The McMansionization of America? Income stratification and the standard of living in housing, 1960–2000

Consumption patterns and living standards are relatively neglected in stratification research even though they are important indicators of material well-being. Consumption inequality is related to income and wealth disparities through complex processes not yet well understood. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing a striking shift in the standard of living in housing in the US that occurred at the same time as a substantial increase in income inequality. Houses became significantly bigger in the 1980s and 1990s just as inequalities deepened, reversing an earlier trend towards smaller houses. Diverse theoretical traditions in the consumption and housing stratification literatures explain this shift differently, and in particular posit very different effects of rising income inequality. I derive several alternative expectations from these traditions: two predicting that the increasing size of houses was broadly shared across income levels, while another expects it represented increasing divergence in living standards, paralleling the trend in income inequality. I use US Census and American Housing Survey data and several different methods to adjudicate between these theories. The results provide some support for each of the alternative expectations, but the most significant finding is that big house ownership became more concentrated among the affluent. A focus on living standards thus uncovers a key source of rising disparities at the turn of the 21st century with important implications for wealth stratification too since houses are the major debt and asset held by most Americans.     

Is Inequality a Latent Construct? An Assessment of Economic Inequality Indicators and Their Relation with Social Cohesion in Europe

In this article, we analyse the relation between different economic inequality indicators and social cohesion. Previous research usually narrows down economic inequality to income inequality, or distinguishes several types of economic inequality. Little attention has until now been given to how different aspects of economic inequality might be related to each other and can have an effect on social cohesion. This article analyses several indicators of economic inequality and makes a distinction between indicators measuring income inequality, poverty, economic strain and unequal distributions of wealth. Arguing that these indicators represent different aspects of inequality, we hypothesise that they cannot be reduced to one latent concept of inequality and have specific relations with social cohesion. In order to test this hypothesis, we conducted an exploratory factor analysis. This resulted in two different factors: one associated with economic hardship, and one associated with imbalances in market outcomes. This would imply that inequality indicators can be classified into two underlying concepts. Secondly, we related the factor scores of the two latent concepts to the social cohesion indicators via regression analyses. This paper focuses on European countries and uses pooled data from the European Social Survey (period 2006–2012), in combination with macro-level data drawn from the OECD, Eurostat and the World Bank. The results demonstrate that the strength of the link between inequality and citizens’ attitudes depends on the type of inequality indicator we analyse: only the factor economic deprivation can be significantly linked to social cohesion.     

Housing and wealth inequality: Racial-ethnic differences in home equity in the United States

In our study, we took a first step toward broadening our understanding of the sources of both housing and wealth inequality by studying differences in housing equity among blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and non-Hispanic whites in the United States. Using data from the American Housing Survey, we found substantial and significant gaps in housing equity for blacks and Hispanics (but not for Asians) compared with whites, even after we controlled for a wide range of locational, life-cycle, socioeconomic, family, immigrant, and mortgage characteristics. Furthermore, the payoffs to many factors are notably weaker for minority than for white households. This finding is especially consistent across groups for the effects of age, socioeconomic status, and housing-market value. Blacks and Hispanics also uniformly receive less benefit from mortgage and housing characteristics than do whites. These findings lend credence to the burgeoning stratification perspective on wealth and housing inequality that acknowledges the importance of broader social and institutional processes of racial-ethnic stratification that advantage some groups, whites in this case, over others.     

Spatial Pattern of Urban Livability in Himalayan Region: A Case of Aizawl City,India

Cities are increasingly expected to provide impetus to the growth and development of their surrounding areas as well as to compete for economic activity with other cities. However, cities in developing countries are characterised by spatial differentiation and segregation due to widening inequality which are detrimental for growth and development of cities and regions. Concern over inequality in urban areas raises moral and ethical issues and demands compensatory and remedial policies to alleviate poorer places. This requires recognition of areas of relative deprivation at smaller scale through proper research. The present study is an attempt to find out patterns of inequality in livability in Aizawl-a fast growing hill city in the Himalayan region of northeastern India. Using data reduction method, levels of objective and subjective dimensions of livability are measured at neighbourhood level. The study found out that centrally located neighbourhoods are more livable in comparison to their peripheral counterparts. The study also found out that objective and subjective dimensions of livability have no significant relationship.     

