Monthly Archives: June 2012

“The [NYC 420 square foot] Studio Apartment with 6 Hidden Rooms”

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I’ve highlighted innovative small spaces before (see arecent post on a two-level 130 square foot apartment in Paris) and here is another one: a 420 square foot New York City studio has six hidden rooms.

In the Soho neighborhood of New York City, where living space is both expensive and limited, Graham Hill and his team at LifeEdited have turned a 420 square foot studio apartment into the Petri dish of future urban living.

The single room studio apartment has been gutted and remodeled with convertible walls and furniture that transform into six different living spaces. “I wanted it all,” says Mr. Hill in his TED talk from a year ago, “home office, sit down dinner for 10, room for guests, and all my kite surfing gear.”

You have to watch the video to get the full idea.

A few quick thoughts about this:

1. What makes this space work are the movable walls. I wonder if this could catch on in larger homes.

2. There is no mention here of how much a place like this would cost. The suggestion is that they could be made cheaper if mass produced but might the price still be out of the range of many people? Is this primarily for young professionals? If these are seen as fashionable or trendy, it could drive the price up.

3. Graham Hill and Bill Weir suggest this may be the wave of the future in urban living. I’m not so sure. How many Americans actually want this as opposed to would take this only because something larger/cheaper isn’t available?

4. There is mention toward the end of the video that “stripping away the excess found in the McMansion has countless benefits.” Hill gets his facts right: we now have bigger new homes (about 2,500 square feet today compared to about 1,000 in the 1950s) and smaller families. Yet, it is a lot to ask to have people downshift from a single-family home (and the average new size of 2,500 square feet is probably not a McMansion) to a New York City studio apartment.

Naperville moving forward with proposal for influential mixed-use Water Street development

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An important new development proposal in Naperville is back up for discussion:

Plans to develop the Water Street area of Naperville’s downtown are being revived after five years and now include a 130-room hotel.

However, the latest proposal will have to overcome concerns from city officials and residents about issues of height, density and traffic congestion.

Marquette Companies, under the name MP Water Street District LLC, presented its revised plan to the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission this week. The 2.4-acre site is bounded by Aurora Avenue on the south, the DuPage River on the north, Main Street on the east and Webster Street on the west…

The current proposal calls for a 130-room Holiday Inn Express and Suites; 61 to 65 apartments; retail, restaurant and office spaces; and a 550-space parking garage. There also would be a plaza and connection to the Riverwalk.

The tallest portion of the development would be the hotel, which has a tower that reaches just above 90 feet…

Bob Fischer, vice president of the Naperville Area Homeowners Confederation, said the plans will “canyonize Water Street.”

“Allowing this kind of height and density along the Riverwalk will forever diminish it as the crown jewel of our downtown,” he said.

I think there are two big points about this that are not mentioned in the article:

1. One important feature of this mixed-use development is that it is south of the DuPage River. In other words, this development would firmly move the downtown across the river. This is no small matter: while there is development on the south side, it is primarily smaller and single-family home. Naperville’s downtown is popular (see the parking issues) but it is not clear that a majority of Naperville residents want the downtown to expand into more residential areas.

2. This development speaks to a broader issue: is Naperville ready for denser development? While the community added about 100,000 people between 1980 and 2008 as it expanded primarily to the south and west, there is really no open land left in the community. Thus, to grow, the city must approve denser development. The downtown is the logical place to start: it is near a train station, it has a number of restaurants and stores, and seems to be quite popular. Yet, projects like this could push Naperville into a new era of mixed-use and denser development as opposed to the primarily single-family home development that characterized the post-war era.

I’ll be tracking what happens with this proposal as both of the issues I cited above are likely to generate a lot of public discussion and comment. This could be a turning point in Naperville’s history: should the downtown expand in a big way and should the city pursue denser development in desirable locations?

UPDATE: I wouldn’t be surprised if the project is approved but the height is limited to something like fifty or sixty feet (five or six stories). Ninety feet would be quite high for downtown Naperville though approving that height could indicate some willingness to to pursue taller projects in the future.

Getting drivers to change their commuting patterns by giving them chances to win money

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Scientists have developed a new way to fight the congestion battle: if drivers change their commuting patterns, they would have a better chance of winning money.

