Category Archives: Sociology

Can pro-housing movements be bipartisan in a polarized era?

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Jerusalem Demsas tackles an interesting question: how can housing advocates navigate a society marked by political polarization?

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One thing that helps bind an ideologically diverse pro-housing movement is that everyone in a community suffers when housing prices soar. Checking Zillow is a nonpartisan activity. The other thing keeping the coalition together is that, well, it’s barely a coalition at all. YIMBYs work in the context of their own states and cities. No national group dictates the bills they support or the messages they send.

On the other hand:

That doesn’t mean the bill will become law. Hobbs told reporters she’s still considering whether or not to sign the Arizona Starter Homes Act, noting that she prefers legislation with support from local jurisdictions, and this bill has been opposed by the local-government lobby. Either way, the political price is low. In a state as divided as Arizona, where the last gubernatorial election was between Hobbs and the right-wing firebrand Kari Lake, no one’s switching their votes over zoning policy.

Not even die-hard YIMBYs. “I’m a Democrat; I voted for the governor,” Solorio told me. “And if she ended up being the biggest NIMBY in our state, I’d still vote for her reelection because zoning, even though I’m one of the biggest zoning-reform advocates in the state … still doesn’t rise high enough for me to flip my vote.”

I have argued before that housing is a local issue. Theoretically, Americans are less partisan at the local government level as they focus more on addressing community needs. Or, perhaps they are just less partisan here compared to the state or national levels.

If the YIMBY movement is able to be less partisan, is this partly because such movements are still rare or not that popular? It takes a lot of work to convince American property owners that more housing should be added near them. It is one thing to support housing in the abstract and another to support it nearby.

Might another path forward be to have third-party candidates that only promote more housing? This means they would not get entangled in other issues and could focus on one issue.

The (declining) number of farms in the United States

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A long-term trend continues as the number of farms in the United States drops again:

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Between 2017 and 2022, the number of farms in the U.S. declined by 141,733 or 7%, according to USDA’s 2022 Census of Agriculture, released on Feb. 13. Acres operated by farm operations during the same timeframe declined by 20.1 million (2.2%), a loss equivalent to an area about the size of Maine. Only 1.88% of acres operated and 1% of farm operations were classified under a non-family corporate farm structure…

In addition to Ag Census data, USDA releases survey-based estimates on farm numbers once every year. Using this annual survey data dating back to 1950, the trend of fewer operations farming fewer acres becomes even more obvious. Since 1950, the number of farm operations has declined by 3.75 million (66%) and the number of acres farmed declined by 323 million (27%) – slightly less than twice the size of Texas. Technological advancements that have increased productivity, such as feed conversion ratios in livestock and yield per acre in crops, have allowed farmers and ranchers to produce more with less even as the U.S. population more than doubled, going from 159 million in 1950 to 340 million in 2023, and the global population more than tripled (2.5 billion to 8 billion) during the same period.

Add to this the drop in the number of people involved in farming or agricultural work over the last century. This all adds up to more and more people living in urban areas, particularly in suburbs where over half of the American population lives.

Even with all of this, the United States produces more food in the long run. Efficiency and innovation mean more can come from the same amount of land. This frees up people and resources for other activities.

The numbers cited above also mean there are still a lot of farms in the United States. The country may no longer be anchored in small towns and family farms – if is ever was – but many continue on with food produced for the country and world.

Workers cottages and a growing suburban dream in the Chicago region

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What kinds of homes did early suburbanites in the Chicago area live in? Some lived in workers cottages:

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Thanks to a plentiful supply of lumber from old growth pine forests in Wisconsin and Michigan, as well as new milling processes such as kiln drying that gave precut wood precise standardized measurements, a new form of structure started appearing. Workers cottages were more affordable than elaborate, but they came with the promise of a better standard of living for working class families.

