Category Archives: Sociology

Chicago suburbs consider more roundabouts

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The roundabout has had a sort of renaissance in American traffic and road design in recent years. While many Americans might consider roundabouts to be European, there are more being built in the Chicago suburbs:

At least 10 roundabouts have recently been considered or launched in the Chicago area. The intersections consist of a center island surrounded by a one-way lane of traffic where drivers yield to circling cars without the instruction of stop signs or traffic signals.

South Holland in 2008 was one of the first in the area to build a modern roundabout. Another was finished in Lincolnshire in November. Kane County is planning one west of Elgin. Another proposal was recently unveiled for Chicago’s West Lakeview neighborhood, and the Illinois Department of Transportation is looking to convert the despised Cumberland Circle in Des Plaines into a modern roundabout as well.

Because the design forces vehicles to slow down and eliminates left-hand turns, the possibility for multicar accidents is much lower than at a traditional intersection, safety experts say.

In addition to the safety improvements, I recall reading that roundabouts also accommodate more traffic. Instead of having cars stop (at either stop signs or traffic lights), there is more continuous flow.

It is also interesting to read how suburban residents seem afraid of these roundabouts: how does one drive through them? Perhaps suburban drivers all have seen how Clark Griswold (played by Chevy Chase) got stuck in a London roundabout for hours in European Vacation. At least at the beginning, this unfamiliarity may contribute to the reduction of accidents: people have to slow down in order to figure out their next course of action.

In the long run, this is a good reminder that driving habits and behavior are very much conditioned by what we are used to. This reminds of Hans Monderman, the Dutch traffic engineer, who went to great lengths to get drivers to readjust their behavior (and the American way of just adding traffic signs doesn’t help – read about it in Traffic).

(As a side note: speaking from experience with a roundabout in northern Indiana that I drove through for several years, it is pretty easy.)

Are Section 8 vouchers now being used for McMansions?

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WalletPop has a story with a provocative opening line: “In what may be one of the strangest twists to the housing market crisis, Section 8 housing tenants are moving from urban housing projects and into high-end condo complexes and single-family McMansions that just a few years ago sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.” The premise makes some sense: in an unstable housing market with a lot of potential for vacancies and foreclosures, landlords are looking for steady money. While Section 8 users were “treated by landlords as the tenants of last resort” in better times, now landlords are looking for this consistent money from the government.

But as I read this article, I tried to figure out where the McMansions come into play: most of the examples here feature Section 8 users moving into nicer condos or apartments, not large homes out in the suburbs. So are Section 8 vouchers really be used for McMansions, which at the most basic level are large, single-family homes? Does a Section 8 voucher provide enough funding to allow people to live in McMansions, even ones with reduced prices? There is not much information here to back up this assertion although it does sound as though the housing crisis has allowed Section 8 users to access a broader market.

Also, the headline of the article, “Section 8 Tenants: the Housing Market’s Salvation?,” doesn’t really address if there are enough Section 8 vouchers to help the broader housing market. For this to happen, the federal government would need to free up more money for more people in this housing assistance program.

New Census figures on Hispanics in US: over 50 million

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Data from the 2010 US Census continues to trickle out (see stories on the shifting US mean population center, the growth in the multiracial population, and the population changes in places like Chicago). With almost all states accounted for, demographers expect that the Hispanic population in the United States has exceeded 50 million for the first time. The Hispanic population growth was also higher than expected for the last decade:

In a surprising show of growth, Hispanics accounted for more than half of the U.S. population increase over the last decade, exceeding estimates in most states…

Racial and ethnic minorities are expected to make up an unprecedented 90 percent of the total U.S. growth since 2000, due to immigration and higher birth rates for Latinos…

“This really is a transformational decade for the nation,” said William H. Frey, a demographer at Brookings Institution who has analyzed most of the 2010 data. “The 2010 census shows vividly how these new minorities are both leading growth in the nation’s most dynamic regions and stemming decline in others.”

Currently the fastest growing group, Hispanics now comprise 1 in 6 Americans; among U.S. children, Hispanics are roughly 1 in 4.

With relatively low birth rates for whites (though these rates are not as low as other industrialized nations such as Western Europe or Japan), most of the recent population growth in the United States is non-white.

I would really like to hear more experts comment on this sort of data. What do they expect America to be within a few decades? How will these figures affect social life, politics, work, culture, and more?

