Category Archives: Places

While all other major cities grow, Chicago loses population

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According to the latest Census figures, Chicago continues to be an outlier among the largest US cities:

Of the country’s 10 largest cities, the Chicago metropolitan statistical area was the only one to drop in population between 2015 and 2016. The region, defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, includes the city and suburbs and extends into Wisconsin and Indiana.

The Chicago metropolitan area as a whole lost 19,570 residents in 2016, registering the greatest loss of any metropolitan area in the country. It’s the area’s second consecutive year of population loss: In 2015, the region saw its first decline since at least 1990, losing 11,324 people.

By most estimates, the Chicago area’s population will continue to decline in the coming years. Over the past year, the Tribune surveyed dozens of former residents who’ve packed up in recent years and they cited a variety of reasons: high taxes, the state budget stalemate, crime, the unemployment rate and weather. Census data released Thursday suggests the root of the problem is in the city of Chicago and Cook County: The county in 2016 had the largest loss of any county nationwide, losing 21,324 residents…

While Chicago suffered the largest population loss of any metropolitan area, the greatest metropolitan population gains were in Texas and Arizona. The Dallas-Fort Worth- Arlington, Texas, metropolitan area gained more than 143,000 residents in 2016, and the Houston region gained about 125,000. The Phoenix area gained about 94,000 residents and the Atlanta region gained about 91,000 people.

The ascendance of the Sunbelt continues. While this demographic shift has been in the works for decades, at what point can we declare that America is a Sunbelt nation? Granted, there is still significant power in other parts of the country – for example, New York, Chicago, Ohio, Pennsylvania – but the swath of America from Virginia to southern California both covers a lot of residents and has an increasing amount of influence.

A push for Naperville to declare itself a “welcoming city”

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The Naperville City Council has recently discussed declaring the suburb a “welcoming city”:

Some Naperville residents and city council members want the city to adopt a resolution that would declare Naperville a welcoming city to people of all backgrounds. The push comes amid an election that includes the first openly gay candidate for Naperville City council…

O’Meara is part of a couple women’s groups that are asking the city not to become a sanctuary city, but to name itself a welcoming city, she said. “We believe that becoming a welcoming city is something that you’ve already done over the years that people have been coming here,” O’Meara said. “It’s important that people moving into this town know that this town is going to support them in what they have to do going forward.”

Councilwoman Becky Anderson floated the idea of adopting such a resolution at an earlier City Council meeting after Naperville resident Anthony Castagnoli spoke during public comment period, asking the City to act in resistance to President Donald Trump’s actions…

“One of the things I would task us to think about as council members as we approach our next social service grant cycle is what could we be doing with the social service grant to make people feel more comfortable, or to aid those who are struggling in our community because of discrimination whether it’s through immigration or otherwise,” Boyd-Obarski said. “As we confront the country around us, if we really want to be welcoming, let’s think about ways that we can do that with our dollars as well as our voices.”

This could be viewed as interesting as a community that traditionally has been fairly conservative. As noted here, perhaps that is why being a sanctuary city is not on the table. At the same time, Naperville is home to a number of wealthier, well-educated residents and wants to continue to attract both high-end businesses and residents. One thing Naperville has done well over the last six decades as it has expanded from a small town to a giant suburb is created a high-quality of life, which today likely includes the values of tolerance and diversity (see Richard Florida’s work for an argument on why this is so important for today’s cities).

The people quoted from this article primarily cite Naperville’s welcoming attitude to gay residents. Have all minority residents had similar positive experiences? It wasn’t that long ago that Naperville was a sundown town or a place where black residents could not be shown housing. Or, in the last twenty years or so, the Islamic Center of Naperville has faced opposition over their locations.

LA development guided by powerful people and relatively few voters

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Some critics have charged that development in Los Angeles is influenced too much by powerful people. Yet, when voters had an opportunity this week to vote on increased regulation of development (Measure S), relatively few people turned out:

In the end, it failed by an overwhelming margin, garnering only 70,000 votes in a city of almost 4 million people. It’s a reassuring sign…

It’s hard to read too much into an election in which hardly anyone voted.

While it was a primary election (where turnout is typically low), this measure would have affected development throughout the city. Does this suggest residents aren’t that interested in development?

Maybe the voters save their attention for local development issues and LA has plenty:

Some of the same people who pushed for the passage of Measure S sued the city over an update to Hollywood’s community plan. In Granada Hills, neighbors are fighting a 440-unit apartment complex. That project conforms to that neighborhood’s newly rewritten community plan, but some residents say it’s too big.

