Category Archives: Places

“Missionary work” selling new mixed-income neighborhoods in Chicago

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In the 1990s, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Chicago Housing Authority, and the City of Chicago developed plans to tear down the public housing high-rises in Chicago and replace them with new mixed-income neighborhoods that would include units for public housing residents as well as market-rate units. Recently, it has been difficult to sell some of these units and the neighborhoods:

“Every single Plan for Transformation (community) is in exactly the same predicament,” said Ziegenhagen, vice president of operations. “They’re looking at their pro forma and they’re looking at a huge loss. The lenders have been more willing to work things out with these developments because they invested in them knowing they were really community development, and we were all assaulted by the same economic development.”…

Even in the good times, Williams said, buyers in a development like Oakwood Shores, on the site of the former Ida B. Wells housing complex, had to be what he calls “trailblazers.”

Now, those trailblazers aren’t happy because the price cuts of 25 to 35 percent have negated their equity, while their property tax bills have increased. Newer buyers need to be trailblazers who are much better educated about just what it is they are buying into at a Plan for Transformation community, Williams said…

“If you believe in real estate, you just have to believe that you keep building a neighborhood. Otherwise, you’ll continue to have a decline in the values of the existing neighborhood. These transformation sites are hard work,” Williams said. “This is missionary work. I didn’t start out thinking this is missionary work, but that’s what I think I’m doing now.

Some of this is certainly due to a depressed housing market. However, this also sounds like it is part of the growing pains of these new mixed-income neighborhoods: even though the units might be on in desirable locations, particularly at the Cabrini-Green site, some homebuyers might be turned off by the idea of living near public housing residents or being part of a newly-formed neighborhood and having to be “trailblazers.”

It will be interesting to see down the road whether this is just a blip in the development of these neighborhoods which were supposed to be transformational or whether they hint at deeper issues that are exacerbated by this economic crisis. I assume time will help take away some of the stigma of these neighborhoods, particularly their historic connection to notorious public housing projects, but this will still be a process.

Applying evolutionary biology to the city

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Biologist David Sloan Wilson has taken an interest in better understanding Binghamtom, New York. His lens: evolutionary biology.

Differences in prosociality, Wilson thought, should produce measurable outcomes — if not in reproductive success, perhaps in happiness, crime rates, neighbourhood tidiness or even the degree of community feeling expressed in the density of holiday decorations. “I really wanted to see a map of altruism,” he says. “I saw it in my mind.” And with a frisson of excitement, he realized that his models and experiments offered clues about how to intervene, how to structure real-world groups to favour prosociality. “Now is the implementation phase.” Evolutionary theory, Wilson decided, will improve life in Binghamton…

Binghamton is hard to love. Established in the early nineteenth century, it has long relied on big industry for its identity and prosperity — early on through the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company and then through IBM, which was founded in the area. But the manufacturers mostly decamped in the 1990s, and since then the city has taken on an aimless, shabby air. Dollar stores and coin-operated laundries fill the gaps between dilapidated Victorian houses and massive brick-and-stone churches. A Gallup poll in March 2011 listed Binghamton as one of the five US cities least liked by its residents. “It is a town that knows it is badly in need of a revival,” says Wilson. Even its motto, ‘Restoring the pride’, speaks of a city clinging to its past and ashamed of its present…

So Wilson decided to see whether he could raise up the prosocial valleys by creating conditions in which cooperation becomes a winning strategy — in effect, hacking the process of cultural evolution. He set about this largely by instituting friendly competitions between groups. His first idea was a park-design project, in which neighbourhoods were invited to compete for park-improvement funds by creating the best plan.

But Wilson soon found out that field experiments in real cities can take on lives of their own: different neighbourhoods couldn’t get their acts together on the same schedule, so the competition aspect largely disappeared. Instead, he is now working on turning multiple park ideas into reality. The dog park is one. Another is Sunflower Park, the most advanced project to date, but still a sad, mainly empty lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. Children don’t spend a lot of time playing here. Undaunted, Wilson is raising funds and laying plans for a relaxing community space flush with trees and amenities. “In a year,” he says, “we will serve you a hot dog from the pavilion.”

