Category Archives: Sociology

Can a McMansion be rated LEED Platinum?

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There are 64 LEED-certified houses in Missouri, with 51 of these built by Habitat for Humanity in recent years. The director of the St. Louis office for Habitat says, “Actually, right now, we’re the largest LEED Platinum builder in the U.S. for single-family detached homes.” But within this discussion, the St. Louis director talks about why it would be difficult for larger homes to be certified as LEED Platinum:

Hunsberger said the investment for Habitat is fairly minimal. He estimates LEED adds about 5 percent to the cost of a standard home.

He said some of the organization’s costs are offset by partnerships with providers of energy-efficient products. Plus, there’s an advantage to Habitat’s houses — size. LEED applies a home-sizing ratio that makes Platinum certification easier to achieve for smaller structures.

“In essence, they don’t want McMansions,” Hunsberger said. “They don’t want 10,000-square-foot single family homes that may have two people living in them to reach LEED Platinum because it’s kind of anti what the movement is.”

This is interesting – so I did a little checking into LEED certification. According to “LEED For Homes Ratings” (a PDF file) from the US Green Building Council, the square footage of a home does factor into its ratings. There is a neutral home baseline and smaller homes have lower thresholds to reach certification levels (Certified, Silver, Gold, Platinum) while homes larger than the baseline have higher point thresholds to reach. The neutral home size is 900 square feet for 1 bedroom or less, 1,400 for 2 bedrooms, 1,900 for 3 bedrooms, 2,600 for 4 bedrooms, 2,850 for 5 bedrooms, and 250 square feet for each bedroom after this. The rationale behind this is explained on page 42 of the PDF file:

These data were simplified and generalized to the assumption that as home size doubles, energy consumption increases by roughly one-quarter and material consumption increases by roughly one-half; combined, these amount to an increase in impact of roughly one-third with each doubling in home size. Thus the point adjustment equates to one-third of the points available in the Materials & Resources and Energy & Atmosphere categories combined for each doubling in home size.

So it is not as if larger homes can’t be LEED certified but they have to meet stricter guidelines. Ultimately, I want to know whether a McMansion, say a home of 4,500 or 5,000 square feet, be LEED certified by making up for its size sufficiently elsewhere?

(I am also intrigued by this Habitat director tying the size of a McMansion to 10,000 square feet. That is not just a McMansion: it may very well be a real mansion. How exactly how large a home has to be in order to be deemed a McMansion is unclear but 10,000 square feet seems on the high end.)

Mean population center of US shifts west and south; Midwest may no longer be the heartland

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Geographically, the Midwest is a broad US region between the two coasts and north of the South (as it was constituted in the Civil War). But symbolically, the Midwest is often referred to the as the “heartland” or as where “mainstream” America is, an idea illustrated by a journalist’s claim that a Nixon policy would “play in Peoria” in 1969.

A little-referenced geographic measure, the mean center of population in the United States, is moving west and south again, suggesting that the Midwest will no longer be the American center within several decades:

When the Census Bureau announces a new mean center of population next month, geographers believe it will be placed in or around Texas County, Mo., southwest of the present location in Phelps County, Mo. That would put it on a path to leave the region by midcentury.

“The geography is clearly shifting, with the West beginning to emerge as America’s new heartland,” said Robert Lang, a sociology professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas who regularly crunches data to determine the nation’s center. “It’s a pace-setting region that is dominant in population growth but also as a swing point in American politics.”

The last time the U.S. center fell outside the Midwest was 1850, in the eastern territory now known as West Virginia. Its later move to the Midwest bolstered the region as the nation’s cultural heartland in the 20th century, central to U.S. farming and Rust Belt manufacturing sites.

In my mind, the best use of this measure is to track its changing path over time: it has consistently moved West though hasn’t moved that far South. In terms of showing where the “center” is, it is less clear. I would see this type of measure as similar to National Geographic’s recent “most typical face“: it tells us something but is best useful for tracking changes over time.

