Category Archives: Sociology

Playing Chicago suburbs off each other to get the best deal for the owners of the Bears

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Which Chicago suburb might give the Bears the best option to make money off a new stadium and development around it? Enter Naperville, the largest suburb in the region:

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“We will continue the ongoing demolition activity and work toward a path forward in Arlington Heights, but it is no longer our singular focus,” Scott Hagel, the Bears senior vice president of marketing and communications said in a statement. “It is our responsibility to listen to other municipalities in Chicagoland about potential locations that can deliver on this transformational opportunity for our fans, our club and the state of Illinois.”…

This isn’t the first time there’s been hopes of a Bears move to the suburbs. Through the years, the Bears have considered sites in Hanover Park, Hoffman Estates, Aurora, Elk Grove Village and Waukegan. And once before in Arlington Heights.

Wehrli’s letter touts Naperville as accessible through major highways, such as the east-west Interstate 88 and the north-south Interstate 355, as well the city’s downtown Metra train station. There are also Metra stops in nearby Lisle and on Route 59 in Aurora.

The meeting is a major splash for Wehrli, who was elected in April and has been mayor for only a month. A lifelong Naperville resident with family roots in the community dating back to the 1840s, his letter to Warren stresses the impact an NFL stadium would have on the city.

This strategy works for the Bears because they can seek out a community that will give them a good deal on land, permits, taxes, and more. Their goal is to make money off the stadium and nearby development.

This strategy might work for individual suburbs beyond Arlington Heights. If the Bears do not come to Naperville, does the new mayor lose anything by reaching out? Even a short conversation keeps his community in the news. If the Bears come, it could be touted as a big deal. (On the other hand, just as some residents and taxing bodies in and near Arlington Heights are not thrilled about the Bears locating there, I imagine there would be some resistance in Naperville.)

Ultimately, providing public money for stadiums tends to benefit the team owners the most. Someone will host the Bears in the future but the team will end up as the biggest winner.

Lack of groundwater means limiting new development in the Phoenix area

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The sprawling growth that characterizes Phoenix will have to contend with new regulations tied to groundwater:

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Arizona officials announced Thursday the state will no longer grant certifications for new developments within the Phoenix area, as groundwater rapidly disappears amid years of water overuse and climate change-driven drought.

A new study showed that the groundwater supporting the Phoenix area likely can’t meet additional development demand in the coming century, officials said at a news conference. Gov. Katie Hobbs and the state’s top water officials outlined the results of the study looking at groundwater demand within the Phoenix metro area, which is regulated by a state law that tries to ensure Arizona’s housing developments, businesses and farms are not using more groundwater than is being replaced.

The study found that around 4% of the area’s demand for groundwater, close to 4.9 million acre-feet, cannot be met over the next 100 years under current conditions – a huge shortage that will have significant implications for housing developments in the coming years in the booming Phoenix metro area, which has led the nation in population growth.

State officials said the announcement wouldn’t impact developments that have already been approved. However, developers that are seeking to build new construction will have to demonstrate they can provide an “assured water supply” for 100 years using water from a source that is not local groundwater.

The sprawl of the United States depends on cheap and abundant water available for the new properties. Phoenix is not alone in pursuing sprawl or in not having to think much about water for a long time.

However, the immediate and long-term future in at least a few metro areas involves a lack of water. This is certainly an issue in the West and Southwest. It could be in play in other regions as well.

Since sprawl is so ingrained in American daily life and in assumptions about successful communities, seeing how developers and communities procure water could get really interesting.

When strangers disappear from all of our photos

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This has been possible with Photoshop and similar tools for years but Magic Eraser from Google makes it even easier: we can get rid of strangers in our photos. Should we?

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My most Andy Rooney opinion, at least since the latest flare-up of the sleepover debate (I’m pro), is that we should not erase strangers from our family pictures. My original nuclear family’s albums, which my mother maintained in those classic 1980s scrapbooks with self-adhesive pages, annotating each image in her distinctive handwriting, are absolutely, positively chock-full of randos. When I was in elementary school, I loved to look at these pictures, hauling out two albums at a time and paging through them at our kitchen table. It was a time when I was becoming acutely aware of the difference between our family and others—not in a bad way, but in an interested one. We lived in a small town, and our family vacations gave us information about how things were elsewhere. I wasn’t going to pass up analyzing those clues.

The people we are around are also parts of our lives, even if we do not know them. To take pictures in public often means that others are present. We may not interact with them but we do not live in a world where we have our own bubbles and no one else is around.

