Category Archives: Sociology

Developer’s son wrong; Naperville residents and leaders made decisions long ago that mean the suburb can’t go back to the 1950s

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Naperville is considering a new project, the Water Street Development, but the developer’s son is not happy with the opposition to the project from the Naperville Homeowner’s Confederation. In a recent email, here is how he made his case:

In his email, Bryan Bottarelli said the council has been “politically intimidated by a group of old-economy thinkers who call themselves the Naperville Homeowners Confederation.”

“This group claims to represent all the homeowners associations in Naperville. But in reality, it consists of a handful of older residents who are bored — and who have nothing better to do than to try keeping Naperville the same exact way it’s been since the 1950s,” the younger Bottarelli wrote. “They’re afraid of change — and they’re using fear tactics to red-light this project. And be honest — what they’re doing has been working. They know how to work the local political system to their advantage.

“And, since they have so much extra time on their hands, they’ve committed their days to bombarding city council with emails, letters, and phone calls in complete opposition to this deal.”…

“The confederation is disappointed at the tone of the email by Mr. Bottarelli’s son,” President Bob Buckman said in a written statement. “This is not in keeping with the tradition of respectful public discourse in Naperville that we all value. It is unfortunate that his description of us does not in any way represent the confederation’s members, or our many contributions to civic life in Naperville. Since 2006, the confederation board and its members have carefully studied, dissected, looked for alternatives, met with the developer, submitted a comprehensive report in 2007 and testified at plan commission and now at city council on this proposed development.”

Here is the problem with his argument: regardless of what current residents want, Naperville can’t turn back the clock to the 1950s. Naperville is little like what it was in 1950 and residents have been part of the process in changing Naperville. I know Bottarelli mentioned the 1950s but a number of the changes to Naperville started occurring at the end of this decade so I’ll make a comparison to 1950. Indeed, my research on the topic suggests Naperville, leaders and residents, have made numerous decisions over the decades to pursue growth.

Here is how Naperville was different in 1950:

1. It had a population of 7,013 in 1950. Today, Naperville has around 142,000 residents. This means the population has expanded by a factor of 20.

2. Along with a significantly larger population, Naperville has significantly increased in land size. Today, the city is over 39 square miles and it can take a while in certain traffic conditions to drive from one end to another. The size is large enough that the city added a second city hall-like facility, it now has two commuter railroad stations, and the city has sought ways to create social space and a community feel on the southwest side because it is a distance away from downtown (for example, planning for a commercial node at the northwest corner of Route 59 and 95th Street).

3. Basically none of the post-World War II subdivisions had been built by 1950. Harold Moser, the local developer who was responsible for a large percentage of the subsequent growth, was just getting started. The homeowner’s associations Battarelli is disparaging didn’t even exist in 1950.

4. Naperville’s downtown is quite different today. There is a renowned Riverwalk. There is a municipal center and Naper Settlement. The downtown has a number of national retail stores. There are plenty of restaurants and bars. There is a new performing arts center (in conjunction with North Central College) along with a carillon tower. In short, the downtown is a suburban entertainment hub. Even if the Water Street development gets turned down, it is not because Naperville hasn’t wanted to have a successful and vibrant downtown.

5. I-88, the highway that runs alongside the north side of Naperville, hadn’t even been built yet in 1950. It opened in the late 1950s and the first major facility, Bell Laboratories, was built near to the Naperville Road interchange in the mid-1960s. The moving of this facility near town helped kicked off Naperville’s rise as a white-collar job center which also helped fuel some of the other changes.

6. The Naperville of 1950 was not known for being one of the best places to live (Money in the mid 2000s), having a top 10 library, or the other accolades Naperville has accumulated in the last ten years or so. In 1950, the community had a small liberal arts college, a swimming pool converted from a quarry, the Kroehler furniture plant, and was known as the community that was once the county seat of DuPage County before Wheaton took the honor in the 1860s.

In other words, the Naperville of 1950 bears little resemblance to the Naperville of today. The cow is already long gone out of the barn on this one. Over the years, Naperville has consistently chosen to annex land, approve development, and grow even as it tries to retain its small-town charm. So if this particular project doesn’t succeed, this doesn’t mean Naperville residents or leaders want to live in the Naperville of 1950: even with some heated discussions over the decades about how much Naperville should grow and whether the new changes would irrevocably change the character of the community, Naperville has consistently pursued growth and change.