Income Inequality and its Consequences for Life Satisfaction: What Role do Social Cognitions Play?

While it is generally agreed that income inequality affects an individual’s well-being, researchers disagree on whether people living in areas of high income disparity report more or less happiness than those in more equal environments, thereby indicating the need to study how and why income inequality matters to the individual’s well-being. Findings on group-specific reaction patterns to income inequality further fuel this need. Alesina et al. (2004) argue that a preference for inequality and the perception of the possibility of social mobility account for the indistinct relationship between income inequality and subjective well-being. Combining this hypothesis with previous research on social cognition and drawing on social justice theory, this paper aims to demonstrate the mediating nature of perceptions of income inequality. It argues that the perceived legitimacy of distributive outcomes and procedures contributes to how income inequalities affect individuals and their sense of well-being. The empirical analysis is based on data from the International Social Justice Project, developed from face-to-face interviews with a representative sample of the German population. Using structural equation modeling, the paper finds structural biases in the perception of income inequality. The paper concludes that subjective well-being is a product of the individual’s perception and legitimating processes. The results indicate that social cognition is a useful tool for studies of income inequality and subjective well-being.     

Toward macro-social accounting: Measures and scales of racial,sexual, and spatial equality in 243 U.S. SMSA's

This paper develops a set of empirical social indicators of quality between races, sexes, and spatial areas in all U.S. SMSA's. New findings are presented concerning the level of equality by city and region. An eight-step Guttman Scale is developed which suggests a progressive hierarchy of these various of equality. Cities develop higher levels of equality between residents in a patterned building block manner beginning first with favorable levels of spatial equality and culminating in equality between black and white professional employment rates. Finally, a canonical correlation model is hypothesized and empirically estimated to explain variation between these 243 cities in level of inequality. This model linked key economic, demographic and ecological forces to levels of equality in spatial systems.     

Indicators of Social Isolation: A Comparison Based on Survey Data from Germany

The paper presents a data-based comparison of three indicators of social isolation that are frequently used in contemporary social research: (a) low frequency of social contact with friends, relatives, and neighbors (social contact indicator); (b) absence of a discussion network (discussion network indicator); (c) absence of social support (support indicator). All three indicators are in line with an understanding of social isolation as the absence of close personal relationships. However, as shown in this paper, they are correlated only weakly to each other and lead to different results concerning the overall share of social isolation, age disparities, and gender differences of social isolation. Against this background, the paper proceeds with considerations on the content validity and criterion validity of the three indicators. Different versions of each indicator are scrutinized to gain insights on content validity. Conclusions on criterion validity are drawn from an examination of the correlations between the indicators and health, poverty, satisfaction with family life, and satisfaction with social life. Findings suggest a higher validity of the social contact indicator compared to the other two indicators. Data source is the German Socio-Economic Panel. Discussions of content validity are additionally based on analyses using the German Family Survey and the German Aging Survey.     

Poverty,Inequality and Deprivation in South Africa: An Analysis of the 1993 SALDRU Survey

This paper analyses poverty and inequality in South Africa based on data from a comprehensive multi-purpose household survey undertaken in 1993 to provide baseline statistics on poverty and its determinants to the new government. The paper shows that South Africa has among the highest levels of income inequality in the world and compares poorly in most social indicators to countries with similar income levels. Much of the poverty in the country is a direct result of apartheid policies that denied equal access to education, employment, services, and resources to the black population of the country. As a result, poverty has a very strong racial dimension with poverty concentrated among the African population. In addition, poverty is much higher in rural areas, and particularly high in the former homelands. Poverty among female-headed households and among children is also higher than average. Moreover, poverty is closely related to poor education and lack of employment. The poor suffer from lack of access to education, quality health care, basic infrastructure, transport, are heavily indebted, have little access to productive resources, and are heavily dependent on remittances and social transfers, particularly social pensions and disability grants. The paper uses an income-based definition of poverty for most of the analysis. In addition, it develops a broad-based index of deprivation including income, employment, wealth, access to services, health, education, and perceptions of satisfaction as its components. While on average the two indicators correspond fairly closely, the income poverty measure misses a considerable number of people who are severely deprived in many of the non-income measures of well-being. This group of severely deprived not identified by the income poverty measure consists predominantly of Africans living in rural areas, concentrated particularly in the province of KwaZulu/Natal.     

