Category Archives: Places

Plans to revamp Navy Pier

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Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin takes a look at new plans to revamp Navy Pier. Overall, Kamin argues the plans lack coherence even as they offer a few nice ideas:

That’s what’s missing from the new report: A bold design framework for the future of the 3,300-foot-long pier (above, in its current state), which was envisioned by Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, completed in 1916, and remains Chicago’s top tourist attraction, even if it’s not as popular as it used to be.

Drawn up for the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority by the Urban Land Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based real estate developers’ group, the report unveiled Wednesday has a certain urgency because Navy Pier’s annual attendance has fallen to 8 million from a peak of 9 million in 2000.

But the report’s principal recommendations lack flashes of insight about the great public work, which originally consisted of classically-inspired buildings framing freight and passenger sheds. The sheds disappeared as part of the pier’s $225 million makeover, completed in 1995.

My complaints about the space would be a little different and not focus so much on the design. My main issue is that it is primarily a tourist attraction that has little revisit value and is not connected enough to other Chicago attractions like Michigan Avenue or the Chicago River. As a tourist destination, it doesn’t actually offer much to do – the stores are limited, there are limited eating opportunities, attractions like the Ferris Wheel aren’t something you would come back to several times a year, and the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre is a great performing space but doesn’t add much to the atmosphere. Additionally, Navy Pier is a bit of a walk from Michigan Avenue which features much more interesting shops and restaurants.

The contrast I would draw with Navy Pier is Millennium Park. The park doesn’t cost anything (outside of some concerts, ice skating, and food) but has attractive elements: interesting design, some great gardens to walk through, and great people-watching opportunities, as people converge from the train stations, State Street, Michigan Avenue, and the lakefront. Most of all, the park is not a mall or amusement park, which Navy Pier can often feel like. Millennium Park feels and operates like a real public space, not a controlled commercial environment.

What might be helpful are some low-cost options for boasting interest. Why not have revolving (and interesting) art displays or themes? Why not have more street performances? Why not work on connecting the Navy Pier streetscape with Michigan Avenue so it doesn’t require a drive to the overpriced Navy Pier garage? Navy Pier needs to offer more unique and cheap features that tourists and others can’t find elsewhere in Chicago.

Prolonged housing issues: one-third of Chicago homes underwater

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The housing crisis of recent years is not just about foreclosures. The loss in housing value across the board means that many homeowners with mortgages owe more on those mortgages than their house is worth. This is a common occurence in the Chicago region where new data suggests one-third of homes are underwater, a rate almost ten percent higher than the national average:

Some 32.9 percent of all local single-family detached homes with mortgages were underwater in September, meaning the homeowners owed more on the loans than the properties are worth, according to new data from realty Web site Zillow.com. That compares with 30.9 percent in June and 27.2 percent in September 2009. The report does not include data on condominiums.

Nationally, 23.2 percent of homes have negative equity.

“Negative equity is going to continue to cast a pall over the housing market for the next several years,” said Stan Humphries, Zillow’s chief economist. “All these people are trapped in their homes and can’t move onto another one and it’s throwing off more foreclosures. For people who are not going to move anytime soon, it is much more of an academic issue. For people who need to move or who encounter an economic issue, it’s a material issue.”

I haven’t seen too many people speculating about the social consequences of this. Americans in the last 60 years have been fairly mobile people but these sorts of mortgage situations limits that. This may have consequences for job markets; even if there are jobs available elsewhere, fewer people are then able to pick up relatively quickly and move. On the other hand, it may lead to increased “feelings or perceptions of neighborhood” as more residents have to stay put longer than they would have even just five years ago.

Dealing with slow people on the sidewalk, London edition

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This is an issue I’ve always wondered about: what to do with slow walkers on public sidewalks? Of particular note are people who stop in the middle of the sidewalk to hold an impromptu conference while others try to get around them.

Apparently, this is a concern for others as well. Business owners on London’s Oxford Street have proposed a plan to have tourists and shoppers walk closer to buildings while those who want to get through the area, such as employees and residents, walk closer to the street:

Sidewalk rage may be closer to the point, and an alliance of local landlords and retailers believes it has an antidote. On behalf of London pedestrians who are sick of dodging Oxford Street’s tourist hordes and texting teens, they’re ready to draw the line. A pretend line, anyway.

