Category Archives: Sociology

How do I tell my friend I do not want to live near her “hideous” McMansion?

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Can a McMansion come between friends? From an advice column four years ago:

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Dear Prudence,
My husband and I are moving to the city where one of my dearest friends lives. She really wants us to move to her neighborhood (“You can walk over for barbecues! Go on morning runs together!”). I love the idea of being close, except I hate her neighborhood. It’s a bunch of huge McMansions with things like fake turrets and nonsensical designs. I get why she and her husband chose it—there’s lots of space for their big family—but you couldn’t pay me to live there. On paper, though, it makes a lot of sense: It’s close to my work, in my price range, etc., so my friend doesn’t seem to catch on to my polite demurrals (“That might be a little too much house for us” or “We’re looking in a lot of neighborhoods.”) What can I tell her besides “your house is hideous”?
—Hideous House

Unless she’s calling you every day and going through all the listings in her neighborhood, I think it’s fine to keep offering her polite-yet-accurate demurrals until you eventually find a house elsewhere. There’s a natural expiration date to this conversation, and that will be when you move into a house in a different neighborhood. In the meantime, you can stress how great it is that you two will finally be living in the same city. If you absolutely can’t stand her gentle but insistent questions, then pick a household feature or two you know her neighborhood can’t provide that are absolute necessities for you and tell her: “We’re looking for something with less than 2,000 square feet, and [your neighborhood] just doesn’t fit the bill. Tell me what you think of these two houses we’ve been looking at.”

The term McMansion is typically negative. The answer above suggests it is best not to call out the friend’s home as a McMansion. This might not go over well, even if the person picked the McMansion because they liked it. Instead, emphasize how your own interests are different and move on.

I have wondered about this very topic for years: it is one thing to dislike McMansions from afar or in the abstract. But, what happens if someone you know and/or like lives in a McMansion and likes it? Is having a McMansion a barrier to friendship or a deeper relationship? Should one who dislikes McMansions express this opinion and the ways that McMansions bring blight to the earth? How does it work to criticize McMansions strongly and then know that at least a few McMansions like them and purchase them? Are these sorts of differences part of the sorting of people into different communities and social spheres?

These dynamics play out regularly in many communities, whether they have subdivisions full of McMansions or teardown McMansions. How exactly they affect interpersonal and community interactions and relationships could be studied further.

American political leaders tend to be homeowners

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A recent study looked at how many political leaders in the United States are homeowners or renters:

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The researchers identified 10,800 representatives across city halls, state houses, and federal offices in 2019 and cross-referenced their home addresses with tax records. They found that about 93% of US senators, congressional representatives, federal judges, city council members, state senators, state representatives and governors definitely or likely owned a home.

In another sample of 1,800 city-level officeholders, the discrepancy between voters and their electeds was stark: For the 190 municipalities researchers examined, citywide homeownership rates were around 50%, while 83% of mayors owned their residences…

Despite these high-profile exceptions — both young people of color, like Azeem — researchers found that in city after city, the broader homeownership trend held, even in costly cities like Miami and Boston, where renters dominate. “There aren’t really any cities where large numbers of renters have been elected to local, state or federal office,” Einstein said.

The paper describes two “bottlenecks” that could prevent renter representation: Either fewer renters run, or fewer voters are willing to elect them. By analyzing the housing status of city council candidates in California between 2017 and 2018, they found that the former is more likely…

Elected officials are even more out of step with their communities when it comes to where and how they live. Researchers found that the homes occupied by local, state and federal officials were worth an average of 50% more than their zip code’s median value. The higher the level of public office, the greater the ratio. Nearly 80% of officeholders who owned their houses lived in single-family homes, while only 67% of houses across the country are considered single family.

Who will represent the renters in a country that loudly proclaims its preference for homeownership?

If you have a list of steps one needs to take to be a successful politician, add this one to early in the list: own a residence.

How exactly does wealth play into this? Does wealth lead to both homeownership and the possibility of running for office?

