What if Facebook could consistently improve users’ moods?

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There has been a lot of hubbub about the ethics of a mood experiment Facebook ran several years ago. But, what if Facebook could consistently alter what it presents users to improve their mood and well-being? Positive psychology guru Marty Seligman hints at this in Flourish:

It is not only measuring well-being that Facebook and its cousins can do, but increasing well-being as well. “We have a new application: goals.com,” Mark continued. “In this app, people record their goals and their progress toward their goals.”

I commented on Facebook’s possibilities for instilling well-being: “As it stands now, Facebook may actually be building four of the elements of well-being: positive emotion, engagement (sharing all those photos of good events), positive relationships (The heart of what ‘friends’ are all about), and now accomplishment. All to the good. The fifth element of well-being, however, needs work, and in the narcissistic environment of Facebook, this work is urgent, and that is belonging to and serving something that you believe is bigger than the self – the element of meaning. Facebook could indeed help to build meaning in the lives of the five hundred million users. Think about it, Mark.” (page 98)

This might still be a question of ethics and letting users know what is happening.  And I’m sure some critics would argue that it is too artificial, the relationships sustained online are of a different kind than that of face-to-face relationships (though we know most users interact with people online that they already know offline), and this puts too power in the hands of Facebook. Yet, what if Facebook could help improve well-being? What if a lot of good be done by altering the online experience?

McMansions as “weapons of mass construction”

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One writer resents having to put up with McMansions, labeled in the headline “weapons of mass construction,” for the sake of the economy:

I hate being all in this thing together. Or let’s just say, I hate being all in this thing together with the home-construction industry. Right now, a McMansion the size of the Louvre is going up directly across the street from my house. Nine other monstrosities are also being deployed in what was once a beautiful, empty meadow. The field has been filled with backhoes and earth movers and building materials on and off for at least two years.

The projects, once begun, take forever to finish. The crew starts work on a house, then gets dispatched to finish another project in a different town, and then comes back. So it takes months to get the micro-chateaux built. It’s like watching someone set fire to your neighborhood, then douse it, then come back and start the fire again six weeks later. You’d rather they just ruined things once and for all and got it over with. If you’re going to sack Rome, sack it. Drilling, digging, dust and leveled trees have been our reality since 2011. It makes it very, very hard to root for the home builders.

I am constantly reading that young people are not buying houses at the pace needed to get the economy percolating. Well, maybe someone should tell the developers to stop building lurid, vile houses that no one can afford. Or to stop building lurid, vile, prefab, ticky-tacky houses even if people can afford them.

When the economy cratered in 2008 and my 401(k) got massacred, I wasn’t as upset as I should have been because it meant that the McMansions scheduled to be erected across the street wouldn’t get built until the recession was over. Four happy years ensued, without bogus cathedral windows and four-car garages and faux-Belgian cobblestones and Philistines for neighbors. This situation put me in the uncomfortable position of having to root against my own country. As long as the housing industry was flat on its back, life was good.

I really wish that the economy were not so dependent upon the health of home builders. I would love to root for these guys. I really would. But they build trash. They tear down adorable bungalows and build McMansions in Princeton, N.J. In Chicago, in Boston, in Los Angeles and even in little old Easton, Pa., they are bulldozing whatever stands in their way and throwing up their eyesores. Throwing up being the operative term.

What does he really think? I wonder if this is closely tied to what he suggests is a personal experience with nearby houses. It is one thing to dislike McMansions on the whole and argue they are bad for society – like Thomas Frank suggested a few months ago – but then not live by them. In fact, a lot of social problems are like this: we know there are bad things happening in our county, state, country, and around the world but it is different when they are removed and abstract. There is some of that argument here: such homes are ugly, he doesn’t want to have to rely on the housing industry so much, etc.

It is another thing if a new McMansion under construction greets you every morning when you walk out your front door. Or if construction projects take a really long time. Are these concerns the result of teardowns where a historic neighborhood is threatened?

USA Today says American Dream costs $130k per year

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Living the American Dream isn’t cheap, according to calculations from USA Today. Here is what went into the cost:

•Home ownership is central to the American dream. So, we took the median price of a new home ($275,000), subtracted a 10% down payment, then projected the annual cost of a 30-year mortgage at 4% interest. We also added annual maintenance costs of 1% of the purchase price. Total: $17,062 a year.

•We used the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s April 2014 figure of $12,659 for a moderate-cost grocery plan for a family of four.

•In May, AAA estimated it would cost $11,039 a year to own one four-wheel-drive sport-utility vehicle.

•The Milliman Medical Index pegged annual health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket medical expenses at $9,144.

•We used various estimates for the costs of restaurants and entertainment; one family summer vacation; clothing; utilities; cable or satellite; Internet and cellphone; and miscellaneous expenses (see table).

