Amazon HQ#2 may be headed to a wealthy suburb

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Crystal City, Virginia may be the new home of Amazon’s second headquarters site. Here are a few features of the suburban neighborhood located in Arlington:

With the Ronald Regan Washington National Airport two miles to the east, the heart of Washington D.C. five miles to the north, and a few stops on Washington’s Metro linking all three, Crystal City is in the right geographic spot for the Seattle-based company…

Today, the neighborhood, although a part of Arlington, has its own distinct downtown area. The walkable Crystal Drive is dotted with businesses, restaurants and public art, while public/private partnerships are bringing investment in parks and open space…

Home prices in Crystal City might be more affordable than they are in Seattle, but that’s not saying much. The median home value in the 22202 area, a zip code Crystal City shares with neighboring Pentagon City, Aurora Highlands and Arlington Ridge, is $625,800, according to Zillow — nearly three times the U.S. median.

Might the lack of single-family homes also be attractive to Amazon?

Crystal City is dominated by one apartment building after another, most of which don’t have ground floor retail or restaurants that would create a sense of community or neighborhood vibrancy. Walk a few blocks away from the shopping mall during any evening of the week and it’s a quiet, almost desolate place. This lack of a community might have been the final piece that Amazon was looking for since it means they can come to town without much opposition.

A few quick thoughts:

  1. On one hand, it is interesting for Amazon to choose a suburban location. A sizable headquarters would be a boon for numerous communities, particularly cities that need a shot in the arm. On the other hand, this is an urban suburban location. The location is technically outside Washington D.C. yet it is a community of high-rises with little distance with the central city in the region.
  2. A location in this region contributes to the rising status of the Washington D.C. region. While other cities and regions may still be larger, this region with its collection of government, military, and business opportunities just keeps growing.
  3. It would be interesting to see how much Amazon would want to contribute to a thriving streetscape in the community. Based on several articles, it sounds like there is limited activity in this community after business hours. Does Amazon want to contribute money to trying to develop a vibrant urban neighborhood (even if it is located in a suburb)?

Suing for more suburban housing

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A California law makes it possible to sue communities regarding housing:

Pro-housing activist Sonja Trauss, a pioneer in the YIMBY movement, was reading about a controversial 315-unit affordable apartment project in Lafayette in 2015 when she learned about a 1982 state law she’d never heard of before: the Housing Accountability Act.

The law said municipalities must approve a housing development as long as it is consistent with local zoning rules and general plan objectives, would not create a public health hazard or take water from neighboring farms, and would meet state environmental standards…

The California Renters Legal Advocacy Fund, or CaRLA — a group Trauss and her YIMBY allies formed in 2015 — is waging the sue-the-suburbs campaign. CaRLA has used the Housing Accountability Act to sue on behalf of developers in Sausalito, Berkeley, San Mateo, Sonoma, Dublin and Lafayette…

While the lawsuits will eventually result in some increase in the Bay Area’s housing stock — none of the projects in question have opened yet — the bigger impact so far has been to make municipal officials aware that violations of the Housing Accountability Act could result in expensive litigation.

How long until California changes the law to give communities more say over these matters? Not surprisingly, the end of the article mentions a counter group that a co-founder says is “not NIMBYs or anti-housing; for us the issue goes back to democracy and local control.” Suburbanites do like their local control.

This certainly would not be the first time the courts have been used to allow new housing construction in wealthier suburbs. It may be the only way to force compliance from suburbs that would rather not have cheaper housing and different kinds of residents. Unfortunately, it can be a very slow process within specific cases and overall progress is limited. Perhaps the threat of lawsuits and several successful cases in the past could force suburbs to move more quickly but I would guess some would still aim to drag out the process as much as possible.

Final thought: it would be interesting to track what happens to these developments allowed by the courts over time. Do communities eventually accept the housing units and residents? Would a positive response to a new development than encourage the community to pursue other similar developments? Or, does a court victory lead to hardened resistance?

