Category Archives: Places

Pushing back against the housing plans of the wealthy in suburban Palo Alto

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One elected local government official wants to limit what wealthy residents can build in suburban Palo Alto:

View Palo Alto, California Eadweard by thegetty is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

The proposed legislation would apply to people who buy three or more homes within a radius of 500 feet, roughly the length of a city block. Any construction project expected to last more than 180 days would need a detailed daily schedule of construction work to prove it can be conducted without double-parking vehicles or blocking driveways or bike lanes.

After finishing one construction project, homeowners would need to wait three years to begin another unless a major emergency occurred. Homes could not be vacant for more than six months in any given year.

The proposal relies on neighbors for enforcement, leaving it up to another homeowner or tenant living within 500 feet to file a lawsuit.

The proposal would place new restrictions on private security guards across Palo Alto, not just those serving wealthy homeowners. All security vehicles would have to be marked and permitted by the city. Security guards would have to identify themselves to the public when asked. They would be prohibited from harassing or intimidating passers-by on public property…

The full Palo Alto City Council is likely to take up Mr. Stone’s proposal in January or February. Mr. Stone said he is confident that a majority of the seven-member council, which has taken a keen interest in housing affordability, would support the general framework but could send it to a committee or city staff member for refinement. It could take six months or longer to reach a final vote, he said.

Three things strike me about this proposal:

  1. It is clearly aimed at particular residents. Not just people with some wealth, who might be found across American suburban communities, but people who are truly wealthy and can afford this kind of construction and property ownership and all that goes with it.
  2. Communities often deal with these concerns at the zoning level. How big can a structure or house be? Are the guidelines in particular areas or in regards to property lines? The proposal above seems to deal with other matters that come along with regular approval of megahouses and properties.
  3. The regulations are about property but local conversations often have to do with local character and community life. Do such homes (and people) fit in the community? Who can live in a place where such properties are common? Who is Palo Alto for? Suburbs often implicitly or explicitly have these discussions while considering development.

Now that this proposal is out there, how do wealthier residents respond and what will the final local regulations be?

Schwinn once an important Chicago company but the industry and the world changed

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A look at a new documentary on the bicycle company Schwinn tells of how it was once a Chicago company and then it was not:

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The story starts in 1895, when German immigrants Ignaz Schwinn and Adolph Arnold founded Arnold, Schwinn & Co. in Chicago. Schwinn would subsequently buy out his partner and build an enduring family business that would reign over the bicycle industry for generations, surviving the rise of the automobile, the Depression and two world wars.

In fact, the original six-story Schwinn factory at Lake and Peoria streets in Fulton Market still stands as a monument to Chicago’s erstwhile bike company, with plans to redevelop the now-vacant building into office space…

As market share dwindled, Schwinn began outsourcing production. By 1983, Schwinn ceased its Chicago manufacturing, laying off 1,800 employees and moving most of its production overseas to Taiwan.

In 1992, struggling with debt, the storied Chicago company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy under fourth-generation owner Ed Schwinn…

The bike company has rolled on under a succession of new owners and is now part of Dutch conglomerate Pon, with Schwinn based in Madison, Wisconsin. But the movie focuses on the Chicago glory years, when the Schwinn brand ruled the sidewalks, schoolyards and bike lanes.

This might be the story of a number of companies over the years. They had success with lots of work and new ideas. They rose to become a known and popular brand. But then industries and places changed. People no longer wanted the product in the same way. They moved manufacturing overseas. They hit hard financial times and even though the brand name lives on, it has done so under the ownership of different companies and the company is now based in another city.

And this could also be the story of places. Chicago, like a number of American cities, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, were centers for manufacturing. American companies produced a lot for decades. And much of that went elsewhere by the end of the twentieth century. Sociologist William Julius Wilson describes these shifts and their effects on neighborhoods in When Work Disappears. The loss of tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs was a hard blow to many cities who struggled to pursue or grow other businesses or industries in subsequent years.

In the big picture, both companies and places go through cycles and lifespans. They do not necessarily continue as they have been, even when they are successful. We tend to like the stories of their rise and it can be harder to wrestle with their falls. But both are part of the human experience.

