Monthly Archives: September 2013

When you build a Walmart in Chicago, you better make sure public transit goes there

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A new Walmart under construction on Chicago’s South Side has a problem: public transit doesn’t make it all the way to the store.

CTA bus routes No. 106 East 103rd and No. 111 111th/King Drive currently stop at Cottage Grove Avenue, which is several blocks from the store that is part of a $135 million development.

Beale said he is outraged and he threatened to convene public hearings on the CTA bus routes if the situation is not rectified by the time the Wal-Mart opens this week.

The alderman said the retail developer built the site to accommodate buses with a bus turnaround and nearby sidewalks for commuters. He said CTA officials told him it would cost $680,000 a year to extend the two bus routes to the Wal-Mart. But Beale said the costs would be offset by the additional riders making trips to the store.

CTA officials, acknowledging that they signed the 2011 contract Beale described, said late Monday afternoon that the transit agency is working with the developer and Beale and will implement service “as soon as possible.”

It sounds like the CTA is behind on this one. At the same time, this provides an interesting contrast to the typical suburban or exurban Walmart which relies on a large parking lot full of drivers. Big box stores are still relatively rare in denser big cities, even as companies like Walmart and Target (their first Manhattan location opened three years ago) are looking to expand. Thus far, the Walmarts in Chicago are more on the edges of the city, lending themselves to driving.

It would be interesting to hear how the companies themselves, local residents, and the city describe how the big box experience changes in an urban area. This would be ripe for participant observation as the store opens and both changes and is influenced by the surrounding urban neighborhood.

Kotkin splits US into 10 areas, predicts which ones will grow

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Joel Kotkin takes a look at which areas of the United States will grow in the next decade. Here are a few of his predictions:

Over the next decade, the Left Coast should maintain its momentum, but ultimately it faces a Northeast-like future, with a slowing rate of population growth. High housing prices, particularly in the Bay Area, are transforming it into something of a gated community, largely out of reach to new middle-class families. The density-centric land use policies that have helped drive up Bay Area prices are also increasingly evident in places like Portland and Seattle. The Left Coast has the smallest percentage of residents under 5 outside the Great Lakes and the Northeast, suggesting that a “demographic winter” may arrive there sooner than some might suspect…

The vast region from Texas to Montana has often been written off as “flyover country.” But in the past decade, no nation in America has displayed greater economic dynamism. Since the recession, it has posted the second-fastest job growth rate in the U.S., after the Inland West, and last year it led the country in employment growth. The Dakotas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Kansas all regularly register among the lowest unemployment rates in the country.

The good times on the Plains are largely due to the new energy boom, which has been driven by a series of major shale finds: the Bakken formation in North Dakota, as well as the Barnett and Permian in Texas. The region’s agricultural sector has also benefited from soaring demand in developing countries…

Once a sleepy, semitropical backwater, the Third Coast, which stretches along the Gulf of Mexico from south Texas to western Florida, has come out of the recession stronger than virtually any other region. Since 2001, its job base has expanded 7%, and it is projected to grow another 18% the coming decade…

More babies and the migration of families, including immigrants, to this low-cost region suggest an even larger political footprint for the Southeast in the decades ahead. Population growth has been more than twice as fast since 2001 as in the Northeast, a trend that is projected continue in the next decade. The region looks set to become smarter, more urban and cosmopolitan, and perhaps a bit less conservative.

Common factors in the analysis: demographics, particularly the influence of immigration; which industries are booming, with an emphasis on technology and oil/gas; and government restrictions/debt. These are common themes for Kotkin. Two quick thoughts:

1. It would be interesting to see how Kotkin’s predictions hold up. One smart move was to restrict this to ten years out which limits some of the unpredictability. But, predictions by experts are notoriously wrong.

2. The prognosis for the South, Southwest, Plains, and some of the West is much better than the big city Midwest or the Northeast. There has been quite a shift to these areas in recent decades in the United States but are we close to a point where these areas take over? Just how much staying power does a region like New York have – would it take decades to overcome its inertia?