•Total federal, state, and local taxes were pegged at 30% for households at this income level, based on a model developed for Citizens for Tax Justice.

•USA TODAY calculated current educational expenses for two children at $4,000 a year and college savings (all of it pretax, we assumed) at $2,500 per year per child, based on various rules of thumb.

•Finally, the maximum annual pretax contribution to a retirement plan for people under 50 is $17,500. That’s slightly less than 15% of this American dream household’s annual earnings, in line with financial planners’ recommendations.

Total: $130,357.

It sounds like a lot — and it is in a country where the median household income is about $51,000. Add one more child and another vehicle and you could easily reach $150,000.

I can see some places where costs could be trimmed, particularly with the car and a more minimalistic approach to retirement savings. I wonder if the emphasis here should be on the overall cost – which is high and the article notes it can vary quite a bit from region to region – or the assumptions about what the middle class is about. I was recently looking at a classic sociological study Working-Class Suburb written by Bennett Berger in 1960. There is a point in the book where Berger juxtaposes the suburban critic frowning at the ills of suburban life and the suburbanite who is happy with his relative comfort of a car, refrigerator, house, and little patch of lawn. In the decades since, expectations about the good life have increased, as Juliet Schor showed in The Overspent American. If Americans need $130,000 a year to have the basics, many of which are good things, then is being middle-class something completely different today?

Should your office cubicle be smaller than your suburban home’s bathroom?

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A short passage from Cubedhighlights the increasing size of suburban bathrooms compared to the size of cubicles:

To add insult to injury, [cubicles] shrank. According to a BusinessWeek editorial from 1996, between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s the average size of a cubicle decreased between 25 and 50 percent. Ironically, the editorial was spurred by BusinessWeek‘s editorial staff being “informed that most of us will lose our private offices in a year or two. This prompted a closer look at cubicles,” they wrote, “which are occupied by some 35 million of the 45 million white-collar workers in this country.” BW forecast only half humorously that at those rates the average cubicle in 2097 would be eight square feet. By 2006, when the average cubicle was seventy-five square feet, half of Americans would report that they believed that their bathroom was larger than their cubicle; one wonders to what extend the extravagant growth of the American bathroom, and of the suburban home in general, is partly a reaction against the shrinking of cubicles, where the owners of those bathrooms spend so much of their time. (p.243)

Interesting contrast. American homes are indeed larger today and have more bathrooms than in the past. Cubicles are often meant to be practical, places for business and yet suburbanites tend to desire more opulent bathrooms. Watch HGTV for a while and lots of homebuyers want bathrooms that are more like spas, have the latest features like granite and rain showerheads, and have plenty of space. For all these niceties, how much time do people spend in bathrooms compared to cubicles? The numbers wouldn’t even be close for the average cubicle dweller. But, bathrooms, particularly connected to the master’s bedroom, are showpieces, status symbols , and catch buyers’ eyes and cubicles are definitely not those things.

Fireworks limited by suburban sprawl

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Fireworks shows are now limited by newer guidelines and more sprawl:

“What’s happened is, the size shell that you can shoot in a particular location has decreased,” Taylor explains. Just as shell width correlates to height, so too does height correlate with regulation. Old regulations dictated that you needed 70 feet of area cleared for every inch of shell fired around a launch area. The new industry standard is 100 feet. So when you play that out, practically, a large 12-inch shell needs 1,200 feet (or nearly a quarter of a mile) cleared in every direction to be considered safe.

Taylor tells me that fireworks sites nationwide have been shrinking with both urbanization and suburban sprawl. And fellow fireworks company Pyrotecnico echoes the sentiment. “What we’re finding is that sites are shrinking,” explains Pyrotecnico Creative Director Rocco Vitale. “Growth is happening. More buildings are going up. And when that happens at a site, a show you could use six-inch shells two years ago becomes a place for four-inch shells.”

Neither company feels that the end product has suffered as a result: Since the extra expense per each inch of shell grows almost exponentially, the savings made from downsizing can be reinvested into the experience.

“Rather than one eight-inch shell, I could probably put 12 three-inch shells up for the same price,” Taylor says. “We like that for several reasons. Larger shells are more dangerous because they have more explosive power in them. But the truth is, people in this country especially like density in their fireworks show.”

So perhaps the best solution is to find large, empty pieces of land that people have to travel to in order to see more impressive fireworks. Or, if available, communities could use bodies of water which also add the bonus of the reflective surface. Yet, many communities shoot fireworks from parks which tend to be close to other things.

