Perceptions of extreme weather affected by social context

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A new study in Environmental Sociology finds that people view extreme weather differently depending on their context:

“Odds were higher among younger, female, more educated, and Democratic respondents to perceive effects from extreme weather than older, male, less educated, and Republican respondents,” said the study’s author, Matthew Cutler of the University of New Hampshire.

There were other correlations, too. For example, people with lower incomes had higher perceptions of extreme weather than people who earned more. Those who live in more vulnerable areas, as might be expected, interpret the effects of weather differently when the costs to their homes and communities are highest.

Causes of extreme weather and the frequency of extreme weather events is an under-explored area from a sociological perspective. Better understanding is important to building more resilient and adaptive communities. After all, why prepare or take safety precautions if you believe the weather isn’t going to be all that bad or occur all that often?…

“The patterns found in this research provide evidence that individuals experience extreme weather in the context of their social circumstances and thus perceive the impacts of extreme weather through the lens of cultural and social influences. In other words, it is not simply a matter of seeing to believe, but rather an emergent process of both seeing and believing — individuals experiencing extreme weather and interpreting the impacts against the backdrop of social and economic circumstances central to and surrounding their lives,” Cutler concludes.

Context matters! (Many sociology studies could be summed up this way.) Weather may have some objective features – it can be measured, quantified, examined, and predicted (to a small degree). Yet we all experience slightly differently based on what shapes us. While it sounds like this study focuses more on demographic factors, I wonder if there would also be big differences based on general attitudes about nature: is it something that is bigger than humans/has a life of its own vs. it is something that humans can control or not be affected by because of our increasing knowledge? Plus, humans are often not the best at detecting patterns; we perceive things to be related when they are not or vice versa.

Perhaps this helps explain why so many people can make small talk about the weather. It isn’t just that it affects us; rather, we all view it in slightly different ways. One person’s big storm that requires changing their behavior might be just an inconvenience to someone else.

Great Quotes in Homeownership #3: Bush in 2002

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As the War on Terror was underway, President Bush traveled to Atlanta in June 2002 and promoted homeownership for minorities:

But my attitude is, if somebody can’t find work and they want to work, we’ve got to continue to work on expanding the job base. And part of economic security is owning your own home. (Applause.) Part of being a secure America is to encourage homeownership. So somebody can say, this is my home, welcome to my home.

Now, we’ve got a problem here in America that we have to address. Too many American families, too many minorities do not own a home. There is a home ownership gap in America. The difference between Anglo America and African American and Hispanic home ownership is too big. (Applause.) And we’ve got to focus the attention on this nation to address this.

And it starts with setting a goal. And so by the year 2010, we must increase minority home owners by at least 5.5 million. In order to close the homeownership gap, we’ve got to set a big goal for America, and focus our attention and resources on that goal. (Applause.)…

I want to go back to where I started. I believe out of the evil done to America will come incredible good. I believe that as sure as I’m standing here. I believe we can achieve peace. I believe that we can address hopelessness and despair where hopelessness and despair exist. And listen, I understand that in this great country, there are too many people who say, this American Dream, what does that mean; my eyes are shut to the American Dream, I don’t see the dream. And we’d better make sure, for the good of the country, that the dream is vibrant and alive.

It starts with having great education systems for every single child. (Applause.) It means that we unleash the faith-based programs to help change people’s hearts, which will help change their lives. (Applause.) It means we use the mighty muscle of the federal government in combination with state and local governments to encourage owning your own home. That’s what that means. And it means — it means that each of us, each of us, have a responsibility in the great country to put something greater than ourselves — to promote something greater than ourselves.

These are not unusual sentiments for an American president. Even as danger lurks in the larger world (now the threat of terrorism rather than the threat of communism), American residents need to be able to participate in the American dream. This dream includes at least a few factors including good jobs and schools but is anchored in owning a home. Bush adds to these broad aspirations in this speech by noting that minorities have lower homeownership rates (this is still the case today) and the government and American society should be committed to helping them join white Americans in owning homes.

