The cities where the super-rich live

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Richard Florida has the rankings of where the super-rich around the world live:

London is the world’s top location for the super-rich, with 4,364 people with $30 million or more in assets. Tokyo is second with 3,575, followed by Singapore (3,227), New York (3,008) and Hong Kong (2,690). The table below shows the top 20 cities with the most ultra-high-net-worth individuals.

Rank

City

Number of Super-Rich

Percentage of Total

Global Super-Rich

1

London

4,364

2.5%

2

Tokyo

3,575

2.1%

3

Singapore

3,227

1.9%

4

New York

3,008

1.7%

5

Hong Kong

2,690

1.6%

6

Frankfurt

1,909

1.1%

7

Paris

1,521

0.9%

8

Osaka

1,471

0.9%

9

Beijing

1,408

0.8%

10

Zurich

1,362

0.8%

11

Seoul

1,356

0.8%

12

Sao Paulo

1,344

0.8%

13

Taipei

1,317

0.8%

14

Toronto

1,216

0.7%

15

Geneva

1,198

0.7%

16

Istanbul

1,153

0.7%

17

Munich

1,138

0.7%

18

Mexico City

1,116

0.6%

19

Shanghai

1,095

0.6%

20

Los Angeles

969

0.6%

And if you control for population size, the list changes:

Rank

City

Super-Rich per

100k Population

1

Geneva

143.7

2

Zurich

70.8

3

Singapore

60.0

4

Frankfurt

42.9

5

Hong Kong

37.0

6

Auckland

35.7

7

Oslo

34.4

8

London

29.9

9

Munich

29.1

10

Hamburg

26.6

11

Rome

22.3

12

Dublin

21.0

13

Toronto

20.1

14

Edinburgh

20.0

15

Stockholm

18.9

16

Taipei

18.6

17

Sydney

15.9

18

Monaco

15.8

19

New York

15.0

20

Tel Aviv-Yafo

14.3

These lists have some overlap with the top global cities but there are some differences. For example, on the first list: Chicago and Los Angeles are typically in the top 10 for global cities but they don’t rate highly here. In other words, there are some different social forces at work as to where the rich live versus which cities are most influential. Some possible forces at work:

1. Perhaps the super-rich in a single country tend to all go to one place. In the United States, perhaps this is New York City which is heads and shoulders above anyone else. Super-rich people want to be where all the other super-rich people are.

2. Certain industries might be important here, particularly ones like global banks or the oil industry.

3. Certain cities have amenities that appeal to the super-rich. This could range from certain cultural opportunities or tax breaks or high-status (and expensive) properties.

The per capita list has even more differences. Auckland? Hamburg? Edinburgh? I’m guessing there are some interesting stories behind these conglomerations.

How should the 1995 Chicago heat wave deaths be commemorated?

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An arts critics think about how Chicago might remember the deaths of hundreds in the 1995 heat wave:

After all, events that caused far fewer deaths have been the subject of remembrances, designed to honor those who died. July 1995 has yet to make into that civic category, but it deserves a spot. Perchance someone may convene a discussion between those who were involved in that crisis and ponder what was learned (I should note that Klinenberg also charges the media, including the management of this newspaper, with some culpability in the tardiness of the connecting of the dots, while acknowledging some formidable reportage).

More useful, though, might be an artistic response.

A commissioned symphonic piece, perhaps played outdoors. A concert honoring those who died. A dance work. Some stirring poetic words. Some deep collective thoughts from city leaders as to if, or how, the city has changed since then and where there still is work to be done. Some consideration of whether we now do a better job of taking care of each other, whatever the weather outside. It is worth the attention of the city’s artists. And politicians.

“Marking it as a historic event is important,” Egdorf said. “If only to remind people to look after their neighbors.”

Three quick thoughts:

1. Given the demographics of those who died, such a commemoration could also go a long ways toward addressing social divisions such as those involving age, class, and race. Important figures are often commemorated but what about a mass number of average residents?

2. For the social forces that contributed to who died in this particular heat wave, I recommend Heat Wave by sociologist Eric Klinenberg.

3. The idea of having an artistic response to this disaster is an interesting one. We often have solemn commemorations but this presents an opportunity to create something new of tragedy.

Don’t be the Realtor that supports McMansions

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In the arguments against McMansions and mansionization, even real estate agents can get caught up in the issue:

Of course, Reni Rose was not the only Arcadia dwelling Realtor to sign a petition designed to promote predatory McMansionization in the Arcadia Highlands. Here are the others:

Song Liem    1141 Oakwood Dr.
Jeffrey Bowen  1919 Wilson Ave.
Darlene Bowen  1919 Wilson Ave.
Ash Rizk   1204 Oakwood Dr.
Nivine Rizk  1204 Oakwood Dr.
Mark Cheng  1741  Oakwood Ave.
Alan Black  238 Hillgreen Place
Ruth Black  238 Hillgreen Place

You might want to consider their support for the mansionization of the Arcadia Highlands when looking for your next Realtor. We have scans of their petition signatures as well. If you would like copies for your own files pop me an email and I’ll send them your way…

The bad news here is that the Henry A. Darling home (we will persist in calling it that despite the sanitized language used in the latest listing), is once agains in the hands of a real estate agent who obviously does not have a problem with McMansions.

