Monthly Archives: April 2013

Plans in the Chicago region to help mitigate future flooding

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With the flooding that took place in the Chicago region in recent days, it is reasonable to ask what is being done to limit flooding in the future. Here is one answer from a regional expert:

Asked if costly and disruptive transportation chaos is inevitable, Josh Ellis, a stormwater expert with the Metropolitan Planning Council, offered some rays of hope.

“We can definitely do better. I’m not sure we’re willing to invest the amount of money needed to have an infrastructure that truly withstands a 100-year storm. When we built most of our infrastructure it was for a five- to 20-year storm standard.”

What’s slightly depressing is that current Metropolitan Water Reclamation District infrastructure and projects under way, including tunnels and reservoirs, will provide about 17 billion gallons of storage, Ellis calculates. Compare that to the 70 billion gallons or so that roiled Cook County alone in storms Wednesday and Thursday.

“Even when the Deep Tunnel is complete, the numbers don’t add up in our favor,” Ellis said. “We can do better, but I’m not sure we can ever solve this and have zero problems.”

So what can we do?

As individuals, it can come down to reducing the impermeable pavement on your property or cultivating a rain garden that holds stormwater temporarily.

On a wider level, it’s going to take expanding municipal stormwater systems, creating stream-side ponds to store rainfall and investing in green infrastructure, Ellis thinks.

“It’s about finding other places to put the water other than in big pipes … that’s what green infrastructure is,” he said. “It’s about finding ways for natural vegetation to prevent water from entering the storm system.”

Likely candidates for ad hoc stormwater storage include public entities with a lot of land — from schools with athletic fields to park districts.

The causes and consequences of flooding like this can be traced to human development. Critics of sprawl have noted for decades that flooding is one pernicious side effect: cover land with houses and asphalt and there is less place for water to go. Cover up natural wetlands and build close to waterways and this is going to happen every so often. Think of the concept of a retention pond; it is an admission that we have altered the natural landscape in such a way that we need to create a space for excess water to go.

I know some critics of sprawl would say the answer is to have less sprawl. Since this cat is out of the bag in many places in the United States, Ellis’ answers above are interesting: a combination of large-scale, regional projects would help as would more individual and municipal actions. Large projects like Deep Tunnel are impressive but they aren’t silver bullets. I’ve noticed more nearby communities have moved toward combining park land and floodplains. Thus, if flooding occurs, not many buildings are hurt and fewer people need to be evacuated.

This could also lead to broader questions: who is responsible for the flooding and its effects? Should individual homeowners bear the burden of protecting themselves and cleaning up? Should local communities? How about regional entities – how much power should they have to tackle such issues? This sort of problem requires coordination across many governmental bodies, calling for metropolitan approaches. It still strikes me as strange in the United States that individual homeowners may not know much at all about the flooding or water problems their property might have.

For a longer look at flooding and water issues in suburban sprawl, I highly recommend Adam Rome’s 2001 book The Bulldozer in the Countryside.

“The average Australian is a suburban Frankenstein”?

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One columnist is not pleased with the idea of the average Australian in the suburbs:

Earlier this month the Bureau of Statistics, apparently hoping to deter Wayne Swan from cutting its allocation in the May budget, made a grab for publicity with a report on the characteristics of “the average Australian”. In the process it broke its own rules.

The ABS applied mathematical magic to data from the 2011 census and sent the media off in search of a blonde brown-eyed 37 year old woman with two photogenic children aged nine and six, two cars and a mortgage of $1800 a month on her three bedroom home. Edna Everage’s granddaughter was born here (like her parents), describes herself as Christian, weighs 71.1 kg, and works as a sales assistant…

Start packing your bags. The ABS decision to build a suburban Frankenstein for the sake of a publicity boost risks returning us to the point in recent history when certain people were labelled “unAustralian” if their language or behavior did not match the world view of Alan Jones, John Laws, Neil Mitchell or Andrew Bolt.

The ABS has played into the hands of those titans of talkback who like to keep the message simple. They’re not interested in this qualifier the ABS included at the end of the report to salve its conscience: “While many people will share a number of characteristics in common with this ‘average’ Australian, out of nearly 22 million people counted in Australia on Census night, no single person met all these criteria. While the description of the average Australian may sound quite typical, the fact that no-one meets all these criteria shows that the notion of the ‘average’ masks considerable (and growing) diversity in Australia.”

The columnist may indeed be correct that the best way to do this would have been to use medians, rather than averages. But, the bigger issue here seems to be the idea that there is a “suburban mold” that Australians need to fit into. Not everyone likes this image as the suburbs are often associated with homogeneous populations, consumption and behaviors to keep up with the Joneses, and middle-class conservatism. Regardless of what the statistics say or whether a majority of Australians (or Americans) live in the suburbs, these suburban critiques will likely continue.

