Monthly Archives: April 2013

Texas Governor Rick Perry advertising for Illinois businesses to move to Texas

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There is a new radio spot running in the Chicago area featuring Texas Governor Rick Perry suggesting Illinois businesses should move to Texas. Listen to the radio spot here and check out the associated web site texaswideopenforbusiness.com. Here is what the website says:

If you’re a business owner in Illinois, I want to express my admiration for your ability to survive in an environment that, intentionally or not, is designed for you to fail.

With rising taxes and government interference on the upswing, your situation is not unlike a burning building on the verge of collapse. If you’re thinking of “just riding it out” you might want to reconsider.

There is an escape route to economic freedom… a route to Texas. The Lone Star State has proven that limited government, low taxes, and a pro-business mindset work wonders when it comes to job creation and a robust economy. If you’re ready for a fresh start in a place that appreciates job creators like you, it’s time to check out Texas.

This echoes the glee in Indiana and Wisconsin when Illinois raised taxes several years ago.

Texas is indeed growing at a rate that a number of states, including Illinois, can only envy. Texas is known for warmer weather (actually, quite hot weather), lower taxes, and is a Republican-dominated state in recent decades. Metropolitan areas like Dallas, Houston, and Austin are booming. And yet, there are still businesses that are willing to locate in and near Chicago. Perhaps it is the world-class city with international connections as well as unique character. Perhaps it is the base of human capital with both high-skill and low-skill workers. Perhaps Chicago’s location in the middle of the country and at the center of transportation networks still matters to some.

I imagine many businesses are already aware of the business climate differences between Illinois and Texas. Is this just an attempt to trumpet the successes of Texas and poke Illinois in the eye?

More young couples buying a home together before getting married

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Buying a home together before getting married is becoming more popular:

Now, the results of a soon-to-be-released survey from Coldwell Banker indicate that today’s young couples are also more likely to buy homes together before marriage. Nearly one-quarter (24%) of polled married couples ages 18 to 34 said that they purchased a home before they were married. Among married couples ages 45 and up, just 14% said that they bought a house together before tying the knot. Couples in the Northeast stand out as particularly likely to buy real estate before getting hitched: Just 60% in the survey waited until marriage to purchase a home, compared to 72% in the tradition-minded South, where people tend to marry younger (and therefore, poorer).

In a phone interview, Dr. Robi Ludwig, a psychotherapist and Coldwell Banker’s official “lifestyle correspondent,” said that buying a home together has become “the new engagement ring” for some young couples. They’re committing to purchasing real estate as a couple regardless of whether they’ve set a wedding date. Some even forego lavish weddings and honeymoons in order to cover the down payment and a chunk of the mortgage. “Millennials have a very pragmatic state of mind,” said Ludwig. “They know that they have an opportunity here, with low mortgage rates and low housing prices. And they think, ‘We’re moving toward marriage anyway, so let’s buy.’ It makes sense.”…

For young people who are in committed relationships and interested in homeownership, Ludwig said that the benefits associated with shopping for a home together go well beyond the prospect of owning property. While considering the very big step of buying a house, couples are forced to deal with exactly the kinds of issues that they should discuss before marriage. “When purchasing a home, there is a need to be transparent on many levels,” said Ludwig. “You must be upfront with your partner, and you also have to get real honest with yourself.” It’s possible to get married without actually knowing how much money your wife earns, or how much credit card debt your husband accrued in college. Salaries, debt, and more are all on the table when the time comes to get a mortgage, however.

Couples also must obviously figure out where they want to live, and envision how long they’re likely to live there. Even topics like how many kids you want to have come up—because that will factor in to the location, size, and style of home you buy. “It’s easy for couples to not think or talk about these things,” said Ludwig, “but they’re forced to once mortgages and banks are involved.”

This seems like an extra-expensive way to learn about each other before marriage. But, it does fit with a narrative that couples should be economically secure before getting married. Plus, couples do need a place to live…

Driving isn’t cheap: average car costs $9,100 a year

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Americans may love driving but it comes with a price. Here is a new cost estimate per car from AAA:

Owning a car will cost the average American driver more than $9,100 this year, the AAA has revealed.