As for whether this moving mean center of population really means that the Midwest will not be considered the mainstream, this remains to be seen. Could the West really be the new heartland in the eyes of the American people? This would involve a shift in symbols, particularly about what it means to be the “heartland.” Is it where most of the people are, where the swing states are, where there is the most history, where there is the most agriculture, where people are most traditional, or where the people are the most “normal”?

 

Debate over whether cities or suburbs are gaining population

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As the 2010 Census figures trickle out, some commentators are debating about how to interpret this data: “are cities gaining or losing population?” While it seems fairly clear that more people are moving to the suburbs and out of central cities (a long-running American trend), it is less clear if they are moving to the land of single-family homes on the metropolitan fringe or to denser suburban areas (which might be considered cities in their own right).

The virtues of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

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A guest blogger at the Christian Science Monitor extols the virtues of Max Weber’s classic The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:

Weber’s historical thesis is fascinating in itself, but what really makes the work is that it is a mini-study in how to historically investigate a social-science proposition, complete with asides on method w[h]ere Weber explains what he is doing. He takes two situations that are in most respects the same (that of German Catholics and that of German Protestants) and notes a crucial difference (besides religion): the two populations have significantly different degrees of participation in the capitalist mode of economic organization (as of 1905).Then, he asks whether the first-noted difference (in religion) could be to some extent responsible for the second (in economic circumstances). He systematically rejects alternative explanations as inadequate, and then shows why religion was, indeed, an important factor in the rise of capitalism.

It is interesting to see Weber’s classic as a methodological text.

Since I’ve always heard this book talk about from a sociological perspective, I would have liked to been able to read more in this post about how an economist would view this work. From the sociological end, this book is one of the first to suggest that “ideas matter” or “culture matters” for larger social structures. While Karl Marx argued that culture was the result of the economic base of society and Emile Durkheim was interested in how culture, rituals, and religion held society together, Weber argued that theological ideas could lead to cultural and economic changes.

 

Infrastructure, beware the solar flare

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Concern has grown in recent years about how much of our infrastructure, electricity, wireless technology, and more, would be affected by solar flares. National Geographic suggests that if we experience a solar flare like Carrington Event of 1859, we would be in trouble:

[T]the biggest solar storm on record happened in 1859, during a solar maximum about the same size as the one we’re entering, according to NASA.

That storm has been dubbed the Carrington Event, after British astronomer Richard Carrington, who witnessed the megaflare and was the first to realize the link between activity on the sun and geomagnetic disturbances on Earth…

In addition, the geomagnetic disturbances were strong enough that U.S. telegraph operators reported sparks leaping from their equipment—some bad enough to set fires, said Ed Cliver, a space physicist at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in Bedford, Massachusetts.

In 1859, such reports were mostly curiosities. But if something similar happened today, the world’s high-tech infrastructure could grind to a halt.

“What’s at stake,” the Space Weather Prediction Center’s Bogdan said, “are the advanced technologies that underlie virtually every aspect of our lives.”…

But the big fear is what might happen to the electrical grid, since power surges caused by solar particles could blow out giant transformers. Such transformers can take a long time to replace, especially if hundreds are destroyed at once, said Baker, who is a co-author of a National Research Council report on solar-storm risks…

“Imagine large cities without power for a week, a month, or a year,” Baker said. “The losses could be $1 to $2 trillion, and the effects could be felt for years.”

An event even close in scale to the Carrington Event would quickly remind us of how much we take this infrastructure for granted.

Although I don’t wish for something like this to happen, it would make for a fascinating natural experiment. If there was no electricity for an extended period, how would governments and people respond? Would we end up in scenes reminiscent of Hollywood apocalyptic thrillers or could we survive and make do? Such movies tend to built around the idea that there will be widespread destruction, not the loss of vital electricity. And if everyone is affected, who would lead the way forward?

h/t Instapundit

ASA in Las Vegas update: union reaches deal with Chicago Hilton hotels

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The American Sociological Association conference was moved earlier this year to Las Vegas. This was done because the Hilton chain in Chicago did not have a deal with the union of hotel workers. The Chicago Tribune reports today that Hilton “is the first major hotel chain” to reach a deal with the union after 18 months without a contract in place.

