Good data is foundational to doing good sociological work

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I’ve had conversations in recent months with a few colleagues outside the discipline about debates within sociology over the work of ethnographers like Alice Goffman, Matt Desmond, and Sudhir Venkatesh. It is enlightening to hear how outsiders see the disagreements and this has pushed me to consider more fully how I would explain the issues at hand. What follows is my one paragraph response to what is at stake:

In the end, what separates the work of sociologists from perceptive non-academics or journalists? (An aside: many of my favorite journalists often operate like pop sociologists as they try to explain and not just describe social phenomena.) To me, it comes down to data and methods. This is why I enjoy teaching both our Statistics course and our Social Research course: undergraduates rarely come into them excited but they are foundational to who sociologists are. What we want to do is have data that is (1) scientific – reliable and valid – and (2) generalizable – allowing us to see patterns across individuals and cases or settings. I don’t think it is a surprise that the three sociologists under fire above wrote ethnographies where it is perhaps more difficult to fit the method under a scientific rubric. (I do think it can be done but it doesn’t always appear that way to outsiders or even some sociologists.) Sociology is unique in both its methodological pluralism – we do everything from ethnography to historical analysis to statistical models to lab or natural experiments to mass surveys – and we aim to find causal explanations for phenomena rather than just describe what is happening. Ultimately, if you can’t trust a sociologist’s data, why bother considering their conclusions or why would you prioritize their explanations over that of an astute person on the street?

Caveats: I know no data is perfect and sociologists are not in the business of “proving” things but rather we look for patterns. There is also plenty of disagreement within sociology about these issues. In a perfect world, we would have researchers using different methods to examine the same phenomena and develop a more holistic approach. I also don’t mean to exclude the role of theory in my description above; data has to be interpreted. But, if you don’t have good data to start with, the theories are abstractions.

Cities, universities, and their interactions

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A new book looks at the interaction of universities and major cities:

The question of the university’s responsibility to its city goes back to the early 20th century and was the subject of much discussion at the annual meetings of the Association of Urban Universities, founded in 1914. The association’s early members included not only municipal universities like City College, Hunter, Akron, Cincinnati, Louisville and Toledo, but private universities including Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern, Brown, Chicago, Harvard and Vanderbilt, among others. In the years after World War II, however, the term “urban university” increasingly came to be understood as an institution serving working-class, immigrant, minority and commuter students.

I believe that all higher education institutions located in cities should take full advantage of their urban location, which means using the vast resources of the city to support teaching, research and community service. Faculty at research universities should study the city, the metropolitan area, local government, business and economic development, public health, K-12 education, and so much more. Some of this research might be commissioned by government agencies, local business associations or other entities involved in advancing the needs of the city. But much of this research should be conducted independently. All urban institutions have a great opportunity to engage undergraduate, graduate and professional students in city internships and experiential learning, which has become quite popular in recent years. In addition to such instruction-based activities, more and more institutions have embraced a commitment to fostering civic responsibility in students through volunteer service. In short, I would argue that all colleges and universities in cities should engage with their municipality, and that such engagement greatly enhances their mission, whether they are exclusively undergraduate institutions or national research universities….

This tension between neighborhood improvement and gentrification has a long history. Both perspectives are appropriate. In 1958, an official of the Ford Foundation described “the plight of the urban university,” which he said has been “left behind to inherit a neighborhood growing steadily less desirable.” Under these circumstances, he argued, these institutions “will be sorely tempted to join the flight from the city,” but he insisted that to do so would “deny the purpose and potential of the urban university.” Retaining middle-class people in cities was widely viewed as an important national goal reflected in federal funding for urban renewal, begun in 1949.

The U.S. Housing Act of 1959 greatly expanded support for university-based urban renewal, providing that for every dollar an educational institution spent for land acquisition, demolition, building rehabilitation or relocation of occupants of demolished buildings adjacent to or in the vicinity of an urban renewal project, the city could receive two to three dollars of federal urban renewal money. By 1964, 120 colleges and university renewal projects had received federal funding. Keeping middle-class people in cities remained a major feature of liberal urban policy through the end of the century. But displacement of low-income residents has also been inconsistent with liberal policy goals. In recent years, many universities have found ways to work closely with neighborhood organizations in improving neighborhood conditions and meeting university expansion needs. I would argue that today, neighborhood-community collaboration is crucial.

There is much to explore here, particularly with the rise in recent decades of cities looking to use colleges and universities as tools for economic development.