An evaluation of the American Community Survey: results from the Oregon test site

The American Community Survey (ACS) is a Census Bureau product designed to provide accurate and timely demographic and economic indicators on an annual basis for both large and small geographic areas within the United States. Operational plans for Census 2010 call for ACS to replace the decennial census long form (Census LF), pending the results of evaluation studies. This plan represents a major change in that variables that traditionally have been collected on a “snapshot” basis once every 10 years would be collected on a “rolling” annual basis. Using a loss function analysis and other tools, this paper reports preliminary findings from a comparison of ACS and Census 2000 results in Multnomah County, Oregon, one of five national “local expert” test sites set up to compare ACS data collected at the time of Census 2000. The preliminary findings suggest that there are notable differences between some of the corresponding variables found in the ACS and Census LF that require more detailed examination. For example, the loss function analysis reveals notable differences for race and disability variables. In other comparisons of corresponding variables between ACS and Census 2000, differences are found within each of the four major areas of interest: (1) demographic characteristics, (2) social characteristics, (3) economic characteristics, and (4) housing characteristics, with housing characteristics showing the least similarity overall. These results also suggest that more detailed examinations are needed to understand differences between corresponding variables collected by ACS and the Census LF.     

Some social indicators for multiple family housing

This research suggests some social indicator candidates for families housed in multiple-family environments. Objective, subjective, and behavioral data sets are all represented in the analysis. This range of social statistics and the utilization of appropriate statistical analysis are viewed as necessary conditions for generating social indicators rather than simply relying on arbitrarily selected social statistics and assume they are indicators. Analysis of 1253 interviews in 88 Alberta subsidized housing projects reveals that subjective data from the tenant category of housing variables rank highest in accounting for present levels of user satisfaction and are viewed therefore as reasonable social indicators with respect to that issue.     

Homeownership and Subjective Wellbeing in Urban China: Does Owning a House Make You Happier?

This paper examines the effect of homeownership status on individual subjective wellbeing indicators in urban China using a large nationally representative dataset. It is the first to gauge the relationship between homeownership and individual subjective wellbeing in the setting of China and is also among the few empirical studies concerning developing countries. The results show that the homeownership status does have a strong positive effect on both one’s housing satisfaction and overall happiness in urban China. Even after controlling for housing satisfaction in the equation, the homeownership status still positively affects one’s overall happiness, suggesting that the homeownership status might also contribute to other possible aspects of life satisfaction except for housing satisfaction. In addition, in terms of housing satisfaction, females seem to value much more on owning a house than males, while the subjective benefits of owing a house in large cities seem to be much smaller than in small cities.     

Human Empowerment and Trust in Strangers: The Multilevel Evidence

This study aimed to develop a social cohesion index for understanding the social relation between residents in high-rise group housing complexes through a self-reported questionnaire. As a background of the study, literature on social cohesion and related literature on residents’ social relation in high-rise housing were reviewed. Later, we selected different high-rise group housings of Kolkata, a city in the eastern region of India. We conducted few focus group surveys involving the residents of those high-rises and also conducted expert opinion surveys to identify a context-specific list of statements for evaluating residential social cohesion. Finally, based on the responses of interviews from 652 residents of the identified high-rise housings from the same city, followed by confirmatory factor analyses, three factors of residential social cohesion were identified with adequate reliability and validity. This index holds huge potential to explore residential social relation in high-rise housing and carry out empirical studies, across various disciplines, in other cities in the country and outside the country of similar socio-economic and cultural context.     