Risk, reward as more complexity leads to new, more problems

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In discussing the recent fine levied about BP for the 2010 oil issue in the Gulf of Mexico, an interesting question can be raised: are events and problems like this simply inevitable given the growing complexity of society?

In 1984, a Yale University sociologist named Charles Perrow published a book called “Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies.” He argued that as technologies become more complex, accidents become inevitable.

The more complex safety features that are built in, the more likely it is that something will go wrong. You not only add technical complexity more things to go wrong but you add a human element of complacency. The more often things don’t go wrong, the more likely it is that people think they won’t. The phrase for this is “normalization of deviance,” coined by Boston University sociologist Diane Vaughan, part of the team that examined the 1986 explosion of space shuttle Challenger.

“Normal accident” and “normalization of deviance” come to mind because 10 days ago, the oil company BP agreed to plead guilty to 12 felony and two misdemeanor criminal charges in connection with the 2010 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Eleven workers were killed and nearly 5 million barrels of oil (210 million gallons) poured into the Gulf over 87 days…

But it requires complex systems that will, at some point, fail. Politically, the government can only seek to explain those risks, try to minimize them with tough regulation and make sure those who take big risks have the means to redress inevitable failure.

If these sorts of events are inevitable given more complexity and activity (particularly in the field of drilling and extraction), how do we balance the risks and rewards of such activity? How much money and effort should be spent trying to minimize risky outcomes? This is a complex social question that involves a number of factors. Unfortunately, such discussions often happen after the fact rather than ahead of possible occurrences. This is what Nassim Taleb discusses in The Black Swan; we can do certain things to prepare for or at least think about known and unknown events. We shouldn’t be surprised that oil accidents happen and should have some idea of how to tackle the problem or make things better after the fact. A fine against the company is punitive but will it necessarily provide the solution to the consequences of the event or guarantee that no such event will happen in the future? Probably not.

At the same time, I wonder if such events are more difficult for us to understand today because we do have strong narratives of progress. Although it is not often stated this explicitly, we tend to think such problems can be eliminated through technology, science, and reason. Yet, complex systems have points of frailty. Perhaps technology hasn’t been tested in all circumstances. Perhaps unforeseen or unpredictable environmental or social forces arise. And, perhaps most of all, these systems tend to involve humans who make mistakes (unintentionally or intentionally). This doesn’t necessarily mean that we can’t strive for improvements but it also means we should keep in mind our limitations and the possible problems that might arise.

A tiny house community in Washington, D.C.

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The Stronghold neighborhood of Washington, D.C. now features a small community of 200-square foot tiny houses:

The group behind Stronghold’s tiny-house community calls itself Boneyard Studios. “As property values and rents rise across the city, we want to showcase this potential option for affordable housing,” the group writes on its Web site. “We decided to live the questions: Can we build and showcase a few tiny homes on wheels in a DC urban alley lot? … Not in the woods, but in a true community, connected to a neighborhood? Yes, we think. Watch out left coast, the DC adventure begins.”

There’s one problem: The city’s zoning laws don’t allow residential dwellings on alley lots unless they are a minimum of 30 feet wide, or roughly the width of a city street. D.C. is currently discussing lifting the 30-foot restriction. So, as Boneyard Studios continues to advocate more progressive zoning laws, it is using the property to showcase what could be…

Although the diminutive homes are made of high-quality materials, they are priced for a flagging economy. They sell for $20,000 to $50,000, less than the down payment on a two-bedroom condo in a trendy D.C. neighborhood…

Despite the fact that tiny houses are, well, tiny, affordable-housing advocates are researching the possibility that attractive micro homes could one day complement or replace stigmatized trailer parks and low-income housing, especially in places such as the District, where they could be built in unused vacant spaces such as alleys.

This sounds like an interesting project. Still, these tiny houses could face a number of issues before being approved as affordable housing. Besides their size, how many people can fit in each tiny house, and how long each house might last, how many property owners would want to live next to these tiny houses? Even if these houses don’t have the stigma of trailer parks, residents and neighborhoods tend to worry about property values. Simply having smaller and cheaper houses nearby might lower other housing prices.