There is an odd juxtaposition with this story. The headline reads: “How McMansions Murdered Big Fireworks.” Then the final short paragraph: “So it wasn’t your imagination. Fireworks have gotten smaller over the years. But there’s a bright side: The public may be safer, and happier, for it.” The headline invokes evil McMansions and the desecration of sacred fireworks shows. The story suggests this is all because we want fireworks to be safer and people tend to like more dense fireworks anyway. That’s a McMansion clickbait headline if I’ve every seen one…

Fighting to protect Chicago’s parks from mini-banks, tea stores, and the Lucas Museum

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Curbed Chicago sets up the likely coming battle over using public space for the Lucas Museum:

Since late Spring, a small “pop-up bank” operated by PNC Bank has sat in Grant Park. It’s a bright orange and blue shipping container with doors and windows and an ATM. The park district earns $120,000 annually from the small structure, but many folks are not happy with its location in the park. DNAInfo has reports of numerous complaints about the very idea of a bank opening “It seems to go against the nature of the park itself,” a citizen tells DNAInfo.

The Park District is okay with it, obviously, in part because of the payola but also because, according to them, it’s not a permanent structure. In their mind, it’s a temporary vendor like you might find several dozen of in the park during Taste of Chicago. But is it the same? And where are the limits? What if Starbucks wants to open a mini-cafe right next to the PNC to capture the millions of visitors Grant Park will receive this summer? Why wouldn’t they?…

And consider Connors Park, to the north of downtown a few blocks from John Hancock tower. The squat little park is now home to an Argo Tea pavilion which just celebrated its one year anniversary of the location. Initially there was confusion about whether the park was still a park, and if it was okay to sit and enjoy the park without buying a tea. At a celebration for the one year anniversary, staff told us that with recent changes to the signage that confusion has dissipated and that neighbors know they’re welcome…

But the fact that these two issues are even issues at all speaks to the city’s constant vigilance against abuse of the parks, and it explains why despite being a seeming “slam dunk,” the Soldier Field parking lot location chosen for the Lucas Museum won’t come without a fight. This isn’t a quarter-block tea house or a 160 square-foot mini-bank, it’s a massive, multi-million-dollar development that has already captured the attention of the nation. As Chicagoist puts it, The Debate Over The Lucas Museum Has Only Started.

There are two levels to this:

1. What seems like an increased interest in many cities in ensuring that public spaces stay public. What can happen in these parks? Is there enough public space as opposed to private space masquerading as public space?

2. The special circumstances in Chicago that suggest the land near the lake needs to remain for public use. All sorts of ideas can pop up for a lakefront – I was reminded again recently about the older Mayor Daley’s suggestion that Chicago should build a major airport out in Lake Michigan – so having these guidelines has been a big boon. Yet, it is hard for a city that is chasing elite status (perhaps due to its own insecurity) to turn down a figure like George Lucas in such a location. Additionally, such a battle could give opponents of Rahm Emanuel an excuse to pick a battle.

Maybe all this represents one of the major trade-offs in today’s world: just how much do want corporate interests or the interests of powerful people overrule the rights of others? Constructing a museum like this isn’t the end of the world for Chicago but it may seem like another event in a long line of concessions to growth machines.

Want a home with extra amenities? Just buy a condo with hotel services

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Developers are building more condos with hotel amenities:

Developers across the U.S. are reviving a concept that collapsed with the real estate crash in 2008: combining condominiums and hotels. In cities including Miami, New York and Los Angeles, a rebounding hospitality market is joining with rising demand for luxury homes, spurring developers to construct new full-service hotels and ask premium prices for residential units associated with a high-end brand…

“I love the amenities the building will have — a restaurant that can provide room service, a concierge, maintenance, a person that can clean your place, valet parking,” said Viete, 25, who works for his family’s real estate company in Caracas. The $250 million project, scheduled to break ground in August, is already 85 percent sold…

Condo developments with a hotel can be structured in several ways. In some cases, residences may be connected to the lodging segment only so that owners can take advantage of the hotel’s amenities and benefit from the brand’s prestige. That tends to put a premium on unit prices.

In other developments, known as condo-hotels, a portion of the condos are made available to the hotel when owners aren’t using them, producing revenue for residents.

Sounds nice if you have some extra money lying around. On one hand, the story doesn’t say how much extra such units would cost over and above condos available elsewhere but on the other hand, if you have to ask, this isn’t the market for you…

Thinking about these units, they are an interesting contrast to a common American narrative about homeownership that goes something like this: you work hard to put together enough to purchase a home, you work hard to maintain it, you are more likely to participate in local community life, and it is a long-term investment and place for sentimental moments. Yet, the housing options available to those with more money goes against these principles. Instead of putting sweat equity into maintaining the home, you can pay someone else. Instead of getting deeply involved with neighbors and local issues, the wealthy can travel from house to house in exciting locations. Instead of holding onto a home because of family life and memories, housing becomes just another commodity to be bought and sold. In other words, condos with hotel features are far beyond normal American conceptions of homeownership.