Child and Family Outcomes in New York and Tel AVIV: Using Social Indicators in a City Level Comparative Analysis

This article presents a comparative study in which social indicators were employed as a means to examine differences in living conditions and family and children outcomes on a local level. The study obtained household-level data on the well-being of children and families in two cities: New York (NYC) and Tel Aviv (TLV). Data were collected using computer assisted telephone interview (CATI) technology and random digit dialing (RDD). Telephone interviews were conducted with the randomly selected adults in English, Spanish and Chinese in NYC and in Hebrew in TLV. The study reported here documented differences in family and child well-being between the two cities. It further documented that family size and caregiver level of education play a similar role in both cities and their importance in regard to child and family outcomes. The significant differences found in adults’ and especially children’s outcomes were analyzed by the caregiver’s level of education and further support the need for policies that alleviate the burden of less educated caregivers and aim to improve the well-being of them and their families. The study demonstrates the relevance of social indicators at the local level, not only for measuring outcomes among specific populations, but also in regard to their possible implications for social policies, a most timely task in an era of social services devolution.     

Territorial social indicator construction: An alternative perspective and example

examination of efforts to construct territorial social indicators for spatial systems suggests that existing contributions, on the whole, have embraced too broad a quality of life realm, failed to embed indicators in models of social processes, and ignored social change. More varied research designs productive of a broader range of indicators are needed. The advantages of limiting such inquiry to much narrower quality of life domains are demonstrated using the racial inequality problem as an example. Five different kinds of indicators which isolate separate facets of the racial inequality problem within a spatial system are developed and applied to the southeastern United States.     

Birth and death in cities in the developing world

City dwellers in Sub-Saharan Africa have increased roughly 600% in the last 35 years. Throughout the developing world, cities have expanded at a rate that has far outpaced rural population growth. Extensive data document lower fertility and mortality rates in cities than in rural regions. But slums, shantytowns, and squatters' settlements proliferate in many large cities. Martin Brockerhoff studies the reproductive and health consequences of urban growth, with an emphasis on maternal and child health. Brockerhoff reports that child mortality rates in large cities are highest among children born to mothers who recently migrated from rural areas or who live in low-quality housing. Children born in large cities have about a 30% higher risk of dying before they reach the age of 5 than those born in smaller cities. Despite this, children born to migrant mothers who have lived in a city for about a year have much better survival chances than children born in rural areas to nonmigrant mothers and children born to migrant mothers before or shortly after migration. Migration in developing countries as a whole has saved millions of children's lives. The apparent benefits experienced in the 1980s may not occur in the future, as cities continue to grow and municipal governments confront an overwhelming need for housing, jobs, and services. Another benefit is that fertility rates in African cities fell by about 1 birth per woman as a result of female migration from villages to towns in the 1980s and early 1990s. There will be an increasing need for donors and governments to concentrate family planning, reproductive health, child survival, and social services in cities, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, because there child mortality decline has been unexpectedly slow, overall fertility decline is not yet apparent in most countries, and levels of migration to cities are anticipated to remain high.     

Latin America and the Social Contract: Patterns of Social Spending and Taxation

This article analyzes the incidence of social spending and taxation by income quintile for seven Latin American countries, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Absolute levels of social spending in Latin America are fairly flat across income quintiles, a pattern similar to that in the United States and differing from the more progressive pattern of spending in the United Kingdom. The structure of taxation in Latin America is also similar to that of the United States. Because of high income inequality in Latin America and the US, the rich bear of most the burden, whereas the United Kingdom taxes the middle class to a greater extent. The analysis suggests that many Latin American countries are trapped in a vicious cycle in which the rich resist the expansion of the welfare state (because they bear most of its tax burden without receiving commensurate benefits), and their opposition to its expansion in turn maintains long‐term inequalities.     

