Santorum (and other Republicans) to stop using the term “middle class”?

Posted on January 10, 2012 by legallysociable

Here is an interesting observation: Rick Santorum and possibly other Republicans don’t like using the term “middle class.”

In American politics, praising the middle class is generally uncontroversial. But over the weekend Rick Santorum chided his GOP primary competitors, and Mitt Romney specifically, for using the formulation. Here’s his complaint:

I don’t think Governor Romney’s plan is particularly bold, it — or is particularly focused on where the problems are in this country. And the governor used a term earlier that I shrink from. It’s one that I don’t think we should be using as Republicans, “middle class.” There are no classes in America. We are a country that don’t allow for titles. We don’t put people in classes. There may be middle-income people, but the idea that somehow or another we’re going to buy into the class-warfare arguments of Barack Obama is something that should not be part of the Republican lexicon. That’s their job — divide, separate, put one group against another. That’s not the language that I’ll use as president. I’ll use the language of bringing people together.

He has previously attacked President Obama with the same talking point. “You’ll never hear the word ‘class’ come out of my mouth,” he said. “Classes? We specifically rejected that. Look in the Constitution.”

The Constitution talks about social class?

On one hand, this is not terribly surprising: Republicans have argued that even talking about class is “class warfare,” trying to pit the interests of one class against another. Talk about class invokes conversation about people like Karl Marx, who is generally anathema to conservatives. On the other hand, to act like the category “middle class” doesn’t exist is silly. This is not simply a term made up by academics; there is plenty of research to show that Americans have certain perceptions about class and that your class standing (made up by things like income and education levels) does influence individual lives (see a recent example from elementary school classrooms here). It would be interesting to hear Santorum talk about the differences between “middle-income people” and “middle-class people” if he does indeed prefer the first term.

This reminds me of something I have thought for several years: Republicans have to find better ways to engage with ideas like social class and race instead of simply acting like the issues or terms don’t matter. Even if Republicans don’t think they matter, enough voters do and they need to find ways to connect with those voters.

“Concerted cultivation” in the Chicago Tribune

Posted on January 6, 2012 by legallysociable

A story about how class affects how willing students are able to ask for help ran Wednesday in the Chicago Tribune:

Just as every school principal knows the adults most willing to pipe up about everything from the kids’ class assignments to cafeteria food — by and large, well-educated working professionals — a study published last month in the American Sociological Review found their children showed the same propensity to advocate for themselves in the classroom as early as third grade. The children of working-class parents profiled in the two-year study seemed more reticent in asking teachers to review directions, provide more instruction or even check their work…

“We tend to assume that once you put kids in school, what they get there will help them overcome any differences they bring with them. But what this shows is … children have a meaningful impact on the way schooling is happening and what they are able to get out of it,” said University of Pennsylvania sociologist Jessica McCrory Calarco…

The picture that emerged was striking: Middle-class students walked in the door knowing how to get their questions answered and, in turn, spent less time waiting for help and typically completed assignments on time. Many working-class children, meanwhile, had to learn those key skills in class from their teachers and peers.

What’s more, Calarco found many middle-class parents coached their students to speak up — politely but persistently — if they did not understand. They viewed seeking help as a critical skill in a class where more than two dozen students turn to a single teacher.

The article doesn’t mention this but this is the concept of “concerted cultivation” (from Annette Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods) in action. While some might just chalk these differences to personality (some kids are more shy or outgoing), Lareau argues that this is really the result of social class. Within the same classroom, students of different class backgrounds have been raised in different ways: the middle- to upper-class students have been socialized to be more assertive with authority figures while lower-class students are less assertive and let authority figures dictate what is happening. With years of being more assertive, middle- to upper-class students are able to reap the benefits of advocating for themselves as well as practicing interacting with and connecting with adults.

While the article mentions that Illinois “the first state in the nation to require that all school districts teach social and emotional skills as part of their curriculum and day-to-day routine,” it doesn’t see if this curriculum helps with this particular topic. While individual teachers might be addressing this, is there a systematic effort to try to help lower-class students find a voice in the classroom and speak up?

It would be fascinating to track these kids further and see how this affects educational achievement differences by high school. Similarly, are there studies about the effectiveness of trying to help lower-class students be more assertive?

This is not a bad run of publicity for the December American Sociological Review: another story from that issue about the gender inequality in multitasking among working parents has also been getting a lot of attention.