Just thinking off the top of my head, it is interesting to connect the top schools in the United States and their location. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the case that highly regarded schools are in major cities or just outside them yet there does seem to be numerous connections. Additionally, campuses and cities can have a feedback loop where they influence each other’s status and presentation to the rest of the world.

Is the Naperville diamond interchange working?

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The relatively rare concept of a diamond interchange opened at the Naperville intersection of I-88 and Route 59 in September 2015. Was the effort to reconstruct the interchange worth it?

The short answer: there has not been an official pronouncement. Proponents suggested the design has several advantages: fewer accidents since drivers are not making left turns onto or off of highway ramps, improved efficiency since cars can merge onto ramps on red lights, and less space needed. Here some pieces of evidence regarding the matter:

–The Illinois Tollway is constructing another diamond interchange at I-90 and Elmhurst Road. Would they do this if their first attempt was unsuccessful?

–Crashes at the intersection were down between 2015 (73) and 2016 (53).

-Since it is a busy intersection – over 180,000 vehicles a day – wouldn’t drivers and officials gone public if there were major issues with the new design? Some drivers still thought it odd as of April 2016 but Naperville issues said they were pleased.

–According to DivergingDiamond.com, there are a number of diamond interchanges in the planning or construction stages across the United States.

The evidence seems to suggest the diamond interchange in Naperville is working. It still may be worthwhile to see when officials are willing to take credit or take a victory lap for their decision.

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Mixing walkability with other concerns like inequality and building community

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The concept of walkability can be tied to a number of other important urban concerns as illustrated by this conversation with a member of Chicago Community Trust:

Q: What’s driving the desire to make neighborhoods more walkable?

A: There are a number of factors but I think there’s more interest in being able to be in the community. It’s not just about walking. It’s about basic, human interactions, the surprise of bumping into people.

As we look to 2050 and see the increased reliance on technology and the diminishing opportunities for basic face-to face-interactions, walkable communities are going to become increasingly important as an essential pathway to building community. Neighborhoods and walkable communities — and the community infrastructure that supports them — will become even more important to facilitate the kind of neighborly interactions, chance meetings, and civic and community building that are so vital to our lives today…

I’ve lived here since 2003 and came from outside of the region. What a surprise it was that many suburbs don’t look like strip malls and housing subdivisions. You have really well-established communities like Oak Park, Aurora, Arlington Heights and Evanston, cities with important bones of more walkable neighborhoods or communities. That’s what Chicago and the region has going for it.

The challenge here is that in neighborhoods and suburbs, the patterns of development and reinvestment have been very uneven. You have haves and have-nots. The south suburbs have struggled with reinvestment for many years and the south and west sides of Chicago have grappled with it. When the Metropolitan Planning Council and the Urban Institute did a study on Chicago segregation, compared to the 100 largest regions we’re the fifth-most economically and racially segregated region. That, to me, is the biggest challenge.

This is a lot to ask of walkable communities. Does a walkable setup necessarily lead to such positive outcomes? Indeed, the last paragraph quoted above hints at this: the real difficult may not be walkability but rather uneven patterns of development and persistent residential segregation.

 

“The most detailed map of the United States’ racial diversity”

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Check out a new map that shows population by race and ethnicity at a very detailed level: SocScape. Curbed provides a brief description of the project:

Adapting a grid-charting system used for mapping the craters of Mars for NASA, Stepinski and his postdoctoral researcher Anna Dmowska, have created the most detailed map of the United States’ racial diversity—ever. The interactive tool displays enormous volumes of census information through more granular units, each representing 323 square feet. The result is a visual presentation that’s more accurate and useful to analysts interested in exploring geographic shifts in population and racial diversity.

Stepinski is already picking up on trends in the data from the 1990, 2000, and 2010 censes: Generally, white neighborhoods have become more diverse, Asian and Hispanic populations appear to be concentrating in distinct geographic pockets, while largely black neighborhoods have not increased in diversity.

Here is a view of much of the Chicago metropolitan region:

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SocScape, Chicago MSA, 2010 Census by race and ethnicity

From this image, it looks like an improved version of the racial dot maps as it has more geographic specificity. The tool also has some added data layers – here is the same region with the 1990 race and ethnicity data:

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SocScape, Chicago MSA, 1990 Census by race and ethnicity

Quite a bit of change over a twenty year stretch with increasing numbers of non-white residents living in the suburbs.

What is the punishment for building a 30,000 square foot home without permission?