On one hand, this is a laudable goal that I suspect many would still support today: minorities should be able to buy homes in good neighborhoods. On the other hand, setting such goals is now viewed as helping to contribute to the economic crisis of the late 2000s. President Bush discusses a variety of means to push homeownership – government programs, community associations, faith-based groups – but we know at least part of this was accomplished through subprime and other loans that produced a facade of increasing homeownership without much substance behind it.

For the future, what is a sustainable path that truly gives minorities opportunities to own a home for the long-term? This might require jettisoning the idea that a home should be an economic investment. It may mean more operating outside of the free market to provide good housing.

Californians to be free to hang laundry on clotheslines

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In a move toward energy conservation, California will soon have “laundry liberation“:

In what a legislative analysis called a “modest energy conservation and freedom of choice measure,” Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday signed legislation requiring property managers to let renters and homeowner association members string clotheslines in private areas.

Assembly Bill 1448, by Assemblywoman Patty Lopez, D-San Fernando, comes amid heightened concern about greenhouse gas emissions in California – and the energy consumption of driers.

One columnist notes the class dynamics at work:

As a class signifier, the clothesline has always been highly charged. In the late 1960s, tumble dryers began to creep their way into middle-class households — according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, fewer than half of American households had dryers in 1980; by 2009, it had jumped to 80% — the clothesline has connoted a certain unsophistication if not downright poverty.

That’s especially true in big cities, where clotheslines hanging between buildings are an indelible marker of tenement living and overall blight. I visited Beijing a couple of years ago, and hanging laundry was ubiquitous even on the balconies of expensive high-rises. During the 2008 Olympic Games, I was told, the Chinese government prohibited outdoor clotheslines as part of an overall image-control effort. As soon as the Games were over, the laundry went back up.

The primary argument against clotheslines is the perceived effect on property values. Yet, why not give people the choice to dry clothes outside rather than put it in the hands of homeowner associations or local governments? I would guess that many middle and upper class residents still won’t hang clothes outside even if they can. At the same time, it could be a nice economic benefit for households with less money.

Is the status tied to using a clothes dryer in your own home more about consumption (having the ability to buy such an object and pay for its ongoing use) or the ability to keep personal items (like dirty laundry) within private areas?

“Landlords have the advantage”

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A new report based on feedback from 500 property managers sums up the rental market:

Vacancy rates are at a low not seen in the last 20 years. According to the U.S. Census, national vacancy rates in the second quarter of 2015 were 6.8 percent for rental housing, down nearly a full percentage point (from 7.5 percent) from the same time in 2014. The last time vacancy rates dipped below 6.8 percent was the fourth quarter of 1985 (6.7 percent)…

As the rental market continues to become more saturated, property managers are having to do even less in order to fill apartment openings. In 2015, 55 percent of property managers said that they are less likely to offer concessions in order to fill vacancies than they have been in years past. In fact, 64 percent reported that they are not doing anything different from one year ago, in order to fill vacancies…

88 percent of property managers raised their rent in the last 12 months, which is likely to continue 68 percent of property managers predict that rental rates will continue to rise in the next year by an average of 8 percent, which is a two percent increase over the estimated 6 percent rent hike predicted by property managers back in 2014…

Millennials face limited job prospects, lower incomes and high student loan debts, making it harder to buy and easier to rent. 45 percent of property managers have noticed an increase in the number of millennials renters. (Maybe some were living at home, and have moved out into the rental market).

Renters are staying in their apartments longer. According to property managers, 34 percent found that renters are holding on tight to their apartments and renewing their leases (up from 29 percent in 2014), rather than moving somewhere new.

This fits with other evidence showing a expensive and tight rental market. So when are communities – from big cities that have tended to emphasize luxury units (like Chicago, New York, and Miami) to suburbs that have tended to approve nicer single-family units to protect property values and keep certain people out – going to have more reasonably priced rental units?