Designing a “disaster-proof home”

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There may be plenty of homebuyers who would like the assurance a “disaster-proof home” could provide:

Charles Roig, a longtime architect and owner of the company, and his twin brother, Daniel, a structural engineer, started working on the idea for disaster-proof homes 14 years ago. After more than 250 pages of structural calculations, they came up with a wood truss design and a patented wind-force resistance system that Charles Roig says can withstand winds of more than 200 mph that are associated with a category EF5 tornado…

“Every time I saw something on television and saw tornado destruction, it just ripped my guts out,” Roig said. “I couldn’t stop this.”

Gibbons likens the job of marketing disaster-proof houses to the early days of selling environmentally friendly homes because consumers have to buy into the concept before they’re willing to pay more for the features. She thinks collectors will be among the first to gravitate toward such a house.

Roig estimates one of his houses would cost 15 to 25 percent more than a conventionally built home. Most of the designs are single-story homes and contemporary in design.

We’ll see how popular these might become. Even in places where tornadoes are more common, they are rare events and the odds of one hitting a particular house are even smaller. But, a one-time occurrence may be enough to convince plenty of people that this is worthwhile.

See the R-Evolution Living website. Here is what they claim about their homes:

  • Tornado-proof, Hurricane-proof, Earthquake-proof
  • Secure against small blasts from inside or out AND Fire-proof possible
  • Able to resist the effects of Sink-Holes
  • Safe, affordable, attractive and GREEN
  • Made from renewable indigenous resources
  • Luxurious and upgradable
  • Backed by Insurance companies
  • Protecting you even while you sleep

With the heavy rains in the Chicago area in the last week, can they also promise to be flood-proof? And here is how the structure works, according to the FAQs page:

How does this structure work, exactly?
The main premise of a R-Evolution Living(TM) VPU, is a principal we refer to as an “Adjacency Structural Matrix” or ASM. ASM is a series of components that rely on the adjacent components in order to gain additional strength. So, instead of a wall required to be 16 feet thick in order to resist the immense force of an EF5 tornado’s 235 mile-per-hour wind, a series of patented components called “ribs” transfer the force to the adjacent members. The floors and ceilings, therefore, now accept the resistance to the force against the wall. Similarly, the exterior walls are now 11’-6” tall “beams” resisting the forces at the roof and at the end walls. This entire system is then linked together so that the unit acts as a living, single, extremely strong component.

Sounds interesting. It may just come down to the price differential…

Chicago’s explosive 19th century growth driven by excrement

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Whet Moser argues Chicago’s remarkable growth from frontier town to big city was the result of excrement and new sewers:

The city was literally shaped by excrement. Its biggest single period of growth, the growth that turned Chicago into the Second City by population, came in the late 1800s, when the city’s sewer and sanitary systems were the envy of what were then suburbs. Lake View Township (the whole of the northeast side from North Avenue up to Rogers Park), Hyde Park Township (the south side between Pershing, State, and 138th), Lake Township (the southwest side bordered by Pershing, State, 87th, and Cicero) all latched on to the city when sophisticated sanitary systems were beyond the reach of booming townships, which were tightly restricted by the state’s limits on local debt.

Read on for more of the story of Chicago’s sewers.

This story in Chicago was not wholly unique. The late mid- to late-1800s were a period when numerous suburban communities outside big cities like Chicago, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were annexed into the city. This annexation was approved by suburban communities for several reasons. First, as Moser notes, sewers and other infrastructure improvements like water and electricity were too expensive for small communities. Second, these communities wanted to be part of the big city and the status that came with that.

Yet, the story changes quite a bit from the 1880s onward when suburban communities started rejecting annexation efforts from big cities. The price of the infrastructure improvements dropped, putting them within reach of smaller suburbs. Cities were growing so fast that they couldn’t keep up with social problems as well as infrastructure improvements, limiting the status appeal of being part of the big city. Finally, an idealism was developing among the suburbs themselves as places people wanted to move to in order to escape the big city. By the 1920s, annexations had basically stopped.

This was a major turning point for most Northeast and Midwest big cities. Once annexations stopped and suburbs decided to go on their own, the boundaries of big cities became fixed. Later, as wealth and jobs fled the city for the suburbs, there were few opportunities for Rust Belt cities to expand their boundaries. In contrast, cities in the South and West (the Sunbelt) have had different annexation histories and many are much bigger in land area.

The quick rise and fall of “Pray for Boston” on social media

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One early response to the Boston bombings on social media, “Pray for Boston,” quickly increased and then quickly faded. Here is one reaction and possible explanation:

It was jarring. There was the weirdness of seeing so many references to the divine in spaces normally reserved for vacation photos and article links and quips about the news. It was tempting to think that all the social-media-fueled “prayers for Boston” somehow degraded the idea of prayer. As one Facebook commenter wrote on the Pray for Boston page: “Do you want me to DEFINE prayer? A solemn request for help or expression of thanks addressed to God or an object of worship. Prayer is solemn. Not a ‘like’ on facebook.”

