Category Archives: Sociology

Emphasizing the McMansion interior

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Many times, McMansions are defined by their exterior: a many-gabled roof or a mish-mash of architectural styles or a cookie-cutter home or a large home that seems to overwhelm its relatively small lot or doesn’t fit into an older neighborhood. But a Sarasota blogger suggests that one could have a small home with a “McMansion interior”:

They have a new development out at Lakewood Ranch called Central Park, and even though it’s very generic and a little closely packed for my taste, they have finally done what I have been hoping somebody would do for years—build a small, inexpensive house that suggests a McMansion inside, but on a tiny scale. By that I mean it has things like a particularly nice master suite and fancy master bath, high ceilings—many coffered and trayed, lots of windows, imaginative layouts, big, well-integrated kitchens, cute little dens and lanais, entrance foyers—all for well under $200,000.

This definition suggests that McMansions can be more about the luxurious interior appointments than the garish or ostentatious outside.While the exterior qualities tend to draw negative attention, would this interior flourishes get the same criticism? I would guess no for several reasons. The interior is not as obvious to outsiders and so it is harder to call it ostentatious. Also, there seems to be a higher level of tolerance for interior appointments: the Subzero refrigerator or Viking stove or 60″ LED TV seem more acceptable as consumer items that are still useful.

Additionally, this story hints at what is likely already a trend: smaller homes with luxury upgrades. A homebuyer no longer needs large amounts of money to buy the square footage typically associated with luxury. Although your home might be just over 1,300 square feet (the size of the model reference above), you too can feel like you live in a mansion.

Mayor Daley on campus

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Influenced by his connection to former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was on the Wheaton College campus today for a lecture and fundraiser. Daley gave the kind of speech you might expect at the end of a politician’s career: he highlighted his successes and how much he enjoyed being a public servant. Here are a few things that he said:

1. Chicago is a world class city. He cited a few recent publications (Standard and Poors, Foreign Policy) that have called Chicago a top ten world city.

2. Chicago has been successful because it was “never afraid of changing” and “never lived in the past.”

3. About government spending: the federal government doesn’t have to balance its budget while other forms of government (state, counties, municipalities) do. Government spending has to level off. To help America move forward: we “need confidence,” we need to move away from being “a country of whiners,” and we can compete if we all sacrifice a bit for the common good.

4. Daley said his biggest issue to face was the education system and he hopes the improvement of this system is his enduring legacy. When he first became mayor, he helped stop social promotion. The Chicago schools today teach Chinese, Russian, and Arabic to compete on the world stage. Teacher’s unions have a responsibility to give more (he cited their 6 hour contractual work day while also saying he knows lots of good teachers and he is not blaming them). He said, “education is the cure of all the social ills we have.”

5. The success of Chicago has always been a public-private partnership. He cited Millennium Park as an example. This is what is behind his efforts to make connections with China so that Chinese businesses will see Chicago as the friendliest American city to them.

6. He said he had worked with mayors in the Chicago region, throughout the state, and around the world to discuss common issues. He said numerous times that the common issues they face are not partisan issues.

7. When asked what advice he would give to Rahm Emanuel, he said something to the effect of don’t give advice to people if they don’t ask for it.

Seeing him in person, I was reminded that he can be quite funny, personable, and can connect with a crowd as an “everyman.” He consistently illustrated his larger points with personal stories and interactions he had. His policy recommendations seemed fairly centrist: better education, government has to add value or other contract out or privatize certain services, working together across the region is necessary, government has to work with business leaders to get things done, elected officials and all government workers (teachers, police/fire, etc.) have to work for the people. He told a number of jokes and also several times mentioned advice he had received from his father.

Some other issues were not addressed: the population loss in Chicago in the 2000s, the perception that the city has a crime problem (even though crime has been down – I thought he might highlight this as a success), budget problems in Chicago and where the money from privatization has gone (parking meter deal, the Skyway), corruption in city government, persistent segregation and inequality, the limited number of public housing and affordable housing units (even with the notorious projects, such as Cabrini-Green, being closed), Daley’s legacy of building (outside of mention of Millennium Park and Chicago as a world leader in “green roofs”), whether Chicago’s educationally system has improved dramatically or significantly, and regional issues that need attention such as congestion and expanding O’Hare.

