Category Archives: Places

The architectural legacy of Mayor Daley

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Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin considers Mayor Richard M. Daley’s architectural legacy in Chicago. Here is Kamin’s conclusion after going over Daley’s hits, mixed results, and misses:

Daley was a great mayor. He was also a flawed mayor. Power enabled him to reshape Chicago. And the abuse of power undermined him—and the cityscape he did so much to uplift.

As Kamin suggests, this will take some years and historical perspective to sort out. Regardless of the final verdict, it will be interesting to see how subsequent mayors try or don’t try to live up to a long-serving Mayor who generally went for big efforts with mixed results.

The rankings of liveable cities

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Architecture critic Edwin Heathcote of the Financial Times asks why the most livable cities in the world, such as Vancouver, are not necessarily the the most loved cities.

This is another argument that deals with methodology: how exactly does one determine which cities are the “most liveable”? If just one or two factors are tweaked by certain publications, the list changes. Just like college rankings (recent thoughts here), such lists should be viewed with some skepticism.

Additionally, the criteria used by publications is not necessarily the criteria used by citizens who have some choices about where to move. Indeed, such lists seem to presume that these are the choices people would make if they had equal opportunity to move within their own country and/or around the world. Of course, most people have more restricted options due to job availability, price, personal preferences, location of family, and more.

In reading about this, it also strikes me that lists of liveable cities also might not make sense to many Americans: why would they want to live in a city when a majority have already chosen a suburban life?

h/t Instapundit

The importance of property values to NIMBYism

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NIMBYism is cited as a common American issue as homeowners often fight hard to protect their pristine homes and neighborhoods. I was reminded of this by an article looking at seven neighbors that damage property values:

Here, the seven suprising neighbors that can reduce your home’s value:

Power Plants. The data is fairly clear on the impact of power plants on nearby home values — it usually hurts them. A study from the University of California at Berkeley shows that home values within two miles of a power plant can decrease between 4% and 7%.

Landfills. A study from the Pima County (Arizona) Assessor’s office shows that a subdivision located near a landfill (and all other residential factors being equal, like house size, school quality and residential incomes) loses 6% to 10% in value compared to a subdivision that isn’t located near a dump.

Robert A. Simons, an urban planning professor at Cleveland State University, says that if you live within two miles of a Superfund site (a landfill that the government designates as a hazardous waste site), your home’s value could decline by up to 15%.

Sex Offenders. Living in close proximity to a registered sex offender is one of the biggest downward drivers of home values. Researchers at Longwood University’s College of Business & Economics conclude that the closer you live to a sex offender, the more your home will depreciate. In the paper, Estimating the Effect of Crime Risk on Property Values and Time on Market: Evidence from Megan’s Law in Virginia, Longwood researchers say, “the presence of a registered sex offender living within one-tenth of a mile reduces home values by about 9%, and these same homes take as much as 10% longer to sell than homes not located near registered sex offenders.”

Delinquent Bill Payers. One surprising way that neighbors can bring down the value of surrounding homes, especially in town home or condo communities, is by not paying their maintenance fees or their mortgages. “Bad neighbors bring values down by not paying their maintenance fees, in some cases their mortgage payments, and not maintaining the home’s appearance,” says Pordes. “These homeowners usually do not care about real estate values.”

Foreclosed Homes. Perhaps the biggest single factor that drives nearby home values down is a foreclosure. A recent study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concludes that a neighbor’s foreclosed home can slash the value of homes within 250 feet of the foreclosed properties by an average of 27%. Says Federal Reserve Governor Joseph Tracy recently in his economic outlook for 2011: “The growing inventory of defaulted mortgages continues to weigh down any recovery in the housing market… Problems in housing markets can impact economic growth.”

Lackluster Landscaping. Studies show that lawn care has a big impact on surrounding home values. Virginia Tech University released a report stating that pristine landscaping can jack up the value of a home by 5% to 10%. But if the lawn looks like it just hosted the world rugby tournament, it can be a green thumb to the eye of local home prices.