Additionally, how might these tiny houses be grouped or placed – would they be in rows, scattered in an open space or bigger lot, or on individual lots? Would a concentration of tiny houses fit under the same residential zoning categories as single-family homes or multi-family housing because of a greater density?

I imagine the neighbors will ask some of these questions and want good answers. Interestingly, the article does not cite any neighbors to the Stronghold colony of tiny houses.

Reading between the lines of an ABC News story on the bad odds of winning the $500 million Powerball lottery

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Check out this ABC News video about the odds of winning the $500 million Powerball lottery.

Several things are striking about the content of the video beyond the bad odds of winning: 1 in 175 million chance.

1. A journalist admits he doesn’t know much about math or statistics. It is not uncommon for reporters to go to experts like statisticians in times like these (appealing to the expert boosts the credentials of the story) but it is more unusual for journalists to admit they are doing so because they don’t know the information. I’ve argued before we need more journalists who understand statistics and science.

2. The reporter mentions some interesting odds that are more favorable than winning the Powerball. One of these is the idea that you are more likely to be possessed by the devil today than win the lottery. Who exactly keeps track of these figures and how accurate are they?

3. The story includes some talk about being more likely to win in particular states than others. Really? This sounds more like statistical noise or something related to the population of the states with multiple Powerball winners (like Illinois and New Jersey).

4. Interesting closing: the math expert himself hasn’t bought a lottery ticket before. So the moral of the story is that people shouldn’t buy any tickets?

Unexpected feature of owning a Texas McMansion: the directTV install takes longer

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I stumbled across an online discussion about how long it takes to wire a Texas McMansion for directTV. Here is an outline of the discussion:

directv install happening NOW

Posted by djtexillinion November 24, 2012, 2:26 pm

im scared

going from 2 cable boxes to 5.

whole home dvr (genie)
3 clients
1 hd dvr

4 hour update

Posted by djtexillinion November 24, 2012, 6:41 pm, in reply to “directv install happening NOW”

almost done

Takes a while to wire a Texas McMansion like yours*

Posted by chadinlaon November 24, 2012, 9:41 pm, in reply to “4 hour update“

Apparently, it is not quick to supply one’s McMansion with plenty of DVRs. This is not something I would have thought about when purchasing a McMansion. However, providing wiring for a large home that has already been built must be more difficult. This reminds me of several articles I have read suggesting it is much better to set up whole house speaker and electronic systems (remember the 1990s articles suggesting all or most new homes would be smart wired by now?) during construction because doing it later can be quite time consuming.

I imagine there are other “normal” tasks that take more time with McMansions. I have seen plenty of online comments over the years about how much time it must take to maintain the yard and clean such homes, particularly those with a large number of bathrooms. However, if you can afford a large McMansion, you are more likely to be able to hire people to landscape and clean it for you.

 

Adapting the genre of transit maps to other kinds of data

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Check out this collection of 6 transit-style maps based on different kinds of information: the best movies of all time, the National Parks system, web trends, the Mississippi River, the US Interstate system, and the world’s transit systems.

Within the sociology of culture, this could lead to an interesting discussion regarding genres. The average city-dweller likely has some idea of what transit maps look like: they involve color coding and also possibly symbols to denote different lines as well as marking stops and important junctions. These maps aren’t necessarily about geography but about a coherent traffic map that showcases the lines and the broad outlines of a city. Some maps, particularly London’s, are quite famous for their design.

So what happens if people are presented with transit maps that convey other bits of information? Could they easily understand them? Looking at all six, the one that might be the most difficult is the best movies map as it would take a little time to figure out how the movies are all connected and the map also implies the movies are derived or connected to each other in significant ways (is the genre of movie enough?).

Flipping the question around, could transit system data be easily “translated” into another genre of maps or data presentation?

Testing rules of reciprocity two ways: sociologist sends out Christmas cards to strangers, making requests of strangers in Facebook

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In 1974, a sociologist tested the social norms of reciprocity by sending out Christmas cards to 600 strangers. He received a sizable response:

And so he went out and collected directories for some nearby towns and picked out around 600 names. “I started out at a random number and then skipped so many and got to the next one,” he says.

