Category Archives: Sociology

Uptick in bigger homes but with some twists: more infill, multigenerational, and upsized homes

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Some recent evidence suggests big homes might be making a comeback in America but with a few twists:

The average size of a newly built home increased 3.7 percent in 2011 from 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That was the first annual increase since 2007 and indicates that home builders are seeing demand for larger spaces. The demand, however, is not where it used to be. Home buyers are less willing to head out to the so-called “ex-urbs” to get their larger space,” according to the latest findings from the American Institute of Architects.

“In many areas, we are seeing more interest in urban infill locations than in remote exurbs, which is having a pronounced shift in neighborhood design elements,” said AIA Chief Economist, Kermit Baker. “And regardless of city or suburban dwellers, people are asking more from their communities in terms of access to public transit, walkable areas and close proximity to job centers, retail options and open space.”

Half of residential architecture firms highlight demand for multi-generational housing, up from 44 percent in 2011. Fifty-nine percent said access to public transportation is key, up from 47 percent a year ago.

More homeowners are also upsizing what they have, with 58 percent of architects reporting improvement in additions and alterations, up from just 35 percent a year ago; kitchen and bath, as usual, top the must-have list.

These factors may make new McMansions more appealing. Infill locations might lead into teardown situations but this could be preferable to sprawl. Multigenerational housing makes better use of the large houses and they appear less wasteful. Upsizing helps people build value in their home and not contribute to sprawl. While these are still big homes, they don’t sound like the exurban cookie-cutter McMansions critics love to attack.

Another note from this article: it suggests in the final paragraph that McMansions are usually thought to have between 3,000 and 5,000 square feet. This seems somewhat right to me though this could be on the conservative end. I’ve seen plenty of instances where a home over 5,000 square feet is called a McMansion and sometimes it seems like the upper end, moving into mansion territory, might be more like 8-10,000 square feet.

Converting American churches into housing units

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More American churches are being converted into housing units:

The building is one of a number of church-to-home luxury conversions popping up around the country. As dozens of churches close or move to different quarters each year, they’re finding second lives as condo developments and townhouses.

The conversion process is growing more common as shrinking congregations and shifting demographics have made it difficult for some congregations to stay afloat financially. According to a March report from CoStar Group, a real-estate research firm, 138 church-owned properties across the country were sold by banks last year, compared with 24 three years earlier…

Architects have found creative ways to convert these historic buildings—which often have 40- or 50-foot-high ceilings, few or no interior walls and stained-glass windows—into homes and apartments that will sell for millions of dollars.

But it isn’t an easy process: Not only do the structures need intensive interior reconstruction and upgrades to meet modern building codes, but they often have been granted landmark status, further complicating renovations.

This is a good example of retrofitting. As the article notes, hundreds of churches have closed in recent years and converting the churches generally leaves the outside while making the interior reusable. One irony in this story is that I have read in recent years about growing conservative churches making use of vacant shopping structures, often big box stores, rather than building new churches or megachurches. So, in the suburbs, some churches are sacralizing profane spaces while in cities, new residents are secularizing once-sacred spaces.

It would also be interesting to hear how these new residential units were received in the communities in which they were built. The article profiles individual owners and builders but doesn’t talk much about the zoning process or reactions from neighbors. It sounds like people generally want to save the historic church buildings but there might be concerns about adding new residents. On the other hand, converting the churches means the property can be added to the tax rolls and generate revenue for the community.

Also, the examples of this article include fairly expensive condos and housing units. Has anyone turned churches into truly affordable housing? If so, the mission of the church might continue even if a congregation no longer meets there.

Nielsen and Twitter combine to measure Twittering about television

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With the rise of Twitter messages about television shows and events, Nielsen and Twitter just announced a new project to measure the connection:

“The Nielsen Twitter TV Rating is a significant step forward for the industry, particularly as programmers develop increasingly captivating live TV and new second-screen experiences, and advertisers create integrated ad campaigns that combine paid and earned media,” said Steve Hasker, President, Global Media Products and Advertiser Solutions at Nielsen. “As a media measurement leader we recognize that Twitter is the preeminent source of real-time television engagement data.”…

The Nielsen Twitter TV Rating will enhance the social TV analytics and metrics available today from SocialGuide by adding the first-ever measurement of the total audience for social TV activity – both those participating in the conversation and those who were exposed to the activity –providing the precise size of the audience and effect of social TV to TV programming.