Closed Schools. Sometimes, neighborhood problems can stem from local government action. For example, if a cash-strapped city or town closes a neighborhood school, that can easily steer home values south. The National Association of Realtors says that 75% of home shoppers, the quality and availability of schools in the neighborhood is either “somewhat important” or “very important.”

As the article notes, what an individual homeowner can do about these situations might be limited. Perhaps the best way to avoid this is simply to do one’s homework before moving into a neighborhood to assess what has happened or might happen in the future. This could involve checking community websites, reading local news, and talking with current residents. But, there are always trade-offs involved in this process. If someone desires a cheaper home, perhaps they might move into an area that has one of these conditions.

At the same time, there are plenty of land uses or neighbors that are not cited in the article where homeowners band together to protect their community. Here are a few recent situations in the Chicago region: a battle over affordable housing in Winnetka (with an update here), Naperville residents opposed to Show-Me’s and Evanston residents opposed to a Tilted Kilt restaurant, and a debate over lighting in Barrington Hills. Compared to a power plant or landfill, these uses seem much less obvious and yet are important concerns for residents of wealthier communities.

On the whole, this article illustrates that one of the primary goals of a homeowner is to protect and/or grow their property values. In order to do this, a homeowner may have to be in opposition to larger neighborhood or community goals. After all, power plants and landfills and sex offenders have to be somewhere. But, if you have the economic means in the United States, you generally move to nicer and nicer neighborhoods where these NIMBY concerns are likely reduced. It would be interesting to track how people’s neighborhood or suburban moves over the years progressively place them further and further away from such property value lowering uses.

11,000 square foot NYC homes designed by a noted architect qualify as McMansions?

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Villanova Heights is a newer residential development in the Bronx, New York City. Despite being designed by noted architect Robert A.M Stern, Curbed NY says even the smallest homes in the development are McMansions:

We’ve occasionally mentioned Villanova Heights, the McMansion community in Riverdale designed by Robert A.M. Stern. And by McMansions, we mean houses that aren’t only huge in comparison to Manhattan apartments—the smallest Bobby A.M. creations in Villanova Heights are around 11,000 square feet. The rents are similarly hefty, with the first two completed homes in the development renting for $13,000 and $16,000 per month. Now we’re finally getting a peek inside one of these things, with the new listing for 5020 Iselin Avenue, an 11,000-square-footer on a 25,000-square-foot lot that contains a heated swimming pool and cabana. In fact, we’d be amazed if there were anything this house didn’t contain. When it comes to Riverdale, though, this one’s still our favorite.

Two things strike me here:

1. The homes are at least 11,000 square feet. This is more like a mansion, not just a McMansion. Percentage-wise, very few American homes are that large. When people typically refer to suburban McMansions, they are thinking of homes that are 3,500 to 5,000 square feet.

2. The neighborhood is designed by a noted architect and yet the houses are still called McMansions. One major criticism of McMansion is that they lack tasteful design or more authentic materials. So is this more of a criticism of Stern’s home designs than anything else? Stern is a noted architect but designs McMansions?

This is how the Villanova Heights website describes the home design philosophy:

In developing Villanova Heights, Robert A.M. Stern Architects has adhered to its philosophy that the residences designed “do not, by their very being, threaten the esthetic and cultural values of the buildings around them.” Further, that no one style “is appropriate to every building and every place.” Finally, consistent with Robert A.M. Stern’s belief in the continuity of tradition, his firm’s work on Villanova Heights is driven “by entering into a dialogue with the past and with the spirit of the places in which we build.”

Does this sound like a description of a McMansion?

Finding Bin Laden in the suburbs

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There has been a lot of commentary about where Osama Bin Laden was found in Pakistan. On one hand, there has been a lot of interest in his house, including people dubbing the compound a “McMansion.” (However, reports yesterday and today have suggested that the house was less unusual or prominent as was first suggested.) On the other hand, he was found in an unusual military town. Here is one take that suggests that Bin Laden was found in the unlikeliest of places: a suburb.

We now all know that, of course, bin Laden was not in a cave. He was hiding in plain sight in a million-dollar mansion in a posh suburb of Islamabad.

Not only that, the suburb was a military complex described as Pakistan’s West Point. And the mansion apparently was built expressly for him – as though he were some chief executive officer cashing in on his bonus options, so he wasn’t being especially discreet.

