Category Archives: Places

Light installation at Cabrini-Green to mark demolition of final building

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Amidst news of Target’s interest in building a store on the former site of the Cabrini-Green housing project, the Chicago Tribune reports that there is a special light installation at the last building to be demolished (and whose last resident left several months ago):

Marked for demolition beginning Wednesday is the last-standing building of the infamous Cabrini-Green public housing complex. But thanks to a light installation orchestrated by artist Jan Tichy, the structure at 1230 N. Burling St. will remain aglow with 134 white LED lights — one installed in each of its vacated apartments — for the four-week duration of its razing. The light installation was completed Monday, in time for Tichy and the Chicago Housing Authority to flip the “on” switch at 7 p.m.

Here is more information on the project from the gallery that represents Tichy:

From January to March 2011, together with over 20 students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Tichy held two and three-day workshops with local youth at Cabrini Connections, Marwen, After School Matters Creative Writing Program at Gallery 37 and ThaBrigade Stamps – Cabrini Green Marching Band. In the workshops, students were introduced to public art and light art, and brainstorming sessions and group activities were held on the concepts of Home, Public Housing, Community and Demolition. The youth were then charged with the task of writing poems or texts that addressed the concepts above. Employing a computer program developed by SAIC students that translates sound into light, the youth performed their texts for recording, creating unique light patterns. These light patterns define each of the 134 LED lights at the high-rise. Thus, the youth’s voices literally “tell” their stories through light.

As a component of Project Cabrini Green, live-feed footage from the site will be projected at the Museum of Contemporary Art at street-level, on the corner of Pearson and Mies Van der Rohe streets behind the museum’s glass façade, thereby rendering it visible at night. A voice/light-activated model of the high-rise will accompany the installation, and the youth participant’s written texts and audio content will be available. Tricia Van Eck, Associate Curator, is the organizing curator of the installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The youth’s texts, the audio content, and the live-feed video will also be available on the project website.

Read more about the project in the New York Times or at Project Cabrini Green.

I wonder if there are plans for a more permanent exhibit or marker of the public housing project.

Cabrini-Green site: from housing project to possible Target store

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Since the mid 1990s, the area around the Cabrini-Green housing project on the north side of Chicago has been changing (see an overview of this change here). As the high-rises have come down (with the last residents leaving just recently), new mixed-income neighborhoods as well as new commercial buildings have gone up in the area. News comes today that Target may be building a store on this site in the near future:

Target Corp., the cheap-chic discount chain, is in talks with the Chicago Housing Authority to build a store at the site of the former Cabrini-Green Housing Project.

The retailer’s proposal was brought up for consideration at a CHA board of commissioners meeting earlier this month, said Matt Aguilar, CHA spokesman. “We are in discussions and hope to help bring additional investment to the neighborhood,” Aguilar said.

Demolition of the last high rise at Cabrini-Green is scheduled to begin on Wednesday. The seven-acre complex, once among the most notorious housing projects in the nation, is just blocks away from Chicago’s glitziest shopping districts on North Michigan Avenue and close to the wealthy enclaves of the Gold Coast and Lincoln Park.

Target declined to comment on the proposal.

If Target does move forward with this, it would be the second high-profile space they have recently obtained in Chicago. (Read here about their plans for moving to State Street.)

As redevelopment of this space continues to take place, how long might it be until residents and shoppers of the area forget altogether that the Cabrini-Green complex was once there?

Another question: is a big box store in the city such as Target okay or the best move? Does it depend on which store moves in (see the long-running battle between Wal-Mart and the City of Chicago) or are big box stores okay in the city but not good in the suburbs because of their contribution to sprawl?

Will future historic preservation districts include McMansions?

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From the concluding portion of a recent column, it appears columnist James Lileks does not like McMansions. But, he also brings up an idea I recently described in discussing how a 1920s suburban home could now be considered authentic and worth preserving:

Everything is historic. Doesn’t mean it’s good; doesn’t mean everything must be preserved ,without exception. But what’s contemporary to you is history to your kids, and hence boring — and a relic of a golden past to the generation after that. Ah, to live long enough to see them fight for the preservation of a ghastly overscale McMansion. It’s the only example of substandard poisonous Chinese drywall we have left!

