Nathanael Lauster

Exploring the distribution of food stores in British Columbia: Associations with neighbourhood socio-demographic factors and urban form

Several studies have identified disparities in access to food retailers among urban neighbourhoods with varied socio-demographic characteristics; but few studies have examined whether key zoning and siting mechanisms described in the urban planning literature explain differences in food store access. This study assessed associations between socio-demographic and urban planning variables with the availability of large supermarkets and stores selling fresh food within one kilometre buffers from residential addresses and the proximity to the closest food stores across 630 census tracts in British Columbia, Canada. Multivariate regression results indicated that neighbourhoods with higher median household income had significantly decreased access to food stores. Inclusion of urban planning factors in multivariate models, particularly housing and transportation considerations, explained much of the relation between area income and food store access, and were significant predictors of food store availability and proximity. Public health research and practice addressing food availability would benefit by incorporating theoretical perspectives from urban planning theory.

Housing and Family: An Introduction

This paper introduces the Housing Studies special issue ‘Housing and Family’. The issue consists of a collection of papers in which a number of connections between housing and family issues are highlighted. Three themes are addressed: the influence of the family of origin on housing characteristics and housing situations; the links between household events and housing events at the micro level of households; and homeownership as a context for parenthood at the macro level of countries. It is concluded that family is as much a context for understanding housing needs and residential outcomes as housing is a context for understanding family events.

Housing and the Proper Performance of American Motherhood, 1940-2005

Current approaches to the link between family and housing tend not to closely examine cultural change. This paper attempts to provide a theoretical framework, rooted in symbolic interaction, dramaturgy and critical theory, well suited to the study of cultural change. This critical dramaturgical framework is applied to explore the changing link between housing as a stage prop and the privileged performance of motherhood. It is argued that redefinition of the proper performance of motherhood by the privileged constitutes an important aspect of cultural change, making positive evaluations of motherhood more difficult to achieve without a proper house. This results in an increase in stage fright, or women avoiding motherhood because they feel ill prepared to perform it properly, and an increase in the devaluing of certain categories of mother. US census data collected through the IPUMS project is used to provide evidence of these trends, where available, and further avenues of research are suggested.

Of Marriages and Mortgages: The Second Demographic Transition and the Relationship between Marriage and Homeownership in Sweden

Past research has established a positive relationship between transitions to marriage and transitions into ownership. This paper explores how this relationship is changing by following a population as it advances through the Second Demographic Transition. Following a rational choice model for tenure decisions, it is hypothesized that the Second Demographic Transition is likely to affect the relationship between partnership and tenure in two ways. First, the preferences for ownership unique to marriage are likely to decline. Second, the importance of an extra income, especially for men, is likely to increase. Evidence is found supporting both these assertions for the population of Gävle, Sweden, between 1975 and 1990.

Culture as a problem in linking material inequality to health: on residential crowding in the Arctic.

Two problems are noted in the process of measuring material inequality and linking it to health across cultural boundaries. First, comparative measurements may be used as the basis for policy making, which ends up disciplining cultural minorities. In this way, policies intended to relieve disparities can actually have the effect of extending the power of the dominant group to define appropriate cultural understanding of the world for the minority group. Second, comparative measurements may inaccurately inform theories of how inequality works to influence health and well-being. To the extent that culture mediates the relationship between inequality and outcomes of interest to researchers, those ignoring cultural differences will fail to adequately assess the impact and significance of material inequality. In this paper we discuss and illustrate these problems with reference to the study and measurement of overcrowding and its effects on health and well-being for Inuit communities in Nunavut, Canada.

The motherhood penalty and the professional credential: inequality in career development for those with professional degrees

Transitions from education to work constitute a distinct set of situations where discrimination is likely to occur. Gender beliefs generally disadvantage women, and when coupled with beliefs regarding parental responsibility, tend to heavily disadvantage mothers. Yet we suggest that professional credentials create a divided labour market, with ameliorative effects. Credentials tend to match specifically to jobs and replace other means of determining the performance expectations of various job candidates. This should be especially true in the public sector, where hiring procedures are more transparent. As a result, we hypothesise that mothers with professional credentials will be less disadvantaged within the occupational market matched to their credentials, especially in the public sector. Data from Sweden, following 43,646 graduates with professional degrees into the labour market, generally support this interpretation, though substantial motherhood penalties remain in many professions. We briefly discuss the implications of these findings.