The automotive club unveiled its annual study of driving costs on Tuesday and found that the average sedan owner will rack of $0.61 for every mile on the road. 

SUV drivers are in for even more pain in the wallet – $0.77 per mile or $11,600 a year.

The AAA estimates include nearly all expenses of taking to the road – from the cost of the car itself to gasoline, tires, insurance and repairs.

The data estimates that Americans drive 15,000 miles a year and drive a standard-size sedan like a Toyota Camry or Ford Fusion…

The survey assumes drivers buy a new car and keep it for five years.

So the figures change a bit depending on what kind of car it is and how old the car is but this is still pretty pricey. The common American cost-benefit analysis might look like this: a car gives me freedom, independence, and the ability to live more where I want to live (based on factors like housing prices and desired community) versus it costs a decent amount to drive. Actually, I suspect few people actually think about the total cost of driving as it tends to be experienced in increments: you fill up for gas here, pay insurance here, pay for repairs another time.

Strong suburban reaction to a roundabout turns to praise

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I was struck by a reaction of a few Lake County residents to a roundabout built several years ago:

When the first roundabout was proposed in Lake County, the response was extreme.

“People were so skeptical, I would seriously get phone calls from people saying there would be deaths at that corner and it would be on my conscience,” recalled Lake County Board Member Ann Maine, of Lincolnshire, who is also president of the Lake County Forest Preserve District.

More than two years after the roundabout opened at Everett Road and Riverwoods Road as an alternative to a traditional intersection, Maine said she hasn’t been stuck in a backup at the intersection and gets occasional notes from people who say they love the change.

That is quite a reaction to a roundabout and the favorable comments afterward are notable. There are studies about such things but I’m guessing those who had such a strong reaction to the roundabout either didn’t read such studies or wouldn’t believe their findings anyway. But, it is just a different way of configuring an intersection that most people get used to fairly quickly and can actually be more efficient.

The human eyes and hours needed to review CCTV footage to find terrorists

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A common tool in fighting urban terrorism today is the closed-circuit camera system. However, it still takes a tremendous amount of personnel and time to go through all of the available tape. Here is a summary of what was required to put together the narrative of the 2005 bombing in London:

Six days after the attack, police start linking these events together. “By 13 July, the police had strong evidence that Khan, Tanweer, Hussain and Lindsay were the bombers and that they had died in the attacks.” But it was no small feat: Police collected 80,000 CCTV tapes, amounting to hundreds of thousands of hours of footage. The London police brought on some 400 extra officers to help with the grunt of it.

“The scale is enormous,” the narrative concluded.

As Alexis Madrigal writes at The Atlantic, although we have the technology to capture and record every inch of a city in real time, the process very much depends on a human eye to analyze. “Right now, there is no video software that can do this type of analysis,” he writes, “not even in a first-pass way.”

Even so, given the history here, it seems likely that given enough time, the perpetrators of the bombing will be found on camera. Whether the police can connect the thread among all the disparate sources of information is another matter.

In other words, you can collect big data but it still requires humans to make sense of it all. I imagine there is a big opportunity here for someone to create reliable recognition software but this may be a task where humans are simply better.

Wired says the data in Boston is being crowdsourced but the investigation will not:

It is unclear whether law enforcement had overhead cameras mounted in helicopters or other aircraft over the Marathon. (Boston-area cops don’t have spy drones — yet.) But the era of readily-accessible commercial imaging tools provides a twist on the exponential growth of surveillance tech used by law enforcement and homeland security. The data on your phone can become an adjunct to police during the highest-profile investigations.

That isn’t an unfettered benefit to police. The military has found that its explosion of imagery data has stressed its ability to process it, to the point where its futurists are hunting for algorithms that can pre-select images a human analyst sees. Davis requested that any spectator providing media showing the attacks indicate the time they collected the data so police “don’t need to go through the electronic signature.”

Lots of work to do.

A new way to fight pollution in Chicago: cement that absorbs smog

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Chicago is the first American city to lay concrete that absorbs smog:

There are many sustainable technologies designers can utilize these days to make a project more Earth- and people-friendly, but smog-eating cement isn’t the most talked-about – until now. The City of Chicago is pioneering the use of a revolutionary type of cement that is capable of eradicating the air around it of pollution, potentially reducing the levels of certain common pollutants by 20 – 70% depending on local conditions and the amount of exposed surface area.