It was also strange to see so many non-religious friends talking about prayer. The majority of my Facebook friends who wrote about praying aren’t especially observant. Maybe they go to church or synagogue on holidays, but not regularly—and they certainly don’t post about prayer under normal circumstances…

But I’m not sure that’s really what’s going on here. I don’t think the outpouring of post-Boston social-media prayer was fueled by a bunch of people who, in the face of tragedy, are suddenly eager to seek God. As Elizabeth Drescher writes in a well-done piece at Religion Dispatches, it didn’t take long for the “pray for Boston” meme to die; it was soon replaced by other, more practical sentiments. I noticed that, too. Here it is in graph form—check out how quickly the phrase “pray for Boston” surged on Twitter on Monday, and then how quickly it fell…

Drescher believes #PrayforBoston rose and fell so quickly because the prayers were never really about religion in the first place. They were more reflections of temporary anxiety and sadness than a lasting call to pursue belief:

I’ll throw out two related ideas:

1. Perhaps expressing prayer for victims of tragedy is an updated feature of civil religion in the United States. After tragic events, particularly deaths, it is common for politicians, media figures, and others to say something like “our thoughts and prayers are with the victims.” This is a shorthand for saying we care about the victims and are hoping for the best for them. Invoking prayer is a generic idea (such phrases are not explicitly about praying to “the Christian God” or Jesus) and works pretty well in a society where 80-90% still believe in God or a higher power. In other words, it is like saying “God bless America” at the end of major political speeches – it is a reference to religion but runs little risk of offending people and taps into some transcendent ideas about ourselves and the United States.

2. It is relatively rare to see sustained expressions of religious faith on social media. While most Americans still have some sort of religious or spiritual belief, social media tends to frown on such expressions. Perhaps this is related to the idea of Moral Therapeutic Deism as found and defined by sociologist Christian Smith – what may work religiously for you is fine as long as you don’t impose your values on me and “force” me to see this on my Facebook or Twitter feed may simply be too much. At the same time, just the fact that this social media meme even started at all indicates some kind of religious background of the users.

Replacing the “master” in master bedroom

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The term master bedroom is falling out of favor in the Washington D.C. area:

A survey of 10 major Washington, D.C.-area homebuilders found that six no longer use the term “master” in their floor plans to describe the largest bedroom in the house. They have replaced it with “owner’s suite” or “owner’s bedroom” or, in one case, “mastre bedroom.”

Why? In large part for exactly the reason you would think: “Master” has connotation problems, in gender (it skews toward male) and race (the slave-master).

Enter the owner’s suite…

Winchester, Pulte Homes, NV Homes and Ryan Homes (both under the NVR Inc. umbrella), Van Metre Cos. and D.R. Horton Inc. have all replaced “master” in their floor plans, some more recently than others…

Over time, “master” will be filtered out entirely, he said. The change is “just working through the industry, and finally, bingo, we got it.”

Randy Creaser, owner of D.C.’s Creaser/O’Brien Architects PC, said he ditched “master” in the early 1990s in his home designs. He vaguely recalled a few lawsuits brought against builders over the phrase. Pulte spokeswoman Valerie Dolenga said Pulte made the shift maybe three or four years ago.

How long will it take to get through the entire industry? This clearly hasn’t reached HGTV yet…

When Main Street features multi-million dollar houses

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Main Street evokes a particular image that is certainly challenged by the expensive homes on some of these Main Streets featured on Curbed. Here is one example:

Nantucket’s historic Main Street has been home to impeccably-maintained million-dollar mansions for decades, so it surprised the Times to find 141 Main in a shoddy state in 2001. That very house has since been fully renovated and listed for $7.9M. The historic columned manse, known as the George C. Gardner House, dates to 1835 and sits on a half-acre lot, but lacks any view of the ocean. There is, however, a private swimming pool, which, according to the listing, could no longer be installed under Historic District regulations.

As suggested by the Wall Street versus Main Street political rhetoric in recent years, Main Street is a powerful idea. Or look at the entry area in Walt Disney’s theme parks: a recreated version of the Main Street of the town in which he grew up.

In reality, real Main Streets don’t really matter as much today. Most Americans don’t live in small towns (with a majority of Americans now living in suburbs), many post-World War II communities don’t really have Main Streets, and businesses are now spread out all over the place in strip malls, shopping malls, business parks, and lifestyle centers. Americans are not as interested in running into neighbors and acquaintances on Main Street; we’d rather do so on Facebook.

