Tag Archives: American culture

Atomic Ranch magazine defends American ranch home

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In a housing market full of architectural twists (McMansions? Stucco homes?), there are still people defending the humble ranch. One such outlet is Atomic Ranch.

Rambler-bashing was the norm when [Michelle Gringeri-Brown] and her husband, Jim Brown, launched Atomic Ranch magazine (www.atomic-ranch.com) in 2004. At that time, ranch-style houses were dismissed as the ugly ducklings of design, the home of last resort for first-time buyers.

The magazine quickly became a cheerleader for simple postwar homes, advocating for their preservation and helping owners find home-improvement resources.

Now ranch-style homes are finding new fans who appreciate their clean lines and open floor plans. And the Browns have published their second coffeetable book, “Atomic Ranch: Midcentury Interiors” (Gibbs Smith, $40), a detailed look at eight drool-worthy homes and how their owners have reinvented them for 21st-century living. We caught up with writer/editor Gringeri-Brown at home in Portland, Ore., to seek her dos and don’ts for remodeling and decorating “the regular old ranch house.”

Q What’s making ranch houses retro cool?

A It remains generational. People who are attracted to a more retro house, with its original elements, tend to be in their late 20s and early 30s, and it can indicate a whole lifestyle — going to scooter rallies, bowling, “Mad Men” parties. With TV promoting it as cool, it’s not just your Aunt Edna’s crummy rambler. And by and large, they’re still more affordable than bungalows.

Q A few years ago, you were concerned about ranches being torn down to make way for McMansions. Has the real estate meltdown had a silver lining for ranch-house preservation?

A With the economy tanking, and flippers having to take a step back, fewer ranch homes are getting the Home Depot treatment, when everything becomes vanilla. There’s more appreciation of what they can be, less disregard and thinking this is a housing stock that should be cleaned out and Dwell-ified.

A new rallying cry: fight the McMansions to defend the ranch houses?

I wonder if people who dislike McMansions also tend to dislike ranches. Here are some similarities: both can be produced on a mass scale. They are often not aesthetically pleasing, McMansions for being a weird mash-up of styles while ranches are very functional. They both are associated with sprawl. (A more speculative thought: perhaps both are not terribly green?) From the other side, ranches may be functional and more modern but are they modern enough in comparison to houses built in a modernist style?

This seems like a classic example of celebrating American pragmatism (in house form).

We need better data on loneliness and its effects

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In response to the recent Atlantic cover story “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” by Stephen Marche, sociologist Eric Klinenberg suggests the data is much less clear than the cover story suggests.

This debate suggests two things:

1. We need better data on loneliness and how it affects people. There are multiple ways that this could be done but perhaps we need a methodological breakthrough. I’ve been thinking lately that we need better ways to know what people do when they are alone. Now, we rely on after-the-fact questions rather than observational data. If we ask the same questions over time (such as the famous one about how many confidants respondents have), we can track changes over time but this also requires interpretation. How much loneliness is acceptable and “normal” before there are adverse effects? Does the importance or effects of loneliness change over the lifecourse? Is loneliness mitigated by other social forces?

2. Without this more conclusive data, I think we end up having a proxy battle over two warring American schools of thought: communitarianism versus individualism. This dates back to the early days of the American experiment. Who is more virtuous, the cosmopolitan city dweller or the self-reliant farmer or frontiersman? Should we all live in urban areas or preserve small town life? Should the government help people get an equal shot at success or help defend people from each other? Should religion be expressed in the public sphere or should it be comparmentalized? Several well-known social science works in recent decades have tackled these divides including the 1985 classic Habits of the Heart.  Both Klinenberg and Marche seem to bring these ideological approaches to their arguments and then look for the data that supports their points. For example, Klinenberg admits that loneliness will be felt by those who live alone but this is desirable because living alone allows for other good things to happen.