There may be occasional times where removing strangers makes sense. Perhaps we want to focus on particular people or a particular scene. But, doing this at a larger scale always puts us at the center and makes it appear as other people do not exist.

Is this a continuation of the emphasis on the individual self? Social media, which is linked to the images we take, see, and use today, also encourages emphasizing ourselves. In images and a world where there is no one portrayed around us, we are at the center.

A future world where our pictures only feature us makes me think of Black Mirror or an extended global pandemic where streets and public places are empty. It would be a loss of our collective memories and the ways that we rely on nameless others every day.

Measuring community success with “fully occupied homes and anchored schools”

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How might we know whether a small town is declining or just experiencing change? Here is one suggestion:

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The University of Illinois Extension earlier this year held a series of webinars to arm leaders of rural communities with positive data, such as fully occupied homes and anchored schools, while suggesting language those leaders should use to recruit people to move to rural towns, which are often coping with negative stereotypes…

Indeed, residents and leaders in Cullom and Wenona, a town of 1,000 an hour’s drive away and about 25 miles south of the LaSalle-Peru area, say their towns are very much in demand. Cullom Mayor Barbara Hahn said that people — mostly from larger cities around the state — call her “all the time” to see if there are any houses for sale and she mostly has to tell them that the housing stock is at capacity…

But Neste said that the lack of population increase is not because rural life is undesirable…

The circumstances lead to one inescapable, albeit morbid, conclusion, experts say. Prospective rural dwellers are left waiting for seniors occupying single-family homes to die.

What is lurking behind this discussion is an assumption in the United States about communities: they are considered healthiest if they are growing. Communities whose populations are stagnant or declining are often viewed as not doing well. There needs to be construction, population growth, and new businesses in a community for outsiders to suggest that it is doing well. The end of this story above tells of one downstate small town that implemented a TIF district and took on risk in order to build some new housing.

But, not all communities in the United States grow decade after decade. Some are growing now, particularly in the Sunbelt. A number of cities, suburbs, and small towns reached their population peak in the past. Some of these examples are regularly discussed, such as Detroit or Chicago or rural small towns.

The measures suggested above offer some different ways of discussing the vitality of a community. In-demand housing is something Americans understand; if there are few housing units available, this suggests people like the community. Having thriving schools is another aspect Americans like as good schools suggest a community has plenty of children and the community rallies around an institution that can help the next generation succeed.

Other measures that might also be helpful:

-The number of active community groups. This suggests people want to participate.

-The number of local jobs available per resident. Are there economic opportunities in the community?

-The number of local businesses owned by residents or nearby residents. This highlights local business activity compared to national firms (like dollar stores or fast food restaurants).

More broadly, a more open conversation among Americans about what marks a healthy or good or desirable community could provide more measures than just population growth.

Regulation coming for renting out suburban backyard swimming pools?

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Suburbanites are renting out their pools through an app and their neighbors are not happy:

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The sounds of summer fun ripple up from ads for Swimply, an app that allows homeowners to rent out private pools to strangers looking to enjoy cool water under the hot sun. But that seasonal chorus has sharply divided suburban residents of Montgomery County as the local government considers formally regulating the short-term amenity rentals — potentially becoming the first in the nation to do so…

It is only mid-spring, but already dozens of pools in and around Maryland’s most populous county have been listed for rent on Swimply, which launched in 2020 as people sought alternatives to public pools that shut down because of the pandemic on the heels of the wild success of apps like Airbnb and Uber. Hosts set hourly rates anywhere between $25 to $100 an hour to access private backyard pools that bypass lines and crowds.

Unlike long-established home rental and ride sharing apps, newer apps that let people rent out their pools, home gyms and backyards have largely been unregulated across the United States so far. In fact, several jurisdictions, from the city of San Jose to towns across New Jersey to the state of Wisconsin, have tried over the past three years to ban the rentals or set up strict rules that require private pools to meet the same standards as a public pool…

A like-minded group of 36 county residents from Chevy Chase, Rockville, Montgomery Village, Kensington and Rosemary Hills, wrote a letter opposing the bill and asking the county instead to outlaw the amenity rentals altogether. The group argued that the rentals turn quiet residential neighborhoods into bustling business districts, without the infrastructure to support commercial activity. They raised dozens of concerns, largely over the added nuisance of strangers pouring into their neighborhoods because of the apps, congested roads, scarce parking, and noise and safety.