An airport as an economic engine, Pittsburgh edition

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Reflecting on the opening of a new terminal at Pittsburgh International Airport, one writer looks back at what the city and region expected the airport to be:

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The airport was to be a driver and symbol of the whole region’s evolution. “Planners hope the terminal, with its vaulted ceilings and driverless underground trains, will complete an image transformation begun decades ago,” the Times story said. “Once known as a gritty old steel town of blue-collar workers, Pittsburgh has become a commercial center of office towers and high-technology industries.” That reinvention has continued apace in the 33 years since the terminal opened. But even as a tech, robotics, and health care hub, the area has three-fourths the population that it did in 1970. And no place was a worse reminder of what Pittsburgh had lost than this airport 20 minutes west of downtown…

As a major airline’s biggest hub, Pittsburgh would be taking a piece out of millions of travelers who weren’t even staying in Pittsburgh, and it would also get a tourist boom from people who suddenly had an ultra-easy way of visiting. Before Sept. 11, 2001, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported, USAir was running 542 daily flights in or out of Pittsburgh. As airline-airport relationships go, this was a huge one. (Today, for example, Delta peaks with about 330 daily flights leaving Minneapolis, its No. 2 city.)…

But the oversized airport was a bleak metaphor for a city that was once more bustling and then got let down—first by the shriveling of the steel business, then by USAir itself. The cavernous, quiet terminal created a bad feeling upon landing at home, like you had just entered a place that wasn’t what it used to be. It wasn’t a good way to be welcomed to a city, whether you lived there or not.

It can’t be overstated how much the point of the new airport is to simply move Pittsburgh past this corporate pantsing by US Airways. Yeah, there are practical logistics reasons for an update. As the airport authority chairman said in announcing the project back in 2017, airlines would face lower costs, and the facility would be “very efficient and modern.” But then he got to the point: “And, finally, this is most important for me, the people of Pittsburgh finally get an airport that is built for them, and not USAir.”…

A major city needs a decent airport. It offers travel opportunities to residents and businesses. It connects a place to other places. It is what people see when they arrive in or leave a city.

Can an airport be an economic engine on its own? Pittsburgh is a smaller big city. According to Wikipedia, it is the 67th largest city in the United States with over 307,000 residents and it is the 28th largest metropolitan area. How much air traffic can be expected to go through an airport in such a city?

The story of this airport seems tied up with the fate of the city. It once thought it could be an airline hub. It has a proud history of industry. But the world changed: industry jobs went elsewhere, the airline industry changed, and the large airport did not live up to its potential.

Having effective and inspiring infrastructure is helpful in many ways. It enables other important activity. Pittsburgh may not have a large airline hub or a standalone economic powerhouse but perhaps it now has an airport that serves the region well for decades.

Chicago as the epicenter for the creation of American time zones

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When Americans decided on time zones in the late 1800s, where did they gather to formalize the boundaries and clocks? Chicago, a railroad center:

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Until 1883, a Chicagoan asked to tell what time it was could give more than one answer and still be correct.

There was local time, determined by the position of the sun at high noon at a centrally located spot in town, usually City Hall. There was also railroad time, which put Columbus, Ohio, six minutes faster than Cincinnati and 19 minutes faster than Chicago. Scattered across the country were 100 different local time zones, and the railroads had some 53 zones of their own.

To do away with the inevitable confusion, the railroads took the matter into their own hands, holding a General Time Convention in the fall of 1883 at the Grand Pacific Hotel at LaSalle Street and Jackson Boulevard. (Today, a plaque at the location — which is just north of the Chicago Board of Trade Building — notes its significance).

Its purpose: to develop a better and more uniform system of railroad scheduling. The Standard Time System — based on the mean solar time at the central meridian of each time zone — was formally inaugurated on Nov. 18, 1883, a day that came to be known as the “Day of Two Noons.”

Another summary of the same story ended this way:

But it was an astonishingly rapid and successful shift, syncing up almost the entire country in the space of a week, with all roads leading back to Chicago.