The size, number, and color of disturbing McMansions in Napa Valley

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New large homes in Napa Valley are causing some concerns for a variety of reasons:

“As though rising amid the St. Helena vineyards like a megalith” is how Zillow describes one home. It is 6,700 square feet and has 17 rooms, with such outdoor features as a pavilion, pool and tennis court.

Napa County Supervisor Diane Dillon said an area west of Highway 29 south of Rutherford pretty much looks like a subdivision of McMansions. Plus, the 5- to 10-acre parcels have the potential to be covered in patios and outdoor lights…

“The biggest threat to the valley isn’t wineries; it is the proliferation of mansions,” the APAC report stated…

One thing supervisors want to move quickly on is the color of large structures. Several noted that when the county demands earth tones, the result can be structures colored white – “white whales,” Dillon said some of her constituents call them.

Given the concerns here, I wonder why the County does not just make such guidelines for property that would not allow large homes. Instead, they are talking about various guidelines – how much of a property can be devoted to a home, the color of the home – to try to make the more palatable. If large homes are problems, why allow them?

There could be multiple reasons for this approach:

1. Looking extremely heavy-handed as a local government may not be desirable. In trying to find a balance between property rights and community goals or character, these local officials may not want to encroach too far on property owners.

2. It may be desirable to have wealthy residents on large properties. Perhaps this leads to more property tax revenues. Perhaps wealthy residents help enhance the status of the community. Perhaps big houses may have some problems but they are certainly preferable to small-lot subdivisions or multifamily units.

In the end, it sounds like the McMansions or mansions need to meet certain guidelines but limiting the total number of them might be the largest issue.

Suburban efforts outside Atlanta to secede and form a new community; about race and income or business development?

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Voters yesterday in unincorporated suburbia outside Atlanta voted on a proposal to create a new suburb:

The proposal to form a new city, up for a vote on Tuesday, has roiled Henry County, raising tense debate about racial and economic disparity and voting rights. Once a sleepy rural, predominantly white region, the county has seen an influx of minorities and a solidification of black political power as its population has exploded in recent years. In 1980, whites made up more than 80% of Henry County’s population, but now they have dwindled to less than 50%…

If Eagle’s Landing manages to wrestle away the southern portion of Stockbridge — a section that includes its most affluent residential pockets as well as its main commercial corridor that brings in nearly $5 million of the city’s $9 million annual revenue — Ford has warned the city would be forced to impose a new property tax on remaining residents…

Backers of Eagle’s Landing counter that their aim is nothing more than to lure new fine dining and retail to a freshly coined community with a median household income of about $128,000 — more than double that of Stockbridge. Imagine, they tell their neighbors, a Whole Foods or a Trader Joe’s, a California Pizza Kitchen or a Capital Grille…

For more than a decade, rich, white pockets of metro Atlanta have led a national movement to form new cities out of unincorporated land in an effort, they say, for greater control, more efficient government and lower taxes. But this could be the first time a new city would take an existing city’s land without all the residents of the existing city having a vote.

Perhaps both arguments could be true: there is a race and class component to the proposal for a new suburb and backers of the change are interested in unique business opportunities that might come to a wealthier suburb. This reminds of the argument Freund makes in Colored Property. By the late 1960s, conservatives realized they could no longer object to non-white residents in or near their communities based on race. They instead switched over to economic arguments to justify ongoing residential segregation: people with fewer resources simply could not access nicer communities.

The matter about annexation law in Georgia is strange. The annexation of suburbs to big cities was fairly common in the late 1800s in the Northeast and Midwest as suburbs saw advantages in joining the big city. But, as cities changed, suburbs in those regions became less interested in being annexed. Laws usually reflect this: people being annexed or affected by annexations generally have to agree to the changes.