A century and a half after they started being built in earnest, an effort is afoot to celebrate and preserve the cottages, houses that have continued to offer utility and accessibility for generations…

The lecture was arranged by the nonprofit Chicago Workers Cottage Initiative, a group organized to celebrate and promote the houses, built mostly from the 1880s to the 1910s, that they say “represent the origins of the ‘American Dream’ of homeownership and the investment and pride of Chicago’s new immigrants.”…

“Some of these cottages were really spartan four-room houses,” Bigott said. “They cost like $600 on a $200 lot. It was a simple frame building, with two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen.”…

It was a model that worked, and its backbone was the workers cottage. Elaine Lewinnek, a professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, argues in her 2014 book “The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl” that the idea of house ownership as “the working man’s reward” was one of Chicago’s most impactful exports, setting the scene for suburbs everywhere.

The suburbs have a longstanding reputation that they are full of people of wealth who are able to purchase a home and afford a suburban lifestyle. Imagine neighborhoods of McMansions, rampant consumerism, and newer vehicles.

This may be largely true and yet it is not entirely true. The homes described above could house the working class in suburban settings. This is not the only area where this occurred; historian Becky Nicolaides described working class houses in the Los Angeles suburbs.

And the housing today in the suburbs can also be varied. Postwar housing also had some variety from larger homes to smaller ranches. Wealthy suburban communities in the Chicago region today sit not far from neighborhoods with more modest housing.

If this article looks back at what was over 100+ years ago, what housing today will be viewed as housing for the working person in the suburbs in 2100?

You should know your neighbors – so you can save money?

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This story highlights an interesting gap in who knows their neighbors. Yet, this statistic is brought up so you can make sure you are not paying their utility bills. First, the statistic:

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However, chatting to your neighbors is not as common as it used to be. A Pew Center study shows that fewer young Americans are familiar with their neighbors. Among adults under age 30, about a quarter (23%) claim to not know any of their neighbors, compared with 4% of those aged 65 and up.

Why might it be useful to know your neighbors?

That’s what happened to Brooke Patterson. She took to TikTok to explain how she realized that she had apparently been paying for her entire apartment building’s utility bills — for two years.

The gap cited above could be the result of multiple factors. People 65 and up might have lived in places longer. They had different social norms regarding neighborly interaction. They might not rely on technology as much in order to interact with people.

Is the primary goal to knowing your neighbors to save money? Or others might suggest your neighbors could help you look out for your property. Other primary goals for knowing your neighbors could include acting neighborly – looking out for each other, offering aid when helpful – and building community. That could come with cost savings down the road or even positive money if the character of the neighborhood helps boost property values. This might be another difference over time: what people hope to gain through social interaction.

Five reasons the United States is so suburban

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I was recently asked about the history of the development of suburbs in the United States. Here was my brief answer regarding important factors in that history (not exhaustive, not ranked in a particular order):

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  1. The importance of single-family homes and private property that started in the mid-1850s with the idea of a little cottage in the woods.
  2. Anti-urban and pro-small town sentiments among Americans. These particularly developed as American cities start growing rapidly in the 1800s. Suburbs offer access to cities and their amenities while retaining some qualities of smaller towns like less distance between residents and local government.
  3. Race, class, and gender. This includes: white flight of residents, businesses, religious congregations, etc. from cities to suburbs; the idea of a suburban middle-class who should live a particular lifestyle in the suburbs; and expectations about nuclear family life in the suburbs.
  4. Government policy that consistently promoted suburban life including changes to mortgages in the first half of the twentieth century and largely funding the federal interstate system (while also putting less money into public housing, public transportation, etc.).
  5. The role of transportation technologies enabling faster travel from further distances (railroad, streetcars, automobiles). This gave rise to commuting, further separation of work and home, and suburban lives oriented around driving everywhere.

These factors are not new to this blog or the scholarship on suburbs. However, limiting the number of factors to five does make it interesting in terms of thinking through important factors. (See a related post: Why Americans Love Suburbs – seven reasons.)

