Author Archives: legallysociable

Substantial “transit deserts” in the Chicago region

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A new report is critical of the state of mass transit in the Chicago metropolitan region:

Even major suburban job centers, such as the bustling I-90 Corridor from O’Hare to Schaumburg; the crowded Oak Brook area and booming Naperville, “are not well-served by transit,” and most jobs in the region cannot be reached in even a 90-minute commute, the analysis found.

The current system stands no chance of meeting the goal of doubling transit use by 2040 and “must be refocused with customer satisfaction as the primary objective,” according to the draft report prepared for the Northeastern Illinois Transit Task Force.

At the same time, there is little coordination of planning between the CTA, Metra and Pace, the report says.

The 15-member task force was created by Gov. Pat Quinn last August to reform the transit system after the controversy erupted over the awarding of ousted Metra CEO Alex Clifford a severance package potentially worth $817,000.

A few quick thoughts:

1. I like this term “transit deserts.” It implies that mass transit is a public good that many or all residents should be able to access.

2. Coordination across these transit groups would be helpful. But, this is a legacy of Illinois’ penchant for multiple government bodies. What is the motivation for each group to work together – and possibly sacrifice something – when they don’t have to and have separate pots of money?

3. The overall issue is also a legacy of the region’s development along railroad lines that radiated out of the city. The first railroad was constructed in the late 1840s and by the 1860s there was a strong network of rail connections. You can see this on the Metra System Map today. While this system was good for funneling people and goods back and forth from Chicago (a hub and spoke model with Chicago as the hub), it doesn’t provide connections across suburbs. This sort of intra-suburb infrastructure was not built when suburban development picked up in the early to mid 1900s and the opportunity was lost. Occasional plans still float around: see the Metra Star Line that would connect three major job centers, Aurora, Naperville, and Hoffman Estates, and O’Hare along a beltway rail line.

4. The major goal of “customer satisfaction” sounds interesting. While I don’t know what other goals were considered, it can take significant efforts to get suburbanites to warm up to the idea of mass transit. It might mean wealthier suburbanites give up driving, a task that can be onerous in Chicago traffic but an option that provides more perceived independence. It might mean suburban communities have to deal with more rail traffic – this has been an issue in past years with using the tracks that the Metra Star Line would run on – which means more delays for at-grade crossings (of which the Chicago region has many). It means making trains and buses and other options both convenient, comfortable, and relatively cheap, a difficult task in sprawling suburbs.

Using drones to sell expensive homes

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What if the expensive home you are selling is really big or has stunning views? Show all of this better via drone:

On Monday, a house in the East Bay town of Alamo was being prepped to go on the market for nearly $1.5 million. To really showcase the home and its view of Mt Diablo, the realtors brought in a drone.

“You get the scale, you get the feeling of the actual home. You can see, ‘hey, this thing’s on an acre. This is what it looks like,’” said Randy Churchill of Dudum Real Estate…

Churchill says for the $500 he’ll spend on the drone video he may get 10,000 hits online, making it very cost-effective relative to hiring a private helicopter.

“This will be something that we do now on every home that we’re marketing in this price-point,” said Churchill.

This doesn’t sound all that expensive for a pricey home. I could see how this would be particularly useful for a house with numerous exterior features (as opposed to the caricatured McMansion where all of the impressive stuff is on the front and the sides and back are lifeless) or a big property, perhaps 1+ acres, where seeing it all is difficult through two dimensional pictures.

If drones do become normal parts of selling a home, how long until we see some drone images that are blurry or clearly below average, just like some of the photos available online today that appear to be taken with little skill?

Snow reveals why we clearly need parking stripes

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I pulled into the parking lot this morning at my normal time and I saw a common winter situation: packed down snow (we got 5 or so inches overnight) covering the parking stripes meant drivers were at all sorts of angles and depths. It is a bit of a different lot – angled parking, sloped – but this is common across parking lots, including big box lots with straight parking, when snow obscures the pavement.

The biggest issue? Spacing goes out the window. Without lines to guide them, parkers are either too close or too far. Looking at the same lot later in the morning, it ended up where people are much too close together. In other lots I’ve seen this winter, people are further apart than necessary, pushing new parkers further out than necessary.