Photocatalytic cement isn’t exactly news – it was developed by the leading Italian cement maker Italcementi for the Vatican in honor of the 2,000th anniversary of the Christian faith. The Seat of the Catholic Church commissioned the construction of a new church to commemorate the event and wanted surface material that would retain its new appearance despite Rome‘s high levels of air pollution.

The cement that Italcementi developed uses titanium oxide that, when exposed to natural sunlight, triggers a chemical reaction that catalyses the decomposition of dirt or grime on the cement’s surface; thus, it is self-cleaning. What further research in Europe uncovered, however, was that this cement possessed pollution reduction properties that not even Italcementi could have foreseen, capable of cleaning up smog in adjacent air – up to 2.5 meters away – by breaking down the nitrogen oxides which are the result of burning fossil fuels.

Naturally, this makes the photocatalytic cement a perfect paving material as it successfully reduces the amount of toxins expelled by vehicles and inhaled by pedestrians. Italy and other areas of Europe have already paved many of their roads with the revolutionary material, but Chicago is reportedly the first city in America to adopt it, laying down a thin, permeable pavement for the bicycle and parking lanes on Blue Island Avenue and Cermak Road.

There might be a few issues associated with this:

1. What is the relative cost of laying down this kind of cement compared to other road surfacing material? In Illinois, I’ve read before that laying asphalt is cheaper in the short term compared to concrete but more expensive in the long term because it has to be replaced more frequently.

2. Some may not like this news because if the cement can help fight pollution, people may pay less attention to the effect of cars.

Here is more information on this concrete from an article last October:

According to Nguyen, the titanium dioxide on the cement surface absorbs UV light and uses this energy to react with water vapor in the surrounding air.

The result of this reaction is a highly reactive particle known as a hydroxyl radical.

It is these unstable hydroxyl radicals that in turn decompose a host of other compounds in the surrounding air, including nitrous oxide, a harmful greenhouse gas released in car exhaust…

David Leopold, project manager for the Chicago Department of Transportation, did say the photocatalytic cement is more expensive than regular pavement, but the city expects to see considerable improvement in street-level air quality as a result…

Based on pre-installation estimates, “on a windless day up to about eight feet from the pavement’s surface, you can see demonstrated improvements in air quality,” said Leopold. “Coincidentally, that’s about the height of a person on a bike.”

We’ll see what happens if this concrete is used more widely.

Don’t paint your lawn green; use a microsphere colorant!

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Should your grass turn brown this year, don’t paint it green. Instead, use this product with microspheres that will keep your grass green for a year:

GetItGreenFrontGetItGreenFront

I am curious to see how effective this product is – though not curious enough to apply it to my own lawn. But, while I have not heard as much this year of the Scotts versus Pennington seed battle, it is good to know companies continue the arms race of keeping the American lawn green. This is both big business as well as referring to a cultural symbol for many: a verdant lawn (presumably surrounding a well-kept house) where a family or pets can frolic and enjoy their small slice of nature.

Another fun part of the product: scan that QR code!

Housing markets could benefit from Latinos who want to buy their first homes

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The executive director of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals says many Latinos want to purchase homes:

Q: Your report (“The State of Hispanic Homeownership” at NAHREP.org), assembles data from a number of private and governmental sources, and contends that the number of Hispanic homeowners has grown to 6.69 million in 2012 from 4.24 million in 2000 and that they represented 51 percent of the total net increase of 694,000 owner-households in the United States in 2012. Considering the nation’s economic circumstances, that sounds pretty good. Yet, you say they’re facing head winds?

A: Even to our surprise, Hispanic homeowners seem to be very resilient, especially coming off the (housing) crisis. Affordability is at an all-time high and a lot of Hispanics have jumped into the market recently. Some of the biggest factors in this are household formation, income trends and overall consumer confidence. They’re forming households at a faster rate than the general population. If you look at the market of Hispanic households, they’re much more likely to be made up of a husband and wife with children, (an arrangement that’s) much more aligned with the purchase of a home.