“Communities,”cities and towns,” and “urban, suburban, and rural” in SOTU speech

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How did President Joe Biden describe where Americans live? Here are some patterns from his State of the Union speech last night:

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  1. Communities was used five times. This phrase covers a lot of potential places. Here are two uses: “Thanks to our Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, 46,000 new projects have been announced across your communities—modernizing our roads and bridges, ports and airports, and public transit systems.”; “Taking historic action on environmental justice for fence-line communities smothered by the legacy of pollution.”
  2. Cities and towns was used twice. This presumably refers to both places with more residents and those with fewer. Here are several uses: “It doesn’t make the news but in thousands of cities and towns the American people are writing the greatest comeback story never told.”; “Help cities and towns invest in more community police officers, more mental health workers, and more community violence intervention.”
  3. Urban, suburban, rural was used once (and mentioned communities): “Providing affordable high speed internet for every American no matter where you live. Urban, suburban, and rural communities—in red states and blue.”

These uses are likely trying to cover as many different places in the United States at once. I imagine few Americans would not fit into one of these places described. A community could refer to municipalities, geographies, and other social groups that would use this term to describe themselves. Cities and towns covers bigger and smaller places. Urban, suburban, rural is a common set of categories that refers to different places and ways of life.

Are these the most effective terms to use when talking to a broad audience of people in the United States? When people hear these terms, do they recognize their own communities?

Small basic income programs all across the United States

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Over 150 communities in the United States have had or are piloting basic income programs:

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Cash aid without conditions was considered a radical idea before the pandemic. But early results from a program in Stockton, Calif., showed promise. Then interest exploded after it became clear how much COVID stimulus checks and emergency rental payments had helped people. The U.S. Census Bureau found that an expanded child tax credit cut child poverty in half. That is, until the expansion ended and child poverty spiked.

Around the country, from big cities to rural counties, there’ve been more than 150 basic income pilots, and counting. Supporters say it works because people can spend the money on whatever they need most…

The pandemic also spurred cash aid because cities got their own pot of COVID relief money. Many are using that to fund guaranteed income pilots. Philanthropic donations are another major funding source, including from groups that have long organized direct cash payments to combat poverty in developing nations.

The pilots target low- to moderate-income people, from a few hundred to a few thousand households, and generally pay them $500 or $1,000 a month for a year or two.

Here is one way to think about such programs: the United States often focuses on helping people or social actors reach their top potential. Whether in education or in innovation, why not enable the top performers to be even better performers? But, another way to operate is to help raise the floor in areas like income so fewer people struggle. These programs seek to provide monies so that people with less income have more opportunities.

One recent headline about these programs noted the $125 million devoted to them. This is just a drop in the bucket compared to the income of the whole United States or even in these locales.

Given the outcomes of these programs plus some of the outcomes of the COVID-19 aid, my guess is that we will see more of this with hopefully positive outcomes for people and communities.

The availability of data online for social science research

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While in graduate school, I learned that data for sociology research could be found online. The Census had a website. The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research had a website. Social media platforms were blooming with Myspace offering lots of activity to examine and Facebook launching. Still today in 2024, I continue to make use of both of these streams of data:

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  1. Datasets available online. The ability to look up accurate and detailed statistics is hard to overvalue. For example, I regularly access the Census website and The Association of Religion Data Archives for information. I experienced the flip-side in graduate school as well. On one research assistant project, I looked through World Health Organization statistics published in thick bound volumes by the United Nations. Presumably, some of these books still exist but the expectation is that such information should be available online.
  2. Online activity as data. With the growth of the World Wide Web and social media, sociologists and others use what is online as research data. I have published a few works that draw on websites and online materials to examine patterns. Of course, online activity is not necessarily the same as offline activity but I think the so-called “virtual world” and “real world” overlap more than people sometimes think. Studying online activity can tell us about important online patterns and offline patterns.

On the other hand, I did not have any specific training in graduate school about how to access this data online. Navigating websites and datasets online requires experience and know-how. Developing datasets from online activity takes work. A lot of methodological writing and advice can apply to online data but collecting data online can be its own process. What about having programming skills to speed up data collection and analysis?

I am sure there is a lot of research to come that will use both of these data streams to good effect. I look forward to the findings about society and social relationships to come.

Grocery taxes and local government revenue

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A recent announcement by Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker that he wants to eliminate the 1% tax on groceries has some suburban official upset:

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In his budget address in February, Pritzker proposed raising taxes by almost $900 million, but called for eliminating the 1% grocery tax as a regressive tax that hurts poor people.