Some urban areas, including London, Stockholm, and the capital of Singapore, have tried disincentives to discourage rush-hour driving. These congestion-pricing schemes have achieved some success, but problems persist. And implementing them is politically difficult; New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg abandoned his early effort to pare traffic in the Big Apple through commuter charges. But a growing number of transportation experts believe the same technology that enables cities to track cars and charge a fee when they enter designated congestion areas can be used to implement schemes that people will accept more readily. Rather than punishing old commuting habits, they reward new ones. For participants, opting to avoid rush-hour traffic means both saving time, and boosting their odds of winning a prize.

Instead of buying lotto tickets, participants in the Singapore program shift their commutes to off-peak hours to earn credits, which can be traded for chances to win cash. Participants earn one credit per kilometer traveled by rail, and three credits per kilometer for rail trips made during the hour before or after morning rush hour (7:30 to 8:30 a.m.). They can pick one “boost day” per week, when each kilometer traveled by rail earns five credits.

At Stanford, where the project is supported by a $3 million U.S. Department of Transportation grant, drivers who live off-campus and shift their commutes up to one hour outside the morning and evening rush hours can earn 10 cents per off-peak trip. That’s the boring, sure-fire option. Alternatively, they can use credits to play a simple online social game that randomly doles out cash prizes from $2 to $50. Cars are tracked using a small radio-frequency identification tag mounted to the windshield.

More than 17,500 Singapore commuters have enrolled in the pilot program, while just over 1,825 have enrolled in the Stanford project. And it seems these efforts to change travel behavior using games, or carrots, rather than sticks (such as congestion pricing) are paying off. Balaji Prabhakar, a Stanford engineering professor who developed both projects, said during a recent talk at the university’s campus in Palo Alto, California, that 11-12 percent of users in Singapore have shifted off-peak. Men tend to shift later, he said, while women generally shift earlier.

Is this the “gamification” of driving? Providing positive incentives rather than “punishing” people seems like it would be more effective in the long run. This reminds me of the new programs some insurance companies are rolling out where you get rewarded for driving more safely by having your rates reduced. At the same time, who is paying for these prizes? I assume this is funded by grant money or something like that but is this sustainable in the long run?

I wonder if there would be some unintended consequences of programs like these: instead of having horrible peak driving periods, traffic will simply be congested at more hours. Is it better to compress bad traffic into a certain number of hours a day versus spreading out the more congested hours? What happens if there are too many drivers all the time and incentives (or disincentives) wouldn’t really change much? I suppose we are a ways from this in some places but techniques like this don’t get at larger issues of having too many cars altogether.

h/t Instapundit

Chicago housing values reverse 49 month slump – with a $100 gain

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The latest data about median housing values in the Chicago region suggests prices are back up – but only a little:

May’s 0.1 percent year-over-year gain in the median sales price of existing homes in the nine-county Chicago area broke a 49-month losing streak that stretched to April 2008. The last time they showed a year-over-year increase was March 2008, the month John McCain earned enough delegates to secure the Republican presidential nomination.

Does that $100 finally signal a turnaround for Chicago’s housing market, particularly because, from May 2010 to May 2011, the median price dropped 10.8 percent?

“What it signals is the first stage of the bumpy ride at the bottom,” said Geoffrey J.D. Hewings, director of the regional economics applications laboratory at the University of Illinois. “I think the trend is going to be modestly positive, but there may be months where it is not.”…

Not every county recorded improvement in its median price, but in Cook County, which accounts for more than half the Chicago area’s sales activity, the median price rose 3 percent, to $170,000, from $165,000 in May 2011. And in Chicago, where overall sales rose 19.6 percent, May’s median sales price of $203,000 was up 6.8 percent from a year ago, largely because of an 11.9 percent gain in the median sales price of single-family homes.

My take: the housing recovery will still take quite a while. A $100 increase the region probably doesn’t mean much and it is not until we see a number of consecutive months of an uptick that we can claim this is a trend. Even then, it could take years (decades?) to make up the drop in housing values.

 

Trulia survey: an increased number of Americans are looking for bigger homes

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Perhaps the McMansion is indeed making a comeback: a Trulia survey suggests more Americans are looking at bigger homes.

