Author Archives: legallysociable

The unfinished “concrete bathtub” Block 37 CTA station

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Here is an inside look at the partly completed Block 37 CTA station that was once intended to be home to express service to both Chicago airports:

The superstation, which was mothballed in 2008, runs on a diagonal from beneath the corner of Randolph and Dearborn streets, southeast to the corner of State and Washington streets. I’m not supposed to say how you access the space — security concerns, you know — but let’s just say that a variety of elevators, locked doors and ladders are involved.What’s striking once you get in the space is its size: as long as a football field-and-a-half (472 feet), 68 feet wide and averaging 28 feet high. Call it a concrete bathtub — or an “envelope,” as our tour guide, Chicago Transit Authority Chief Infrastructure Officer Chris Bushell, put it — with rows of support pillars receding into the dim far distance. And all completely unlit, except for some temporary light strung up on the mezzanine and the portable lights we brought along…

The money needed for express train service, likely in the billions, never was obtained. And any private-sector interest melted away when the economy entered its worst downturn in many decades in the late 2000s. So, the city stopped after completing the shell and built no more.

By that time, though, City Hall had spent $218 million — $171 million of CTA bonds, $42 million in tax-increment financing and $5 million from outside grants, the CTA says. And to make the station useable — to connect the tracks, build the escalators, attach all of the needed electrical and plumbing to the outlets — will take an additional $150 million or so, the CTA says.

It’s too bad the city won’t say what they envision doing with this space. Just how long will it stay empty? Because of this, I’m a little surprised Chicago was willing to show reporters exactly what they built. Not only was several hundred million spent, the city still does not have any faster train service to the airports. All together, this is not exactly a shining moment in Chicago infrastructure.

Chicago tries to solve stormwater issues with Deep Tunnel but is behind in utilizing greener options

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The Chicago Tribune suggests while Chicago has pursued the impressive Deep Tunnel project to relieve stormwater issues, the city has fallen behind in pursuing greener alternatives:

Cities from Philadelphia to Seattle already are moving aggressively to prevent basement backups and sewage overflows without the expensive work of laying pipes and boring tunnels. Milwaukee is the first city in the nation with a federal stormwater permit that legally requires “green infrastructure,” such as streets and parking lots with permeable pavement and neighborhood rain gardens designed to capture the first flush of stormwater…

For instance, the Green Alley program promoted by former Mayor Richard Daley has overhauled just 1 percent of the 1,900 miles of Chicago alleys with permeable pavement, according to city records. Other than a showcase project on Cermak Road in the Pilsen neighborhood, city officials could not provide details about any other street outfitted with green infrastructure…

Daley’s 2003 “Water Agenda” and 2008 “Climate Action Plan” promoted green infrastructure as a solution. Mayor Rahm Emanuel embraced the idea last year in his “Sustainable Chicago 2015” plan, which called for making the projects a routine part of the city’s bricks-and-mortar budget and promised to annually convert 1.5 million square feet of impervious surfaces into areas that allow runoff to seep into the ground.

But despite the years of talk about green alternatives, the city’s money and political focus largely is still on big-ticket construction projects like Emanuel’s program to replace and refurbish old sewer lines, funded in part by doubling water bills for the average household by 2015.

The larger official response to flooding and sewage overflows in Chicago and suburban Cook County is the Deep Tunnel, a network of massive storm sewers and cavernous flood-control reservoirs that has been under construction since the mid-1970s. The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, a tax-supported agency that operates independently from city government, has spent more than $3 billion on the project but isn’t scheduled to complete it until at least 2029.

There seem to be several issues at work:

1. Deep Tunnel is a sunk cost already and it will still be years before it is fully operational. Can a government back away from such a large project, supposedly one of the largest civil engineering efforts in the world, when so much money has already been spent? This kind of retreat with billions spent already is difficult to envision. Also, I assume we know more about stormwater management today than people did in the 1960s and 1970s when Deep Tunnel was planned.