Even if race was truly not a factor (and it certainly sounds suspicious here), it also sounds like some growth machine activity is taking place. Local officials and businesses (developers?) see possible profits at stake in a suburban area with little wealth thus far. They get the state legislature to make some special regulations. Who exactly will profit here? How much of the money will come back to the (new) community?

Suburban voters, voting and acting out of fear

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The much-discussed suburban voter of this election cycle may have multiple motivations for voting. One factor that appears present now is fear. Are our lives at risk? Will the country will be ruined if the other party is in control?

A little thought experiment: does this easily play into suburban anxieties and fears? Here are some fears scholars have suggested suburbanites face on a regular basis:

1. Fear of the “other,” usually referring to people of non-white races and ethnicities. This manifests itself in multiple ways including exclusionary zoning and gated communities.

2. Fear of losing a middle-class or upper middle-class status. This leads to trying to gather resources for just their family or community.

3. Fear that either their children are not going to succeed or that they are at risk. After all, the suburbs are supposed to be a safe place for which to launch them to excellence.

4. This dates back more to the early decades of postwar suburbia but a fear of losing their individualism and being pushed into conformity to suburban norms.

There are counterarguments to each of these as well as a general claim that suburbanites move to the suburbs because they wanted to, not because they were all fearful.

But, if there are indeed numerous fears in suburbia, does marketing politicians and policies on the basis of fear an even more effective tactic for suburban voters?

Defining middle class in an era of economic uncertainty

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Understanding the middle class requires looking not just at resources but also how the middle-class life is lived:

By the 1990s, the world that Mills had documented was coming apart as corporate downsizing and disinvestment upended the neat equation of secure work and praiseworthy home life. Social thinkers writing in that decade, including the sociologist Katherine Newman and the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, followed Mills in charting the social and psychological shape of that in-between class. But they found that loss had replaced dependency as the most conspicuous feeling associated with middling workers’ place in the hierarchy.

Today anguish over lost social standing has, in turn, been replaced by a pervasive sense of insecurity…

Aspiring to stability and respectability today means not only navigating the landscape of eroded and contingent work, but of managing debts. Trying to give children a shot, parents take on financial burdens that can destabilize their own future security.

Class has always been partly about income, but debt is now an equal component of the middle-class story, leading to a central paradox of aspirational lives: Striving for stability and respectability means inhabiting insecurity both socially and psychologically. Economic metrics alone can only tell a shallow story, but at the very least, debt should join income in any attempt at definition.

If this is true, perhaps social class should be accompanied by a different sort of measure. Here are a few options:

  1. Economic security or economic insecurity. Perhaps there would be a certain bar to meet – having a certain amount of savings, the ability to find another job, or something else.
  2. Some measure of anxiety or well-being about current economic conditions.

Two households with similar sets of resources could be quite different on these measures based on the particulars of certain jobs, family situations, debt, etc.

The biggest downsides to such measures could be that they remove the baselines that social class measures often have as well as affect the value judgments made about social class. We know that less income or lower wealth matters; a household with $20,000 of income is going to be different than one with $100,000. (Yes, this could be contextual based on cost of living.) But, if we start including some measures of the lived experience of class, is there a baseline? Similarly, what if financial measures were similar for two groups but one group had a higher level of anxiety or insecurity; would researchers and pundits be quick to judge whether that anxiety is justified?

Of course, if the insecurity/anxiety questions are asked alongside more traditional measures of social class, researchers can look at the relationships and determine what a consistent and valid measure of social class should be.