In Trulia’s latest American Dream survey, 17 percent more homebuyers said they envisioned buying 2,600 sq. foot homes this year than in 2011. What’s more, the number of people who set their sights on super-sized digs (3,200 sq. foot-plus) has nearly doubled from 6 percent to 11 percent.

“It turns out that new-home builders spotted this growing appetite for size,” Trulia notes. “The Census recently reported the average home constructed increased from 2,392 square feet in 2010 to 2,480 square feet in 2011.”

The only problem is our eyes might be bigger than our budgets…

There’s also the housing market itself to consider, as Trulia points out:

“Although newly constructed homes are getting bigger, most inventory is existing homes, including foreclosures, and the current inventory of for-sale homes skews smaller than most people’s idea…Meanwhile, the super-sized category –3,200-plus–is pretty much on the money, but the majority of available homes fall in the smaller size categories–800 to 2,000 square feet. That means many Americans may have to downsize their dreams to fit a smaller reality.”

Granted, this is still a small segment of the market (under 20% of homebuyers) but there does appear to be more interest in larger houses. I wonder if this suggests the housing market will continue to be bifurcated: wealthier homebuyers will look for larger new homes with amenities while the lower end buyers will scour smaller homes, short sales, and foreclosures.

A call to “begin creating synthetic sociology”

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Two academics call for “synthetic sociology”:

Well, it’s time we begin creating synthetic sociology. Along with Nicholas Christakis, I recently laid out the potential for this new field:

We wanted to see if this could be done in humans. Like crabs, humans have specific kinds of behavior that can be predicted, in groups. To harness this, we created a survey on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, surveying lots of people at once.

We asked a couple hundred people to complete a string of 1’s and 0’s, and asked them to make it “as random as possible.” As it happens, people are fairly bad at generating random numbers—there is a broad human tendency to suppose that strings must alternate more than they do. And what we found in our Mechanical Turk survey was exactly this: Predictably, people would generate a nonrandom number. For example, faced with 0, 0, there was about a 70 percent chance the next number would be 1.

From this single behavioral quirk, it is theoretically possible to construct a way in which a group of humans can act as what is known as a logic gate in computer science. By running such a question through a survey of enough people, and feeding those results to other people, you can turn them into what computer scientists call a “NOR” gate—a tool to take two pieces of binary input and yield consistent answers. And with just a handful of NOR gates, you can make a binary adder, a very simple computing device that can add two numbers together.

What this means is that, given sufficient numbers of people, and their willingness to answer questions about random bits, we can re-deploy humans for a purpose they were not intended, namely to act as a kind of computer—doing anything from adding two bits to running Microsoft Word (albeit really, really slowly).

On one hand, it sounds like we are far from using these methods to have humans finish complicated tasks yet, on the other hand, this continues to build upon research about social networks and how information and other traits can be passed along and built on in a group of people. As these academics suggest, we have come some distance in recent decades in understanding and modeling human behavior and advances are likely to continue to come in the near future.

This also isn’t the first time that I have heard of social scientists using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for studies. For a relatively small amount of money, researchers can find a willing group of participants for experiments or other tasks.

The Chicago Fire and Bridgeview: another case when building a sports stadium is not a good investment

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Residents of the southwest Chicago suburb of Bridgeview are not happy about reports that Toyota Park, built to be the home of the Chicago Fire, has created a lot of debt for the community:

The exchange came Wednesday night at Bridgeview’s first Village Board meeting since the Tribune published a report detailing the small southwest suburb’s financial woes tied to its biggest bet, the 20,000-seat Toyota Park.

The taxpayer-owned home of the Chicago Fire has come up millions of dollars short of making its debt payments since opening in 2006. Meanwhile, the town has nearly tripled property taxes in less than a decade, even as the town offset some of the financial sting by taking out more loans to help make payments.

In all, the blue-collar suburb is now more than $200 million in debt.

In comparing towns’ debt to property values, the Tribune found Bridgeview had the highest debt rate in the Chicago area. Much of the debt is tied to a stadium deal in which the newspaper found insiders landed contracts and town officials enriched their political funds with stadium vendor donations.

The stadium might have helped put Bridgeview on the map (leading to higher status/prestige) as it is the only suburban facility in the Chicago area that is home to a major sports team (despite arguments in the past from the Bears and White Sox that they might move to the suburbs). But this level of debt seems insurmountable for a village of 16,500 people who have a median household income of $42,073, below the national average.