He apparently had been living there undisturbed for six years, according to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). He was a suburbanite enjoying the pleasures of a life of leisure – behind 12-foot walls.

This was so far beyond our expectation of how the world’s most wanted terrorist would be living that no one, apparently, bothered to look for him outside the mountains. Terrorists just don’t live in the suburbs.

I’m not so sure this community was a suburb. It was at least an hour outside of Islamabad. It was also a military community, not necessary a resort community. However, there have been reports that a number of wealthier military officials live in this community. And Bin Laden was living a life of leisure when he was possibly in the same room for five years? Bin Laden is comparable to a CEO “cashing in on his bonus options”? In terms of thinking that this community is like a typical American suburb outside of Los Angeles or Chicago and Bin Laden was the typical suburban head of household, this is not quite the case.

The story goes on to cite the sociological idea of “lifestyle enclaves”:

Back in 1985, the sociologist Robert Bellah and his cohort, in their seminal book “Habits of the Mind,” coined the term “lifestyle enclaves” to describe the way Americans had begun to cluster on the basis of “shared patterns of appearance, consumption and leisure activities, which often serve to differentiate them sharply from those with other lifestyles.”

These enclaves were self-selected – you gravitated toward others like you. In the sociologists’ view, they were increasingly replacing real community in America with these superficial bonds of similarity.

There are dozens of these enclaves today – from members of the National Rifle Association, to upwardly mobile young married couples, to outdoorsmen, to the very wealthy. Enclaves have become a primary way we define ourselves.

But I doubt that Bellah and the others ever thought of terrorists as a possible enclave back when they were writing the book. Yet the concept of people who choose to live with others who look like them and think like them is now so deeply embedded in our consciousness that the idea of a terrorist enclave apparently did cross the mind of the intelligence community today.

The conclusion of the piece is that Bin Laden was found because he didn’t play by the “lifestyle enclave”/suburban rules. So all of the residents of Abbotabad were terrorists?

All of this seems like a stretch in order to connect to the average American suburban reader. The basic premise could be interesting: the suburbs (or more rural/military town suburbs) are supposed to be the land of safety, not the place where terrorists (or any people who commit violent crimes) actually live next door. But to suggest that Bin Laden was similar to a typical suburbanite and was caught because he didn’t fit in seems kind of silly. Projecting the image of the American suburbs on Abbotabad, Pakistan may not be the best way to understand a complex situation.

Chicago’s Fifth Avenue an example of late 1800s growth machine

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Chicago has its own Fifth Avenue but it is the only numbered avenue in the city. Here’s why:

When what is now the East Garfield Park neighborhood became part of the city in 1869, much of the West Side was open prairie.

According to Streetwise Chicago: A History of Chicago Street Names (Loyola University Press, 1988), the street, originally called Colorado Avenue, was renamed in an effort to boost residential and commercial development.

The new name was meant to evoke the prestige of New York’s flashiest shopping strip—a far cry from the modest bungalows, brownstones and warehouses that have come to define the area…

Peter T. Alter, an archivist at the Chicago History Museum, says the name switch happened around 1890, near the time Chicago beat out New York for the right to host the World’s Columbian Exposition fair.

“Perhaps,” Alter notes, “that lessened the idea of Chicago being seen as second to New York City.”

This is a great illustration of a growth machine at work: in order to boost development in what was an undeveloped area, the street name was changed in order to invoke the wealthy street in New York City. Additionally, the name change seems tied to the 1893 Columbian Exposition (see here for a review of The Devil in the White City which describes some of this time period), an important moment in Chicago’s early history that established the booming city as a world-class city. It sounds like boosterism all around.

First Dairy Queen to be celebrated in Joliet

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Americans are well-known for their fast-food culture that has since spread around the world. Joliet, now the fourth largest city in Illinois, will honor the nation’s first Dairy Queen:

Joliet will celebrate its heritage as the home of the first Dairy Queen as  part of the Route 66 Red Carpet Corridor Festival on Saturday,

The Joliet Area Historic Museum will be open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and feature displays of Dairy Queen memorabilia, photos and original product sample packages. Visitors will get a Dairy Queen Dilly Bar.