Conservative viewpoint: Biggest change in modern society is “the entry of women into the labor market”

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Here is an interesting summary of what conservatives think is the biggest change in American society over the last half century:

The single most important economic and sociological change in our society in modern times has been the entry of women into the labor market. Today, three of every four women of working age are in the labor market — more than double the share a half century ago.

These changes have had a major impact on family life. Less than one out of every four households is “traditional,” with one wage-earner and a stay-at-home spouse. Dual-earner families — with both spouses in the labor market — now constitute more than half of all married couples.

A few quick thoughts:

1. This commentary on the effects of family life really picked up in the 1960s with the Moynihan Report and the “culture of poverty” thesis.

2. The family has changed quite a bit since the 1950s with more children today born to unmarried parents and more people living alone. However, was the 1950s family quite unusual (the product of a postwar economic boom plus the return of servicemen) compared to families in the last few hundred years?

3. Some women did always work, particularly in lower-class families, because their income was needed. Granted, the number of women who work has risen since the mid-1900s.

4. Behind this seems to be the assumption that the nuclear family is the fundamental building block of society. A society with weak families will be a weak society.

Two common uses of the word McMansion: to describe teardowns, tied to larger issues of consumption

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Earlier this week, I ran across two articles from two major newspapers that illustrate two of the definitions of McMansions.

1. The term McMansion can often refer to teardowns. In the Chicago Tribune, an interesting overview of teardowns in several North Shore communities in the Chicago suburbs uses the term this way:

Critics often pair “tear-down” with the pejorative term “McMansion,” coined more than 15 years ago to describe quickly built, super-sized structures that replace more modest homes. Some neighbors complain that once a home is torn down, there is seldom an effort to blend its replacement with the surroundings…

But now tear-downs seem to be rebounding. Last year, the village [of Winnetka] issued 28 demolition permits. Through March of this year, the village received 10 applications for permits, according to Ann Klaassen, a village planning assistant…

The factors behind the new upswing have changed from a decade ago, when developers and speculators were driven by easy profits. Tear-downs now seem to be the result of the foreclosures that left homes deteriorating.

Whatever the cause, Follett says tear-downs threaten the North Shore’s historic housing stock.

But builders call it a positive sign of an economy finally getting back on its feet, and argue that many buyers just prefer new homes over renovation jobs.

The key here is that teardown = McMansion plus the term McMansion is used as an effective piece of negative rhetoric. This is quite a different idea than a McMansion being built on a cul-de-sac in an exurb. These North Shore communities have a long history and an aging housing stock. The battle over teardowns is taking place in many communities across the United States and one tool at the disposal of preservationists and those who wish to avoid this architecturally incongruent new homes is to label them McMansions.

2. In contrast, an op-ed column in the New York Times about obesity and eating habits in the United States ties McMansions to other objects of excessive consumption:

I lived in Western Europe—in Rome—for two years. And I happen to be in Western Europe—in Lisbon—as I write. And in this part of this continent there’s a different attitude and set of signals about the appropriate amount of food a person should eat than there are in America.

In restaurants and at dinner parties here, portions are much, much smaller. And, seeing them, no one cries foul about insufficient value or inadequate hospitality. We Americans somehow imprinted our nation’s historical and famous “bigger-is-better” mentality onto the way we eat. Our Costco purchases and our supersized meals mirror our S.U.V.s and McMansions: they’re assertions of wealth and expressions of comfort through sheer size.

This matters. Because if, indeed, our evolutionary nature is to grab and gorge on food when it’s there, then we’re best served in the current era of abundance by cultural cues that try to condition us in the opposite direction.

This is a common argument: American culture promotes the idea “bigger is better” and this applies even to our food. But particularly interesting to me is the link between McMansions, Costco, supersized fast food meals, and SUVs. When this argument is made, these objects often are placed together, perhaps to show how pervasive this American mentality is: it covers where we live, what we eat, what we drive, and where we shop. In other words, McMansions are an easy to spot symbol of a larger American issue of excessive consumption.

