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Around a decade ago, Chad Dale watched as some of his friends started to leave Seattle. They wanted to stay in an urban environment, but the city was too expensive for them to have all the things that they wanted to have, Dale says. His friends who were beginning to have kids wanted backyards and guest rooms for visiting in-laws; they looked for single-family houses in the suburbs. But Dale, a developer, wondered whether there could be a different solution. What if he and several friends joined together to build their own apartment buildingand all lived in the same place? [Photo: Andrew Storey/courtesy Johnston Architects] Some friends had already bought a vacation home together on nearby Whidbey Island, and they liked the sense of community there. That house, with a single bathroom used by eight people, wasnt designed for communal living. But Dale realized that it would be possible to construct a new building based on the values that they shared. He and his wife, along with 10 other familiesincluding two from the Whidbey Island projectstarted plotting what the development could look like. They decided to build apartments in a range of sizes, from 500 square feet to 2,000 square feet, based on what each family needed. They also wanted to include 24 units that could be rented out to others. And the development would be filled with shared space. [Photo: Andrew Storey/courtesy Johnston Architects] When they found a lot for sale in Seattles Phinney Ridge neighborhood, they also bought a full-size lot next door to use as a huge yard for all of their children. Everybody shares in the cost of that through rents, Dale says. But more importantly, theres a betterment that happens because there are other kids there. Youre not bummed that youre sharing, youre happythe experience is improved. The building, completed in 2023, has several other shared spaces that go beyond what a typical apartment building offers. A huge rooftop deck includes a large greenhouse with dining tables inside and a firepit outside. (The building, appropriately, is named Shared Roof.) Theres a guest suite that residents can use for visitors. A soundproof room is designed for kids to practice drums or play in bands. An on-site gym goes beyond a standard shared fitness room to include the best equipment; the building financed that effort by renting the space to personal trainers, so its used by the outside community as well as residents. [Photo: Andrew Storey/courtesy Johnston Architects] Residents also share resources like tools. The goal is to live together and then determine what else we want to share, says Dale. Weve talked about everything from electric bikes to a pickup truck. If you use the pickup truck three times a year, it’s not worth it. And it’s annoying when you have to go rent from U-Haul. But if you have 35 groups using it three times a year, then maybe it makes sense. [Photo: Andrew Storey/courtesy Johnston Architects] The friends wanted to make the building as sustainable as possible, and its now on track to get LEED Platinum certification, the highest rating from the green building platform. Solar panels mounted over the roof double as a canopy for the deck space. The building has heat pumps and ventilation systems that recover energy, along with energy-saving electric heat pump dryers. On the ground floor, Dale worked to find new businesses that would add to the neighborhooda bakery, a tap room for a brewery, a wine shop, and an Italian restaurant. The retail space surrounds a courtyard thats open to the public. [Photo: Andrew Storey/courtesy Johnston Architects] From the outside, it looks like a fairly standard apartment building. Inside, its clearly different: The friends who invested in the project each made their own choices about how they wanted their own apartment to look. None of theunits stack, says David Fuchs, principal at Johnston Architects, which designed the building. They’re all different shapes and sizes. Inside, everyone got to choose from several different finishes, so the apartments are unique. The financial arrangement is also unique. “We realized very early that if youre going to ask people who could otherwise be purchasing their own piece of property to live in an environment like this, then you also need to provide a way for them to be an investor, because oftentimes thats a significant component of their retirement income or of their nest egg, Dale says. So we came up with the solution to allow folks to be investors as well as tenants. They calculated that the return from the investment could potentially be similar to the return from owning and selling a single-family home. Three outside investors also joined the project without planning to live on-site. [Photo: Andrew Storey/courtesy Johnston Architects] Each of the original families had the option to invest as much as they wanted in the project; the final investments ranged from $50,000 to millions. Because of that, it made sense to have the families pay market-rate rent and then separately earn investment income from the building. (Twenty percent of the other units are offered at a more affordable rate to moderate-income tenants, through a city program that offers a tax break to developers who include affordable apartments.) Initially, the concept was a tough sell to banks. “When we started, I was so excited about the idea that I’d go out and tell everybody, Look, we’ve got this crazy idea where we’re going to have tenants who are also owners, Dale says. “And for the most part, I just got blank stares from the groups that I was trying to get financing from, like, ‘What the hell are you talking about?'” [Photo: Andrew Storey/courtesy Johnston Architects] He realized that he needed to explain it differently: An LLC owns the building, and the LLC has members, as in most apartment buildings. The difference is that some of the members are also tenants. Starting with a core group of longtime friends as tenants transformed the feeling of the building. “The people who live here now treat each other wildly differently than in a typical apartment building,” he says. “They treat the building differently. And then that all rubs off to the people who aren’t [investors] as well. Walking around in this space, people are happier. They’re engaged with each other.” Apartment living is underrated, Dale says. If someone wants social interaction, it’s immediately available. If something breaks, the building manager can deal with it instead of the tenant. “In the U.S., we’ve got a funny way of idolizing single-family homeownership,” he says. “Apartment living is pretty incredible. In terms of function and livability, it’s actually maybe the best way to live, particularly when you’re in an environment where there are other people that you enjoy being around.”
