Robert Wuthnow on new findings about small town America

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Sociologist Robert Wuthnow discusses his new findings about small town America:

The nation’s 15,000 small towns are sometimes portrayed as idyllic places that are “the real America” and sometimes as dying communities to be escaped at the first opportunity, said Wuthnow, the Gerhard R. Andlinger ’52 Professor of Social Sciences and a professor of sociology. Too often missing from the discussion, he said, are the voices of small-town residents themselves.

That’s part of the reason Wuthnow undertook a research project that included interviews with more than 700 people in small towns around the country and analysis of Census and survey data. Results of the research are detailed in a book, “Small-Town America: Finding Community, Shaping the Future,” released this month by Princeton University Press…

“[This issue] matters mostly because any segment of the population, especially one that includes some 30 million people, is one that we need to understand, whether we are attracted or not attracted to small towns,” Wuthnow said. “My main hope in doing this project was first of all to encourage greater understanding of the variety of small towns, the complexity of small towns and secondly to engender a certain degree of respect so that there was an appreciation of what small towns have to offer.”

Wuthnow said there’s reason for optimism about the future of many of those towns, pointing to the resilience of their residents, opportunities for small-scale economic development and lower cost of living.

“A lot of people have predicted the death of small towns. It is true that many small towns are declining, especially if they have already become quite small or already were declining. My view is a little more mixed than that,” he said. “There is also a social resilience in small towns. A town of anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000, up to 10,000 people is likely to do pretty well. I would predict that in the next 10 years or 20 years there will still be at least 30 million people living in small towns.”

If the population remained around 30 million in small towns, the proportion of Americans living in small towns would still decrease, suggesting small town life is still declining in the United States. Additionally, this means less political representation. At the same time, Wuthnow is right in suggesting that small towns still play a large role in American life. See this earlier post about how American live in an urban society but still are tied to small town values. I still think the suburbs are often about combining the ethos of a small town – smaller population, community participation and volunteering, safe for kids – with the amenities of urban areas which include a range of jobs, access to social and cultural events, and a measure of anonymity or degree of choosing compared to small towns where everyone knows everyone else (also see this earlier post).

Unrest in Paris suburbs highlights changes in suburbs around the world

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Tensions ran high last week in a Paris suburb as immigrants reacted to their economic and social conditions:

Weekend violence outside Paris triggered by France’s controversial veil ban has highlighted how tensions with the Muslim community are adding to an already-volatile mix of poverty and alienation in the country’s blighted suburbs.

The unrest in the Paris suburb of Trappes erupted after a man was arrested for allegedly attacking a police officer who stopped his wife over wearing a full-face veil in public.

Feelings of anti-Muslim discrimination, coupled with unemployment and tensions with police are creating an “explosive” mix in the suburbs, said Veronique Le Goaziou, a sociologist and expert on urban violence in France…

A few kilometres (miles) from the Chateau de Versailles, Trappes is a poor city of 30,000 surrounded by wealthy neighbours. In 2010, half the households lived on less than 13,400 euros ($17,600) a year and unemployment was at 15 percent.

“This is a terrifyingly common situation,” said sociologist Michel Kokoreff. “We are in an area that has problem after problem, where people have a profound feeling of abandonment.”

This is a reminder that the monoculture view of suburbs, that they primarily consist of the middle- to upper-classes around the world living in isolated communities, is simply not the case in many places.  American suburbs are increasingly diverse (recent posts: more poor residents, more aging residents, more immigrants looking for opportunities) and suburbs outside of many European cities have been poorer from the beginning (though the increasing religious diversity is of more recent decades). All together, there are plenty of suburban problems for American and French suburbs to address. The actions taken (or not taken) have the potential to set the course individual suburbs but also suburbs as a whole for decades to come.

Photographing suburban McMansions around the world

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See pictures of large suburban homes around the world as well as read insights about the developments from the photographer:

After six years of travel to five different continents, Adolfsson has published Suburbia Gone Wild, a new photography book that goes in and around the model homes of wealthy cul-de-sacs in cities like Bangalore, Moscow, and Cairo. His discoveries reveal a world that continues to homogenize around emerging clusters of wealth aspiring to a particularly American brand of suburban life.