I know the ASA had to make a decision at some point and couldn’t wait around for the hotels and unions to reach a deal. Even though Chicago would have been an excellent location, Las Vegas should be fun in its own way.

Using a sociological approach in “e-discovery technologies”

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Legal cases can generate a tremendous amount of documents that each side needs to examine. With new searching technology, legal teams can now go through a lot more data for a lot less money. In one example, “Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.” But within this discussion, the writer suggests that these searches can be done in two ways:

E-discovery technologies generally fall into two broad categories that can be described as “linguistic” and “sociological.”

The most basic linguistic approach uses specific search words to find and sort relevant documents. More advanced programs filter documents through a large web of word and phrase definitions. A user who types “dog” will also find documents that mention “man’s best friend” and even the notion of a “walk.”

The sociological approach adds an inferential layer of analysis, mimicking the deductive powers of a human Sherlock Holmes. Engineers and linguists at Cataphora, an information-sifting company based in Silicon Valley, have their software mine documents for the activities and interactions of people — who did what when, and who talks to whom. The software seeks to visualize chains of events. It identifies discussions that might have taken place across e-mail, instant messages and telephone calls…

The Cataphora software can also recognize the sentiment in an e-mail message — whether a person is positive or negative, or what the company calls “loud talking” — unusual emphasis that might give hints that a document is about a stressful situation. The software can also detect subtle changes in the style of an e-mail communication.

A shift in an author’s e-mail style, from breezy to unusually formal, can raise a red flag about illegal activity.

So this second technique gets branded as “sociological” because it is looking for patterns of behavior and interaction. If you wondered how the programmers set up their code in order to this kind of analysis, it sounds like some academics have been working on the problem for almost a decade:

[A computer scientist] bought a copy of the database [of Enron emails] for $10,000 and made it freely available to academic and corporate researchers. Since then, it has become the foundation of a wealth of new science — and its value has endured, since privacy constraints usually keep large collections of e-mail out of reach. “It’s made a massive difference in the research community,” Dr. McCallum said.

The Enron Corpus has led to a better understanding of how language is used and how social networks function, and it has improved efforts to uncover social groups based on e-mail communication.

Any sociologists involved in this project to provide input on what the programs should be looking for in human interactions?

This sort of analysis software could be very handy for sociological research when one has hundreds of documents or sources to look through. Of course, the algorithms might have be changed for specific projects or settings but I wonder if this sort of software might be widely available in a few years. Would this analysis be better than going through one by one through documents in coding software like Atlas.Ti or NVivo?

Might the 30-year mortgage disappear?

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An article suggests that the 30 year mortgage might “fade away.” As both Republicans and Democrats think about eliminating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it is unclear whether a purely private mortgage industry would retain features like a 30-year payment period:

Life without Fannie and Freddie is the rare goal shared by the Obama administration and House Republicans, although it will not happen soon. Congress must agree on a plan, which could take years, and then the market must be weaned slowly from dependence on the companies and the financial backing they provide.The reasons by now are well understood. Fannie and Freddie, created to increase the availability of mortgage loans, misused the government’s support to enrich shareholders and executives by backing millions of shoddy loans. Taxpayers so far have spent more than $135 billion on the cleanup.

The much more divisive question is whether the government should preserve the benefits that the companies provide to middle-class borrowers, including lower interest rates, lenient terms and the ability to get a mortgage even when banks are not making other kinds of loans…

Hanging in the balance are the basic features of a mortgage loan: the interest rate and repayment period.