Play considers what it was like to grow up in Naperville

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Since the post-World War II suburban boom, a number of writers, filmmakers, musicians, and others have considered suburban life. Mat Smart, a playwright who grew up in Naperville, has a new Steppenwolf play about growing up in that community:

Though Smart acknowledges that part of the play’s genesis stems from a trip he took to Cameroon five years ago, the issues explored come from the same place where he grew up. Smart said the brothers, whom he described as “very much suburban Chicago dudes,” have differing views of growing up in Naperville.

Samuel K., the adopted brother, enjoyed living there, while Samuel J. complains about it and says the people living there are shallow.

“That was the same discourse among some of my friends when we were growing up,” Smart said. “Some people love it and some people hate it. But you’ll probably find that anywhere in the world.”

This sounds like it could be a different view than many works that simply suggest living in the suburbs is one of life’s worst fates.

The play also contains some dialogue comparing Naperville to another Chicago suburb:

The play also includes a humorous exchange between the brothers poking fun at the underlying attitudes some Naperville residents hold toward neighboring Aurora.

Samuel K. tells his brother, “Stop dumping on Naperville. We’re lucky to be from there. We could be from a lot worse places.”

“What, like Aurora?” Samuel J. says.

“No, like Rwanda.”

This exchange hints at how suburbanites view the character of other suburbs. For some Naperville residents, Aurora would be considered beneath their community with comparisons made between schools, crime rates, housing prices, downtowns, and more. Historically, Naperville thought Hinsdale was above it as it had a wealthier population. These sorts of comparisons between suburbs are not always explicitly stated but I suspect are commonly held among suburbanites.

More minorities in the Chicago suburbs leads to new issues

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The Chicago Tribune discusses some of the growth in minority population in the Chicago suburbs as well as the challenges this poses to these communities:

“Immigration is coming right to the suburbs because of jobs and because there are networks that have been established in the suburbs,” said Chicago-based demographer Rob Paral.

The greatest number of new suburbanites were Hispanics. More than 62,000 Latino residents settled in Will County, many in Aurora, Joliet and Bolingbrook.

Bolingbrook also saw its Asian population more than double, with a surge of Indian, Pakistani, Filipino and Chinese residents, village officials said. In Naperville, the black, Hispanic and Asian populations were each up by 70 percent or more, while the still much larger non-Hispanic white population dipped slightly…

“When you talk about the challenges of integration, part of the problem is that some of these communities were not built to sustain or increase by 150 percent, let alone by people whose language is from a different country,” said Sylvia Zaldivar-Sykes, executive director of the Lake County Community Foundation.

This will pose some interesting challenges to many suburban communities. Having new residents in the community might lead to reconsidering the characters of these suburbs: how will residents and other communities view themselves and other suburbs? New programs or services will require more money, something in short supply in our current era of suburban budget shortfalls. And in the long run, what will the white residents in these communities do – move to other suburbs, as many whites have done in the past, or stay within their changing communities?

Claim: Obama wants higher gas prices. Is this necessarily bad?

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Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour (a rumored Republican presidential candidate) suggested today that Obama wants higher gas prices:

Barbour…accused the Obama administration Wednesday of favoring a run-up in gas prices to prod consumers to buy more fuel-efficient cars…

Barbour cited 2008 comments from Steven Chu, now President Barack Obama’s energy secretary, that a gradual increase in gasoline taxes could coax consumers into dumping their gas-guzzlers and finding homes closer to where they work. Chu, then a Nobel Prize-winning professor, argued that higher costs per gallon could force investments in alternative fuels and spur cleaner energy sources.

Barbour said Obama’s energy team wouldn’t be happy until gas prices reached $9 a gallon.