Overall, I would argue that these are just two of the meanings of the word McMansion. These two articles do illustrate the idea that when people use the term McMansion they don’t necessarily mean the same thing.

My recent work on McMansions is discussed in The Atlantic Cities

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Read this story on The Atlantic Cities to get a summary of my recent publication on McMansions. While the article in the Journal of Urban History is not yet in print, it is available online. Here is the abstract:

The single-family home is a critical part of the American Dream, and there has been a long conversation about what houses mean and symbolize. As American homes have grown larger, some of these newer homes have been called McMansions. This study examines the use of this term in the New York Times and Dallas Morning News between 2000 and 2009 and shows that McMansion is a complex term with four distinct meanings: a large house, a relatively large house, a home flawed in architecture or design, and a symbol for more complex issues including sprawl and excessive consumption. The author argues that the usage and meaning of the term differs by metropolitan context, suggesting there may not be a singular national process of “mansionization,” and provides three suggestions for the future study of McMansions.

I’ve posted a lot about McMansions on this blog and many of these thoughts are based on this analysis.

The church should respond to Going Solo

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In Going Solo (a summary of the argument here), Eric Klinenberg documents a growing trend in American social life: more and more people are living alone. As I read this book and thought through the idea that this is an unusual trend in human history, I was somewhat surprised that there was very little about a religious approach to this issue. Klinenberg mentions at a few places how a few “singletons” are sustained by their faith and how a few religious organizations are serving elderly singletons but there is no bigger mention of how religious faiths address this issue. Although I don’t study this area, I believe this is a golden opportunity for evangelicals and others in the church to respond to this growing trend. Here are a few thoughts about the issue at hand and how churches can begin to tackle the issue.

Many churches, particularly the average evangelical church, are built around the family. Many programs are geared toward kids and families. Sermons are much more likely to be about family relationships that about living alone. In my own experience, you often don’t “fit” in these churches unless you are married and have kids. Even being married is not enough: I’ve felt this in multiple churches, that you aren’t fully a participant unless you have children who are involved in kid’s ministries. If I didn’t volunteer to serve or seek out relationships, simply being part of a married couple isn’t going to get me far. While we have been invited to some events and groups, we have rarely been invited to the house of a couple who has kids. (I am more than willing to admit that this may have more to do with me than my family status.)

This is not just a feature of the church. As Klinenberg points out, the societal expectation is that people will get married and have children. Not following that course leads to questions and sometimes bewilderment. I’ve heard the idea from others that having children allows one to more easily make connections with other adults. For example, having kids in school or in a neighborhood means that parents will inevitably meet other parents as their children interact. Without children (or perhaps a pet?), it can be difficult to strike up conversations even with people we see on a regular basis in the neighborhood, in public places, or at church.

I’ve thought at times that some churches verge on placing families higher than God. Which one is mentioned more? What are the subtle and not-so-subtle messages broadcast to people who attend? I wonder how much of this is driven by a perceived demographic need, a feeling among evangelicals that the best way to continue our churches and our faith is to raise children in this faith. A great example of this is a supposed statistic sociologist Christian Smith pointed out a few years ago: “only 4 percent of today’s teenagers would be evangelical believers by the time they became adults.” As Smith notes, this statistic is not true but it fits a mindset where there is a continuous battle between evangelicals and the rest of the world. One of the best ways to fight back is to have children who will continue the fight. Of course, Smith’s later work in books like Souls In Transition suggests that parents do indeed matter for a lasting religiosity.

While supporting marriage and families is a good thing (though I am reminded of sociologist Mark Regnerus’ arguments several years ago in an article titled “The Case for Early Marriage“), this leaves a lot of people out: younger adults, the widowed, the divorced, the separated, those who haven’t married. A common message is that once you leave these categories and get married, you are “normal” in the church’s eyes. Otherwise, you are more on the margin.