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A developer in Los Angeles is facing some consequences for building a large home:

Hadid and the city attorney’s office met in private Thursday morning, after which Hadid’s attorneys said their client is close to a guilty plea for violating the city building code by building a 30,000-square-foot spec home at 901 Strada Vecchia, the Courier reported.

The real estate mogul — best known from appearances on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” and as the father of supermodel Gigi Hadid — will still face a mix of public service and fines, as well as a potential ban from building in L.A., according to the Courier.

Hadid’s attorneys argue that if sentencing could be delayed, he could bring the property into compliance so any potential criminal conviction would be erased…

The real estate mogul was charged in late 2015 with building a spec mansion without a permit, illegally using land, and failing to comply with orders from the L.A. Department of Building and Safety to halt construction. Angry neighbors called the project “starship enterprise.”

I’m not sure what you would do to someone who constructs such a home. Jail them?

I know the burden is on the owner here but I wonder why the city didn’t step in at some point during the process. Most locales have people checking permits and codes along the way. And if the home was so large and attracting the attention of neighbors, why wasn’t this stopped?

Finally, the headline for this story calls this home a McMansion. The architecture may lend itself to this; the included picture suggests the exterior is designed to impress and the neighbors certainly had an interesting moniker for the home. Yet, it is a home with 30,000 square feet. It would be one thing to quickly construct a 3,000 square foot home but 30,000 square feet is on a whole level up.

Affordable housing shortage affects much of America

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A new report from the Urban Institute suggests affordable housing is a concern in both urban and rural counties:

Nationwide, only 21 units are available per 100 extremely low-income renter households (those earning below 30 percent of the area median income) without government assistance. With assistance, it’s 46.

UI has also created a neat interactive map, which is an update from a previous version. It lets users explore the gap between the demand and supply of affordable units in every single U.S. county. (The National Low Income Housing Coalition released a similar report for states and metros this year, based 2015 one-year American Community Survey data. The UI report is based on 2010-2014 five-year estimates, which is better for a county-level analysis.) The UI map also lets users toggle the impact of assistance from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Here’s what the affordable housing deficit looks like in Hays County, Texas. (Urban Institute)

The map shows how much more severe the problem is in urban counties. Overall, they have 42 units per every 100 low-income renting household, compared to 62 among rural counties. But in a blog post, the UI researchers note that while housing costs are lower in the countryside, so are incomes. And poverty rates are higher.

Urban areas are going to get the most attention with this issue since they have more people looking for housing, more government aid, more media, and more developers and builders interested in constructing housing units there. But, if affordable housing is difficult to supply there, how much harder must it be to supply it in more rural areas?

It would be interesting to think about how a lack of affordable housing in rural areas might contribute to affordable housing issues in urban centers. In other words, people who can’t find reasonable housing in rural areas might move to urban areas where they are more housing options but this could also exacerbate existing urban housing issues.

Quick Review: Driving After Class: Anxious Times in an American Suburb

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I recently read anthropologist Rachel Heiman’s Driving After Class: Anxious Times in an American Suburb. Here are some thoughts about the study:

  1. I was drawn to this because even though a majority of Americans live in suburbs, there is a lack of in-depth studies of their experiences and social lives. I realize it is not a sexy topic – everyone thinks they know everything about suburbs – but there are plenty of interesting topics to pursue.
  2. The book is a little unusual in that it seems to be published a good amount of time after the research was done. Heiman undertook the research for her dissertation but the book was not published until 2015. This is not necessarily bad as time can give a researcher an opportunity to truly think about what they have found. At the same time, Heiman interprets some of her findings in light of the housing bubble and economic crisis of the late 2000s even though her research was from an earlier period.
  3. The best part of the analysis in my opinion was the chapter on a battle in the local school district. The New Jersey residents were part of a district that included a number of communities and when the district had to decide how to spread resources and which schools students should attend, the communities fought each other. In particular, the wealthier parts of the district generally did not want their children to have to attend the other schools which either had populations of lower-class or minority residents. Another chapter looked at how a community negotiated a request from a homeowner to place a gate across his driveway, a move interpreted by his neighbors and local leaders as an exclusionary effort. At other points, Heiman noted how residents reacted when she mentioned that she was living in a more affordable but less well regarded nearby suburb. More broadly, the analysis was better when it pointed out inter-suburban differences and how suburbanites negotiated their various statuses.
  4. The overall argument was that these suburbanites are trapped in a destabilizing neoliberal system. While this argument makes sense, I’m not sure it is too much different than critiques of suburbia dating back to the mid-1950s. Some of the same themes are present: conformity, squabbles over local class differences rather than looking at the larger social and economic system, anxiety, an emphasis on children, etc. While there are not enough studies of suburbs, we also need new approaches and arguments. And, there is still a basic question for studies of suburbs to consider: if life is so problematic in suburbs, why do many Americans still seek them out? If they are not dupes and have agency, what are viable alternatives to sprawling suburbs that offer what many Americans say they want?
  5. One topic I would have enjoyed reading more about: experiences inside housing. There is a chapter that takes an unconventional approach to this topic through examining the portions of homes with new carpet that is intended to impress visitors (and that children must not walk on with shoes).