Just how long might it before McMansions are considered historic homes that are worth saving? And if they are not worth saving, what else might be done with them?

Sugrue: “It’s not clear that this new [black] migration [to the suburbs] is a positive step”

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Recent figures suggest more minorities are moving to the suburbs (see here and here). But looking at evidence from Detroit (see a related story here), historian Thomas Sugrue suggests blacks moving to the suburbs may encounter a lot of the same issues they faced in the city:

So far, Detroit’s black suburbanization has followed a well-trodden path. Those blacks heading outward from Detroit aren’t moving to all suburbs equally. Rather, they move into places with older houses, rundown shopping districts and declining tax revenues. Such towns also typically have poorer services and fewer job opportunities than wealthier suburbs — where, despite strong antidiscrimination laws, it is still harder for blacks to find housing.

It’s not clear that this new migration is a positive step, even if it allows blacks to escape the city and its troubles. For whites, suburbs have often been a big step up — but as long as most blacks find themselves in secondhand suburbia, the American dream of security, prosperity and opportunity will remain harder to achieve.

This term “secondhand suburbia” is an interesting one. Perhaps this term lines up with the concept of “inner-ring suburbs.” A number of commentators, notably Myron Orfield (in texts like American Metropolitics), have discussed how inner-ring suburbs, those closest to the big city, have many of the same issues of the city: large and growing minority populations, declining white populations, limited tax bases, crowded conditions and an older housing stock, crime, and more. Sugrue’s phrase, however, seems to emphasize the racial transition these suburbs, probably classifiable as “inner-ring suburbs,” are experiencing as he describes how these “second-hand” places are changing over from white to black. The implication is that these places are hand-me-downs: the whites used them up and are now using their wealth to move further from the city.

In the long run, if these suburbs don’t offer suburban opportunities but simply reproduce problems like residential segregation, has anything been gained?

How to discover hidden racial profiling in McHenry County police data

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McHenry County is located northwest of Chicago, has just over 300,000 residents, and is part of the six-county Chicago region. In recent years, the county has had a growing Hispanic population (2009 Census figures estimate Hispanics make up about 11% of the population) and there was data to suggest that Hispanics might have been racially profiled by local police. Here is how the Chicago Tribune describes the data between 2004 and 2009:

Racial profiling is difficult to prove. That’s why researchers push for data collection, to flag potential problems. In 2004, the first year data were collected, McHenry County’s indicators were high.

Statewide, minorities were 15 percent more likely to be stopped than what would have been expected based on their respective populations.

McHenry County’s disparity rate, however, was 65 percent, more than double that of the Chicago area’s five other sheriff’s departments.

The county’s rate, however, began dropping dramatically in 2007, and by 2009 was average for area sheriff’s departments.

On the surface, this data suggests the problem might have been solved: police were made aware of the issue and McHenry County’s numbers were back in line with regional figures within a few years.

But the Chicago Tribune goes on to say that a statistical analysis suggests it isn’t that racial profiling actually decreased; rather, McHenry County police simply marked Hispanics as white in their reports:

By 2009, the statistical analysis showed, 1 in 3 Hispanics cited by deputies likely were mislabeled as white or not included in department data reported to the state.

•If mislabeling and underreporting are taken into account, the department’s official rate of minority stops would have towered over its Chicago-area peers rather than appearing average.

•Department brass repeatedly missed warning signs of potential problems, even after a deputy complained that some peers targeted Hispanics.

So how exactly did the Chicago Tribune do this analysis: how does one look between the lines of arrest data to make a claim about current racial profiling? As a sidebar in the print edition and an extra link to click on online, the Tribune describes how they did their analysis:

Drivers’ names from the court and department data were compared with names in the census database to find each driver’s likelihood of Hispanic ethnicity. Mirroring methodology of similar research, drivers were deemed Hispanic only if their last names were 70 percent or more likely to be Hispanic.

