Selecting the right McMansion for Gone Girl

Posted on by

Following up on a post from two days ago, here is how the production designer described finding Nick and Amy’s McMansion in Gone Girl:

HOW DID YOU FIND NICK AND AMY’S HOUSE? WHY WAS THAT ONE PERFECT?
It’s hard to explain without being insulting (laughs). Those neighborhoods, with that style of housing— and without finding any other better way of describing it, sort of that “mcmansion” — they aren’t very attractive. You go, oh geeze do we have to really film this, you know? We found this simple one, and it had all the attributes of that type of house without being too obscene. It felt like it could be traditional, but it was a modern take on traditional. Just the fact that it was on the corner, it gave us good angles for a lot of the scenes with the driving and the staging of the news vans.

DID YOU SHOOT THE INTERIOR SHOTS AT THAT HOUSE, TOO?
We built the entire interior on a stage in Los Angeles. We took the floor plan of the house that we shot on location, and we started adjusting it for our own story and our own camera angles. It was important for me, especially, not to do something where you’d look at the exterior and then you go inside and you’re like wait a second, how could this interior even fit with that exterior? I didn’t want to do that. David [Fincher, the director] and I had long conversations about it. We cheated a few things, we stretched the interior.

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE THE INTERIOR YOU CREATED FOR NICK AND AMY’S MISSOURI HOUSE?
You know those homes are they’re done with traditional elements but in a modern style? They have the built-in cabinets and they have the wooden molding, but there’s something askew about it. The way the moldings are done, they are made out of mdf instead of real wood. It’s that modern construction where they use traditional, classical elements— they put medallions on the ceilings and they have recessed lighting in drywall ceilings instead of real plaster. The spiral staircase isn’t really spiral. It’s curved, and it looks elegant but when you stand there and take it in, you realize there’s something skewed about it.

WHY WAS THAT PERFECT FOR THIS STORY?
It works in the sense that Nick is trying to give Amy the perfect home in the perfect place. It’s sort of like, why wouldn’t you like this? Why wouldn’t you feel comfortable in this large house? There’s remnants of the New York feel, but it’s a little bit offbeat from that.

A few thoughts, question by question:

1. The dislike for McMansions is clear. But, then he notes that the house wasn’t too bad in its attempt to replicate a traditional style. What then marks it as a McMansion? Subdivision. Multiple gables. Square footage. Tall entryway.

2. Even with a home that is already large, they stretched the interior. Does this mean that the home scorned for its size was depicted as even larger on the screen?

3. Commentary on the quality of construction. The style may fit from a distance but someone who knows the older style can spot the problems quickly.

4. Conjecture about what such homes are supposed to symbolize: the perfect house. Looks new, nice landscaping, quiet neighborhood…how did all that violence and coldness end up there again?

Even with all that explaining about the negatives of such homes, it is amusing to see the comments below the story from people who want to replicate the look.

Public homebuilders increase their Chicago area market share in the last 15 years

Posted on by

What kinds of firms have built homes in the Chicago region has changed quite a bit in the last 15 or so years:

Public companies accounted for nearly 60 percent of the contracts for new homes in the Chicago market last year, up from 54 percent last year and well above the 11 percent market share they held in 1999, according to Tracy Cross & Associates, a Schaumburg-based consulting firm.

The top five builders in the Chicago area all were public companies, led by D.R. Horton of Fort Worth, Texas, with 517 local contracts signed last year.

The growth of public companies partly at the expense of private builders—a trend playing out in many markets across the country—will likely continue for the next few years until conventional banks grow more willing to finance land purchases and development, said Tony Avila, chief executive of Builder Advisor Group, a San Francisco firm that advises and raises capital for homebuilders.

Many private builders rely more on banks, which have clamped down on financing home construction since the financial crisis, while public companies have other options, such as issuing bonds or shares, Avila said.

Quite an increase since 1999. This reminds me of the shift from really small builders – often just a few homes a year – before World War II to the larger-scale construction afterward (often said to be illustrated by Levitt and Sons). Then (big housing need, new innovations) and now (economic crisis leading to new lending guidelines), broader economic and social conditions contributed to these changes.

With that said, how does this affect the average homebuyer and resident? Large-scale firms may offer economy of scale and therefore lower prices but they also might have fewer options in their housing designs and interiors and be able to construct larger developments, contributing to sprawl. Does the quality increase? Do homebuyers have a better experience in one versus the other?