I don’t know how often those in real estate are asked about their stances toward particular properties or planned developments. Would it be good for business to publicly support one side or another? It might if there is a large business base at play but I feel like I don’t often see such public statements. Instead, wouldn’t real estate agents want to be “neutral” toward clients as any business is good business? Getting too involved in local politics could end up being problematic if the tide turns or if it limits future business opportunities. So, perhaps these realtors shouldn’t have signed a public petition at all, even if they felt it was promoting the rights of property owners which could be perceived as good for business.

This is another example of how politicized McMansions can be. Discussions don’t just involve local policymakers who could place restrictions on teardowns or new developments but can also come to pit neighbors against each other as well as involve local businesspeople.

SimCity set path for games about systems, not about characters

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In contrast to video games about characters, SimCity made the gameplay about the complex system at work in cities:

Such was the payload of SimCity: not a game about people, even though its residents, the Sims, would later get their own spin-off. Nor is it a game about particular cities, for it is difficult to recreate one with the game’s brittle, indirect tools. Rather, SimCity is a game about urban societies, about the relationship between land value, pollution, industry, taxation, growth, and other factors. It’s not really a simulation, despite its name, nor is it an educational game. Nobody would want a SimCity expert running their town’s urban planning office. But the game got us all to think about the relationships that make a city run, succeed, and decay, and in so doing to rise above our individual interests, even if only for a moment…

The best games model the systems in our world—or the ones of imagination—by means of systems running in software. Just as photography offers a way of seeing aspects of the world we often look past, game design becomes an exercise in operating that world, of manipulating the weird mechanisms that turn its gears when we’re not looking. The amplifying effect of natural disaster and global unrest on oil futures. The relationship between serving size consistency and profitability in an ice cream parlor. The relative unlikelihood of global influenza pandemic absent a perfect storm of rapid, transcontinental transmission.

And system dynamics are not just a feature of non-fictional games or serious games. The most popular abstract games seem to have much in common with titles like SimCity than they do with Super Mario. Tetris is a game about manipulating the mathematical abstractions of four orthogonally connected squares, known as tetrominoes, when subjected to gravity and time. Words With Friends is a game about arranging letters into valid words, given one’s own knowledge merged with the availability and willingness of one’s stable of friends. A game, it turns out, is a lens onto the sublime in the ordinary. An emulsion that captured behavior rather than light…

There’s another way to think about games. What if games’ role in representation and identity lies not in offering familiar characters for us to embody, but in helping wrest us from the temptation of personal identification entirely? What if the real fight against monocultural bias and blinkeredness does not involve the accelerated indulgence of identification, but the abdication of our own selfish, individual desires in the interest of participating in systems larger than ourselves? What if the thing games most have to show us is the higher-order domains to which we might belong, including families, neighborhoods, cities, nations, social systems, and even formal structures and patterns? What if replacing militarized male brutes with everyone’s favorite alternative identity just results in Balkanization rather than inclusion?

Fascinating argument. Could video games truly be a tool that help players move beyond individualism? At the same time, even a game about systems still can provide an individualized experience: SimCity players could spend hours by themselves crafting a city in their own image (and the game even provided some space for this with honorary statues and the like). Such games could be social – you could have various players interacting with each other either as leaders of different cities or even as leaders within the same city – but they generally were not.

This doesn’t have to stay at the level of argument. Why not run some tests or experiments to see how players of character-driven versus system-driven games compare on certain outcomes?

Recommendation that many Chicago area highways have 60 or 65 mph speed limits

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A new investigation from an state agency suggests speed limits on several Chicago-area highways should be raised:

Higher speed limits on parts of I-294, I-88 and I-355 were recommended for approval Thursday by the Illinois Tollway’s customer service and planning committee.

According to the state’s vehicle code, the tollway is required to conduct an engineering and traffic investigation before raising its maximum speed limits.

The investigation — which took factors like prevailing speed, high-crash segments, access point density and the volume of traffic congestion into consideration — determined that the 70 mph maximum that is allowed by the state is not a “safe and reasonable increase in the speed limit” for certain sections of the highway…

Once all the necessary approvals are complete the Illinois Secretary of State can publish the updated rules and the new speed limit signs can be installed. Tollway officials estimate that the new speed limit signs could be posted this summer.

