The middle class finding it difficult to find city housing – what to do?

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Some urban neighborhoods are hot but this can lead to housing prices that limit how many middle class residents can move in:

The casualties in this war are mostly the middle class. In 2016, rents continued their years-long rise, incomes stratified further, and the average price to buy a home in major US cities rose. The strain pushed the middle class out of cities like Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Austin—the so-called “hot cities.” Some families move to the suburbs. Others flee for less expensive cities. But across the US, the trend holds: cities are increasingly home to high-rollers who can pay the high rents or down payments and lower income people who qualify for subsidized housing.

Macroeconomists say this a good problem to have. These cities are growing. People want to live in them. Stagnating economies in the Rust Belt might envy this kind of trouble. From the perspective of the overall wealth of cities, the middle class being pushed out doesn’t matter. But it matters on the human level, the neighborhood level. In Fort Hill, it means that a teacher at the local elementary school cannot afford to live in the neighborhood where she works. The effects on inequality, mobility, and the demographic composition of cities are very real, their causes multifold, and the solutions difficult…

“It’s very hard to get people to understand that the affordable housing crisis is not for the very poor,” says lawyer Mechele Dickerson of the University of Texas, an expert in housing and the middle class. It’s for people with good jobs who are not poor enough to qualify for subsidized housing, nor rich enough to pay the rising housing prices. “A family that makes $100,000 can’t afford to buy a house in most US cities,” Dickerson says…

The incoming administration has given experts no reason to expect it will prioritize fixing the affordability crises for the middle class. “In terms of the federal government, I see no hope,” Dickerson says. But as with immigration reform and climate change, housing affordability is something that states and cities can tackle on their own. In 2017, this trend toward decentralized power will continue—that is, if cities make retaining middle class residents a priority. That means relaxing the zoning laws to permit more housing stock to enter the market. This is the single most helpful thing the city of San Francisco could do, for example, to counter the tech money forcing prices on the limited housing stock up, says Shulman.

Four quick thoughts:

  1. This article seems to suggest that the government should do something to help middle class residents live in cities and the Trump administration may not help much. So, we do still in America subscribe to the idea that the federal government should subsidize middle class housing (whether in suburbs or cities)?
  2. I’m a little skeptical that the real problem is middle class housing rather than housing for poorer residents. Either this is a very broad definition of the middle class – which is entirely possible since most Americans consider themselves to be middle class – or cities really don’t care about poor and working class residents. I know cities want to keep middle-class residents but about people with less education and job prospects with less pay?
  3. This is an area that could really use some innovation. Big government doesn’t seem to have all the answers (what is the long-term effect of HUD?) nor does the free market (which tends to lead to residential segregation by race/ethnicity and class). What could really work well here is for a number of cities to try new ideas and see what might work.
  4. As the article notes, one of the biggest barriers is existing residents who don’t want to be near “affordable housing.” I’m not sure how you can get around this though there have been some indications that well-designed affordable housing limits some of the stigma. How do you get Americans (urban or suburban) to get past the mentality of pulling up the drawbridge after they move into their desirable neighborhood?

Can you plan suburban growth around an Amazon distribution center?

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Thanks to state tax breaks, Amazon will soon begin construction on a new distribution center in northeast Aurora. The new facility is said to bring 1,000+ jobs. The latest newsletter from the City of Warrenville discusses the new facility. The facility is located near the border with Warrenville and the city thinks this will be a good for Warrenville:

warrenvilletifamazon

Can an Amazon facility be an economic boon for a suburb, particularly in a portion of the community that is underdeveloped? At the least, the 1,000+ workers will have to live somewhere. Could there be certain facilities that pop up to serve the workers – fast food places? Gas stations? Dry cleaners? Tattoo parlors (wait, Warrenville has enough of those)? Adding students to the school system?

I’m sure the city is either working on estimates of this and it would be worth sharing with the public. Connecting the dots between a warehouse/distribution facility and other community amenities is not obvious and what is Warrenville willing to do to capitalize on this opportunity?

