Facebook as the new gatekeeper of journalism

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Facebook’s algorithms now go a long way in dictating what news users see:

“We try to explicitly view ourselves as not editors,” he said. “We don’t want to have editorial judgment over the content that’s in your feed. You’ve made your friends, you’ve connected to the pages that you want to connect to and you’re the best decider for the things that you care about.”…

Roughly once a week, he and his team of about 16 adjust the complex computer code that decides what to show a user when he or she first logs on to Facebook. The code is based on “thousands and thousands” of metrics, Mr. Marra said, including what device a user is on, how many comments or likes a story has received and how long readers spend on an article…

If Facebook’s algorithm smiles on a publisher, the rewards, in terms of traffic, can be enormous. If Mr. Marra and his team decide that users do not enjoy certain things, such as teaser headlines that lure readers to click through to get all the information, it can mean ruin. When Facebook made changes to its algorithm in December 2013 to emphasize higher-quality content, several so-called viral sites that had thrived there, including Upworthy, Distractify and Elite Daily, saw large declines in their traffic.

Facebook executives frame the company’s relationship with publishers as mutually beneficial: when publishers promote their content on Facebook, its users have more engaging material to read, and the publishers get increased traffic driven to their sites. Numerous publications, including The New York Times, have met with Facebook officials to discuss how to improve their referral traffic.

Is Facebook a better gatekeeper than news outlets, editors, and the large corporations that often run them? I see three key differences:

1. Facebook’s methods are based on social networks and what your friends and others in your feed like. This may be not too much different than checking sites yourselves – especially since people often go to the same sites or go to ones that end to agree with them – but the results are out of your hands.

2. Ultimately, Facebook wants to connect you to other people using news, not necessarily give you news for other purposes like being an informed citizen or spurring you to action. This is a different process than seeking out news sites that primarily produce news (even if that is now often a lot of celebrity or entertainment info).

3. The news is interspersed with new pieces of information about the lives of others. This likely catches people’s attention and doesn’t provide an overwhelming amount of news or information that is abstracted from the user/reader.

CHA opens all three housing waiting lists for first time ever, expects over 250,000 applicants

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The Chicago Housing Authority opened its three housing lists yesterday and is expecting a lot of people to sign up:

Agency officials expect more than 250,000 families to apply for spots on three waiting lists — one for public housing, one for housing vouchers and one for apartments in privately owned subsidized housing,

“We don’t have a set number of slots available. … We can’t predict how long people will be on the wait list,” said Katie Ludwig, a deputy chief housing officer at the CHA. “We are getting to the end of our (current) wait lists, and we thought it was a great opportunity for people who are in need of housing. We thought we’d open all three lists at the same time. It’s something we’ve never done.”…

Having their name on a list at the agency does not guarantee housing. It is simply one step closer to participating in the agency’s programs. Historically, the CHA has had wait lists that surpass 15,000 families for each of its programs, records show.

Residents can wait years to be called in for housing.

Still, the current move comes as the agency has been under fire for not doing enough to house the city’s poorest and most vulnerable populations. In July, a report from an independent think tank revealed that the agency had banked more than $355 million rather than use the money for housing. Local officials and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development have pressed the agency to serve more people.

Two things have not changed:

1. The CHA continues in not providing enough housing.

2. There is a lot of demand in Chicago for affordable housing.

Both of these issues date back decades. The CHA has been either slow or incompetent, or perhaps both. While new housing units may have been built for wealthier residents in trendy neighborhoods or along the lakefront, the city still does not have enough affordable or public housing. You might think these problems might be solved at some point given their long history and the basic need for decent housing but there has not even been much conversation about addressing these concerns.

Patterns in teardowns in Chicago’s inner-ring suburbs

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An architecture professor has found some patterns in the teardowns in inner-ring suburbs surrounding Chicago:

Together, the data set Charles studied included 591,101 single-family houses in Cook County suburbs [between 2000 and 2010], and she determined that 4,789 were redeveloped during that 10-year period. That’s less than 1 percent, but that 1 percent was concentrated and not just in the obvious suburbs one might think.

She found that the teardown phenomenon didn’t affect all communities, wasn’t driven just by developers (often a homebuyer was behind the first teardown in a subdivision), and wasn’t confined to tony neighborhoods where the rebuilt homes were expensive McMansions that stretched from one lot line to the other.