The first Dairy Queen opened June 22, 1940 at 501 N. Chicago St., now the site of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. Sheb Noble opened the store and sold soft-serve ice cream cones for 5 cents.

The Dairy Queen closed in the early 1950s, and over the years the building has housed a lawn-mower repair business, furniture store, motorcycle shop and plumbers.

I wish this article had more information about the growth of Dairy Queen: how did it go from this one location to “more than 5,700 locations operating throughout the United States, Canada and 22 other countries“? According to Dairy Queen’s website, the growth happened quickly:

Back then, food franchising was all but unheard of, but the new product’s potential made it a natural for such a system. When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, there were less than 10 Dairy Queen stores. However shortly after the war, the system took off at a pace virtually unrivaled before or since. With only 100 stores in 1947, it grew to 1,446 in 1950 and then to 2,600 in 1955.

It sounds like they found a particular market niche, soft-serve ice cream,  and really capitalized even before other iconic fast-food restaurants, like McDonald’s (whose first franchised restaurant, the ninth overall, opened in Des Plaines, IL in 1955), really took off.

I’m not sure there is any other fast-food place that can compete with the Blizzard (sorry McFlurrys). And I’ve had my fair share.

Comparing inner vs. outer suburban growth

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There are numerous types of suburbs (I think I now have at least 13 different types in one of my lectures in American Suburbanization) but one broad comparison includes looking at suburbs adjacent to cities (“inner-ring suburbs”) vs. suburbs on the metropolitan fringe (often referred to as “exurbs”). USA Today reports on some of the population trends in these two areas:

A new pattern is emerging this century. Most of the growth is happening on opposite ends of the suburban expanse: in older communities closest to the city and in the newer ones that are the farthest out.

“A few decades ago, all the growth was on the edge,” says Robert Lang, an urban sociologist at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas who analyzed 2010 Census data. “Now, there are citylike suburbs doing well on one side of the metropolis while conventional suburbs still flourish on the fringe.”

Close-in suburbs in the 50 largest metropolitan areas added 6 million people from 2000 to 2010, an 11.3% increase. The nation grew 9.7% in the same period.

At the same time, less populated suburbs on the outer edge grew even faster. They gained 6.7 million, a 24.5% increase.

DuPage County, Illinois is cited in this story as an example of suburban areas that are between these two extremes. Such “mature suburbs” had lower rates of growth as they “add[ed] 3.5 million people, a 7.8% increase” over the previous decade.

I like this emphasis on looking at the different rates of suburban growth depending on proximity to the city. There are a couple of stories that one could tell:

1. The suburban population is growing. I still am eager to hear the final 2010 figures that tell us what percentage of Americans live in suburbs compared to urban and rural areas.

2. The fastest-growing suburbs are on the metropolitan fringe. This is what might be considered typical suburban growth and/or “sprawl” as metropolitan regions continue to expand. It would be helpful to know how this 24.5% population increase over the last decade compares to previous decades.

3. Inner-ring suburbs are also growing quicker than the national growth rate. This may support recent findings that people want denser neighborhoods. It would be interesting to see how much of this growth is due to city dwellers moving just across municipal boundaries (for example, did those 200,000 people who left Chicago move to Oak Park or to Joliet?) or whether this population growth is from people from other areas, such as outer-ring suburbs, moving closer to the city.

4. So where does this leave mature suburbs? They are caught in the middle as they don’t have the open land for sprawl development but also are unlikely to have the denser or taller development of inner-ring suburbs. Most projects will either have to be small in-fill projects or bigger redevelopment projects. It will be interesting to see how these suburbs adapt: they were once outer-ring suburbs but will now have to make decisions about what direction to go.

h/t The Infrastructurist

The mean population center of Illinois is close to Chicago but this wasn’t always the case

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The mean population center of Illinois is relatively close to Chicago:

[B]ased on new data from the U.S. Census, the true center point of Illinois’ population is about 70 miles southwest of Chicago’s bustling Magnificent Mile.

