Summary of problems with Australian McMansions

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One Australian columnist covers a number of the critiques of McMansions:

THEY’RE not McMansions. They’re Shateaux. They’re houses so big they take up the entire block, stretching fence to fence like a Neo-Georgian Graceland. From Caroline Springs to Camberwell, Werribee to Wantirna, many new houses have six bedrooms, three living rooms and five bathrooms — not to mention teen retreat, parents’ zone, indoor/outdoor cabana and entertainers’ deck.

Many are the slums of tomorrow being built for the people of today. In established suburbs these houses are being built by Chinese investors for other Chinese investors so they have somewhere safe to park their money amid the financial crisis. The Chinese don’t care about heritage trees, visual intrusion or the lack of privacy; they just care about getting maximum box for their buck.

For Aussies, it’s more about having the appearance of wealth and upward mobility, even if they don’t quite have the funds to match. With a four-wheel drive out the front and a jetski in the garage, it’s all part of our modern sense of entitlement. People tell themselves they deserve it, even if it’s all on credit and interest-only loans…

As long as it meets the state building code, no one has the ability to stop anything from going up. It’s too bad for residents affected by the monolithic monster being built next door that blocks out their light, overlooks their backyard, is three times the size of any other nearby house and stretches from boundary to boundary. They can’t even look at the plans, let alone object…

Sure, we all want bigger houses, but there’s a difference between big and supersized. What’s the point in having a house that is so massively huge that you can’t afford to heat or cool it, let alone meet other utility costs?

What’s left? Covered here: bad architecture; too much space; slums of the future (either because they are poorly built or push buyers into debt); outsiders entering the neighborhood; about showing off wealth; fits broader patterns of consumption; teardowns ruin the homes of their neighbors and nearby residents can’t fight back; McMansions are inefficient in energy use. Perhaps the only thing missing in this article is a connection to the terrible sprawling suburbs. Or, perhaps the suggestion that such homes exemplify all that is wrong about society.

Chicago’s population decline masked by Mexican immigration

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Amid news that the Chicago region led the country in population loss during 2015 comes this reminder of how Chicago has bolstered its population in recent decades:

More than any other city, Chicago has depended on Mexican immigrants to balance the sluggish growth of its native-born population, said Rob Paral, a Chicago-based demographer who advises nonprofits and community groups. During the 1990s, immigration accounted for most of Chicago’s population growth. The number of Mexican immigrants rose by 117,000 in Chicago that decade, making up 105 percent of all growth, according to data gathered by Paral’s firm, Rob Paral and Associates.

After 2007, falling Mexican-born populations became a trend across the country’s major metropolitan areas. But most of those cities were able to make up for the loss with the growth of their native populations, Paral said. Chicago couldn’t.

Chicago is often held up as a shining example of a Rust Belt city that survived and thrived – but this may have had less to do with grand building projects or powerful mayors or a prominent international presence and more with continuing to be a center for immigration.

Living as the only Section 8 resident in a wealthy suburb

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Mary Schmich tells the story of Winnetka’s sole Section 8 resident:

In a Chicago suburb where million-dollar homes are common and the median household income exceeds $200,000, Miranda held a rare distinction for a while: He was the only person in town with a Section 8 housing choice voucher.

With his large belly and his mustache, his T-shirt and his jeans, he was a notable presence in the village. He liked to be out and about — staying inside depressed him — and his subsidized one-bedroom apartment on Elm Street put him in the heart of Winnetka’s action, meaning close to the Metra station, a bookstore, a Peet’s, a Starbucks, restaurants and boutiques, most of which he couldn’t afford.

He was often spotted with a big coffee cup in one hand, a cigarette in the other, maybe sitting on a park bench. He liked going to the library and, in the summer, relaxing by the lake…

Having a stable home of his own in a tranquil place offered him some peace that life otherwise denied him.

As much as residential segregation by race and ethnicity is present in the suburbs, this highlights another aspect: segregation by social class. According to the Census, Winnetka has over 12,000 residents, is very white – 94.8%, and also very wealthy – a median household income of over $207,000 and a median value of owner-occupied housing units of $941,800. How much affordable housing is available in places like Winnetka? Previous efforts to introduce the idea have met resistance. Does having any Section 8 residents threaten property values or the community’s image? Suburban residents don’t have to actively oppose such plans to provide space for poorer residents; their zoning and comprehensive plans can make their thoughts pretty clear. Would their opinions change if they met a person like Thomas Miranda? Maybe, but no matter how much they might like him as an individual, too many such residents of a certain status would not be good.