The department data were used to analyze accuracy of labeling by deputies — comparing the rate of likely Hispanics with what each deputy logged. But the department database lacked records of all cited drivers, so the Tribune used the court data to determine the extent of mislabeling and incorrect logging departmentwide. The rate of likely Hispanics, as shown by the court data, was compared with the rate of Hispanics that the department told the state it cited.

In doing the departmentwide analysis, the Tribune counted only the labeling of likely Hispanics as white, because such mislabeling artificially improved the state’s rating of the department. Deputies at times also labeled likely Hispanics as other minorities, such as when a driver who looks like Sammy Sosa was labeled African-American. The analysis didn’t count that type of mislabeling because it didn’t affect the state’s rating.

Researchers say the census-based analysis is commonly used in studies but has limitations: It counts non-Hispanic women who marry Hispanics, and misses Hispanic women who marry non-Hispanics. It also misses Hispanics who have nontraditional surnames. With the limitations taken into account, it’s generally considered an undercount of Hispanics.

This is an interesting methodological process involving several moving parts. The analysis used and compared multiple sources of data. This triangulation method then doesn’t just rely the data that police report – such data can have issues as the TV show The Wire illustrated. Surnames from the records were compared to US Census records to determine the likelihood that the name is Hispanic. This isn’t going to catch all cases but the Tribune says other researchers claim this actually produces an undercount. If this is the case, perhaps McHenry County police are even further engaged in this practice. Also, what counts as a correct labeling or not is determined by the state.

A few lessons could be learned from this:

1. “Official data,” as self-reported police records here, are not necessarily trustworthy.

2. There are often multiple sources of data one can use to describe or evaluate a situation. Relying only on one source of data gives a part of the story – in this case, the one the police wanted to tell, which is interesting in itself – but having multiple sources can give a more complete picture.

3. If the Chicago Tribune analysis is correct, it is a reminder that “hiding” or “disguising” data can be difficult to do if people are interested or determined enough to look into what the data actually means.

McMansions are Republican homes?

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In a humor/satire column in the Huffington Post, McMansions are tied to Republicans:

A Pew survey finds President Obama is polling quite well against a “generic” Republican opponent, better than George W. Bush was against a “generic” Democrat in 2003. Forty-seven percent of respondents said they would like to see Obama reelected while 37 percent opted for a generic Republican candidate. HuffPost Hill couldn’t reach “generic” Republican, Pleated Q. Pants IV, at his McMansion in suburban Columbus for comment. We hear he was shopping at a big box store and thinking about national security.

This is an interesting mix of characteristics: the “generic” Republican candidate shops at a big box store (why not say Wal-Mart? Is Target too trendy?) in central Ohio and lives in a suburban McMansion. There may be some truth to some of this: Joel Kotkin argued after the 2010 election that Republicans won the suburban vote even as both parties for fighting for this demographic.

I have seen other cases where McMansions are tied to Republicans. What exactly about the McMansion is Republican: the size? The bad architecture? The sprawl? The suburban lifestyle? The three (or more) car garage? The big mortgage? The wealth that made the house purchase possible?

What would a Democratic characterization in the same vein look like? In terms of the housing unit, how about an urban loft or a refurbished rowhouse or brownstone, all in a gentrified, atmospheric, and trendy neighborhood?

More on people living beneath Las Vegas

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I first ran into a story on people living under Las Vegas in The Sun (UK) two years ago. The most recent edition of Newsweek also briefly discusses this situation as part of a larger article about Las Vegas and the impact Celine Dion has had on the city:

At the south end of the Strip, near the iconic “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign, a hidden concrete path leads into a 500-mile warren of wet, trash-strewn drainage pipes that function as an underground shelter for hundreds of the city’s most downtrodden. Several have been laid off from the same well-paid, benefits-packed service jobs that give Vegas its rep as a working-class paradise. The pipes are one of the few places police and hotel security don’t bother to tread, and since the recession, they’ve become increasingly populated, according to Matthew O’Brien, author of a 2007 book about the tunnels, Beneath the Neon.