Why is a 5,600 square foot, $3.2 million home squeezed on a small lot a “mini-McMansion”?

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Jack Osbourne recently purchased a new home in Studio City that Variety calls a “mini-McMansion”:

In late May, rock ‘n’ roll scion and budding television and documentary producer Jack Osbourne sold his refurbished 1920s Spanish-style abode in L.A.’s celeb-saturated Los Feliz area for $3.2 million and, we first heard from gossip juggernaut TMZ, he and his missus, Lisa Stelly and their toddler daughter hightailed it to the San Fernanado Valley where they spent — oddly enough — $3.2 million for a bigger and brand-spanking-new house in and unassuming but affluent, north of Ventura Boulevard neighborhood in Studio City.

Young Mister Osbourne’s new, clapboard-sided residence in Studio City — online marketing materials rather generously describe as a “Cape Cod” — sits somewhat tightly on a .27-acre corner lot with five bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms in 5,614 square feet. (It’s really too small to be a right-proper mccmansion so, oxymoron-ish though it may be, we’ll call an architecturally jumbled mini-mcmansion. How’s that sound?

In addition to the square footage, the price, and a small lot, the continued description of the home includes some more typical McMansion features like a two-story foyer, three-car garage facing the street, and an interesting front exterior (see the picture). So why isn’t this a McMansion?

My best guess is that this home is small by celebrity standards in Los Angeles. Compared to all new homes in the United States, Osbourne’s home is more than twice the size but he doesn’t live in an ordinary place: he lives in a place with mega-celebrities. In this city, 5,600 square feet simply can’t compete with flashier and bigger homes. See some of these celebrity homes here. Since real estate is local, Osbourne’s home is just mini-McMansion rather than opulent showplace.

The real estate market for religious buildings in America

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American religious buildings continue to change hands as different denominations and groups lose or gain members:

The handover in houses of worship across the country is not a straightforward case of an increase in non-Christian immigrants in the United States. In fact, many church sales can be attributed to shifts among Christian denominations. Roman Catholic weekly service attendance has slid from 75 percent in 1955 to 45 percent in the mid-2000s, while Southern Baptist and Evangelical churches have seen big drops in attendance, partially due to a split within the Protestant church between mainline Protestantism and Evangelicals. Meanwhile, Pentecostal churches have seen spikes in attendance…

Though sales of churches has picked up during the recent recession, it’s not a new phenomenon. Look to synagogues, says Ellen Levitt, author of The Lost Synagogues, a series of books and tours exploring the changing of hands of the Jewish place of worship to churches, community centers, and schools…

It’s not just because of immigration patterns—religions are also changing, creating ripples in the church sales market. Christian Science groups, for example, have reported declining attendance. Korean-based Christian congregations have reported spikes in worshipers, while Mormonism is the fastest growing religion in America.

But finding a new place to worship presents a dual problem: getting a brand new building for many groups is out of reach, while the smaller churches that are being sold are just too small for growing congregations. Most state rules require that a building be established as a church for fire code reasons, which means buying a house and turning it into a church is off. And parking, particularly in space crunched California, is precious.

The real estate market is not one many people might associate with religion but religious groups own a lot of property in the United States. It would be interesting to see some figures how much religious real estate changes hands on a yearly basis. And how many of the non-religious or people outside of the particular group that currently owns and uses the building notices much different?

As the article notes, as some groups decline, particularly older religious groups, newer groups are looking for space. Even as it might be complicated to adapt existing buildings, it might be even harder to construct new buildings, particularly if they are large, because of needing money or building in neighborhoods that don’t want a new religious building. I would guess proponents of reusing buildings and retrofitting – giving old buildings new uses, though this could lead to religious buildings being turned into things like residences – would also like this.

One-quarter of Americans live in areas with over 20% poverty

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The Census Bureau recently released updated data showing an increased number of Americans living within poverty areas:

In 2010, the overall U.S. poverty rate was about 15 percent. However, about a quarter of all Americans lived in a so-called “poverty area”—defined as a census tract where more than 20 percent of the population lived below the poverty line. For our purposes, we can just call these places poor neighborhoods, even though the term is a little more accurate in an urban context than a rural one. The problem was especially severe in Appalachia and across the South and Southwest, where in most states 30 percent or more of all residents lived in these communities…

The South may have the greatest share of its population packed into poor neighborhoods, but the growth of concentrated poverty was actually fastest in the Midwest, as shown on the graph below. The poor-neighborhood population also became more suburban and rural compared to 2000, according to the Census…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Researchers have paid more attention to such neighborhoods in recent decades and yet the problem seems to have gotten worse.