2. The greener alternatives seem to take a different approach to stormwater. Instead of relying on a large, centralized system, it sounds like other cities have stricter requirements for individual property owners. These owners can’t foist the problem off on the city or nearby properties; they have to find ways to reduce their contributions to the system.

3. Chicago has tried to promote a greener image over the last decade or so. Mayor Daley was fond of pointing out the city’s green roof initiative. Here is a little bit more on Chicago’s green roofs:

“If every rooftop in Chicago was covered with a green roof, the city could save $100 million in energy every year,” said Jason Westrope, a developer for Development Management Associates, who has overseen the building of green roofs in the city.

Green roofs also help absorb stormwater runoff. That’s important because the city’s stormwater drains through its sewers, and if the system gets overloaded after a big storm, that wastewater is in danger of backflowing into the river, the lake, and even into people’s basements.

Chicago already has 359 green roofs covering almost 5.5 million square feet — that’s more than any other city in North America. But city planners are pushing for even more.

Chicago has mandated that all new buildings that require any public funds must be “LEED” Certified — designed with energy efficiency in mind — and that usually includes a green roof. Any project with a green roof in its plan gets a faster permitting process. That combined with energy savings is the kind of green that incentivizes developers.

Does this assessment of Deep Tunnel work against this green image? Compared to other major cities, how exactly does Chicago rank in terms of green programs and initiatives? It is one thing to look at a single project, even a massive one, compared to an overall assessment.

Some wealthy US zip codes don’t have enough mansions to sell

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This may be related to a supposed McMansion comeback: some wealthy US communities have a limited inventory of big homes available for purchase.

While housing inventory is falling throughout the country, it’s falling especially fast in some of the country’s richest ZIP codes. A study from Altos Research, the Mountain View, Ca., real-estate research firm, found that inventory in the nation’s 90 wealthiest ZIP codes fell 15 percent over the past year, slightly faster than the broader market.

But in the richest ZIP codes, inventory is down more than 50 percent. In a ZIP code in Carmel, Calif., inventory fell 76 percent over the past year. There were only four homes left on the market priced at $1 million or more as of the end of May, according to Altos.

In Palm Beach, Fla., the number of $1 million-plus homes has plunged by 70 percent, falling from 89 to 26. And in the Old Greenwich, Conn. ZIP code, there are only 10 homes left priced at $1 million or more, down 58 percent, according to Altos.

“I don’t recall seeing the market like this, and it’s come so quickly,” said Cristina Condon of Sotheby’s International Real Estate in Palm Beach. She said buyers have poured into the market in recent months, many from overseas. American buyers are also piling in—some from higher-tax states like California, lured by low taxes and still-low prices in Florida.

The phrase “mansion shortage” sounds funny. It may be true in a business supply and demand sense but shortage is a term often reserved for more essential commodities, not luxurious homes.

This is more evidence that there is a bifurcated housing market: the wealthy, whether Americans or residents of other countries, seem to be doing fine with their real estate.

Opposing gentrified suburban strip malls in order to give immigrants and others cheaper business opportunities

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Plenty of suburban critics detest strip malls for their ugliness, auto-dependence, and effect on traditional shopping districts. But, Kaid Benfield argues they may need to be protected from gentrifiers as they offer cheap real estate that can be taken advantage of by immigrants and others.

And yet:  As these properties have declined, so have their rents, making them affordable to small, often entrepreneurial businesses.  Particularly as immigrants have settled in inner suburbs (where many of these fading commercial strips are), businesses owned and patronized by the immigrant population have occupied many of these spaces, in some cases alongside small start-ups owned by longtime community residents as well.

The risk is that, as we reshape these old properties with new buildings and concepts, the replacement properties will be much more valuable than their predecessors; indeed, that’s why new development is appealing to investors and how it is made possible.  Overall, that’s a good thing.  But small businesses either go under, unable to afford new rents, or relocate as a result.  The logical place to relocate in many cases will be vacant storefronts in other strip malls in locations less attractive to the businesses’ clienteles.  What to do?…

According to Ritchey’s article, Asheville’s strip malls offer a setting for synergies to develop and help connect entreprenurial businesses to each other:  for example, establishments offering diverse but complementary products and services can share a customer base, trade ideas, and cross-promote.  This strikes me as analogous in some ways to synergies available to start-ups in more urban “business incubators.”