In fact, some of the municipalities that saw clusters of teardowns were suburbs with moderately priced houses and families with moderate incomes, and it was those communities that saw the most conspicuous difference in size between the old house and the new one that replaced it. Charles also found that most teardowns occurred in white and non-Hispanic communities, and in areas with highly regarded school districts.

The article continues with the typical arguments for and against teardowns. Her conclusions?

“I’m not entirely convinced this is gentrification,” Charles said. “If you look that the new house is three times as expensive, you’d think the household coming in would have a considerably higher income. By one definition, that’s a form of gentrification. But I’ve heard examples in Norridge of people who grew up in Norridge and wanted to stay there.”

I wonder if this is what is going on: the Chicago suburbs have experienced teardowns for decades but they were much more likely in higher-class suburbs like Elmhurst, Hinsdale, and Naperville. These suburbs had relatively expensive property so only those with a lot of money and who were really interested in the particular status conferred by these suburbs could pursue teardowns. However, now with those with less money or who are looking for “original” neighborhoods have spread out to other suburbs that offer good schools, good deals, and some status. In other words, the locations have become more diffuse as the practice spreads. This won’t necessarily spread to all suburbs – some just don’t have the status or schools or demographics that those with money will want to buy into. Yet, those looking for unique teardown opportunities may continue to seek out new suburbs.

Political campaigns combining big data, ground games

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Close elections mean both political parties are combining ground games and big data to try to eke out victories:

Workers like Ms. Wellington and Mr. Noble are, in the end, critical to any ground campaign, no matter how sophisticated data collection and targeting models are, said Sasha Issenberg, author of “The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns.”

“The great irony of the modern ground game is it’s this meeting of incredibly modern analytics and data married to very old-fashioned delivery devices,” he said. “It’s people knocking on doors; it’s people making phone calls out of phone banks; but the calculations that are determining which door and which phone are different.”…

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee ramped up its commitment, creating the “Bannock Street project,” a multimillion dollar, data-driven effort to persuade, register and turn out voters.

“The easiest way to look at it is our strategy to winning is expanding the voting universe,” said Preston Elliott, Hagan’s campaign manager, in an interview in his Greensboro office. “It’s a little more machineish than just catching a wave and riding momentum.”

Republicans say they are catching up. In Raleigh, campaign workers and volunteers showed off a new smartphone app that helps canvassers target their door knocks. But Republican officials refused to reveal volunteer numbers, paid staff totals, field office locations or a tabulation of voter contacts. Nor would they allow reporters to recount the phone-bank pitch, “the secret sauce,” as they called it.

This is taking new information about voters – something political parties always want – and putting it into real-time (or close) models in order to produce more effective targeted efforts with limited time and efforts before elections.

Two other thoughts:

1. It would be interesting to then see how these new efforts fit with broad appeals politicians make to the public. Does this new kind of information and targeting mean that politicians will spend less time making big claims and instead focus on smaller segments of voters?

2. Americans aren’t always thrilled with the kind of information corporations or tech companies have about them. Are they happy with political parties having more information? Of course, people don’t have to give out this information but this information is going into the hands of political parties who don’t exactly have the highest ratings these days.

Argument: homeownership is not worth risky financial situations

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Megan McArdle argues that policies and leaders promoting homeownership for those with less resources are doing a disservice:

Because, I think, most of us still haven’t managed to shed the idea that buying a house is a good way to get some unearned bonus wealth. Too many people managed to do just that for too many years. We think of 2008 as an aberration, rather than reversion to the mean. And that’s a costly mental error.

The long, steep increase in American home prices from 1946 to 2008 was driven by a whole lot of trends that are hard to repeat: the invention of the 30-year, fixed-rate, self-amortizing mortgage, which allowed people to pay more for a house by lowering the monthly payments. The securitization revolution, which lowered mortgage risk by bundling the loans into large, diversified portfolios, thereby lowering rates. Rising inflation, which pushed up the price of houses. Falling inflation, which lowered interest rates and monthly payments still further and allowed people to pay even more for those houses. The credit-scoring revolution, which allowed banks to offer loans to more people, increasing demand for the existing housing stock. And in dense coastal areas, you also had the rise of NIMBY zoning laws, which made housing scarcer and therefore more expensive…

Which is not to say I am against buying homes. I am very much for buying a home — so much so that I went and bought one myself a few years ago. But buying a house is a good idea only if you meet the following conditions:

  1. You can afford a sizable down payment to cushion you from the effects of local economic downturns or you have a super-stable job, such as working for the government or your father-in-law, that makes you unlikely to ever miss any payments.
  2. You can afford the maintenance as well as the payments, insurance and property taxes.
  3. You have good disability and/or mortgage insurance to make sure that you do not miss any payments even if you break your back and can’t do your job anymore.
  4. You are pretty sure you do not want to leave your area or move to a larger, more expensive home anytime in the next five years.
  5. Your payment is a reasonable percentage of your take-home pay (I shoot for under 25 percent; anything over 35 percent is far too risky).
  6. You have a sizable emergency fund to deal with contingencies.
  7. You can afford other forms of savings, rather than counting on your house as a piggy bank for future needs. In general, if declining home prices would send you into a hysterical panic about your financial situation, you are buying too much house.