It sounds like safety concerns led to this slight increase. But, I would be interesting in seeing this study as the reasoning behind a slight increase is not clear. If prevailing speed is a factor, we know that a good number of Chicago-area highway drivers still go faster than the new 60 or 65 mph speed limits. How many more crashes and deaths will occur with a 60 or 65 mph speed limit? Does this mean Illinois is not joining the move toward zero-death roads? And if there is more damage, how is the positive side calculated (less time lost, less congestion, etc.)? At the same time, raising the speed limits won’t necessarily lead to faster driving; evidence from Michigan suggests people will continue to drive at the speed at which they feel comfortable.

Essay on Chicago’s alleys

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You aren’t going to find too many erudite essays like this one on the subject of Chicago’s alleys:

Thus, alleys in Chicago, as in most other cities, evolved organically: as a general product of function and construction, but with modulations in dimension, materiality, position, and construction, readily changed to suit the needs of its neighbors and occupants. Fluxing along their entire lengths, they cut a byzantine pattern in the city’s figure ground, contributing to its unmistakable appearance in plan without serving as the primary warp and weft of the fabric…

The results are not always beautiful or orthodox, but they are usually interesting; alleys seen in this light could be conceived as both museums and laboratories for material combinations and adjacencies, methods of assembly and detailing. But in another light, alleys are urban canyons—broken glass, vegetation clinging to the fragile mortar joints, with a single swath of sky above: more products of time and erosion, with human intervention to architectonic formations what glaciers are to geology. Again: raw super-nature registered through a Kantian impression of the sublime…

And consider this: glamour in its modern manifestations is generally assigned to objects and places that are alluring, attractive, and special. Its secondary connotation is less positive; a permutation of Norse and Scottish words that tie it to illusion and obfuscation, spells of the eye meant to conceal true natures. In that vein, is it so difficult to see ordinary as glamour, and alleys as extraordinary? We would do well to keep ourselves open; there may be something truly remarkable lying in plain sight within the gravel and brick.

For those who know cities well, I suspect many of them could tell of places where they found something sublime in the non-glamorous places. Much of the attention paid to major cities focuses on major works (like skylines) while residents and others who take a longer and deeper look see a different side.

I was reminded of Chicago’s alleys recently when showing my class part of Mitchell Duneier’s video supplement to his ethnography Sidewalk. In the film, we see images of the subjects of his research – homeless street vendors – wandering through New York City’s garbage in order to find books, magazines, and other things to sell at their sidewalk tables. There was so much garbage simply piled at the curb, not exactly a glamorous sight. In contrast, alleys allow some of these basic functions to be moved behind buildings and open up sidewalks for more pedestrian and social uses.

Suburban communities add business district taxes but what are developers doing with the money?

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A number of Chicago suburbs have instituted business district taxes that partially funnel money to developers:

The business district tax is becoming more common as municipalities struggle to recover from the Great Recession and loss of shoppers to the Internet. Leaders in both Roselle and Villa Park initiated 1 percent business district taxes within the past year, the maximum rate on districts that cannot exceed 1 square mile. In some suburban locations, the additional business district tax can raise the sales tax to 9.25 percent, equal to the sales tax in Chicago…

Bloomingdale has two such districts. One adds a 1 percent sales tax to purchases inside Stratford Square and another adds the same percentage at Indian Lakes Resort, where it’s used to help pay off $4.8 million in village-issued debt that went to the resort for improvements…

Last year, the village paid the owners of the mall $1,199,151, which is more than 95 percent of all the money generated by the business district tax. Since the tax was implemented, the village has paid the mall owner more than $8 million. According to village finance records, the mall owner still is owed more than $11 million…

Lombard has a similar deal with its mall owner. The village instituted a 1 percent business district tax almost a decade ago. It helps push the sales tax rate at Yorktown Center mall to 9.25 percent.

Lombard’s deal allows up to $25 million in business district taxes to be rebated to Yorktown’s owner through 2024, in exchange for an addition that was built onto the mall where an abandoned Montgomery Ward once stood. So far, the mall’s owner has received almost $4.2 million from the business tax…

Taxpayers in Oakbrook Terrace are the ones with skin in the game. The city borrowed nearly $8.2 million to spur development of the Oakbrook Terrace Square Shopping Center. City officials did not return calls seeking comment about the city’s stake in the shopping center. However, according to the city’s budget documents, the investment has yet to pay off.

Given the problems facing the American shopping mall as well as the financial difficulties facing many suburbs, perhaps these suburbs think such taxes are necessary to help keep sales tax generators in the community. Yet, if the extra money generated is given to developers who then line their own pockets, how much is the local taxpayer helped? This raises similar questions to giving corporations tax breaks to locate their headquarters or facilities in suburban communities. Few politicians or residents want to lose a potential tax revenue generator – especially a large shopping mall, even if they are relatively ugly and detract from local businesses given their reliance on chain stores – but there is often little public discussion of the trade-offs involved with the tax breaks.

