital age. We do need to set the record straight, however. The Class Calculator was designed by the BBC to mimic the more complex model we had developed on the basis of the survey data, and the two should not be conflated. As numerous people have pointed out, changing just one response can shift you between different classes. This would not be possible within the latent class analysis we deployed, where all six measures are simultaneously used to allocate class membership. Actually, this kind of simplification was deliberate, as the measures used in the Class Calculator were chosen precisely to make respondents aware of the most important factors in placing people into classes. But it still poses questions about whether we have been simplistic.

Let me be blunt. The concept of class matters, because we need a way of connecting accentuating economic inequalities to social and cultural differences which permeate our society. Rather than seeing our lifestyles and social networks as somehow separate from economic inequalities, there are overlaps that can work together to produce social advantage and disadvantage. For all its problems, the concept of class remains fundamental to making these connections. Sure, we would all rather not live in a class-divided society. But in reality, the markers of class cannot be doubted. Our model seeks to find a way of making these connections, arguing that occupational measures alone are too blunt a tool for this purpose…

In my view, probably the most important finding from our research is the existence of a distinctive “elite” class. We are so used to turning the telescope on the poor and disadvantaged that sociologists have had little to say about those who are at the apex of British society. Sociological studies of class have no specific place for an elite category. What we have shown is that this very wealthy class is now clearly distinguished from all the other classes in Britain, and the economic differences are huge. That is a powerful and unsettling finding.

It is a simple little survey (it took me a few minutes and this was a little longer than it had to be because I was trying to do some mental conversions from dollars to pounds) but it sounds like it might have some potential for research and reflection.

I wonder how well this might work in an American setting. Compared to the United States, Britain is known for being more conscious of class. In contrast, most Americans would prefer to say they are middle class. So, what would happen if PBS or the New York Times or an equivalent news source ran such a survey? Would it be beneficial in that it could help show people where they really fall in society rather than the middle-class aspirations many claim to have?

More aldermen voting with Emanuel than did with Daley

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Chicago may have a newer mayor but a new study shows voting with the mayor is now even more pronounced for Chicago aldermen:

After analyzing 30 divided roll calls in the nearly two years since Emanuel took office, University of Illinois at Chicago researchers concluded that Emanuel has enjoyed more iron-fisted control over the council than former mayors Richard M. Daley, Richard J. Daley or Ed Kelly, the Democratic machine co-founder.

Twenty-one aldermen supported the mayor’s programs 100 percent of the time, while 18 others were more than 90 percent in lock-step.

There have been no shortage of controversies — ranging from speed cameras, police station and mental health clinic closings to the mayor’s Infrastructure Trust and his plan to nearly double water and sewer fees.

But only seven of the 30 issues drew six or more dissenting votes. Emanuel’s average level of support on all of the divided roll calls was 93 percent, compared to 83 percent during Richard J. Daley’s first two years in office and Kelly’s 88 percent…

Pressed to explain the City Council’s obedience, Simpson pointed to the take-no-prisoners reputation Emanuel built while working under former President Bill Clinton and current President Barack Obama and as chief architect of the 2006 Democratic takeover of the U.S. House.

Still Chicago, “the city that works“?

One issue with this analysis is that is still leaves Chicago residents with little knowledge of whether these voting patterns are unusual or not. Do other major cities have more contentious voting patterns? Or, is this fairly normal for big cities outside of the occasional wide disagreement? There are always references to more contentious times in the history of the Chicago City Council (see the short-lived Council Wars) but how about even a long view within Chicago for sake of comparison? I imagine this consistent voting together is fairly unusual but once you are around Chicago long enough, this becomes normal.

And regardless of the voting patterns, how about more analysis about whether Mayor Emanuel’s decisions have been good for Chicago in the long-term? Some of this will take time to sort out…

How does the rise in non-tenured college faculty affect education?

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There has been much conversation about this in academia lately but here are some actual numbers about the percentages of tenured and non-tenured faculty:

Once, being a college professor was a career. Today, it’s a gig.

That, broadly speaking, is the transformation captured in the graph below from a new report by the American Association of University Professors. Since 1975, tenure and tenure-track professors have gone from roughly 45 percent of all teaching staff to less than a quarter. Meanwhile, part-time faculty are now more than 40 percent of college instructors, as shown by the line soaring towards the top of the graph.

