Category Archives: Places

More poor people now in suburbia

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American suburbs are often imagined as homes to primarily the middle and upper classes. However, new figures from the US Census suggests the number of poor people living in suburbs continues to grow:

The analyses of census data released Thursday show that since 2000, the number of poor people in the suburbs jumped by 37.4 percent to 13.7 million. That’s faster than the national growth rate of 26.5 percent and more than double the city rate of 16.7 percent…

Cities still have higher poverty rates — about 19.5 percent, compared to 10.4 percent in the suburbs. But the gap has been steadily narrowing. In a reversal from 2000, the number of poor people living in the suburbs now exceeds those in cities by roughly 1.6 million.

Analysts attribute the shift largely to years of middle-class flight and substantial shares of minorities and immigrants leaving cities in the early part of the decade for affordable housing and job opportunities in the suburbs. After the housing bust, their fortunes changed, throwing millions of people out of work.

To recap: in terms of absolute numbers, there are more poor people living in suburbs than in large cities. As a proportion of the population, cities have higher percentages of poor people compared to suburbs. And the number of poor people in suburbs has grown more since 2000 than the number of poor people in cities.

On one hand, these figures should challenge the typical images of suburbia as a wealthy paradise. On the other hand, there have always been some poor and working-class people in suburbs – this is nothing new, suggesting the typical image has always been somewhat wrong.

What will be interesting to watch is how suburban municipalities respond to the growing number of poor people.

The most dangerous American neighborhoods

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Walletpop.com has its second annual list of the most dangerous neighborhoods in America:

For the second year in a row, using exclusive data developed by Dr. Andrew Schiller’s team at NeighborhoodScout.com, and based on FBI data from all 17,000 local law enforcement agencies, WalletPop reveals the top 25 most dangerous neighborhoods with the highest predicted rates of violent crime in America.

This year, Chicago took the not-so coveted top spot from Cincinnati for the most dangerous neighborhood, while Atlanta has the highest number of neighborhoods making the list (four).

You may ask, why neighborhoods and not cities? Schiller explains that even the cities with the highest crime rates can have relatively safe neighborhoods, and thus it is less useful to generalize about an entire city.

The reason for looking at neighborhoods rather than cities is a good one – most American cities are quite large so city-level data is not very useful. To see the data for the Chicago neighborhood that tops the list, check out this page.

NBCChicago.com seems to have made an interpretation error with the data:

According to the info, anyone walking down Lake Street between Damen and Western has a 1 in 4 chance of being a victim of a crime.  Those who choose to live there face the same odds with the chances of being robbed.
As far as I can tell, the neighborhood crime rates apply to people living there for a full year, not people just walking in the neighborhood.
The website that this crime data was developed for, neighborhoodscoutreports.com, seems like it has some interesting proprietary data. When you enter a zip code, you can purchase a full report – though they leak out a few interesting tidbits. According to the website, zip code 60187 (Wheaton, IL) is “More sophisticated than 97%of U.S. neighborhoods. More walkable than 65%.”

Daley wants high-speed rail from Loop to O’Hare

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Impressed on a recent visit by a 7 minute 20 second trip between Shanghai’s airport and subway system (with speeds up to 268 mph!), Mayor Daley wants a similar high-speed line for Chicago. Of course, the question becomes: who is going to fund such a venture?

This has been an idea of Daley’s for several years.

Quick review: Watching The Social Network at Harvard

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This weekend, the movie The Social Network, a disputed origin story about the founding of Facebook, hit theaters to nearly universal acclaim.  I had the opportunity to see the movie on the second day of release and can add my wreath to the many laurels heaped upon this Aaron Sorkin–David Fincher collaboration.  However, since so many others have dissected this film so thoroughly, I will refrain from a typical movie review as I feel I have little to add.  I will instead comment briefly on just how surreal it was to watch this movie at Harvard.

The AMC Loews Harvard Square 5 is located one block off the Yard at Harvard University, and the mood at the 6:30pm showing on Saturday, October 2nd was electrifying.  The audience appeared to be a mix mostly of college students and their professors, and they clearly had come to have a good time.  When the Mark Zukerberg character, played by Jesse Eisenberg, made a crack early in the movie about Boston University students not needing to study, there was a collective gasp.  When the exterior of The Thirsty Scholar made a cameo appearance, there were actual cheers.

This movie was about us–not as representatives of some abstractly-defined generation nor as students coming of age during web 2.0–but as residents of Mt. Auburn Street, two blocks away.  In the men’s bathroom after the movie, I overheard a conversation between two students debating the wisdom of trying to get into one of Lawrence Summer‘s classes now that he is returning to Harvard (after working as director of the White House National Economics Council).

Many of the best movies take us from our own specifics into the universality of the human condition.  While I am sure that The Social Network will do this for many people, it had quite the opposite effect on me.  For me, it took that most abstractly universal of all web phenonmenon–Facebook–and gave it a specific human face.  One that might well have been in the theater with me last night.

Cities using art as a development tool

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USA Today describes the attempts of some cities, including Grand Rapids, Michigan, to use art as a development and economic tool.