It makes a lot of sense to me and, in many parts of the country, it is newer Americans who are benefitting the most from these opportunities.  For them, a successful business in a strip mall is the American Dream at work.  Three years ago, Aaron Renn (The Urbanophile) and I wrote separate articles about a sort of organic economic revitalization being initiated by immigrants within the existing fabric of our older suburbs.

Interesting argument. Three quick thoughts:

1. Does this mean strip malls might be viewed differently in the future by suburban critics? While they might prefer strip malls are not built in the first place, this does seem like a good use of resources.

2. When people argue that small businesses are really important to the American economy, how many of these small businesses are in strip malls? Could the humble strip mall be one of the backbones of the American economy?

3. This is tied to larger issues about redevelopment in mature suburbs. In American metropolitan areas, many suburbs are built-out and have no large land parcels for new development. There is a lot of potential then for utilizing existing structures or knocking them down and doing something new. If people don’t like strip malls, what would replace them? How much density are suburban residents willing to accept in their neighborhoods or nearby?

New HUD study shows minorities continue to be shown fewer homes, apartments

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A new HUD audit study shows that compared to whites, minorities are given less access to homes and apartments:

Compared with white homebuyers, blacks who inquire about homes listed for sale are made aware of about 17 percent fewer homes and are shown 18 percent fewer ones. Asians are told about 15 percent fewer units and are shown 19 percent fewer properties. Researchers are unsure why Hispanic buyers were treated more equitably than other minority populations.

Among renters, all minority groups found out about fewer choices than did white consumers. Hispanic testers who contacted agents about advertised rental units learned about 12 percent fewer units available and were shown 7 percent fewer than white renters saw. Black renters learned about 11 percent fewer units and saw 4 percent fewer available rentals, while Asians were told about 10 percent fewer available rentals and shown 7 percent fewer units.

In the Chicago area, researchers found that African-American and white renters got equal access to information and showings of apartments, but African-Americans were less likely than white consumers to see at least one home that had no problems.

Blacks also were more likely than whites to be told that a credit check had to be performed and that particular rental units carried fees. They also were quoted higher fees than the ones quoted to white testers. On average, the extra fees quoted to blacks put the first-year cost of securing a rental unit at $350 more than the cost for white renters.

Hispanic testers in Chicago reported that they heard comments about their credit standing more often than the white testers, and the extra payments quoted to them were $131 more than white testers’.

As the HUD Secretary notes, these actions are less obvious than the redlining, blockbusting, and restrictive covenants of the early 1900s but they still lead to similar outcomes. This kind of study with pairs having the same qualifications and traits except for their race/ethnicity has been conducted for several decades with similar results: whites consistently have better access to housing options. Limiting access to housing options like this is illegal but happens regularly both in cities and suburbs. And housing and patterns of residential segregation is related to all sorts of other important life chances including job opportunities, schools, community resources and services, and social networks.

This article fails to mention what can be done about such discriminatory practices. Housing providers and those in real estate can be sued. However, this takes place on a case by case basis and thus it can take a while to crack down on a large number of offenders.

Methodological issues with the “average” American wedding costing $27,000

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Recent news reports suggest the average American wedding costs $27,000. But, there may be some important methodological issues with this figure: selection bias and using an average rather than a median.

The first problem with the figure is what statisticians call selection bias. One of the most extensive surveys, and perhaps the most widely cited, is the “Real Weddings Study” conducted each year by TheKnot.com and WeddingChannel.com. (It’s the sole source for the Reuters and CNN Money stories, among others.) They survey some 20,000 brides per annum, an impressive figure. But all of them are drawn from the sites’ own online membership, surely a more gung-ho group than the brides who don’t sign up for wedding websites, let alone those who lack regular Internet access. Similarly, Brides magazine’s “American Wedding Study” draws solely from that glossy Condé Nast publication’s subscribers and website visitors. So before they do a single calculation, the big wedding studies have excluded the poorest and the most low-key couples from their samples. This isn’t intentional, but it skews the results nonetheless.