This doesn’t actually mean that there are fewer full-time professors today than four-decades ago. College faculties have grown considerably over the years, and as the AAUP notes, the ranks of the tenured and tenure-track professoriate are up 26 percent since 1975. Part-time appointments, however, have exploded by 300 percent. The proportions vary depending on the kind of school you’re talking about. At public four-year colleges, about 64 percent of teaching staff were full-time as of 2009. At private four-year schools, about 49 percent were, and at community colleges, only about 30 percent were. But the big story across academia is broadly the same: if it were a move, it’d be called “Rise of the Adjuncts.”

This is quite a shift over several decades. While there is a lot to explore here about economic life in colleges and universities, there is another question we could ask about how this affects the college experience: how does this change educational experiences and outcomes? Are students learning more or less depending on what kind of faculty in the classroom? Does it matter?

The booming housing market: Washington D.C.

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Washington D.C. may be growing in influence and its housing prices are certainly growing – they just reached a record high.

The median price of a home in the District reached its highest point in history last month, according to the latest data from RealEstate Business Intelligence, a subsidiary of MRIS.

D.C.’s median sale price soared to $460,000 from $405,000 in February, an increase of 13.6 percent month over month. For the entire metro area, the growth was more modest. The median sale price for the region rose 8 percent, to $372,500 in March from $345,000 in February.

Falls Church boasted the largest median price in the area last month and the biggest percentage uptick year over year. The median sale price for homes in Falls Church climbed to $631,000 in March, a 37.7 percent increase. However, there were only 16 sales in Falls Church in March, which likely skewed the numbers…

While this is good news for sellers, it is not as good for buyers who are combatting not only rising home prices but also depleted inventory. The number of homes for sale in the region continues to hover at historic lows. The 6,289 active listings in March were down 4,200 from the same month a year ago and have dropped nearly 20,000 since their peak in the fall of 2007.

A couple of thoughts:

1. This seems to reinforce the figures that suggest the Washington D.C. area is doing quite well. Housing prices are up, the population is growing, the region now has some of the wealthiest counties in the United States…this is a contrast to the fate of many Rustbelt locations as well as some Sunbelt communities that are still recovering from the real estate bust of recent years.

2. This will feed into ongoing conversations about the expansion of the Washington D.C. region and sprawl. In recent decades, there have been a number of discussions and fights about sprawl in Maryland and Virginia and with these housing prices and housing demand, there will be plenty of people who want more new homes.

Photographing some of the densest housing on earth in Hong Kong

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Check out a few photos of the dense high rises in Hong Kong:

As one of the most densely populated regions in the world, Hong Kong boasts not only the number one spot on Forbes’ list of escalating real estate markets, but also some of the most packed housing towers on Earth (at least one of which includes an honest-to-goodness 16.4-square-foot apartment). Captivated by these tightly crammed stacked cities, of sorts, German-born photographer Michael Wolf created tapestry-like shots of the residential buildings, cropping context to make the scope of each photo seem all the more mind-bending. In Hong Kong, architecture is “driven by function, not form and one tower block can only be distinguished from the next by the bold colour schemes of its façade,” he says, which means each piece in his Architecture of Density series, published earlier this year in a book by the same name, is pattern-driven and geometric; it’s so reminiscent of computer code that the human element nearly disappears altogether.

It would be interesting to see how people react to these pictures and these building designs. The headline to the story suggests these buildings are “sterile” but I could imagine other reactions: there is an order (and perhaps even some symmetry) to these structures; these buildings are stark and devoid of character; perhaps the buildings have to be this way to squeeze in so many people. Of course, these buildings don’t have to look this way; ornamentation doesn’t necessarily limit density. But, these buildings are the product of a particular era, context, and purpose.

Here is some more from the London School of Economics on Hong Kong’s density and the architecture and planning that has gone into it:

The urban area of Hong Kong has the highest population and employment density in the world. Measured at block level, some areas may have population densities of more than 400,000 people per square kilometre. As of 2011, there are seven million people for its 1,068 square kilometres (412 square miles) of land. However, more than 75 per cent of this land comprises no-built-up areas. The high concentration of people in just a few square kilometres is due partly to the fact that new town development did not take place until well into the 1970s and therefore most of the population (which had experienced a post-war boom in the 1950s) had to be accommodated in the main urban area along the waterfront of the Victoria Harbour on Hong Kong Island. The high price of land in Hong Kong also contributes to its high-density development…

Over the past few years, Hong Kong has developed the following planning, design and management measures to continue improving its high-rise living environments:

External environment of buildings
1) Better planning and design so that buildings are positioned further apart and have more open space;
2) Improved transport management by prioritising the development of mass transit and focusing on pedestrian movement in order to keep traffic congestion in check;
3) Creation of space by fully utilising the already-existing areas within buildings, such as roof tops and podiums, and transforming them into community and recreational spaces;
4) A trend towards large-scale property developments, which allows a greater consolidation of space in order to provide community facilities and ease of movement between locales;
5) The use of new building technology and materials to break the monotony of a district, while outdoor escalators facilitate the movement of pedestrians; and
6) Public education campaigns to encourage people to contribute to maintaining a clean environment.