Hiding the remains of the dead Chicago Spire

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With the plans for a 150-story Chicago building postponed or dead, the massive hole in the ground is going to be harder to see:

It was supposed to be a strutting 150-story lakefront symbol of the city’s virility — but eight years after construction of the Chicago Spire skyscraper ground to a halt, the gaping hole where it was to have stood has instead become an enduring reminder of the Great Recession.

So owner Related Midwest is now hiding the unsightly circular hole that would have formed the foundation of the world’s second-tallest building behind a pile of dirt.

Workers last week started moving dirt to form a landscaped berm that will block the view of the 110-foot diameter hole from a row of 10 Streeterville row homes on the 400 block of East Water Street…

The screen, which won’t be tall enough to block the view of the hole from nearby high-rise buildings, is simply “the neighborly thing to do,” Anderson said on Tuesday, declining to comment on Related Midwest’s long-term plans for the land.

There could be a variety of reasons for blocking views of this large hole:

  1. The city requires such changes.
  2. People have complained about this, either because it is a safety issue or it harms property values.
  3. The company has some plans or changes they don’t want to broadcast.
  4. The empty hole in the ground is a negative symbol that reflects poorly on the property and Chicago.

We tend to like stories of large skyscrapers that succeed against all obstacles. They fit with narratives of endless urban growth, humans producing technological marvels, reaching for the heavens, and serve as symbols of power and wealth. Recently, I had my class watch part of Episode 8 (“The Center of the World”) of the PBS documentary New York which details the decades long effort to build the World Trade Centers which were not needed but came to be important markers. Yet, there are certainly stories of significant building projects that failed or never got off the ground. These are rarely told or there is little physical evidence that something went wrong. A large hole in the ground present for years suggests something didn’t work out and few corporations, planners, or urban officials would want to be reminded of this.

White flight starting in the 1910s, not after World War II

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Two economists look at white flight as it occurred decades before the post-World War II era:

Economists Allison Shertzer and Randall P. Walsh at the University of Pittsburgh analyzed data from 10 large U.S. cities in the Northeast and the Midwest from 1900 to 1930 to isolate the role of white flight that occurred in that period—before the Federal Housing Authority, which instituted many of the discriminatory housing policies, was born. They found that the exodus of white people from a particular neighborhood following the arrival of black residents led to a 34 percent increase in segregation during the 1910s; In the 1920s, it resulted in a striking 50 percent increase…

They isolated demographic data for 10 U.S. cities—New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Boston, and Baltimore in the Northeast, and Cincinnati, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, and St. Louis in the Midwest—all of which had seen large influxes in black residents as a result of the Great Migration. They then designed a strategy to quantify the contribution of white flight to racial segregation…

One important thing to note: when white people left their neighborhoods in response to black arrivals in this period, they didn’t go to the suburbs—because suburbs didn’t really exist until the second half of the 20th century. They went to neighborhoods pretty similar to the ones they left—at least in terms of tax bases and public spending. That means that the measurements of white flight here “may thus provide a better gauge of racial distaste than those using postwar data,” the authors write in the paper.

When I’m asked about suburbanization, I often note that is start in the early 1900s, was derailed by the Great Depression, and then really took off after World War II. Many of the processes of post-war suburbia – including mass consumption, the construction of major roads and highways, more mass produced homes, the dominance of the automobile for daily life and planning, and changing racial and ethnic demographics in numerous urban neighborhoods – were already underway decades before. Perhaps it is convenient to blame the post-war era – and there were specific policy changes that happened then like federal funding for highways and changes to the mortgage industry to make homes accessible for more Americans – but these disliked features of 1950s suburbia have deeper roots.

Real estate agents and steering today

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Many real estate agents today won’t answer certain questions but does this eliminate steering?

Agents such as Foster and Thakkar are hypersensitive because they don’t want to run afoul of the Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, familial status, disability or handicap. The law is administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Penalties for violating fair housing rules can be costly, so many real estate brokerage firms train agents on what constitutes “steering” of homebuyer clients as well as what could be interpreted as showing any form of bias against any “protected class.”

