Summarizing 25 years of researching the lives of 790 Baltimore kids

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Three sociologists followed 790 Baltimore children over 25 years and published a book of their findings in 2014. Here is a quick summary of their results:

“The implication is where you start in life is where you end up in life,” Alexander said. “It’s very sobering to see how this all unfolds.”

Among the most striking findings:

  • Almost none of the children from low-income families made it through college. Of the children from low-income families, only 4 percent had a college degree at age 28, compared to 45 percent of the children from higher-income backgrounds. “That’s a shocking tenfold difference across social lines,” Alexander said.
  • Among those who did not attend college, white men from low-income backgrounds found the best-paying jobs. Although they had the lowest rate of college attendance and completion, white men from low-income backgrounds found high-paying jobs in what remained of Baltimore’s industrial economy. At age 28, 45 percent of them were working in construction trades and industrial crafts, compared with 15 percent of black men from similar backgrounds and virtually no women. In those trades, whites earned, on average, more than twice what blacks made. Those well-paying blue collar jobs are not as abundant as during the years after World War II, but they still exist, and a large issue today is who gets them: Among high school dropouts, at age 22, 89 percent of white dropouts were working compared with 40 percent of black dropouts.
  • White women from low-income backgrounds benefit financially from marriage and stable live-in partnerships. Though both white and black women who grew up in lower-income households earned less than white men, when you consider household income, white women reached parity with white men — because they were married to them. Black women not only had low earnings, they were less likely than whites to be in stable family unions and so were less likely to benefit from a spouse’s earnings. White and black women from low-income households also had similar teen birth rates, but white women more often had a spouse or partner, a relationship that helped mitigate the challenges. “It is access to good paying work that perpetuates the privilege of working class white men over working class black men,” Alexander said. “By partnering with these men, white working class women share in that privilege.”
  • Better-off white men were most likely to abuse drugs. Better-off white men had the highest self-reported rates of drug use, binge drinking, and chronic smoking, followed in each instance by white men of disadvantaged families; in addition, all these men reported high levels of arrest. At age 28, 41 percent of white men — and 49 percent of black men — from low-income backgrounds had a criminal conviction, but the white employment rate was much higher. The reason, Alexander says, is that blacks don’t have the social networks whites do to help them find jobs despite these roadblocks.

My quick interpretation: race and class still matter. White children could access jobs through social networks (a point also made in Deidre Royster’s Race and the Invisible Hand study of vocational students in Baltimore) and could still get jobs even with deviant behavior. White women partner with these white men and do better as a result. Starting in families with higher incomes leads to a higher likelihood of going to college. That these two social factors continue to matter should not be surprising – look at the life outcomes and changes by race/ethnicity and income for all American adults – but their presence can get drowned out.

What about American mid-sized metropolitian areas with 500,000 to 1 million residents?

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The biggest American cities get a lot of attention but what about the population changes in smaller big cities? Here is a look at population trends among the 53 metropolitan areas that have between 500,000 and 1 million residents:

The United States has 53 mid-sized metropolitan areas, with populations from 500,000 to 1 million. These metropolitan areas together had a population of nearly 38 million in 2014, according to the most recent Census Bureau population estimates (Table). In number, they match the 53 major metropolitan areas (over 1 million population), though they have only one fifth of the population (178 million). The mid-sized metropolitan areas are growing somewhat slower than the major metropolitan areas, at an annual rate of 0.81% between 2010 and 2014, compared to 1.00% in the major metropolitan areas. Combined, the major metropolitan areas and the mid-sized metropolitan areas have two-thirds of the US population…

The 10 fastest growing mid-sized metropolitan areas are from every major region of the country except for the Northeast. Cape Coral, FL was the fastest growing between 2010 and 2014. Its growth rate picked up substantially in 2013 to 2014. Cape Coral (formerly called Fort Myers) was hit particularly hard by the real estate bust of the late 2000s. The core municipality itself has not only the usual street system, but an extensive canal system (photo above). It is hard to imagine a metropolitan area that feels less urban…

Virtually all of the slowest growing mid-sized metropolitan areas are former industrial behemoths that lost out in the competition for survival in the Northeast and Midwest. A visit to any of these cities will reveal either a relatively strong pre-World War II central business district or the remains of one. Each of these has a built form that looks more like Louisville or Cincinnati than the dominant pattern for new metropolitan areas that developed with a far more modest density gradient and with much weaker cores…

The list of mid-sized metropolitan areas is fluid. As noted above, a number of mid-sized metropolitan areas could move into the major metropolitan category before 2020 or 2030. On the other hand, there will be new mid-sized metropolitan areas. Three seem likely to be added by the 2020 census (Lexington, KY, Lafayette, LA and Pensacola, FL). There should be a rush of new mid-sized metropolitan areas between 2020 and 2030, at current growth rates. This could include Visalia, CA; Springfield, MO; Corpus Christi, TX; Port St. Lucci, FL; Reno, NV; Asheville, NC; Huntsville, AL; Santa Barbara, CA; and Myrtle Beach, SC.

