Tag Archives: elites

Just how many compounds, mansions, and luxury condos does a billionaire need?

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Jeff Bezos owns multiple expensive properties:

Photo by James Wheeler on Pexels.com

When Jeff Bezos isn’t launching himself into space, he’s on the hunt for another trophy property to add to his already-impressive real estate portfolio. Earlier this year, the Amazon founder reportedly acquired a 14-acre compound in Hawaii for a whopping $78 million in a mysterious deal (more on that later) which brought the value of his real estate holdings to an astronomical $578 million, if not more. The billionaire has picked up several properties in his home state of Washington, a number of New York City apartments, a few sprawling estates in California, a ranch in Texas, and a number of places in Washington, D.C. Below, we’ve rounded up all of the homes the entrepreneur owns in the U.S.—so far…

Several years after Bezos founded Amazon, he put down $10 million for what has largely been his primary residence over the past few decades. It comprises two homes measuring 20,600 square feet and 8,300 square feet, respectively, situated on about 5.3 acres in the exclusive Medina neighborhood of Seattle (Bill Gates also owns a home there). In 2010, the Albuquerque native invested $28 million to renovate the property. That same year, Bezos reportedly bought the property next door, a 24,000-square-foot house that came with an additional five acres. The Tudor–style home was listed for $53 million at the time, but it is unclear what the billionaire ended up paying for the purchase. Bezos still owns this massive compound…

Bezos made a big move to Washington, D.C. in late 2016, snapping up two sprawling mansions measuring a combined 27,000 square feet for $23 million. Built in 1914, one of the massive homes was previously the site of the Textile Museum and was recorded as one of the largest houses in all of D.C. According to The Washington Post, which Bezos owns, the billionaire purchased the property with plans to convert the two adjacent structures into one single family home so that the Bezos family could use it during their visits to the city. It is located in the Kalorama neighborhood, which has also been home to the Obamas, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner. In 2018, it was reported that Bezos was planning a $12-million renovation on the place, including the addition of a garden room to one of the two structures…

The next year, Bezos expanded his Beverly Hills compound with the purchase of the $12.9-million home next door to the Spanish-style mansion he’d bought in 2007. While details of the house are scant, the Los Angeles Times reports that the structure measures 4,586 square feet, with four bedrooms and six full bathrooms. The property features a gated semi-circular drive and a picturesque swimming pool shaded by mature trees…

In April, Bezos bought a fourth unit in the luxe Madison Square Park apartment building where he’d snapped up three homes the previous summer, dropping $16 million for a three-bedroom unit adjacent to the two lower-level units from the original purchase. Although it was unclear at the time what Bezos’s plans were for combining all four units, building permits were submitted in fall 2019, so it’s likely the fourth acquisition was meant to be an addendum to the already-grand Manhattan mega-mansion.

Real estate can serve multiple purposes for the wealthy. They need multiple places, homes near work, in important cities, and in getaway locations, to keep their wealthy lifestyle going and to keep their daily activity out of the public eye. These properties can be investments as the number of such units is limited. Finally, these holdings are status symbols in themselves as they require money, staff, and attention that few individuals could provide.

The implication here is that Bezos has spent a lot on all of his properties. Given his wealth, maybe not. What I would be more interested in is how his holdings compare to other billionaires. What is the average number of expensive properties? Are mansions, urban luxury locations, resort properties, or rural holdings more common? How do these big actors affect real estate activity in different locations? Deeper study of the real estate activity of the most wealthy could help us better understand how wealth translates into real estate capital.

Facebook and powerful actors

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The Wall Street Journal reports on the ways powerful people interact with the platform differently compared to regular users:

Wall Street Journal graphic at https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-files-xcheck-zuckerberg-elite-rules-11631541353

The program, known as “cross check” or “XCheck,” was initially intended as a quality-control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts, including celebrities, politicians and journalists. Today, it shields millions of VIP users from the company’s normal enforcement process, the documents show. Some users are “whitelisted”—rendered immune from enforcement actions—while others are allowed to post rule-violating material pending Facebook employee reviews that often never come.

