Author Archives: legallysociable

A zoning paradox: sacred residential spaces are dependent on their market values

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The last page of Sonia Hirt’s book Zoned in the USA lays out a key paradox in the American zoning system:

Isn’t it ironic that American residential space is so sacredly residential (so protected from intrusion through land-use law, that is) only because it is so commercial (because it is an object of trade rather than an object of our sentiments)?

Perhaps this another piece of evidence that single-family homes are one of the biggest objects of American consumption as well as key pieces in the American economic system.

Video gambling in Illinois trickles money into local coffers

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As video gambling has spread across Illinois, who is making money? A little is going to local governments:

Video gaming revenues, after payouts, are taxed at a flat 30 percent rate. Five-sixths of those tax proceeds go to the state and one-sixth to the local government. Remaining revenues — the other 70 percent — go to the establishments, like Lucky Jack’s, and the video terminal operators.In the year ended in September, almost $12.7 million was played at Lucky Jack’s in Waukegan, and $11.7 million was won by gamblers, according to Illinois Gaming Board statistics. That means the terminals netted just shy of $1 million. Of that, more than $246,000 went to the state and about $49,000 to Waukegan. The rest is split between Lucky Jack’s and Gold Rush Gaming, its terminal operator…

In Waukegan, a resolution passed in 2014 earmarked virtually all of its cut of gambling revenues for the underfunded pension plans of its police officers and firefighters. Were it not for video gambling, the resolution said, taxpayers might have to cover the shortfall.

Not every municipality, however, is looking at the terminals as a cash cow. Chicago, Naperville and Arlington Heights don’t allow them…

The cities with the most video gambling terminals are Springfield, Rockford and Decatur. The counties with the most machines are Cook, Lake and Winnebago counties, the commission report said.

In an era when many municipalities are looking for every cent they can, video gambling can provide some revenue. But, many communities likely consider a fraught deal: it may start a trickle of money but it also projects a particular image. One anecdote in the article suggested people pull up to a local establishment with video gambling and idle as they wait from some signal from inside that a spot at one of the machines is open. Is this what a wealthier community wants to be known for? Like tattoo parlors and bars, many places wouldn’t want to avoid the stigma of gambling establishments.

It would also be interesting to know whether these more local operations siphon money from casinos which could generate significant revenues for local governments. In other words, if every gas station or local eatery had video gambling, would there be enough money to go around? Do people simply go to the places that are most convenient to them or would they cluster in places with either better or more video gambling options?

The origins of Chicago’s residents-only parking

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An article on rethinking Chicago’s residential parking permits system reveals how it all started in the first place:

The first residents-only parking signs were put up in 1979 to protect North Side bungalow-belt homeowners who were tired of fighting Northeastern Illinois University students for spaces. Since then they’ve proliferated across the city, with 1,466 zones currently on the books. Aldermen often don’t want to say no to residents who ask for a parking zone, fearing the political backlash.

Two quick thoughts:

  1. It is not surprising that such a program might spread. What was intended for one particular problem suddenly appeared appealing to all sorts of people and before you know it, permits were applied everywhere. This is a good example of the ease of creating such regulations – they spread really quickly – but the difficulty of putting the cat back into the bag when such regulations become normal and institutionalized.
  2. Chicago is often touted as a city of neighborhoods but what this means is that a lot of people are able to keep cars as the neighborhoods have plenty of lower density residences as well as single-family homes. The underlying issue here isn’t necessarily whether there are permits or not; rather, how do encourage people to have fewer cars? Is this even possible in a city that wants people to be able to own detached homes?

Can McMansions ever add to the charm of a neighborhood or community?

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I’ve seen many stories over the years of how teardown McMansions ruin the charm of older neighborhoods. Here is a recent case from the north shore of Long Island:

Call it a neighborhood dispute over home sizes. A small village on Long Island is seeing more and more small homes torn down to make way for so-called ‘mcmansions.’

Some neighbors have been pushing back, saying the huge homes are taking away from the charm of their community.