New West End Company, a group of 600 business owners in the district around Oxford Street, is planning to direct slow movers to walk in a “shopper lane” along store fronts, so that hurried residents and workers can proceed without opposition on the sidewalk’s edges. The concept echoes a gag played in New York City last May, when pranksters laid a chalk line down a sidewalk on Manhattan’s busy Fifth Avenue, with one lane reserved for “tourists” and another for “New Yorkers.”

But London’s line would likely be virtual. Under the plan being hatched by Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas, chairman of New West End Company, maps available at airports, hotels and other traveler spots would tell visitors to cling to buildings. The directive would also be written onto local area maps outside subway stations and at busy intersections.

With little chance of enforcing such rules, how effective could this be? And could tourists and others mount a counter-campaign where they remind the people of Oxford Street how many dollars they bring into the tourist industry and local businesses? (This is unlikely considering the diffuse origins of the slow movers – but it would be interesting nonetheless.)

h/t The Infrastructurist

Quick Review: Radiant City

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I’m always on the lookout for movies having to do with suburbia. I recently ran across Radiant City at a local library and found that it had earned some recognition at film festivals (including the 2006 Toronto Film Festival). Here are my thoughts on this 2006 “mockumentary” set in the suburbs of Calgary:

1.If you have read any critiques about suburbia, you are likely to see it discussed in this film: sprawl, too many cars that everyone is dependent on, lack of community where no one knows their neighbors, too much private space and not enough public space, no activities for teenagers, a lack of mass transit, health issues (obesity), a lack of walkability, big box stores, wasted land, the solution of New Urbanism, and on and on.

1a. A number of anti-sprawl experts (or “stars”) are featured including James Howard Kunstler and Andres Duany.

1b. There are a number of “statistical interludes” throughout the film that deliver facts about the horrors of suburbia.

2. The film tries to set up fictional family storylines to follow. I didn’t find any of these to be compelling as it seemed like the characters were simply there to break up the facts of the documentary. One of the storylines, of a father who is acting in a satirical musical about suburbia, is particularly obvious.

3. The many shots of the Evergreen neighborhood outside of Calgary are both beautiful and jarring. The homes featured in the films are on the edges of suburban development so there are plenty of open fields (mostly dirt), empty lots filled with construction equipment, single-family homes built very close to each other, concrete sounds barriers and highways that cut off views and walking, and beautiful skies (we are told at one point that the mountains are off in the distance – you could see them if the guy next door would open his front door so you could see through his house).

Overall: you can find the same critiques in many other places. I don’t think the fictional storylines added much as the main point seemed to be the commentary of the experts and the statistics that are meant to get viewers to question their assumptions about suburban living. If you already are opposed to sprawl and suburbs, your likely to find this film preaching right to you.

(This film was well-received by a limited number of critics at RottenTomatoes.com: the movie is 93% fresh with 14 out of 15 positive reviews.)

Lake Forest debates affordable housing

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Lake Forest, Illinois is one wealthy suburb: according to the latest Census estimates, the suburb of 18,757 people has a median household income of $139,765 and owner-occupied homes are worth a median value of $900,000. The Chicago Tribune reports on some recent arguments over a small affordable housing project in the suburb – note, the suburb currently has about 7,188 housing units and one existing affording housing project with 5 units:

Five years ago, Lake Forest created an affordable-housing plan, acknowledging that high property values in the community were shutting out some seniors, families and education and health care workers, people who are “part of the fabric of daily life in Lake Forest,” from homeownership.

Almost two years ago, the city began working with the Lake County Residential Development Corp. to come up with a plan to construct affordable housing on less than 3 acres of city-owned land.

Last month, the City Council voted down the Settler’s Green project and directed its housing trust to modify the plan, which would have brought one market-rate and 15 affordable single-family rental homes to the northwest corner of Everett and Telegraph roads. In doing so, Lake Forest walked away from $6 million in Illinois Affordable Housing Tax Credits.

