Category Archives: Sociology

Can’t we build greener McMansions?

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This is a story that comes up from time to time: people who live in larger homes, sometimes called “McMansions,” should pay some sort of penalty as they consume more. Here is this very suggestion from an Australian academic:

People who want to build energy-guzzling McMansion-style homes should pay more taxes, an academic says.

And taxes should also be used to make owning multiple plasma TVs prohibitive, says Melbourne University construction expert Dr Robert Crawford.

Rapidly increasing suburban house sizes, more reliance on cars and a rise in demand for consumer goods had wiped out many of the benefits of building energy-efficient homes, he said yesterday…

“Indirectly through the price of materials and things like that, if you make it more expensive in some way to build larger houses then that might encourage people not to do it,” he told the Herald Sun.

Such a move would be similar to other incentives that governments offer regarding certain activities.

But I have wondered in recent years why there aren’t more builders who are trying to make these large homes greener. They could benefit from this as one of the big knocks on McMansions is that they are symbols of excessive consumption. So why not earn some points back by making them more environmentally-friendly? I assume there are things that could be done that might cost some money but could also fight back against this image. In the long run, it may just be “greenwashing” but building homes that most people consider “McMansions” because they contribute to environmental problems is a losing cause. Additionally, this might expand their markets to people who are looking for greener homes. What reasonable American homebuyer with money today wouldn’t want a larger AND greener home? And for critics of McMansions, what if they were quite green – is the larger issue the presumed unnecessarily large size or the home or suburban sprawl or something else?

Of course, we could also have a larger national conversation about greener standards for buildings. But we would know how this conversation might play out…

Sociology quiz turns 19 year old into local hero

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A 19 year old Canadian college student illustrates the dramatic effect a sociology quiz can have on one’s life:

Nanaimo’s Derrick Kalicum just had to stop when he saw an elderly lady trapped in her car…

The 70-year-old woman was in a Toyota Matrix that was struck by a reddish-maroon vehicle at the intersection of Wakesiah Avenue and Second Street around 12:42 p.m. The car that hit the Matrix backed away and then fled the scene…

He didn’t hesitate to stop and he credits [Vancouver Island University] for teaching him about the “bystander affect.”

“That’s something I was quizzed on the day before in my sociology class,” he said…

“I have to thank my sociology professor for explaining the bystander affect to me. I really think people should stop and help,” he said.

A little knowledge can go a long way. And they say a sociology degree isn’t worth much…

It is too bad that he wasn’t asked if he would have stopped to help this woman if he hadn’t learned about the bystander effect.

Quick Review: Spousonomics

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I picked up Spousonomics recently after reading some reviews earlier this year. Here are some thoughts about this book that has the intriguing subtitle “Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage and Dirty Dishes”:

1. The book uses economic principles to illustrate common problems in marriage. The bulk of each chapter is made up of case studies, usually three per chapter, where we read about how couples were using economic principles without knowing it.

2. I’m not sure what this book aspires to be: a primer in basic economic principles? A marriage book? Based on the front cover blurb from Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat, Pray, Love fame) and the heavy emphasis on case studies, it reads more like a marriage advice book, just from the perspective of economics. On the other hand, the authors, both journalists, begin each chapter by explaining economic concepts and seem interested in sharing these ideas with a broader public. With some more information (more on this in a moment), this could be an interesting introductory text using a context that many adults are familiar with (not so much for high school and college students). If I had to choose, I would argue the book is more of a marriage book dressed up with economics. Even so, I imagine there is a decent-sized market for texts about marriage.

a. Here is the justification early in the book for why economics can help marriages:

We believe in economics because it doesn’t discriminate between the sexes, between who’s “right” and who’s “wrong,” who communicates better and who talks worse. It doesn’t talk down to you or attempt to psychoanalyze. It doesn’t care who won the last fight or whose turn it is to control the remote. Instead, it offers dispassionate, logical solutions to what can often seem like thorny, illogical, and highly emotional domestic disputes.

3. Several things grated on me throughout the text:

a. The authors say they talked to a number of economists but they quote relatively few economists. Perhaps I am reading this too much like an academic but why not utilize more information form the experts?

b. The authors cite economic studies but often only cite one or two to illustrate a point. There is a lot more complexity to some of these concepts that one or two study (which can often be complex themselves).

c. The authors talk about how they collected data by interviewing couples and conducting a survey. However, they continually refer the survey as the “Exhaustive, Ground Breaking, and Very Expensive Marriage Survey.” This may be interesting the first time but not every time they talk about the survey results. Additionally, most of the case studies they present in the book seem to be middle- or upper-class couples that deal with middle- and upper-class problems of balancing work and family ambition, kids who are in too many activities, etc.

d. The writing style can be quite informal – I know this is aimed at a mass audience but I wonder how much of this comes from the authors themselves or from editors who suggested that they needed to find “their voice.”