These expensive listings suggest a transformation of Main Street away from the ideals of community life to the best private residences money can buy. Main Street, like many other things, can become commodified and can become exclusive by being priced out of the reach of many Americans. Additionally, these listings remind us of the variability across Main Streets. As we might guess, the Main Street of Santa Monica, California is going to be quite different than the Main Street of small town Kansas.

Retail redlining

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Residential redlining is well-known in the United States as a means for keeping whites and blacks living in separate neighborhoods. But what about retail redlining?

David Mekarski, the village administrator for the south Chicago suburb of Olympia Fields, told a startling story this week at the American Planning Association’s annual conference about a debate he recently had with a restaurant official. Why, he wanted to know, wouldn’t quality restaurants come to his mixed-race community, where the average annual household income is $77,000, above the county average?

The reply: “Black folks don’t tip, and so managers can’t maintain a quality staff. And if they can’t maintain a quality staff, they can’t maintain a quality restaurant.”

A gasp then rippled through the room in front of Mekarski. “This is one of the most pervasive and insidious forms of racism left in America today,” he says.

There’s a term for the phenomenon he’s describing: retail redlining. The practice is a more recent and less studied variation on redlining as it’s been historically recognized in the housing sector. In the context of retail, grocery stores, and restaurants, redlining refers to the “spatially discriminatory practice” of not serving certain communities because of their ethnic or racial composition, rather than their economic prospects.

This sounds like it is worth studying. This reminds me of research about food deserts and payday loan stores and pawn shops that show their relations tend to be related to social class and race. On one hand, the article suggests it is difficult in research to sort out the effects of economics and race as businesses consider a lot of factors for their locations. On the other hand, couldn’t research look at the locations of specific businesses, like Walmart or Walgreens, and see if they tend to be located in certain places over others when the economic characteristics are similar?

Looking for new houses that don’t give off a McMansion vibe

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A discussion of some new homes in Mt. Airy, Pennsylvania involves which homes do and do not give off a “McMansion vibe“:

“What’s THAT?” she said suddenly. “That’s just not okay.”

She was looking at two identical McMansions near the intersection of Lincoln Drive and Wayne Avenue, tall houses too big for their lots with boring beige stucco and stone that lacked the tell-tale Wissahickon schist sparkle.

I had a similar reaction to a house on the corner of Bryan and Durham, in a close-knit neighborhood known for the quality and variety of its Halloween decorations. It’s a neighborhood where kids play in the streets and everybody lives in almost identical row houses and twins with deep porches and sparkling stone walls. The new house looks like something from a soul-crushing suburban development, and the owners haven’t bothered to plant anything in the huge sunny side yard. The most notable feature of the house is a No Parking sign on the front of it.

So I was relieved when I looked at the listing for a new house being built on one of my favorite streets in Mt. Airy–St. Georges Road. It’s one of two planned homes by Blake Development.

From the looks of the plans, the house suffers a little from a common East Coast malady, multiple siding disorder, where the vertical exterior surfaces have a little too much variety. They’re stone, no they’re stucco, no they’re wood-like planks made out of concrete. But overall the house holds true to the character of the neighborhood. I’m encouraged by the interior shots of the developer’s other projects. The rounded door under the stairs is very Mt. Airy, and the kitchens
are good quality but not overly fancy. They’ve also won a bunch of awards for historic restoration.

It seems that the primary trait of what distinguishes between a McMansion vibe or not is whether the new home fits architecturally with other homes in the neighborhood. So, the definition of a McMansion could then differ quite a bit from place to place depending on whether the new home is near 1950s ranches, early 19th century Cape Cods, or other styles.

This could also lead to an interesting question: should new homes always fit in with existing homes? More broadly, should all new buildings fit in with nearby buildings? What happens when architectural styles change? I suspect the answer in practice is that it depends; not all homes or buildings are perceived as worth preserving and it often requires dedicated groups of residents or local actors to defend existing styles.

By the way, what neighborhood wants to be known primarily for “the quality and variety of its Halloween decorations”?

When the new McMansion next door blocks your solar panels

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This is a twist on the issue of a McMansion being built next door: what if it blocks your solar panels?

What happens when the community wants terrace houses and a developer says ”no thanks, I’d prefer 20 storeys”? Which anonymous expert then knocks him back to 18 and compliments himself on his Solomonic even-handedness? Who prevents the new ”complying” McMansion next door from overshadowing your new solar panels? Who decides who gets listened to?

One complaint about teardowns or larger buildings constructed next door is that they can block sunlight. This can be a big deal, particularly in cities where really tall buildings could block sunlight for blocks. Indeed, many cities have restrictions on the footprint and the shadows large buildings can cast.

But, I’ve never seen the argument that it isn’t really about experiencing natural light and is more about solar panels. How many people are affected by this issue? Do homeowners have a right to access direct sunlight so they can power their dwellings? This sounds like a new area for regulations.