Three interrelated features of Chicago stand out to me as contributing to being the place where time zones were agreed upon:

  1. A railroad center with numerous major railways running in and through the city and region.
  2. Business leaders, specifically railroad leaders, pushing for standard time zones in order to help their commercial activity. Chicago was a center for commerce and industry.
  3. The ease of getting in and out of Chicago – lots of railroads, central location in the United States – helped facilitate a meeting there.

These features of Chicago still hold today. The city continues to be a railroad center with lots of traffic throughout the region. It is still a business center, a leading global city. And it still serves as a transportation hub. Just as the railroad executives found it a good place to gather, see the number of important meetings that take place near O’Hare Airport, in the city, and throughout the region.

Might such a meeting in 1883 taken place elsewhere? Perhaps. If something as consequential as time zones were to be decided in 2025, which American city might we expect to host the discussion: the political center of Washington, D.C.? The leading global city of New York? The tech capital in San Francisco?

Chicago, a city of (many suburban) neighborhoods

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Chicago grew in a way that many American cities have grown: they annexed land and communities just outside their borders. Famously, New York City annexed Brooklyn in 1898 when the separate community across the East River was one of the most populous communities in the United States. But Chicago also had its share of large annexations that helped it add neighborhoods and expand to the borders it has today. The Encyclopedia of Chicago summarizes this process:

The Encyclopedia of Chicago (The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 22

For Chicago, the period of extensive annexations extended from 1851 to 1920. The largest annexation occurred in 1889, when four of five incorporated townships surrounding Chicago (as well as a part of the fifth) were annexed to the city. Most annexations to Chicago during these years came because Chicago offered superior services, from better water connections in the nineteenth century to better high schools in the early twentieth. Later, prior incorporations and suburban resistance to the power and urban complexity of Chicago halted the process.

Chicago is often known now as a city of neighborhoods and starting with efforts by University of Chicago sociologists in the 1920s to define Chicago neighborhoods, it has 77 community areas. But many of these areas were once suburban. Historian Elaine Lewinnek in The Working Man’s Reward discusses what happened in Lake Township, bordered by Pershing, State, 87th, and Cicero, as it developed as an industrial suburb with working-class residents. It was added to the city in 1889, an important year for the city’s boundaries as several other large suburban areas were incorporated into the city including Hyde Park just east of Lake Township and Jefferson Township and Lake View Township on the north side of the Loop.

As these suburban areas became part of the city, they received city services and became part of the larger city’s fabric. They added residents and structures. But they also have hints of suburban life. Row upon row of single-family homes. Strip malls and big box stores. Residents might drive more.

Such neighborhoods can be found in many American cities. Big cities are not just the dense downtowns with skyscrapers, major corporate offices, and certain cultural institutions. They include numerous residential, commercial, and industrial neighborhoods on their edges where the borders of municipal boundaries can blur.

Not knowing about significant local events, bridge collapse edition

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I have driven over the Sunshine Skyway Bridge a number of times when flying into Tampa and driving south. Here is an image of the roadway leading onto the bridge from 12 years ago:

Recently looking through used books at a local library, I learned that part of the prior span collapsed after being hit by a boat in 1980:

Wikipedia’s description of the disaster:

The second incident came on the morning of May 9, 1980, when the freighter MV Summit Venture collided with a support pier near the center of the bridge during a squall, resulting in the catastrophic failure of the southbound roadway and the deaths of 35 people when several vehicles, including a Greyhound bus, plunged into Tampa Bay.[13] Traffic was diverted onto the surviving two-lane span for several years until the replacement Skyway Bridge was completed, at which time the old bridge was partially demolished and converted into two[14] long fishing piers.

This is a significant local event that I had not heard of before. Such events are rare and likely stick in people’s memories for a long time. But as a visitor to the area, even one who has been there at least a few times, I did not know that this bridge had once collapsed.

What else am I missing when visit places near and far? In my research on suburbs, I have focused on key moments involving character, times when communities had public discussions about the choices they faced. Looking back, it was clear that these choices then shaped subsequent decisions and the character of the community.

Could local disasters have a similar effect on local character? Catastrophic events can rally a community, impacting people far beyond just those direct affected. Do people remember when they heard about the bridge collapsing? How many people wondered about their own drive over the bridge?