4. So has anyone written a similar mass-market book utilizing sociological concepts? This would be a classic example of an attempt to use an everyday phenomenon to teach about a particular discipline.

Overall, some of the case studies are interesting (there are a lot of examples in here and this would make it easier for people to identify with something) and the idea that economic principles can help us understand our relationships is intriguing. But some of the recurring smaller issues kept me from being impressed and in the long run, I wonder if this isn’t just another book dispensing marital tips.

Dunbar’s number: 150 friends is our limit

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It seems like it is pretty easy to collect hundreds of friends on Facebook. Between people we know from years of schools plus jobs plus other activities, the number can increase quickly. But having a large number of online “friends” goes against Dunbar’s number:

Most of Dunbar’s research has focused on why the GORE-TEX model was a success. That model is based on the idea that human beings can hold only about 150 meaningful relationships in their heads. Dunbar has researched the idea so deeply, the number 150 has been dubbed “Dunbar’s Number.”

Ironically, the term was coined on Facebook, where 150 friends may seem like precious few…

Dunbar has found 150 to be the sweet spot for hunter-gatherer societies all over the world. From the Bushmen of Southern Africa to Native American tribes, a typical community is about 150 people. Amish and Hutterite communities — even most military companies around the world — seem to follow the same rule.

The reason 150 is the optimal number for a community comes from our primate ancestors, Dunbar says. In smaller groups, primates could work together to solve problems and evade predators. Today, 150 seems to be the number at which our brains just max out on memory.

Dunbar goes on to suggest that larger organizations then have to find ways to create smaller groups where people can still maintain connections with others.

I’ve thought for a while that Facebook should move away from saying that all people you are connected to are “friends.” This indicates a closeness that I suspect doesn’t really exist in many of these online relationships. They are probably more like “acquaintances” or “people you have interacted with.” But, imagine what would happen if someone you thought was a friend marks you an acquaintance or vice versa. Additionally, by calling everyone a friend, you are suggesting that you are open to a broader set of relationships and Facebook is interested in bringing more people together. If we wanted to get more sociological, we might call these “strong” and “weak” ties but this seems fairly impersonal.

Figures from a few years ago suggested that people had an average of 120 Facebook friends. This still seems like a lot even as sociological research from 2006 (read the full study here) suggests that Americans have fewer confidants and less contact with existing confidants:

In 1985, the average American had three people in whom to confide matters that were important to them, says a study in today’s American Sociological Review. In 2004, that number dropped to two, and one in four had no close confidants at all…

The percentage of people who confide only in family increased from 57% to 80%, and the number who depend totally on a spouse is up from 5% to 9%, the study found. “If something happens to that spouse or partner, you may have lost your safety net,” Smith-Lovin says.

Here are two tentative hypotheses regarding this data:

1. Younger Facebook users are more likely to have higher numbers of friends. This seems to be driven by being students in high school and college where it is common to friend lots of people across a broad swath of classroom, social activity, and living situations.

2. Older Facebook users are more uncomfortable with the term “friends” to describe online relationships. Of course, as the younger generation ages and is used to such terms, the term will become more normal.

How a long commute harms you

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The Infrastructurist has a round-up of recent studies that show the negative effects of long commutes: higher rates of divorce plus “low happiness, high stress levels, and loneliness; they even makes us physically unhealthy.”

As they note, enough Americans seem willing to make the trade-off between a better house for a long commute. Is this because people simply don’t know or think about the social costs of long commutes? If not, what sort of organization would or could make this more known?

“Anti-obesity housing”

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The design of housing units is rarely meant to just be functional. But here is design that I have not heard about before: a new “Bronx co-op apartment building” that is meant to reduce levels of obesity:

The building, called the Melody, has a backyard with brightly colored exercise equipment for adults, and climbing equipment for children. It also has both indoor and outdoor fitness centers.

City officials say it’s the first in New York to be built with design elements aimed at countering obesity.

Two flights of stairs feature silhouettes of dancing women and jazz playing through speakers and motivational signs posted throughout the building tout the benefits of exercise.