At times, the documents show, XCheck has protected public figures whose posts contain harassment or incitement to violence, violations that would typically lead to sanctions for regular users. In 2019, it allowed international soccer star Neymar to show nude photos of a woman, who had accused him of rape, to tens of millions of his fans before the content was removed by Facebook. Whitelisted accounts shared inflammatory claims that Facebook’s fact checkers deemed false, including that vaccines are deadly, that Hillary Clinton had covered up “pedophile rings,” and that then-President Donald Trump had called all refugees seeking asylum “animals,” according to the documents.

A 2019 internal review of Facebook’s whitelisting practices, marked attorney-client privileged, found favoritism to those users to be both widespread and “not publicly defensible.”

“We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly,” said the confidential review. It called the company’s actions “a breach of trust” and added: “Unlike the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences.”

This will likely get a lot of attention for the different approach to different kinds of users. That elite members are treated differently could get interesting in an era with an increased focus on inequality and the influence of social media.

I am also interested in hearing more about how much Facebook and other social media platforms rely on powerful and influential people. Celebrities, whether in politics, entertainment, sports, the arts, or other spheres, are important figures in society. Elite figures may not be like regular users in that they attract a lot of views and promote engagement among other users. Social media platforms want users to engage with content and elites may provide just that.

Going further, social media platforms have power users. For example, a small percent of Twitter users are highly engaged. Social media use and content generation is even across different users. Should those who generate more content and engagement operate under a different set of rules? Is having provocative users or people who push the boundaries (or even get away with breaking the rules) good for business?

This makes me wonder if there would be a market for a social media platform that puts users on a more level playing field. If we know that certain resources, statuses, and social markers lead to differential treatment, might an online platform be able to even things out?

The McMansions and their wealthy owners who do not need house numbers

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As one writer walked every street of zip code of 22207 to look at house numbers, they noticed something about some of the larger homes:

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Photo by Daria Shevtsova on Pexels.com

Some exorbitant McMansions featured no address numbers at all, only very pointed security-company signs. (The cars parked at those homes often sport diplomatic plates.) Many of the richest houses in Arlington—for example, the mansions overlooking the Potomac near Chain Bridge—were not visible from the street at all, and so the only address numbers ascertainable were on mailboxes or security gates at the foot of long, winding driveways.

One of the purposes of McMansions, particularly according to critics, is to broadcast the status and money of the owners. Through the garish architecture and an imposing facade, McMansion owners show what they have.

So, if a homeowner does not have a street address visible, does this mean their home is not a McMansion? Perhaps the home still shows off even if it more difficult to connect the home to its particular owners.

The story might be a little different here. Might these be less of McMansion owners – those who want to project their success – and more of people with real money and status who want to stay quiet about their success? One of the advantages of being elite and/or having resources in insulating yourself from the public. This may be why it is harder for sociologists, journalists, and others to get access to the elite as they can better control access to themselves. Not having easily visible house numbers is just a start.

Coming back to the McMansion status of such homes. I wonder if this could turn into a minor addendum to defining McMansions: how does the visibility of the home to the street affect whether it is a McMansion? Let’s say the McMansion is shielded from the road by trees and a gate; does this render the home less offensive since it is not broadcasting its architecture so much?

Studying elite/townspeople relations in wealthy Teton County, Wyoming

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Elites have made Teton County, Wyoming a home and they have complicated relationships with local residents:

When he visits the downtown bars, “I don’t tell people that I live in a gated community. They accept me as a local,” he tells author Justin Farrell in his new book, “Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West” (Princeton University Press), out now…

According to a 2018 report from the Economic Policy Institute, the wealthiest 1 percent in Teton County bring in an annual income that’s approximately 142 times more than the other 99 percent of families in the county. The “average” per-capita income in Teton County is just over $251,000, the highest in the country, according to the US Department of Commerce, and the rest of Wyoming doesn’t even come close, with most counties ranging between $40,000 and $50,000 per year, and none going above $70,000. Coming second to Teton is Manhattan, where the average income is $194,000…