This is not a new phenomenon. Richard Florida, in particular, has promoted this with his ideas about the “creative class.” But, perhaps we will see a rise in this sort of activity as cities look for non-traditional economic foundations.

h/t The Infrastructurist

“Most romantic ‘L’ station” analysis with faulty generalization

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Among other features, Craigslist offers a “missed connections” page where people can try to identify and track down people they ran into in public life. Based on this data, Craigslist recently released a list of the “most romantic” spots in Chicago’s CTA system:

Turns out it’s Belmont. The stop on the CTA’s Red, Brown and Purple lines won the title of Chicago’s most romantic ‘L’ station in a report the Web site released Thursday. The crown for most romantic train line went to the Red Line.

The site did a four-week study this summer of more than 250 missed connections postings (read, “potential hookups”) in Chicago and ranked stations based on a scale called the Train Romance Index Score Total — or TRIST for short.

The TRIST is calculated by dividing the number of missed connections that mention a CTA station or line by the number of riders a year who use that station or line. Then, that number is multiplied by 10 to get a whole number and rounded to two decimal places.

The romantic train line is defined as having the best odds of a passenger spotting another rider across a crowded train or platform and then posting a missed connections listing to get in touch.

The data is limited (a pretty small sample) but the generalization is the biggest issue: does this really reveal what is the most romantic spot on the CTA rail system? It is probably much more indicative of who uses Craigslist (young North-siders?).

My guess is that this was simply meant to be fun and promote Craigslist. But sometimes statistics and arguments like this take on a life of their own…

Rebounding from the economic crisis in Dubai

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The economic crisis didn’t just affect American building or construction. The city that has grown out of the desert, Dubai, was also strongly affected and now is making a slow recovery:

Chastened after an extravagance-fueled debt crisis last year at Dubai World, the state-run investment giant, Dubai is getting back to basics.

Glamorous whimsies like a giant artificial island shaped like a palm tree are giving way to more pragmatic priorities meant to revive Dubai’s status as the dominant trading hub between the industrially advanced West and the oil-rich Middle East.

The article goes on to mention a number of factors that need to accompany building and development for it to last long-term including stable governance and a diversified economy.

One factor that is cited as aiding Dubai’s recovery is its established infrastructure.

Large “shadow inventory” lurking behind foreclosures

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While foreclosures have drawn a lot of attention, there may be yet another threat: the “shadow inventory” of homes where owners are at least one month delinquent on their payments.

In the eight-county Chicago area, 19 percent of mortgages — representing nearly 1 in 5 residential properties with a loan — are delinquent by at least one month, helping create an inventory of almost 204,000 homes at risk of reverting back to lenders, according to data provided to the Chicago Tribune by John Burns Real Estate Consulting in Irvine, Calif. That “shadow inventory,” as experts define distressed homes not yet put up for sale, is the largest in absolute terms for any metropolitan area in the country.

Based on its calculations, the firm believes that 80 percent of those homeowners eventually will lose their property, either through foreclosure or a short sale, in which the lender permits the home to be sold for less than the value of the loan.

If these figures are correct, or even close to correct, the housing crisis will continue for years to come as they properties eventually come up for sale. This will continue to have a strong effect on housing values and new building starts.

This could also have specific effects for the Chicago region. While most of the foreclosure attention seems to be focused on the Southwest and Florida, this data suggests many homeowners are teetering on the edge of keeping their homes.

How a curved glass Las Vegas hotel can burn people at the pool

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According to a story in the Daily Mail, the design of the Vdara hotel in Las Vegas is leading to burnt guests at the pool. Because of the concave design of the building plus its glass exterior, several guests have reported being burned by this “death ray”:

Due to the concave shape of the Vdara hotel, the strong Nevada sun reflects off its all-glass front and directly onto sections of the swimming pool area below.

The result has left some guests with burns from the powerful rays and even plastic bags have been recorded as melting in the heat…

The Las Vegas Review Journal quotes one hotel employee as saying the building’s design causes the sunshine to be diverted ‘like a magnifying glass that shines down’ over a space of about 10 by 15 feet as the poolside.

And as the Earth rotates, the spot moves across the pool area. The ‘death ray’ can increase temperatures by around 20 degrees.

The article also suggests the architects foresaw this problem but their initial solution didn’t solve the issue.

Interesting stuff – the unintended consequences of building a large, concave, glass building in desert conditions. This could lead to a cheesy movie or some pontificating about the folly of humankind trying to build in a climate like that of Las Vegas.

A more upbeat assessment of the state of Detroit

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In recent years, numerous media outlets have focused on the troubles of Detroit. Photo essays of now abandoned but once glorious buildings have become normal.

There is one grassroots news organization that is now pushing back against these more bleak images. VICE/VBS.TV explains their approach:

In August 2009, Vice published a story called “Something, something, something, Detroit: Lazy journalists love pictures of abandoned stuff,” about the roving gangs of photojournalists prowling the empty city and feasting on its highly photogenic carcass. Since then, some of the worst offenders have abashedly changed their approach to covering Michigan’s largest city. But most outlets are still fixated on the all-you-can-click pageview buffet that is “misery porn” of the decaying Motor City…

The fact of the matter is that the situation in Detroit is daunting. The city that so successfully realized the 1950s American dream is now a visual testament to its grandiose demise. But is that really news?

We like to think that the story is better told by identifying those who remain in Detroit and those who are moving back precisely because it is challenging. We set out to give the people of Detroit a platform to tell their story. The city has become a place where enterprising classes can find the space and time to do whatever they want, cheaply and hassle-free. It’s a raw space where they can create community and start rebuilding their city from the inside out.

I’ll be curious to see how much attention their coverage generates. And the possible transformation/regeneration of Detroit will continue to be a fascinating story.