A sign posted between the elevator and stairs, for example, notes that stairs are a healthy choice.

This description doesn’t sound like much has changed: couldn’t a lot of housing units be enhanced with playground/exercise equipment and signs/images that promote exercise?

The New York Times has more on why this building has the specific design elements that it does:

Near him hung a sign, between the building’s sole elevator and a staircase door, reading, “A person’s health can be judged by which they take two of at a time, pills or stairs.”

In 2010, the city released a 135-page guide called Active Design Guidelines, on the construction of buildings that would encourage exercise and mobility; it was compiled by city agencies in collaboration with health experts and architects. City officials said that while the Melody was the first to incorporate its suggestions, other projects were being developed.

Builders do not receive tax credits or compensation for following the rules in the guide, but doing so can earn them points in a rating system administered by the United States Green Building Council called LEED, for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

The city’s guidelines are more detailed and specific than LEED rules, which reward builders who, for example, use less toxic paints or locate their buildings near subway stops. The city’s guide encourages windows in gyms, bicycle storage areas and stairways that are bright, centrally located and attractive.

This is interesting. Of course, we will have to wait and see whether these design elements actually do increase levels of exercise and activity and decrease obesity levels.

When I think about other designs that promote exercise, New Urbanism springs to mind though I’m not sure I have seen them use exercise as a selling point. Since their developments are intended to be walkable or bike-friendly, this pitch could be made but what they often highlight is the community that is fostered by denser space and the environment-friendly design.

At some point, I may just have to dig into the “Active Design Guidelines” although you have to register online to download a copy or purchase a copy.

The view of Chicago from New York City

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Chicago still occasionally goes by the nickname of the “Second City,” even though the population of Los Angeles passed it years ago. But which city is the “First City” is in America has been clear for over a century. Recently, “The Urbanist” section of New York magazine focused on Chicago and at least one Chicago critic thought the review was even-handed. This reminded me of two historic links between the two cities:

1. A number of Chicago’s early prominent residents and boosters were transplanted New York residents.

2. New York annexed all the boroughs into the city in the 1890s so that it would keep a population lead over Chicago.

Today, is there really direct competition between the two cities? They both are global cities that rely heavily on finance and trading. Do big companies often choose between these two locations? If I had to quickly point out the biggest differences between the two regions today beyond the obvious (size, location), I might go with culture. New York City is an entertainment and celebrity center in a way that Chicago is not. New York City combines both commerce/industry with glamor while Chicago is hard-working, tough, and Midwestern (which some might consider the opposite of cosmopolitan).

The effect of the “McMansion ordinance” in Austin

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In the past decade, a number of communities across the United States have debated and enacted ordinances intended to regulate teardowns, often termed McMansions. Austin, Texas has gone through this process and Kathie Tovo, a candidate for the city council, discusses her take on the “McMansion ordinance”:

AC: One more fundamental criticism that’s been leveled at your campaign is that your goal of “complete communities” – the live-work-play ideal with affordable family housing – may be at odds with some policies supported by some of the neighborhood associations you’ve been affiliated with. The Austin Neighborhoods Council, for instance, seemed supportive of the McMansion ordinance, which some people argue has facilitated sprawl by preventing the sort of home expansions that would keep growing families in the city.

KT: I guess I just don’t buy that argument, especially about McMansion. Because, for one thing, a lot of people were really concerned about the McMansion ordinance; it was going to kill the building industry in Austin. It really hasn’t, and a lot of the McMansions weren’t adding density to our neighborhoods because they were typically being occupied by a couple of people. I think that you can add on a considerable amount to your house and not be a McMansion. Absolutely, we want to be sure our land development code allows for people living in small bungalows that might have accommodated families 40 years ago when we want them to be able to add on in ways that are appropriate. I think there’s a lot of room for doing that without running up against the McMansion standards. And as you look at older neighborhoods, people are adding on. And in looking at our Families and Children [Task Force] research – families with kids will live in smaller spaces, including multifamily residences, if the spaces are well-designed. I’m married to an architect, and he’s done some additions to older houses for families that wanted to stay in the central city but the house was really too small for their modern standards.

[Editor’s note: In response to this question, Tovo later added the following to her answer via email:

KT: This criticism has little grounding and shows a lack of understanding of the research in this area or the work that has been done by groups like the city’s own Families and Children Task Force. Neighborhood associations tended to be big supporters of many of the amenities that enhance the quality of life for families across the life span: parks, open spaces, sidewalks, and safe pedestrian and bike routes.