Some in Warrenville, Lisle want to annex to Naperville

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This would be a rarity: at least a few residents of two suburbs are interested in being annexed by the large suburb next door.

Apparently spurred by the recent emphasis on government consolidation in DuPage County, residents in Lisle and Warrenville are circulating petitions to place referendum questions on the April 4 ballot to measure support for proposals to annex their communities to Naperville. A similar petition has been rumored to be circulating in Woodridge.

Officials in all four towns said Friday they don’t know what’s behind the effort and stress that the complexities and likely resistance to such consolidations make them extremely unlikely…

“I would oppose that proposal 100 percent,” Broda said. “Each town has unique characteristics that make them special. Longtime Lisle residents wouldn’t even want to think about it. We want to keep the uniqueness of our communities.”…

Naperville is a fine community, he said, “but we have a strong identity of who we are and we have no desire to be part of Naperville.”

The general idea is intriguing if you want to put some conservative ideals into practice. Illinois, in particular, has many local taxing bodies – over 6,000 – and reducing the number of these could streamline operations and possibly lower taxes.

But, why would these particular suburbs want to be part of Naperville? What would they gain? The only thing I could really think of is prestige: for a few decades, Naperville has impressed both with its growth and its amenities. However, that growth has slowed (and won’t significantly increase unless Naperville makes some big decisions about allowing denser developments) and to some the amenities might be outweighed by the downsides of being large (think more traffic, lots of outsiders, etc.). Leaders of nearby suburbs are very aware of Naperville’s growth and, like in this article, are quick to note that they do not aspire to be Naperville and their communities have their own strengths.

Generally, I can’t imagine many existing suburban communities would want to merge with another suburb. The only two scenarios I could imagine: one suburb goes broke and/or one suburb is so small and their infrastructure costs so high that annexation makes sense to spread the cost.

Just to note: the time to become part of Naperville was decades ago. Warrenville finally incorporated in the 1967 after several failed votes in order to help protect itself from Naperville’s expansion. Naperville and Lisle also had conversations in the postwar decades about where each wanted to expand.

What are the criteria for choosing the most beautiful religious buildings?

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I saw this list of 25 stunning churches, mosques, and temples around the world and wondered: how do people decide on a list like this? Even the introduction of the article seems to recognize this:

The architecture of houses of worship varies according to time and place, ranging from hilltop chapels built in the 10th century to geometric modernist designs of glass and steel…

A tour around the world in search of the most beautiful houses of worship shows that despite the immense differences in architecture, the ability of humans to create beautiful, holy places transcends geographical and sectarian boundaries. Behold, 25 of the world’s prettiest churches, mosques, and temples.

I would be interested in reading more about how each of these buildings lead visitors to feelings of beauty and holiness. Is it because of the exterior? (Clearly marked as a religious building, difference from or convergence with the surrounding landscape, it took a long time to build.) Is it because of the interior? (A number of these captions mention that the buildings invoke certain feelings inside.) It is because it is old and/or cultural important? Ultimately: is there a common feature across religious buildings of different faiths and times that generally moves humans toward feelings of transcendence?

(This isn’t exactly what my coauthor Bob Brenneman and I were getting at in a recent Sociology of Religion article titled “When Bricks Matter: Fourt Arguments for the Sociological Study of Religious Buildings” but this would be interesting to consider alongside our thesis that we should pay more attention to how religious buildings affect the people within.)

The cultural bubbles of popular TV shows tell us what exactly?

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This is a cool set of maps of the popularity of 50 different TV shows across zip codes in the United States. But, what is the data and what exactly can it tell us? Here is the brief explanation:

When we looked at how many active Facebook users in a given ZIP code “liked” certain TV shows, we found that the 50 most-liked shows clustered into three groups with distinct geographic distributions. Together they reveal a national culture split among three regions: cities and their suburbs; rural areas; and what we’re calling the extended Black Belt — a swath that extends from the Mississippi River along the Eastern Seaboard up to Washington, but also including city centers and other places with large nonwhite populations.