What can agents do when clients ask certain questions? Here are several of the examples provided:

“We can’t answer,” Foster said. “It’s all too subjective.” Instead, she refers them to online information sources about whatever they’re asking — websites that rate schools, statistical compilations on crime rates and the like…

“It’s a very common question,” he says: “Can you tell us how many other Indian families live on this street?” Even though he thinks he understands the thrust of the question — are there people like us around? — he declines to answer directly. Instead, he supplies them a list of the names of current owners on the street, allowing his clients to decide for themselves whether the names indicate that they are Indian or not.

Referring people to other sources may lead to issues:

But some fair housing advocates are concerned that the online information available today may actually enable a subtle form of racial steering when agents name specific sites that offer highly localized racial and ethnic breakdowns and refer clients to them. Lisa Rice, executive vice president of the National Fair Housing Alliance, a nonprofit group that has fielded teams of white and minority “testers” to detect bias in homes sales, thinks that in the event of fair housing complaints against those agents, the fact that they made such specific referrals could be held against them.

It seems to me that one of the best ways to eliminate this issue is to educate homeowners about all the potential information they can access. Stop them from asking in the first place. Realtors could even make this clear at the beginning. The Internet certainly presents a lot of available information to possible home buyers ranging from the Census to other data aggregators to message boards to municipal websites. In other words, it is not hard to find out this sort of information. Yet, this would go against the argument that realtors make about why they are still necessary: they have inside information about the home and the entire process. Additionally, all the online information is not necessarily easy to interpret. Say a homeowner is interested in future property values: can they make a prediction based on what is online? Or, say that an online message board suggests one thing is happening while the local newspaper claim something else is taking place. How could someone unfamiliar with the area make a judgment regarding conflicting information?

In the long run, if people want to fight residential segregation and housing discrimination (which are legitimate concerns), would it be better to remove real estate agents from the process or not?

Using a supercomputer and big data to find stories of black women

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A sociologist is utilizing unique methods to uncover more historical knowledge about black women:

Mendenhall, who is also a professor of African American studies and urban and regional planning, is heading up the interdisciplinary team of researchers and computer scientists working on the big data project, which aims to better understand black women’s experience over time. The challenge in a project like this is that documents that record the history of black women, particularly in the slave era, aren’t necessarily going to be straightforward explanations of women’s feelings, resistance, or movement. Instead, Mendenhall and her team are looking for keywords that point to organizations or connections between groups that can indicate larger movements and experiences.

Using a supercomputer in Pittsburgh, they’ve culled 20,000 documents that discuss black women’s experience from a 100,000 document corpus (collection of written texts). “What we’re now trying to do is retrain a model based on those 20,000 documents, and then do a search on a larger corpus of 800,000, and see if there are more of those documents that have more information about black women,” Mendenhall added…

Using topic modeling and data visualization, they have started to identify clues that could lead to further research. For example, according to Phys.Org, finding documents that include the words “vote” and “women” could indicate black women’s participation in the suffrage movement. They’ve also preliminarily found some new texts that weren’t previously tagged as by or about black women.

Next up Mendenhall is interested in collecting and analyzing data about current movements, such as Black Lives Matter.

It sounds like this involves putting together the best algorithm to do pattern recognition that would take humans too long to process. This can only be done with some good programming as well as a significant collection of texts. Three questions come quickly to mind:

  1. How would one report findings from this data in typical outlets for sociological or historical research?
  2. How easy would it be to apply this to other areas of inquiry?
  3. Is this data mining or are there hypothesis that can be tested?

There are lots of possibilities like this with big data but it remains to be seen how useful it might be for research.

Exodus of black residents from Chicago’s South Side

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A long-time resident of Chicago’s South Side discusses the movement of black residents to other locations:

For South Side residents, the writing has been on the wall. Starting as a slow trickle into the suburbs as industrial jobs began drying up in the 1970s, black flight increased in the 2000s, with blacks seeking the suburbs like never before — as well as places like Georgia, Florida or Texas, according to U.S. Census data.