All of this makes for quite a sight, even compared to the density of Manhattan.

Google and AT&T want to build high-speed Internet in Austin

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Another indicator of booming Sunbelt cities: both Google and AT&T will soon be putting together high-speed Internet service in Austin, Texas.

Google said Tuesday it plans to bring its ultra high-speed Internet and television service to Austin, Texas, next year, prompting AT&T to reveal its own plans to follow suit — if it gets the same terms from local authorities.

AT&T appeared to be making a political point to highlight the heavy regulations that encumber traditional phone companies, analysts said.

Google promised to begin connecting homes in Austin by the middle of 2014 with a 1-gigabit-per-second Internet service, roughly 13 times faster than the speediest service AT&T had previously committed to offering and about three times faster than the zippiest available from Verizon Communications…

While James said he did not know what the terms of Google’s Austin deal were, he pointed out that Google received various benefits in Kansas City, including preferential right-of-way access, access to data centers, and reduced pole access rates.

The news reports I’ve seen have tended to emphasize the Internet speed that would be possible with these changes and how this might change how we use the Internet. But, I think it is also interesting to consider “why Austin?” Austin is well-known these days for its population growth, its ability to attract high-tech and educated workers and companies (related to the presence of UT-Austin), and its cultural scene, complete with SXSW. In other words, this is a “cool” middle-America city, exactly the kind of place Google might want to expand this product.

I hope we will hear more about the deals Austin might make with Google to help this project move forward. Just how much should Austin give up? I suspect residents would be more in favor of these kinds of deals or tax breaks when it involves Internet services (it is infrastructure after all) versus tax breaks for big box stores or corporate headquarters…

The next logical question: after starting in Kansas City and then moving on to Austin, what city/metropolitan area is up next for Google’s high-speed service?

Should thriving Sunbelt cities like Houston seek a denser core?

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Joel Kotkin points out the growth in a number of Sunbelt cities and then raises a debate within urban circles today: should these thriving Sunbelt cities try to replicate the cores of older American cities?

Finally, they will not become highly dense, apartment cities — as developers and planners insist they “should.” Instead the aspirational regions are likely to remain dominated by a suburbanized form characterized by car dependency, dispersion of job centers, and single-family homes. In 2011, for example, twice as many single-family homes sold in Raleigh as condos and townhouses combined. The ratio of new suburban to new urban housing, according to the American Community Survey, is 10 to 1 in Las Vegas and Orlando, 5 to 1 in Dallas, 4 to 1 in Houston and 3 to 1 in Phoenix.

Pressed by local developers and planners, some aspirational cities spend heavily on urban transit, including light rail. To my mind, these efforts are largely quixotic, with transit accounting for five percent or less of all commuters in most systems. The Charlotte Area Transit System represents less a viable means of commuting for most residents than what could be called Manhattan infrastructure envy. Even urban-planning model Portland, now with five radial light rail lines and a population now growing largely at its fringes, carries a smaller portion of commuters on transit than before opening its first line in 1986.

But such pretentions, however ill-suited, have always been commonplace for ambitious and ascending cities, and are hardly a reason to discount their prospects. Urbanistas need to wake up, start recognizing what the future is really looking like and search for ways to make it work better. Under almost any imaginable scenario, we are unlikely to see the creation of regions with anything like the dynamic inner cores of successful legacy cities such as New York, Boston, Chicago or San Francisco. For better or worse, demographic and economic trends suggest our urban destiny lies increasingly with the likes of Houston, Charlotte, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Raleigh and even Phoenix.

The critical reason for this is likely to be missed by those who worship at the altar of density and contemporary planning dogma. These cities grow primarily because they do what cities were designed to do in the first place: help their residents achieve their aspirations—and that’s why they keep getting bigger and more consequential, in spite of the planners who keep ignoring or deploring their ascendance.