Some quick thoughts:

  1. Can we assume that Facebook likes are an accurate measure? How many people are represented per zip code? Who tends to report their TV show preferences on Facebook? Why not use Nielsen data which likely has a much smaller sample but could be considered more reliable and valid?
  2. How exactly does television watching influence everyday beliefs and actions? Or, does it work the other way: people have certain beliefs and behaviors and they watch what confirms what they already like? Sociologists and others that study the effects of television don’t always have data on the direct connections between viewing and other parts of life. (I’m not suggesting television has no influence. Given that the average American still watches several hours a day, it is still a powerful medium even with the rise of
  3. The opening to the article both suggests TV viewing and the related cultures fall along an urban/rural divide but then also split across three groups. The maps display three main groups – metro areas, rural areas, and areas with higher concentrations of African Americans. I would want to know more about two areas. First, political data – and this article wants to make the link between TV watching and the 2016 election – suggests the final divide is really in the suburbs between areas further out from the big city and those closer. Can we get finer grained data between exurbs and inner-ring suburbs? Second, does this mean that Latinos and Asian Americans aren’t differentiated enough to be their own TV watching cultures?
  4. The introduction to this article also repeats a common line among those that study television:

In the 1960s and ’70s, even if you didn’t watch a show, you at least probably would have heard of it. Now television, once the great unifier, amplifies our divisions.

We certainly are way into the cable era of television (and probably beyond with all of the options now available through the Internet and streaming) but could we argue instead that the earlier era of fewer channels and viewing options simply papered over differences? As numerous historians and other scholars have argued, the 1950s might have appeared to be a golden era but most of the benefits went to white, middle class, suburban families.

In other words, I would be hesitant to state that these TV patterns are strong evidence of three clearly different cultures in the United States. Could these television viewing patterns fit in with other cultural tastes differentiating various groups based on class and race and ethnicity? Yes, though I’d much rather see serious academic work on this developing Bourdieu’s ideas and encompassing all sorts of consumption items treasured by Americans (homes, vehicles, sports fandom, making those hard choices like Coke and Pepsi or McDonald’s and Burger King or Walmart and Target). Also, limiting ourselves to geography may not work as well – this approach has been tried by many including in books like The Big Sort or Our Patchwork Nation – as it did in the past.

HGTV is the third highest rated cable network after “embrac[ing] the real America” and avoiding conflict

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American viewers – at least those still paying for cable – like what HGTV is showing:

The escapist appeal of looking at other people’s beautiful homes turned Home & Garden Television into the third most-watched cable network in 2016, ahead of CNN and behind only Fox News and ESPN. Riding HGTV’s reality shows, parent company Scripps Networks Interactive Inc. has seen its shares rise more than 30 percent this year, outperforming bigger rivals like Walt Disney Co., 21st Century Fox Inc. and Viacom Inc.

HGTV’s formula is relentlessly consistent: a shabby house gets a makeover, and a happy couple moves in. A variation on the theme — house-flipping for fun and profit — works too. The network has aired 23 different flipping shows over the past few years. Today “Flip or Flop” and “Masters of Flip” run in prime time…

“If you watch a lot of our competitors, it’s about bling-y expensive real estate in New York or crazy flipping in L.A.,” said Scripps chief programming officer Kathleen Finch. “For the most part, our viewers live in suburban houses with yards. We embrace the real America.”…

The key, Scripps executives agree, is a refusal to upset HGTV’s audience. There’s no profanity, and on-air conflicts are confined to paint colors or tile choices. Instead of making the network feel trivial, its fans say, the relentlessly pleasant programming is a comfort, especially in hard times.

Americans like houses, both in terms of what they might aspire to themselves (the home may be their number one opportunity to define themselves) as well as knowing what their “neighbors” have (don’t those people on TV count as neighbors in today’s world of limited deep social ties?). The lack of open conflict could also tie in nicely with M. P. Baumgartner’s work The Moral Order of a Suburb which argued suburbanites create community by avoiding conflict.