Development can be tricky in that many residents might be very aware of what is happening next door or on the same block (particularly if it affects their property values or their children) but not have much knowledge or concern about matters in other parts of the city. In a big city like Los Angeles, residents may not be very familiar with the daily happenings of other locations. And, this is Los Angeles, famously the poster child for decentralization.

In other words, talking about development in the abstract might be a difficult sell, even in locations like this where housing prices are high for all.

UPDATE 3/9/17 9:08 PM: Here are more exact figures on how many LA residents decided the fate of this sweeping development regulation:

The Los Angeles Times reported late on Tuesday that just 11.4 percent of the electorate participated in the election, despite the fact that the mayor, half the city council, and several heavyweight ballot measures were all up for debate. In Tuesday’s election, apathy won.

Read further for an argument on why measures like this that are so broad should not be on primary ballots.

Debating whether Detroit is on an upward trend

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There is some disagreement about whether Detroit is on the rebound:

Michigan State political scientist Laura Reese and Wayne State urban affairs expert Gary Sands have written an essay “Detroit’s recovery: The glass is half-full at best,” for Conversation, which was reprinted at CityLab as “Is Detroit Really Making a Comeback?” The article is based on a longer academic treatment of this subject by Reese, Sanders and co-authors, entitled “It’s safe to come, we’ve got lattes,” in the journal Cities.  (This is one of those rare cases where the mass media version of an article is more measured and less snarky than the title of the companion academic piece, but I digress.)

Reese and Sands set about the apparently obligatory task of offering a contrarian view to stories in the popular press suggesting that Detroit has somehow turned the corner on its economic troubles and is starting to come back. We, too, are wary of glib claims that everything is fine in Detroit. It isn’t. The city still bears the deep scars of decades of industrial decline coupled with dramatic failure of urban governance. The nascent rebound is evident only in a few places.

And the opposite position:

It’s going to be a long, hard road ahead for Detroit. And that road will lead to a different and smaller Detroit than existed in, say, the 1950s. That road is made even harder by critics who damn the first few candles for shedding too little light.

While the debate is about Detroit’s fate, it hits on important larger questions: at what point can experts know whether a city is on the decline or on the way up? Who gets to make such pronouncements and with what data? While we are in the moment, when is a trend clearly a trend? Even a consensus of experts may not be good enough; they can all be wrong.

The more complicated answer is that it takes time and lots of data to know for sure what is happening. This is not comforting if things are going bad; there is often a lot of post-hoc analysis of what could have been done in the moment but such moments are difficult to handle. (Think about the public discussions regarding the economic crisis of the late 2000s and what lessons should be drawn from the Great Depression and similar events.) And if the situation has been bad for a long time, people do want to find hope and build on good happenings.

For those of us looking on from a distance, perhaps the best we can do is wait and hope for positive change in Detroit which likely includes both new activities as well as difficult decisions about moving on from past arrangements.

Film about McMansions on Martha’s Vineyard

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Here is a review of how a film examining the larger and larger homes built on Martha’s Vineyard:

The premise of the film begins on familiar ground, with Bena casting a critical, almost dogmatic eye on the issue:

“On the first day that I arrived I landed several jobs and it wasn’t long before I was working seven days a week. My main gig was carpentry. At first I really enjoyed the work, but over time I found myself working on larger and larger homes. The larger the home, the more my sense of uneasiness increased. And the fact that they were often third or fourth homes seemed incongruous with their enormous size. They looked more like bus stations or hotels, not summer cottages.

The houses were heated year round and I found the waste of resources shocking and depressing. Not only did the “starter castles” dwarf the cottages and historic homes they replaced, they seemed out of keeping with everything that I love about Martha’s Vineyard. I felt like I was ruining the place that I wanted to call home. And that is why I took off my tool belt and picked up a camera.”

But as the film progresses, Bena’s approach becomes much more nuanced. In talking with other local carpenters who work on these huge houses, we discover that their livelihood depends on these large contracts. We hear from long-time residents, some of whom are uneasy about telling newcomers what to build or not to build. In his interviews with some of these owners of these oversize mansions, we hear the human side of their stories as well. But we also see how some of these wealthy homeowners take advantage of legal loopholes — or even flout them completely — with serious consequences.

This sounds interesting and surprisingly multi-faceted for a story about McMansions.