But there are a couple of major barriers to this trend continuing, and though difficulty in accessing mortgage credit is an important one, even more important right now is the lack of inventory of houses for sale…

The fulfillment of this scenario of Hispanics being a dominant force in future homebuying will require the industry to be able to adapt to cultural nuances. And basically, NAHREP is saying the industry isn’t there yet. Twelve years ago, when we started this organization, we were selling a vision that few people bought into. It’s not really like that anymore — the major players in housing now understand, or are starting to understand, how important the Latino market is.But there are nuances to working with the Hispanic market — there’s language, of course, and the likelihood of so-called “thin” credit files (that limit access to mortgages) within a culture where having debt is not a desirable thing.

The housing market could benefit from such a reservoir of buyers. For example, those baby boomers who want to unload their homes in the near future may just want to access possible Latino buyers. Plus, the one cited figure above seems to suggest that some of the uptick in housing in the country can be attributed to Latinos. But, assuming different groups in the United States want to or perhaps more importantly can, given the wealth differences in the United States, purchase homes is not a given. There are still big gaps in homeownership rates by race and ethnicity.

It would be interesting to hear how real estate agents and others in the real estate industry are really adjusting their methods for potential Latino customers.

Hoping Chicago can become a big data hub

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A fundraiser held by Tom Pritzker this weekend in Chicago was part of a plan to make Chicago a center for big data:

University of Chicago computer scientist Ian Foster pressed the clicker and up popped a map of the most sophisticated fiber-optic networks in the world.

On that map, at least, Chicago appeared to be the center of everything, a crossroads of information dwarfing Beijing, London and New York in importance.

Fiber-optic lines lace this city — because they are often laid along railroad lines. And the University of Chicago is working to use that geographic advantage to build the largest storage hub in the world for genetic and medical information, called the bionimbus cloud. The goal is to harness massive amounts of data and computing power to solve the riddle of diseases such as cancer.

Last week, Hyatt Hotels Corp. Chairman Tom Pritzker and his wife, Margot, hosted a fundraiser at the Park Hyatt Chicago to introduce the project to about 50 friends, including CDW Corp. founder Michael Krasny; Melvin and Ellen Gordon, the CEO and president of Tootsie Roll Industries, respectively; Crate and Barrel founders Carole and Gordon Segal; Wheels Inc. Chief Executive Jim Frank; and Charles Evans, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago…

Grasping the magnitude of the data the medical community needs to collect and analyze is almost impossible.

But understanding a railroad hub — and the transport of grain, meat or oil — is not.

“Business, innovation, discovery, jobs still depend on taking raw materials and turning them into refined products,” Foster said. “Often, nowadays, the raw material is data and the refined material is knowledge.”

This is an interesting comparison to make in Chicago, a city that heavily depends on its transportation facilities such as busy airports and the large percentage of US rail traffic that goes through the region and has served as a commodity trading center for decades. So why not data analysis and infrastructure? At the same time, I’m guessing Chicago has a ways to go compared to other tech and data centers like Silicon Valley and Seattle, let alone other places like Austin and Boston.

Fighting McMansions in Miami

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The group “Save Miami Beach Neighborhoods” is looking for help in fighting McMansions:

Miami Beach homes comprise a variety of architectural styles that reflect the history of our City, which is not yet 100 years old. Unfortunately, recent zoning changes have allowed for out-of-scale McMansions which threaten the historic character, authenticity and desirability of our single-family neighborhoods.

Our goal with Save Miami Beach Neighborhoods is to ensure that new construction is in line with existing neighborhood context. We want to stop oversized McMansions that are popping up seemingly all around us…

As homeowners and concerned residents, we must act to limit new construction size and scale before our neighborhood character is lost forever.

I would say the one photo of an 18,000 square foot McMansion in the neighborhood is pretty emblematic of what critics do not like about McMansions: large, taking up much of the lot, unusual design compared to the house next to it, and much larger than the next house (which is probably only 5,000 square feet).

At the same time, I wonder if outsiders would look at this and say it is simply an argument between wealthy people about something nebulous like “community character.”