Chicago looking for redesigns for 49 public spaces

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The City of Chicago invites proposals for redesigning 49 public spaces:

Chicago is pulling the next lever in its multi-part bike & pedestrian improvement project, dubbed Make Way For People. After beginning to address critical shortfalls in bicycling infrastructure, easing hazardous pedestrian crossings, and adding new spaces for spontaneous leisure, the City is looking to imaginatively rebuild its 49 public plazas. A Request for Proposals (RFP) has gone out, reports Streetsblog Chicago, and will reward one private entity with a contract to tackle at least 30 of the citywide locations. The project will build on modest interventions like CDOT’s “People Spots” and Architecture for Humanity’s ACTIVATE! design competition that spawned design interventions to a handful of neglected public spaces.

Unlike “People Spots”, “People Plazas” will work with existing gathering spots— spots that could generally use sprucing up, livening up, and year-round attractions. CDOT Project Director Janet Attarian tells Streetsblog’s John Greenfield she suspects the RFP will be most interesting to nonprofit groups and that awarding the contract in bulk will ensure lesser spaces in less desirable neighborhoods don’t get short shrift in the bidding. According to the RFP, the city will give $50,000 in seed money in the first year of the contract to help attract cultural programming to the plazas, with ongoing revenue available through advertising, retail, and grant opportunities. Existing positive activities must be retained (i.e. farmers market) and, obviously, the contractor has to have some maintenance know-how. Proposals must reach CDOT by Monday, September 30.

This sounds like it has the potential to be an exciting program, giving groups with closer connections to neighborhoods the ability to develop spaces that can enhance social life. However, I wonder what kind of groups would have the ability to submit proposals and then carry them out over an extended period of time.

Additionally, this sounds like it be an interesting “natural experiment” by looking at the outcomes for these different public spaces given the different organizers as well as demographics around the spaces.

Restricting McMansions, aka “White Whales”

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This story of trying to change zoning regulations to avoid teardown McMansions is fairly standard – but it also includes a new name for McMansions: “white whales.”

Residents in East Rockville are considering creating what’s known as a neighborhood conservation district in an effort to curb mansionization—the proliferation of large homes that seem like mismatches among the smaller ones that surround them, including an East Rockville residence derisively referred to as “The White Whale.”…

East Rockville is mostly comprised of single-family homes built in the early 1940s and during the World War II housing boom. But despite the city’s revised zoning code in 2009, developers have still been able to build massive residences—many of them functioning as rentals for multiple families—that just seem out of character in East Rockville, neighbors complain.

East Rockville residents have publicly voiced their concerns over preserving the integrity of their neighborhood, having testified at Rockville City Council meetings and writing letters to city officials…

Meanwhile, the city council has been discussing the problem, but can’t seem to agree on how to go about fixing it—preserving property owner’s rights, attempting to legislate taste, and other unintended consequences are only a few of the issues complicating things.

I have not heard this term for McMansions before. The photo accompanying the story portrays one of these “white whales” and it is indeed large. But, there are a couple of issues here:

1. Size is one issue. Lots of teardown controversies involve this. From this one photo, it looks like this is a large house and it also is large compared to nearby homes.

2. A second issue is the actual look of the house. When using white to describe the home, I presume critics are referring to the rather bland front dominated by white siding. Building guidelines can suggest certain styles and design elements. Interestingly, one critique of McMansions is that they their exteriors are too odd, perhaps mixing architectural styles, perhaps utilizing features and materials not found in the region, perhaps having ill-proportioned features. Neighborhoods likely want to set an “appropriate” design that isn’t too outlandish but isn’t that bland.

If you won’t want your neighbors to build a “white whale,” what color plus animal name would you prefer they build? We need a catchy alternative…

Another note: the Urban Dictionary has several definitions for “white whale.” The first doesn’t necessarily cast the McMansion opponents in the most positive light: “Something you obsess over to the point that it nearly or completely destroys you. An obsession that becomes your ultimate goal in life; one that your life now completely encircles and defines you.” The second might be more to McMansion opponents’ liking: “Term used to describe an opponent/nemesis who is extremely difficult to defeat. The term can also apply to miscellaneous games or events which are difficult to master.”