Chicago Tribune calls for phasing out of mortgage-interest deduction

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What interesting arguments people will make in the midst of an economic crisis. While one commentator has a number of reasons why he is “never going to own a home again,” the Chicago Tribune argues that the United States needs to phase out the mortgage-interest deduction. The main reason seems to be that the deduction primarily benefits wealthier homeowners, not the middle class:

Trade groups such as the National Association of Home Builders portray the benefit as a middle-class tax break. But it does a lot less for most Americans than those with a vested interest in promoting home sales would have you believe: If you rent, you get nothing. If you have reasons not to itemize deductions, you get nothing. If you pay off your mortgage to live debt-free, you get nothing.

Borrow a fortune for a McMansion, however, and the Internal Revenue Service provides a big discount, at the expense of every other taxpayer. More than three-fourths of the benefit from the mortgage-interest deduction goes to the 14 percent of tax filers reporting six-figure incomes. Almost one-third of the subsidy goes to the population reporting incomes of $200,000 or more. Those 3 percent of tax filers at the very top receive about the same amount as do the 86 percent earning less than six figures.

As a consequence, this deduction does little to promote homeownership — supposedly its main objective. Data suggest that almost no one now benefiting from the break would flee the real-estate market. People just wouldn’t borrow as much to fund home purchases.

What is remarkable to me about both of these arguments is that such arguments might have been unheard of before this economic crisis. But since the economy has gone downhill, the housing market in particular (and the most recent housing figures are not good), desperate times apparently call for desperate measures.

All of this bears watching: will homeownership remain a cornerstone of the American Dream?

Aurora now second largest city in Illinois

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The population growth in the Chicago suburbs has shifted from Naperville (in the 1980s and 1990s) to communities further west and south. In particular, Aurora grew during the 2000s and is now Illinois’ second largest city:

[T]he Alperins are among the nearly 55,000 new residents since 2000 who helped Aurora boost its population to 197,899 and officially eclipse Rockford as Illinois’ second-largest city, according to the recently released 2010 U.S. census figures.

Aurora’s 54,909 jump was the largest among Illinois cities. Its percentage increase of 38.4 percent was just behind top-ranked Joliet, which grew at a 38.8 percent pace to 147,433 and beat out Naperville as Illinois’ fourth-largest community.

The growth comes as Aurora makes strides resurrecting what had become a struggling downtown and boasts of statistics that show the city’s major crime rate is at its lowest in more than three decades. The physical size of the city also has grown to accommodate more people. Aurora has three times as many square miles as it had four decades ago.

There are several reasons that the community has grown including a growing Hispanic population and open land in a growing region of the Chicago suburbs. But the city has also dramatically expanded in size:

Aurora, meanwhile, now covers 46 square miles compared with 35 in 1990 and 15 in 1970. It sprawls through four counties, six school districts and seven townships. But like Naperville in the last decade, the city could eventually be boxed in by neighbors, Greene said. And there’s also no guarantee that brisk growth from the 1990s through part of the 2000s will repeat when the economy improves.

The explanation for why Aurora is growing is very similar to what led to Naperville’s growth between 1960 and 2000: it is located near highways, it has a number of businesses, and there is plenty of room to expand and the city has annexed a lot of land. But as Naperville discovered, the growth only goes on for so long: eventually, the land runs out and then Aurora will become a different kind of place. As the end of the article notes, the long-term course of the city will likely include denser development near the center of the city.

At the same time, Naperville and Aurora’s growth are not quite the same: Naperville has long had a wealthier profile compared to Aurora’s status as an industrial satellite city (named as such in this 1915 work).  During the 1980s and 1990s, Naperville’s growth was quite unusual: Naperville was classified as the only boomburb outside of the South or West during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Naperville is quite well-off for a large community, has a history of high-tech companies dating back to the mid-1960s, has very low crime and poverty rates, and has a vibrant and popular downtown.

It will be interesting to watch in the coming years how Aurora, Joliet, Plainfield, and other suburbs in the southwest suburbs continue to grow.

From former suburban home to authentic home to be restored

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What happens to suburban homes that were once on the outskirts of the big city? One writer describes the 1927 rowhouse she and her husband bought in Jackson Heights (part of Queens, New York City) and their plans to restore it:

Friends warn me this will be a lifelong endeavor. But my husband and I have always preferred houses with some history in them (this is our fifth, and maybe last, transaction). I suspect it’s a rejection of my New Jersey McMansion rearing.

To get a better sense of this house’s past, I turned to Daniel Karatzas, an agent with Beaudoin Realty Group and the local historian. He wrote the book, “Jackson Heights – A Garden in the City,” which sits on our coffee table. Well, it used to. Now it’s in storage.

Our house, Karatzas told me, was designed by Robert Tappan, “one of those unsung architects” who helped develop the neighborhood into a slice of suburbia just a few miles from midtown Manhattan.