Fannie and Freddie allow people to borrow at lower rates because investors are so eager to pump money into the two companies that they accept relatively modest returns. The key to that success is the guarantee that investors will be repaid even if borrowers default — a promise ultimately backed by taxpayers.

A long line of studies has found that the benefit to borrowers is relatively modest, less than one percentage point. But that was before the flood. Fannie, Freddie and other federal programs now support roughly 90 percent of new mortgage loans because lenders cannot raise money for mortgages that do not carry government guarantees.

The issue of a 30-year mortgage would be up for debate within a broader restructuring of an important industry. Both organizations, Fannie Mae founded in 1938 and Freddie Mac created in 1970,  were intended to help Americans become homeowners. Fannie Mae, along with several other government programs, particularly helped to boost homeownership rates after World War II. During this postwar housing boom, government programs helped lower down payments and lengthened the years in a mortgage. If I remember correctly, mortgages prior to this postwar period were 15 or 20 years at most, required much larger down payments, and were available from mortgage lenders or savings and loans associations.

Where this article needs to go next is to ask whether this means fewer Americans will have access to mortgages and homeownership. If the industry is indeed restructured in the coming years, will the homeownership rate continue to drop? If politicians from both sides of the aisle are interested eliminating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, does this mean the federal government is pulling away from more explicit endorsements of homeownership? It is intriguing to note that all of this might take place because of a large economic crisis (though both of these programs have had their critics for decades) while Fannie Mae was instituted in response to an earlier crisis.

A stronger market for sociological themes, due in part to the rise of the “Gladwellian” genre

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While considering David Brook’s new book The Social Animal (some earlier thoughts here), a reviewer provides some context by explaining why books invoking social science, including sociology, have been more popular recently:

The public appetite for books on social science was weak for decades. In the 1980s, particle physicists and cosmologists like Stephen Hawking learned to cut out the equations and reached a big audience. But in the 1990s, interest shifted to sociology and psychology. Steven Pinker wrote about the evolution of the mind, and Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” signaled a tipping point itself by scaling the best-seller lists and staying there for 10 years (and counting).

Mr. Gladwell’s ability to create page-turners out of material from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology cast a long shadow over the genre. “Gladwellian” would not have been listed on the Word Exchange in 1986, but if you had invested at its IPO in the early 2000s you would have earned a tidy sum by now. Authors in this genre now labor to find Gladwellian stories and characters to vivify the theories and studies that support their counterintuitive insights. Sometimes they focus on the stories to the exclusion of the studies, a practice that makes it easy to reach pleasing but unsound conclusions.

Gladwell’s use of sociological ideas and themes earned him the first award for “Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues” in 2007 from the American Sociological Association.

While Gladwell certainly wasn’t the first to write such books, he certainly seems to have spawned a number of (often inferior) imitators. The “Gladwellian” genre goes something like this: take a common facet of life, explain why it matters, and then winsomely weave together both established bodies of scientific research with compelling stories. Since David Brooks seems to be taking a slightly different approach by developing two characters to carry his narrative, does this mean Brooks is trying to deliberately break out of this genre by returning to “the 18th-century didactic narrative”? Just how many “Gladwellian” books or articles can the market bear?

But someone could do a much deeper analysis of this. While Gladwell may have a good presentation, what changed in American society such that his books would find a receptive audience? If physics ruled the day in the 1980s, why the shift to the social sciences in the 1990s? Was this some response to a booming economy or the end of the Cold War or a number of new discoveries and exciting theories in the social sciences around this time?

Two more thoughts on Daley’s speech on campus: lack of partisanship and regional cooperation

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I’ve already written two posts about Mayor Daley’s visit to campus (see here and here). But a few days later, two themes, a lack of partisanship and an emphasis on regional cooperation, continue to stand out for me as I have thought about how this talk fits with my research on suburbs. Here is why these two themes matter:

1. To start, many people might look at Daley’s visit to the suburbs as strange, particularly since he came to Wheaton, a community known both for its political and religious conservatism. Daley is quite well-known for being a Democrat and one who sits atop a broad Democratic machine in Chicago. And yet, Daley stressed that many issues facing cities and municipalities are not partisan issues. Rather, they are issues of serving the people and having a balanced budget.