The most likely ways I could imagine finding about such events is either through reading about what happened or talking with someone who lived in the area. And some events might be more important than others; a major hurricane in an area is going to have a larger effect than a smaller matter.

When a suburb declines a train station along a proposed passenger line

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The Chicago suburb of Huntley is a little more than 50 miles from downtown Chicago. With the planned opening of a new passenger rail line from Chicago to Rockford, here is how city officials responded:

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Huntley officials confirmed Friday that the village has decided against having a train station come to town.

Huntley had been slated to have a stop on the Chicago-to-Rockford rail line that’s expected to start operations by 2027, but the village recently notified project leaders they no longer wanted a station.

Village officials cited potential parking and traffic issues, among other things, downtown as well as uncertainty with ridership numbers and village financial commitments…

In nearby Marengo, which isn’t scheduled to have a train stop despite the rail line going through the center of town, the City Council has expressed its support for having the train stop there.

For a long time, suburbs would have wanted a stop on a commuter rail line. This offers nearby residents – in the particular community with a stop but also residents in nearby communities – opportunities to go to the city. Not having a train station means other communities could benefit from the commuting options and the business and residential opportunities that might go with it.

But the reasons cited above suggest a railroad today might be seen as more trouble than its worth for suburban communities. Parking and traffic concerns come up with any new development. Ridership and money figures could be hard to forecast.

I wonder if another matter at play is the rapid growth of the community in the last few decades. As late as 2000, the suburb had 5,730 residents. In the 2020 Census, the community has 27,740 residents. Would a train line contribute to that change? Might it encourage denser development around a train station, something that has happened near numerous Chicago suburban train stations?

Also, the community already has transportation options. It is along a major highway, I-90, to and from Chicago. Residents can access train lines to Chicago in the nearby suburbs of Elgin or Cary, roughly 25 minutes drive away, if they really want a train.

Still, I wonder if the suburb will regret not having a train stop. The train will run through the community anyway; would a train station disrupt life that much and/or might it add something for residents?

Record office vacancy rate in Chicago’s Loop

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Over a quarter of the office space in Chicago’s Loop is empty:

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The vacancy rate in the Loop was 24.7% in the second quarter of 2025 — a record high, according to research from commercial real estate firm Bradford Allen. That’s up 1.3% from the first quarter, and a 2.7% increase compared to the second quarter of 2024.

The firm said the second quarter was also one of the weakest periods for overall office demand since the beginning of 2024. Direct net absorption, a measure of space that’s been leased versus vacated over a period of time, hit negative 1.5 million square feet. That means more companies vacated than leased office space in the second quarter…

But it’s reassuring to see more foot traffic in the Loop, and he said more companies are requesting office tours for larger spaces, signaling strong interest in the Loop. He also said his firm is doing more office and retail deals downtown.

Leasing activity is starting to return after companies pulled back on signing larger leases during the pandemic. There’s a lot of larger tenants in the office market right now, and it feels promising, DeMoss said.

Each time I teach Urban Sociology, we consider the famous concentric circles map of Chicago produced by the Chicago School. At the middle of the map is the Loop, the central business district. For decades, it has been an economic center for the city. With its placement at the center, it represents the importance of economic activity in the big cities of today.

But what if the Loop became something else? The vacancy rate cited above suggests about one-quarter of the office space is empty. In a setting where there is a lot of office space overall, this adds up to a lot of space. What if this space was used differently?

This could be a shift toward more residential units in the Loop. Mixed-use development is popular in many places as it can help create a 24-hour vibrancy that can be lacking in places primarily consisting of office space used during workday hours.

But it could also mean a shift toward other land uses. More food and retail spaces? More recreational and cultural spaces? More community and municipal spaces? Less need for parking spaces?

While the record vacancy rate gets the headlines, it would be interesting to hear more about people and institutions that could help shape the future. What will the Loop be in 10 or 25 years and does this hint at shifts across many American cities?