American cities that are no longer hypersegregated

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Between 2000 and 2010, eleven American cities moved off the hypersegregation list as defined by sociologist Douglas Massey:

Cincinnati may offer a compelling example of what it takes to desegregate. It progressed enough toward desegregation from 2000-10 to fall off a list of “hypersegregated” cities. Princeton University sociologist Doug Massey, who released the list this year, uses five traditional measures of black-white segregation, and he considers areas that score highly on at least four of those measures to be hypersegregated.

Eleven other cities have fallen off Massey’s list since 2000: Atlanta; Buffalo, N.Y.; Fort Wayne, Ind.; Grand Rapids, Mich.; Indianapolis; Louisville, Ky.; Pittsburgh and York, Pa.; Springfield, Mass.; Toledo, Ohio; and Washington, D.C.

Metro areas that have made the least progress – still with high marks in all five segregation measures – are Birmingham, Ala.; Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit; Flint, Mich.; Milwaukee; and the St. Louis metro area, which includes Ferguson, where the shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer last year sparked nationwide protests.

According to Massey, what works to decrease hypersegregation?

Other than zoning for affordable housing in the suburbs, segregation is less about policy and more about economic opportunity and “the degree of local racial prejudice,” Massey said.

May more cities have such success even as dealing with these two issues – providing more economic opportunity and limiting racial prejudice – are not easy tasks.

How Chicago became “the alley capital of the country”

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Chicago has a lot of alleys and here is how they came to be:

According to Michael Martin, alley expert and professor of landscape architecture at Iowa State University, the “why alleys” question is easy to answer. You just have to go back to the late 1700s, decades before Chicago was founded. America was young, and had hardly touched any of its newest territories to the west…

According to cartographer and Chicago history buff Dennis McClendon, alleys had become so commonplace in the American West that the Illinois General Assembly “simply expected it to happen in Chicago.”…

The I&M Canal Commission hired surveyor James Thompson to lay out Chicago at the eastern end of the canal in 1830. To attract prospective land buyers, the General Assembly ordered that the new town of Chicago be “subdivided into town lots, streets, and alleys, as in their best judgment will best promote the interest of the said canal fund.”…

For its boom years in the 1800s, Chicago was an alley monster; it planned new blocks with alleys, annexed towns with alleys, and added territory to its alley-riddled gridiron. But all grid things must come to an end, and soon communities started popping up without alleys.

The first of those communities arrived in 1869. That year, Frederick Law Olmsted — the father of landscape architecture (and who later played a huge role in Chicago’s landscape) — planned the community of Riverside, which was situated on what was considered to be the far western outskirts of the Chicago region. It was the first planned suburb in America, and the earliest sign of divergence from Chicago’s alley trend.

In other words, Chicago has alleys because when it was founded, many communities had alleys. Chicago just happened to boom at this time and the alley was seen as a normal feature – until it slowly petered out in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Then, different expectations took over which emphasized lawns and cars. The vast majority of post-World War II housing does not include alleys as the car is given a prominent spot at the front of the house (with a driveway and garage) and the backyard became a private and important space. Today, New Urbanists promote alleys largely because they are a traditional design feature that removes undesirable activities (like cars) to the back and allows the house to be closer to the street (encouraging sociability). And, I have hard time imagining many municipalities want to pay for alleys – they add an additional layer of cost and infrastructure.

Three tips for avoiding turning a $250 million bridge into a $13 billion one

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A new book chronicling the long saga of the new Bay Bridge offers these lessons for avoiding massive cost changes/overruns:

Reference other projects. Frick points to a couple ideas for controlling mega-project costs. Scholar Bent Flyvbjerg, who has studied infrastructure cost overruns around the world—and who often boils them down to political deception—has promoted the idea of basing costs on a “reference class” of similar projects already completed. The fear with that is project leaders won’t bother to keep costs down if they know they can hit a certain number, but Frick says that possibility bothers her less than the uncertainty surrounding costs that goes on right now.