A possible follow-up study: do political candidates run markedly different campaigns given their homeownership status or do they generally play to the ideals of homeownership?

Interesting framing: American faith beliefs and practices down “despite a megachurch surge”

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Here is a summary of recent data on religiosity in the United States:

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Church membership, church attendance and belief in God all declined during the pandemic years, survey data suggest, accelerating decadeslong trends away from organized worship.   

At least one-fifth of Americans today embrace no religion at all. Researchers call them “nones.”  

A similar share tell pollsters they do not believe in God, an all-time high.

The lone, striking countertrend is a steep rise in nondenominational Protestants, who attend churches outside the “mainline” denominations — the once-ubiquitous Baptists, Methodists and Lutherans.

The story is set up this way: religion is on the decline and the only phenomena standing out are megachurches. This is an interesting set of evidence to put together. Do religion and megachurches go together or cause each other? Here are just a few ways they might be related:

  1. Religion is down and megachurches are up. (This is what the article suggests in the headline and later in the story.)
  2. Religion is down and megachurches are a last gasp of religion.
  3. Religion is down and megachurches helped contribute to this decline.
  4. Religion is down. And megachurches are not related to this overall pattern.

Which of these options is most accurate? What is the causal link between overall American religiosity and the presence of sizable religious congregations?

Argument: emphasizing homeownership for investment purposes as the ultimate American goal leads to worse housing outcomes

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Americans like single-family homes and especially owning a home that appreciates in value. What if this is the wrong way to go about providing housing?

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At the core of American housing policy is a secret hiding in plain sight: Homeownership works for some because it cannot work for all. If we want to make housing affordable for everyone, then it needs to be cheap and widely available. And if we want that housing to act as a wealth-building vehicle, home values have to increase significantly over time. How do we ensure that housing is both appreciating in value for homeowners but cheap enough for all would-be homeowners to buy in? We can’t…

Fundamentally, the U.S. needs to shift away from understanding housing as an investment and toward treating it as consumption. No one expects their TV or their car to be a store of value, let alone to appreciate. Instead, Americans recognize that expensive purchases should reflect their particular desires and that the cost should be worth the use they get out of them…

I should be explicit here: Policy makers should completely abandon trying to preserve or improve property values and instead make their focus a housing market abundant with cheap and diverse housing types able to satisfy the needs of people at every income level and stage of life. As such, people would move between homes as their circumstances necessitate. Housing would stop being scarce and thus its attractiveness as an investment would diminish greatly, for both homeowners and larger entities. The government should encourage and aid low-wealth households to save through diversified index funds as it eliminates the tax benefits that pull people into homeownership regardless of the consequences…

If we are interested in helping low- and middle-income people live well, we need to fix renting. Some potential policies include increasing oversight of the rental market, providing tenants with a right to counsel in eviction court to reduce predatory filings, advancing rent-stabilization policies, public investment in rental-housing quality, and, most important, building tons of new housing so that power shifts in the rental market from landlords to tenants. Even if nothing changes and America’s love affair with homeownership continues, tens of millions of people will continue renting for the duration of their lives, and almost everyone will rent for at least part of their life. Financial security, reliable and reasonable housing payments, and freedom from exploitation should not be the domain of homeowners.  

There is a lot to think about here. A few thoughts:

  1. Is the entire goal of the American system to generate money through property and ownership? Owning land and property has been very important from the beginning not only for what land could be used for and the money that could be generated but also because of status and rights attached to owning land and homes.
  2. Who is homeownership for? Consistently in American life, it is more available and profitable for wealthier white residents. Policies and ideals have promoted and perpetuated this.
  3. Given #1 and #2, renting is not just a difference in how one pays for their dwelling. It is a difference in how a person is regarded and what is viewed as ideal. The current system may have vast disparities in homeownership and the wealth generated by it but renting or renters is disagreeable to a good portion of Americans.
  4. Even if the goal remains to help adults in the United States attain homeownership, more could be done to address renting or obtaining a first property or addressing racial disparities in housing values. Ignoring renting means that it could limit people in the future from owning a home. Or, not having entry-level housing means people cannot easily move up. Or, help limit the disparities in housing values based on existing patterns. Promoting only homeownership is short-sighted.