SocialGuide, recently acquired by Nielsen and NM Incite, currently captures Twitter TV activity for all U.S. programming across 234 TV channels in English and Spanish, and more than 36,000 programs.  Through a sophisticated classification process, SocialGuide matches Tweets to TV programs to offer key social TV metrics including the number of unique Tweets associated with a given program and rankings for the most social TV programs.

This may be interesting in itself but the key may just be translating this into information that TV networks can sell to advertisers:

Brad Adgate, an analyst at Horizon Media, said advertisers will view the Twitter ratings as a useful layer of information about a show’s popularity, but it is “not going to be close to the currency” of existing ratings metrics.

“It lets producers and creative directors know if the storyline is working, like a huge focus group,” Adgate said. “But I don’t think you can translate comments to ratings for a show. Right now I think the bark right now is bigger than its bite.”…

Mark Burnett, executive producer of NBC’s hit “The Voice,” argued that advertisers should value programs that can attract a high level of social media engagement from viewers. Deeply embedded social media elements, such as live Twitter polls, were critical in driving “The Voice” to the top of the Tuesday night ratings among viewers between 18 to 49, Burnett said.

“If you’re an advertiser, wouldn’t you want to know whether people are watching this show passively or if they’re actively engaged in the viewing experience?” Burnett said. “Five years from now this will make traditional television ratings seem archaic.”

In other words, if this metric works well, television networks will be able to charge advertisers more based on increased levels of Twitter engagement or find some way to provide more targeted advertising to Twitter users. What will Twitter engaged TV watchers get out of it? I’m not sure. Will any of this measurement and action based on the data enhance the interactive element of TV watching? Theoretically, if TV networks could get more money for advertising based on social media engagement, they might have more money to put into developing quality programming. But, there are few guarantees there.

I’ll be very interested to see in coming years if Twitter and Facebook continue to remain relatively ad-free or if the need to monetize these experiences to make money takes precedence.

Contrarian view: “Why 2012 was the best year ever”

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The Spectator argues that 2012 wasn’t so bad when you look at the big picture:

It may not feel like it, but 2012 has been the greatest year in the history of the world. That sounds like an extravagant claim, but it is borne out by evidence. Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity. The West remains in the economic doldrums, but most developing countries are charging ahead, and people are being lifted out of poverty at the fastest rate ever recorded. The death toll inflicted by war and natural disasters is also mercifully low. We are living in a golden age.

To listen to politicians is to be given the opposite impression — of a dangerous, cruel world where things are bad and getting worse. This, in a way, is the politicians’ job: to highlight problems and to try their best to offer solutions. But the great advances of mankind come about not from statesmen, but from ordinary people. Governments across the world appear stuck in what Michael Lind, on page 30, describes as an era of ‘turboparalysis’ — all motion, no progress. But outside government, progress has been nothing short of spectacular.

Take global poverty. In 1990, the UN announced Millennium Development Goals, the first of which was to halve the number of people in extreme poverty by 2015. It emerged this year that the target was met in 2008. Yet the achievement did not merit an official announcement, presumably because it was not achieved by any government scheme but by the pace of global capitalism. Buying cheap plastic toys made in China really is helping to make poverty history. And global inequality? This, too, is lower now than any point in modern times. Globalisation means the world’s not just getting richer, but fairer too.

The doom-mongers will tell you that we cannot sustain worldwide economic growth without ruining our environment. But while the rich world’s economies grew by 6 per cent over the last seven years, fossil fuel consumption in those countries fell by 4 per cent. This remarkable (and, again, unreported) achievement has nothing to do with green taxes or wind farms. It is down to consumer demand for more efficient cars and factories.