 

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Mapping England’s emotional mood in real-time

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A group of researchers have developed a real-time map of England’s emotions based on Twitter:

The team, from Loughborough University, say it can scan up to 2,000 tweets a second and rate them for expressions of one of eight human emotions…

The team, from the university’s new Centre for Information Management, say the system can extract a direct expression of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, shame and confusion from each tweet.

The academics said that using the Emotive software to geographically evaluate any mass mood could help police to track potential criminal behaviour or threats to public safety.

It may be able to guide national policy on the best way to react to major incidents, they added.

There have been several projects like this in recent years. The algorithms to sort out all of the language must be intricate. But, I’m skeptical about two things. One is a sampling issue. Just how many people in England are using Twitter? In the United States, the figures about regular Twitter users are still quite low. You can map the moods of Twitter users but this doesn’t necessarily represent the larger population. The Twitter population probably trends younger. At the same time, responding to vocal responses on the web or on Twitter might be effective for public relations. A second issue is how exactly tracking moods could be used to help police. So police will be sent to places that show high concentrations of disgust or anger and pay less attention to places experiencing happiness? Or, such a system might alert police to trouble spots? I suspect it is more complicated than this yet I imagine such talk could make Twitter users nervous about how exactly their moods will be analyzed.

The of effects tech company shuttle buses from San Francisco to Silicon Valley

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A number of Silicon Valley workers live in San Francisco and a number of the biggest tech companies offer private shuttle buses for employees. This has led to changes in a number of San Francisco neighborhoods:

Take the public transportation provided by corporate shuttle buses from the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook, and others. It’s not news that these shuttles, and the big digital tech companies that run them, are changing the fabric of San Francisco as we’ve known it. What feels new is that it’s not enough to say that change is coming soon. It’s already, very much here…

On one hand, some have called the shuttles “a vivid emblem of the tech boom’s stratifying effect in the Bay Area” because they allow the “techy progeny” of Silicon Valley to be “launched into SF proper.” That the shuttles are “alienating everyone who isn’t in technology” — or that there’s simply too much tech for one city to take.

Others are of the mind that it’s simply time to get over it and recognize a new reality; cities change, neighborhoods rise and fall. That in fact a paradox of Silicon Valley is in its “distributing meaningful equity” to ordinary people who wouldn’t otherwise access such wealth. (And then there’s the logic that wonders whether public transportation is yet another bit of infrastructure that should be upended by the Valley’s “meritocratic“ spirit.)…

What we’re talking about isn’t simply the replacement of presumably authentic recent immigrants by their presumably younger, whiter, or better educated new neighbors. What we’re talking about is the replacement of an entire system of urban inter-relationships, built up over generations and stratified in ways that make sense within an urban context — now short-circuited by the inexorable demands of the (suburban) digital technology landscape.

This is a reminder of a few things:

1. The arrival of “the creative class” is not just a positive occurrence. This is a group many big cities would love to have for their wealth (think of the tax money!) as well as their innovative and creative spirits. Yet, as the term gentrification describes, this group can at the least change the character of places and more problematically push out existing residents.

2. This hints at the interdependence within metropolitan regions. Tech workers may like their jobs in Silicon Valley but San Francisco offers a more exciting, urban, and cultured place to live. And, San Francisco benefits from its business connections to Silicon Valley. It would also be interesting to consider the role of San Jose which offers a bigger city closer to Silicon Valley but one that has less of a reputation for social life.

With these changes, it puts officials in San Francisco in an interesting position. Existing urban residents tend to resist major changes to their neighborhoods. But, as noted above, cities have a hard time turning down new money.

Congressional town halls not necessarily indicative of public opinion

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I heard two news reports yesterday from two respected media sources about Congressional members holding towns halls in their districts about possible military action in Syria. Both reports featured residents speaking up against military action. Both hinted that constituents weren’t happy with the idea of military action. However, how much do town halls like these really tell us?

I would suggest not much. While they give constituents an opportunity to directly address a member of Congress, these events are great for the media. There are plenty of opportunities for heated speeches, soundbites, and disagreement amongst the crowd. One report featured a soundbite of a constituent suggesting that if he were in power, he would put charge both the president and his congressman with treason. The other report featured some people speaking for military action in Syria – some Syrian Americans asking for the United States to stand up to a dictator – and facing boos from others in the crowd.