Move at the right time to reap the benefits of an American boomtown

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At the end of a listing of the “Top Boomtowns in America” in 2022, here is some advice about timing a move to one of the boomtowns:

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“Moving to a boomtown at its earliest stages can be a great opportunity for entrepreneurs and investors, as there’s still plenty of room for growth. And for those who are looking for a job, there are usually plenty of opportunities available in rapidly growing cities,” says Edith Reads, senior editor at TradingPlatforms. “However, if a city has already reached its peak, it may be too late to get in on the action. In this case, it may be wiser to wait until the city’s growth slows down before making the move. This way, you can avoid getting caught in the midst of a housing or job crunch.”

In other words, a resident or business wants to get in on the earlier parts of the boom, not in the latter stages or after it is over. Why? A few reasons listed above:

  1. There is money to be made. Whether owning a business or a home, an investment early on could pay off down the road. (For more on American homes as investments, see this earlier post.)
  2. A growing community means numerous job opportunities.

Mess up your timing in moving to one of these boomtowns and these two opportunities are not as good.

Another thought that is not accounted for in this ranking: how does the community change because of the boom period? Is it just as an attractive place to live and work after the rapid population growth? How do the old-time residents view the change? If the community grows enough, it will not exactly be the same place. Ultimately, other boomtowns will reign in future years. Will the boomtown be a good place to be in a few decades?

My thoughts on friendship and the suburbs

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In the latest Wheaton magazine, I share some thoughts on friendship and the suburbs:

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Developers began mass producing tracts of parklike suburban housing in the 1920s, and the trend burgeoned after WWII. All along, sociologists have found that parents move to the suburbs in large part for their children’s success. Those goals shaped the housing structure in these new developments, which featured single-family homes and activities centered on nuclear families of parents and children.

“Suburbia is so individualized, privatized, and family-oriented,” said Miller. “Relationships beyond those boundaries are seen as bonuses or good things to have, but not necessary.”

The arrangement of the American suburbs also narrows a person’s potential pool of friends. “When you’re making decisions based on schools, quality of life, and affordability, you end up preselecting your social relationships and possible friends,” Miller said.

In this milieu, Miller said, many Americans end up making friends based on two things: geographic proximity or shared interests. For example, one might find friends at grocery stores, local parks, or children’s activities like schools and sports. But even proximity and shared interests are not enough to push people into deeper friendships, as Langan has found.

Later in the article:

Miller sees this tension in his research on the suburbs, where—again—people prioritize family success over friendships. Over the past two decades, most books published on practicing faith in the suburbs have pushed against the societal current of surface-level and transactional relationships. “You should be forming relationships with people who have nothing to give you, nothing to offer you,” Miller said, summarizing a key theme in Dave Goetz’s 2006 book Death by Suburb: How to Keep the Suburbs from Killing Your Soul (HarperCollins, 2007). “That’s where you may truly meet God and meet people.”

Miller has seen some Wheaton students take these teachings to heart as they graduate. Some friend groups will decide to live together for one or two years post-graduation, focusing on relationships rather than careers. “That’s frowned on as delaying adulthood, but it poses a great question for Christians about what we value,” Miller said. “Is it about going out after graduation and finding the ‘best job’ and then finding people later? Or is it prioritizing relationships, friendships, and connections to a local church? I hope we would say that the latter are more meaningful in the long run.”

Build and idealize a suburban landscape around single-family homes, nuclear family life, exclusion, and driving and these are some of the patterns of social interaction that develop. I am sure there are numerous ways to address this; there are many researchers better suited to comment on that. Yet, it is helpful to know the underlying factors that contribute to difficulties to forming adult friendships at the start of the 21st century in the United States (in addition to oft-cited factors like social media).

Can a relaxed, suburban “third place” get away with selling a high sugar, high caffeine lemonade drink?