Widen early cost ranges. Giving a precise cost number out to multiple decimals, as the state legislature did with its $1.285 billion estimate in 1997, makes the figure seem more scientific and precise than it really is, and creates that much more public frustration when the costs keep rising in the future. “In the early planning stages, ranges in the projects would be really important to provide,” she says.

Track progress more closely. Frick also suggests that officials pay more attention to “transaction cost economics”—an approach that “analyzes project development over time,” she writes, in an effort to identify the precise “political and economic origins” of new costs. This fuller accounting also considers costs that often go overlooked, such as the time and energy that go into public participation. Without better cost estimates, projects will continue to suffer from the type of strategy described to Frick by one senior engineer:

“Basically at the onset of a project I think the higher ups prefer a dollar amount and schedule that doesn’t shock the public.”

Which, as the Bay Area knows, only makes the shock that much worse when it finally arrives.

The typical resident is going to look at this and ask how in the world this was allowed to happen. Large infrastructure projects have a lot of moving pieces but the change in price is still hard to understand. Of course, there may be a political penalty for adhering to this advice – a higher projected cost upfront is likely to limit support. Yet, going with an unreasonably low projection with no cost range borders on dishonesty.

Housing policy that encourages both affordable housing and rising home values

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This article points out a contradiction in housing policy: can we promote affordable housing while at the same time suggesting housing should be a good investment?

So how are these two conflicting ideas to be reconciled? Well, that’s the basic challenge of housing policy. Perhaps a start would be to acknowledge that there is, in fact, a tension here—that “protecting” or “promoting” property values is the same thing as “making housing more expensive.” It’s somewhat discouraging, for example, when community organizations claim that “affordability doesn’t mean housing values have to remain stagnant,” without acknowledging that if housing values aren’t stagnant—i.e., they’re growing—that means they’re also becoming less affordable.

But there is some hope. One thing that could help is robust production of housing that isn’t priced by the market, and therefore isn’t affected by rising market prices. That can be accomplished through public housing, privately-developed affordable housing with programs such as the low-income housing tax credit and housing vouchers. At the moment, few places produce non-market housing at anything close to a scale that would provide broad affordability, but there are encouraging examples: Portland, for instance, has created 2,300 units of affordable housing in its redeveloping Pearl District, adjacent to downtown, financed largely by taxes.

In many places, having a wide variety of housing types and sizes can also make room for people with a wide variety of incomes. My street in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago, for example, contains a handful of single-family homes, whose value at this point probably reaches into the six figures; expensive newer condo buildings; older multifamily buildings, some of which have large, luxuriously updated units, and others whose apartments are somewhat smaller, or have less up-to-date finishes; and a few single room occupancy buildings, with minimal accommodations. As a result, there is market-rate housing for everyone from upper-middle-class professionals to working-class immigrant families to low-income elderly adults. Of course, that sort of diversity is typical of a pre-zoning “illegal neighborhood”: A vanishingly small proportion of American neighborhoods allow that sort of mix to be created today, which is a large part of the problem. Making these kinds of neighborhoods more common might make America’s housing policy a little more cohesive and less contradictory.

In the explanation of why we have two contradictory positions, I think two key pieces are missed. One is the political dimension of these two goals for housing. Both have broad appeal – people want to be able to move to better neighborhoods even as they want higher housing values – and politicians continually push homeownership for the average American.  This has been a common theme going back to the 1920s (see an example from 1931). To put it bluntly, it helps secure votes. Second is the role of residents themselves who continue to want both outcomes. Policy, particularly at the federal level, is important here and a number of scholars have noted how decisions about mortgages and urban renewal privileged homeownership in the suburbs. Still, numerous residents practice NIMBY behavior, resisting change once they have their secure position within the home and neighborhood they want. Given the amount of money required to buy a home – it is the biggest single investment many people will make – this is understandable but it certainly doesn’t help others.

