Collective effervescence in dancing all night at the club

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An overview of the unique experience of the nightclub dance floor hints at Durkheim’s idea of collective effervescence:

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“I feel one with the crowd of energy and lose my sense of self. I don’t feel myself as expressing anything in particular on the dance floor, I’m doing the opposite—I’m just being present in the moment, dancing, being a part of the greater whole of the night. I’m able to do this because I become engulfed in the intense sensations from the music, lights, and the energies that reverberate from the rest of those dancing,” said Jason Friedlander, another dance floor patron from Manila, Philippines. 

For Friedlander, dance floors are a place where differences dissipate, conflict seizes, and equality reigns. 

“On the dance floor socio-economic hierarchies are leveled and each becomes equally subject to the wonders of melody and rhythm. Unlike other communities fostered through sports teams or most organized religions, the cult of music is neither founded on conflict nor opposition, but on harmony.”

Get caught up in the music, the crowd, and dancing and the group on the dance floor is melded together through the common activity and energy.

Is such an experience available to anyone who joins the dance floor? How much do the conditions of the club/venue and the particular participants shape the collective effervescence?

Why aren’t there more cars and vehicles that serve as moving billboards?

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At the Chicago Auto Show, I noticed two unique cars that advertised something: an art show and a suburb.

The first car is not unique in its context. Every Nascar vehicle is covered in sponsorships. This one is unusual in that a suburb, Elk Grove Village, is continuing a marketing campaign that included sponsoring college bowl games.

But, why not have cars and trucks driving around the Chicago region with the same branding? It probably does not cost much to put decals or magnets or paint jobs on vehicles and then have a bunch of vehicles advertising “Makers Wanted.” This might be particularly helpful in a region with hundreds of suburbs and where there is a perceived need among some suburbs that they need to stand out for particular reasons.

The second car is a more unusual advertisement: an art exhibit at a world-class art museum. The Art Institute does not advertise broadly in mass media. But, what if there were a lot of Van Gogh vehicles driving along local roads? (There would need to be allowances for the “Van Go” jokes.”) Van Gogh and his works are widely known and some people might even want a Van Gogh painting on their vehicle for aesthetic reasons.

Even with all the colorful paint jobs at the Auto Show this year (lots of bright blue and yellow), this could be an opportunity for someone or some place to exploit without having to pay too much.

How are the best places to live different from the “best cities for remote workers”?

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A new list looks at the best places to live as a remote worker. Here is the description of what sets these places apart:

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We compared the 200 biggest U.S. cities based on 20 remote worker-friendliness factors, such as internet quality, cost of living, and access to coworking spaces. We even considered financial bonuses that local and state governments offer prospective telecommuting incomers.

Here are some trends in the rankings:

Live your best remote life in Plano, Texas, our 2023 gold medalist. Plano displaces fellow Dallas suburb Frisco, our former top city for telecommuters, as well as Austin, Arlington, and Dallas, which were also ahead last year…

Eight of our top 10 cities are all located in the South. This region is known for its general budget-friendliness (including no state income tax for some) and sprawling spaces, and our data maintains that reputation…

What gives? The real question is, what doesn’t California’s biggest cities give? The answer is a lot: generous square footage and affordable goods and services. There are exceptions in each category, of course, but they’re few and far between.

This list seems to roughly overlap with other lists of best places to live: there are certain factors and locations that offer opportunities in ways that others do not.

At the same time, this list and the best places to live lists tend to be skewed toward certain kinds of jobs or industries. This list depends on the kinds of jobs or sectors where people can work from home. The best places to live lists often rank highly places with lots of well-paying white collar jobs.

Does it matter that the so-called best places to live are similar to the places named as best for remote workers? Such rankings can reinforce each other and lead to population growth in some places – and not others that could also be good places for people to live.

Leaning into “Everywhere else is Cleveland”

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A recent ad from the New Orleans Police Department tried to set their city apart from other cities, namely, Cleveland:

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The NOPD posted the commercial—”Everywhere Else Is Cleveland”—to its social media accounts at 9 a.m. Wednesday…

“Everywhere Else Is Cleveland”—which features women, people of color and members of the local LGBTQ community—was commissioned by the foundation as part of a broader recruitment push to help fortify the city’s shrinking police force. To broaden their applicant pool, the department recently relaxed restrictions around past marijuana use, credit scores and physical appearance—including tattoos, facial hair and nail polish.

The commercial’s title is a play on the famous Tennessee Williams quote: “America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.”

See an earlier post about this quote.

This quote referenced above hints at a larger issue for those who study American cities. When is it helpful to lump cities together as similar enough or helpful to put them in different categories because they have unique traits? All big cities share some common characteristics but they are also different in certain ways. Is size, the time of settlement or rapid population growth, density, political system, cultural opportunities, or something else the factor we should use to analyze cities?