What might be solutions?

1. Some kind of glowing parking lines. This would have to be a strong glow to make it through snow. How about bioluminescent paint?

2. Heated parking lines. The cost might be prohibitive but it works for heated floors.

3. Pop-up parking lines. I’m not sure exactly how this would work with snow on top of them but perhaps they would be activated before the snow falls.

4. Parking lines that are more like rumble strips so people know when they are going over them. Again, having snow on top poses a problem.

There has to be someone working on this, right?

Putting together plans for the final redevelopment of Cabrini-Green

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All the high-rises at Cabrini-Green are gone but the planning of what will replace them continues:

Next week, CHA officials will hold open houses for developers who will learn what parameters the agency has designed for construction of new housing and retail. The land boundaries are North Avenue to Chicago Avenue and Halsted to Orleans…

Last spring CHA unveiled Plan Forward as a way to wrap up the final stretch. Former CHA CEO Charles Woodyard resigned last fall amid sexual harassment allegations, but also because City Hall became disenchanted with the slow pace of progress.

The goal is for Cabrini construction to start by 2015 on the mostly vacant 65 acres. The Cabrini rowhouses will remain but not be 100 percent public housing – much to the chagrin of many residents. Of the 583 units, 146 have been redeveloped into public housing and will stay that way. The others are empty. Originally, CHA had planned to keep the row houses all public housing.

“We felt that in order for Plan Forward to work, in order to have a very vibrant community and what works for the residents to move toward self sufficiency, it was important to do mixed income. Not to leave that area to be the only secluded area that remained 100 percent public housing,” Brown said…

“We’re adamant that the row houses be rehabbed to 100 percent public housing like it was supposed to be,” [row-house resident activist] Steele said.

This seems like an appropriate path forward based on the prior history of redevelopment at Cabrini-Green:

1. The CHA’s difficult history continues with yet another new leader plus plans that stretch on longer than anticipated with funding problems.

2. The city continues its interest in mixed-income development which gives developers some great opportunities to build on the North Side (and profit) while also providing some public housing units but not having to provide for all of the public housing residents.

3. The public housing residents, particularly compared to some of the other Chicago housing projects, continue to speak out and challenge the city’s plans.

Sixty-five acres of land in this part of Chicago will be attractive to numerous people and I hope the public gets to see the competing proposals.

Most cited works in sociology journals in 2013

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Here is an analysis of the 45 most cited works in sociology journals last year. The top ten:

1. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Harvard University Press, 1984.
2. Glaser, Barney G., and Anselm L. Strauss. The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Transaction Books, 2009.
3. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. Simon and Schuster, 2001.
4. Raudenbush, Stephen W. Hierarchical linear models: Applications and data analysis methods. Vol. 1. Sage, 2002.
5. Massey, Douglas S. and Nancy Denton. American apartheid: Segregation and the making of the underclass. Harvard University Press, 1993.
6. Goffman, Erving. The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY (1959).
7. Steensland, Brian, Lynn D. Robinson, W. Bradford Wilcox, Jerry Z. Park, Mark D. Regnerus, and Robert D. Woodberry. “The measure of American religion: Toward improving the state of the art.” Social Forces 79, no. 1 (2000): 291-318.
8. Swidler, Ann. “Culture in action: Symbols and strategies.” American sociological review (1986): 273-286.
9. McPherson, Miller, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M. Cook. “Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks.” Annual review of sociology (2001): 415-444.
10. Granovetter, Mark S. “The strength of weak ties.” American journal of sociology(1973): 1360-1380.

No major surprises here: several important works on methods (hierarchical linear modeling, grounded theory, defining religion), several dealing with social networks, and key works in important subfields spanning from the sociology of culture to tastes and social class. Are they over-cited or the sort of influential works sociologists will still recognize years from now?

It might also be interesting to see what sociology works are cited the most outside of sociology journals. I assume Bourdieu, Putnam, and Granovetter are cited frequently elsewhere but what about Goffman, Massey and Denton, and Swidler?