And so on. It is hard to keep this big picture in mind. Tragedies seem common or at least too frequent. Good news doesn’t seem to trickle up to the top of the news heap as much. Or perhaps it is because our relative status in the United States and elsewhere in the West seems precarious. Or perhaps it is because due to globalization we are also more aware of the risks in the world around us.

This argument reminds of Stephen Pinker’s 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature (my quick review here). Pinker argued in the book that humans have had a much more violent past and today is marked by relative peace and conflict today tends to be more limited in terms of deaths and how big of an area is affected. Yet, the average citizen would not probably pick up on this.

Before watching The Hobbit on Friday night, my wife and I were struck by the number of movie trailers for post-apocalyptic films. Granted, we didn’t see any trailers for romantic comedies or many Oscar worthy dramas – the theaters clearly think there is a certain audience for The Hobbit – but these sort of narratives seem to be on the rise. People want to watch fictionalized movies and TV shows about the end of times, when the narrative of human progress is clearly smashed and small groups of people try to put the pieces together again. Of course, such movies can also be an excuse for monsters and violence but this is a fascinating trend tied to pessimism about the present and future.

Building “a live test case” city in China

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Curbed describes a proposed pop-up city in China that could be used to test a number of planning ideas:

With the amount of architectural phenomena China’s churning out these days, it can be tough for decent renderings to garner any sort wow factor. The market is just glutted with all manner of wackadoo designs, from car-free “Great Cities” to the world’s next tallest building to alien/pinecone towers. Still, these renderings for an urban oasis in Changsha, Hunan, to be built from scratch by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF) stand out. An “experiment in future city planning,” this lakeside city lets the architects play with neighborhood structure, flood prevention systems, and urban agriculture, all the while housing 180,000 residents—that’s 100,000 more people than accounted for in China’s other planned pop-up city. KPF’s press release calls the Meixi Lake project “a live test case”—always a reassuring phrase when talking about urban architecture—designed to integrate nature into densely populated cityscapes. The city—described as “actually happening” by a spokesperson—will be organized by neighborhood pods, each housing about 10,000 people, with a school, shopping center, and other public spaces in each town-like structure. The plan, proposed five years ago, is intriguing, though the verdict’s still out on whether it has enough pie-in-the-sky details to be make it into the selective club of most outlandish cities of the future.

I detect some skepticism here. But, I’m interested in this phrase of a city acting as “a live test case.” Experimenting with cities? While the sociologists of the Chicago School suggested Chicago was a laboratory, I don’t think this is what they had in mind. I suspect this language couldn’t be used openly in the United States even though certain development plans and projects have acted as experiments of sorts over the decades. For example, public housing went through an experiment of sorts starting with the construction of high-rises in the 1950s and 1960s. However, these high-rises (famously marked by the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis) were torn down in recent decades after being marked as untenable. When talking about cities as live test cases, does that mean the development will be evaluated years down the road and if it worked, it will continue but it will be changed if it didn’t work? Could portions of test cities be torn down and then make way for new cities?

Converting a Salt Lake City McMansion into condos

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Check out how one Salt Lake City McMansion was converted into condos:

In 2005, construction started on the monster house at 678 North H Street in the Avenues. Over the next year, and against the wishes of many neighbors, the home grew and grew. In 2006 construction stopped, and the partially-finished home went on the market. For the next four years the exterior shell of the 16,000 sf structure was the blight of H Street.

Eventually, however, Allen Millo did a conversion on the building. This picture shows what the building looked like as fairly bland McMansion during construction.

Looks pretty good now. Of course, McMansions aren’t the first big houses to be converted into multi-unit housing:

In most cases, those units have been carved from historic homes, are rented to students, and are hated by longer-term residents.

But the H Street project offers a more pleasing take on that classic approach, proving that multi-unit conversions can be beautiful and even appealing to upscale buyers. In other words, it shows how this can be awesome rather than awful.

This isn’t the first appeal I’ve seen for converting McMansions into multi-unit housing. I do wonder about a couple of things that could stall this momentum for this:

1. How likely are neighbors to approve of this kind of conversion? McMansions tend to be built in neighborhoods with other McMansions where wealthier property owners are worried about property values and having a certain kind of neighborhood. This might be more doable if the McMansion was originally constructed in an older neighborhood, possibly as a teardown, but these situations tend to lead to their own problems.