The rest of the article describes how Wilson acts more like a social scientist, taking surveys, making observations, interacting with residents, trying to understand local religious congregations. Some of this discussion is amusing as it rehashes debates about how close researchers should get to research subjects – social scientists would describe it as participant observation.

This reminds me of some of the work of early sociologists such as Herbert Spencer and the Chicago School who based at least some of their ideas on biological principles. Spencer viewed society as being like an organism and the Chicago School viewed competition for space as a primary driver of urban development and action. But evolutionary thinking has generally faded away in sociology (outside of sociobiology). Could sociologists, and urban sociologists, again view evolutionary principles as a boon for the field or simply a distraction from the better work that is going on in the field? Wilson is also interested in the topics of altruism and prosociality, topics that have attracted the attention of more sociologists in recent years. It would be interesting to hear what happens when Wilson comes to some conclusions about social and city life and then presents them to social scientists.

Replicating New York’s High Line

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New York City’s High Line, a park created out of old elevated railroad structures, has proven quite popular with visitors and with urban commentators. But can it be replicated in other places?

This week the second section of New York’s iconic High Line park opened with almost as much fanfare as the first section got when it opened in June 2009 and drew 2 million visitors in its first 10 months.

What makes the High Line so unique as an urban park is that it rises 30 feet above the street on a 1930s elevated freight line that was slated for destruction after the last train ran on it in 1980. Only the action of neighborhood community groups, committed to preservation of what they regarded as a local landmark, saved the High Line.

High Line concepts are being considered for other cities across the country. And well they should. For the message the High Line sends is: Treat your urban ruins carefully. They may be more valuable than you think.

The difficulty with trying to apply the High Line concept to other cities, as the architectural historian Witold Rybczynski recently observed, is that few cities have New York’s density. The High Line could not, for example, work in an old, industrial area people avoid, or in a neighborhood in which it towered over one- and two-story homes.

The density argument is that this works because there is a large nearby population. Visitors from elsewhere, other neighborhoods of the city or suburbanites or tourists, can also come but the park is sustained by daily visits from nearby residents. Urban amenities from parks to museums to public spaces need a steady population of visitors just to survive, let alone thrive. Just because they are unique or interesting is not a guarantee that visitors will come.

But there is another angle to this as well. In the case of the High Line, we need to hear more about how the neighborhood and the city help make this possible: what is it about this particular social setting that creates an environment where this park can succeed? Witold Rybcynzski makes this argument:

The High Line may be a landscaping project, but a good part of its success is due to its architectural setting, which, like the 12th Arrondissement, is crowded with interesting old and new buildings. The park courses through the meatpacking district and Chelsea, heavily populated, high-energy residential neighborhoods. Very few American cities — and Manhattan is the densest urban area in the country — can offer the same combination of history and density.

Rybcynzski concludes by suggesting that this idea will end up becoming another “failed urban design strateg[y].”

So other cities could move in a couple of directions after this:

1. Try to build their own “High Line” anyway. Since this has gotten so much popular attention, someone is bound to try it. (Outside of Chicago, how many cities have existing elevated railroad structures?)

2. Look to develop their own unique repurposed structure(s). This would likely take different forms in different places but has the advantage of working with existing structures and the existing character of the community.

There must be other cities that have done something like this but how many of them are public spaces? I was thinking of several repurposed museum spaces, like the Tate Modern in London which was a former power station and the Museum of Science and Industry which dates back to the 1893 Columbian Exposition, but these require admission.