I’m also intrigued by the idea that showing “the best side” of suburbanites could be a winning formula on television. I’ve been working on several projects in recent years about the depictions of suburbia on television. In the 1950s and early 1960s, there were numerous shows that presented everyday suburban life (obviously, a very sanitized white, upper middle class perspective) but since that period, many shows that do this are doing it with a wink and nod or to laugh at suburbanites. Do the fairly wealthy viewers of HGTV enjoy seeing themselves on screen when few other shows or TV networks offer such an opportunity?

The ongoing politics of the 2020 Census

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The dicennial Census is not just a counting exercise; it is a political matter as this commentary suggests.

According to recent documents from the Census Bureau and the Government Accountability Office, the bureau plans to substantially cut back on door-to-door surveying and, instead, use the internet, the Post Office and other means to determine who is living where.

The bureau thinks the 2020 survey will cost $5.2 billion less than the last one (an estimate the GAO questions), but the accuracy could be called into question. There will also likely be worries about fraud because many of the conclusions will be drawn through “imputations” — educated guesses.

In fact, fraud could affect the House of Representatives elections for years to come if someone isn’t watching.

During a recent hearing before the House Oversight Committee, which maintained control over the Census Bureau after the Obama-Emanuel caper, a key technology officer for the 2020 decennial admitted that a fraud prevention system won’t be fully in place until just a few months before the polling starts.

If the Census Bureau – often led by sociologists and other social scientists who have expertise in collecting and analyzing data – is fraudulent because certain parties don’t like the result, what can be left alone?

Sampling and estimation alone does not have to be a problem. Just because the Census can’t reach everyone – and they have certainly tried at points – doesn’t mean that there is room for fraud. If done well, the estimates are made based on accurate samples – meaning they generally match the proportions of the total population – and responsible people reporting on this data will always note that there is not 100% certainty in the data.

What if the best single display of America is Walmart?

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In making several trips to Walmart in advance of Christmas, I found myself marveling several times at the store. Here are some reasons why this retail giant may be the best single illustration of America today:

  1. Consumerism rules. Each Walmart has so much stuff, from groceries to auto parts to Christmas trees to dinnerware. And Americans like this stuff even more if it is reasonably priced.
  2. On the flip side of consumerism, how can one company coordinate all that manufacturing and shipping to get items to each store? Walmart’s rise is due in part to their logistical abilities.
  3. Walmart is a great place to find stuff with which to go overboard for whatever holiday is coming up. Americans love Christmas, Halloween, Fourth of July, Easter…
  4. Walmarts generally require customers to drive there, often due to their locations in suburban or rural areas, the need for a good chunk of land, and helping shoppers to transport all the stuff they buy.
  5. Because of the prices and locations, Walmarts tend to attract a diverse set of shoppers.
  6. The company does not let workers unionize.
  7. The Sam Walton story is not exactly rags to riches but it does suggest that a hard worker with some new ideas can make something big of himself.
  8. Everyone has to eat and Walmart is the largest grocery chain in the United States.
  9. It is an iconic American brand though it hasn’t exactly caught on around the world like others (such as Coca Cola, McDonald’s, Nike).
  10. Everyone seems to have an opinion about its merits or flaws. Still, according to the company, “Every week more than 60 percent of Americans shop at Walmart.”
  11. It is convenient and ubiquitous for many: “About 90 percent of Americans live within 15 minutes of a Walmart store.“
  12. The company’s size is hard to fathom:

    “And Wal-Mart’s heft is not just financial, it’s physical too. Its 4,600+ U.S. stores occupied almost 700 million square feet. That’s roughly enough space for 11,800 football fields. That means the entire population of Buffalo, New York, could suit up, split into teams and play football against each other simultaneously in Wal-Marts across the country.

    The company’s total revenue for fiscal 2016 was $482.1 billion. That’s enough to buy a gallon of milk every day for every person in Brazil for two years, based on the $2.89 price per gallon at the North Bergen, New Jersey, Wal-Mart.