On one hand, it is good that the community is thinking about this issue. On the other hand, when push comes to shove in terms of approving even a small project on just 3 acres of land with 15 affordable housing units, people do not want the project. Additionally, the affordable housing project seems to have been aimed not at lower-income or minority residents but rather at “some seniors, families and education and health care workers.”

Some other figures suggest that Lake Forest needs more than just 5 units of affordable housing – there are plenty of workers in the area who make little money but need housing:

Last year, in a presentation to the Metropolitan Planning Council, Morsch noted that more than two-thirds of the work force in Lake Forest, Highland Park, Northbrook, Deerfield and Highwood earns less than $50,000 a year, meaning they can afford only 3 percent of the local housing stock.

It would be easy to categorize this as another case of NIMBY where citizens in the well-off community just don’t want land to be used in a way that is inconsistent with what already exists. But, this is not just an issue in Lake Forest. There are some deeper issues involving social class and race embedded in this issue of affordable housing in the suburbs.

Viewing Main Street at Disneyland alongside its inspiration (Marceline, Missouri)

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A number of sociologists have in recent years written about spaces where there is an attempt to build in nostalgia, to recreate an atmosphere from the past but with new materials and design. One of the places to see this is in Disneyland’s Main Street, the opening part of the park where Walt Disney attempted to produce a copy (or an improvement?) of the typical small-town downtown.

The Chicago Tribune has a short photo essay where they show pictures from Disney’s Main Street alongside pictures from downtown Marceline, Missouri, the small town that Disney claimed influenced his later Main Street. While this just a limited set of pictures, seeing these images side by side does reveal some things:

1. Main Street in Marceline looks similar to the Main Streets of many small towns: brick buildings, a little bit drab (probably partially due to the fate of small towns since the era when Disney was in Marceline), some “old-time” features (such as the clock on the stand at the corner).

2. In comparison, Disneyland’s version really does seem “hyper-real”: it is much more colorful (or is that just the sun in southern California?), the buildings feature extra features (more architectural touches, more flash than just the plain brick), and there are crowds of people walking through. While the buildings of Marceline are more functional, the buildings at Disneyland are meant to entertain and invoke feelings (such as nostalgia and consumerism). Disneyland’s Main Street looks like a movie set whereas as Marceline looks like dull reality.

3. Perhaps we could make a case that Disney took his pre-teen experiences and translated them into his Disneyland Main Street. Perhaps to a pre-teen, Marceline’s downtown was the height of excitement: different goods being sold, people from around the town (and area) gathering together, new things to look at. A more cynical take would be that the Disney Main Street is a glamorous (or garish) pastiche of real downtowns where people cared less about entertainment and more about maintaining community.

Kotkin: election results “the smackdown of the creative class”

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Amongst pundits sifting through the election returns, I have only seen Joel Kotkin explore how votes broke down by broad location categories: cities vs. suburbs. Before the election, Kotkin suggested that both parties were fighting over middle-class suburbanites (and the Democrats were losing at this). Afterward, he continues this argument and suggests the creative class and bourgeois bohemians were overwhelmed by the middle-class, suburban vote:

More than anything, this election marked a shift in American class dynamics. In 2008 President Obama managed to win enough middle-class, suburban voters to win an impressive victory. This year, those same voters deserted, rejecting policies more geared to the “creative class” than mainstream America.

A term coined by urban guru Richard Florida, “the creative class” also covers what David Brooks more cunningly calls “bourgeois bohemians”–socially liberal, well-educated, predominately white, upper middle-class voters. They are clustered largely in expensive urban centers, along the coasts, around universities and high-tech regions. To this base, Obama can add the welfare dependents, virtually all African-Americans, and the well-organized legions of public employees…

But the real decider–to use George W. Bush’s unfortunate phrase–remains the much larger, more amorphous middle class. Given the economy of the past two years, the subsequent alienation of this group should pose no mystery. Suburban swing voters didn’t suddenly turn into racists or right-wing cranks. Instead they have seen, correctly, that Obama’s economic policy has to date worked to the advantage of others far more than themselves or their families. Until the Democrats and Obama can prove that they once again can serve the interests of these voters, they will continue to struggle to recapture the optimism so appropriate two years ago.