It wasn’t always easy for Adolfsson to capture these oddly beautiful shots of perfectly arranged kitchen pantries and opulent living rooms. His method was to photograph the model homes inside these developments, hiring locals to pretend to be a significant other who would then distract sales reps as he snuck off to take pictures around the house…

This copy+paste behavior is a result of America’s cultural dominance over the past five decades, exported through soap operas, movies, and magazines. I also think that the “lifestyle” fills a cultural gap as many of these countries didn’t have an upper middle class until recently and haven’t established a strong identity for this growing class yet…

I came to the realization that many of the residents living in these suburbs share a common identity with residents living in similar communities around the world, whether it’s Bangkok, Cairo, Moscow or São Paulo, than they do with their fellow countrymen living outside the gates of these suburbs. I think this is the beginning of a huge global shift where national identity is becoming less relevant.

Another cultural export of the United States of America.

I like the connection to a global/Americanized/suburbanized mentality. At the same time, this is only available to an upper-income section of global society so this is a limited group. It could get a lot more interesting if these people from around the world started gathering and interacting on a more consistent basis. Perhaps this is already happening in tourist spots, conferences, places of consumption (from retail to media), or corporate offices.

There would be a lot of room for research on how this global/suburban identity then meshes with more local identities. Critics have argued that suburbs within America have their own culture, full of everything from conformity to individualism (depending on which critic you listen to over the last six decades). But, the United States is now a suburban nation so the suburban identity is quite common and is expressed all over the place from movies to TV to books to politics. It would be a lot different in countries without an established suburban ethos.

Shift from buying big homes to upgrading fixtures

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I’ve suspected this for quite a while: here is some evidence Americans have moved past purchasing large homes, McMansions if you will, and are instead paying more for the finer touches in their homes.

Beginning next month, Majestic Building Products, a longtime wholesale supplier to companies such as Pulte Homes and Marriott International, is opening its showroom to the public.

Owner Jeff Jenkins said he is expanding the Leesburg-based company to keep up with growing demand for more-customized fixtures — ranging from bathroom mirrors to closet shelves.

“The whole philosophy has changed,” said Jenkins, who founded the company in 1989. “Ten years ago, everybody was out buying McMansions. People don’t care about having an 8,000-square-foot house anymore. They’re more interested in upgrading the little things.”

Those little things — door hinges, towel holders and shower doors — bring in about $9 million in annual revenue for the company. Jenkins said he expects sales to rise an extra 20 percent in the next year.

This could be viewed as a positive sign by those who decry the purchase of unnecessarily large homes: more Americans are paying attention to the interiors of their homes and making them enjoyable. Instead of focusing on size and its impressiveness and functionality, customizing the fixtures allows owners to focus more on their own personal interests and develop a home that more closely reflects their own tastes. This could be viewed as a shift away from mass-production to owners taking more responsibility and interest in their own settings.

On the other hand, focusing on the fixtures simply transfers the consumption from the larger issue of the home to the innumerable upgrades that could be made within a home. Think granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, hundreds of floor options, faucets, paint colors, and on and on. Plenty of money is still being spent on housing but instead of it going for new homes, it goes into new furnishings. As the article suggests later, the company is opening their showroom in part to help counter the fluctuations of the housing market and ensure a steady revenue stream. Can’t purchase the bigger or newer home you dream about? Instead, put that money into your current setting.

If this is all the case – and there is plenty of evidence that the new housing market is still sluggish – this hints at a possible large shift in American housing. Rather than being driven by housing starts and new development, perhaps the future in a tighter economic market is in premium fixtures and more customization of existing homes to the tastes of their current owners.

New TV shows with young adults feature unrealistically large city apartments

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The dwellings of many young adults on television are quite large:

Plenty of things are unrealistic about television: No iconic moment in my life has ever been accompanied by Ellie Goulding’s “Anything Can Happen,” despite how much I wish it were. But the perpetual tiny-but-annoying quirk that most shows are guilty of is the unemployed twentysomething with a fabulous apartment. I’m onto you, Girls: No matter how much junk you throw around in Marnie and Hannah’s onetime-shared living space, it doesn’t hide the fact that they’ve got a ton of room. I live in New York City; I know you’re lying to me.

This isn’t anything new, of course. The go-to example is usually Carrie Bradshaw and her ridiculous Manhattan apartment with its gorgeous walk-in closet full on Manolos when her only source of explained income was a weekly newspaper column. But while everyone loves some good 1998 nostalgia (the Friends’ West Village apartments are another egregious example), the trend of the unbelievably large home isn’t fading away.