2. Does a conversion like this this make the construction of a McMansion morally good? McMansions are often criticized for not being good examples of architecture or design, taking up too many resources, and contributing to sprawl. This example from Salt Lake City started with a 16,000 square foot home which means that each of the condos are still of a decent size, probably well-appointed, and probably not cheap. The structure is still built on a more suburban-like lot. At the same time, this conversion leads to denser housing and more efficient use of resources.

Social psychologist on quest to find researchers who falsify data

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The latest Atlantic magazine includes a short piece about a social psychologist who is out to catch other researchers who falsify data. Here is part of the story:

Simonsohn initially targeted not flagrant dishonesty, but loose methodology. In a paper called “False-Positive Psychology,” published in the prestigious journal Psychological Science, he and two colleagues—Leif Nelson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and Wharton’s Joseph Simmons—showed that psychologists could all but guarantee an interesting research finding if they were creative enough with their statistics and procedures.

The three social psychologists set up a test experiment, then played by current academic methodologies and widely permissible statistical rules. By going on what amounted to a fishing expedition (that is, by recording many, many variables but reporting only the results that came out to their liking); by failing to establish in advance the number of human subjects in an experiment; and by analyzing the data as they went, so they could end the experiment when the results suited them, they produced a howler of a result, a truly absurd finding. They then ran a series of computer simulations using other experimental data to show that these methods could increase the odds of a false-positive result—a statistical fluke, basically—to nearly two-thirds.

Just as Simonsohn was thinking about how to follow up on the paper, he came across an article that seemed too good to be true. In it, Lawrence Sanna, a professor who’d recently moved from the University of North Carolina to the University of Michigan, claimed to have found that people with a physically high vantage point—a concert stage instead of an orchestra pit—feel and act more “pro-socially.” (He measured sociability partly by, of all things, someone’s willingness to force fellow research subjects to consume painfully spicy hot sauce.) The size of the effect Sanna reported was “out-of-this-world strong, gravity strong—just super-strong,” Simonsohn told me over Chinese food (heavy on the hot sauce) at a restaurant around the corner from his office. As he read the paper, something else struck him, too: the data didn’t seem to vary as widely as you’d expect real-world results to. Imagine a study that calculated male height: if the average man were 5-foot?10, you wouldn’t expect that in every group of male subjects, the average man would always be precisely 5-foot-10. Yet this was exactly the sort of unlikely pattern Simonsohn detected in Sanna’s data…

Simonsohn stressed that there’s a world of difference between data techniques that generate false positives, and fraud, but he said some academic psychologists have, until recently, been dangerously indifferent to both. Outright fraud is probably rare. Data manipulation is undoubtedly more common—and surely extends to other subjects dependent on statistical study, including biomedicine. Worse, sloppy statistics are “like steroids in baseball”: Throughout the affected fields, researchers who are too intellectually honest to use these tricks will publish less, and may perish. Meanwhile, the less fastidious flourish.

The current research may just provide incentives for researchers to cut corners and end up with false results. Publishing is incredibly important for the career of an academic and there is little systematic oversight of a researcher’s data. I’ve written before about ways that data could be made more open but it would take some work to put these ideas into practice.

What I wouldn’t want to happen is have people read a story like this and conclude that fields like social psychology have nothing to offer because who knows how many of the studies might be flawed. I also wonder about the vigilante edge to this story – it makes a journalistic piece to tell about a social psychologist who is battling his own field but this isn’t how science should work. Simonsohn should be joined by others who should also be concerned by these potential issues. Of course, there may not be many incentives to pursue this work as it might invite criticism from inside and outside the discipline.

Multiplicity of Illinois governments just symptomatic of American government overall?