Barbour goes on to say that there are two primary negative consequences of higher gas prices: it hurts workers and it hurts the larger economy. In a troubled economic period, Barbour is suggesting that Obama is willing to risk a prolonged economic crisis in order to promote things like electric cars and clean energy.

But this is really a larger issue and affects multiple dimensions of American life. Let’s assume that raising gas prices cuts down on driving and gas consumption overall – and there is evidence to back this up. There could be some benefits to this:

1. This would limit our dependence on foreign nations for  oil. What has happened in the Middle East in recent weeks can have an impact on our economy because we import so much oil. Some have gone so far as to say that this is a “national security issue.”

2. Using less gasoline would lead to lower levels of pollution.

3. Having more expensive gasoline may reign in sprawl, or at least make living in denser areas (cities or denser suburbs) more attractive. (See an example of this argument here.) In the long run, higher gas prices could be viewed by some as a threat (or by some as a welcome deterrent) to the sprawling suburban lifestyle that many Americans have adopted  since the end of World War II. Higher fuel prices would likely impact driving trips, fast-food restaurants, and trucking costs, all key pieces to the typical suburban lifestyle. One could argue that the American lifestyle of the last 65 years has been made possible by relatively cheap gasoline – and life would change if it was consistently at European price levels.

There could be other impacts as well including more walking and bicycling (cheaper, less pollution, better for health) and less time wasted due to traffic and congestion.

It bears watching how this rhetoric over gas prices continues. Is it simply a matter of a short-term (lower prices to help the economy) vs. a long-term perspective (higher prices help limit some negative consequences of driving) or could this turn into a debate about how driving (and cheap gasoline) is closely linked to the essence of American life?

From a sociology class project to the Illinois House floor

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Many teachers and professors hope that what is taught and discussed in the classroom will influence the world outside the classroom. Here is one example of a proposed Illinois bill that was inspired by a sociology class project:

House Bill 180 was introduced by state Rep. Kay Hatcher, R-Yorkville. Currently, those engaging in disorderly conduct must stay 200 feet from a funeral for at least 30 minutes or risk being charged with a misdemeanor.

The legislation would increase the distance to 1,000 feet and the time to one hour. Those restrictions would put Illinois in line with most other Midwestern states, Hatcher said.

The legislation was inspired by a bill-writing project in a Northern Illinois University sociology class. One of the students was angered by some of the groups that had been protesting at the funerals of soldiers and other high-profile people.

At the end of the class, one of the students, Gayle Deja-Schultz of Sugar Grove, contacted Hatcher about sponsoring the bill.

“I believe everybody has a right to mourn in peace,” Deja-Schultz told the committee.

I could see using this project idea of writing a bill in the future. And then I could present this news story as inspirational evidence for what could happen.

From bobos to social animals: the upcoming book from David Brooks

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Commentator David Brooks will soon be releasing a new book titled The Social Animal. This Newsweek story provides some clues about the new book:

The book’s subtitle—The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement—conveys its ambition. Brooks’s first two books, Bobos in Paradise and On Paradise Drive, were acutely witty satires of a social group whose name he coined: bobos, or “bourgeois bohemians,” the “affluent educated class” that frequents “gourmet coffeehouses” and issues corporate reports “with quotations from Émile Zola.” The books are smart—Brooks is a shrewd anthropologist of this fanciful type—and hugely entertaining. But they lack gravitas. The Social Animal is of a whole other order: authoritative, impressively learned, and vast in scope.

Its thesis can be stated simply: who we are is largely determined by the hidden workings of our unconscious minds. Everything we do in life—the careers we choose; even, on a deeper level, the way we experience and perceive the sensation of being alive—emerges from an infinitely complex neuronal network sending out signals (Brooks calls them “scouts”) that, largely unknown to us, assess and determine our behavior. Insights, information, responses to stimuli are governed by our emotions, a rich repository of thoughts and feelings that courses just beneath the surface of our conscious minds. They are “mental sensations that happen to us.”