I’m not simply talking about gorgeous, jealousy-inspiring apartments; I totally get and buy into the fact that say, Dr. Lahiri from The Mindy Project would have an awe-worthy living space to bring all of her meet-cute boyfriends. What I can’t get behind is recent shows like dearly-departed Happy Endings (perpetually unemployed Max’s “gross loft” in Chicago is gorgeous) or 2 Broke Girls‘ Williamsburg, Brooklyn, apartment (They’re supposed to actually be broke, not heiresses!) where the characters ostensibly “have no money,” yet are somehow chilling around complaining about said fact in an abode that would retail for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Sure, this is a minor issue. None of this is getting in the way of my enjoyment of all of these shows. But there is some point during each of these programs’ respective runs — often more than once — where I’ll laugh out loud at the sheer ridiculousness of it. It’s all I can do; I can’t change the channel: basically all shows with twenty-something characters are guilty of this. Weirdly enough, the most realistic living set-up on television right now might be the Big Brother house, with all 16 of its residents fighting in a Hunger Games of sorts for limited bed space.

Several quick thoughts:

1. If Big Brother is perceived to be more realistic, these other shows may have some problems.

2. Of the examples cited above, most of the urban apartments are in New York City with one in Chicago (Happy Endings). Manhattan and some of the surroundings areas are some of the most expensive areas in the country so the housing situation as portrayed on TV is really unrealistic. At the same time, TV shows with young adults in places like Atlanta or Houston or Dallas or some other cheaper markets could feature bigger apartments without losing all realism.

3. This is not a new phenomenon on TV. In The Overspent American, sociologist Juliet Schor talks about the expanding middle-class lifestyle on television in the later decades of the 20th century. As the years went by, middle-class people on TV had more and more material goods, larger houses, and had fewer concerns about work and money. Schor then argues that TV contributed to changing perceptions among Americans in what they needed to own to have “the good life.”

4. Shows on channels like HGTV don’t help. It seems like every show features a person looking for the most-updated features. Granted, their price range varies quite a bit but the homes tend to be on the larger side. This is simply unrealistic for many emerging adults.

5. There is potential here for some TV shows to work with more size-appropriate dwellings. How about a show about young people revolving around micro-apartments? How about bringing back the starter home on TV?

The value of using maps to see the rise and fall of Detroit

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Here is a series of maps that show both the growth and decline of Detroit over its history. When looking at these maps, I’m reminded that it is quite difficult to talk about either the rise or decline of a major city just by discussing raw numbers, such as population increases or losses or economic figures, or photographs. For example, we could talk about the rise of Houston in recent decades and contrast this to the sharp population decrease in Detroit. Moving past statistics, we could include photographs of a city. Detroit has been photographed many times in recent years with often bleak scenes illustrating economic and social decline.

In some middle ground between numbers and photos and in-depth analysis (of which there does not seem to be much about Detroit recently – the mainstream media has primarily focused on short snippets of information) are maps. A good map has sufficient information to provide a top-down approach to the city and give some indication of the city’s infrastructure. Additionally, it is much easier today to provide multiple layers of mapped information based on Census data and other sources. Growth is relatively easy to see as new streets and points of interest starting showing up. On the other hand, decline might be harder to show as the streets may be empty and the points of interest might be decaying. Still, a current map shows the scope of the problem facing Detroit: it is population and economic decline plus a large chunk of land and structures that is difficult to maintain.

All together, I’m advocating for more widespread use of maps in reporting on and discussions about cities, whether they are struggling or thriving. Maps can help us move beyond seeing vacant houses or economic developments and take in the big picture all at once.

Argument: many Chicago suburbs have boring mottos

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The Daily Herald suggests a number of Chicago suburbs have dull mottos that don’t say much about the communities:

Town mottos are like nicknames in that the best ones, such as “City of Big Shoulders” for Chicago, are bestowed by others and not self-proclaimed, such as “Urbus en Horto” (“City in a Garden”) for Chicago. At least there is a story behind Des Plaines’ destiny. Most suburbs adopt bland, easily forgotten mottos that tout development or vague hopes for the future, such as Schaumburg’s “Progress Through Thoughtful Planning,” Bloomingdale’s “Growth With Pride,” or Bolingbrook’s “A Place to Grow.”

Wauconda’s “Water. Spirit. Wonder.” is unique but might sound a little cold compared to neighboring Island Lake, which is “A Community of Friendly People” who settled there instead of in Huntley, “The Friendly Village with Country Charm.”