The quote above suggests there are four categories of cities: three that stand on their own then a much larger category represented by Cleveland. Cleveland is the stand-in here for all nondescript cities compared to three American cities that have unique personalities and settings. The ad suggests New Orleans is a very different kind of place.

Is this objectively true? As far as I know, there is no New Orleans School of urban thought, but this does not mean there should not be. Urban sociologists and theorists tend to squabble more about the biggest cities and whether New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles are the best models for understanding urban processes.

When the values of homes quintuple over 5 decades by just being there

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I recently saw a house near me that was for sale. Checking the online property history, I found that the home is now worth roughly 5 times more than what it sold for in the early 1980s. By just being there for the last four decades, the home has quintupled in value.

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This is not a phenomena restricted to our suburban area. Recently following an Internet rabbit trail, I was looking up property values in Levittowns on the East Coast. I remember seeing that their values had at least tripled or quadrupled over a similar span. What were once cheap and simple suburban homes became homes with values significantly above the median value for owner-occupied homes.

Homeowners would likely say that the values have increased because of the maintenance and upgrades in the homes and properties. There has been change; the homes near us have been updated and added to over the last fifty years while the Levittown houses have been transformed in numerous ways over the decades.

But, those positive changes do not add up to such an increase in value. Much of the increase in value has come from just being there. Being in the right location. The owners who lived in such homes benefited financially from a positive return on investment and could roll that new found wealth into other homes, investments, or opportunities.

The fear that people will be trapped in 15 minute cities

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Online actors are suggesting leaders want to limit people to living in 15 minute cities:

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“Never have there been proposals for restrictions — on the contrary, this is a new opportunity: more choice, more services, more desire to thrive in one’s neighbourhood,” he said.

“Since the start of 2023, the concept of the 15-minute city has been subject to conspiracy theories, produced and shared by people already well known for spreading disinformation about Covid, the climate, vaccines and politics,” he said…

Particular claims debunked by AFP Fact Check in recent weeks have targeted the English city of Oxford and Edmonton, Canada. Claims surfaced in various languages, including English, French and Portuguese.

“You can’t leave a 15-minute city whenever you please … The city walls or restrictions or zones or whatever you want to call them won’t be used to keep others out, they’ll be used to lock everyone in,” says one man in a video viewed more than 59,000 times on Facebook, commenting on the Edmonton plan…

Supporters of 15-minute cities include the worldwide C40 cities alliance plus the United Nations and the World Economic Forum -– targets of numerous false claims that are subject to frequent fact-checks.

Would these particular fears about denser communities fit under long-running fears that a globalist structure wants to restrict the everyday lives and freedoms of workers? One way to control people is to restrict geographic mobility. Doing so would increase population densities and limit what people could access.

These fears likely find a stronger foothold in the United States where frontier and suburban motifs are strong. Americans like suburbs, in part, because they are able to have private property, can drive where and when they choose, and have closer connections to local government. Denser areas do not appeal to many Americans.

The mixed messages of a new subdivision sign with red brick but a modern font

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A new subdivision I drive by regularly has this as its sign at the entrance off a busy road:

I think I get what the sign is trying to signal:

-Tradition and permanence with the red brick. It signals this is an impressive community that is here to stay. This is not a small sign either; it will be noticeable from a road on which people are driving 45 mph.

-The modern font suggests the neighborhood is not stuck in the past, even if other parts of the sign suggestion a connection to the past. The clean, crisp lines of the letters plus the all-caps first word and not capitalized second suggest dynamism, not stodginess.

Can a subdivision sign have it both ways? Can the font push one direction while the structure of the sign push another?

(Bonus features of the picture: the sales sign for the subdivision is more standard emphasizing “MODELS OPEN” and the starting prices, this is a good encapsulation of what February in the Chicago suburbs often looks like.)

Is American car culture changing due to the different preferences of younger adults?

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Americans like driving and have woven it in to many aspects of life. However, younger adults are driving less:

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Gen Zers point to many reasons they are turning their backs on cars: anxiety, finances, environmental concern.Many members of Gen Z say they haven’t gotten licensed because they’re afraid of getting into accidents — or of driving itself. Madison Morgan, a 23-year-old from Kennewick, Wash., had multiple high school classmates pass away in driving accidents. Those memories loomed over her whenever she was behind the wheel…

Others point to driving’s high cost. Car insurance has skyrocketed in price in recent years, increasing nearly 14 percent between 2022 and 2023. (The average American now spends around 3 percent of their yearly income on car insurance.) Used and new car prices have also soared in the last few years, thanks to a combination of supply chain disruptions and high inflation…

E-scooters, e-bikes and ride-sharing also provideGen Zers optionsthat weren’t available to earlier generations. (Half of ride-sharing users are between the ages of 18 and 29, according to a poll from 2019.) And Gen Zers have the ability to do things online — hang out with friends, take classes, play games — which used to be available only in person…

But, he added, data has shown that U.S. car culture isn’t as strong as it once was. “Up through the baby boom generation, every generation drove more than the last,” Dutzik said. Forecasters expected that trend to continue, with driving continuing to skyrocket well into the 2030s. “But what we saw with millennials, I think very clearly, is that trend stopped,” Dutzik said.