Gallup CEO criticizes measurement of unemployment in the US

Posted on by

The CEO of Gallup says the current unemployment rate is “a Big Lie” because of how it is calculated:

None of them will tell you this: If you, a family member or anyone is unemployed and has subsequently given up on finding a job — if you are so hopelessly out of work that you’ve stopped looking over the past four weeks — the Department of Labor doesn’t count you as unemployed. That’s right. While you are as unemployed as one can possibly be, and tragically may never find work again, you are not counted in the figure we see relentlessly in the news — currently 5.6%. Right now, as many as 30 million Americans are either out of work or severely underemployed. Trust me, the vast majority of them aren’t throwing parties to toast “falling” unemployment.There’s another reason why the official rate is misleading. Say you’re an out-of-work engineer or healthcare worker or construction worker or retail manager: If you perform a minimum of one hour of work in a week and are paid at least $20 — maybe someone pays you to mow their lawn — you’re not officially counted as unemployed in the much-reported 5.6%. Few Americans know this.

Yet another figure of importance that doesn’t get much press: those working part time but wanting full-time work. If you have a degree in chemistry or math and are working 10 hours part time because it is all you can find — in other words, you are severely underemployed — the government doesn’t count you in the 5.6%. Few Americans know this…

Gallup defines a good job as 30+ hours per week for an organization that provides a regular paycheck. Right now, the U.S. is delivering at a staggeringly low rate of 44%, which is the number of full-time jobs as a percent of the adult population, 18 years and older. We need that to be 50% and a bare minimum of 10 million new, good jobs to replenish America’s middle class.

How an official statistic is measured may seem mundane but it can be quite consequential, as is noted here. What exactly does it take to get a government agency to measure and report data differently?

This critique may make some interesting political bedfellows. Conservatives might jump on this in order to show that the current administration hasn’t made the kind of economic progress they claim. Liberals might also like this because it suggests a lot of Americans still aren’t doing well even as big corporations and Wall Street seem to have profited. Neither political party really wants to take on Wall Street so they might support these numbers so stocks keep moving up.

Following the ideals of Gautraux to deconcentrate poverty in the Chicago suburbs

Posted on by

The Gautreaux Program in Chicago preceded Moving To Opportunity and now there are more recent efforts to deconconcentrate poverty in the Chicago region:

After all, suburbs are no longer the bastions of privilege they once were (though majority white suburbs still, for the most part, are). Since the recession, it’s the exurbs in Chicago that have had job growth, while affordable housing near those jobs is often hard to find. Poverty is growing in suburbs across the country, including in Chicago, and moving families blindly out of the city may do more harm than good.

That’s why Chicago’s leaders are now focusing on helping low-income people live in mixed-income neighborhoods in both the suburbs and the city that have good access to transit and jobs, high homeownership rates, low commute times, walkable areas and a low percentage of people receiving public-housing assistance, said Robin Snyderman, a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who also works as a consultant on housing policy in Chicago.

Nine housing authorities now participate in a regional pool of resources that began more than a decade ago. They include authorities in counties such as DuPage, Lake, and McHenry, using the money to build nearly 30 mixed-income developments in “opportunity areas” that are near transit and job opportunities.

“Just getting rental housing into some of these communities was hard to do for many years,” said Snyderman said.

A pilot program launched in 2011, the Chicago Region Housing Choice Initiative (CRHCI), encourages families to use vouchers to move to some of these locations, giving them counseling to help them do so.

Regional authorities and mayors have “adopted new tools for promoting inclusion and diversity, building on the lessons learned from Gautreaux,” she said. “I feel more hopeful that the historic segregation in the Chicago region can be transformed—because it’s now not all on the shoulders of the public housing authority,” she said.

See this earlier post about some of the results of the Moving To Opportunity program. These programs aren’t immediate panaceas and progress is often slow. It took decades to get Gautreaux into action and more time to assess results from MTO. Additionally, it can be difficult to get wealthier suburbs to buy in – if they do talk about affordable housing, it tends to involve seniors, young college graduates, or civil servants, not actually poorer residents.

In all, residential segregation is a difficult problem to address. If it is all left to the market, wealthier residents will move to nicer suburbs, maintaining or increasing their life chances, and then limit the access of others to move into their communities (even if they need them as workers in that community). Social programs can help but they can be costly, it takes time to assess their effectiveness, and it requires wealthier communities to get on board. This is one of those social problems that requires patience, active efforts, and time to see social change occur.