But it goes deeper than taxes. Over the last few decades, the wealthy “feel like they’ve been unfairly criticized and targeted,” Farrell says. “Because of the Occupy Wall Street movement and politicians like Bernie Sanders, attacking the rich has become part of the dominant discourse. I actually had a few people tell me that they’ve come to Teton County to escape the socialist revolution. Wyoming feels like a safe haven for them.”…

Stewart considered this relationship, and others he had with lower-income locals, to be authentic and equitable, but as Farrell points out, “his friendships are often based on economic exchange and uneven power dynamics.”…

Claire Drury, who lives in Teton County but is far from rich, has a thinly veiled disgust for her wealthy neighbors. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, the ultra-wealthy are befriending us savages while drinking a really nice 1976 Bordeaux,” she told Farrell. “It is reminiscent of all the Buffalo Bill Wild West shows, [with] the noble savages sitting there stiff as a board while their photos are being taken in some sort of sepia-toned thing.”

It is rare to find studies of the elite that includes more direct data including interviews. For a variety of reasons, sociologists tend to focus with elites in an aggregate or from a distance. And one advantage of having money and/or power is that people can exert some control of who has access to them.

And yet, this also sounds like a neighborhood or community study (albeit in a more rural area), a common feature of American sociology for over one hundred years. Even the wealthiest members of Chicago’s Gold Coast could not easily ignore the more difficult conditions just down the street from them (from the classic study The Gold Coast and the Slum). Elites do not exist outside of communities and interactions with people around them. How they get along with others – or not – is worth considering as is how these interactions affect broader communities and could affect the influential ways that elites can act.

 

 

Studying poor neighborhoods alongside “Racially Concentrated Areas of Affluence”

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Scholars in recent decades have spent a lot of time studying neighborhoods with concentrated poverty but what about those areas of concentrated wealth?

Cities such as St. Louis, Boston, Baltimore, and Minneapolis have more racially concentrated areas of affluence (RCAAs) than they do racially concentrated areas of poverty (RCAPs). Boston has the most RCAAs of the cities they examined, with 77. St. Louis has 44 RCAAs, and 36 RCAPs. Other cities with a large number of racially concentrated areas of affluence include Philadelphia, with 70, Chicago, with 58, and Minneapolis, with 56.

In Boston, 43.5 percent of the white population lives in census tracts that are 90 percent or more white and have a median income of four times the poverty level. In St. Louis, 54.4 percent of the white population lives in such tracts…

Public policy has “focused on the concentration of poverty and residential segregation. This has problematized non-white and high-poverty neighborhoods,” said Goetz, the director of the Center for Urban and Rural Affairs at the University of Minnesota, when presenting his findings at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “It’s shielded the other end of the spectrum from scrutiny—to the point where we think segregation of whites is normal.”…

In racially concentrated areas of affluence, federal dollars come in the form of the mortgage-interest deduction. In areas of poverty, they come through vouchers and subsidized housing units. In the Twin Cities, the total federal investment in the form of housing dollars in RCAAs was three times larger than the investment in RCAPs. On a per capita basis, it was about equal.

Federal dollars are now being spent to “subsidize racially concentrated areas of affluence,” Goetz said.

Three quick thoughts:

1. Sociologists studying such topics may not spend enough time studying elites and the wealthy. This could be for a variety of reasons: those with power and money can limit access (hence moving to smaller exclusive communities or compounds or towers of the uber-wealthy); sociologists tend to be middle to upper-class themselves; poverty presents a more visible social problem compared to the shadowy actions of those with money and influence.

2. Suburban scholars have long noted the government support for wealthier areas. The American suburbs came about partially due to certain cultural values (individualism, private property, racism) but may not have been possible on such a grand scale without federal money for mortgages (as the industry was altered in the first half of the early twentieth century), highways (interstates as largely paid for by the federal government), and diverting money away from cities to suburban areas.