But an even bigger problem with the average wedding cost is right there in the phrase itself: the word “average.” You calculate an average, also known as a mean, by adding up all the figures in your sample and dividing by the number of respondents. So if you have 99 couples who spend $10,000 apiece, and just one ultra-wealthy couple splashes $1 million on a lavish Big Sur affair, your average wedding cost is almost $20,000—even though virtually everyone spent far less than that. What you want, if you’re trying to get an idea of what the typical couple spends, is not the average but the median. That’s the amount spent by the couple that’s right smack in the middle of all couples in terms of its spending. In the example above, the median is $10,000—a much better yardstick for any normal couple trying to figure out what they might need to spend.

Apologies to those for whom this is basic knowledge, but the distinction apparently eludes not only the media but some of the people responsible for the surveys. I asked Rebecca Dolgin, editor in chief of TheKnot.com, via email why the Real Weddings Study publishes the average cost but never the median. She began by making a valid point, which is that the study is not intended to give couples a barometer for how much they should spend but rather to give the industry a sense of how much couples are spending. More on that in a moment. But then she added, “If the average cost in a given area is, let’s say, $35,000, that’s just it—an average. Half of couples spend less than the average and half spend more.” No, no, no. Half of couples spend less than the median and half spend more.

When I pressed TheKnot.com on why they don’t just publish both figures, they told me they didn’t want to confuse people. To their credit, they did disclose the figure to me when I asked, but this number gets very little attention. Are you ready? In 2012, when the average wedding cost was $27,427, the median was $18,086. In 2011, when the average was $27,021, the median was $16,886. In Manhattan, where the widely reported average is $76,687, the median is $55,104. And in Alaska, where the average is $15,504, the median is a mere $8,440. In all cases, the proportion of couples who spent the “average” or more was actually a minority. And remember, we’re still talking only about the subset of couples who sign up for wedding websites and respond to their online surveys. The actual median is probably even lower.

These are common issues with figures reported in the media. Indeed, these are two questions the average reader should ask when seeing a statistic like the average cost of the wedding:

1. How was the data collected? If this journalist is correct about these wedding cost studies, then this data is likely very skewed. What we would want to see is a more representative sample of weddings rather than having subscribers or readers volunteer how much their wedding cost.

2. What statistic is reported? Confusing the mean and median is a big program and pops up with issues as varied as the average vs. median college debt, the average vs. median credit card debt, and the average vs. median square footage of new homes. This journalist is correct to point out that the media should know better and shouldn’t get the two confused. However, reporting a higher average with skewed data tends to make the number more sensationalistic. It also wouldn’t hurt to have more media consumers know the difference and adjust accordingly.

It sounds like the median wedding cost would likely be significantly lower than the $27,000 bandied about in the media if some basic methodological questions were asked.

DuPage County Board wants judge to tell them what to do about proposed mosque

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The DuPage County Board was due to vote on a proposed mosque yesterday but put off the vote to hear more from a federal judge:

But first they want a clarification about exactly what the judge wants them to do…The delay came after a closed-door session, where some county board members raised questions about U.S. District Judge Rebecca R. Pallmeyer’s decision to overturn a January 2010 vote by the board that denied the permit…

“Either you tell us we violated the rules and what we’re going to do, or you let us make the decision,” Larsen said. “You can’t tell us to take another look at it and then tell us what decision to reach. That violates separation of powers.”

I must be missing something here. Is there a chance the Board doesn’t want to do what the judge suggested? The article says several times that this is not the case. Here is one example:

None of the issues raised by board members are “deal-breaker concerns,” Cronin said. He said board members just want to have a discussion about how to achieve the desired outcome.

