Category Archives: Sociology

Chicago’s population loss, neighborhood by neighborhood

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After the recent news that Chicago lost about 200,000 residents between 2000 and 2010, the Chicago Tribune takes a look at how the population changed in each of Chicago’s 77 neighborhoods. Here are some of the trends:

Sixty of Chicago’s 77 neighborhoods lost population, according to the 2010 Census. The focus of the population growth was in the Loop, the Near South Side and the Near West Side, areas that experienced a boom in new residential high-rises and loft developments.

The city lost more than 200,000 people during the decade, many from predominantly black neighborhoods hard hit by crime and foreclosures. More than 27,000 non-Hispanic white residents, meanwhile, poured into the city’s downtown and surrounding areas.

On the Southwest Side, the number of Hispanics and Asians grew in historically white ethnic neighborhoods such as Bridgeport, Archer Heights, West Lawn, West Elsdon and Ashburn. White populations in those communities dipped.

So the population growth took place in two places: around the downtown where wealthier whites moved in and on the southwest side where Latinos and Asians moved in. Throughout the rest of the city, the population declined.

As the City of Chicago thinks about how to respond to these figures, should they focus resources on the areas that were growing (particularly the area around the Loop which is likely to get more attention) or figure out some way to boost the prospects of the 60 other neighborhoods that experienced population loss?

PC games

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Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch is reporting that Zynga recently removed “Wedding Chapels” from its CityVille game:

Players could previously buy “Wedding Chapels,” which looked like small country churches but without a cross or other religious symbols, to add to their city. But the virtual item has been removed and replaced with the more secular and nondescript “Wedding Hall.” With two gold ring things that somehow makes me think only of McDonalds.

No word yet from Zynga concerning their reasons for the change.  Arrington, however, thinks the company was just taking the easy way out:

I don’t know why this bothers me so much, since I’m not very religious myself. But it just seems so artificially politically correct.

As a leader in social network games, Zynga (Wikipedia backgrounder) certainly has a lot of constituents to keep happy.  But I have to agree with Arrington that this seems unnecessarily petty.

A-Rod real estate tax flap tied to incentive to construct affordable housing

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It appears that a number of luxury housing owners in New York City, including Yankees’ star Alex Rodriguez, are getting a major real estate tax break. While this is creating a stir, there is more to this story: these luxury units are getting a tax break because the developers have promised to build affordable housing elsewhere in the city.

Rodriguez and all the residents of his posh high rise will get tax breaks for 10 years under the city’s 421A tax abatement program. Luxury developers get tax breaks in exchange for making sure affordable units get built elsewhere. Rodriguez is one of some 45,000 New Yorkers who have scored the tax break.

“I think it’s outrageous,” Lewton said.

When Rodriguez’s moves into his $6 million, five-bedroom penthouse his tax bill will be $1,150. In contrast, Stephen and Phyllis Franciosa pay $3,100 in taxes one their one-family home in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx…

The councilman said the law needs to be changed because this year alone the program will cost the city $900 million in lost revenue.

A-Rod’s taxes are so low that if he paid the going rate his tax bill would be 50 times higher. He should get such a break when he faces the Red Sox pitching staff.

City officials claim the tax breaks on Rodriguez’ building helped build over 575 units of affordable housing in the Bronx.

This is not an uncommon tactic for communities to encourage affordable housing: grant some tax breaks in exchange for the builder or developer constructing some units of affordable housing. It is often a struggle to get developers and builders to construct affordable units on their own as profit margins are lower. So communities have searched for incentives that would still allow builders to make their money while also providing for the public good.

In the long run, will this story simply be commentary about how the rich and famous get to play by different rules (and New York loves to pick on A-Rod) or can there be a reasonable discussion about how cities go about promoting affordable housing? I am guessing that the first option will easily win out. Why can’t New York news organizations go to those 575 units of affordable housing in the Bronx and talk to the other people who benefited from this tax break?

Selling a car by selling Detroit

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The troubles of Detroit have been well documented and discussed in the American media in recent years (see here and here). So why would Chrysler mount a full advertising campaign (and I see this commercial almost every commercial break at times) based on Detroit  for its new 200 model? See the long-form (2:03) video here.