Both of the proposed solutions above are difficult to pull off. Using public money for public housing or affordable housing has been opposed since the early 1900s. Having mixed use and mixed income neighborhoods may be popular with some (New Urbanists, young people moving to the city) but it doesn’t get the same level of support from the broader public. To have housing for all or many would mean giving up some on the idea of housing as investment but those with more means – from the middle class on up – will not like this idea one bit.

Are McMansions bad for children?

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I recently read how one family wanted to help their kids avoid McMansions:

No McMansions: Andrew Porter said that his family was drawn to Maywood by the idea of raising his two preschool-age daughters in a community full of homes that felt plucked from a bygone era.

“The historical designation really helps preserve the character of the neighborhood,” said Porter, a lawyer in his mid-30s who lives on 23rd Road. “You don’t have to deal with people tearing down the original structures and replacing them with huge McMansions on tiny lots.”

So here is one argument for how McMansions could be bad for kids: they get to experience older homes in a historic neighborhood. What might be other reasons?

  1. McMansions encourage consumption. They are big houses with room for lots of stuff.
  2. McMansions teach bad things about proper architecture and design.
  3. McMansions are often constructed in suburban neighborhoods where kids become dependent on cars, limiting their opportunities to explore, and have limited interactions with neighbors.
  4. McMansions are poorly constructed (not built to last, cheaper materials) and this could hurt kids in the long run.
  5. Fires work differently in McMansions.
  6. If the oft-criticized teardown McMansion is located on a small lot, there is little room for kids to play.

I imagine some McMansion critics could add to this list. Of course, the owners of such homes might argue McMansion could also be positive for kids – how many parents would move into a home that could hurt their children? I’m actually a little surprised neither side makes this case more strongly; claiming that their actions are best for their children or future generations is a common tactic of opinionated people in the United States.

Facebook’s new emoji reactions based on sociological work

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Facebook used sociological work to help roll out new emojis next to the “Like” button:

Adam Mosseri has a very important job. As head of Facebook’s news feed, Mosseri and his team were assigned the task of determining which six cartoon images would accompany the social network’s ubiquitous thumbs-up button. They did not take the task lightly. To help choose the right emoji to join “like,” Mosseri said Facebook consulted with several academic sociologists “about the range of human emotion.”…

The decision was reached after much deliberation. Arriving at the best of those trivial and common picture faces followed a lot of data crunching and outside help. Mosseri combined the sociologists’ feedback with data showing what people do on Facebook, he said. The goal was to reduce the need for people to post a comment to express themselves. “We wanted to make it easier,” he said. “When things are easier to do, they reach more people, and more people engage with them.”…

In order for something to qualify for the final list, it had to work globally so users communicating among various countries would have the same options, Mosseri said. One plea from millions of Facebook users, which the company ultimately ignored, was a request for a “dislike” button. Mosseri wanted to avoid adding a feature that would inject negativity into a social network fueled by baby photos and videos of corgis waddling at the beach. A dislike option, Mosseri said, wouldn’t be “in the spirit of the product we’re trying to build.”

Operation emoji continues at Facebook while the company monitors how Spaniards and Irish take to the new feature. The list isn’t final, Mosseri noted. The first phase in two European countries is “just a first in a round of tests,” he said. “We really have learned over the years that you don’t know what’s going to work until it’s out there, until people are using it.”

Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have been clear for years that they do not want Facebook to spread negative emotions. Rather, the social network site is about finding and strengthening relationships. The emojis both avoid dislike (though this set of six emojis includes one for sad and one for angry – but these are different than dislike) and make it easier for people to react to what others post.

Here are two factors that could affect these reaction emojis:

  1. Facebook will be pressured to add more. But, how many should they have? At what point does more options slow down reactions? Is there a proper ratio for positive to negative emojis? I’m guessing that Facebook will try to keep the number limited as long as they can.
  2. Users in different countries will use different emojis more and ask for different new options. At some point, Facebook will have to choose between universal emotions and providing country-specific options that appeal to particular values and expressions.