Considering a community’s “moral geography”

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A resident of Harrisonburg, Virginia walks through the community and consider the moral implications of its design:

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Today, as in the century-old photo in my hand, the rail bends out of sight just beyond a wooden bridge. A brick warehouse still flanks the right side of the track, though offices now peer through its rows of windows. To my left, the changes are starker. Where the train platform once extended welcome and permitted leave-taking, the blank face of the local jail looms overhead. Razor wire and surveillance cameras stand vigil. The pride of the city at its inauguration in 1911, Union Station is now a faint memory. In its place stands a depot of another infrastructure project: our national network of prisons, jails, and detention centers…

I remember Gilmore and the jail’s residents as I walk toward Court Square, at the heart of this small city. A domed pavilion stands on the corner. The waters that flowed from a spring here made this a place of gathering and relief long before any dream of a city or courts. For generations, many Indigenous peoples, including the Monacan, have made the Shenandoah Valley a place of dwelling and struggle, provision, and exchange. Though European arrival transformed land into possession and fixed new boundary lines upon it and upon our hearts, ancient routes still guide our movement through this valley. Early roads followed the trails of Indigenous peoples, as did the railways. Today, a federal interstate channels commerce and transit along similar paths…

These spasms are more than historical artifacts or chance misfortunes on the road to progress. They shape our national history, the places we live, and how we move. Nearly a century after Harris’s death, the civil rights movement challenged Jim Crow laws and won significant advances toward desegregation and legal equality. Meanwhile, racial and class separation were being further inscribed upon the land itself. Three signature construction projects characterized this reactionary spatial reordering of the postwar and civil rights era: the suburb, the interstate highway system, and the carceral archipelago. Together with their complementary social and physical infrastructure, these institutions map an enduring moral geography that guides how we live and move in the world…

There are no quick fixes or universal remedies. But if we’re willing to dream new dreams together, there are tools we can learn to use to refashion the places we live into places of shared thriving. In the Shenandoah Valley, we are reckoning with our liability for supremacist land use planning and the historic destruction of housing. Community groups are participating in comprehensive zoning and regulatory reviews in hopes of spurring affordable housing and increasing neighborhood economic integration. Networks of mutual aid and community safety are warming up to keep immigration enforcement from tearing us apart. Families are organizing bike buses for schoolkids. Cooperatives, cohousing, bail funds, and community land trusts are forming to practice new ways of being free together in the land. Everyday people are taking risks and making sacrifices to redesign our lives in this place for connection, care, and joy.

Our building and planning choices reflect decisions made by leaders and residents. These decisions have moral dimensions; they are not just practical matters or problem-solving exercises but rather are the result of humans enacting meanings in a setting. Answering “What makes a good community?” is a moral question that then affects all sorts of discussions and decisions.

I appreciate that the article both acknowledges the past processes that led to our settings today and reminds us that we participate in shaping our communities today. If we find that we do not like the moral geography we have today, there are opportunities to develop a different moral geography.

It would also be interesting to hear how others in the community understand and respond to the past and current moral geography. How many people notice these moral dimensions? Who benefits from the existing moral geography? Is there consensus about what the moral geography could be in a decade or 50 years?

The lingering reminders of the railroads that once marked Chicago’s lakefront

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In its early history, Chicago’s shoreline with Lake Michigan was marked by railroad lines and activities. Trains pulled right up to the Chicago River, moving goods to the center of the city and its thriving port. You can see a late nineteenth century images of the lines of the Illinois Central right along the water here and here.

Today, it is harder to see evidence of the bustling railroad activity. The city still has sizable railyards and a large amount of railroad traffic. But it is now largely outside of the Loop and more railroad activity has been pushed to the edges of the metropolitan region.

I recently found a spot where an observer can still get a hint of the important railroad activity that marked the lakefront:

This passenger line comes into the central part of the city from the south and its station is underground. This angle gives a broader view of the tracks and the infrastructure needed to move trains and people.

The major cities of the United States, including Chicago, are still dependent on railroad lines. The average resident of a region may only travel via car and visitors from further away may primarily arrive via airplane but the railroad lines continue to deliver large amounts of goods and resources. Their presence may be less visible but keeping the trains running on time in and around cities still matters.