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Since I am not a regular patron of Panera’s – though there are several within a several mile radius of my suburban address – I was not aware of a new drink in these pleasant and sociable spaces:

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Technically, one could do the same thing at a McDonald’s or another more casual fast food spot. But given that McDonald’s isn’t exactly relaxing, it may not be people’s first choice for a leisurely afternoon hang. Panera, on the other hand, is what’s known as a “third place,” a special type of social environment that blurs the lines of work and home.

This concept originates from sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s 1989 book The Great Good Place, wherein he separates daily life into three distinct spaces. The first is the home, the second is the workplace, and the third is any other environment where people can freely gather and exist in public without obligation. Starbucks, notably, is explicitly designed with the third place in mind. As Forbes first wrote in 2015, Panera has increasingly been chasing this idea as well, arranging their stores more like living room spaces and encouraging customers to stick around by offering free Wi-Fi. Particularly with its Unlimited Sips program, Panera has shaped itself to be a third place where people can hang around with a low barrier to entry—even more so than Starbucks, where two drinks would cost as much as a month’s worth at Panera, and there aren’t even free refills.

All of this helps explain what makes this Panera lemonade situation so compelling. If it were a 7-Eleven selling chaos in a cup, nobody would think twice. Instead, it’s this suburban-feeling sandwich retailer that has shaped itself as a simulacrum of the neighborhood cafe. And that’s weird—a Charged Lemonade would be a better fit for the X Games vibe of Taco Bell, a chain that already flavors everything with Mountain Dew and Doritos dust. Panera seems so innocent—until you remember that they’re essentially feeding you a loaf of sourdough with every meal. At Panera, the mayhem is merely disguised by the presence of words like Napa and brioche, and the dissonance of it all abounds.

Nevertheless, for Baus, who says in the video that she hates working from her home, Panera is the perfect environment for both work and leisure. “It’s close to my house and it’s actually quiet,” she said. “I kept going to coffee shops that had loud music and very limited seating. Plus, Panera has the Unlimited Sip Club, which is much cheaper than paying for a coworking space.” For all these reasons, she says, she’ll continue to work from Panera—and yes, continue to glug the lemonade. “I have started watering it down about 70/30, though, because I don’t need that much sugar or that much caffeine,” she said.

My first two thoughts are these:

  1. Panera knows its audience.
  2. This is an embodiment of America today.

Imagine this scene: a semi-busy fast causal restaurant on a December morning with light snow. People are scattered around the tables and seats, some talking quietly, some working on devices. They all have a drink in front of them. Some have coffee, others water, more have a lemonade in different hues. As they drink and work or socialize, the levels of the drinks go down and then are quickly refilled. Some people leave, replaced by others and eventually the lunch crowd raises the volume of the place.

What powers the activity in this third place? Whether in coffee or soda or a lemonade drink, it is caffeine. For a country that sleeps poorly, this is the answer in suburbia.

Three responses to whether suburbanites can successfully steward land and nature

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In unveiling a proposed development on a 700+ acre parcel in Lake County, one of the family members who currently own the land said this:

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“We are committed to providing long-term stewardship that will allow future generations to enjoy the amenities and natural beauty of this ground-breaking residential community”

Is it possible for this to happen in the suburbs? Here are three possible answers:

  1. Suburbanites cannot steward land and natural beauty. By virtue of being suburbia, the land is used poorly, roads and houses are put everywhere, habitats and ecosystems are disturbed, and the land and nature become just echoes of what they once were.
  2. On the opposite end of the spectrum: humans have tended land and nature for millennia. Suburbia can enhance land and nature for human use. Suburbia can even be beautiful if careful attention is paid to ensuring open space, lawns, parks, gardens, trees, and natural features.
  3. A somewhere in the middle position: suburbia can treat land and nature better or worse, depending on decisions about development and how everyday life looks when completed. There are features of suburban nature that are laughable – such as so-called “nature band-aids” in sprawling parking lots – and others that are more admirable – plots of natural plants, preserved trees, and Forest Preserves (to name a few).