I would love to see some actual numbers on this. It seems like Richard Florida could post some maps like he has recently been doing on Atlantic.com that would correlate voting patterns with the presence of the creative class.

I wonder if Kotkin would suggest this is a continuation of the older “culture wars” idea (progressives vs. conservatives, religious vs. non-religious, etc.) or a new trend (the creative class vs. middle-class suburbanites).

More broadly, how big will the creative class in America grow to be? Is it possible, or even desirable, that a significant number of Americans become part of the creative class or the bourgeois bohemians?

Building the “aerotropolis”

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An article in the Boston Globe discusses a recently-coined phenomenon: the aerotropolis. This refers to the conglomeration of businesses and other uses that now tend to gather around important international airports:

Dulles is no longer an airport but an aerotropolis, a term coined by a University of North Carolina business professor. An aerotropolis is a city of the 21st century, built around a runway in roughly the same way that historic cities grew up around water or rail lines, with a close-in network of businesses, an outer loop of service industries, and suburbs full of homes.

Aerotropolises have emerged in places like the former no man’s zone between Dallas and Fort Worth, in suburban Atlanta, and around Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands, near Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague. They provide what John D. Kasarda, the UNC professor, calls “connectivity” to the global marketplace. International companies want to locate where their executives can step out their doors and be on another continent eight hours later. Firms producing the highest-value goods want to ship them to markets around the world. (“The Web won’t move a box,” Kasarda declares. “High-end products move by air.”) And businesses with tentacles around the globe want a place where all their people can fly in easily for meetings.

The story goes on to discuss how this did not come about around Logan Airport in Boston, primarily because of space issues. If space is indeed an important concern, this may be tricky to navigate – a city wants an airport relatively close to businesses and travelers can easily get downtown but at the same time, perhaps airports should be located further out as airports themselves require a good amount of land and if the aerotropolis is the goal, this takes up even more space.

This new term also suggests that airports are more than just pieces of infrastructure or places where tourists come and go but rather are important nodes in urban business networks. But some other information might be helpful to better understand the aerotropolis: does the aerotropolis provide more or less benefits than businesses that gather around other modes of transportation (highways, rail lines, seaports)? How does the business generated around airports today compare to the business generated 20 years ago? Which industries in particular benefit from the aerotropolis? How much money do municipalities gain from the aerotropolis versus other land uses?

Translating this into some other terms in use, is this simply an edge city with an airport at its center?

h/t The Infrastructurist

Fighting over suburban character: Show-Me’s in Naperville

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One long-lasting idea about suburbs is that they are family-friendly places. So when a business comes to town that may not fit that image, some residents can become angered. Such is the case with a new restaurant that wants to move into Naperville:

Naperville residents will get a chance this week to formally voice their opinions about a controversial plan to open a restaurant called Show-Me’s, which opponents say will feature scantily clad waitresses who do not fit the city’s “family-friendly” image.

An open forum will be held during a Naperville Liquor Commission meeting Thursday.

But a group of about 30 people let their feelings be known during a demonstration Friday. Standing in front of the proposed site, they loudly chanted “Stop the show!” to passing cars.

The protesters have suggested this restaurant does not fit with the character of the community. The community’s mayor is on the record suggesting that he “thought it was a regular restaurant as far as I was concerned” and the clothing of the waitresses was “tastefully done.”

While this seems like just a small group of protesters, the question they raise is an interesting one: what exactly is a suburban community supposed to look like? What businesses and residents fit its image? As the mayor suggested, the proposed restaurant is not breaking any laws or rules so it would hard to reject their liquor license proposal. But necessarily following the rules or laws is not the concern of many suburbanites who have ideas about their ideal community. Local politicians have to account for (or at least acknowledge) these feelings and images even if the proposed business breaks no rules and brings in tax dollars.

(Additionally, it always interesting to read comments on stories about Naperville – it tends to bring out people who both intensely dislike and like the city.)