It is clear what side Kotkin is on – we might call this “free market urbanism.” Kotkin suggests cities are all about freeing up individuals. This is not the common urbanist view that typically suggests cities are about community life (what can be accomplished through cities is greater than what individuals can do as individual parts) or about vibrant and diversestreet life (think Jane Jacobs).

But, Kotkin is not the only one who suggests there are some major differences between older American cities and newer Sunbelt cities. For example, the Los Angeles school of urban thought held up decentralized LA as the way cities were going. But, their analysis was more Marxist than free market and involved a thorough critique of capitalism and its effects on major cities.

In the end, it remains to be seen what happens to these newer Sunbelt cities as they could go all sorts of directions. If they continue on their current path, they will continue to be decentralized and sprawling. But, social or economic changes might encourage more density, new land use policies, and new visions about what the city should be.

What to do with closed schools

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Once schools are closed, what should communities do with them?

One of the thorniest issues (in what is a veritable forest of mess) is what to do with those school buildings once they’re empty. Often, the facilities are in poor shape, with promised renovations put off quasi-indefinitely. Many are located in depressed neighborhoods. And there are only so many developers with the know-how and resources to convert classrooms into condos or a community center.

Then, there are often complex laws that limit who may or may not take over city-owned property. Some cities ban charter schools from moving into empty traditional schools (officials know that moving a new school into an old school can foment frustration with the district); others require time-consuming input from the community. Laws like these can tie school districts’ hands and slow re-development…

It’s not unusual for closed schools to sit empty for years at a time. A 2011 Pew Charitable Trusts report estimated that there were 200 vacant public school campuses in six cities — Philadelphia, Detroit, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C. — alone…

Kansas City isn’t the only place to have found success with school building conversions. In Chicago, one closed school became an Irish American Heritage Center with a library, museum, and regular step dancing performances. In Lansing, Michigan, an elementary school was turned into a hub for technology start-ups; another was converted into a business incubator. The third was reborn as a gym.

It sounds like the biggest issue is for cities to move relatively quickly when schools close and find new uses. In fact, the buildings might even generate a little income that could then help the cash-strapped cities that had to close schools in the first place. But, having no plan simply means communities lose potential opportunities.

With that in mind, what is Chicago planning to do with all the schools they just announced would be closing?

The new Ace Hardware home is badly proportioned

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Ace Hardware has a new set of television commercials where they argue going to their neighborhood stores is like visiting your neighbor. However, there is one big problem (beyond the fact that many people don’t know their neighbors): the house is badly proportioned. Take a look:

AceHardwareHouse

The bottom portion of the house doesn’t look too bad: a porch, front door, and a two car garage. But, then look above. My best guess is that the Ace sign displaced the actual window which then got squeezed in between the roof line and the garage. Overall, it doesn’t look good. The neighbors would not be happy if the house next door looked like this.

Despite the odd looking house, I like the sales pitch. I was at Home Depot to get five items related to gardening this weekend. Due to the size of the store and my infrequent visits (perhaps once a month or so), I had to ask where three of the five items were because they were very difficult to locate otherwise.

Claim: America has 40 million McMansions?

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Here is an interesting claim: America has 40 million McMansions.

Americans, especially generations X and Y, want shorter commutes, walkability and a car-free existence. Which means that around 40 million large-lot exurban McMansions, built primarily during the housing boom, might never find occupants.

My guess is that this application of the term McMansion is quite misguided. Look at the original news story about these figures:

America has too many big houses — 40 million, to be exact — because consumers are shifting preferences to condos, apartments and small homes, experts told the New Partners for Smart Growth Thursday, holding its 11th annual conference in San Diego through Sunday.

Relying on developers’ surveys, Chris Nelson, who heads the Metropolitan Research Center at the University of Utah, said 43 percent of Americans prefer traditional big, suburban homes but the rest don’t…

He estimated that this demand suggests a need for 10 million more attached homes and 30 million more small homes on 4,000-square-foot lots or less. By contrast, demand for large-lot homes is 40 million less than currently available.

There is no explicit mention of McMansions in this original story. There can’t really be 40 million McMansions. In 2000, there were just under 70 million total detached housing units. So roughly half of all American houses are McMansions? Also, there are 40 million houses in the exurbs? (You may have to define all suburbs as exurbs to get close to this.) At the same time, one could argue that the average new home, around 2,400 square feet is still too big for what many Americans want. But, a home at the average or even slightly over is not automatically a McMansion.