Are there any conditions under which a new McMansion might be considered charming? While I can’t recall seeing such a positive description used, here are a few scenarios in which it might work:

  1. The replaced home was small, decrepit, and in severe disrepair. McMansions may not be the preferred replacement option but some homes can be terrible shape and such eyesores are appreciated by few neighbors.
  2. The owners of the new home go significantly out of their way to placate neighbors. Regular deliveries of baked goods? Lots of volunteering for local duties? Handwritten notes asking for forgiveness? Hosting regular parties for neighbors in their spacious new home?
  3. The McMansion meets certain conditions: it is not so large compared to nearby homes, it does not seem to be bursting out of its lot, and the architecture is tasteful and consistent with nearby homes. Even with these, I suspect some neighbors will never be able to get past the idea of a McMansion.

Critics of McMansions tend to pick out clear-cut cases but not all larger teardowns are so easily categorized.

Comparing the architecture of Chicago and LA

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If baseball teams from two cities square off, why not use it as an opportunity to compare the architecture of the two locations? “Chicago vs. Los Angeles: Which city has the better architecture, public art, and parks?” Here are the comparisons in the iconic skyscraper and landmark categories:

Willis Tower

During much of the twentieth century, Chicago was a merchant city and the biggest name in the business was Sears. In the late ‘60s, the company decided to build a new headquarters and tapped Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to design what would become the tallest building in the world. Designed by Bruce Graham and Fazlur Rahman Khan, the building’s “bundled tube” design not only allowed it to reach new heights, but to also make a grand gesture in the Chicago skyline. With an official height of 1,450 feet (1,729 feet if you include its antennas), the tower held the world’s tallest title until 1998 when the Petronas Towers in Malaysia were completed.

US Bank Tower

The tallest building on the West Coast—until about six weeks ago, anyway—is strong and mighty—it was built to withstand an 8.3 magnitude earthquake. But that hasn’t mattered much to filmmakers. It’s such a standout building that director Roland Emmerich targeted it in no less than three of his blockbuster disaster films; Aliens destroyed it in Independence Day, Tornadoes swept through it in The Day After Tomorrow, and it was felled by an earthquake (presumably above 8.3) in 2012. Completed in 1989, it was designed by architect Henry N. Cobb, who outfitted the structure with its signature crown. This year, the tower unveiled a terrifying glass slide that suspends riders above the street 1,000 feet below. (Even the engineer admitted it’d be “scary as hell” to ride in an earthquake)…

Chicago Water Tower

The Chicago Water Tower in many ways is a reminder of Chicago’s ability to endure through difficult times. The 154-foot tall limestone structure is a physical connection to the city’s early days as it is one of the rare buildings that survived the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 which wiped out most the city’s downtown. Today, it is surrounded by towering skyscrapers but remains a popular tourist destination and symbol of Chicago’s strength and determination.

Hollywood sign

Perhaps the most recognizable landmark this side of the Pyramids at Giza, the Hollywood Sign has come to stand in for so much—show business, fame, excess—but is locally a symbol of the city’s complicated relationship with growth and change. The sign originally read “Hollywoodland” and was merely an ostentatious billboard advertising a new subdivision during a 1920s development boom. Later, when it had become a recognizable local landmark, preservationists sought to restore and preserve the sign. And now, with tourists from around the world flocking to Beachwood Canyon to get a closer look at those giant letters, it’s apparently become the bane of local residents’ existence—some of whom have proposed dismantling the sign entirely.

If we are comparing the most iconic representatives of each categories, the cities may be closer than many realize. Chicago is widely recognized as a capital of architecture yet Los Angeles has a good number of interesting and well-known buildings and designs. Additionally, the “feeling” of each place – spatially, culturally – is quite different so it could be hard to make direct comparisons. Yet, I would guess that if we went with quantity as well as history, Chicago would be a more clear cut winner.