Are there suburban shopping centers that don’t have such a tax and if not, do they advertise to this effect?

Big claim in a new book title: “Society Explained”

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Go big or go home with your sociology book titles as this new sociology book Society Explained illustrates:

Rousseau had a couple of overriding goals in writing the book, his third.

One goal was to make the case that technological change, the use of social media and a sense of both economic and personal powerlessness are causing people to turn inward and become increasingly self-absorbed.

“People are much more alone than they need to be,” Rousseau said.

His other goal was to write a book that “is not dull or jargon-filled,” as many sociology texts tend to be, using personal examples and historical perspective.

“I was trying to take a very down-to-earth look at how our society functions,” he said.

In that, he appears to have struck a chord. After reviewing more than 7,000 titles, the American Library Association has named “Society Explained” one of the top 25 academic books of 2014.

Does this book offer one or a few key social forces that explain society today or does it take the typical introduction to sociology approach of looking at numerous subfields? I would expect the former with such a title though I’ve seen enough books to suspect the latter might be true. Alas, society is complex with numerous moving parts and doesn’t have the same kind of universal laws that might be found in the natural sciences. (What is the sociological equivalent of the law of gravity?) Yet, this is precisely what makes the subject so fascinating.

14 times The Simpsons took on famous architecture

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Curbed put together a short list of times The Simpsons has lampooned architecture:

Frank Gehry crumples up a piece of paper, tosses it to the ground, and suddenly becomes inspired to build a similar-looking concert hall for Springfield, hometown of The Simpsons. Rem Koolhaas, with his eyes closed, teaches nine local children about “Lego architecture” using a model of OMA’s CCTV tower in Beijing. Since The Simpsons began airing in 1989, there have been countless references to landmarks and architects, new Dwell-reading neighbors and postmodern malls filled with identical Starbucks stores…

Dialogue from an episode aired in 2003:
Lisa: I’m impressed that you drew up blueprints, but these are for a go-cart track.
Homer: Did Frank Lloyd Wright have to deal with people like you?
Lisa: Actually, Frank Lloyd Wright endured a lot of harsh criticism.
Homer: Look. I have no idea who Frank Lloyd Wright is.
Lisa: You said his name two seconds ago.
Homer: I was just putting words together.

Some fun moments here. In fact, I suspect there is an interesting dissertation or book to be written about how The Simpsons presents spaces, from homes to Springfield (which really is a zany community) to broader geographic and social contexts. What if a two-dimensional animated show ended up offering one of the most astute mass market analyses of our spatial lives?

The declining “McMansion to Multi-Millionaire ratio”

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One analysis looks at the popularity of McMansions (amidst articles claiming they have returned) via a ratio of McMansions to multi-millionaires in the United States:

We can get a good contemporaneous gauge of the popularity of McMansions by dividing the number of new 4,000 plus square foot homes sold by the number of households with a net worth of $5 million or more: call it the McMansion/Multi-Millionaire ratio. (There’s no universally accepted definition of McMansion, but since the Census Bureau reports the number of newly completed single-family homes of 4,000 square feet or larger, most researchers take this as a proxy for these over-sized homes.)

The McMansion to Multi-Millionaire ratio started at about 12.5 in 2001 (the oldest year in the current Census home size series)—meaning that the market built 12 new 4,000 square foot-plus homes for every 1,000 households with a net worth of $5 million or more. The ratio fluctuated over the following few years, and was at 12.0 in 2006—the height of the housing bubble. The ratio declined sharply thereafter as housing and financial markets crashed.

McMansiontoMultiMillionaireRatioEven though the number of high-net-worth households has been increasing briskly in recent years (it’s now at a new high), the rebound in McMansions has been tepid (still down 59 percent from the peak, as noted earlier). The result is that the McMansion/Multi-Millionaire ratio is still at 4.5–very near its lowest point. Relative to the number of high-net-worth households, we’re building only about a third as many McMansions as we did 5 or 10 years ago. These data suggest that even among the top one or two percent, there’s a much-reduced interest in super-large houses.

An interesting measure that tries to put together how many wealthy people there are (the ones who can build and purchase McMansions) with how many new large homes were constructed (with the rough proxy of square footage – not all homes over 4,000 square feet would be considered McMansions). The conclusion is interesting: the number of McMansions being built today is quite lower than the peak ten years ago or so. So, when journalists write that the McMansion is back (usually with a negative tone – our wild spending and consumeristic days of the early 2000s are set to return!), it is not at the same scale as we are still in the middle of a depressed housing market.