The builder behind Lego’s architecture series

Posted on January 3, 2012 by legallysociable

Perhaps you have seen them in the store: Lego kits that allow you to build the White House, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, and many other buildings. Here is some background on the man who designs these kits:

Tucker is a serious sort, with a vaguely brooding air — not impolite, but not comfortable with niceties. He does not flinch from saying that he is an artist and that the Lego is a real medium. “I have zero interest in this as a toy,” he said, holding up a brick. He did not seem like the type who sets out on a Lego-based career path. And he wasn’t. He’s 40 now, but five years ago he was designing high-end residential homes until the real estate market started going stagnant, he said, and clients started drifting away and canceling new projects. He and his business partner split up, and so, rudderless, he moved back in with his parents.

“Six months into my hiatus, I sat down and wrote up a list of everything I wanted to do in this life,” he said. “Didn’t matter what it was — race car driver, dentist, architect. Then I looked at the list and refined it, and through a process of elimination I realized I wanted to work with my hands and I wanted to be my own boss — because I don’t take authority figures especially well. Also, I wanted to do something with architecture. The thing is, how could I be an inspiration to others if I was working in a medium most people can’t do?”

Here’s what he did: He drove to a Toys R Us in Highland Park and loaded eight shopping carts with Lego kits. He then came home, sat on the floor, spread the pieces out at his feet and, because he hadn’t played with Legos since he was a kid, reacquainted himself. He built samples and took them to a Lego convention in Washington, where he caught the eye of Lego brass.

He found Lego at the right time: After going through a rough patch in the late ’90s, the company was ready to refocus on design, and by 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, sales were up 40 percent, making it the rare company that not only weathered the recession but didn’t feel it. Tucker, meanwhile, rounded up licensing agreements with building owners. “I got a sense he didn’t have many contacts, so I set him with the people in other important buildings,” remembered Randy Stancik, the general manager of the Skydeck at Willis Tower, where Tucker’s Willis Tower kit has long been the most popular tchotchke in the building’s gift shop.

Tucker’s relationship with Lego is complex. He is not a Lego employee. With his wife, Brittny, he runs Brickstructures, which has a long-term contract that says he can only design kits for Lego. He also distributes the Architecture series in North America himself, using Lego’s warehouse in Wood Dale (though Lego distributes the series internationally). When I asked who owns the rights to the kits, he said it’s a gray area.

Is this a success story from the new American economy? Alas, it seems like there is only one such job available…

Some additional thoughts:

1. I’ve wondered this for a long time as a Lego fan: why are these sets so expensive?

2. Does Lego have a larger goal of helping people understand the world’s great architecture? If not, why not bill these as educational products? Then you might really see these fly off the shelves.

3. If I had to guess, I would say these sets are bought primarily by highly educated people. Perhaps we can apply Bourdieu to this: lower-class people buy them because they are fun to play with and make a nice decorative piece while the middle- and upper-classes appreciate the aesthetics (squared off as they may be) and knowing about great architecture.

4. Are Lego creations considered art by the broader art community?

Argument: “environmental racism” in Aspen

Posted on December 30, 2011 by legallysociable

Two sociologists discuss “environmental racism” in Aspen:

A new book by two sociology professors at the University of Minnesota, blasting the Aspen way of life for fostering “environmental racism,” is stirring up indignation and mea culpas among the glitterati. The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden, by Lisa Sun-Hee Park and David Naguib Pellow, is a ten-year study of the use of immigrant labor in the ski town that focuses on the stark contrasts between the good life of superwealthy “locals” — many of them absentee landowners who are around only a few weeks of the year — and the legions of foreign-born workers who live in trailer parks and dilapidated rentals “down valley” and commute to menial but essential jobs at the resort.

The authors contend that the privileged have ample use of the beauty and recreational opportunities of the Roaring Fork Valley while systematically excluding the lower-income workers from sharing in that bounty. “This is a bizarre story of a town that prides itself on being environmentally conscious,” they write, “whose city council can approve the construction of yet another 10,000-square-foot vacation home with a heated outdoor driveway, and simultaneously decry as an eyesore the ‘ugly’ trailer homes where low-income immigrants live.”…

Response to the authors’ charges have been heated, with some locals denouncing illegal immigration and “scab labor” — while others have pointed out that the book doesn’t give much attention to the town’s efforts to develop affordable housing and improve living conditions for seasonal workers. The town of Basalt recently signed off on a deal to purchase a trailer park in a floodplain, redevelop it as open space and relocate the residents to better housing.

But Park and Pellow see the notion of “affordable” housing in Aspen to be problematic, at best — kind of like the prissy locals who complain about the older, high-polluting cars driven by immigrant laborers while tooling around themselves in shiny new Range Rovers. Nothing about a bubble of privilege like Aspen is simple, especially at this time of year.

Another social arena where race and class matter (and I also imagine there are gender disparities here as well). I imagine the situation is not that different in many tourist destinations: wealthy travelers can easily travel in and out and even practice consumption in environmentally-conscious ways while poorer workers struggle to meet ends meet, have limited mobility, and can’t partake of the natural beauty the wealthy visit to enjoy.