Illinois redistricting also about capturing suburban voters

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Much of the press about redistricting in Illinois has highlighted how Democrats plan to increase their seats. But the Daily Herald offers an additional insight by suggesting that the redistricting is really about capturing suburban voters:

But even as political analysts poring over the new boundaries provide slightly different takes, one thing is certain: the suburbs, which saw booming growth over the last decade, were the prime meat in the proverbial fattened calf — filleted to produce congressional districts that would help assure a Democratic majority in the state’s delegation over the next 10 years…

“There’s been a shift in power,” Northern Illinois University professor Richard Greene said. “Because of the population shift, the Democratic core and the inner manufacturing suburbs are losing strength, as the outer-edge suburban communities are gaining substantially in strength.”

Democrats, political consultant Kitty Kurth said, want to continue to capitalize on their base — the largely Democratic voting bloc of Chicago, some of which has moved to the suburbs in recent years.

The new map appears to do just that, in some cases through odd-shaped districts that often start in solidly Democratic Chicago and extend into the suburbs through long, gnarled fingers. That essentially extends Democratic Chicago districts into traditionally Republican suburban ones, but not by so much as to put any Democratic majority at risk.

Traditionally, some of the suburban areas, particularly DuPage County, have been solidly Republican strongholds. While these figures are already changing somewhat, this redistricting might help push  these state offices further away from Republicans.

The article also goes on to note how the second Hispanic district in the state could be located in the southwest suburbs “centered around Aurora and Joliet.”

Such a move to control suburban votes would go along with commentary that suggests suburban voters are critical for national political outcomes.

How a long commute harms you

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The Infrastructurist has a round-up of recent studies that show the negative effects of long commutes: higher rates of divorce plus “low happiness, high stress levels, and loneliness; they even makes us physically unhealthy.”

As they note, enough Americans seem willing to make the trade-off between a better house for a long commute. Is this because people simply don’t know or think about the social costs of long commutes? If not, what sort of organization would or could make this more known?

The view of Chicago from New York City

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Chicago still occasionally goes by the nickname of the “Second City,” even though the population of Los Angeles passed it years ago. But which city is the “First City” is in America has been clear for over a century. Recently, “The Urbanist” section of New York magazine focused on Chicago and at least one Chicago critic thought the review was even-handed. This reminded me of two historic links between the two cities:

1. A number of Chicago’s early prominent residents and boosters were transplanted New York residents.

2. New York annexed all the boroughs into the city in the 1890s so that it would keep a population lead over Chicago.

Today, is there really direct competition between the two cities? They both are global cities that rely heavily on finance and trading. Do big companies often choose between these two locations? If I had to quickly point out the biggest differences between the two regions today beyond the obvious (size, location), I might go with culture. New York City is an entertainment and celebrity center in a way that Chicago is not. New York City combines both commerce/industry with glamor while Chicago is hard-working, tough, and Midwestern (which some might consider the opposite of cosmopolitan).

The effect of the “McMansion ordinance” in Austin

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In the past decade, a number of communities across the United States have debated and enacted ordinances intended to regulate teardowns, often termed McMansions. Austin, Texas has gone through this process and Kathie Tovo, a candidate for the city council, discusses her take on the “McMansion ordinance”:

AC: One more fundamental criticism that’s been leveled at your campaign is that your goal of “complete communities” – the live-work-play ideal with affordable family housing – may be at odds with some policies supported by some of the neighborhood associations you’ve been affiliated with. The Austin Neighborhoods Council, for instance, seemed supportive of the McMansion ordinance, which some people argue has facilitated sprawl by preventing the sort of home expansions that would keep growing families in the city.

KT: I guess I just don’t buy that argument, especially about McMansion. Because, for one thing, a lot of people were really concerned about the McMansion ordinance; it was going to kill the building industry in Austin. It really hasn’t, and a lot of the McMansions weren’t adding density to our neighborhoods because they were typically being occupied by a couple of people. I think that you can add on a considerable amount to your house and not be a McMansion. Absolutely, we want to be sure our land development code allows for people living in small bungalows that might have accommodated families 40 years ago when we want them to be able to add on in ways that are appropriate. I think there’s a lot of room for doing that without running up against the McMansion standards. And as you look at older neighborhoods, people are adding on. And in looking at our Families and Children [Task Force] research – families with kids will live in smaller spaces, including multifamily residences, if the spaces are well-designed. I’m married to an architect, and he’s done some additions to older houses for families that wanted to stay in the central city but the house was really too small for their modern standards.