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Knowing the calorie content of foods does not help people understand which foods are healthier, according to a study I recently coauthored in the Journal of Retailing. When study participants considered calorie information, they rated unhealthy food as less unhealthy and healthy food as less healthy. They were also less sure in their judgments. In other words, calorie labeling didnt help participants judge foods more accurately. It made them second-guess themselves. Across nine experiments with more than 2,000 participants, my colleague and I tested how people use calorie information to evaluate food. For example, participants viewed food items that are generally deemed healthier, such as a salad, or ones that tend to be less healthy, such as a cheeseburger, and were asked to rate how healthy each item was. When people did not consider calorie information, participants correctly saw a big gap between the healthy and unhealthy foods. But when they considered calorie information, those judgments became more moderate. In another experiment in the study, we found that asking people to estimate the calorie content of food items reduced self-reported confidence in their ability to judge how healthy those foods wereand that drop in confidence is what led them to rate these food items more moderately. We observed this effect for calories but not for other nutrition metrics such as fat or carbohydrates, which consumers tend to view as less familiar. This pattern repeated across our experiments. Instead of helping people sharpen their evaluations, calorie information seemed to create what researchers call metacognitive uncertainty, or a feeling of I thought I understood this, but now Im not so sure. When people arent confident in their understanding, they tend to avoid extreme judgments. Because people see calorie information so often, they believe they know how to use it effectively. But these findings suggest that the very familiarity of calorie counts can backfire, creating a false sense of understanding that leads to more confusion, not less. My coauthor and I call this the illusion of calorie fluency. When people are asked to judge how healthy a food item is based on calorie data, that confidence quickly unravels and their healthiness judgments become less accurate. Why it matters These findings have important implications for public health and for the businesses that are investing in calorie transparency. Public health policies assume that providing calorie information will drive more informed choices. But our research suggests that visibility isnt enough, and that calorie information alone may not help. In some cases, it might even lead people to make less-healthy choices. This does not mean that calorie information should be removed. Rather, it needs to be supported with more context and clarity. One possible approach is pairing calorie numbers with decision aids such as a traffic light indicator or an overall nutrition score, which both exist in some European countries. Alternatively, calorie information about an item could be accompanied by clear reference points explaining how much of a persons recommended daily calories it contains (though this may be challenging because of how widely daily calorie needs vary). Our study highlights a broader issue in health communication: Just because information is available doesnt mean its useful. Realizing that calorie information can seem easier to understand than it actually is can help consumers make more informed, confident decisions about what they eat. What still isnt known In our studies, we found that calorie information is especially prone to creating an illusion of understanding. But key questions remain. For example, researchers dont yet know how this illusion interacts with the growing use of health and wellness apps, personalized nutrition tools, or AI-based food recommendations. Future research could look at whether these tools actually help people feel more sure of their choicesor just make them feel confident without truly understanding the information. Deidre Popovich is an associate professor of marketing at Texas Tech University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
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Graduate students interested in an academic career after graduation day have often been told they need to be open to moving somewhere they may not want to live. This advice is because of how hard it is to get a tenure-track professor position. These days, this advice may be less relevant as graduate students are increasingly pursuing and ending up in careers outside of academia. Where graduate students want to settle post-graduation has potential consequences for communities and states across the country that depend more and more on a steady stream of skilled workers to power their economies. Locations seen as undesirable may struggle to attract and retain the next generation of scientists, engineers, professors, and other professions filled by todays graduate students. We are sociologists who are examining some of the factors that influence graduate students educational and career paths as part of a research project supported by the National Science Foundation. In March 2025 we distributed a survey to a sample of U.S.