A lot of this seems to mirror broader trends: continued Sunbelt population growth, declining populations in the Northeast and Midwest, big effects of the economic crisis and housing bubble, and slow but steady population growth overall.

While the population data is interesting, it all raises some interesting questions that I know some scholars have taken up even as the lion’s share of attention rests on the bigger cities:

1. Is the experience of living in these cities and regions qualitatively different than living in a larger city? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

2. How does the size of the region affect all sorts of things including a region’s resiliency or ability to grow? In other words, are these places simply scaled down versions of bigger cities or are they something quite different?

3. Given the proclivity of Americans to choose small towns as their preferred places to live, would these kinds of cities offer a preferred lifestyle? (Of course, people still need jobs and want certain amenities so if they had to make tradeoffs between that but a manageable size, does that lead residents to cities like these?

Comparing the overall diversity of cities versus neighborhood diversity within cities

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Nate Silver looks at how large cities can be diverse overall but still have high levels of residential segregation:

This is what the final metric, the integration-segregation index, gets at. It’s defined by the relationship between citywide and neighborhood diversity scores. If we graph the 100 most populous cities on a scatterplot, they look like this:

silver-segregation-scatter

The integration-segregation index is determined by how far above or below a city is from the regression line. Cities below the line are especially segregated. Chicago, which has a -19 score, is the most segregated city in the country. It’s followed by Atlanta, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Washington and Baltimore.

Cities above the red line have positive scores, which mean they’re comparatively well-integrated. Sacramento’s score is a +10, for instance.

But here’s the awful thing about that red line. It grades cities on a curve. It does so because there aren’t a lot of American cities that meet the ideal of being both diverse and integrated. There are more Baltimores than Sacramentos.

Furthermore, most of the exceptions are cities like Sacramento that have large Hispanic or Asian populations. Cities with substantial black populations tend to be highly segregated. Of the top 100 U.S. cities by population, 35 are at least one-quarter black, and only 6 of those cities have positive integration scores.

So perhaps the Chicago School was correct: it is really neighborhoods that matter, even within cities with millions of people. This is what an interesting recent map of Detroit showed where there are clearly clusters of the city that have traditional neighborhoods while other parts are more vacant urban prairies. The sociological literature on poor neighborhoods that emerged starting in the 1970s gets at a similar concept: there are unique conditions and processes at work in such neighborhoods. And, Silver’s analysis confirms sociological research on residential segregation that for decades (perhaps highlights most memorably in American Apartheid) has argued that black-white residential segregation is in a league of its own.

Based on this kind of analysis, should sociologists only use city-wide or region-wide measures of segregation in conjunction with measures or methods that account for neighborhoods?

Traditional neighborhoods vs. urban prairies: block by block in Detroit

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National Geographic has quite a map showing Detroit with each block coded to be more or less less a traditional neighborhood or an urban prairie/naturescape. Here is the map:

DetroitBlockbyBlockNeighborhoodorPrairie2015NatlGeo

The map clearly shows clusters of both kinds of places, which contradicts the idea (reinforced by numerous stories and images) of recent years of a monolithic empty Detroit. As the text at the bottom left notes, “Many neighborhoods along Detroit’s perimeter are as densely populated as the city’s wealthier suburbs.” So it isn’t that all of Detroit needs fixing; neighborhoods that suffered from similar issues including deindustrialization, the loss of white residents, the lack of capital both for businesses and residents/homeowners, and crime do need the attention.

Record 5 homes over $100 million sold in the world last year. Is this really a trend?

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The luxury housing market is booming and a new record was set last year for sales of $100 million+ homes:

Demand for mega-mansions and penthouses has accelerated as wealthy buyers seek havens for their cash and search for alternative investments such as art and collectible real estate, according to a report Thursday by Christie’s International Real Estate, owned by auction house Christie’s. Five homes sold for more than $100 million last year, with at least 20 more on the market with nine-figure asking prices, the brokerage said…

Just one home sale exceeded the $100 million mark in 2013, following four such transactions in 2012 and three in 2011, Christie’s reported.