[Editor’s note: In response to this question, Tovo later added the following to her answer via email:

KT: This criticism has little grounding and shows a lack of understanding of the research in this area or the work that has been done by groups like the city’s own Families and Children Task Force. Neighborhood associations tended to be big supporters of many of the amenities that enhance the quality of life for families across the life span: parks, open spaces, sidewalks, and safe pedestrian and bike routes.

The reasons families with children have been leaving the central city are complex…Suggesting that unregulated development will somehow lead developers to create more affordable housing or more family friendly housing is incorrect.

(And for the record – the trend of families leaving the central city pre-exists the McMansion Ordinance.)]

This candidate makes several interesting points:

1. There is an argument out there that cities lose out when they create such ordinances as it drives out middle-class and upper-class residents. If these possible residents can’t tear down an older home and build the kind of suburban home that they desire, they are going to take the tax dollars and go elsewhere. In the long run, the city loses out on the sort of stable residents and tax base that it needs. I’ve seen this argument made in Dallas as well. Tovo suggests this isn’t really the case; people were leaving Austin even before the ordinance, suggesting other factors are also at work.

2. Tovo makes an architectural critique of McMansions, suggesting that people “will live in smaller spaces, including multifamily residences, if the spaces are well-designed.” I wonder if the ordinances/regulations in Austin go far enough to make sure housing units are well-designed.

3. Tovo wants to make clear that she is not opposed to people adding on to their homes – but this has to be done “in ways that are appropriate.” She is trying to chart a middle path between the two poles in the teardown debate: the rights of the community versus the rights of individual property owners.

4. Tovo suggests that unfettered, free-market housing policies will not lead to “more affordable housing or more family friendly housing.” Other communities agree with this as they offer incentives and regulations to insure that some of these structures are created alongside more typical single-family homes.

It sounds like Tovo is trying to tread carefully in these comments (perhaps also highlighted by her follow-up email after the interview). Overall, it sounds like she is promoting New Urbanist type neighborhoods that are walkable, diverse, affordable, and well-designed.

You can read the “McMansion ordinance” here on Austin’s official website.

The battle between Illinois and Indiana casinos

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Due to budget issues, Illinois lawmakers recently approved new five new casinos. But it remains to be seen how the new casinos in Illinois will affect the already-existing casinos in northwest Indiana:

All told, the five casinos [in northwestern Indiana] generated nearly half a billion dollars in tax revenue in 2010.

Five casinos are strung along the Lake Michigan shoreline in some of the Hoosier State’s most economically depressed communities. Ball State University economist Mike Hicks says at least one casino likely would be shut down by increased competition. Some 80 percent of gamblers visit casinos once or twice a year, and choose newer, glitzier options, Hicks said…

Horseshoe spent $400 million to build a brand-new “boat” that is essentially a floating building just three years ago, an investment Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr. said was made with the prospect of a downtown Chicago casino in mind.

“We wanted to build something that was Chicago-proof,” McDermott said. “I think it’s the best option outside Las Vegas.”

I have to think that the knowledge that this gambling tax revenue was going to Indiana helped motivate Illinois lawmakers to capture some of this money. And I wonder if any politicians were thinking about the talk from Wisconsin, Indiana, New Jersey, and other states months ago regarding encouraging businesses to leave the high taxes of Illinois.

I haven’t seen much talk about many casinos the Chicago area could reasonably support. There are already four, two in Joliet, one in Elgin, and one in Aurora plus the five in northwest Indiana plus more across the borders in Wisconsin and Michigan. And it would be interesting to see how these existing casinos have helped or hurt their communities (and the state government).