3. From a policy perspective, is it easier to move those in poverty to wealthier areas (though programs like Moving to Opportunity) rather than encouraging the wealthy to move to less advantaged areas? Policy sometimes gravitates to solutions that seem doable (as opposed to what might be most effective in the long run) and I imagine the wealthy really don’t want to move to areas with more poverty.

 

Sociologist is the “Jane Goodall of the [insular] art world”

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Sociologist Sarah Thornton provides a behind the scenes look at the elite art world:

It’s an exclusive, insular world, but Thornton’s first book about art, 2008’s “Seven Days in the Art World,” was pure populism, a dishy, behind-the-scenes read about heady auctions at Christie’s, the cutthroat atmosphere of art fairs, and much more. It became an unexpected bestseller and landed the writer in art’s inner circle…

Thornton has the ability to “seduce people to expose themselves,” the artist Andrea Fraser recently told an audience at New York’s New Museum.

The author’s two volumes on art read nothing like most art books, which are often academic tomes or picture-filled coffee-table books. But “33 Artists” has just one muddy black-and-white image for every chapter. Instead, Thornton fills in the blanks, writing so evocatively that the reader can easily imagine the immensity of a hundred million sunflower seeds rendered in porcelain by Ai…

Fraser and others opened their doors to Thornton as she traversed the globe to interview and observe artists in their own world. The author watches as Maurizio Cattelan prepares for what he called his retirement retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim in 2011. She is with eccentric Japanese pop artist Yayoi Kusama on the eve of her phenomenal 2012 comeback, when she landed a retrospective at the Whitney and a complementary Louis Vuitton line. And Thornton spends time in the studios of photographer Laurie Simmons and her husband, painter Carroll Dunham, just before their daughter, Lena, lands a deal with HBO.

This is one of Thornton’s greatest knacks: She tends to arrive on artists’ doorsteps just before some seismic shift in their public profiles. But her other talent is gaining access, penetrating artists’ private spheres as both an art-world insider and an academically minded outsider.

While the article is short on details about the art world, it does describe three unique features that help Thorton’s work stand out. First, she effectively uses the ethnographic method. One artist describes her as “like a ghost” and she clearly has the ability to build relationships and then use connections to explain the broader world of major artists. All of this takes time, sustained effort, and the ability to systematically gather information. Second, she is able to write in a way that appeals to a popular audience. How many sociologists write bestsellers or are said to write evocatively? Third, she gets access to an elite group. Artists whose works sell for millions have a particular social status and can be inaccessible to the average person. (I remember one of my art colleagues asking a group of other faculty about how many of the most famous artists alive today they could name. We did not do well.)

It all sounds interesting to me…

Answering suburban critiques by firing back at educated urban elites

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After one professor suggests strip malls are closely tied to the ills of global capitalism, one conservative’s response is to fire back at urban, educated elites:

Because Deneen cannot wring meaning from big-box stores and six-lane roads, we are meant to assume that no one can. But this elision of any distinction between personal aesthetic preferences and objective universal laws is as empirically false as it is politically problematic. As a happy son of the suburban Midwest, I can personally attest that plenty of good people have little difficulty finding much to worship and be thankful for, no matter what they drive or where their kids’ toys were constructed.

Erudite, comfortable people are always so bemused that middle-income Americans could possibly opt for a suburban life of cars, backyards, and affordable goods. The alternative, of course, is an urban life spent waiting for buses and watching the erudite, comfortable people enjoy boutique brunches that they will never be able to sample. For millions of our brothers and sisters without PhDs, the parking lots and mini-malls that Deneen dismisses are sites of real grace and meaning. They are places where paychecks are earned, conversations are shared, and the sanctification of even mundane work can transpire.

While there are some interesting conversations to have about how spaces shape social life (think of the differences between the strip mall and the urban street with mixed uses), this particular response simply falls into an argument pattern that has been around at least 60 years. When a critic attacks the suburbs, someone is bound to respond that middle Americans seem to like the suburbs and the pretentious of the elites prevents them from seeing the good side of suburbs. And, this often devolves into name-calling and generalizations, elites versus average Americans, city dwellers against suburbanites, about morality and community life. Does this get anybody anywhere?