“It wasn’t like Frank Lloyd Wright,” says Karatzas. “They were building traditional styles that would appeal to upper middle-class families. They used vernacular architecture. … Tudor, French, Georgian. That made it seem the houses had been there longer than they had.”

The houses on my block first sold for between $24,000 and $28,000. If he had to liken it to a modern-day phenomenon, Karatzas said, our 1920s house might have once been considered like “those McMansions in New Jersey.”

A couple parts of this stick out to me:

1. This neighborhood was once a suburb of New York City. While the home is now 80+ years old, it is still more of a suburban setting. According to this brief history of Jackson Heights, the community was built primarily after World War I, which would have been during a large wave of suburbanization.

Suburban homes generally get a bad name, both today and historically for being relatively cheaply made and looking all the same. Perhaps this is epitomized by the 1962 song “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds – here are the opening lines:

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.

There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And yet, with age, some suburban homes can become the sort of authentic homes that people desire. This house has history but it is suburban history. While the realtor suggests this home was probably like a McMansion of the 1920s, the writer is interested in restoring and rehabilitating this home, gold-metal cabinets in the kitchen and all.

2. The primary comparison made is between this new purchase and the McMansion the writer grew up in New Jersey. We don’t quite know why this writer disliked this New Jersey upbringing but it is clear that this new home has more character than that home did. She also suggests that her father is likely puzzled by her decision to move back to Jackson Heights: “Sometimes, I suspect my decision to settle in Jackson Heights puzzles him, since he worked so hard to get out and buy a house in the suburbs.” While one generation viewed a move to the suburbs as a good thing, some people in later generations see a move back to city life (though this is somewhere between city and suburban life) as desirable.

Does this mean that the sort of suburban homes that people now call McMansions may one day be authentic and the sorts of places that others will want to restore? This idea perhaps assumes that Americans will continue to move further and further out from the center of metropolitan regions and then the older suburban homes will age and no longer be on the fringes. What is the long-term fate of McMansions: will they fall apart? By co-opted for other uses (like perhaps being subdivided into multiple units)? Become desirable reminders of the past? Become teardowns themselves and the land put to other uses?

American Sociological Association committee on doctoral program rankings

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While the ranking of undergraduate programs is contentious (read about Malcolm Gladwell’s latest thoughts on the subject here), the rankings of doctoral programs can also draw attention. In February, a five-person American Sociological Association (ASA) committee released a report about the 2010 National Research Council (NRC) rankings of doctoral sociological programs (see a summary here).

The ASA committee summarized their concerns about the NRC rankings:

Based on our work, we recommend that the ASA Council issue a resolution criticizing the 2010 NRC rankings for containing both
operationalization and implementation problems; discouraging faculty, students, and university administrators from using the core 2010 NRC rankings to evaluate sociology programs;
encouraging them to be suspicious of the raw data accompanying the 2010 NRC report; and indicating that alternative rankings, such as those based on surveys of departments’ reputations, have their own sets of biases.

The explanation of these issues is an interesting methodological analysis. Indeed, this document suggests a lot of these rankings have had issues, starting with the 1987 US News & World Report rankings which were primarily based on reputational rankings.

So what did the committee conclude should be done? Here are their final thoughts:

At this time, the committee believes that ASA should encourage prospective students, faculty, university administrators or others evaluating a given program to avoid blind reliance on
rankings that claim explicitly or implicitly to list departments from best to worst. The heterogeneity of the discipline suggests that evaluators should first determine what characteristics they value in a program and then employ available sources of information to assess the program’s performance. In addition, the ASA should help facilitate, within available means, the dissemination of such information.

So the final recommendation is to be skeptical about these rankings. This seems to be a fairly common approach for those who find issues with rankings of schools or programs.

How might we get past this kind of conclusion? If the ranking process were done by just sociologists, could we decide on even a fuzzy rank order of graduate programs that most could agree upon?

A Houston Chronicle editorial pushes for historic preservation districts

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When sociologists talk about urban zoning, Houston is often cited as an example of a city that has had and has little zoning. However, there is a recent debate about instituting the city’s first six historic preservation districts. The Houston Chronicle wrote an editorial supporting these districts as they only affect a small part of the city:

In a council meeting earlier this month, one council member compared city restrictions on property rights to Gestapo tactics.

People, please: We’re not talking about seizure of private property. We’re talking about bungalows, Victorians and Dutch colonials. The new rules don’t say that you can no longer build McMansions or townhouses in Houston — just that you can’t plop them into a historic district. That leaves 99 percent of Houston wide-open.