While I have seen other corroborating evidence that this segment of the market is indeed doing well, how much of a trend or record is this went the number of transactions throughout the world increased to five? Here is the trend from the last four years: 3, 4, 1, 5. So if 2014 was a record year, was 2013 a big plunge in the market? The number of cases is so small and the timeline is so short that it is difficult to draw any substantial conclusions. Yet, suggesting a record occurred makes for a better headline or story…

How big investors buying up properties may be limiting cheaper housing

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The economic crisis opened up space for bigger housing investors yet here is one argument about how their actions may be limiting the supply of cheaper housing:

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal highlighted how some investors are using algorithms to quickly parse housing data and formulate bids on undervalued properties, site unseen. While doing so is a cool technological feat, it can spell trouble for normal people trying to navigate the often complex home-buying process in order to make offers on similar homes. And algorithms aren’t the only benefit that more sophisticated investors have. “Investors are winning over the first-time buyers in some bidding processes because investors are all cash,” says Lawrence Yun, a chief economist at the National Association of Realtors. For a seller that means a smoother deal: no waiting around on financing, loan approvals or other inconveniences that traditional buyers bring to the table.

For their part, some investors contend that the homes they purchase don’t put them in direct competition with first-time buyers. Invitation Homes, an investing and leasing company owned by Blackstone says that they typically funnel another 10 to 12 percent of the purchase price into renovations in order to make a property market-ready—an investment that most first-time home buyers wouldn’t be able to afford. Many investors also contend that compared to the number of homes that are bought and sold nationwide, their activity is just a drop in the bucket.

When looking at the big picture, that’s true. Nationwide, large institutional investors made up only 4.3 percent of the single-family home purchases in the market during 2014, according to RealtyTrac a real-estate data firm. And overall investment activity is dwindling as home values return to normal and there are fewer deals to be had. Dallas Tanner, the chief investment officer at Invitation Homes says that the group currently buys about $25 to $30 million a week of single-family properties, that’s down from their 2012-2013 peak when the group spent upward of $160 million each week.

But like all things in real estate, it’s also a matter of location. Lots of investor activity is concentrated in markets where homes are still available at reasonable enough prices that purchasers can turn a profit. According to a February 2015 report from RealtyTrac, “There were 35 zip codes nationwide where at least 50 single-family homes were purchased by institutional investors in the fourth quarter, with institutional investor purchases representing from 17 percent to 74 percent of all single-family home sales in those zip codes.” Places like: Atlanta, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Memphis. Those are also places that first-time buyers have the best bet of stretching their dollar far enough to purchase a home. Herbert, of the JCHS, says that that in some places, developers may in fact be pushing out normal home buyers, “For certain property segments, they may be creating competition.”

Even as the higher end of the housing market does well (see recent evidence here, here, and here), any impediment on the lower end of the market isn’t helping these days. With developers not showing much interest in building starter homes, these institutional investors may be grabbing up homes that those who want to join the housing market – whether recent college graduates or those working lower-income jobs – would need to get their foot in the door.

So if Americans – from politicians to average citizens – want to push homeownership, are these institutional investors good for this in the long run?

Wealthier communities with no fire hydrants require different firefighting tactics

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A recent house fire in a large Barrington Hills home illustrates the issues present in fighting fires in wealthier suburbs:

In all, 40 fire companies from departments as far away as Hebron, Des Plaines, Hanover Park and West Chicago converged on Barrington Hills April 18 to blast the fire with hundreds of thousands of gallons of water. But instead of hooking their hoses to nearby hydrants, all of that water had to be brought in from elsewhere in trucks, ratcheting up the degree of difficulty for firefighters.

“Having to bring water in on wheels is time-consuming,” said Deputy Chief Rich May of the Palatine Rural Fire Protection District. “The planning behind it is done quite well, but you can’t move it like tapping into a fire hydrant. There’s just no comparison.”…

“Years ago we had a lot of natural-based materials in houses,” he said. “Nowadays, with all of the synthetic products in the homes, such as plastics, they burn hotter and burn faster.”

That means houses burn hotter and collapse sooner, Giordano added…

Given the village’s lack of water system and regulations requiring minimum lot sizes of 5 acres, it’s not likely Barrington Hills residents will see hydrants near their homes anytime soon. However, fire officials said there are some steps homeowners can take to help make firefighters’ jobs easier.

In other words, the wealthier nature of the community led to a lack of fire hydrants. This is a bit odd because homeowners here could probably afford the costs of a full water system but would not have wanted to pay the costs for it which were exacerbated by the large lot sizes. Yet, when they need to put out a fire, doesn’t this lack of paying upfront for the water system lead to financial consequences down the road? One of the suggestions in this article – sprinklers within each home – would help keep homeowners more responsible for fighting fires in homes built in such settings.

See earlier posts about the unique challenges of fighting fires in large homes or McMansions.