I would be interested to see how many architects worked in both cities. In other words, were they separate architectural worlds or was there a lot of back and forth? Given that the two cities are so different, I wonder how much overlap is possible and then how much either the cities or architects would want to broadcast such overlap.

The “night mayor” looks to improve the urban overnight experience

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The head of an advisory NGO in Amsterdam is looking to make the overnight experience better both for city residents and night owls:

“I think that to really build a 24/7 economic system in Amsterdam, we should focus on creating one 24-hour area in the city,” Milan tells CityLab. “You could have working spaces there, and a library open 24 hours a day for students. It would also be a place for food. In Holland you can’t have a proper meal after 9.30 p.m., and when friends arrive late from out of town, all you can really offer them is fries.”

The idea might sound ambitious, but then forward-thinking about Amsterdam after dark is actually Milan’s job: he’s the Dutch capital’s “night mayor.” This innovative office, unique to Amsterdam when created in 2014 (as the development of a project itself begun in 2003), has helped to clear up a blind spot that many cities face. Too often, public officials view their city’s nighttime existence with suspicion—as a sinister doppelgänger of its daytime form but with added sex and crime, sleep-spoiling noise, and sidewalks slicked with vomit. Even liberal politicians can have little experience with this twilight zone, given that they’re often tucked up in bed by 10 p.m.

It’s the role of the night mayor to bridge this gap. The incumbent’s job is to manage and improve relations between night businesses, residents, and City Hall. Milan and his team have proved so successful in Amsterdam that the concept has taken off internationally. Paris, Toulouse, and Zurich now all have night mayors, while London and Berlin are considering creating their own. Within the Netherlands two other cities, Groningen and Nijmegen, also have their own professional nocturnal managers, part of a total of 15 Dutch municipalities that have some form of night mayor role…

“In the nighttime economy, there’s a lot of talent,” he says. “Think of all the graphic designers, party promoters, DJs—all these people that use the night as a serious playground to develop their skills and in the end, have their daytime job. Definitely the creative industries are really important for Europe and especially for cities like Amsterdam or Berlin, but actually for everywhere in the world.”

The big city is supposed to be the place where you can find all sorts of activities at all times of day. One of the biggest surprises for visitors to the city is the amount of activity in some places all night long. Imagine Times Square or The Strip with all the lights and people. (I’ve been to both late and it is remarkable just how many people are wandering around.) But, those places are not necessarily where a lot of people live and they are filled with tourists. What is the average urban night owl supposed to do, particularly if they are a resident and not a tourist?

It would be interesting to see every major city develop a night district. Presumably, such a district would need good public transit, a variety of uses to serve different interests (from restaurants to arts spaces to music venues to gyms to coffee shops), temperate weather (I assume this would be very helpful), and probably should be composed of smaller buildings in more of a neighborhood feel rather than within a set of tall, modern structures. Would enough people flock to such a place if it was located far from primary residential areas?

Coming soon: more fully automated parking garages

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Adding more automated parking garages could lead to more saved time and space:

Right now in the U.S., 22 garages already are using automated systems to store and retrieve vehicles, and it’s starting to scale up. Ground is breaking soon on a parking structure for a mixed-use development in Oakland, California, and it is claimed to be the newest such fully automated structure in the San Francisco Bay Area—and one of relatively few to allow public access (it will be visitor parking) and to be unmanned. The structure’s footprint is just 1600 square feet, the size required by seven surface-parking spots, yet it has 39 parking spaces over seven levels.

What it amounts to is virtually a dumbwaiter for cars. You drive the vehicle past a height sensor, then through a garage doorway and onto a platform—which itself is on what look like the tracks you’d find at an automatic carwash. Following instructions on a screen, you exit your vehicle, and visit a kiosk to get a ticket that you use to retrieve the vehicle upon your return. The system rotates the vehicle, loads it onto an elevator, and then stores it away on the appropriate shelf, potentially several stories up or down in a narrow-footprint building.

Retrieval, according to CityLift, the company behind the development, takes less than two minutes after inserting the ticket.