This should be a reminder for many communities, small suburbs or big cities: sports stadiums are not the deals they may be made out to be. Yes, it could bring or keep a major sports team. But, the public debt may take decades to repay, can lead to higher tax burdens for residents who are likely not all attending the games, doesn’t necessarily mean that a host of entertainment businesses will open up nearby to serve stadium patrons, and the primary people who benefit are the sports teams (who get new stadiums for which they don’t have to pay the whole bill) and a small number of local leaders and businesses. It may be nice to mentioned on TV every once in a while (if you can find the more minor channels the Fire tend to be relegated to) and be the politician who helped bring the major team to town but it often isn’t a great deal for the whole community.

Several reasons Americans may be moving toward rejecting sprawl

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An architecture writer sums up some of the arguments of why Americans might be starting to turn against sprawl:

In short, builders are recognizing that buyers (and renters, too!) value the neighborhood as much as — if not more than — the house. And what they want from that neighborhood might not be McMansions and four-car garages after all. Resale value may not in fact trump all else. Young and old, whether they’re in the city or the suburbs, want to walk to places like restaurants and shops. (And let’s stop talking about the integration of things like cafes, public transit and bike racks as “urbanizing” an area, which only reinforces the divide between two entities that are divided enough already.)

People have begun to wake up to the fact that the more time spent in the car means poorer health and less time with their families — and they’re seeking shorter commutes. They’re interested in smaller homes that are easier to maintain (and less expensive to heat and cool). Young millennials and older baby boomers are also showing less and less interest in car ownership and a corresponding greater interest in public transit, walking and biking. And again, it’s likely that we’re all less interested in continuing to discuss “urban” and “suburban” as dueling polar opposites — and more interested in recognizing there’s mutual benefit to some overlap.

The aforementioned changes point to the fact that a paradigmatic shift in our concept of the American dream is underway. And this shift is not just because of the recession, says Gregory Vilkin, managing principal and president of MacFarlane Partners, quoted in that USA Today piece, “It’s no longer the American dream to own a plot of land with a house on it and two cars in the driveway.”

And here is her summary of the people still defending sprawl:

And yet … there are still those who are having none of it. And they are a vocal and often breathtakingly well-funded minority. For them, the sprawl that characterized the years leading up to the financial crisis remains a dream to strive for. Any threat to the McMansion of yore is equated to “feudal socialism” (I kid you not). And these opponents not only excel at mobilizing the troops but at mastering the message. Take a look at the rhetoric of, say, the Texas Republican party, which recently passed “Resist 21” in opposition to Agenda 21, the United Nations’ sustainable communities strategy adopted in 1992. Taken together, proclaims Resist 21, those strategies aspire to “the comprehensive control of all our population and its reduction to sustainable levels and the socialization of all activities by their relocation to highly restricted urban settlement centers.”

Nothing like cherry-picking the more extreme arguments…there is not much defense of the “traditional American suburbs” here. At the same time, I thought this was a decent summary of some of the arguments out there though, of course, it remains to be seen which side Americans will choose. Is “everyone” really interested in merging urban and suburban life? Opponents of sprawl can continue to tout the advantages of denser living but we don’t have the proof yet that we are headed toward a full “greatinversion” back to city life.

Another note: there is a small paragraph in this article suggesting that government could do more to promote alternatives to sprawl. This is true but one doesn’t have to go all the way to a Agenda 21 level of involvement. Local governments could provide tax breaks or incentives for denser (and more affordable) housing. Gas taxes could be raised. More money could be spent on mass transit. The government could revoke the mortgage interest deduction. Different levels of government could cede some of their own power (such as 45 mosquito abatement districts in DuPage County) in order to work together on a metropolitan level and solve problems together. And so on. The federal government helped promote suburban sprawl throughout much of the 21st century – what would happen if the playing field started tilting in the other direction? Is any attempt to provide alternatives to sprawl “feudal socialism”?

 

Richard Florida: homeownership not related to economic growth and development

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Richard Florida looks at some data and argues that homeownership is not related to several dimensions of economic growth and development:

The economic growth and development of cities and regions is generally thought to be driven by three key factors: innovation, human capital, and productivity. Homeownership, it turns out, is not related to any of them.