“Urban clusters” = a small town outside of an urban area

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In looking at Census definitions for urban areas, I found this definition for what many Americans would consider small towns:

For the 2010 Census, an urban area will comprise a densely settled core of census tracts and/or census blocks that meet minimum population density requirements, along with adjacent territory containing non-residential urban land uses as well as territory with low population density included to link outlying densely settled territory with the densely settled core.  To qualify as an urban area, the territory identified according to criteria must encompass at least 2,500 people, at least 1,500 of which reside outside institutional group quarters.  The Census Bureau identifies two types of urban areas:

  • Urbanized Areas (UAs) of 50,000 or more people;
  • Urban Clusters (UCs) of at least 2,500 and less than 50,000 people.

“Rural” encompasses all population, housing, and territory not included within an urban area.

From a certain perspective, this all makes sense. When we think of cities, we think of places with larger populations and the Census sets this boundary at 50,000 people. At the same time, “urban clusters” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as “urban areas.”

An additional complication in all of this is that Americans might legitimately see themselves as small town residents within an urban area. For example, the Chicago region may have over nine million residents but more than two-thirds live outside of the city and many live in communities under 60,000 people. The cultural attachment is “small town” is important: it often implies a tighter-knit community, a certain quality of life (particularly avoiding big city problems), and smaller units of government that are more responsive to local residents.

My recommendations would be:

1. Find a replacement term for “urban cluster” that is more palatable.

2. We need a better way to differentiate between small town feel and actual small towns. Leaders in Naperville often claim it has features of a small town even with a population of over 140,000.

“Megacities Might Not Save the Planet After All”

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One researcher suggests not all megacities are as efficient as they might be:

It turns out that while density equals efficiency, “megacity” does not necessarily equal density. Many megacity dwellers live outside those hyper-efficient city centers, Kennedy explains. Look at New York—if you live in Manhattan or parts of Brooklyn and Queens, you’re probably getting around on the subway. But if you live in Westchester, New Haven, or Newark? You’re probably driving your car—maybe not into the city center, but around it. And there are a lot of you. That’s why New York is almost off the chart in its consumption of transportation fuel, despite all its great rail.

Mega_Cities3

But not all megacities consume as many resources as New York. Look at the ones clustered at the bottom end of transportation energy use: Mumbai. Karachi. Lagos. Cairo. Delhi. These are also some of the cities that use the least amount of electricity per capita. Unfortunately that’s not because their electrical grids are super-efficient. It’s because not everyone living there has electricity. “There’s huge disparities between the amount of resources being used between the wealthiest megacities and the poorest ones,” Kennedy says. In the latter, the resource inputs aren’t enough to support a basic standard of living for all citizens…

So while developed-world megacities should consider reining in their gasoline and electricity use—or expanding center-city style efficient infrastructure to the ’burbs—growth (combined with smart policy) may be the answer to developing-world megacities’ woes. Which is good, because if one thing’s for sure it’s that megacities are growing, and they’re not going to stop.

So the issue may not really be density but a higher order issue of social class. In other words, efficiency is the result of different processes depending on the wealth and development of particular cities and countries. In wealthier countries, individuals have the resources to spread out and can afford to consume too much. On the other hand, poor countries have big cities with lots of residents who can’t afford to consume what they need.

New gadgets, apps want more location data from users

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Location data is valuable and more new gadgets make use of the information:

Location-tracking lets developers build fast, useful, personalized apps. They’re enticing, but they come with tradeoffs: your gadgets and apps maintain a log of where you’ve been and what you’re doing, and more of them than you think are sharing that data with others.

It’s going to advertisers, mostly, so they can lure you into the Starbucks a block away or the merch tent at Coachella. It’s as creepy as any other targeted marketing, but most of us have come to accept that it comes with the territory. Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says it goes deeper. Your data might get sold to your credit reporting agency, which wants to know more about you as it determines your credit score. It might go to your insurance company, which is very interested in your whereabouts. It might be subpoenaed by the government, for just about any reason. Maybe none of that is happening. Maybe all of it is. There’s really no way for us to know…

Your phone’s ability to pinpoint your exact location and use that info to deliver services—a meal, a ride, a tip, a coupon—is reason for excitement. But this world of always-on GPS raises questions about what happens to our data. How much privacy are we willing to surrender? What can these services learn about our activities? What keeps detailed maps of our lives from being sold to the highest bidder? These have been issues as long as we’ve had cellphones, but they are more pressing than ever.

Another major trade-off that I suspect most users will make without much fuss in the coming years. The cynical take on the advantages for the user is that this is primarily about customizable marketing that can account for both your individual traits and where exactly you are. In other words, sharing location data will give consumers new opportunities. More consumerism! On the flip side, it is less clear how or when location data might be used against you. But, when it is, it probably won’t be good.

The broader issue here is whether people should have geographical freedom that is not known to others. This is increasingly difficult in today’s world even as we would celebrate the mobility Americans have within their own communities, country, and to travel throughout the world.