This summary is missing one key piece of information: how does this work financially? Putting more cars into less space should generate more revenue but this technology could be costly to purchase and maintain. In other words, how attractive would this option be to developers and owners of parking lots and garages?

I wonder how this might alter an experience I had in an underground garage in Chicago earlier this year. This particular garage was long and narrow with the lengthy side going away from the entrance. When we drove into the garage, it wasn’t much of a problem: we found the attendant and he had plenty of time to go find a spot further back in the garage. However, our return after a large sporting event concluded was more problematic. One side of the garage had cars stacked two deep, the other side had them stacked three deep, and the one attendant was running back and forth to bring cars up to the front of the garage. We were fortunate to be closer to the front of the line but I’m sure others behind us waited over an hour to have their car retrieved. Two minutes retrieval would be a significant help in this situation as would having fewer cars total in the garage (this helps with a rush of people coming in or out at the same time).

A sociologist goes to the Urban History Association meetings, Part Two

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I posted several observations yesterday from my time at the Urban History Association meetings. I turn today to the three most interesting ideas or debates I heard when attending sessions and panels:

  1. On a session on public housing, the discussant made this observation: with all of these negative cases of big government involvement in public housing, perhaps we need to turn away from seeing this as the solution. The main issue is this: when the federal resources are earmarked for the poor and redevelopment, it always seems to end up in the hands of the wealthy and developers rather than with those who really need the assistance. (For another example of this that involves lots of government money but not public housing, see the book Crisis Cities about New York City after 9/11 and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.) He suggested then and in later conversation that doesn’t mean that government should be completely removed from public housing. However, more local efforts seem to allow more opportunity for success rather than a completely top-down approach.I’ve argued before that the private market can’t do much about affordable housing in the United States, let alone public housing. At the same time, I would agree that the record of the federal government regarding public housing is mediocre at best. Are there some middle-range solutions? (I’ll also acknowledge that sometimes it does seem to take the federal government to help local governments do the right thing. For example, the Chicago Housing Authority was a mess for decades and required some oversight.)
  1. On a panel on Jane Jacobs, one of the scholars highlighted her upbringing in Scranton, Pennsylvania as being particularly formative. While Jacobs is most associated with New York City and Toronto, she was shaped by this smaller big city, the third most populous Pennsylvania city at the time and a city that attracted a variety of residents to work in the coal mining industry. This made me think of two things: (1) Why don’t more scholars pay attention to smaller big cities that may not be as important on the global stage but still contain a large number of American residents and (2) how might Jacobs and fictional resident and booster Michael Scott of The Office get along?
  1. A later panel discussed the history of Silicon Valley. In a response to a question about the representativeness of Silicon Valley for understanding other places in the United States and around the world, at least one participant suggested the ideas, social life, and spatial dimensions of Silicon Valley were likely to spread elsewhere and become normal. Another participant pushed back, suggesting that many places have no interest in becoming like Silicon Valley or don’t have the knowledge or resources to follow such a path. Such a discussion highlights how a place devoted to creating things for the masses may be in its organization and daily life be very separate from the rest of the country.

A bonus nugget from a session: when the Illinois Tollways first opened, there were not enough customers/drivers. Thus, a marketing campaign kicked off and the commercials featured Mary MacToll. Enjoy.

A sociologist goes to the Urban History Association meetings, Part One

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I attended and presented at the Urban History Association biennial meetings this weekend and I made some observations during my foray. Some thoughts:

  1. In the last five years or so, I’ve been to both specialist conferences – usually involving the sociology of religion – and general conferences – the American Sociological Association. They each have their perks. I particularly enjoyed two things about the specialty aspect of the UHA meetings: (1) it was nice to be with a group of scholars who shared a common set of readings and understandings of a particular social phenomena and (2) the smaller size seemed to allow for more conversations during and after sessions. Even though the conference drew attendees largely from R1 schools – and people from liberal arts colleges like myself were in short supply and tended to be from the Chicago area – it felt pretty inviting.
  2. Several quick observations on the discipline of history as I saw it practiced:
    -There was a tension between particular cases – micro history – and broad sweeping generalizations about social patterns. The micro history could be quite minute, perhaps focusing on a particular influential figure (or arguing why that figure should be viewed as influential) or brief time period while other papers and sessions focused on 50+ years or emphasized broader movements like modernism. Individual papers tended toward the micro while panels could think more broadly. I would guess that at least a few of the papers are part of larger works – dissertations, manuscripts – that touch on broader periods or forces.
    -There was an informal dress code for male attendees: dress shirt and jacket. Not everyone followed this but there were more sports coats and blazers than at the typical sociological gathering.
    -Race, class, and gender popped up now and then but this trinity of analysis wasn’t as present as at sociological meetings.
    -There were some interesting instances of trying to connect historical events to current events, particularly in a panel on Silicon Valley. But, often the papers stuck to their particular historical moment.
    -Almost every paper began with a story or anecdote from history. This is more acceptable with qualitative sociological work but rarer in sociology as a whole.
    -Every introduction I saw included a short bio of the scholar’s education and work. Sociologists rarely give this information. Does this suggest that pedigree is more important for the audience or do they benefit from having more information regarding the speaker?
  3. I realize that now eight years into my post-graduate school career, I feel much more comfortable at conferences. I had met only two of the conference attendees prior to the meetings but it was easier to introduce myself to others and participate when I had questions. During graduate school, I remember this being more difficult: who wants to talk to a lowly graduate student? My enjoyment of conferences has gone up as I feel like I have a leg to stand on (I have published works that people can read) and I feel like I can contribute (I’ve wrestled with a number of issues in my own work and in the classroom). These two factors work in another way: even as I do some urban history work, I likely would not have attended this meeting without receiving an invitation from the organizer of a session to submit a paper.

Tomorrow, I’ll present the three most intriguing ideas I heard at the conference from my one day of attending sessions.

GE moved to Boston to be near big ideas, disruption, competition

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Big companies moving back to big cities is a trendy thing and here the CEO of General Electric describes their recent move back to Boston:

Immelt: You know, we wanted to get to a city. At the end of the day, I think for the company we wanted to get into a place where there was more of an every day where you could get up and be part of an academic setting. So I think it was important to get to a city...

I have to say it’s real. I thought it was a little bit of B.S. initially, I wasn’t sure. And when I looked out the window—when I was in Connecticut, it was beautiful, awesome, great office—but when I looked out my window, I saw nothing, there was nothing going on. I could watch cars go on the highway, things like that.

I’ve been Boston now six weeks and you just walk out the door. You’re in the middle of an ecosystem that quite honestly for a big company, it makes you afraid. You’re where the ideas are. You get more paranoid when you’re doing that and that’s a good thing. So I thought it was—

Isaacson: Only the paranoid survive!?

Immelt: No, no. It’s a good thing. When you’re a big company, it can get hidden but it’s important that you’re in touch with what the next idea is or what the next disruption is. And so I’m kind of a big believer that that’s the wave of the future.

The summary suggests this echoes Richard Florida’s approach to cities. Yet, when people talk about Florida, they often refer to his ideas about employees and the workforce: a talented, diverse, and tolerant workforce that is attracted to thriving cultural and entertainment scenes. Immelt is suggesting something else is also important: competition between ideas. In the suburbs, it is easy to become comfortable and become insulated from cutting edge thinking (and technologies?).

It seems like it wouldn’t be too hard to test this idea: cities produce more innovation and competition than suburban areas. Off the top of my head, it seems like Bell Labs did okay for decades in largely suburban office and R&D facilities. Are the various companies in Silicon Valley hampered by being in more suburban settings (or to put it another way, could they have been even more successful)? Is being in the metropolitan area enough to help spur innovation or does a physical location in an urban core (even opposed to being within city limits but not near thriving areas) near other firms and employees doing these things matter?