-based graduate students in five natural and social science disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and sociology. As part of our survey, we asked students to identify states they would prefer to live in and places where they would be unwilling to go. To some extent, our findings match some past anecdotes and evidence about the varying number of applications received for academic positions across different states or regions. But little data has directly assessed students preferences, and our survey also provides some evidence that some states policies are having a negative impact on their ability to attract highly educated people. Most preferred, most unwilling For our study, we built our sample from the top 60 graduate programs for each of the five disciplines based on rankings from U.S. News & World Report. We received responses from nearly 2,000 students. Almost all of these students98%, specificallyare pursuing PhDs in their respective fields. As part of our survey, we asked students to identify locations where they would prefer to live and also those where they would be unwilling to live after finishing their graduate program. For each of these questions, we presented students with a list of all states along with the option of outside of the United States. Just looking at the overall percentages, California tops the list of preferred places, with 49% of all survey-takers stating a preference to live there, followed by New York at 45% and Massachusetts with 41%. On the other hand, Alabama was selected most often as a state students said theyd be unwilling to move to, with 58% declaring they wouldnt want to live there. This was followed by Mississippi and Arkansas, both with just above 50% saying theyd be unwilling to move to either state. Clusters of preference While the two lists in many respects appear like inversions of one another, there are some exceptions to that. Looking beyond the overall percentages for each survey question, we used statistical analysis to identify underlying groups or clusters of states that are more similar to each other across both the prefer and unwilling questions. One cluster, represented by California, New York, and Massachusetts, is characterized by a very high level of preference and a low level of unwillingness. About 35% to 50% of students expressed a preference for living in these places, while only 5% to 10% said they would be unwilling to live in them. The response of outside of the United States is also in this category, which is noteworthy given recent concerns about the current generation of PhD students looking to leave the country and efforts by other nations to recruit them. A second cluster represents states where the preference levels are a bit lower, 20% to 30%, and the unwillingness levels are a bit higher, 7% to 15%. Still, these are states for which graduate students hold generally favorable opinions about living in after finishing their programs. This cluster includes states such as Colorado, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey. A third group of states represents locations for which the rate of preference is similar to the rate of unwillingness, in the range of 10% to 20%. This cluster includes states such as Minnesota, Delaware, and Virginia. The fourth and fifth clusters consist of states where the rate of unwillingness exceeds the rate of preference, with the size of the gap distinguishing the two clusters. In the fourth cluster, at least some students5% to 10%express a preference for living in them, while around 30% to 40% say they are unwilling to live in them. This cluster includes Florida, Montana, South Carolina, and Utah. Almost no students express a preference for living in the states contained in the fifth cluster, while the highest percentages40% to 60%express an unwillingness to live in them. This cluster includes Alabama, Kansas, Oklahoma, and South Dakota. Signs of current politics Many factors influence our preferences for where we want to live, including family, weather, and how urban, rural, or suburban it is. The politics of a community can also influence our perceptions of a places desirability. Indeed, political factors may be of particular concern to graduate students. In recent years, some states have taken a more hostile stance toward specific academic disciplines, institutions of higher education in general, or professions that are of interest to graduate students. While states such as Florida and Texas have been leading such efforts, many others have followed. Interestingly, our statistical grouping of states finds that students unwillingness to live in states such as Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Ohio is higher than we would expect given those states corresponding preference levels. For example, about 10% of students selected Texas as a place they would prefer to live in after graduation. Looking at other states with similar preference levels, we would expect bout 10% to 20% of students to say they are unwilling to live in Texas. Instead, this percentage is actually 37%. Similarly, 5% of students say they would prefer to live in Florida. Other states with this preference rate have an unwillingness rate of around 35%, but Floridas is 45%. Although our data does not tell us for sure, these gaps could be a function of these states own policies or alignment with federal policies seen as hostile to graduate students and their future employers. These findings suggest that communities and employers in some states might continue to face particularly steep hurdles in recruiting graduate students for employment once they finish their degrees. Christopher P. Scheitle is an associate professor of sociology at West Virginia University. Katie Corcoran is a professor of sociology at West Virginia University. Taylor Remsburg is a graduate research assistant in sociology at West Virginia University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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