In the end, I’m not sure this text would make my short list of excellent ethnographies of suburban life. At the same time, it has some strong moments and I could imagine using the chapter on school districts in courses.

Predicting the “great senior sell-off” to come

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Here is an update on one event that might be coming down the road: the time when the Baby Boomers decide to sell their homes.

Nelson pointed to the affordability issue as well as the fact that about a quarter of Millennials prefer urban housing, such as condos or townhouses, over the detached suburban homes that were the Boomers’ preferred habitat. Younger buyers, he said, will also be looking for starter homes—smaller than the big Colonials and split-levels that line America’s cul-de-sacs. “We can predict the next housing crash,” he said at the time. “That’ll be in about 2020.”

Four years later, Nelson tells CityLab that that he believes the sell-off will still occur—but later, in the mid- to late 2020s. This has to do with people deciding to defer selling their homes, hoping to get a better price later than settling for a lower price now. “Home values in much of the country are still less than those before the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009,” he says. Prior to the recession, the typical homeowner would sell a house about every six years. “It was like clockwork,” says Nelson. “This drove a lot of planning and development projections.”…

Nelson predicts that the fringe areas surrounding cities will bring the biggest headaches for Boomers looking to unload their houses. Because Millennials will be looking for small homes when they finally start to buy in larger numbers, the sprawling McMansions of the exurbs won’t be desirable to many of them. “The Boomers in the exurbs are going to be in a real pickle,” says Nelson. “Even in a dynamic market like Washington, D.C. or other booming cities, the market for those homes is going to be soft.”…

But many analysts do agree on one thing: More housing will need to be built for Millennials—and it needs to be scaled to their desires, not their parents’s. “Millennials are likely to prioritize different features in their homes, such as greener materials or in-law suites,” says Molinsky. And according to the Harvard Joint Center’s projections, nearly 90 percent of those looking for homes in 2035 will be under 35 or 70 and over—and both groups tend to buy less square footage.

I suppose we’ll see what happens. I tend to think that Millennials might not be as transformative as some have suggested in regards to where they want to live or in what kinds of houses they inhabit. At the same time, there may be fewer Millennials than Baby Boomers in the market for housing – both due to different sizes of the various cohorts as well as the limited purchasing power of some Millennials  which means it could take some time for those Baby Boomer dwellings to find buyers.

It is also interesting to consider what might happen if these homes, particularly those on the metropolitan fringes, can’t be sold. Would they be demolished? Converted? The community retrofitted? Drop to a low enough price that they become very attractive to certain groups? We have plenty of history as a country of people spreading out but not much experience with any serious contraction.

A need to better understand why more education doesn’t lead to less religiosity among American Christians

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A new Pew report looks at the relationship between education and religiosity:

On one hand, among U.S. adults overall, higher levels of education are linked with lower levels of religious commitment by some measures, such as belief in God, how often people pray and how important they say religion is to them. On the other
hand, Americans with college degrees report attending religious services as often as Americans with less education.
Moreover, the majority of American adults (71%) identify as Christians. And among Christians, those with higher levels of education appear to be just as religious as those with less schooling, on average. In fact, highly educated Christians are more likely than less-educated Christians to say they are weekly churchgoers.
There is a two part process with this data. First, it has to be collected, analyzed, and reported. On the face, it seems to contradict some long-held ideas within sociology and other fields that increasing levels of education would reduce religiosity. Second, however, is perhaps the tougher task of interpretation. Why is this the case among Christians and not other groups? What about the differences between Christian traditions? How exactly is religion linked to education – does the education reinforce religiosity or are they separate spheres for Christians (among other possibilities)? Data is indeed helpful but proper explanation can often take much longer.