The entire campaign seems to be built around this idea that Detroit is something different: the ad says it is not New York, Chicago, or Las Vegas. While we get some typical shots, of a high school team running and a woman ice skating, the emphasis is on their hard work. The scenes on the street are at night with steam coming out of manhole covers as the 200 rolls along. The longer ad features Eminen, perhaps the only celebrity known to most Americans as being from Detroit (does Kid Rock count?). And all of this is driven home by the tagline: “Imported from Detroit.”

Perhaps the strategy is this: why not take all of this talk about Detroit’s darker side (and the commercial mentions that this is a “town that has been to hell and back”) and turn it around so that the commercial makes a positive point about this gritty, tough, and edgy car. Will this explicit linking to Detroit, a city on the decline, boost sales of a particular car model? Do Detroit residents see this commercial as positive and representative of their city?

Quick Review: The King’s Speech

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The upcoming Oscars seem to be a battle between two films: The Social Network (see my earlier review here and sagescape’s here) and The King’s Speech. I just had a chance to see the second film and have some thoughts about this Best Picture contender.

1. Since this is a historical drama, I expected this film to be somewhat bland and formulaic. It was neither.

2. There is a little bit of a storyline about the gap between British royalty and the common people. In the film, this gap is between King George VI and his speech therapist, an untrained but effective practitioner. The question arises: how can someone rule a country (and empire) if either side has little idea of how the other lives? We could probably ask similar questions today about many of the people at the top of our social hierarchy.

3. The film had more humor, albeit fairly dry, than I was expecting. I don’t know that I would think of Colin Firth as a comic actor but he has some good lines spoken by a struggling character.

4. The context of the film is engaging as Europe inches toward World War II. Even if the timeline in the movie doesn’t quite match the historical record, the struggles of King George VI are heightened by the gathering storm.

5. The peak of the film is a speech by King George VI. Even though it is an important speech delivered at a key historical moment, I appreciated that the musical score and the editing was understated and intimate. Too often, I think films use music and editing as a crutch to cover up less-than-exciting climaxes. Good plots don’t need to be oversold.

6. I thought The Social Network was interesting but not great. In comparison, The King’s Speech is weightier, has better acting, and doesn’t have to rely on edgy dialogue or a current storyline. My vote for the Best Picture (between these two and the other nominees I’ve seen including True Grit, Toy Story 3, and Inception): The King’s Speech.

(Critics also like this film: RottenTomatoes.com says the film is 94% fresh with 188 positive reviews out of 199 total reviews.)

St. Louis also lost population (8%) in the 2000s and mayor says it is “absolutely bad news”

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Last week, 2010 Census figures about Chicago were released and showed a population decline of 200,000. Population figures regarding St. Louis were just released and city leaders are surprised at the 8% population loss over the 2000s:

Figures from the 2010 census were a bitter disappointment, as the city’s population dipped to 319,294.

That’s down more than 29,000 – a staggering 8 percent – from 2000.

For St. Louis leaders, the news was doubly disappointing because they were expecting to see an increase.

“It is absolutely bad news,” Mayor Francis Slay said. “We thought after more than 50 years of population decline that the city had finally changed direction. Obviously, that’s not the case.”…

St. Louis was the nation’s eighth-largest city with a population of 856,795 in 1950. Now, for a couple of decades, it hasn’t even been Missouri’s largest city.

Kansas City’s population grew to 460,000 in the latest census, widening the gap over St. Louis, though the St. Louis metro area remains significantly larger.

Since the mid-20th century, the exodus of St. Louis residents to the suburbs has been startling. And people keep moving farther away from the urban core. St. Louis County lost population in 2010 for the first time, down 1.7 percent to 998,954 in 2010, as residents relocate to communities like St. Charles, O’Fallon, Wentzville and Troy.

Since 1950, St. Louis has steadily lost population. A few thoughts about these figures:

1. On one hand, it seems odd that the mayor would be caught so off-guard by these figures. Couldn’t the city have predicted or at least seen some hints of it through other measures (like vacancies)? But this is more complicated:

A census estimate on July 1, 2009, forecasted that the city’s population of 348,189 in 2000 had grown to 356,587.

Either the estimate was wrong or there has been a substantial recent exodus.

The 2010 census is based on the population in April 2010.