Should the property rights of homeowners reign supreme – they can do what they want with their property – or is this too much activity within residential neighborhoods where people expect quiet and do not want neighboring activities that they perceive will affect their property values?

If Montgomery County does not regulate this, someone will. I can imagine an alternative line of reasoning from a suburban government: this is a possible revenue stream.

Adding MENA to Illinois forms

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An Illinois bill will make the state the first in the country to recognize MENA groups on forms:

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Illinois is on its way to becoming the first state to recognize Arab Americans when collecting public data.

This month, H.B. 3768 passed both houses of the General Assembly and is on its way to Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s desk. When signed into law, Arab Americans and minority groups from the Middle East will be recognized separately in state data.

Pritzker tweeted his support upon the bill’s passage in the House on May 18: “History made! With HB 3768 passage, our MENA or Middle Eastern and North African communities will now have their own category on state forms and surveys.”…

Illinois has one of the largest populations of Arab Americans in the nation. But on most registration forms, Arab American is not an option when selecting ethnicity, something groups such as Arab American Family Services, advocates and community leaders have sought to change for years.

It will be interesting to see if this helps move along the conversation at the national level where the MENA category was not added to the recent Census. I assume if enough states did this, it would then be easier to add it at the federal level to make sure there is data from all parts of the country.

The McMansion riches of ’80s TV versus the massive dwellings of today’s Succession

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TV depictions of what constitutes a house for the wealthy can change over time:

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And if the “Succession” audience is smaller, the money is, pointedly, bigger. Rewatched in 2023, the idea of luxury in “Dallas” looks quaint, almost dowdy. The aesthetic is Texan country club; the Ewing homestead, the size of a decent suburban McMansion, is a toolshed next to the Manhattan aeries, Hamptons manors and Italian villas that the Roys flitter among.

Some of this is a matter of modern premium-cable budgets vs. the grind of old-school network-TV production, of course. But it also reflects the changed, distorting nature of modern riches. In 1980, American wealth inequality was still near its postwar lows. Since then, the wealth of the top .01 percent has grown at a rate roughly five times as much as that of the population overall. Today, the very rich are very, very, very richer.

The holdings of Waystar Royco — Hollywood studios, cruise lines, newspapers, amusement parks, a king-making right-wing news channel — make Ewing Oil look like a franchise gas station. We know only vaguely how Logan Roy built his empire, but it was enabled partly by the media-consolidation and antitrust deregulation, beginning in the “Dallas”/Reagan era, that allowed his real-life analogues like Rupert Murdoch to make their own piles.

American homes do broadcast messages about a resident’s status and wealth. McMansions are supposed to signal that the owner can afford a big home in a particular style (even if the imitation of traditional styles are odd).

On the other hand, mansions are even bigger, more extravagant, and can be of better build quality. Having multiple such dwellings extends far beyond the McMansion owner in the suburbs.

Another question: do the super wealthy make use of all that square footage and the features or are these part of a real estate investment? The McMansion owner is also hoping to get a return on their investment but the amount of money involved with extra-large properties is at another level.

Courtesy of Architectural Digest, see more about some of Succession’s dwellings here.

The Brady Bunch house as “the second most photographed home in America”

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The house featured on the Brady Bunch is up for sale again. Apparently, many people have photographed the home:

Zillow house listing

The Brady Bunch only lasted five seasons, but its cultural footprint has endured. The ABC comedy — which followed a blended family of eight, their live-in maid and, at certain points, a dog — ran from 1969 through 1974 before inspiring TV movies, a satirical feature remake (and sequel) and countless pilgrimages to 11222 Dilling Street. It has been called the second most-photographed home in America, trailing only the White House, though there is little evidence to back up such claims. 

I am sure someone could try to quantify this. Scan through all of the pictures on the Internet including photo upload sites? Perhaps measure the number of visitors each year to different houses and estimate how many pictures they might take?

A better question to ask might be this particular house is so popular for pictures. It is tied to a popular TV show, it is accessible to the public who can see the home from the street, it is located within the second largest metropolitan area in the United States, and there are a lot of tourists in the area. Still, it is a home built in 1959 that looks rather unremarkable from the outside. This might be a story about (1) the power of TV in American culture and (2) the importance of TV in this particular era of suburbia and Baby Boomers.

I wonder if any other TV shows would be in a top 10 of photographed homes in the United States.

(See earlier posts about the Brady Bunch house: a 2018 post about HGTV owning the home and a 2012 post about comparing the exterior and interior of the homes.)