In other words, this is nothing new.

Confessions of a Community College College Dean: “Foucault, plus lawn care”

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The “Confessions of a Community College Dean” blog at Inside Higher Ed has this intro tagline for the author:

In which a veteran of cultural studies seminars in the 1990s moves into academic administration and finds himself a married suburban father of two. Foucault, plus lawn care.

Is it fair to say the implied contrast here is that this cultural studies scholar wouldn’t have imagined being part of suburban life? Knowledge of lofty French thinkers and maintaining a yard. I suspect there are many in academia who would have similar thoughts: I’m an expert in such and such field, study important things all day, and for sure won’t end up in the populist and anti-intellectual suburbs. Yet, some certainly do become suburbanites. How do they reconcile these two areas of life?

Sociologists looking at the “seamy underside” of cities

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A number of media reviews of sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh’s latest book highlight his look at the “seamy underside” of New York City:

A finishing school for young minority hookers. A Harlem drug dealer determined to crack the rich white downtown market. A socialite turned madam. A tortured academic struggling to navigate vicious subcultures.

All in all, this might have made a pretty good novel. Instead it’s “Floating City,” the latest nonfiction look at the urban underbelly by self-described “rogue sociologist” Sudhir Venkatesh…

Much of what the author finds out about the seamy underside of urban life has already been discovered by predecessors as various as Emile Zola, Nathan Heard and Tom Wolfe (to say nothing of the producers of “The Wire”).

This reminded me that this is not a new approach for urban sociologists. The classic 1920s text The City from Robert Park and others in the Chicago School looks at some of the seamier sides of Chicago including boarding houses and slums. Numerous other sociologists have explored similar topics including looks at bars, drug use, and criminal activity in cities. This sort of approach works to challenge more cultured American society who can’t understand what motivates urban dwellers involved in these activities, satisfy curiosity.

While this research might help expose the plight of some urban residents, it might have another effect: limit the number of sociologists looking at elites. I remember hearing sociologist Michael Lindsay speak about this a few years ago after carrying out his research with elites. Who is closely studying elites who have both influence and resources?

Argument: elite colleges offer MOOCs because they can afford to

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Here is an interesting argument about MOOCs, massive open online courses, that a hot topic of discussion these days: elite colleges can offer them because they accrue status and can afford the financial losses.

Millions of people were already taking online courses in 2011, when The New York Times noticed that thousands were taking a Stanford course online. The MOOC surge has been driven by the warm feelings associated with elite American colleges. Brand equity is obviously the principal admissions criterion for edX and Coursera, and for Udacity by implication, with its pedigree of Stanford origination and Silicon Valley cool.

Ideally, this will allow elite colleges to profit from and enhance their brands at once. Penn can’t ever be Coca-Cola. Its brand is tied to the noble purpose of higher learning. If it’s seen as a crass profit-taker, the whole thing falls apart. Many observers have asked where the “business plan” is for Harvard, MIT, and other institutions leading MOOCs. That misses the point.

Elite colleges are ultimately in the business of maximizing status, not revenue. Spending a lot of money on things that return a lot of status isn’t just feasible for these institutions—it’s their basic operating principle. It’s not hard to make money when you’re already wealthy—witness the performance of the Harvard Management Company over the past 20 years. The difficult maneuver is converting money into status of the rarefied sort that elite institutions crave.

MOOCs offer that opportunity. Elite colleges are willing to run them at a loss forever, because of the good will—and thus status—they create. Free online courses whose quality matches their institutional reputation (a tall order, to be sure, but MOOC providers have strong incentives to get there) could ultimately become as important to institutional status as the traditional markers of exclusivity and scholarly prestige.

In other words, MOOCs offered by elite colleges can reinforce existing status structures where these elite schools can continue to amass resources, financial, knowledge-wise, and social status and still claim they are helping the masses. On the other hand, can takers of MOOCs use them as real stepping stones to move up in society?