Teaching how science and research actually works

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As a regular instructor of Statistics and Social Research classes, I took note at this paragraph in a recent profile of Bruno Latour:

Latour believes that if scientists were transparent about how science really functions — as a process in which people, politics, institutions, peer review and so forth all play their parts — they would be in a stronger position to convince people of their claims. Climatologists, he says, must recognize that, as nature’s designated representatives, they have always been political actors, and that they are now combatants in a war whose outcome will have planetary ramifications. We would be in a much better situation, he has told scientists, if they stopped pretending that “the others” — the climate-change deniers — “are the ones engaged in politics and that you are engaged ‘only in science.’ ” In certain respects, new efforts like the March for Science, which has sought to underscore the indispensable role that science plays (or ought to play) in policy decisions, and groups like 314 Action, which are supporting the campaigns of scientists and engineers running for public office, represent an important if belated acknowledgment from today’s scientists that they need, as one of the March’s slogans put it, to step out of the lab and into the streets. (To this Latour might add that the lab has never been truly separate from the streets; that it seems to be is merely a result of scientific culture’s attempt to pass itself off as above the fray.)

Textbooks on Statistics and Social Research say there are right ways and wrong ways to do the work. There are steps to follow, guidelines to adhere to, clear cut answers on how to do the work right. It is all presented in a logical and consistent format.

There are hints that this may not happen all the time. Certain known factors as well as unknown issues can push a researcher off track a bit. But, to do a good job, to do work that is scientifically interesting and acceptable to the scientific community, you would want to stick to the guidelines as much as possible.

This provides a Weberian ideal type of how science should operate. Or, perhaps the opposite ideal type occasionally provides a contrast. The researcher who committed outright fraud. The scholar who stepped way over ethical boundaries.

I see one of my jobs of teaching these classes as providing how these steps work out in actuality. You want to follow those guidelines but here is what can often happen. I regularly talk about the constraints of time and money: researchers often want to answer big questions with ideal data and that does not always happen. You make mistakes, such as in collecting data or analyzing results. You send the manuscript off for review and people offer all sorts of suggestions of how to fix it. The focus of the project and the hypothesis changes, perhaps even multiple times. It takes years to see everything through to publication.

On one hand, students often want the black and white presentation because it offers clear guidelines. If this happens, do this. On the other hand, presenting the cleaner version is an incomplete education into how research works. Students need to know how to respond when the process does not go as planned and know that this does not necessarily mean their work is doomed.

Scientific research is not easy nor is it always clear cut. Coming back to the ideal type concept, perhaps we should present it as we aspire to certain standards and particular matters may be non-negotiable but there are parts of the process, sometimes small and sometimes large, that are more flexible depending on circumstances.

HGTV cashes in on the popularity of the suburban Brady Bunch home

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The iconic home of the Brady family on The Brady Bunch may have a number of confusing features but it is still popular: HGTV is working on a show about the renovation of the home.

The Studio City, Calif., residence was pictured in each episode before the camera took viewers inside the family’s abode. Those scenes, which featured, for example, the kitchen where housekeeper Alice (the late Ann B. Davis) dished out jokes or the girls’ bedroom, where Marcia Brady brushed her hair, were shot on a soundstage.

The house changed hands over the summer, when the network snapped up the property for an unknown price. (Former ‘N Sync member and Brady Bunch die-hard fan Lance Bass narrowly missed out on the place in a bidding war.)

HGTV revealed in August that it had placed the winning bid and would restore the home “to its 1970s glory” as part of a new show.

On Thursday, the network announced that A Very Brady Renovation is set to premiere in September 2019. Home renovation pros from HGTV will “reimagine the popular show’s interior set design, working to ensure that the final renovation results stay true to the spirit of the Brady Bunch family home that everyone loves and remembers,” according to a press release. In other words, the iconic staircase and the retro hues used in the home will remain.

Perhaps this is what nostalgia about postwar suburban life looks like: it is filtered through television. Instead of having a show about updating postwar suburban homes (imagine an HGTV show solely devoted to the iconic Levittown and other mass produced suburbs), a network banks on a fictional suburban home. If this Brady Bunch renovation show works, I imagine more shows featuring famous TV homes could occur.