Taking McMansion battles to the stage

Posted on by

One playwright thinks neighborhood battles over McMansions provides compelling material:

The threads that run through “Two Stories,” a new play making its world premiere at Salt Lake Acting Company, are pulled from today’s headlines: “Neighbors battle over McMansions” and “Can newspapers save jobs with web hits?”

The topics are just two things that keep Utah playwright Elaine Jarvik — a former reporter with a love of houses and neighborhood aesthetics — up at night.

“I really wanted to tell both these stories,” she said. “There was a connection: my rights versus your rights, and what do we really own?”

The play follows Jodi Wolcott, an old-school journalist forced to produce stories that will draw web hits, and the Masoris family, who plan to remodel their modest house…

The tension explodes when Amir and his wife plan to remodel their house into a two-story McMansion that will change the look of the middle-class neighborhood and cut off the Wolcotts’ light and view.

The underlying story of the property rights of a homeowner (the American ideal!) versus neighbors (your new home threatens my own and the neighborhood!). What resolution can they find? I know these sorts of reviews don’t give away the ending but since I’m not going to get to Salt Lake City anytime soon, I would love to know how it all comes together. The last cultural product I viewed involving McMansions was Gone Girl and that story involving McMansions – with the author playing up the McMansion part in the early pages (a common theme in darker stories of recent years) – did not turn out well.

Structuralists vs. culturalists in explaining poverty

Posted on by

Sociologists may not have the public profile they desire but the discussion about it may have helped. The New Yorker looks at two sociological approaches to poverty and attempts to sum up the culturalist approach:

There is a paradox at the heart of cultural sociology, which both seeks to explain behavior in broad, categorical terms and promises to respect its subjects’ autonomy and intelligence. The results can be deflating, as the researchers find that their subjects are not stupid or crazy or heroic or transcendent—their cultural traditions just don’t seem peculiar enough to answer the questions that motivate the research. Black cultural sociology has always been a project of comparison: the idea is not simply to understand black culture but to understand how it differs from white culture, as part of the broader push to reduce racial disparities that have changed surprisingly little since Du Bois’s time. Fifty years after Moynihan’s report, it’s easy to understand why he was concerned. Even so, it’s getting easier, too, to sympathize with his detractors, who couldn’t understand why he thought new trends might explain old problems. If we want to learn more about black culture, we should study it. But, if we seek to answer the question of racial inequality in America, black culture won’t tell us what we want to know.

Do we have to have an either/or answer? Situations like these are complex and involve a multitude of factors. That doesn’t necessarily lend itself to quick policy making or answers the media can grab and run with. Yet, even sociologists of culture would highlight other structural factors including economics and race in addition to the power of patterns of meaning-making.

Can sociologists be the ones who officially define the middle class?

Posted on by

Defining the middle class is a tricky business with lots of potential implications, as one sociologist notes:

“Middle class” has become a meaningless political term covering everyone who is not on food stamps and does not enjoy big capital gains. Like a sociological magician, I can make the middle class grow, shrink or disappear just by the way I choose to define it.

What is clear and incontestable is the growing inequality in this country over the last three decades. In a 180-degree reversal of the pattern in the decades after World War II, the gains of economic growth flow largely to the people at the top.

I like the idea of a sociological magician but this is an important issue: many Americans may claim to be middle class but their life chances, experiences, and tastes can be quite different. Just look at the recent response to possible changes to the 529 college savings programs. A vast group may help political parties make broad appeals yet it doesn’t help in forming policies. (Just to note: those same political parties make bland and broad appeals even as they work harder than ever to microtarget specific groups for donations and votes.)

Given some recent conversations about the relative lack of influence of sociologists, perhaps this is an important area where they can contribute. Class goes much further than income; you would want to think about income, wealth, educational attainment, the neighborhood in which one lives, cultural tastes and consumption patterns, and more. The categories should clearly differentiate groups while remaining flexible enough to account for combinations of factors as well as changes in American society.

LA McMansions prize interior space over backyards

Posted on by

New LA McMansions tend to have limited backyards for a variety of reasons:

“Comfortable” translates to a desire for bigger spaces, more amenities and higher-quality materials than in the past, notes John Closson, vice president and regional manager of Berkshire Hathaway Home Services...In many cases, the yard is not the family center it used to be, says architect Hsinming Fung, director of academic affairs at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. “What a family would do together for entertainment value is no longer in the backyard or the frontyard,” Fung says. “Technology has completely changed the way we use space. They need the indoor space because they use it much more.”…

A simple — some say brutal — development equation is at work today: More square footage equals greater return on investment. “Obviously, the price of land continues to climb in Los Angeles,” architect Ron Radziner of Marmol Radziner says. “Even if the client doesn’t necessarily want a bigger house, they feel they need to have it as an investment to have it make sense.”…

One point generally acknowledged is that many people today do not want the expense and hassle of a big yard. “It’s not practical to have a big lawn these days,” Tighe says. “People are rethinking that, rightfully so.” But they do still want something of a yard, just not the way we think of it.