Brooks has absorbed and synthesized a tremendous amount of scholarship. He has mastered the literature on childhood development, sociology, and neuro-science; the classics of modern sociology; the major philosophers from the Greeks to the French philosophes; the economists from Adam Smith to Robert Schiller. He quotes artfully from Coleridge and Stendhal. And there’s nothing showy about it. He’s been busy, working on the book over the past three years during the stray hours when he isn’t writing his column, appearing on TV, or lecturing around the country. “I used to play golf,” he says. “I gave up every second that I wasn’t hanging around with my wife and kids.” (He has three, and lives, bobolike, in the Washington suburb of Bethesda, Md.)

To create a readable narrative from this daunting store of information, Brooks has written the book in the form of a novel, following an imaginary couple named Harold and Erica from womb to tomb.

Based on the summary here, it sounds like I will pick up this book somewhere down the road.

It is interesting that this reviewer suggests that Brooks was an “anthropologist” in writing his first two books. Brooks himself suggests in Bobos in Paradise that he was practicing “comic sociology.” This new book sounds more like anthropology as Brooks sets out to explore why humans are the way they are. Or more broadly, Brooks is approaching a question that many humans throughout history have asked(see a recent example here): what exactly makes us human?

Also, I am not sure about the idea that his first two books suffered from a lack of gravitas. Sure, the books were somewhat snarky. But there was also some truth in them about recent changes in American suburbs. Did they lack gravitas because they pointed out some of the foibles of bourgeois bohemians?

(Read other posts about David Brooks: making a pitch for sociology; a system that might discourage good candidates from running for political office; and defending the liberal arts.)

Zoning, churches, and tax bases

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Zoning of land can become a contentious issue, particularly when a community sets limits that some community members find restrictive. An article quickly mentions one of these points of contention: when communities make it difficult for churches to be built.

“Churches do not realize the fight they’re in,” Baker said. “If you go into a commercial district, they say you’re wrecking their tax base. If you go into residential, they say you’re disturbing their peace.”

While the issue is not new, Baker said, “The objections to churches obtaining zoning do seem to be heating up under the [economy].”…

In Houston, churches recently raised objections over a proposed drainage fee by city officials. In Mission, Kansas, churches filed a lawsuit after being charged a “transportation utility fee” to help fix roads.

In the case of Burbank, Mayor Harry Klein told the Chicago Tribune, “It’s obvious—every city likes to see their tax base grow, that’s a given.”

An alderman in Evanston, Indiana, raised concerns last year about the impact of “storefront churches” on the tax base and proposed an ordinance requiring special-use permits for houses of worship to operate in all business or commercial districts.

While this article doesn’t give any insights into how common this is, it does suggest that these cases might be more common now in a time of economic crisis. This may be the case as many communities look to close budget shortfalls and churches also have some more purchasing power with reduced real estate prices. Is there any data to suggest these sorts of incidents are now more common?

This article does highlight the goals of local municipalities: generating tax revenue and expanding the tax base. To require fees to pay for roads or sewers are not unusual when commercial or residential property is involved as these fees help offset the infrastructure costs for local communities. Churches do not generate property or sales taxes for a community so they might be considered dead weight. And if a church wants a potentially lucrative property, then the aims of the church and the community are at odds. Zoning is a means by which local communities have some control over land use and therefore can attempt to use zoning rules to regulate everything from the placement of banks to churches to tattoo parlors.

It would also be interesting to compare these sorts of cases with churches to those of mosques (one example here).

The role of residential segregation in lawsuit over Elgin school district

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The Chicago suburb of Elgin has long been a satellite city with more diversity and manufacturing than the average suburb. The city’s school district, U-46, is the second-largest district in the state and is the plaintiff in a long-running civil suit that is continuing in federal court this week:

The two sides in a long, bitter fight over boundary lines in an Elgin-area school district met in federal District Court in Chicago on Monday, six years after a class-action suit sought to improve learning conditions for minority students.