The population shift has folks like myself, left behind on the South Side, feeling like life after the rapture, with relatives, good friends and classmates vanishing and their communities shattering. A recent study found that nearly half of the city’s African-American men between 20 and 24 were unemployed or not attending college…

Every senseless death, every random shooting and every bullet-riddled weekend means another family, another frightened parent must make the decision to stay or go.

Those of us left behind must deal with the aftershocks: lessening political clout, limited public services and the creep of poverty and crime into neighborhoods like South Shore and Auburn-Gresham.

Even as some trumpet the demographic inversion of metropolitan areas other research suggests poor neighborhoods, particularly in Rust Belt cities, can often slowly lose residents. On one side, there is a lot of attention paid to whiter and wealthier residents moving into urban cores and hip neighborhoods while on the other side, little attention is granted to disadvantaged neighborhoods. In some of these neighborhoods, it is remarkable just how much open space there can be as buildings decay and few people clamor to move in (think of Detroit and its urban prairies as an example).

We are still trying to cope with 19th century social changes

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I recently heard a talk from historian Heath Carter regarding his new book Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago where he drew connections between the Gilded Age and our own current times of inequality. In thinking further about the topic, I was struck by the number of issues that were pertinent then and are still present today. While it is difficult to know exactly when social processes begin and end, here is an incomplete list of concerns from the 1800s that we are still trying to figure out:

-How do we cope with all the people moving from small towns/agricultural areas to big cities?

-How can we have fulfilling lives in an industrialized, mechanized, global, capitalistic economic system? How do we deal with influential corporations as well as the ultra-rich?

-How can welfare states operate effectively with numerous interest groups and big money involved?

-Can science and religion coexist?

-On the whole, does mass culture (through mass media whether newspapers, telegraph, radio, TV, or Internet) help or hinder society?

-Can technological progress solve many of our problems?

-How can society – particularly, nation states – be cohesive and unified given increased levels of heterogeneity and specialization?

-What is the role of the self compared to the shaping and undeniable influence of growing (and often necessary) social institutions?

-What kind of relationship should we have with nature given industrialization and modifications to the environment?

-Under what pretenses and at what costs should major wars and social conflicts be waged?

Put another way, it is little surprise to me that the discipline of sociology emerged when it did: as these large-scale social changes were getting underway, numerous people were interested in explaining the effects. But, these are long-term social processes that may take decades or centuries to play out across a variety of contexts and as they interact with each other.

Deannexation option could lead to smaller Tennessee cities

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Efforts by the Tennessee legislature may make it easier for residents and neighborhoods to deannex from large cities:

The growing deannexation debate could ultimately shrink six cities in Tennessee, including Knoxville, Chattanooga, Memphis, Johnson City, Kingsport, and Cornersville.

For more than six decades, communities across Tennessee could simply pass an ordinance to forcibly expand their city limits, whether the people who owned the annexed property liked it or not.  In 2014, the state passed a law requiring residents to vote in favor of joining a city before their property can be annexed…

However, the 1990s and early 2000s were a time of rapid expansion under former mayor Victor Ashe.  Knoxville grew by 26 square miles during his time as mayor, mostly through what was nicknamed “finger annexation” that extended the city limits in the shape of fingers along the interstates…

Deannexation means the city would also lose out on some property taxes.  Rogero said if every annexed neighborhood left the city, it would add up to around $377,000 in annual property taxes.  That figure is actually much smaller than you may expect based on how much property Knoxville annexed in the late 1990s.  Rogero noted only residential property would be eligible for deannexation and much of Knoxville’s annexed property was zoned for commercial use.

Annexation stopped for many Northern cities around the turn of the 20th century as suburbs stopped wanting to join big cities but Sun Belt cities have often had different policies and more land growth over recent decades. Forced annexation would be one of the worst things one could do to many suburbanites who prize property rights and local control. But, it is another thing to allow them to deannex themselves. Would a better solution be to have both parties – those who want to leave as well as the larger community – both approve the annexation or deannexation via vote?

More broadly, there are various efforts for more metropolitan government, particularly to help balance out disparities (housing, education systems, tax bases, etc.) wrought by residential segregation, or to consolidate or limit the growth of local taxing bodies. Thus, it is interesting to hear of an effort to go the direction and let people continue to fragment within regions.