This reminds me of a paper one of my students wrote at the end of this semester suggesting that the environmental movement has ignored issues of race and class when promoting or condoning gentrification (or renewing older urban neighborhoods) because it can then push lower-class residents to the suburbs which the environmentalists would claim are environmentally harmful. Like in Aspen, the wealthy have better chances to be environmentally conscious.

I wonder how much these two sociologists tie these issues to a growing divide in the United States between those with the education and income to pursue desirable behaviors, whether it is being green or getting married, and those who cannot.

Required for political participation: “digital skills”

Posted on December 8, 2011 by legallysociable

Here is an argument that African-Americans and Latinos could participate more in American politics if they had more “digital skills”:

Could the key to increasing civic engagement among Latinos and African Americans be computer classes? A growing body of research is linking Internet use, particularly social network use, and increased social capital and civic engagement. A new reportfrom the MaCarthur foundation finds that Facebook use is correlated with increased interest in and participation in politics. Scholars like Northwestern Sociologist Esther Hargatti [sic] speak eloquently about the information gap between rich and poor online. This gap is less about access to technology and more about developing the skills to harness the technology for political and social gain. The ability to do information searches, send text messages, tweet, share content and other on-line skills is a central element in becoming what Evegny Morozov calls a “digital renegade” rather than a “digital captive.”

The key to using the Web in democracy-enhancing ways is acquiring digital skills. While this concept has been measured in lots of ways, the presence of digital skills can be measured by the level of autonomy the user has, the number of access points a user has to get online, the amount of experience a user has with different types of online tools, etc.

This should be an area of interest to a lot of people: how social factors, such as race, education levels, location, and other forces affect online use. “Digital skills” are not simply traits that everyone picks up on their own. It requires a certain level of exposure, time, and resources that not all have. See a video clip of Hargittai talking about this.

I wonder how much arguments like this are behind recent government efforts to provide cheap or free broadband to poorer US residents. Here is part of the statement from the head of the FCC:

“There is a growing divide between the digital-haves and have-nots. No Less than one-third of the poorest Americans have adopted broadband, while 90%+ of the richest have adopted it. Low-income Americans, rural Americans, seniors, and minorities disproportionately find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide and excluded from the $8 trillion dollar global Internet economy.”

As I’ve asked before, how close are we to declaring Internet access an essential human right?

The still somewhat large and pricey “Not So Big” house in the Chicago suburbs

Posted on November 28, 2011 by legallysociable

Architect Sarah Susanka has become well-known for her idea of the “Not So Big House.” One of her homes has just been built in the Chicago suburb of Libertyville:

The showcase home, located at the 26-site SchoolStreet Homes development under construction a block east of downtown, is open for weekend tours until May 20. It and the rest of the homes, which are not open to the public, are Susanka’s and developer John McLinden’s take on new urbanism: smaller homes close together, with front porches, a sense of community and walking distance to shops, restaurants and services.

Don’t be fooled, though. When Susanka says not so big, she doesn’t mean small or cheap. The Libertyville home, at 2,450 square feet, won’t be priced until next year when it is put on the market, but other non-Susanka single-family homes on the block start at more than $500,000.

“A lot of builders are building smaller but cheaper,” Susanka said, standing in the furnished home just before it was opened to the public this month. “I believe people are ready for something that is smaller but better.”…

McLinden read Susanka’s books when they were first published and originally invited her to work on one of the houses as a marketing strategy to draw attention to the project. Now they are planning additional collaborations and have been contacted by three other communities about doing similar projects.

In an era where the McMansion is said to be dead and “tiny houses” are growing in popularity, Susanka’s houses stand out for two reasons I’ve noticed before and are also cited in this article. First, these houses are not small. On the spectrum between mansions and tiny houses, Susanka’s houses are very near the national average for the square footage of a new home. As she has said before, the article cites Susanka as saying the homes aren’t small but the space is used well and not wasted. Second, such homes may not be cheap. Perhaps the prices in this story are primarily being driven by being in Libertyville (with a median household income just over $100,000) but then again, Not So Big houses are likely to be built in communities like these.

The emphasis in Susanka’s homes are on two things beyond size and price: quality and fit with the homeowners. Neither of these things are cheap as the homes are not meant to be mass-produced (then they might fall perilously close to tract home or McMansion territory) and the features are customized to the activities and tastes of those who live there. Apparently, there is a market for this.