Instead of focusing on town halls which provide some political theater, we should look to national surveys to American public opinion. Focus on the big picture, not on towns halls which provide small samples.

Building McMansions in Minecraft

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Check out this recently constructed McMansion in Minecraft. Here is a description of the structure:

Finally, it’s here! I have built an amazing McMansion!

This grandiose house features:

• A large entrance and foyer,
• a large living room with a high ceiling (and a balcony of the second floor hallway),
• multiple smaller rooms that could be sitting rooms, a dining room, a kitchen, etc.,
• a back porch, and
• 10 bedrooms! Gee whiz!

I have built two other McMansions before (both on the Iciclecraft server), but this is by far the best one.
Feel free to paste it into your own Minecraft world. However, if you use it in multiplayer, please credit me as the builder.

Sounds like McMansion features. The only thing missing here is a full neighborhood of mass-produced McMansions. And the tags for the post reinforce the McMansion idea:

Tags:Mcmansion, Mansion, Manor, House, Grand, Large, Big, Grandiose, Land Structure

I suppose the quick answer for why someone would build a McMansion in Minecraft is because they can. Perhaps they like building houses. But, to intentionally design a kind of home that is generally viewed negatively begs for a better reason. If you could build anything, why a McMansion?

Science problem: study says there is not enough information in methods sections of science articles to replicate

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A new study suggests the methods sections in science articles are incomplete, making it very difficult to replicate the studies:

Looking at 238 recently published papers, pulled from five fields of biomedicine, a team of scientists found that they could uniquely identify only 54 percent of the research materials, from lab mice to antibodies, used in the work. The rest disappeared into the terse fuzz and clipped descriptions of the methods section, the journal standard that ostensibly allows any scientist to reproduce a study.

“Our hope would be that 100 percent of materials would be identifiable,” said Nicole A. Vasilevsky, a project manager at Oregon Health & Science University, who led the investigation.

The group quantified a finding already well known to scientists: No one seems to know how to write a proper methods section, especially when different journals have such varied requirements. Those flaws, by extension, may make reproducing a study more difficult, a problem that has prompted, most recently, the journal Nature to impose more rigorous standards for reporting research.

“As researchers, we don’t entirely know what to put into our methods section,” said Shreejoy J. Tripathy, a doctoral student in neurobiology at Carnegie Mellon University, whose laboratory served as a case study for the research team. “You’re supposed to write down everything you need to do. But it’s not exactly clear what we need to write down.”

A new standard could be adopted across journals and subfields: enough information has to be given in the methods section for another scientist to replicate the study. Another advantage of this might be that it pushes authors to try to read their paper from the perspective of outsiders who are looking at the study for the first time.

I wonder how well sociology articles would fare in this analysis. Knowing everything needed for replication can get voluminous or technical, depending on the work that went into collecting the data and then getting it ready for analysis. There are a number of choices along the way that add up.

Report shows Chicago region’s poverty split equally between city and suburbs

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Mirroring larger American trends, a new report finds poverty is split evenly between Chicago and its suburbs.

The “Poverty Matters” report, released today by the Heartland Alliance’s Social IMPACT Research Center, says the suburbs accounted for 34 percent of the area’s poor in 1990. Now, the suburbs are home to 50 percent of the area’s poor…

“We were pretty shocked that it balanced out to 50-50,” said research associate Jennifer Clary. “It definitely flies in the face of the image of affluence in the suburbs.”…

Since poverty is a complex problem, the Heartland Alliance report states there is no single reason for the shift. Causes include growth in low-wage work, stagnating wages and shifts in policies for low-income housing, according to the report…

In the suburbs, the poverty rate increased by 33 percent for foreign-born people, 26 percent for native-born whites, 31 percent for native-born Latinos, and 12 percent for native-born blacks from 1990 to 2011.

Given what is happening elsewhere, these findings shouldn’t been too surprising. But, as the report notes, now the onus is on suburban communities to adjust to changing populations.