Take innovation and high-tech industry. Homeownership bears little relation to either, being weakly negatively associated with the concentration of high-tech industry (-.20) and not associated at all with innovation (measured as the rate of patenting).

Or consider the percentage of college graduates or share of highly-skilled knowledge/creative jobs. Again, nothing. The arrow in fact points in the wrong direction. Homeownership is weakly negatively correlated with both the share of college grads (-.27), and with the creative class share of the labor force (-.30).

What about productivity? Once again, no connection to homeownership. Homeownership is weakly negatively associated with economic output per capita (-.19)…

It used to be that homeownership signaled and led to economic growth. But that relationship was tied to the industrial era, when building and buying more homes primed the pump of America’s great assembly-lines, increasing demand for cars, appliances, televisions, and all manner of consumer durables. Those days are gone. The United States is a now knowledge and service economy; less than ten percent of Americans work in some form of manufacturing and just 6.5 percent are engaged in actually producing things. The stuff Americans buy is largely made offshore.

I wonder how this relates to the recent campaign from the National Association of Realtors regarding how building homes would lead to more jobs. While having more construction might lead to some good short-term outcomes, Florida is arguing here that homeownership doesn’t have a large influence on the economy.

Going beyond the economic impact of homeownership and building homes, these statistics don’t quite capture the cultural influence of homeownership in American culture. At the same time, the numbers might suggest that policymakers shouldn’t go all in for promoting homeownership for its economic benefits. Selling homeownership can be done by linking it to values of individualism or the American Dream but the larger economic angle doesn’t hold up.

I wonder what the story would be utilizing data that allow analysis beyond correlations…

Naperville cites traffic concerns and proximity to a residential area in rejecting McDonald’s near downtown

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Naperville’s City Council voted Tuesday against a proposal from McDonald’s to build a restaurant just south of downtown. The cited reasons: traffic and proximity to a residential area.

The City Council unanimously turned down the proposed fast-food restaurant at the southeast corner of Washington Street and Hillside Road citing concerns about traffic at an already busy intersection and locating a 24-hour business close to homes…

The proposal was backed by both city staff and the plan commission. However, in a discussion that lasted more than an hour, councilmen focused on the potential for traffic tie-ups…Addressing the myriad of traffic concerns, William Grieve, a traffic engineer hired by McDonald’s, said a traffic study showed travel time through the intersection would only increase by about a second and double drive-through lanes would prevent backups.  Stillwell said the company would be diligent about addressing any problems if they arise…

But traffic wasn’t the only concern. Neighbors said they feared there would be increased noise and lights coming from the restaurant if it was allowed to stay open 24 hours as proposed.

Both Judy Brodhead and Joe McElroywere among the councilmen who agreed and said having a restaurant open 24 hours so close to homes was a deal-breaker regardless of the traffic issues.

I’m not surprised by this result: not too many residents would willingly choose to have a McDonald’s nearby and few people want more traffic. However, this seems a bit strange for a few reasons:

1. Washington is already a fairly busy road.

2. This intersection is near homes but there are already strip mall type establishments at this corner. In fact, I’m not sure there any homes that back up directly to this site as the DuPage River is to the east and all of the corners at the intersection are already occupied. The McDonald’s would replace a Citgo gas station, not exactly a paragon of civic architecture. Across the street is a Brown’s Chicken establishment. The other two corners include a cemetery and another strip mall type establishment.

3. The traffic study from McDonald’s seems to suggest there wouldn’t be any issues.

4. I wondered if this had anything to do with protecting the downtown but it is three blocks south of the downtown so it shouldn’t contribute to congestion problems there.

I wonder if there isn’t more to this story. Indeed, here are a few more details from the Daily Herald:

Council members admitted they were initially thrilled that McDonald’s wanted to open a downtown store on the southeast corner of Hillside and Washington streets. But when it came down to a plan that included five zoning variances, three landscape variances and a sign variance, they just weren’t lovin’ it.

So the McDonald’s required too many deviations from Naperville’s guidelines? While the restaurant might have needed 9 variances, the city could have made it happen if they really wanted to. Just how much did the pressure from the neighborhood matter?