To these 600 strangers, Kunz sent his Christmas greetings: handwritten notes or a card with a photo of him and his family. And then Kunz waited to see what would happen.

“It was just, you know, a shot in the dark,” he says. “I didn’t know what would happen.”

But about five days later, responses started filtering back — slowly at first and then more, until eventually they were coming 12, 15 at a time. Eventually Kunz got more than 200 replies. “I was really surprised by how many responses there were,” he says. “And I was surprised by the number of letters that were written, some of them three, four pages long.”…

“We got cards for maybe 15 years,” he says.

While the article goes on to discuss why strangers might reciprocate in this way, I wonder how much this applies to the social realm of Facebook. If someone did something similar on Facebook today, such as making friend requests of many people they don’t know or sending messages to strangers, would people respond in the same way? From personal experience, research on the topic, and an experiment one of my students did this semester by sending messages to random Facebook users and receiving no response, reciprocation does not occur to the same degree in Facebook. Here are a few reasons why this might be the case:

1. A growing distrust of strangers. On Facebook, this sort of behavior tends to be described as “creepy.” Even as media sources suggest users, particularly kids and teenagers, can meet all sorts of random people online, most users tend to stick with people they already know or who are in geographic proximity (like classmates at the same school).

2. People are less in the habit of having to reciprocate because more encounters on Facebook are controlled, meaning they happen when a user wants them to happen. In other words, chance encounters between people who don’t know each other are more limited. Overall, Facebook and text messaging and other means make it more possible to have social interactions on someone’s own terms.

To some degree, reciprocity is part of how trust is built between social actors. It is part of basic exchanges: if you ask someone “how are you doing?” you expect a polite response. If you provide a favor for someone at work, we tend to expect a favor in return down the road. However, these sorts of exchanges may look very different on Facebook (for example, common encouraging responses to new profile pictures or posts about tough circumstances) and could signal larger shifts in how people interact.

Did all American adults shop on Thanksgiving weekend?

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The Weekly Standard takes a look at some figures on Thanksgiving weekend shopping as reported by the National Retail Federation:

“A record 247 million shoppers visited stores and websites in the post-Thanksgiving Black Friday weekend this year, up 9% from 226 million last year, according to a survey by the National Retail Federation released Sunday,” the CNN reports reads. The headline reads: “247 million shoppers visited stores and websites Black Friday weekend.”

This would seem to mean, according to these statistics, that basically all Americans over the age of 14 went shopping this past weekend…

That means, if you subtract those who are too young to shop, 0-14 year olds, from the total U.S. population, there are 247,518,325 people in this country. The number of people CNN reports who went shopping this past weekend…

CNN’s numbers, however, include those who visited “websites.” The numbers [are?] so loose it could even include news website or the same person visiting multiple shopping websites.

Even if there is some double-counting in this data (and tracking across websites is difficult to do), these figures suggest a large majority of Americans went shopping after Thanksgiving. I’ve written before about the difficulty in getting 90% of Americans to agree about something but perhaps we could add the value of Black Friday shopping to the list. These figures also may add to the idea that shopping is the favorite sport of Americans.

Mortgage interest deduction part of fiscal cliff negotiations

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The negotiations regarding the fiscal cliff include the mortgage interest deduction:

Limits on a broad array of deductions could emerge in any budget deal. It is likely that any caps would be structured to aim at high-income households, and would diminish or end the mortgage tax break for many of those taxpayers…

Such a move would be fiercely opposed by the real estate industry. The industry has played a crucial role in defending the tax break, even as other countries with high homeownership have phased it out…

One of the reasons the mortgage tax break is so vulnerable is that both Democrats and Republicans have recently favored capping deductions, including both President Obama and the recent Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney…

Taken on it own, the deduction limit wouldn’t make a huge difference. But it can play an important role in a broad plan to cut the deficit, and shows a willingness to tackle once sacred cows. The tax numbers suggest it may not be hard to structure deduction limits in a way that leaves most middle-income households untouched.

This is not a new idea – people have been suggesting for a few years now (see here) that the mortgage interest deduction tends to help the wealthiest the most. Capping the deduction would still provide a benefit for less wealthy homeowners and boost the housing market. Yes, homebuilders and real estate people may not be able to construct and sell as many large and expensive homes that provide higher profit margins and commissions but there are plenty of other arguments against such homes beyond the mortgage interest deduction (see the green argument and the moral argument). Wealthier Americans are probably still going to buy homes, because they have the money and there is still an American cultural push toward homeownership, whether the mortgage deduction is there for them or not.