Trying to put back together urban neighborhood split decades ago by highways

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New monies from the federal government are intended to help neighborhoods deeply affected by highway construction:

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Kansas City officials are now looking to repair some of the damage caused by the highway and reconnect the neighborhoods that surround it. To date, the city has received $5 million in funding from the Biden administration to help develop plans for potential changes, such as building overpasses that could improve pedestrian safety and better connect people to mass transit.

The funding is an example of the administration’s efforts to address racial disparities resulting from how the United States built physical infrastructure in past decades. The Transportation Department has awarded funding to dozens of projects under the goal of reconnecting communities, including $185 million in grants as part of a pilot program created by the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law.

But the project in Kansas City also shows just how difficult and expensive it can be to reverse long-ago decisions to build highways that slashed through communities of color and split up neighborhoods. Many of the projects funded by the Biden administration would leave highways intact but seek to lessen the damage they have caused to surrounding areas. And even taking out a roadway is just a first step to reinvigorating a neighborhood.

“Once you wreck a community, putting it back together is much more work than just removing an interstate,” said Beth Osborne, who served as an acting assistant secretary at the Transportation Department during the Obama administration and is now the director of Transportation for America, an advocacy group.

In the name of fast travel between outlying areas and the city, such highways removed people and buildings, disrupted economic corridors, and created barriers between neighborhoods.

From the examples provided in this article, it sounds like this money will be used to try to reestablish streetscapes. Wide highways made it difficult for pedestrians to walk between places. Businesses had to rely on vehicle traffic. Decades after the highways were constructed, there may be relatively little activity on roadways near the highways.

Simply creating better paths over a major highway could be helpful. Removing a highway can also help, as evidenced by at least a few projects in American cities. But, there is a lot that goes into a streetscape. It takes time and resources to recreate thriving neighborhoods with multiple factors at play. Even then, vibrant sidewalks and streetscapes are relatively hard to find in American communities given the other priorities Americans emphasize.

What companies could embody the slogan “Delivering the American Dream”?

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I recently saw on the side of a truck the slogan for a company: “Delivering the American Dream.” Before I say which firm uses this, some thoughts on what kinds of companies this could fit:

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-Take the first part of the slogan: “delivering.” Could this fit a major delivery company? Imagine this as the slogan of UPS or FedEx; would it fit as they delivery so many different items to people?

-The second part of the slogan references “the American Dream.” This could refer to housing and the suburbs. (And I did spot this slogan in the suburbs.) Could a house be delivered or could it refer to some essential parts of homes (furniture, appliances, etc.)?

-The whole phrase suggests the American Dream can be delivered. This is a big promise. As noted above, the Dream can be symbolized by tangible objects but it is also an important ideology encompassing multiple factors.

Time for the reveal: this is the slogan of 84 Lumber. Here is part of the company’s history on their website:

Founded in 1956 and headquartered in Eighty Four, Pennsylvania, 84 Lumber Company is the nation’s largest privately held supplier of building materials, manufactured components, and industry-leading services for single- and multi-family residences and commercial buildings.

The company operates 310 facilities which includes stores, component manufacturing plants, custom door shops and engineered wood product centers in 35 states. 84 Lumber also offers turnkey installation services for a variety of products, including framing, insulation, siding, windows, roofing, decking and drywall.

In the early days, founder Joe Hardy, in conjunction with his two brothers, Norman and Bob Hardy, and family friends Ed Ryan and Jack Kunkle, pooled together $84,000 in funds to purchase land and buildings for a new “cash and carry” lumberyard. The idea was that customers would pay by cash or check and if merchandise was unable to be “carried” out, an additional charge was implemented to have the item personally delivered…

Since then, 84 Lumber experienced exceptional growth, powered by Maggie’s vision to expand, and evolve the business. With tenacious leadership, and the 84 Lumber team’s true passion for their company, a new 84 Lumber emerged from tough economic times to become the powerhouse it is today. Now, 84 Lumber is a certified national women’s business enterprise and has held a spot on the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest growing companies for several years in a row. The company hit $7.9B in sales in 2021, and increased to $8.78B in 2022.

The slogan does indeed refer to the single-family home and other buildings. They deliver some of the essential components of structures that many Americans use without any knowledge of where the materials came from.

If any company could live up to this slogan, this seems to be a good fit. While other companies could make a good claim with other goods and services, a close connection to single-family home construction connects closely to the American Dream.