On one hand, we could view this as Daley simply knowing his audience: with a more conservative crowd, Daley might have been unwilling to sell a Democratic agenda. But on the other hand, this idea of a lack of partisanship is quite common in suburban government. While certain communities are known to be more Democratic or Republican (roughly, further out suburbs are more Republicans, inner-ring suburbs are more Democratic), local mayors and councilman (or alderman) rarely run on party platforms. Rather, their “parties” tend to be called things like “Citizens to Improve Wheaton.”

When a problem arises, such as dealing with police or firefighter unions, Democratic or Republican communities might approach the issue in different ways. But at the same time, it is not as if Republicans can dismiss or ban the unions while Democrats can’t simply give in to every union concession. With a more limited budget in many suburbs, city governments have to maintain good levels of service (indeed, good suburbs tend to be marked by a lack of crime and good fire coverage) while still meeting a budget.

Additionally, Daley mentioned the need for businesses in a community multiple times. Whether Democrat or Republicans, communities need businesses to provide jobs for citizens but also to maintain and grow the tax base. This issue of a tax base is not just an abstract matter: it is directly linked to the size of the municipal budget. Therefore, mayors and leaders on both sides have to be pro-business (though their approach might differ somewhat) in order to provide services.

2. A second theme was the need for regional cooperation. Daley was introduced by former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert who said, “what is good for Chicago is good for northern Illinois, and what is good for northern Illinois is good for Chicago.” Daley said something similar that what is good for the suburbs is good for Chicago and vice versa.

Again, Daley might have been playing for the crowd but I don’t think this is a full explanation. One, regional cooperation is needed on certain issues. Daley mentioned O’Hare expansion several times. Although the land is in the City of Chicago, the slow process has involved several suburban communities who have opposed Daley’s plan. Unlike a situation like Meigs Field where Daley could do what he pleased, he has had to work with others on this project. (Whether he wants to work with others on O’Hare is another matter.) Another transportation issue that drew regional emphasis was the fight over whether Canadian National should be allowed to purchase the Elgin, Joliet, & Eastern railroad line. Similarly to the O’Hare issue, this purchase harmed certain suburbs by increasing train traffic while reducing traffic on other lines in other communities. (See the largest regional group opposed to this purchase.)

Two, Daley mentioned regularly meeting with suburban mayors (as well as with big city mayors in the US and around the world). Outside of particular large issues, regional mayors and city managers get together to discuss “best practices.” While there were county groups that did this (like the DuPage Mayors & Managers Conference), Daley brought together mayors from 272 communities across the region in the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus which began in 1997.

At the same time, we could ask why groups like these don’t push harder for tackling larger regional issues like planning or crime. The Chicago region is notorious for having a large number of independent, taxing bodies. The whole region would benefit from a regional planning approach that could start to tackle issues like affordable housing across the region (and not sticking it only in certain less wealthy communities) and containing sprawl (which impacts issues like traffic congestion and pollution levels).

We know historically that the split between cities and suburbs really became clear in the early 1900s when suburban communities no longer wanted to be annexed into the nearby big city. Communities want to work together: just recently, a number of suburban leaders said they were looking for help from new Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (though I also wondered whether these suburban mayors would help Emanuel in kind). Today, these regional groups are better than having no groups but primarily focusing on practical or technical municipal matters leaves a whole range of regional issues left to be tackled. Granted, these regional groups have no binding legislative authority but they could also be leveraged to do big things in a region.

Ultimately, a mayor or city leader has to respond to the needs of one’s citizens. However, many of the issues that mayors face are similar across communities and the challenges are often beyond the scope of just one municipality. All suburban and city leaders need to deal with the tax base, balancing the budget, and thinking about regional issues such as transportation and how to manage growth.