There are other countries in the world with higher rates of homeownership even with the federal government’s decades-long support of homeownership. The data is a few years old but check out these figures reported by National Association of Home Builders: a number of European countries have higher and lower rates of homeownership. Of course, American homes tend to be larger than European homes and I’m reminded of quick suggestion in Suburban Nation that Americans may have the best private realm, referring to our homes, in the world.

I assume a capped deduction would also limit or remove the deduction for the purchase of second homes?

Perhaps the biggest thing to note here is that the mortgage interest deduction was indeed was once a “sacred cow” but tough economic times lead to new measures.

 

 

Science more about consensus than proven facts

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A new book titled The Half-Life of Facts looks at how science is more about consensus than canon. A book review in the Wall Street Journal summarizes the argument:

Knowledge, then, is less a canon than a consensus in a state of constant disruption. Part of the disruption has to do with error and its correction, but another part with simple newness—outright discoveries or new modes of classification and analysis, often enabled by technology. A single chapter in “The Half-Life of Facts” looking at the velocity of knowledge growth starts with the author’s first long computer download—a document containing Plato’s “Republic”—journeys through the rapid rise of the “@” symbol, introduces Moore’s Law describing the growth rate of computing power, and discusses the relevance of Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation. Mr. Arbesman illustrates the speed of technological advancement with examples ranging from the magnetic properties of iron—it has become twice as magnetic every five years as purification techniques have improved—to the average distance of daily travel in France, which has exponentially increased over the past two centuries.

To cover so much ground in a scant 200 pages, Mr. Arbesman inevitably sacrifices detail and resolution. And to persuade us that facts change in mathematically predictable ways, he seems to overstate the predictive power of mathematical extrapolation. Still, he does show us convincingly that knowledge changes and that scientific facts are rarely as solid as they appear…

More commonly, however, changes in scientific facts reflect the way that science is done. Mr. Arbesman describes the “Decline Effect”—the tendency of an original scientific publication to present results that seem far more compelling than those of later studies. Such a tendency has been documented in the medical literature over the past decade by John Ioannidis, a researcher at Stanford, in areas as diverse as HIV therapy, angioplasty and stroke treatment. The cause of the decline may well be a potent combination of random chance (generating an excessively impressive result) and publication bias (leading positive results to get preferentially published)…

Science, Mr. Arbesman observes, is a “terribly human endeavor.” Knowledge grows but carries with it uncertainty and error; today’s scientific doctrine may become tomorrow’s cautionary tale. What is to be done? The right response, according to Mr. Arbesman, is to embrace change rather than fight it. “Far better than learning facts is learning how to adapt to changing facts,” he says. “Stop memorizing things . . . memories can be outsourced to the cloud.” In other words: In a world of information flux, it isn’t what you know that counts—it is how efficiently you can refresh.

To add to the conclusion of this review as cited above, it is less about the specific content of the scientific facts and more about the scientific method one uses to arrive at scientific conclusions. There is a reason the scientific process is taught starting in grade school: the process is supposed to help observers get around their own biases and truly observe reality in a reliable and valid way. Of course, whether our bias can actually be eliminated and how we go about observing both matter for our results but it is the process itself that remains intact.

This also gets to an issue some colleagues and I have noticed where college students talk about “proving” things about the world (natural or social). The language of “proof” implies that data collection and analysis can yield unchanging facts which cannot be disputed. But, as this book points out, this is not how science works. When a researcher finds something interesting, they report on their finding and then others go about retesting the findings or applying the findings to new areas. Over time, knowledge accumulates. To put it in the terms of this review, a consensus is eventually reached. But, new information can counteract this consensus and the paradigm building process starts over again (a la Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). This doesn’t mean science can’t tell us anything but it does mean that the theories and findings of science can change over time (and here is another interesting discussion point: what exactly is a law, theory, and a finding).

In the end, science requires a longer view. As I’ve noted before, the media tends to play up new scientific findings but we are better served looking at the big picture of scientific findings and waiting for a consensus to emerge.