politics

Detachment and Democracy

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

In my book I suggest that houses make poor habitat for democracy. The big argument here, I think, is that houses tend to prioritize control over private space. In so doing they generally encourage detachment from public life. Houses suggest we can cut ourselves and our families off from those around us rather than investing in ways of figuring out how to live together. The “single-family detached” house reifies the notion that the only ties that matter are those of kinship, cutting off our obligations to the broader social world. As I describe in my book, and as further detailed in the work of historians like Frykman & Löfgren (see their excellent book Culture Builders) and John Gillis, this was a strategic move on the part of a rising urban middle-class in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Housing was meant to serve as both a stage for demonstrating moral worth and a sanctuary from the moral claims of others (the latter rendered obsolete by the extension of market governance).

In a broader sense, most houses are surrounded by other houses. That’s a legacy of zoning, of course. But it tends to insure that even when residents leave their housing, they don’t have many public places to go, and to the extent they bump into anyone, their encounters tend to be with people much like themselves.* As described by a variety of political theorists (from Susan Bickford to Thad Williamson to the wonderful Iris Marion Young), who we regularly run into influences who we think we need to take into account in our politics. In much the same way that getting our news through social media tends to provide us only a very partial picture of the world, surrounding ourselves with similar people does much the same, and tends to lead us toward intolerance of difference.

So too many houses is concerning for collective projects like democracy. On a related note, there is a very strong correlation (r=0.82) at the state-level between the proportion of structures made up of detached houses and the proportion of votes that went to Donald Trump. Here’s the scatterplot:

trumpvote2houses

Housing data come from Census (American Fact Finder) 2010-2014 ACS 5-year estimates. Vote data comes from USelectionatlas.org (thanks Dave Leip), and of course is subject to change – especially as recounts get under way! And yes, the correlation is still quite strong if you remove Washington DC (r=0.74) or drop mobile homes (r=0.76), bivariate analyses I’ve already tried (all are defensible variations on the theme). I haven’t run the analyses yet, but at the county level, you’d likely get similar results, if not stronger. More urbanized counties voted heavily for Clinton, as you can see mapped out here (and let’s not forget that she won the popular vote).

So did the USA build its way to Donald Trump? There’s a correlation and a plausible connection, fitting with an alarming streak of intolerance running through the Trump campaign. But there’s also Vermont and New Mexico (one of my home states!), clear outliers from the pattern. Other stories might be told as well and surely will be in the months to come, but this one’s definitely worth keeping in mind.**

 

*-that said, suburbs are getting more diverse! See, for example, Christopher Niedt’s book.

**-for instance the historical association between racism and zoning in the USA is also worth noting, with the persistence of racism possibly playing a role in both the way zoning has configured the housing stock and the 2016 vote (see, for instance, Dorceta Taylor’s work on some of these connections)…

“Ride This Out” and Housing Summit Slides

~ Nathan Lauster ~ Leave a comment

In my last post, I combined a Leonard Cohen theme (“You Want it Darker“) with somewhat cathartic musings about the US election, in which the nation seems to have declared 2016 the Year of the Scary Clown. The next day, I found out Leonard Cohen had died.  Technically, he appears to have died before I wrote the post, which is important because I don’t want to risk causing the deaths of any other beloved musicians. On that note, here’s a bit more of a rousing theme about riding out the election results and getting back to work (please don’t die, Imaginary Cities!):

Also, the slides from my talk for the Vancouver Re:Address Summit on Housing and the Future of City Building have now been posted.* The background image is from a photo I took of a lovely mural over on Vancouver’s East Side, where the row of houses just doesn’t quite fit into the urban scene. Funny that.

*For some reason, I think whoever posted the slides thought my first name was “Michael”

You want it darker…

~ Nathan Lauster ~ 2 Comments

So America’s taken a turn for the dark, and a page out of the songbook of Leonard Cohen.

The vote suggests a turn toward a darker vision of America as it currently exists, painting a bleak picture of a rigged system put in place by a self-interested elite living side-by-side with a misled multicultural mob in the hellish cityscapes along the coasts.

I don’t recognize this vision. And I’m not sure how many others do. The polls failed us, suggesting somewhere between a 71% to 99%+ likelihood of a Clinton win (credit where it’s due, Nate Silver at least got the uncertainty right! I long suspected and hoped that Sam Wang was closer). We seem to have ushered in a new, dark age in polling, long feared, but until recently mostly postponed, at least in US politics.  Here, too, we’ve taken a turn for the dark.

And of course, we have no idea what Trump will do as president.He’s promised to “Make America Great Again,” suggesting a return to a glorious, and largely imaginary past. It’s true, income inequality during and after WWII, under FDR, hit all-time lows, according to Picketty and Saez, only to take off again in the 1980s under Reagan.

picketty-saez-incomeinequality

To be sure, much of the decline in income inequality seemed connected to a broadly prosperous working class and large manufacturing base. But I have a hard time seeing a Republican government successfully bring this back, especially given widespread antagonism to the unions that often made this work. I have a much easier time seeing Republicans attempting to “make American great again” by curtailing the rights of women and minorities. This, of course, is the vision of where the alt-right wants to take us, and it’s squarely in-line with the Trump campaign.  Here, too, America has taken a turn for the dark. Possibly very, very dark.

A Republican government will own the next two years (at least) and possibly longer. The (in my view likely) failure of this government to enact policies that will make anything better for either the vast majority of people who voted for them, or for those who didn’t may move us toward a political re-alignment in the long term, favoring some set of Democrats and responsible Republicans. But the temptation will be there for Republicans to instead pin the blame for their (likely) failures on imaginary internal and external foes. This temptation has basically been Trump’s entire campaign. It’s too easy to imagine it taking hold in a wider form, even if I hadn’t just read through Philip Roth’s excellent The Plot Against America this past year.  You want it darker?  It doesn’t get much darker than the macho victimhood of fascism.

If there’s an even darker lining to all of this darkness, it’s that Trump seems to be a liar, a con-man, and a narcissist. He hasn’t played well with his fellow Republicans. Who knows what he’ll do in power?  Maybe he’ll just use his position to enrich himself and sell more stuff. I fear he will try to make good on his promises, but I take some small, weird measure of comfort from his failure to do so in the past and the fact that I remain so thoroughly in the dark about how things will turn out.

You want it darker? We kill the flame.