“We just want to talk a little bit about how we get there,” said Cronin, adding that county officials “would like to put the matter behind us sooner rather than later.”

Do they want the judge to be more explicit so that she provides political cover for the decision? We’ll have to wait and see what happens…

Using algorithms to judge cultural works

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Imagine the money that could be made or the status acquired if algorithms could correctly predict the merit of cultural works:

The budget for the film was $180m and, Meaney says, “it was breathtaking that it was under serious consideration”. There were dinosaurs and tigers. It existed in a fantasy prehistory—with a fantasy language. “Preposterous things were happening, without rhyme or reason.” Meaney, who will not reveal the film’s title because he “can’t afford to piss these people off”, told the studio that his program concurred with his own view: it was a stinker.

The difference is the program puts a value on it. Technically a neural network, with a structure modelled on that of our brain, it gradually learns from experience and then applies what it has learnt to new situations. Using this analysis, and comparing it with data on 12 years of American box-office takings, it predicted that the film in question would make $30m. With changes, Meaney reckoned they could increase the take—but not to $180m. On the day the studio rejected the film, another one took it up. They made some changes, but not enough—and it earned $100m. “Next time we saw our studio,” Meaney says, “they brought in the board to greet us. The chairman said, ‘This is Nick—he’s just saved us $80m.’”…

But providing a service that adapts to individual humans is not the same as becoming like a human, let alone producing art like humans. This is why the rise of algorithms is not necessarily relentless. Their strength is that they can take in that information in ways we cannot quickly understand. But the fact that we cannot understand it is also a weakness. It is worth noting that trading algorithms in America now account for 10% fewer trades than they did in 2009.

Those who are most sanguine are those who use them every day. Nick Meaney is used to answering questions about whether computers can—or should—judge art. His answer is: that’s not what they’re doing. “This isn’t about good, or bad. It is about numbers. These data represent the law of absolute numbers, the cinema-going audience. We have a process which tries to quantify them, and provide information to a client who tries to make educated decisions.”…

Equally, his is not a formula for the perfect film. “If you take a rich woman and a poor man and crash them into an iceberg, will that film always make money?” No, he says. No algorithm has the ability to write a script; it can judge one—but only in monetary terms. What Epagogix does is a considerably more sophisticated version, but still a version, of noting, say, that a film that contains nudity will gain a restricted rating, and thereby have a more limited market.

The larger article suggests algorithms can do better at predicting some human behaviors, such a purchasing consumer items, but not so good in other areas, like critical evaluations of cultural works. There are two ways this might go in the future. On one hand, some will argue this is just about collecting the right data or enough data. Perhaps we simply aren’t looking at the right things to correctly judge cultural products. On the other hand, some will argue that the value of an object may be too difficult for an algorithm to ever figure out. And, even if a formula starts hinting at good or bad art, humans can change their minds and opinions – see all the various cultural, art, and music movements just in the last few hundred years.

There is a lot of money that could be made here. This might be the bigger issue with cultural works in the future: whether algorithms can evaluate them or not, does it matter if they are all commoditized?

Naperville to add to public art with statue of founder Joseph Naper

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A new statue will be coming to Naperville in the near future as a cartoonist is creating a new sculpture of Naperville’s founder.

Dick Locher, a longtime Naperville resident and legendary cartoonist known for both his Dick Tracy strips and his political cartoons, is helping create the statue of Capt. Joseph Naper that will be placed on the founder’s homestead this summer.

Bryan Ogg, curator of research for the Heritage Society’s Naper Settlement museum, called Locher’s involvement in the project a “natural union.” Locher, a Pulitzer Prize winner, has spent four decades living in Naperville and working for the Chicago Tribune. He just recently retired from political cartooning.

But the 84-year-old’s passion for art has not waned, and he said he was happy to take on the project to commemorate Naper, who founded the city in 1831…

Locher visited Naper’s homestead site at Jefferson Avenue and Mill Street and researched the 1830s before making sketches of the statue. He had little to go on when creating Naper’s likeness, but said he was determined to make it a piece that would stand the test of time.