Situated in a corn field east of the intersection of U.S. Route 47 and Illinois Route 113 in Grundy County is the point referred to by the census as the Mean Center of Population for Illinois…

The center point can tell a lot about a state.

It can help explain why Illinois has a state government controlled largely by Chicago politicians.

It can help explain how money gets distributed around the state. It can help explain why some issues — say, gun control — can pit rural interests against urban interests.

“Somewhere close to half the population of the state is within 40 miles of the Loop,” Illinois State University geography professor Mike Sublett said.

This is not too surprising: by far, Chicago is the largest city in the state and the population of the Chicago metropolitan region (2009 estimate of the Illinois portion only – not counting Wisconsin and Indiana populations) is just under 8 million while Illinois’ total population is just over 12.8 million (2010 figures).

But the value of such a measure seems to be not exactly where this mean is located but rather how this population mean has shifted over time. The article goes on to note how the population mean wasn’t always so close to Chicago:

In the 1840s, the center point was located east of Springfield, relatively close to Illinois’ geographical center point in the Logan County community of Chestnut.

But, as Chicago began to grow as an urban center, the population center point began its northward trek along a line nearly mirroring what would become Interstate 55.

The 1880 center of the state’s population was on the south side of Bloomington, near U.S. Route 150 south of where State Farm Insurance Cos. has its Illinois regional office complex.

In 1910, the center moved out of McLean County for the first time in 50 years. The new center was in a farm field just a few miles southeast of Pontiac.

The only time it took a break from its northeasterly trek until recently was in 1940, when the center — then located in Livingston County — briefly moved southward…

The northern movement of the center point also has stalled in recent decades. The 2010 center point near south of Morris in Grundy County is somewhat south of the 2000 and 1990 population centers, located just a few miles away.

Sublett attributes the stall to the rapid growth of Chicago’s western suburbs and the loss of population within the state’s largest city.

“The center point has kind of stagnated. It has just been migrating around Grundy County,” Sublett said.

As I’ve written before regarding the US population mean (see here), the population mean measure seems to make the most sense when placed in a historical context so that people can get a quick look at larger population and migration trends.

I wonder how many Chicago area residents know that the bulk of the state’s early population lived in the central and southern portions of the state and it wasn’t really until the 1840s and 1850s that the population of northeastern Illinois really began to grow and tilt the balance of power in the state.

Current trends in Finnish suburbs

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This blog contains a number of posts about American suburbs but I am also interested in learning more about suburbs in other countries. Here are some insights into the changes taking place in Finland’s suburbs:

Urban geographer Venla Bernelius says that the same process that took place in other parts of Europe is now under way in Finland. A previous low level of immigration, combined with relatively small income disparities has delayed the phenomenon.

“The direction appears clear. Differentiation is increasing all the time.”

Experiences from other parts of Europe and North America suggest that it is very difficult to reverse a process of ethnic differentiation. Bernelius says that the time to act is now.

At present, conditions in Finnish suburbs are nowhere near those of slums or ghettoes in other countries.

However, Matti Kortteinen, professor of urban sociology at the University of Helsinki says that isolation from the population at large makes it more difficult for immigrants to adapt to Finnish society.

“The development harms people’s overall well-being”, Kortteinen says.

One reason for the trend is that immigrants often end up living in areas where there is much municipal housing. Many Finns who are long-term unemployed also live in these areas.

“The issue is not only about ethnic differentiation. The worst-off Finns and the worst-off immigrants live in isolated suburbs”, Bernelius says.

It might be helpful to compare these trends with what is taking place in American suburbs. To start, more minorities and immigrants are moving to the American suburbs (just as it sounds like Finland). More broadly, the American suburbs contain a variety of communities and suburbs, some very wealthy and some quite poor. But, the suggestion here is that immigrants and minorities become isolated in Finnish suburbs while we would tend to think the opposite in the United States. If people have “made it” in the US or have certain income levels, they tend to move to the suburbs. A more general European pattern works in reverse: the poorer segments of the population, immigrants and natives, live in suburbs away from the city and its wealth.

It will be interesting to see how Finland, and other European nations, adjust and respond to this kind of suburban population growth.