Tomorrow, council will vote whether to accept the maps for the six most controversial districts, all of which are in the Heights and Montrose.

All six districts survived a postcard referendum that could have obliterated their historic status completely; the only change to the maps is the removal of a single commercial property from Montrose Commons.

Opponents have argued that historic designation will hurt neighborhood property values, but that strains credibility.

It sounds like this battle over historic districts is quite similar to other historic district battles: are there limits to what property owners should be able to do? And as is often the case, these historic districts are proposed because some of these older homes are being torn down to make way for newer homes, the larger ones which are dubbed McMansions.

But the larger issue may be neighborhood change: just how much should any neighborhood be allowed to change in a short period of time? Buildings in a historic district are protected because they are older (perhaps at least 50 years old?). But these questions can also pop up in newer neighborhoods: should a religious building or a park or a gas station be allowed to be built on the corner at the edge of the neighborhood? Should a set of townhouses be built the next street over? What happens if more traffic starts driving down the main street in the neighborhood? The same people who would want the right to build a McMansion in an older part of town after tearing down an old home would also probably not desire an apartment building constructed next door or a garbage facility built a block away.

Where exactly you draw the line between these competing interests is not an easy decision but one that must be made by individual communities.

Manhattan’s grid created 200 years ago

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Manhattan, the center of New York City, is famous for its street grid running throughout the whole island. Read a short celebration of this grid’s 200th anniversary (which was actually March 21) here. Not only is the grid orderly but it cut the island into developable lots and very quickly, land speculation became a favorite pastime.

What current-day people often forget is that this grid was laid out long before New York City had advanced very far north on the island. This map from the New York City Department of City Planning up to 1998 shows that growth was limited to the southern tip of the island for much of the period that the island has had European inhabitants. (The quality of this online map is atrocious – perhaps they really do want people to send in $3.) And if you want a longer-term view, why not go back to 1609 and compare NYC blocks then and now?

American Sociological Association explains new dues structure

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The American Sociological Association (ASA) has developed a new dues structure that will be voted on during the ASA’s May 2011 elections. In addition to adding more income brackets (increasing from 7 to 10), the organization is increasing dues since the dues have only been inflation-adjusted since 1997. Here is how the ASA explains how they adjusted the dues:

For many years, ASA members have voted for a progressive, income-based dues structure for regular members while subsidizing the dues of students and emeritus members. It is, of course, as difficult to agree on how to define “fairness” in a membership organization’s dues structure as it is to agree on the more familiar problem of fairness in public taxation.

One broadly accepted principle of fairness in taxation, however, is that everyone should experience the same burden of paying for the state because most taxes are used to pay for public goods which broadly benefit everyone in the society. Because a given amount of money is more valuable to people with lower incomes, the equal burden principle underwrites the idea that the percentage of their income people pay in taxes should increase with income – that is, those with more income should pay more taxes than those with less. To be fully progressive, of course, the taxes people pay should also be a progressively higher proportion of their income as their income rises. While this second aspect of a progressive structure may not be achievable in a membership association that has a narrower range of member income than the overall population, the ASA membership has long endorsed the principle of higher dues for higher income members.

As a scholarly membership association, ASA Council and EOB see much of what dues (and other revenue sources) pay for as a general good of having a professional association that supports the profession of sociology as a whole as well as providing specific services to individual members. In a wide variety of ways, ASA provides professional public goods: It organizes key journals in the discipline; gathers and disseminates data on sociologists and academic departments; provides timely information on the job market for sociologists and brings potential employers and employees together; promotes public dissemination of sociological research through the media; facilitates the building of strong networks among sociologists in the different settings in which sociologists work; organizes the annual national meeting of the profession at which new scholarship is shared; represents the discipline of sociology in the activities of many inter-disciplinary scientific and professional organizations; advocates along with those organizations for increased federal funding for social scientific research and graduate training; and has an experienced staff that responds quickly to public issues affecting the discipline, sociology departments, and individual sociologists.

These are real public goods for the community of sociologists, and thus the equal burden principle has been relevant to the ASA for decades. This is why the membership has voted in the past for a progressive dues structure in which higher-income members pay more in dues than lower-income members, albeit not necessarily a great deal more.

I have a few questions about this:

1. So this is not a “fully” progressive system, rather a somewhat progressive system. Why not be “fully” progressive based on income?

2. Where is the extra dues money going? Is the ASA providing more “public goods” or improved “public goods” or has the quality of these “public goods” suffered since dues have only been adjusted for inflation since 1997?

3. How did the organization’s value commitments as sociologists interact with their commitments to being a professional organization which, like all professional organizations, has certain tasks and duties?