A Room to Grow: The Residential Density-Dependence of Childbearing in Europe and the United States

It is argued that cultural processes linked to the demographic transition produce new density-dependent fertility dynamics. In particular, childbearing becomes dependent upon residential roominess. This relationship is culturally specific, and that the cultural nature of this relationship means that professional and managerial classes are likely to be particularly influenced by residential roominess, while immigrants are less likely to be influenced. Hypotheses are tested linking residential roominess to the presence of an “own infant” in the household using census data from the Austria, Greece, Portugal, Spain, and the United States. Roominess predicts fertility in all countries, but to differing degrees.

How much of too much? What inspections data say about residential clutter as a housing problem

Abstract How big of a housing problem is residential clutter? In this paper, we draw upon inspections data in Vancouver to both estimate the size of the problem and detail how it is observed and constituted through municipal regulatory processes. We contrast the inspections approach to residential clutter with the mental health approach, which focuses on hoarding disorder. Inspections data indicate the problem of residential clutter is potentially larger than might be expected by the epidemiology of hoarding disorder, and also point toward the many risks associated with clutter. Using our best estimate, approximately seven per cent of low-income, dense, single-room occupancy (SRO) housing units inspected were identified by inspectors as problematically cluttered, indicating a sizable problem. Larger buildings and those managed as social housing were more likely than other buildings to have many units identified as problematically cluttered. Strikingly, for given buildings, estimates of problematic clutter tended to remain relatively stable across time, inspector, and inspection method.

In Defense of Housing: The Politics of CrisisIn Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis, by MaddenDavidMarcusePeter. New York: Verso Press, 2016. 230 pp.

bility to historical change, of social character. Social character is also a psychodynamic concept (rooted in psychoanalysis) capable of illuminating psychological (and social) ambivalence and conflict. Compared with habitus, the concept of social character provides a far more energetic conception of human psychology. Langman and Lundskow write that ‘‘social character manages individual drives’’ (p. 28). They point to the irrational mechanisms by which individuals reinforce their social character by filtering reality through motivated reasoning, denial, splitting, and projection. Langman and Lundskow’s book exemplifies the power of psychoanalytically informed sociology to illuminate cultural processes and, in this way, makes a powerful case that the rekindling of interest in psychoanalysis would do much to revive sociological theory. One way, however, in which Bourdieu’s use of habitus does have greater specificity than Langman and Lundskow’s use of social character is in relation to class. Whereas Bourdieu pays attention to the distinctness of class cultures, Langman and Lundskow present American social character as a feature of individuals that is relatively standardized across classes. The authors are certainly under no illusion about America as a classless society; they stress the extreme level of inequality in contemporary America, and class conflict is a key dimension of their historical analysis. They do differentiate social character by class in arguing that members of the capitalist elite are likely to exhibit social dominator, destructive, and narcissistic traits (pp. 11–14, 112–113, 138–152). ‘‘[M]ost of the top 1% didn’t become rich and powerful because they gave away (or even invested) their money for the common good,’’ the authors remind us (p. 11). This means that these elites are typically closer to one end of the ‘‘polarities’’ that run through American character. In their account of the present day, it is clear that American social character is not homogeneous, but highly polarized, and that seismic changes are underway in the psychologicalcultural makeup of the United States, carried by more sexually liberated and open-minded younger cohorts (pp. 256–268). Nevertheless, ‘‘American character’’ appears in Langman and Lundskow’s account to transcend class, although the typical traits are displayed in extreme, and increasingly pathological, form at the top of the socio-economic ladder. The authors follow Philip Slater in suggesting that, at the opposite cultural-psychological polarity, Americans also carry a suppressed longing for collectivity. This raises the question of to what extent the cultural-psychological suppression of collectivism is itself bound up with class power—that is, the suppression of working-class organization. The book addresses the history of trade unionism in terms of elite reactions (p. 111) but does not examine to what extent what Rick Fantasia calls ‘‘cultures of solidarity’’ within the working class have been sustained within social character. This reader looks forward with anticipation to the authors’ next book, to be titled A Sane Society in the 21 Century, which, they tell us, ‘‘will . . . focus on the inclusive, compassionate, and progressive side’’ of American character (p. xiii).