Education, income still linked to American digital divide

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The gap between those with Internet access at home in the United States is marked by education and income differences:

The quarter of American households still without Internet, not surprisingly, are disproportionately made up of families with less income and education. Of these 25 percent, half say they simply don’t want Internet, and about a quarter say it’s too expensive. As computers are increasingly replaced by other devices, from phones to tablets, any gap in penetration will seem less significant. Differences in internet access, though, will only become more so…

The Census Bureau’s latest data tracking internet and computer use in American homes suggest that both have become ubiquitous with impressive speed. About three-fourths of American households now boast both technologies, according to the Current Population Survey’s data, collected through late 2012. That’s up from 8.2 percent for computers back in 1984, and 18 percent for the Internet in 1997, when most of us who were online were dialing up to get there.

This is a persistent issue: those with fewer resources are not able to take advantage of what is available online. This becomes more and more problematic as all sorts of information and government services are accessed primarily through the Internet. Additionally, kids in lower income and education households don’t get as much exposure to the Internet.

It will be interesting to see if that number of Americans who say they don’t want the Internet changes in the near future. It may drop as more people see it as necessary. But, it might also rise if people see the Internet as a nuisance or is still better accessed elsewhere (like at a library).

How long should customers be able to stay at a McDonald’s?

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McDonald’s has been part of some recent controversy over how long customers should be able to stay:

In the past month, those tensions came to a boil in New York City. When management at a McDonald’s in Flushing, Queens, called the police on a group of older Koreans, prompting outrage at the company’s perceived rudeness, calls for a worldwide boycott and a truce mediated by a local politician, it became a famous case of a struggle that happens daily at McDonald’s outlets in the city and beyond…

McDonald’s is not alone in navigating this tricky territory. Last year, a group of deaf patrons sued Starbucks after a store on Astor Place in Lower Manhattan forbade their meet-up group to convene there, complaining they did not buy enough coffee. Spending the day nursing a latte is behavior reinforced by franchises like Starbucks and others that seem to actively cultivate it, offering free Wi-Fi that encourages customers to park themselves and their laptops for hours…

“As long as there have been cities, these are the kind of places people have met in,” said Don Mitchell, a professor of urban geography at Syracuse University and the author of “The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space.”…

But the leisurely cafe culture and the business plan behind fast food are in opposition. Although signs hang in many McDonald’s stores instructing customers to spend half an hour or less at the tables, Ms. McComb said there was no national policy about discouraging longtime sitting. “The individual franchisees do what they feel is best for their community businesses,” she said. “In the case of Flushing, that franchisee welcomed those guests for years, and it was only when other customers felt they were no longer welcome that he attempted to adjust the visit time with the customers.”

Are these businesses solely for profit or do they also function as social spaces? Clearly the latter is true to some degree, particularly in a country that tends to lack many public spaces or a culture of cafes and pubs. When there are few other places to go, particularly for the economically disadvantaged who have less ability to carve out private spaces (whether big houses or their own cars), why not make a McDonald’s or a Starbucks into a third place between home and work? Going even further, could it be that McDonald’s is one of the few public places that will take you in if you have little?

Building Chicago its first “true backlot” as filming days grow

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Cinescape recently announced plans to expand their Chicago backlot which is featured on several current shows:

Cinespace, the soundstage complex on the West Side that is home to TV shows such as NBC’s “Chicago Fire” and ABC’s upcoming midseason drama “Mind Games,” plans to expand its filmmaking options by building a backlot on its existing 58-acre campus…

“We’re going to put the facades right on the existing buildings,” says Pissios. “One street will be a row of New York brownstones. One will be Chinatown. Another will be a restaurant, a bank and a courthouse.

“So this will help TV and film productions when I can say, ‘This will save you money.’ We have a solid film (tax) incentive but it’s not the best in the country. And there’s big costs when you shoot on location — moving all the trucks, setting up catering, closing streets off, which requires security people. So how about when you’re here, I give (you) the option to just shoot everything on our 58 acres? Instead of going to 19th and Michigan Ave. to shoot those brownstones, they could shoot it right here…

L.A. is currently the only U.S. city with true backlots, so one in Chicago would be unique. Pissios plans to start the project in the fall, with work expected to be completed about a year later. “And if everything goes well, we would love to somehow, down the line, make this a little tourist attraction, where buses could come in and we give people a tour.”