Building Universal Socio-cultural Indicators for Standardizing the Safeguarding of Citizens’ Rights in Smart Cities

This research explores the opportunity to use standards as recommender instruments for designing urban policy. Standards are soft regulatory mechanisms that can be used for monitoring and safeguarding. More precisely, we explore the potential use of social standards for centering the focus of the smart cities initiative back to the citizens, and establishing a citizen-centered approach. This is in contrast to the industrial drive and technological emphasis which currently dominates. Accordingly, we present a set of novel citizenship indicators which serve as the basis for the social standardization of smart cities, something which is not now taking place, in order to ensure and safeguard the basic social urban rights of citizens. The juridical basis and well-established points of reference for building indicators for citizens’ rights in the city are two International Charters. These are the European Charter for the Safeguarding of Human Rights in the City, and the Global Charter-Agenda for Human Rights in the City. In this paper, we start by comparing and analyzing the rights contained in each of the two Charters, and elaborating indicators for measuring the promotion and protection of these rights. The elaboration of indicators has been based on different criteria and under the common premise of universal existence of feeding data, which is the most recurrent problem when building indicators meant to be global. Next, at the request of the International Standards Organization (ISO), we select the most relevant socio-cultural indicators for the Global Charter Agenda, which will be introduced in the on-going revision of the smart cities and communities standard ISO 37120:2014 Sustainable development of communities—Indicators for city services and quality of life. This will make ISO 37120 a more beneficial social standard for monitoring and safeguarding citizens’ rights in the smart city.     

Comparison of Urban Housing Satisfaction in Modern and Traditional Neighborhoods in Edirne,Turkey

Numerous cross-cultural studies have focused on certain aspects of urban housing conditions and their social consequences. However, most data on housing satisfaction is restricted to Western countries. Relatively little comparison has been made between these findings and those in developing areas where rapid urbanization is occurring and where concomitant problems in urban housing are emerging. Moreover, since primary cities of developing countries in the initial stage of economic development have received extensive attention in urban housing research, it would be interesting to examine a non-primary city where relatively good standards of living have been achieved. Thus, this study investigates people’s housing satisfaction in modern and historical neighborhoods. This paper addresses some conceptual and measurement issues related to the study of housing satisfaction. We build a conceptual model, which links the multiple dimensions of housing satisfaction, measured by a modified version of Bardo and Dokmeci’s (1992, Genetic, Social and General Psychology Monographs 118(3)) housing satisfaction scale, in a causal sense. An empirical examination of the model in traditional and modern neighborhoods reveals that social and environmental living conditions positively influence overall housing satisfaction. The results also indicate that the drivers of the social and environmental living conditions constructs differ between traditional and modern neighborhoods.     

Residential independence among older persons: community and individual factors

The objective of this study is to evaluate an expanded version of the resource model of living arrangements among older persons. This expanded model includes community-level measures of geriatric health services and housing market conditions. We employ the first two waves of the National Survey of Families and Households to test static and longitudinal fixed effects models of residential living arrangements. We find that residing in areas with higher levels of geriatric health care services increases the likelihood of residential independence, net of other contextual factors and individual characteristics. Our results show that housing market conditions are not related to levels of or changes in residential independence when control variables are included in the models. The results for the individual-level resource variables show that persons with greater economic resources, more children, and better functional status are better able to maintain independence and are less likely to die or live in a nursing home. This study shows the utility of expanding on micro-level approaches to understanding community living arrangements among older persons. Future investigations should include measures of the policy environment, transportation constraints and opportunities, and a more complete array of indicators of health and social services oriented toward helping elderly persons maintain their independence.     

欧洲生育支持政策效果的评估及启示——基于模糊集定性比较的分析

采用组态比较方法中的模糊集定性比较分析,系统性检验了2000—2018年29个欧洲典型国家社会情境和现行生育支持政策的条件组合与生育率变化的关系,试图为我国借鉴欧洲国家生育支持政策提供新的研究思路。通过欧洲各国三类生育支持政策(育儿津贴、生育假期和儿童照料设施供给)与三类社会情境的条件(经济发展水平、性别平等及家庭重视文化)进行必要条件检验,得到五类影响生育率的组态方案。通过将不同社会情境下各国生育支持政策的实施效果与我国国情的比较和讨论,本研究提出,我国生育支持政策的出台要充分考虑地区差异:对于性别较为平等的经济发达地区,大力发展儿童照料设施和有针对性的育儿津贴可以稳定生育率;对于性别平等较差的西部欠发达地区,育儿津贴更能提高生育率;在性别差距较大、重视后代的经济发达地区,较慷慨的生育假期和提供儿童照料设施双管齐下会有助于提升生育水平。