Is less need for driving causing this or is driving viewed as less enjoyable and even reprehensible (climate change concerns)?

While per capita driving has plateaued, have other driving activities increased driving and traffic? For example, the number of deliveries from Amazon and similar companies did not exist in the same way nor did ride-sharing. Younger adults are driving less than older Americans but the world today depends on driving more than ever?

The last paragraph of the article emphasizes how planning could change based on less interest for driving. It would be interesting to see how planners and others work with both populations – younger Americans who do not drive as much and older Americans who drive a lot – to reach possible solutions.

Fewer than 10% of homes sold via virtual real estate transactions

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A small percentage of homes are sold without the buyer seeing the property in person:

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The National Association of Realtors first started collecting data on virtual real estate transactions in April 2020, according to Jessica Lautz, deputy chief economist and vice president of research. Virtual home sales, which are sometimes referred to as “blind offers” or “sight unseen sales,” peaked at 13% of all transactions in January 2022. By November 2022, that number dropped to 9%.

Lautz sees two drivers for virtual sales, beyond the pandemic. “It’s not only because inventory is tight, but people are moving longer distances. It might be very difficult to make your way to that home before it is under contract,” she said. “If you’re moving to a different state, the ability to quickly book a flight because that perfect home has just come onto the market may be impossible.”…

Lautz sees virtual transactions continuing, even if they’re less frequent. “If you had asked me that at the start of the pandemic, I would have thought it was a fluke. But it seems to be here to stay.”

Virtual transactions may reflect another shift, as the National Association of Realtors sees the median distance folks relocate increasing to 50 miles. “It makes sense because of housing affordability, people are moving farther out because of hybrid or remote work,” Lautz said. Being close to friends and family is top priority for so many buyers today, so they may be moving to a different area to seek that.”

Several thoughts in reaction to these numbers:

-I thought the percentage might have been higher during the pandemic. But, even then, seeing a property in person matter mattered.

-How much can technology remedy the desire to see a property in person? How long until prospective buyers could walk through a housing unit in the virtual realm? This is related to the biggest question I have: how well could technology substitute for being in a space? One matter is feeling like you were in person and could experience everything. Another matter is whether the technology allows you to consider everything. If that technology could be improved, maybe it can provide enough or all of the experience.

-Would more virtual showings increase the need for realtors or reduce them? If the main issue is technology being able to show everything about a unit, I could imagine it done without a realtor. If the main issue is about knowing a community and having connections, then the realtor continues even if the technology improves.

Build it – the residential and commercial development around a suburban football stadium – and they will profit?

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What if the new football stadium is less of a draw in the long run than the development right around the stadium? Here is one report about what has changed in Glendale, Arizona, home to today’s Super Bowl, where the stadium opened in 2006:

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Far out? The site of Sunday’s Super Bowl is about 13 miles northwest of downtown Phoenix. Arlington Heights is about 30 miles northwest of downtown Chicago.

The distance is less of an issue than it was when State Farm Stadium was built, said Kevin Phelps, Glendale’s city manager. Some projections show that two out of three newcomers to the Phoenix area will live in the West Valley…

The last time Glendale hosted a Super Bowl, it had about 800 hotel rooms near the stadium. By next year, that number will be 3,000. The city has found that most people spend money on dinner and shopping within two miles of their hotel. But a new development has to deliver.

“You have to have a ‘there’ there,” Phelps said. “I don’t care how good your advertising is. If we told everyone to come to Glendale and they got here and there was an ice cream shop and a Denny’s and that’s all there is, you’d never get them back again.”

Just having a superb stadium experience is not enough. The stadium can anchor a larger entertainment district where people come for a variety of events, enjoy food and other experiences, and are willing to spend a few nights or a long day. The real activity and money is in the year-round potential of the property that at the center has a recognizable stadium but also has enough to attract people when there is not a big game.

Still, the more important question is this: who benefits from the new development? Does the suburb of Glendale? Do its residents? Or, does this primarily enrich the team owners who see the value of their franchise increase?