This could lead to an interesting question: are these primarily homes for educated, wealthy people who appreciate the design features and can afford the prices? Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising as architects do need to make money and wealthier clients (and higher-end builders) could certainly help. Could Susanka help market her homes even further if she could create and market a smaller version that could be affordable (or in terms more palatable for many suburban communities, “workforce”) housing? Would she want to produce a lot of these homes or would these reduce the appeal of status of these architect-designed homes?

The Big Sort continues? Fewer Americans live in middle-income neighborhoods

Posted on November 17, 2011 by legallysociable

Here is another way to look at the gap between the rich and poor in the United States: the percentage of Americans living in middle-income neighborhoods has shrunk in recent decades.

In 2007, nearly a third of American families — 31 percent — lived in either an affluent neighborhood or a mainly low-income one, up from just 15 percent in 1970, according to the study conducted by Stanford University, and released in partnership with the Russell Sage Foundation and Brown University.

Meanwhile, 44 percent of American families lived in middle-class neighborhoods in 2007, down from 65 percent in 1970…

For the study, researchers used data from 117 metropolitan areas, each with more than 500,000 residents. In 2007, those areas were home to 197 million people — or two-thirds of the US population.

This study covers about two-thirds of the American population. I assume the study is restricted to larger metropolitan areas because of how the researchers defined a neighborhood but couldn’t they adapt to smaller cities in order to represent more of the US population? Also thinking about the research methods, I hope the researchers used analogous cutoff points for these different classes in 1970 and 2007.

Moving past methodological issues, this does bring to light an interesting issue: how many Americans experience residential segregation based on social class? Of course, race and social class is linked. Do Americans care that people of different income strata live in completely different areas? Based on American history, I would say no: Americans don’t seem terribly concerned about concentrated poverty or pockets of affluence. If you have money, it is generally expected that you go live with people who also have money. You might provide incentives for the classes to mix (example: mixed-income neighborhoods on the site of former housing projects) but this is rare.

It would be interesting to see a breakdown here between cities and suburban areas. Some of the earliest American sociological research focused on these disparities in the city, such as Zorbaugh’s work The Gold Coast and the Slum where the rich and poor lived in incredible proximity but rarely mixed. Is class-based residential segregation higher in the suburbs?

How small is too small for a new house? Debating minimum sizes (along with race and class)

Posted on November 8, 2011 by legallysociable

There are plenty of people who would like to see Americans live in smaller homes but some communities have minimum square footage requirements for new homes, leading to this question: how small is too small for a new house?

Chris Jaussi, owner of Zip Kit Homes in Mount Pleasant, manufactures homes as small as 400 square feet and would like to sell the micro dwellings in the county. But dwellings that small are prohibited by a 1980s ordinance that mandates the minimum size [800 square feet] of a residence…

He believes the current ordinance is “discriminatory” against lower-income people who can’t afford a conventional “stick-built home” in the county…

County officials said the existing policy was adopted to limit mobile and double-wide manufactured homes to specified zoned areas and keep them from springing up randomly in the county…

“I have a lot of sympathy for those who can’t afford their own homes — the poor of Sanpete County. But I don’t want to make housing so cheap we import the poor from other cities,” said Stewart [vice chair of the county’s Planning and Zoning Commission], according to the newspaper. “We get someone who can’t afford to build a bigger home, so they buy this one and fill up the rest of the [5-acre county lot] with junk cars …we don’t want people to come to Sanpete County for that reason.”

This is fascinating for a couple of reasons:

1. Many residents may not think about minimum or maximum home sizes – can’t you build what you want on your own property? However, zoning laws are often quite clear about this.

2. I don’t think minimum home sizes are that unusual. It sounds like this was enacted in this particular county to limit manufactured homes but I also have read about a similar battle in Naperville. Levitt and Sons, the same builders who built the famous Levittowns in the Northeast, proposed building smaller homes of about 1,000 square feet in the early 1980s. However, residents of nearby newer subdivisions complained that the much lower prices of these “downsized” homes would reduce their own property values. Naperville thought about enacting a minimum size ordinance but decided not to after finding that similar regulations in other Chicago suburbs had been struck down in court.

3. Let’s be honest here: this is all about property values and of course, property values also coincide with issues of race and class. More expensive homes, which on average are more likely to attract middle- to upper-class residents who are more likely to be white, are seen by many communities as a boon while smaller homes which attract the lower classes and minorities are seen as less worthwhile. Look at the associations cited here in this story: allowing smaller homes will automatically attract lower-income residents who will live in mobile homes and/or keep junked cars in their yards. The suburbs have a long history of formal and informal ways of restricting access to the poor and a minimum house size or lot size (usually associated with exclusionary zoning) can accomplish this. I do wonder though if these smaller homes will necessarily attract low-income residents – if these smaller homes are about being green (and perhaps also about quality rather than quantity), might they also be marketed to more educated, higher-class residents?

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