If you do not meet these conditions, then buying a house is gambling — not just on rising home prices, but also on the continued soundness of your roof, boiler and plumbing. If you wouldn’t borrow the money to go to Vegas, then don’t borrow it for a house, either.

It sounds like McArdle is concerned with two issues:

1. People have not learned the lesson of the housing crash: housing prices do not inevitably go up. They may go up – and generally have over time – but this is not a guarantee. If you don’t accept this premise, then you will treat real estate differently.

2. The general American desire for owning a home is not enough compared to economic realities. Americans generally like owning homes: they are part of the American Dream in symbolizing status, we assume homeowners are less transient and care more about their communities, and they allow for individual freedom. But, if people can’t properly afford them, McArdle says it is not worth stretching financial bounds to make it possible. Instead, we need sound principles like saving up your money over time to make a good down payment on a house.

Both are valid concerns. Generally, Americans like seeing homes as an investment as well as an essential part of a successful life. Telling them otherwise may not be popular for politicians…

Want more affordable housing? Build more pre-fab homes and trailer parks

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Affordable housing can be cheaply provided by building more manufactured homes:

“The manufactured home is probably the most cost-effective way to provide quality affordable housing,” said Donna M. Blaze, the CEO of the Affordable Housing Alliance, which helped provide manufactured homes for Sandy refugees. “Most of our new units are light years ahead of the apartments for rent in today’s market.”

The average sales price for a manufactured home in 2013 was $64,000, according to the Census Bureau, while the average sales price for a single-family home was $324,000. The single-family site-built home includes the land, though, while owners of manufactured homes often have to still grapple with landlords and leasing issues. But the structure itself is nevertheless significantly cheaper: New manufactured homes cost around $43 per square foot; site-built homes cost $93 per square foot…

There are currently about 18 million Americans living in manufactured homes, and the houses make up the largest stock of unsubsidized housing in the country, according to the Manufactured Housing Institute. That is becoming more important as government budgets shrink and Americans prioritize other policy areas over public spending on subsidized housing…

But there are actually fewer of these homes being built than there were two decades ago. While manufactured home builders shipped more than 200,000 units a year through the 1980s and 1990s, last year there was demand for a fraction of that amount, just 60,000, according to the Manufactured Housing Institute.

From one end of the housing market – luxury in NYC – to another. I can only imagine the response in some communities if this is the kind of affordable housing proposed. It is already difficult for many middle- or upper-class communities to promote affordable housing without also having to combat the (unreasonable) stigma of manufactured housing. So even while these homes might be quite cheap, where exactly can they be put?

 

Luxury building boom continues in New York City

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The housing market may still be somewhat sluggish throughout the country but the luxury market continues to grow in NYC:

New York City developers will spend 60 percent more on new homes this year, while adding only 22 percent more units, a sign of the market’s tilt toward luxury condominiums, the New York Building Congress said.

Spending on new housing will reach $10.9 billion, the most in records dating to 1995 and $4.1 billion more than last year’s total, the trade group said in a report released today. The number of homes that money will build is 22,500, up from 18,400 in 2013.

A record wave of ultra-luxury condo projects planned or under construction in Manhattan accounts for the “wide disparity” between costs and unit production, said Frank Sciame, chairman of the New York Building Foundation, the trade group’s philanthropic arm…

Even as construction spending increases, the number of homes produced still falls far short of the 30,000-plus built annually from 2005 to 2008, the building congress said. In 2008, the city gained 33,200 units at a cost of $5.9 billion.

This echoes the larger housing market in the United States: while the market for cheaper or more affordable homes is slow, the luxury market still has plenty of builders and buyers. And we are talking about New York City, one of the places to be for the wealthy and influential.