This whole concept makes some sense. Television emerged at the same time as the suburbs. Certain shows, including the Brady Bunch, became associated with suburban America. Some have argued the depictions of suburbs on television helped encourage suburban development – I’m not sure there is much evidence for that. Still, the suburban TV show following the exploits of a nuclear family and kids developed in this time and is still a genre today.

But, I could also imagine some alternative ways that a home like that of the Brady Bunch could enter the realm of nostalgia:

  1. Becoming a museum. Imagine either someone purchasing the property and turning it into a museum or a local government acquiring the property. Put a little money into the home to set up some displays, charge a manageable entrance fee, and the facility is up and running.
  2. Since the first option might cause some zoning issues, move the whole home to a place – museum, theme park, TV studio – better suited to host visitors to the home. What if there was a theme park built around TV buildings or even just around depicted suburban homes?

 

Would less door-to-door trick-or-treating and more community Halloween events decrease or increase social interactions?

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If Halloween is indeed evolving away from neighborhood trick-or-treating (good discussion here), are the replacement or alternative or additional events in downtowns, at churches, and activities organized by other groups leading to more or less community and social interactions? Thinking out loud:

-Going door-to-door often involves interacting with people who are near you in physical proximity. Even if neighborhood interactions are declining, people would be more likely to run into each other at other times just because they live near each other.

-Going to centralized Halloween events in other locations means more people might gather together. But, their interactions might be limited. Perhaps it depends on what commonalities people at the event may share – a church event could involve a number of core community members as could a downtown event where local luminaries or figures are involved. On the other hand, community or organized events could involve more people just dropping in and out after acquiring candy and a lower likelihood of later interactions.

In both cases, the practice of getting candy could do little to build community if (1) candy is the only goal and (2) the likelihood of subsequent interactions is limited. It would be easy to turn Halloween into an exercise is gathering a commodity with few opportunities to interact with people.

And more broadly, how much is Halloween a family or community holiday compared to other big celebrations like Christmas, Thanksgiving, and July 4th?

Drawing artistic inspiration from growing up around McMansions

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Artist Katherine Vetne builds upon a childhood spent around McMansions:

Vetne says her interests in exploring (and subverting) objects of status and consumerism started when she was growing up in Newburyport, Mass. She observed the differences between established “old money” and the newly affluent: A lot of the newer families built “McMansion” houses that looked like new versions of the town’s historic homes in an attempt to emulate that status.

Those experiences led to a unique form of art:

Vetne, 31, of San Francisco, has been building a reputation as a sculptor who works in an unusual medium: destruction. Vetne’s best-known work during the past three years has been a series of sculptures made from kiln-melted housewares crystal, which takes a distinctive, puddle-like shape when heated.

She then “mirrors” the melted crystal mass in a chemical process that turns the blobs into reflective objects. The pieces are presented individually or in big groups, like in her “Guilty Pleasures” installation that was part of the Catharine Clark Gallery’s summer show, “We tell ourselves stories … In order to live.” Ford and Vetne took the shopping trip at Clark’s invitation to find the raw material for a piece Ford recently commissioned from Vetne.

The idea of working with crystal, whether it’s fine Baccarat or more mass-market Avon, appeals to Vetne, who is interested in exploring issues of class, gender and materialism. “At the crux of my practice is the more middle-class people with some amount of resources trying to look ‘higher class’ than they are through the objects they acquire. I am interested in concepts of visual excess and how they’re supposed to communicate something. Usually, it’s ‘I have a lot of money.’”

Given the general reputation of McMansions, this is not surprising: take objects by which aspiring people try to build up their status and then destroy them to show what those objects are really about. Perhaps it would even be more shocking if an artist celebrated McMansions.

I’m also trying to imagine this destruction process applied to actual McMansions or parts of McMansions. Could a piece of performance art involve taking a wrecking ball to a McMansion? Or, imagine taking a two story foyer to a museum and showing it falling apart every so often, like the way “Concert for Anarchy” displays a piano in an unusual form. Or, take granite countertops and stainless steel appliances and destroy them.