The social history of the food pyramid

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With the unveiling later this week of a replacement to the food pyramid (it will be a “plate-shaped symbol, sliced into wedges for the basic food groups and half-filled with fruits and vegetables”), the New York Times provides a quick look at the background of the food pyramid:

The food pyramid has a long and tangled history. Its original version showed a hierarchy of foods, with those that made up the largest portions of a recommended diet, like grains, fruit and vegetables, closest to the wide base. Foods that were to be eaten in smaller quantities, like dairy and meat, were closer to the pyramid’s tapering top.

But the pyramid’s original release was held back over complaints from the meat and dairy industry that their products were being stigmatized. It was released with minor changes in 1992.

A revised pyramid was released in 2005. Called MyPyramid, it turned the old hierarchy on its side, with vertical brightly colored strips standing in for the different food groups. It also showed a stick figure running up the side to emphasize the need for exercise.

But the new pyramid was widely viewed as hard to understand. The Obama administration began talking about getting rid of it as early as last summer. At that time, a group of public health experts, nutritionists, food industry representatives and design professionals were invited to a meeting in Washington where they were asked to discuss possible alternative symbols. One option was a plate.

Two things stand out to me:

1. This is partly about changing nutritional standards but also is about politics and lobbying. Food groups are backed by businesses and industries that have a stake in this. Did they play any part in this new logo?

2. This is a graphical design issue. The old food pyramid suggests that certain foods should be the basis/foundation for eating. The most recent pyramid is a bit strange as the pyramid is broken into slivers so the peaking aspect of a pyramid seems to have been discarded. The new logo sounds like it will be a more proportional based object where people can quickly see what percentage of their diet should be devoted to different foods. Since this is a logo that is likely to be slapped on many educational materials and food packages, it would be helpful if it is easy to understand.

Seeing the Chicago area’s “pre-European settlement vegetation”

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Here is a website that offers a look at the vegetation in the Chicago area before settlers really transformed the land. According to this article, the maps were created by looking at surveyor’s notes:

Nearly 200 years ago, long before global positioning systems, the land was surveyed with little more than a compass, a 66-foot-long metal chain and an ax to mark trees, said McBride. Luckily, surveyors also brought notebooks.

Surveyors’ notes slowly outlined gorgeous, ecologically diverse landscapes now largely lost. “As they divided each township into 36-square-mile sections, surveyors marked up to four ‘bearing’ trees near each section corner. They jotted down the trees’ species and other notes describing the landscape,” said McBride.

From these records, McBride painstakingly reconstructed the landscape: 65 percent prairie, 30 percent wooded, and at least 2.8 percent wetland. Trees flourished in northern townships; prairie dominated southern ones.

Things I think of when looking at this map:

1. Some of the first settlers in the Naperville area settled around the “Big Woods” area which I would guess is the big forested section on the map between Batavia and Aurora and east of the Fox River.

2. In the days before trains (with the first train line running out of Chicago through what is now Wheaton and West Chicago in 1849), the prairie land between southwestern DuPage County and Chicago could turn quite soggy. Hence, there was quite a network of plank roads in the Chicago region so that people could traverse the prairie.

3. There was quite a bit of prairie. How long did it take for most of that prairie land to disappear and be converted into farm land?

4. There was a lot of trees north of Chicago along Lake Michigan. I don’t know how much of that timber was cut down and ended up in Chicago but there were a number of timber/logging communities around Lake Michigan including in western Michigan and in Wisconsin. Perhaps the most famous of these communities is Peshtigo, Wisconsin, which suffered a tragic fire on the same day as the Great Chicago Fire in 1871.

5. In the area I am most familiar with, western DuPage County, it seems like the DuPage County Forest Preserve has grabbed some of the original timber areas. I wonder if these areas were harvested and then grew again.

6. It would be an added bonus if there was an overlay to this map of current development and vegetation. This would provide insights into how much has changed.