Life here is spare and dangerous. Aside from floods that can fill the space in minutes, there is ever-present crime. Jody Alger, 48, an unemployed casino waitress, guards her tunnel with a BB gun. Another camp has two makeshift barricades at its entrance; inside, its 32-year-old inhabitant huddles on an old bed with a flashlight strapped to his head. In a nearby tunnel, John Tondee sleeps on a sagging leather couch that he found in a Dumpster. His clothes are in a messy pile, and his entertainment is a guitar with a broken string, which he uses for playing country gospel. “I’m at the point of coming out of here,” he says. “I’ve had enough.” Tondee says he’s a former maintenance worker who lost his job a year ago and couldn’t afford to pay the $675 in rent. “I’ll do whatever it takes to survive,” he says. “I’ll go around and wash windows.” At night, he used to dress in drag and walk down the Strip. But someone came into the tunnel and stole his 16 wigs. Now he has only one head of fake black curls left.

These two paragraphs are meant to set up a comparison between the glitzy and popular Celine Dion shows at Caesar’s Palace and the desperate times some residents are facing.

But from what I can gather, people living underneath a city is not a limited phenomenon perhaps tied to difficult economic times. The space underneath cities can be easier to access than people might realize: this story about Paris suggests all sorts of people end up exploring this area (though many of them are on tours of the Paris Catacombs). And the 1995 book The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City, which I first read for my undergraduate Introduction to Sociology class, is a fascinating look at how a number of people have carved out a life in a space that most would avoid.

Declining number of children in San Francisco

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The City of San Francisco is facing an interesting problem: a declining population of children.

Families that remain in The City are bucking the trend that has plagued San Francisco for years as the number of children — defined as people up to 17 years old — has dropped from 181,532 in 1960 to 107,524 today, according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau figures. The 2000 census counted 112,802 youths.

The decrease is disappointing news for city officials, who have attempted to counter the family-flight trend by creating more affordable housing, improving schools and cutting costs, such as a college savings account for kindergarten enrollees.

What is interesting in this article is that it is not said why having children in a city is so desirable. What if a city decided that it didn’t really want to attract families or children – would this be acceptable to Americans? Children cost money, not only to families but particularly due to schools and other city services.

I could think of a few possible reasons why not having children in a city would be a problem: this means that younger families who work in certain jobs and pay taxes will not be present, a lack of children suggests the city is not a “family-friendly” place which would cut down on tourist money, or children might be considered a symbol or sign of vitality and passing down the values of the city down to a new generation.

I wish the article said more about what San Francisco officials, including more than the ones involved in children-centered agencies, really thought about this issue.

Aurora now second largest city in Illinois

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The population growth in the Chicago suburbs has shifted from Naperville (in the 1980s and 1990s) to communities further west and south. In particular, Aurora grew during the 2000s and is now Illinois’ second largest city:

[T]he Alperins are among the nearly 55,000 new residents since 2000 who helped Aurora boost its population to 197,899 and officially eclipse Rockford as Illinois’ second-largest city, according to the recently released 2010 U.S. census figures.

Aurora’s 54,909 jump was the largest among Illinois cities. Its percentage increase of 38.4 percent was just behind top-ranked Joliet, which grew at a 38.8 percent pace to 147,433 and beat out Naperville as Illinois’ fourth-largest community.

The growth comes as Aurora makes strides resurrecting what had become a struggling downtown and boasts of statistics that show the city’s major crime rate is at its lowest in more than three decades. The physical size of the city also has grown to accommodate more people. Aurora has three times as many square miles as it had four decades ago.

There are several reasons that the community has grown including a growing Hispanic population and open land in a growing region of the Chicago suburbs. But the city has also dramatically expanded in size:

Aurora, meanwhile, now covers 46 square miles compared with 35 in 1990 and 15 in 1970. It sprawls through four counties, six school districts and seven townships. But like Naperville in the last decade, the city could eventually be boxed in by neighbors, Greene said. And there’s also no guarantee that brisk growth from the 1990s through part of the 2000s will repeat when the economy improves.