I have heard/read all three positions. If the development goes forward as planned or in a similar format, future residents and visitors might find it difficult to envision what was there in a less-developed state. On the other hand, they might see a version of suburban nature that residents and the community see as helpful and worth preserving in the land of single-family homes and driving.

Metrics we need: claim that an expensive and lengthy construction project will cut delays 50%

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With the unveiling of the reconstructed Jane Byrne Interchange in Chicago, this promise was made:

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Illinois Department of Transportation engineers are promising a 50% improvement in traffic delays as the interminable Jane Byrne Interchange rebuild wraps up…

It’s estimated the redo could save more than $180 million hours annually in lost productivity from workers in traffic jams and result in a one-third reduction in greenhouse gases.

Can we start tracking this immediately and see if the promise is true?

With numerous major projects facing longer-than-predicted timelines and significant cost overruns, perhaps this is a way forward in marketing. Ignore the extra time and money; it will be worth it!

At the same time, why not use similar metrics for all sorts of infrastructure projects? Infrastructure is needed for many areas of modern life to go well. Yet, people may not want to endure construction or costs. Promises like this at least fix a number on what people might experience as a positive outcome. And if the modeling is so difficult, does this mean that it might be hard to justify a big project? (I could imagine a different number that is also accurate but less negative: without this project, there will be this % of a negative outcome.)

The multiple barriers to converting office space into housing units

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Henry Grabar details the many issues in switching office space to living space:

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What’s going on? One problem is simply with the shape of office buildings: Their deep floor plates mean it’s hard for natural light to reach most of the space once it’s divided up into rooms. Their utilities are centralized, which requires extensive work to bring plumbing and HVAC into new apartments. Either way, they require significant architectural intervention. The older stock of prewar offices, which are better suited for residential units, have often already been converted in cities like Chicago and Philadelphia. Another issue is with zoning codes that bar housing from office districts. A third obstacle is the building code: Early residential conversions, like those in SoHo’s lofts, were usually illegal, sometimes for complicated reasons that seem less important than mandating a window in every bedroom.

What’s more, business districts don’t empty out building by building but with vacancies here and there across the skyline. You wouldn’t convert Twitter’s building, since it’s partially occupied by workers. So, in one sense, Musk’s bed stunt is an example of his already innovating at Twitter. Very mixed-use! “You’re not going to run into a building that’s 100 percent empty, ready to be converted,” said Anjali Kolachalam, a researcher with Up for Growth. She recently ran office space in downtown Denver through a filter to find good conversion targets—tall buildings with high vacancy rates and small floor plates built before 2010. She wound up with just 4 office buildings, out of the 208 total.

Finally, converting buildings to residential use is expensive. Couple that with the fact that office rents are higher per square foot than residential rents are, and you see why developers aren’t champing at the bit to get new projects underway. Van Nieuwerburgh gave me an example from San Francisco, where Juul’s old headquarters—down the block from Twitter’s improvised dormitory—is for sale for $150 million. That’s a lot less than the $397 million the embattled nicotine vape company paid for it in 2019. But at $400 a square foot to buy and another $400 a square foot to renovate, he said, the conversion would still produce a building with rents too high even for San Francisco. In other words, offices may be down, but they’ll have to fall a lot further before adaptive reuse becomes a bargain.

While the challenges are present, I wonder if someone has this figured out – this could be a company, developer, or community. Are there ways to quickly address the issues listed above or does it require a sustained effort? Imagine someone figures this out and there is a way to make some cool conversion from an exciting work space (if this is possible) or name to an interesting housing unit. If this can happen for churches and religious buildings, why not for office buildings?

If this does not work easily now, could we anticipate new buildings that could more easily switch between uses? There are ways to plan, zone, and build with more flexibility in mind so that adjustments could be made given needs and market conditions. Would it cost more to construct a building in this way? If so, perhaps the possible higher occupancy rates and the ability to adjust could bring in more money in the long term.