One possible solution to some of these issues is to have more intergenerational classes and activities. Churches often group people by life stages, often literally separating groups from the main activities from the church (like in youth groups). I’ve never been a fan of this: both personally and as a sociologist, I see a lot of value in interacting with and learning from those who have more experience and wisdom than I do. There is much to be gained by building relationships with those who are experiencing similar issues related to age but it also emphasizes certain landmarks. For example, singles’ ministries or small groups based on childless couples can be odd in that the unstated goal is to leave these groups. Why not treat people as whole people who can learn from other whole people rather than pushing ourselves into easily defined and sorted groups? Simply worshiping together in a large service doesn’t lead to deeper relationships in the way that consistent intergenerational interaction can.

Another possible solution is to broaden the focus away from nuclear families and to a more expansive definition of “families” and “neighbors.” This does not have to look like the final scene from the movie About A Boy where the lonely teenager Marcus and the lonely middle-aged man Will have found a group of people they like and that like them who they now define as their “family.” Rather, this could and should include people we wouldn’t immediately gravitate to, people who aren’t necessarily easy to make initial connections with. We can be reminded that the suburban nuclear family that many churches are built around is a relatively recent invention in human history. The Biblical characters we uphold in church would have seen themselves as part of larger families, clans, and tribes. As historian Robert Fishman points out in Bourgeois Utopias, William Wilberforce and friends, renowned persons of faith, contributed to this in the late 1700s by moving their families to one of the first Western suburbs, Clapham outside of London, in order to preserve their wives and children from the evils of the city (much more could be said about this topic). Retreating to a suburban family life with limited contact with the world may limit some dangers but it might also introduce some others.

Third, this trend presents a chance for the church to push for and truly live out the ideals of “community, ” a word oft discussed in Christian circles but much harder to put into practice. What does this really look like? How many people are really striving for this? Or is it something that tends to come up in times of trouble? Even further, Klinenberg argues that behind the trend of living alone are American cultural values are self-reliance and individualism. Neither of these are Christian virtues and yet we Americans need to be reminded, as one of my former pastors was fond of saying, “there are no solo Christians.” This broader Christian community should care for all, just as the sociologist Rodney Stark argues the early Christians effectively did. Sure, this is an uphill battle in a world of many single-family homes, cars, long work hours, and growing opposition to organized religion but it is a battle worth fighting.

In sum, this is an opportunity for Christians to uphold values of marriage and family while also addressing the trends of American social life toward singleness. It will not be enough for churches to argue that people should simply get married and then support those people. In dealing with issues like loneliness and searching for meaning that Klinenberg suggests are common along those living alone (and frankly, most people), the church should be leading the way. The church can be a place where close relationships with others are created and nurtured. The church can challenge ideas about self-reliance and independence, ideas about having to be tough to face the world as solitary people. If there is any place where the single and married, young and old, people of different classes, races, and ages should be able to come together, it should be in the places that claim that “God so loved the world” and whose followers are called to “love their neighbors as themselves.”

Elderly co-housing in France an alternative to Going Solo in the United States?

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While Americans may be increasingly living alone, Le Monde reports on another trend: co-housing among the elderly.

This unconventional but pragmatic solution is happening all over France – dozens of house-shares have already been created, and they are giving food for thought to many in their 60s, 70s and 80s…

According to Yankel Fijalkow, urban sociologist and author of “Sociologie du Logement” [Sociology of Housing], “House-sharing for the elderly is a sort of group response to the ambient individualism.” Fijalkow says. “It is part of the same phenomenon as co-housing – houses with shared facilities – in Northern Europe and the United States or housing cooperatives. Faced by the fragility of the family unit, a desire emerges to recreate a quasi-family.”

But Fijalkow adds: “Let’s not be idealistic. Accommodation is expensive, and this is mostly a commercial transaction. With the current changes in family models, we go from being part of a couple to living on our own or in a house-share. People are flexible and adapt when the housing market is prohibitively expensive.”…

This system is being adopted all over Europe. Colocation Seniors, an organization in the western French city of Nantes was inspired by a similar project in Belgium, and has already helped dozens of seniors set up house-shares in the last three years, offering continuing support even after the house-share has been organized.