It is a little bit funny that the expanded backlot would help provide settings for other cities. Why not a full backlot of Chicago scenery? At the same time, Chicago has had more film and TV shooting in the city so perhaps this doesn’t matter too much, particularly if the alternative is for people to go to Toronto or Vancouver to shoot “Chicago.” The city set a record in 2013 for the most filming days in the city:

The number of film and television projects filmed in Chicago, jumped 20 percent in 2013 to 2,198 filming days, according to the Chicago Film office.

City officials said it was a new record high, trumping 2012’s 1,808 days.

The filming hours include six simultaneous full-time TV series, three studio features shot back-to-back and 137 commercials…

TV series shooting in Chicago during 2013 included ABC’s “Betrayal” and “Mind Games” as well as NBC’s “Chicago Fire,” “Chicago PD” and “Crisis.” USA’s “Sirens” also shoots in Chicago.

Studio features filmed in Chicago in 2013 included “Divergent,” “Jupiter Ascending” and “Transformers 4.” All three will be released in 2014.

Good for business but how Chicago are these movies/shows/commercials anyway? Are there lots of shots of iconic Chicago buildings or more of a Chicago culture or not much at all?

Chicago’s annexations through the years

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Watch Chicago expand through annexation here.

Maps at the Chicago History Museum show that in 1837, city borders were:

  • Lake Michigan to the east
  • North Avenue to the north
  • 22nd Street to the south
  • Wood Street to the west

In the Great Fire of 1871, much of the city was destroyed. The most significant annexation in Chicago history came almost two decades later, in 1889.

That’s when Hyde Park, Lake View and Jefferson and Lake townships became part of Chicago. The annexations were the result of an election and added 125 miles and 225,000 people to the city, making it the nation’s largest city by square mileage at the time…

“One of the reasons annexation stops […] in the early 1900s is because the city really doesn’t want to annex any more territory,” said Chicago historian Ann Keating, who wrote Chicago Neighborhoods and Suburbs: A Historical Guide and co-edited The Encyclopedia of Chicago. “Our vision is suburban communities wouldn’t want to join in to the city, but the fact of the matter is the city kind of hits a point where they can no longer extend services.”

This is a common trait of most American big cities: they started relatively small and then annexed quite a bit of territory. However, Chicago’s experience mirrors cities in the North which essentially couldn’t annex much past 1900. While suburbs prior to this point had been willing to join the city to gain from the big city’s services and the city’s prestige, by around 1900 these local services were cheaper to build themselves and cities had different reputations. But, annexation was still quite common for Sunbelt cities, most of whom were able to continue to annex through the 20th century. David Rusk tracks these annexations in his book Cities Without Suburbs. Here is one chart:

RuskCitiesWithoutSuburbsTable1.5Quite a big difference which Rusk argues allowed Sunbelt cities to capture more of the suburban growth and benefit from a wider tax base and more diverse population.

Super Bowl byproduct: first regional mass transit map for New York City

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The Super Bowl prompted officials to put together a regional mass transit map for New York City for the first time:

Festivities for the big game are spread between Manhattan’s Times Square, Newark’s Prudential Center, and the MetLife Stadium in the Meadowlands. So getting around by public rail involves, depending on your route, the PATH, NJ Transit, the MTA subway, the Long Island Railroad or even Amtrak.

To make life easier, the New York/New Jersey Super Bowl Committee asked designer Yoshiki Waterhouse of Vignelli Associates to merge all the systems onto one diagram.

The result is the closest thing the New York City area has to an all-in-one rapid transit map. The host committee has been passing them out to fans and media and has made it available online. But if you’re a regular New Jersey to Manhattan commuter, or just a design fan, you should probably get your hands on one of one these before they end up as an expensive collector’s item.

While there are clearly a lot of things going on in this map, it doesn’t make much sense that this is the first full transit map. (Technically, it doesn’t include buses but that is another story.) Why might this be? One assumption could be that the average visitor or tourist isn’t terribly interested in leaving New York City on a typical visit. Plenty of visitors might want to go to Brooklyn but how many want to take a train to Long Island or the Prudential Center in New Jersey? Another answer could be that for trips within New York City, the city and others clearly see the subway as the only way to go because of its efficiency and coverage.