The students and the families who were part of the original case filed in 2005 have long since left School District U-46, a racially and culturally diverse district of 40,000 students in the northwest suburbs. But the conditions that sparked that initial outrage — overcrowding and poor classroom conditions — continue to persist and are putting minority students at a disadvantage, attorney Stewart Weltman told the judge in his opening remarks.

“U-46 served the needs of white students first, and the needs of minority students second,” Weltman told U.S. District Judge Robert W. Gettleman. “The district knew it had thousands of empty seats in white schools, and yet it forced more and more minority students into overcrowded schools and portable classrooms without running water.”

Attorneys for the school district say race never played a role in the redrawing of attendance boundaries for the district’s 55 elementary, middle and high schools. Instead, they say, the changes were part of a reorganization plan by the district in 2004 to allow more students to attend schools closer to home.

I don’t know the particulars of the case. What the district did sounds like what a lot of American parents might desire: let my children go to schools close to home rather than busing or driving them to schools across the city. Closeness is one issue but the idea of local control or rule of nearby schools is important, even in a large school district.

But as I read this, I am struck by an idea: with the district letting students “attend schools closer to home,” U-46 was letting the wealthier kids go to the nearby nicer schools and the minority kids go to nearby worse-off schools. And if you look at the map of the U-46 boundaries, there is quite an economic range, from Elgin (median household income in 2009: $57,009) to wealthier Bartlett (median household income in 2009: $91,863) and Wayne (less than 2,000 people in the village but a 2009 median household income of $142,321). Therefore, it may appear that the district is not spreading the wealth (in money or children) around the district in a way that benefits everyone. The residential segregation patterns in suburbia, where the wealthier tend to live with the wealthier and the poorer live with the poorer, then get reinforced.

It will be interesting to see how the case turns out. On one hand, I’m sure the district has an interest in keeping wealthier families and areas within the district, something that may have been aided by this 2004 decision. On the other hand, the larger school district is supposed to be providing the same opportunities for all students.

 

Tying together being green, McMansions, and promoting urban development in Asia

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As the world discusses how to reduce carbon emissions, Edward Glaeser (see a review of his latest book here) suggests that America is an odd position: we want to promote urban development in fast-growing Asian countries and yet we subsidize sprawl within our own borders.

America’s interest in promoting a hyper-urban Asia, so different from our sprawling nation, puts us in a slightly awkward position. How can a country of McMansions and Ford Expeditions preach the virtues of low-carbon urban living?

Freedom is America’s greatest treasure. This includes the freedom to choose where we live — city or suburb. But we should eliminate the mistaken policies that artificially subsidize sprawl. The federal government subsidizes transportation significantly more in low-density areas than in high-density areas, and that pulls people away from cities. Economist Nathaniel Baum-Snow found in 2007 that each new postwar highway that cut into a city reduced that city’s population by 18%. The home mortgage interest deduction induces people to leave urban apartments, which are overwhelmingly rented, and move to suburban homes. Because the deduction scales up with the size of the mortgage, it essentially pays people to buy bigger, more energy-intensive homes.

Reducing such policies, which push Americans away from our green cities, will enable us to make a stronger case for higher-density dwelling in India and China.

The key to Glaeser’s argument here is that the US government “artificially” makes suburban living look like the best choice. Without these subsidies, highway construction, mortgage benefits, etc., the suburbs might not look like the good option that they appear to be. Glaeser may be right – but I wonder if there still might be Americans who would want to pursue a suburban lifestyle. Perhaps this alternate version of American suburbs would be more restricted to the wealthy who could subsidize their own extra costs.

But Glaeser is also suggesting that there is the matter of looking like hypocrites: how can we as a country ask other countries to live in certain ways when we promote relatively ungreen suburbs? More broadly, should the many residents of China and India who have joined the middle class in recent decades get a shot at living in suburbs or should they have to live in more urban developments to help offset American patterns?

And I would also note the common citing of McMansions and SUVs as emblematic of the entire United States and its behaviors.