The article also hints that New York Mayor Bill de Blasio promised lots of affordable housing in the next ten years. Having more luxury condos doesn’t necessarily preclude also building cheaper units but the statistics above suggest overall building is down. What big-city mayor could truly turn down or fight luxury projects? Cities desperately need such money even as they need to find ways to help promote housing for more average residents.

What will the closed CPS properties become?

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When the Chicago Public Schools closed nearly 50 elementary schools (part of the story of the series Chicagoland), they noted it would be difficult to sell many of these properties. Well, the first one just sold:

The Chicago Board of Education on Wednesday unanimously approved the sale of the former Peabody Elementary school site and building to the Svigos Asset Management company for $3.5 million.

The site at 1444 W. Augusta Blvd. was one of only three closed schools that reached a bid stage for a potential sale.

The other two — the former Marconi Elementary in West Garfield Park and Wadsworth Elementary in Woodlawn — will receive new bid solicitations from the school district. CPS said both the closed schools “failed to generate qualifying bids.”

The board also unanimously approved the sale of the district’s soon-to-be-vacated headquarters at 125 S. Clark St. to Blue Star Properties for $28 million.

This is a minimalistic explanation that leaves out some very important information. Like:

1. Were these fair prices for the properties? The suggestion that other properties haven’t sold does hint that CPS is asking a decent amount.

2. How are these properties going to be used? Perhaps it doesn’t matter once they generated some revenue and are now off the hands of CPS.

It still sounds like this could be a drawn-out process.

Driverless buses could improve mass transit

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Discussion of driverless buses in Britain highlights the efficiency they could offer, leading to improved service:

Claire Perry, the Transport Minister, said that operating buses without drivers could help companies provide “better and more frequent” services, particularly in rural areas.

She also revealed that work is already under way to identify any problematic “regulatory issues” which could prevent the vehicles being rolled out on roads across Britain.

Speaking at the Driverless Vehicles Conference at Thatcham on Wednesday, Mrs Perry said she could “see a future where driverless buses provide better and more frequent services”.

“A major component of rural transport is the cost of the driver – and so a truly driverless bus could transform rural public transport in the future,” she said.

Driverless cars offer safety and commuting convenience but this is a twist: mass transit could be more frequent and cheaper without drivers. It would be interesting to know how much cheaper this could be. Would this mean a 20% increase in bus service for the same price or is it something even more drastic? If so, perhaps this could make buses a lot more attractive, particularly in rural or suburban areas where riders may not necessarily want to ride with a lot of other people and want service that doesn’t inconvenience them much.

Continued mansionization debates in Los Angeles

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The Los Angeles Times reports that controversy over mansionization in Los Angeles continues as the city struggles to develop guidelines that will please residents:

Los Angeles leaders say they want to tighten restrictions on mansionization, but citywide fixes are expected to take at least 18 months to allow for repeated hearings and environmental review, according to city officials…

Local politicians and planning officials say that L.A.’s rules against mansionization — meant to prevent bloated houses from being built on modest lots — have fallen short. The restrictions, put in place six years ago, curb the size of new and renovated homes based on lot size. But the rules also include “bonuses” of 20% or 30% more space than otherwise allowed…

In the meantime, city planners have suggested temporary rules to curb demolitions and give residents “breathing room” in neighborhoods that have mobilized against mansionization, including Sunset Square, Studio City and North Beverly Grove.

The Los Angeles chapter of the Building Industry Assn. is worried about those moves, saying that the temporary restrictions could “result in a flurry of lawsuits.” Homeowners have not been given enough warning about the restrictions, which “will immediately remove property owner rights,” the group’s chief executive, Tim Piasky, said.

Planning officials say the temporary restrictions would immediately address the problem in mansionization hot spots: desirable areas with older, smaller homes targeted for teardowns…

“It creates a situation of haves and have-nots,” said Traci Considine, whose Faircrest Heights neighborhood has been recommended to get temporary curbs on home demolitions. “If you do a few Band-Aids for a few select neighborhoods, the target is just bigger on the backs of the neighborhoods that aren’t protected.

Los Angeles is a big city so having city-wide regulations could be quite difficult. Austin passed a noted anti-McMansion ordinance but the city has 885,000 people in 272 square miles while LA has 3.88 million residents in 503 square miles. In addition to size differences, real estate in California is huge: the housing market is still quite pricey so limiting the ability of property owners to cash out is a bigger restriction than in the cheaper Austin market.

I would guess that the long-term solution is different guidelines for different neighborhoods in accordance with what residents desire. Yes, this might push the mansionizers to different neighborhoods. But, this is how communities often tackle this problem.