So what happened between this 2009 Census estimate and the 2010 figures?

2. There are two things at stake with these figures: the loss of state and federal dollars (often tied to population) and a blow to civic pride. As the mayor suggested, the city had thought they had turned a corner. Additionally, there appears to be some comparisons to Kansas City, the other major city in Missouri.

2a. But on the other hand, the trends happening in the St. Louis area are happening in many large cities: people are moving to the suburbs, further and further from the center of the metropolitan region. Even St. Louis County (suburban but three times larger than St. Louis) lost population, 1.7%, for the first time.

3. While it is notable that the population in St. Louis dropped by about 29,000 (8%), in the last sixty years, this is the smallest percentage drop since a population increase in 1950. From 1960 onward, here are the percentage decreases: -12.5% in 1960, -17% in 1970, -27.2% in 1980, -12.4% in 1990, -12.2% in 2000, and -8.3% in 2010. So perhaps the population in St. Louis is slowly stabilizing.

Richard Florida argues cities increase levels of inequality

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Richard Florida, dubber of the Creative Class, argues that data shows that cities exacerbate levels of inequality:

“Something fundamental has changed in our economy, and it’s happening at the metropolitan level,” explains Baum-Snow. “If we want to understand what’s causing the wage gap, we now know we need to look at the unique economies of our larger cities,” adds Pavan.

Both the U.S. and the world have grown increasingly spiky, with our socio-economic divide increasingly overlaid with a growing economic geography of class.  Big cities like New York and LA have attracted wealthy people not just from America but from around the world.  This trend reflects the growing advantages of geographic clustering or agglomeration.  The larger and more populous a city or region, the more likely it is to have the human capital and economic ecosystems required to support the most advanced — and hence the highest-paying — technologies and industries.  Bigger cities attract more innovators, more entrepreneurs, and more highly skilled and ambitious people in general, and provide a fluid environment where these individuals can combine and recombine their skills. Big cities also generate powerful economies of scale and scope, resulting in higher rates of innovation, new firm formation, and productivity.  They attract better-educated, better-trained, more-experienced workers, driving up wages.

At other side of the spectrum, manufacturing, which once clustered in and around large cities and metros, has shifted to less expensive suburban, exurban, and off-shore locations. And large cities have become home to a large and growing contingent of lower-skill, lower pay service jobs — from childcare and food preparation to retail sales and personal services.  Taken together these factors have in effect divided or bifurcated the labor market in big cities into highly paid “creators” and much lower-paid “servers.”

On the other side, Florida also shows a (very modest) correlation that city size is related to higher wages. But overall, Florida argues that cities draw both the uber-wealthy and those who “serve” the city.

Florida doesn’t present much data here so we would need more analysis in order to figure out what is going on. Does this argument present a  counterpoint to these two articles about the future of cities and suburbs in Foreign Policy last fall? It is hard to tell – Florida also says that cities are centers of innovation and entrepreneurship. And even if cities do have extreme levels of inequality, do they benefit larger society enough to offset the inequality within their borders?

(Interestingly, both Florida’s data and the study he cites use metropolitan areas to mean cities. This makes a lot of sense: central cities and suburbs should be viewed more often as single, interdependent units. Would the inequality be even more pronounced if the analysis was limited to central city borders?)

Nostalgia for the early 1990s: McMansions, SUVs, and more

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The early 1990s are not that long ago but this comparison of the 2011 Ford Explorer and the 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee is wistful for this earlier era:

The early 1990s are starting to seem like a long time ago. McMansions were barely a twinkle in the Toll brothers’ eyes. Apple stock was less than fifteen dollars a share. The Iraq war was going great. A tea party was something for little girls. And Justin Bieber hadn’t even been born.

In the U.S. car market, perhaps the biggest difference between then and now is that the SUV, as an automotive force, was in its infancy. Sure, Wranglers, Blazers, Broncos, Scouts, and the like had been bouncing along on the fringe of the American automotive scene for a while, but their numbers were small.

I am interested in this mention of McMansions, which has several connotations in these opening paragraphs:

1. It is not unusual to lump the McMansion in with other consumer objects. Perhaps its most common pairing is with the SUV, often considered an oversized and ostentatious vehicle.