Whenever I visit downtown Naperville, I’m impressed with the number of statues and public art pieces. The downtown isn’t that large but the public art is prominent. Here are just two examples:

DickTracyStatueNaperville

NapervilleRiverwalkFountain

To hear Naperville tell it, the art was made possible by a concerted effort known as the Naperville Century Walk:

Genevieve looks up at us from her bench outside of Barnes and Noble on Washington Street. The Cat and the Hat practically takes our hand and strolls with us into Nichols Library. Officer Friendly, known to us today as Mayor Pradel, reminds the children of Naperville to be careful on one way streets ensuring the safety of our town’s youngest citizens. We are reminded of uncommon valor when we gaze upon five of Naperville’s most highly decorated servicemen from World War II immortalized in the bronze sculpture Veterans’ Valor in the plaza next to the YMCA.

Each of these works is just one of the 40+ pieces of public art that make up Naperville’s Century Walk.

In 1996, Century Walk began as a public art initiative featuring murals, mosaics, reliefs, mobiles, and sculptures throughout downtown Naperville. Each of the first 30 pieces in some way represents the history of Naperville during the twentieth century through people, places and events. It is a fascinating way to portray the history of Naperville through public art. Several of the last pieces were not limited to historical themes as they expand the body of artwork throughout Naperville.

See a map of the variety of art here. All of it adds a nice touch to a downtown that made quite a comeback in the 1990s when it attracted national retail stores and a number of restaurants. Many of the pieces, such as the statue of Genevieve Towsley or of Harold Moser, reference small-town Naperville which existed into the 1960s. I suspect many Naperville residents may not even know the characters referenced (for example, Genevieve Towsley wrote a newspaper column about local history for several decades) or much about Joseph Naper who came from Ohio and served for a number of years in the Illinois legislature. The art both enhances the public spaces and helps local residents and visitors, if they read the plaques, understand how much the suburban community has changed.

Building urban and suburban infrastructure better suited to the growing number of aging Americans

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Emily Badger highlights a new issue: fitting existing and future infrastructure to the rapidly growing older population in the United States.

Cities everywhere need to begin recalibrating for this moment now (a better crosswalk speed, for instance, would be closer to 3 feet per second). But this generational age bomb is also arriving at precisely the worst moment to pay for those changes that will actually cost money. And then there is the problem of imagination: How do you get urban planners, transportation engineers, and anyone running around a city in their prime to picture the places where we live through the shaded eyes of an octogenarian?..

Aging Americans, Waerstad predicts, are going to experience a lot of pain before we really have infrastructure and systems in place to accommodate them, particularly in a country where we’ve spent decades creating communities that can only be navigated by car. And then what?…

The biggest challenge, though, won’t come from neighborhoods like Harvard Square, where a couple of curb cuts and some slower crosswalks could actually make a difference. It will come from suburban communities where there are often no sidewalks at all, let alone places to go at the other end of them…

The prospect of an aging suburbia poses a challenge to the whole way we’ve been designing communities in America, not just how we lay crosswalks and print tiny-font bus schedules. Waerstad argues that the demographics of monetary power in America will play a crucial role. More than half of the discretionary income in the United States belongs to people who are older than 50. And so the same spending might that helped create suburbia will soon be clamoring to reinvent it, to create town centers that actually have stores and doctor’s offices, to turn residential neighborhoods into something more diverse, to expand transit access.

Several good points made in this article. Aging is a cultural as well as physical issue. It would be interesting to discuss further how major cities and new developments do take this American emphasis on youth and translate into design. How would a new condo building look different? How about a new streetscape? Second, critics of suburbia have pointed this out for quite a while: American suburbs require driving, which tends to disadvantage those who can’t drive. Sociologist Herbert Gans noted this way back in his early 1960s classic The Levittowners when noting that teenagers and the elderly are stuck.

I assume there are some places we could look in order to learn about how to do this better. How do other countries tackle this? What about American communities geared toward older residents – what adjustments does Del Webb make?