Hanover Park opts for “One Village — One Future.” It doesn’t say much, but no one can argue with the math. No one should quibble about Elgin’s “The City in the Suburbs.” But Naperville’s “Great Service — All the Time,” also a favorite motto of pizzerias, might fuel discussions. One Wikipedia entry falsely touts Libertyville’s motto as the impressive “Fortitudine Vincimus,” Latin for “By Endurance We Conquer,” which basically means “We Will Win By Hanging Around Until Everybody Else Quits.” But Libertyville never used that motto and currently sports only the phrase “Spirit of Independence” on its red-white-and-blue logo…

Lombard, “The Lilac Village,” still boasts a motto that brings to mind something pretty and fragrant. Roselle hosts a rose parade and includes roses in its village seal, but it uses the motto “Tradition Meets Tomorrow,” which is pretty similar to the “Where Tradition and Vision Meet” motto of Batavia. (Given Batavia’s link to the high-energy physics of Fermilab, it might consider the motto “Village of Density.”)

These mottos sound like classic talk from city boosters: they tend to contain grand visions about the future without getting into too many specifics or highlight a small part of the community’s character. I think they are primarily about trying to impress businesses, trying to attract them to relocate in a place that is thriving and will continue to thrive.

Unfortunately, when all the mottos sound similar, they all don’t mean a whole lot. How does a business really differentiate between communities based on their mottos? The biggest issue for a suburb might be having a motto that is significantly different. This might lead people to ask why that community is so out of line.

Critics of suburbs might see these mottos as more evidence of the homogeneity or blandness of suburbs. Many communities seem to be striving after the same things. Yet, we know that suburbs are actually quite different, whether that is due to different functions (like comparing a bedroom suburb and an edge city) or different histories (date of founding, specific historical circumstances) or a unique set of self-perception (like suburbs that view themselves as extra friendly or full of volunteers). So perhaps more suburbs should work to differentiate themselves in their mottos, move away from bland American notions of progress, and more explicitly highlight their more unique features.

Three possible reasons why the harsh national spotlight is on Chicago

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Whet Moser proposes three reasons Chicago has received negative attention recently from the national media:

It’s a big, easy target. Chicago’s “Big Shoulders” image—it was the city that “built the American dream,” to use the historian Thomas Dyja’s words—makes any fall from that perch seem that much more momentous. “We were the future,” says the Northwestern professor Bill Savage.

The Obama factor. Chicago’s problems never used to be much of a national story (unless a governor got indicted). But after a skinny Chicagoan became president—a man whose team has included a Daley, our current mayor, and one of the country’s most powerful political advisers—the light of press attention shone more brightly. “When you look at what’s wrong [with the country],” says Savage, “you look at Chicago.”

It’s our turn. In the 1970s, New York City “was collapsing,” the Reader media critic Michael Miner points out. “The Summer of Sam, ‘Ford to New York: Drop Dead.’?” When Los Angeles hit hard times in the early 1990s, it “was just as much of a [media] whipping boy,” says Savage. Chicago is a logical third. It will be somebody else’s turn soon enough. Prepare yourself, Houston (which is projected to surpass Chicago in population by 2030): You may be next.

Some thoughts about each of these proposed reasons:

#1: Out of the three reasons listed above, I find this one the least plausible. Yes, Chicago was once the new American city (see the late 1800s) but it has been eclipsed by Los Angeles (perhaps Hollywood and the generally glitter of the city limits negative attention?) and Chicago has been suffering from the same kinds of problems as today (loss of manufacturing jobs, poverty, crime, inequality) since at least the 1970s if not all the way back in the early 1900s with the Black Belt and immigrant experience. Chicago may have once been the future (also see the 1893 Columbian Exposition) but that future disappeared a long time ago (and perhaps Chicagoans hold on to that 1893 fair a little too closely as well). This might be a longer story about Chicago representing the problems of the Rust Belt – a cycle of loss, rebirth (1990-2006 or so in Chicago), then problems again – than about the loss of a future.

#2: Chicago has never had a president so linked to the city. And, while Obama spent much of his adult life in Chicago, he isn’t originally from the city. While the Daleys are well known, their rule was much more provincial.

#3: This suggests that such negative attention is cyclical, either because different cities experience trouble at different times or there is a sort of revolving set of cities that receive attention. Houston might be next if people first learn about its growth and changes.

Plus, has Chicago received more negative attention recently than Detroit?

Mapping the boundaries of the Midwest

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Mapping the Midwest has now become a crowdsourced project through asking “What’s the Midwest to you?”

That’s the question design and planning firm Sasaki Associates is asking visitors to its new exhibit, “Reinvention in the Urban Midwest,” which opens at the Boston Society of Architects (BSA) Space this week. The project includes an interactive survey that contains a timeless challenge: Draw the geographic boundaries of what counts as the U.S. Midwest…

Judging by the maps drawn by others and myself, it appears Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Oklahoma are the states of most contention. I personally felt I had no choice but to cut some of them in half. Perhaps the correct answer is still the textbook answer: the states of most intensified yellow (at least as identified by those who’ve lived in the Midwest the longest) make up the U.S. Census Bureau’s definition of the Midwest: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin to the east, plus Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota to the west.  (As a commenter pointed out, cartographer and historian Bill Rankin has also done a Midwest mapping project, in which he overlaid 100 different maps of the Midwest and made the confounding observation that  “no area that was included on every single map”.)