It is hard to know from this article how big of a trend this really is.

It is interesting to hear Fijalkow talk about these two motivating factors: a desire to have a “quasi-family” and economic realities. Which of these are more important? Does this suggest that people with more economic resources would not choose co-housing? It is already a foregone conclusion in many places that most families are fragile and/or past the breaking point?

This also reminds of the end of Kate Bolick’s article “All the Single Ladies” from November 2011. Here is where Bolick ends her thoughts on current relationships between women and men – a tour of a sort of dormitory for single women in Amsterdam:

The Begijnhof is big—106 apartments in all—but even so, I nearly pedaled right past it on my rented bicycle, hidden as it is in plain sight: a walled enclosure in the middle of the city, set a meter lower than its surroundings. Throngs of tourists sped past toward the adjacent shopping district. In the wall is a heavy, rounded wood door. I pulled it open and walked through.

Inside was an enchanted garden: a modest courtyard surrounded by classic Dutch houses of all different widths and heights. Roses and hydrangea lined walkways and peeked through gates. The sounds of the city were indiscernible. As I climbed the narrow, twisting stairs to Ellen’s sun-filled garret, she leaned over the railing in welcome—white hair cut in a bob, smiling red-painted lips. A writer and producer of avant-garde radio programs, Ellen, 60, has a chic, minimal style that carries over into her little two-floor apartment, which can’t be more than 300 square feet. Neat and efficient in the way of a ship, the place has large windows overlooking the courtyard and rooftops below. To be there is like being held in a nest.

We drank tea and talked, and Ellen rolled her own cigarettes and smoked thoughtfully. She talked about how the Dutch don’t regard being single as peculiar in any way—people are as they are. She feels blessed to live at the Begijnhof and doesn’t ever want to leave. Save for one or two friends on the premises, socially she holds herself aloof; she has no interest in being ensnared by the gossip on which a few of the residents thrive—but she loves knowing that they’re there. Ellen has a partner, but since he’s not allowed to spend the night, they split time between her place and his nearby home. “If you want to live here, you have to adjust, and you have to be creative,” Ellen said. (When I asked her if starting a relationship was a difficult decision after so many years of pleasurable solitude, she looked at me meaningfully and said, “It wasn’t a choice—it was a certainty.”)

When an American woman gives you a tour of her house, she leads you through all the rooms. Instead, this expat showed me her favorite window views: from her desk, from her (single) bed, from her reading chair. As I perched for a moment in each spot, trying her life on for size, I thought about the years I’d spent struggling against the four walls of my apartment, and I wondered what my mother’s life would have been like had she lived and divorced my father. A room of one’s own, for each of us. A place where single women can live and thrive as themselves.

How modern societies reconcile aging and individualism will be very interesting to watch.

Sociologist: Canadians and Americans are more alike than people might think

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A Canadian sociologist argues that Americans and Canadians are quite similar:

But experts suggest English Canadians — though the QMI Agency poll found we’re still divided whether stereotyping is widespread — are alike on most fronts.

In fact, so much so that most of us could blend in with our U.S. cousins, according to one scholar.

Ed Grabb, a professor in the University of British Columbia’s Department of Sociology, has begun a new course outlining how Canadians and Americans, while not identical, are more alike than most of us would have thought.

In fact, on things like attitudes toward health care, government and individuality, research has found we’re very similar.

Even differences in religion are shrinking. In 1991, Americans were 16% more likely than Canadians to take in a religious service at least once a week.

By 2006, that number had dropped to 11%.

While Grabb sees regional differences in both countries — during national elections, Quebec generally pulls Canada to the left just as the southern U.S. pulls that nation to the right — he’s also noticed a softening of old hackneyed chestnuts.

“I do think the Alberta redneck jibe is an endangered species,” Grabb said.