    Wal-Mart’s costs and expenses hit $458 billion for the year, which is bigger than the budgets of all but four U.S. government departments. Here’s what the rankings would be:

    1) Health and Human Services
    2) Social Security
    3) Treasury
    4) Defense
    5) Wal-Mart.”

For better or worse, is Walmart America?

Fighting over suburban voters and Trump lost ground

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Democrats and Republicans both need suburban voters and analysis of the 2016 presidential results suggests Donald Trump lost ground in some suburban areas:

Trump’s general election struggles in suburbia were anticipated. With few exceptions he struggled in those same localities in the primary season, routinely losing suburbs to Sens. Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. Trump’s ability to press an agenda that wins those suburban voters back—or Democrats’ ability to seize on this schism—may largely define the success of both parties in the next era of American politics.

A national analysis of 20 high-growth suburban Republican counties surrounding the metropolitan areas of Chicago, Columbus, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Kansas City, St. Louis, Nashville, Atlanta, Charlotte, Jacksonville, Richmond, Washington, Denver, New Orleans, Dallas, Houston, Austin, and Fort Worth show the same softness in Trump support across disparate regions of the country. Of those 20 counties studied, only St. Charles, Missouri, delivered a Trump a larger margin than it had given Romney. The 20 suburban growth counties studied collectively gave Romney a 753,442-vote advantage over Obama but yielded Trump a smaller 467,120-vote advantage over Clinton…

Democratic strategists are hawking the narrative that Trump’s metropolitan problem was due primarily to minority voters, and some of that is true. In Gwinnett and Cobb Counties outside Atlanta, white voters now make up less than two-thirds of the population and Trump was nine percentage points weaker than Romney had been. But Trump’s softness in even heavily white suburbs indicates a broader warning sign for Republicans….

Suburbanites Like Republicans But Not Trump

Who will put together the best campaign to reach these suburban voters in 2020? Perhaps we need to update the phrase from the Nixon campaign of “Will it play in Peoria?” (though the original phrase came from vaudeville, not politics) to something more like will it play in Cobb County or Loundon County or Kendall County.

More land protected by private owners than the American National Parks system

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Here is an interesting fact: private landowners have protected more land than all of the National Parks system.

More than 56 million acres of private land have been voluntarily conserved across the country, according to the latest National Land Trust Census, which is released every five years by the Washington, D.C.-based Land Trust Alliance (LTA). For context, that’s double the size of all land in national parks across the lower 48 states.

“Land trusts are in a position to address many of society’s ills,” says Andrew Bowman, president of the LTA, in a statement about the census. “How do we stem a national health crisis and provide opportunities for people to exercise and recreate? Land is the answer. How do we secure local, healthy and sustainable food? Land is the answer. And land even has a role to play in mitigating climate change.”

Thanks to the flexibility of private land conservation, those 56 million acres play a wider range of roles than we typically expect from state or national parks. The owner of a small forest may prohibit any construction or public access, for example, while another may allow some hunting and fishing, or may even turn it into a community park with hiking trails. A family that owns a farm, meanwhile, could decide to protect certain parts of their property — like a stream buffer or a flowering meadow — while reserving their right to build structures or clear pastures elsewhere…

And while it’s not always as accessible as a national park — often by design, for the sake of wildlife or for the privacy of people who live there — protected private land is still valuable for public recreation, too. The census counts nearly 15,000 private properties with public access, including more than 1.4 million acres owned by land trusts and another 2.9 million acres under easement. More than 6.2 million people visited U.S. land-trust properties in 2015, according to the LTA, for the kinds of friluftsliv outdoor activities that boost public health without much public investment.

I’m guessing those landowners that do this like that both the National Parks and private owners are conserving this land. On the other hand, does this figure suggest that the National Parks system is not the best to preserve land? It may be the best way to preserve land for public use – and the busiest National Parks are indeed often overrun with visitors – but perhaps is not the best approach in the long run.