One complaint about teardown McMansions is they are built close to the lot lines, dwarfing other homes or open spaces. At the same time, I’m not sure about the concern for backyards. These spaces have also tended to be private spaces, even if they are outdoors. Many yards have fences and landscaping intended to keep others out of sight. Backyards are also a symbol of sprawl: every housing unit has its own outdoor space.

A stronger public argument might be made for front yards. As New Urbanists and others argue, these are important for joining the street and sidewalk with the private home. This is why many architects emphasize front porches – they can provide some of the same features of the backyard deck but do so in sight of the public, encouraging social life and presenting a more lively and green streetscape.

It will be interesting to see if arguments/discussions about McMansion regulations in Los Angeles include guidelines about backyards.

I like the band name “Big Data”

Posted on by

Band names can often reflect societal trends so I’m not surprised that a group selected the name Big Data. I like the name: it sounds current and menacing. I’ve only heard their songs a few times on the radio so I’ll have to reserve judgment on what they have actually created.

It might be interesting to think of what sociological terms and ideas could easily translate into good band names. One term that sometimes intrigues my intro students – interactional vandalism – could work. Conspicuous consumption? Cultural lag? Differential association? The culture industry? Impression management? The iron cage? Social mobility? The hidden curriculum?

Reminder of how much we can cheaply consume today

Posted on by

Megan McArdle discusses living standards in earlier period of American life and suggests we can consume a lot more now:

In 1901, the average “urban wage earner” spent about 46 percent of their household budget on food and another 15 percent on apparel — that’s 61 percent of their annual income just to feed and clothe the family. That does not include shelter, or fuel to heat your home and cook your food. By 1987, that same household spent less than 20 percent on food and a little over 5 percent of their budget on apparel. Since then, these numbers have fallen even further: Today, families with incomes of less than $5,000 a year still spend only 16 percent of the family budget on food and 3.5 percent on apparel. And that’s not because we’re eating less and wearing fewer clothes; in fact, it’s the reverse.

The average working-class family of 1901 had a few changes of clothes and a diet heavy on beans and grain, light on meat and fresh produce — which simply wasn’t available for much of the year, even if they’d had the money to afford it. Even growing up in the 1950s, in a comfortably middle-class home, my mother’s wardrobe consisted of a week’s worth of school clothes, a church dress and a couple of play outfits. Her counterparts today can barely fit all their clothes in their closets, even though today’s houses are much bigger than they used to be; putting a family of five in a 900-square-foot house with a single bathroom was an aspirational goal for the generation that settled Levittown, but in an era when new homes average more than 2,500 square feet, it sounds like poverty.

At that, even the people living in the last decades of the 19th century were richer than those who had gone before them. I remember coming across a Mauve Decade newspaper clipping that contained a description of my great-grandmother “going visiting” in some nearby town during the 1890s. On the other side of the clipping was a letter to the editor from a woman in her 90s, complaining that these giddy young things didn’t know how good they had it compared to the old days — why, they even bought their saleratus  from a store instead of making it from corncobs like they did back when times were simpler and thrifty housewives knew the value of a dollar.

As McArdle notes at the end, it is difficult to remember these conditions of the past when we have so much today. Part of the story here is just how much we have but it is worth thinking about why we have a hard time remembering these conditions that were not really that long ago.

We have certain social values that may make us more ahistorical than others. For example, Americans value progress. We’re always talking about novelty and developing solutions. We consistently suggest our kids should have better lives than we did and we expect it to happen. The American Dream is about getting ahead so why would we want to spend much time thinking about the poverty of the past? Not only do we have a lot, we like the acquisition process. Shopping is a popular activity and we spend a lot of time looking at various consumer objects (clothes, cars, smartphones, etc.). Capitalism is good, consumption is a necessary part of the economy, it is just part of everyday life. Some might point to the role of technology in making the past even further away or more fragmented from our everyday reality. When many things come so quickly today, how can truths about the early 1900s be communicated in a way that resonates? (It is interesting that McArdle uses the example of reading Little House on the Prairie books. Do we expect the children of today to be reading those or similar books about that time period?)