“I think that the assumption that all Ontarians are affluent is also going by the boards.

It would be interesting to see comparisons across the board: income, political and social views (both at home and abroad), religion, education, and consumer purchases and entertainment choices. Then, compare these to what Americans and Canadians think about each other. Why do I think Canadians would know way more about Americans than the other way around?

I also want to know how to explain this. Both the United States and Canada are settler colonies but we have different histories as Canada has had a different relationship with Great Britain in the last few centuries. Perhaps people might fall back on the frontier hypothesis since both countries pursued territorial expansion and span between two different (geographically and cultural) coasts. Perhaps today we tend to share a lot of media and cultural influences. For example, how many Americans care or would they have been able to tell without being told that Justin Bieber is Canadian. Perhaps our geopolitical position away from major international wars has led to similar ways of viewing the world. Perhaps the better way to differentiate between the countries is to refer to the “Jesusland” map where Canada joins with the East and West American coasts plus some of the Great Lakes states and red America is the south, great plains, and mountain west.

“The mothering you see today in America is culturally and historically unprecedented”

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A sociologist suggests mothering is done very differently in America:

“American parenting is child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, financially expensive and is expected to be done by mothers alone. And it is impossible to do alone,” said Sharon Hays, a sociologist at the University of Southern California. “The mothering you see today in America is culturally and historically unprecedented. We expect selfless devotion to what we interpret as the child’s needs, wants and interests at every moment of the day. And with the vast majority of mothers working, that puts them in an impossible paradox.”

While the intensity is at its most acute in the middle and upper-middle class, she said, her studies have found that low-income parents feel the same parenting pressures, compounded by the guilt of having neither the resources nor the time to meet them.

The rest of the article talks about why this is: we have structured society in such a way so that the brunt of child care is borne by individuals, not society, and with our cultural gender norms, women are left with much of the burden.

Sociologist to journalists: “Racism: Not Isolated Incidents but Systemic”

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After several recent incidences in East Haven, Connecticut, a sociologist explains why racism is a systemic issue, not a matter of a few racist individuals:

As a sociology professor whose specialties include the study of racism, I am sometimes asked to explain what is happening following such a flurry of racist incidents. That question is based on the faulty assumptions that what is happening now is something new and that what occurred is no more than a disturbing accumulation of isolated incidents of racial bigotry committed by a few Neanderthals who didn’t get the memo that in today’s colorblind America we have moved past all that.

Social structures, racist, or otherwise, don’t just disappear or grow old and die. Consequently, when I get that “what is happening now?” query from the press, I feel like yawning as I mutter, “There you go again.” Lately I have advised reporters to connect the dots. I challenge them to, for once, abandon racism-evasive language such as “race” or “the race issue” and to call the thing what it is, racism, which is by its nature always systemic.

So far, to my knowledge, no reporter has taken my advice. Instead they tend to write stories that, if they even acknowledge a pattern of racist incidents, seem to attribute it to the bad economy, the coming of a full moon or perhaps some foul-smelling concoction that was secretly slipped into our drinking water. Then they go away for another few months; and when still more overtly racist stuff happens, they email again to ask me to explain, once more, what is happening, now.

Unfortunately that type of news reporting supports the dominant response to racism by European Americans — the militant denial of its existence or significance. A very successful racism denial tactic is to conveniently confuse the racial, bigoted attitudes and behaviors of some person of color with systemic racism as a way of suggesting that white racism is no more of a problem than is so-called black racism. On other occasions a person of color may be accused of being a racist for simply bringing up the issue of racism.

This is a message needed for more than just journalists.

I wonder if journalists are any better on this issue than average Americans. On the whole, Americans often privilege individualistic situations to social problems, race or otherwise. White Americans, in particular, would prefer to act like race doesn’t matter and claim that we should move on. I’ve noted before that the reverse should be true: Americans should have to show that race isn’t involved in social situations instead of suggesting it doesn’t matter until there is incontrovertible proof otherwise.