2. The Toll Brothers, a large American home builder, are often tied to McMansions. This builder preferred to call their larger homes “estate homes” but critics ended up dubbing them McMansions. Read a quick summary of Toll Brothers history here. The term McMansions really started being used in earnest in the late 1990s.

3. There seems to be a growing idea that the McMansion might have been a blip in American history. This review pegs the McMansion as beginning in the 1990s and other recent commentators (see here and here) have suggested McMansions are done and will not return. The jury is still out on this one: the size of the average American home grew steadily from the 1950s until just a few years ago.

(4. An unrelated issue: can we already have nostalgia for a time just 20 years ago? Think of this in terms of “oldies” on the radio: it’s hard to even find 60’s music on the radio and now the 80’s and 90’s are considered old. How far can we compress the past in order to develop a prepackaged nostalgia?)

In review of Triumph of the City, summary of how city dwellers view the suburbs

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As he reviews the new book Triumph of the City, a reviewer summarizes how city dwellers view the suburbs:

But look past the rhetorical flourishes, and you see an ambivalent verdict on post-1960s urban policy: It is often the actors most philosophically “urbanist” in intent that are the most deleteriously anti-city in effect. Mr. Glaeser brings us, in striking detail, a gated subdivision in the Houston outskirts called “The Woodlands.” The city dweller’s inborn cultural revulsion to the place is the stuff of any number of Sundance dramas: the sterility of the McMansions, the moral vacuity of the micropolitics, the ecological nihilism of the SUVs. But the appeal of such prefab townlets—one million people have moved to the Houston area since 2000—has little to do with culture; the Sun Belt beckons because urban California and the Northeast have radically distorted the market for any city’s most crucial commodity: property.

These complaints about suburbia do seem to be commonly found in Sundance-type dramas, books, and music. This is practically its own genre: the “average person” (often middle to upper class whites) finds emptiness in sparkling (but shallow) suburbia yet comes alive when encountering something different than white, crass, depressing suburbia. But as the reviewer notes, there are reasons that people move to places like Houston.

(A condensed version of this book’s argument, particularly about how skyscrapers will help the city thrive,  can be found here.)

The ubiquity of the standing ovation

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My wife and I recently had the chance to see Les Misérables in Chicago. At the end of the show, the crowd gave a standing ovation. It seems that this is no longer unusual: whether it is a high school play, an orchestra concert, or a big-time musical, the crowd gives a standing ovation. Is this a new social norm?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, here is the definition of a standing ovation: “a rousing ovation conferred by an audience standing as a mark of enthusiastic approval, esp. after a speech.” But I have always thought that a standing ovation is not just given when the crowd enthusiastically approves; rather, it is reserved for special occasions, when the performance or speaker has done a tremendous job. This more restrictive definition is supported by Wikipedia: “A standing ovation is a form of applause where members of a seated audience stand up while applauding. This is done on special occasions by an audience to show their approval and is done after extraordinary performances of particularly high acclaim…Standing ovations are considered to be a special honor.” If this is the social norm, how can every performance be worthy of a standing ovation?

So why might crowds be more willing to give more frequent standing ovations? A few thoughts:

1. It has lost its status as something done for a special or noteworthy performance. It is now perfunctory. Crowds think they are supposed to give a standing ovation no matter what.

2. A more nuanced explanation: in the case of something like Les Misérables, the average attendee does not know whether the actors have given a good performance or not. This is a world-renowned musical, the attendees have paid a lot of money to attend, and so it must have been good and deserving of a standing ovation. The key here is that the average person can’t easily distinguish the quality of many performances and is left to judge the performance by other factors, such as its status. Since the theater or going to the orchestra is a rare event for many and it is accompanied by ideas about high culture and fancier dress, the standing ovation may just seem like the right thing to do.

(This is supported by an incident after the musical: a teenage couple was walking out and one said, “Epinone was just terrible.” The other said, “Yeah, her singing was bad.” A few of us who overheard this just smiled and looked at each other. How were we to know whether this was true or not? Presumably, one would have had to see this musical multiple times or listened to the music many times before a judgment could be made.)

If the standing ovation is now normal, what can a crowd do to show extreme enthusiasm or to mark an excellent performance? A few options: a prolonged applause or loud whistling or yelling along with the clapping.