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Whet Moser at the 312 Blog links Illinois’ long-standing issue of having lots of government bodies with how government works at the national level:

Yesterday I went on CNBC to talk with Rick Santelli about the unusually large number of governments (not just cities and counties and townships, but school districts and mosquito abatement districts and whatnot) the state of Illinois has. It’s a lot—more than any other state, including states with bigger populations and more square mileage. I wrote about this awhile ago; the BGA did a report last year; it’s been a political issue for awhile, one that both Kirk Dillard and Pat Quinn have floated…

It’s not big government; it’s kludge government. I loved this passage from Teles (emphasis mine):

Conservatives over the last few years have increasingly claimed that America is, in Hayek’s terms, on the road to serfdom. This is ridiculous, for it ascribes vastly greater coherence to American government than we have ever achieved. If anything, we have arrived at a form of government with no ideological justification whatsoever…

This comes from Suzanne Mettler’s “submerged state” thesis. It’s a kludge in action: keeping the political system functioning by burying the actual actions of government under a confusing web of laws. And the greater the number of laws, the more nooks and crannies for the “kludge industry” to embed itself: “having pulled the fundamental knowledge needed for government out of the state and into the private sector, thus becomes nearly indispensable.”

This argument could provide a way between the current debate about whether to have a big or limited federal government: let’s just make sure the system actually works rather than burying itself under a blizzard of rules and exceptions that few people can fully understand. Both small and big government can be run poorly or in less efficient ways.

This also provides good insight into the nature of complex social systems. When institutions become larger and larger (and don’t forget American government today is setting policy for over 300 million people), it is really hard to keep things simple. This reminds me of Max Weber’s warnings one hundred years ago about the threats of bureaucracy. While such systems might be the best way to deal with complex problems on a broad scale, they can become bloated and reified. Weber was pessimistic about the options but the fate of modern nation states like the United States might just depend on being able to cut through some of the complicated structures.

Look for a F(underpass) near you

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A New York City pedestrian underpass is getting a makeover and a new name: F(underpass).

The news broke that the New York City Department of Small Business Services had awarded a $75,000 grant to the Atlantic Avenue BID to transform the dark, empty stretch of Atlantic Avenue beneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway into a funderpass. (Or, as it’s sometimes spelled, F(underpass).)

The details of the funderpass — a collaboration between the BID, Planning Corps, and the Design Trust for Public Space — are still being hashed out. It could include colorful artwork by Groundswell and a bicycle pump, and will bridge the space between the shops of Atlantic Avenue and the brand-new park space beyond.

These sorts of pedestrian underpasses are often dreary affairs: the lighting often isn’t very good, they can attract graffiti, and they may be noisy if the overhead noise is loud or consistent enough. This all is not very inviting to pedestrians. So including artwork and help for bicyclists might bring some vibrancy and perhaps even connect two spaces.

Here is what I wonder: once these improvements are made, how much work would it take to maintain it and who will do it? This could just be the details that need to be worked out but this is an important question as an improvement like this should be sustainable.

Thursday Night Football logo takes over Philadelphia skyline

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While watching a bit of the match-up last night featuring the Cincinnati Bengals at the Philadelphia Eagles, I saw this image where the Thursday Night Football takes over the Philadelphia skyline:

Sports broadcasts have been using this technique for at least a few years now. I first noticed it on Fox NFL broadcasts. They will often put fake video boards at different points around the stadium and then show the Fox logo or advertisements on this fake board before panning back to the field and game action. The NBA on TNT also uses this quite a bit though I’ve noticed they tend to use the same settings when in certain cities. For example, when they do Bulls home games, the same location is used: the camera, probably mounted on a tall building, looks southeast from Wolf Point with the fake video board mounted on the first bridge, Lake Street, on the South Branch of the Chicago River. Imagine if the board in Chicago moved around a bit: there it is popping out of the trees in Grant Park. There it is on the top of the John Hancock building. There it is on Navy Pier blocking the view of the Ferris Wheel.

However, these examples feature fake video screens built on existing structures while this Thursday Night Football segue involved a giant logo attached to two buildings on the Philadelphia skyline. In my opinion, this stretches the idea a little too far. It doesn’t look very realistic and even among big buildings it looks disproportionately large. At the same time, perhaps it is meant to be commentary about the power of the NFL: it is so big that it dominates the skyline of a major American city!