The explanation for why Aurora is growing is very similar to what led to Naperville’s growth between 1960 and 2000: it is located near highways, it has a number of businesses, and there is plenty of room to expand and the city has annexed a lot of land. But as Naperville discovered, the growth only goes on for so long: eventually, the land runs out and then Aurora will become a different kind of place. As the end of the article notes, the long-term course of the city will likely include denser development near the center of the city.

At the same time, Naperville and Aurora’s growth are not quite the same: Naperville has long had a wealthier profile compared to Aurora’s status as an industrial satellite city (named as such in this 1915 work).  During the 1980s and 1990s, Naperville’s growth was quite unusual: Naperville was classified as the only boomburb outside of the South or West during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Naperville is quite well-off for a large community, has a history of high-tech companies dating back to the mid-1960s, has very low crime and poverty rates, and has a vibrant and popular downtown.

It will be interesting to watch in the coming years how Aurora, Joliet, Plainfield, and other suburbs in the southwest suburbs continue to grow.

From former suburban home to authentic home to be restored

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What happens to suburban homes that were once on the outskirts of the big city? One writer describes the 1927 rowhouse she and her husband bought in Jackson Heights (part of Queens, New York City) and their plans to restore it:

Friends warn me this will be a lifelong endeavor. But my husband and I have always preferred houses with some history in them (this is our fifth, and maybe last, transaction). I suspect it’s a rejection of my New Jersey McMansion rearing.

To get a better sense of this house’s past, I turned to Daniel Karatzas, an agent with Beaudoin Realty Group and the local historian. He wrote the book, “Jackson Heights – A Garden in the City,” which sits on our coffee table. Well, it used to. Now it’s in storage.

Our house, Karatzas told me, was designed by Robert Tappan, “one of those unsung architects” who helped develop the neighborhood into a slice of suburbia just a few miles from midtown Manhattan.

“It wasn’t like Frank Lloyd Wright,” says Karatzas. “They were building traditional styles that would appeal to upper middle-class families. They used vernacular architecture. … Tudor, French, Georgian. That made it seem the houses had been there longer than they had.”

The houses on my block first sold for between $24,000 and $28,000. If he had to liken it to a modern-day phenomenon, Karatzas said, our 1920s house might have once been considered like “those McMansions in New Jersey.”

A couple parts of this stick out to me:

1. This neighborhood was once a suburb of New York City. While the home is now 80+ years old, it is still more of a suburban setting. According to this brief history of Jackson Heights, the community was built primarily after World War I, which would have been during a large wave of suburbanization.

Suburban homes generally get a bad name, both today and historically for being relatively cheaply made and looking all the same. Perhaps this is epitomized by the 1962 song “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds – here are the opening lines:

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.

There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And yet, with age, some suburban homes can become the sort of authentic homes that people desire. This house has history but it is suburban history. While the realtor suggests this home was probably like a McMansion of the 1920s, the writer is interested in restoring and rehabilitating this home, gold-metal cabinets in the kitchen and all.

2. The primary comparison made is between this new purchase and the McMansion the writer grew up in New Jersey. We don’t quite know why this writer disliked this New Jersey upbringing but it is clear that this new home has more character than that home did. She also suggests that her father is likely puzzled by her decision to move back to Jackson Heights: “Sometimes, I suspect my decision to settle in Jackson Heights puzzles him, since he worked so hard to get out and buy a house in the suburbs.” While one generation viewed a move to the suburbs as a good thing, some people in later generations see a move back to city life (though this is somewhere between city and suburban life) as desirable.

Does this mean that the sort of suburban homes that people now call McMansions may one day be authentic and the sorts of places that others will want to restore? This idea perhaps assumes that Americans will continue to move further and further out from the center of metropolitan regions and then the older suburban homes will age and no longer be on the fringes. What is the long-term fate of McMansions: will they fall apart? By co-opted for other uses (like perhaps being subdivided into multiple units)? Become desirable reminders of the past? Become teardowns themselves and the land put to other uses?