The reasons families with children have been leaving the central city are complex…Suggesting that unregulated development will somehow lead developers to create more affordable housing or more family friendly housing is incorrect.

(And for the record – the trend of families leaving the central city pre-exists the McMansion Ordinance.)]

This candidate makes several interesting points:

1. There is an argument out there that cities lose out when they create such ordinances as it drives out middle-class and upper-class residents. If these possible residents can’t tear down an older home and build the kind of suburban home that they desire, they are going to take the tax dollars and go elsewhere. In the long run, the city loses out on the sort of stable residents and tax base that it needs. I’ve seen this argument made in Dallas as well. Tovo suggests this isn’t really the case; people were leaving Austin even before the ordinance, suggesting other factors are also at work.

2. Tovo makes an architectural critique of McMansions, suggesting that people “will live in smaller spaces, including multifamily residences, if the spaces are well-designed.” I wonder if the ordinances/regulations in Austin go far enough to make sure housing units are well-designed.

3. Tovo wants to make clear that she is not opposed to people adding on to their homes – but this has to be done “in ways that are appropriate.” She is trying to chart a middle path between the two poles in the teardown debate: the rights of the community versus the rights of individual property owners.

4. Tovo suggests that unfettered, free-market housing policies will not lead to “more affordable housing or more family friendly housing.” Other communities agree with this as they offer incentives and regulations to insure that some of these structures are created alongside more typical single-family homes.

It sounds like Tovo is trying to tread carefully in these comments (perhaps also highlighted by her follow-up email after the interview). Overall, it sounds like she is promoting New Urbanist type neighborhoods that are walkable, diverse, affordable, and well-designed.

You can read the “McMansion ordinance” here on Austin’s official website.

James Q. Wilson on the difficulties of studying culture

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In a long opinion piece looking at possible explanations for the reduction in crime in America, James Q. Wilson concludes by suggesting that cultural explanations are difficult to test and develop:

At the deepest level, many of these shifts, taken together, suggest that crime in the United States is falling—even through the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression—because of a big improvement in the culture. The cultural argument may strike some as vague, but writers have relied on it in the past to explain both the Great Depression’s fall in crime and the explosion of crime during the sixties. In the first period, on this view, people took self-control seriously; in the second, self-expression—at society’s cost—became more prevalent. It is a plausible case.

Culture creates a problem for social scientists like me, however. We do not know how to study it in a way that produces hard numbers and testable theories. Culture is the realm of novelists and biographers, not of data-driven social scientists. But we can take some comfort, perhaps, in reflecting that identifying the likely causes of the crime decline is even more important than precisely measuring it.

I find it a little strange that a social scientist wants to leave culture to the humanities (“novelists and biographers”). This sounds like a traditional social science perspective: culture is a slippery concept that is difficult to quantify and make generalizations about. I can imagine this viewpoint from quantitatively minded social scientists who would ask, “where it the data?”

But there is a lot of good research regarding culture that utilizes data. Some of this data is fuzzier qualitative data that involves ethnographies and long interviews and observations. But other data regarding culture comes from more traditional data sources such as large surveys. And if you put together a lot of these data-driven studies, qualitative and quantitative, I think you could put together some hypotheses and ideas regarding American culture and crime. Perhaps all of this data can’t fit into a regression or this isn’t the way that crime is traditionally studied but that doesn’t mean we have to simply abandon cultural explanations and studies.

Great quotes in homeownership #1: Owning a home keeps Americans from Communism

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In a recent conversation with a college friend, we talked about how keeping up with a home takes a lot of time. This reminded me of a quote from William Levitt, a member of the famous family who built the Levittowns:

He [William Levitt] was a prime facilitator of the American Dream in its cold war formulation. “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist,” he once said. “He has too much to do.”

So the key to fighting the Cold War through homeownership was not about owning private property; it was about keeping men (and women?) busy taking care of their homes so they can’t get involved in causes like communism.

The trick is that people have to want to and be able to put the time, effort, and money into homes that they buy. Starting mainly in the 1960s, Americans were given new options for homeownership that didn’t require as much work: townhomes and condos. (Contrary to the typical interchanging of the two terms, these two types of units are actually different: in a townhome, the homeowners own the land while condo owners do not.) The associations in these developments take care of much of the outdoor work leaving the homeowners to tackle the interior.

In addition to Baby Boomers who are retiring and downsizing to homes that will require less work, I would guess that many in the younger generation want homeownership without all the work.