Revenue from the tax goes entirely to local governments. The mayors laid out how that would affect their municipalities.

The change would cost retail-rich Algonquin around $2 million, about 10% of its budget, Sosine said, calling it “unacceptable.”…

Libertyville Village President Donna Johnson said the mayors are sensitive to financially strapped residents, but said the cuts affect basic services like police, fire, public works and roads…

In anticipation of such criticism, the governor’s office released a statement that it supports local government operations with more than $1 billion annually in additional funds from sources including an internet sales tax, gas taxes and transportation bonds.

Local governments have an ongoing balance to keep in generating revenues and then providing services to their communities. On one hand, they have mechanisms by which they can raise their own revenue. As noted above, the small grocery tax has generated some monies that municipalities count on. On the other hand, local governments receive revenue from other governmental bodies. As noted above, the state of Illinois provides monies to communities through a variety of means.

The concerns expressed by these local officials hint at both immediate concerns of needing to address a potential budget shortfall if the grocery tax is halted and long-term concerns of making sure state funds continue to go to communities. Cited elsewhere in this story is that the percent of income tax monies going to communities has dropped several percentage points in recent years.

What is the ideal percent of revenue for municipalities that should be generated within the community? (Is the correct answer something like 110+%?) Answering this question has consequences for zoning and land use decisions as well as what local governments will offer to residents.

COVID-19 measures live on in “ghost architecture”

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How many signs in public and private spaces can you find providing guidance regarding COVID-19?

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Beginning in 2020, COVID signage and equipment were everywhere. Stickers indicated how to stand six feet apart. Arrows on the grocery-store floor directed shopping-cart traffic. Plastic barriers enforced distancing. Masks required signs dotted store windows, before they were eventually replaced by softer pronouncements such as masks recommended and masks welcome. Such messages—some more helpful than others—became an unavoidable part of navigating pandemic life.

Four years later, the coronavirus has not disappeared—but the health measures are gone, and so is most daily concern about the pandemic. Yet much of this COVID signage remains, impossible to miss even if the messages are ignored or outdated. In New York, where I live, notices linger in the doorways of apartment buildings and stores. A colleague in Woburn, Massachusetts, sent me a photo of a sign reminding park-goers to gather in groups of 10 or less; another, in Washington, D.C., showed me stickers on the floors of a bookstore and pier bearing faded reminders to stay six feet apart. “These are artifacts from another moment that none of us want to return to,” Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU and the author of 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed, told me. All these fliers, signs, and stickers make up the “ghost architecture” of the pandemic, and they are still haunting America today…

The contradiction inherent in ghost architecture is that it both calls to mind the pandemic and reflects a widespread indifference to it. Maybe people don’t bother to take the signs down because they assume that nobody will follow them anyway, Fessler said. Avoidance and apathy are keeping them in place, and there’s not much reason to think that will change. At this rate, COVID’s ghost signage may follow the same trajectory as the defunct Cold War–era nuclear-fallout-shelter signs that lingered on New York City buildings for more than half a century, at once misleading observers and reminding them that the nuclear threat, though diminished, is still present.

I have noticed these leftover signs as well. I recently spotted a retail shop with a sign saying that people without masks were not allowed inside.

There are numerous ways to pass along a message in a large complex society and signs are one way to do so. But, this assumes people will read the signs and then act on them. I have read a little about road signs and how too many signs can make for clutter and less attentive drivers. Is the same true for public health warnings in every public space? How well did people follow these directives? How many people follow the hand washing signs when they are posted in many restrooms (with specific warnings for employees)?

Another way to address this would be to redesign spaces so that there are fewer opportunities to be within such proximity to others or to limit the possible problems of proximity. However, many of our public and private spaces are pretty open. A bank lobby has lots of open space. Grocery stores have rows but these do not go up to the ceiling and checkout areas are right next to each other. Entertainment spaces, like movie theaters and stadiums, put people in proximity to others. And so on. It would be very difficult to address all of these and try to retain some sense of public interaction and space.