So the geographic boundaries of what most Americans consider the Midwest aren’t exactly clear, but Sasaki has also included another set of maps that reveal a much less murky truth: the Midwest has urbanized in a vastly different way from the rest of the United States. The graphic below maps out the population densities found in urban areas from four U.S. regions in 2010 (a darker shade signifies a larger, denser population)…

The Midwest is characterized by small but strong urban centers that transition sharply to rural surroundings. This pattern has of course grown from the region’s historical focus on agricultural land use. Sasaki’s recent work in Iowa suggests a continued population decline in rural areas but growing population density in more urban areas. However, the growth of urban areas in the Midwest is not uniform. The firm has further identified that agricultural cities in the plains sub-region, such as Des Moines, Iowa, or Lincoln, Nebraska, are indeed growing due to factors like de-ruralization and in-migration to city centers, while traditionally heavy-industry cities in the forest sub-region, such as Milwaukee or St. Louis, are still losing population.

One takeaway: the Midwest is a fuzzily-defined entity that perhaps has more to do with perceptions and culture than it does with exact geography. This would be aided by then asking people who drew the maps to then type in words they associate with the Midwest. I like the contrasting maps between those who have spent more of their lives in the Midwest versus those who have not: there are some clear differences.

The connection between farmland and cities is a good catch. Big cities like Chicago or Omaha were (and still are) intimately connected to agricultural commodities that needed to be distributed and sold through the big cities. For example, if you look at the early railroad construction in the Chicago region, much of it was linked to shipping products from the plains, everything from wheat (southwestern Wisconsin) to lead (Galena) to then distribute further east. Or look at the trading of commodities in places like Chicago and the creation of new kinds of markets. Even though there are big gaps between the Chicago area and the rest of Illinois – they operate as very different worlds – both would strongly consider themselves part of the same region, even if they can’t speak to the deeper ties that connect them.

McMansions pass away quickly like reality stars, unlike stone buildings

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McMansions are often assumed to a passing phenomenon. See this quote from the TV show House of Cards:

“Money is the McMansion in Sarasota that starts fallin’ apart after 10 years,” Spacey’s character, Rep. Francis “Frank” Underwood (D-Antebellumville), tells us in an on-again off-again honeysuckle accent. “Power is the old stone building that stands for centuries.”

Or this description of a common path of reality stars: becoming famous and buying a McMansion.

Anyone remember what happened when that other TLC reality show about a big family got really, really popular? Jon and Kate Plus Eight quickly evolved: In later seasons, there was a new McMansion for the family, and a posh new look for Kate. By all accounts, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo could have followed the same trajectory. According to TMZ, the network has raised their salary from $5,000 and $7,000 an episode at the beginning of the series to “somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000 an episode.” But the extra cash hasn’t changed the family’s priorities.

For one thing, a bigger house was apparently in the offing, too. “We’re told TLC even offered to help the family find a somewhat larger, more secure home, but June refused,” said TMZ. “She said she wanted to stay in the house because she makes a big deal over Christmas — decorating the house for the community. June is heavily involved in her town.” Thus Season 2 takes place in and around their same little house with the beat-up furniture and the one bathroom.

Both quotes above discuss the notion that McMansions won’t last long. It pits modern spec houses against solid stone buildings. In reality, many homes in the US are not the stone variety. Plus, we don’t quite know how McMansions will stand up in the long run. Barring natural disasters, humans can be pretty resourceful with existing structures if they want to. The link to reality stars is quite clever; the implication is these are stars who will burn brightly, purchase their McMansions, and then burn out, never to be heard from again. McMansions have more staying power than these reality stars, if just by the number of such homes that have been built.

McMansions are new in the sense that the word didn’t really emerge in popular usage until the late 1990s. These houses simply haven’t been around that long so they are newer luxury items. On the other hand, McMansions seem to have become another part of the long-running battle between old and new money. McMansion can then be a derogatory term thrown at the nouveau riche who don’t have the proper social standing to compete with old money.

All together, there is a temporal dimension to the use of the term McMansion. Critics hope they are a passing fad. Others suggest they are making a comeback or larger homes are simply what Americans desire. Perhaps we need a new popular form of housing to replace the McMansion…