At the same time, I suspect the story is complicated here because of tourism. This is not a “normal” location but rather one that locals as well as thousands of visitors might consider “home.” Additionally, there is a lot of money involved with what it takes to visit and build (with limited land). When the president travels there and draws attention to this particular issue, this is a special place. The story of McMansions at Martha’s Vineyard might be able to reach more people because of the known location but it isn’t necessarily the same McMansion story as teardowns in Los Angeles neighborhoods or in suburbs outside of Washington D.C. or new McMansions in the exurbs.

Naperville adds another corporate headquarters

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It isn’t the full headquarters for the company – just the North American headquarters – but Naperville is gaining another impressive office as Chervon North America announced plans to move in:

A Chinese maker of power tools plans to bring more than 200 jobs to its new North American headquarters in Naperville over the next three years.

Chervon North America, the U.S. arm of Nanjing, China-based Chervon Holdings, confirmed plans to move workers from Michigan and several suburban Chicago locations when it opens a new headquarters in Naperville sometime in the spring…

Chervon also considered locations in California, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee, Turoff said. The company is not receiving any incentives from the Illinois or Naperville governments, Turoff said.

“In the end our decision came down to three key factors: proximity to talent, proximity to current and acquired employees (and) Naperville’s pro-business attitude,” Turoff said in the email.

No tax breaks needed. This has been the story of Naperville for several decades now: the community is attractive to a number of businesses. This started with the move of Bell Laboratories just north of the city in the 1960s along the East-West Tollway. Since then, white-collar firms have moved into the suburb, attracted by the quality workers and bucolic setting. These moves have boosted the reputation of Naperville even as it has helped attract even more residents. It is the sort of cycle that many suburbs would like to emulate but would have a hard time pulling off.

Going forward, it will be interesting to see whether this can continue for Naperville. There is increased competition for businesses. Naperville has a very limited amount of open land for new commercial or residential development (unless they make a major decision to build up). This space for Chervon opened up because another major company decided not to use the space.

CHA takes care of its own finances, waiting list grows

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The Chicago Housing Authority doesn’t exactly have a distinguished history in serving those that need housing and that trend appears to be continuing:

While tens of thousands of families languished on a waiting list for assistance, the Chicago Housing Authority paid off practically all of its debt and overfunded its pension plan, according to a report released Friday by the bipartisan Center for Tax and Budget Accountability.

The agency also socked away hundreds of millions of dollars in cash reserves even as its ambitious plan to replace thousands of demolished public housing units lagged years behind schedule…

By the end of 2016, the waiting list for housing assistance stood at more than 119,000 households…

Originally, the [Plan for Transformation] was supposed to be completed in 2009, but by then the CHA had delivered just 71 percent of the promised units. The goal was eventually pushed back to 2015. By the end of that year, however, more than 2,000 units still hadn’t been built, the report found. The plan is now expected to be completed by the end of this year.

As the article notes, this is an interesting contrast to many other governments and taxing bodies in Illinois that are struggling to meet their budgets and fund their pensions. But, the trade off here repeats a pattern that the CHA has followed for decades: it doesn’t actually provide enough housing for the needs of city residents.

Once the public housing high rises were torn down (such as the Cabrini-Green towers coming down several years ago), the topic of public housing has not received much attention from the media or the public. However, why don’t we hear more about the slowed Plan for Transformation? What about the growing waiting list (it is not a new problem)? Ultimately, have the efforts since the early 2000s actually improved the housing situation in Chicago or simply moved the problems around (and out of the public view)?

I know there is a lot of concern about the lack of trust the public has in government institutions. From my perspective, a lack of trust in the CHA is entirely warranted (it may never have been warranted given its checkered history) and it would take a lot to reverse this.

The ever-active big city as antidote to Donald Trump

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One New Yorker writes about how the city itself is a salve against the election of an undesirable candidate:

Urbanism isn’t perfect, certainly not as we’ve ever managed to live it in New York. It’s brought us income inequality and political complacency and an ugly disdain for the forsaken voters on whose rage our boy-king just boogie-boarded into office. But the city is not one that will respond to that comeuppance with humility. And as the days wore on after the election, and we settled back into our know-it-all selves, we began to feel a little less ignorant or even ill-informed. We know plenty. We know tolerance and science and that cosmopolitanism does not mean unanimity but that it does mean vitality, and that you shouldn’t intervene when two drug addicts are yelling at each other outside a Chinatown subway station but that you should when it’s one of them yelling at a Mexican woman to clear out of town. We know that, whatever he thinks of Hamilton, there are safe spaces for the president-elect in this city — Staten Island, for starters, and Hasidic Williamsburg and the ‘21’ Club and Jean-Georges, apparently. Thankfully, we know there are unsafe spaces, too, including right outside his front door, where many continue to rally every day despite the armored trucks and sandbags and police with blacked-out name tags. We know that “inner cities” aren’t “war zones” and that ending discriminatory policing doesn’t lead to a rise in gun deaths — we actually know that because the city is an urban laboratory for city-first governance, and it has yielded real results. We know that putting America First means welcoming the world, and we know our immigrants have enriched us, not raped us. We know that city life can be ugly, but also that we are all strong enough to live among some ugliness. We know that, stranded in a country that may soon privatize public schools, we have just established universal pre-K, and we know — or think we know — that it works. We know that we have pretty gender-­accommodating public bathrooms because we know people who still fuck and do drugs in them. We know that La Guardia is a dump — but so what? We know this city is, ultimately, ungovernable — that it’s too unruly, that it’s at its best when it’s unruly, and that its unruliness is what gave rise to what people like Trump used to call the American Dream. We know that people like him are the cost of that unruliness, and that you can learn to live with them by mocking them. We thought we knew the country would listen to our warnings, but we’re not going to stop making them. We know, whatever one might think of Bill de Blasio, our giant in Gracie Mansion is up to the task of grandstanding, suggesting he’d erase the city’s ID-card data rather than endanger immigrants. We know the city will be independent, and we know the city will also continue to be itself — a theater of freaks and refugees and the restless who were never elsewhere able to feel at home. We know that an open and tolerant and ­progress-minded future still lies before us, even if we have to go it alone, and even if that future now looks a few feet smaller at the shoreline.

And we also know that we are not in fact alone — that New York is not an island but an archipelago. Our mayor has resister-cousins in Chicago and Los Angeles and Providence, San Francisco and Seattle and Minneapolis — and those are just a few of the cities mobilizing themselves as immigrant sanctuaries. We know that the number of Democratic counties has shrunk over the last decade or two, as entrepreneurs and other hustlers flooded into cities, and we know that the counties that went blue in this election account for nearly two-thirds of the American economy. We also know that Peter Thiel was basically the only Trumper in Silicon Valley. If you have to live in a bubble, really, you could do worse.

This could be relatively easy to dismiss as an example of urban dwellers or coastal residents leaning Democratic versus those in more rural areas or in the middle of the country voting Republican. But, the underlying idea is more interesting: is the city, particularly the #1 global city in the world New York City, bigger than presidential elections? Regardless of who is president, this city moves on with its own concerns and attitudes. It is affected by national politics but it is also a world onto itself. More broadly, the economic heart of the city – giving rise to all the traffic (vehicular and pedestrian), Wall Street, dynamic urbanism described by Jane Jacobs – continues.

Vancouver reaches goal of 50% of city trips not by car

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How did Vancouver reach its goal of limiting car trips ahead of schedule? Here is one explanation:

It all began back in the late 1960s, says the city’s former chief planner (and urban-Twitter celeb) Brent Toderian, when residents rejected a proposed highway that would have torn up the dense urban core and separated it from its famous waterfront. Vancouver is still the only major North American city without a freeway running through it. The open waterfront became the location of the hugely successful Expo ‘86, which was themed around the future of transportation and featured the debut of the elevated SkyTrain, a swoopy automated light rail system. A new extension that opened in December allowed SkyTrain to reclaim its title as the world’s longest fully automated metro system in the world (besting the similarly driverless Dubai Metro). The system also helped pave the way for the dramatic transformation of Vancouver’s waterfront a couple of years later. Hundreds of new residences and offices were built, unified by pedestrian thoroughfares and the city’s seawall—which is “routinely ranked as the best public space in at least Canada,” says Toderian.

The 2010 Winter Olympics encouraged more car-to-pedestrian street conversations, and peppering the in-between years were lots of smart decision-making, such as turning a stretch of Granville Street into a pedestrian mall in the 1970s and the city’s 2008 strategic shift to support cycling as daily form of mobility rather than pure recreation. A mess of new protected bike lanes have pushed Vancouver’s active-transit infrastructure beyond the downtown core: “24 percent of our bike network is now considered [appropriate] for all ages and abilities,” says Dale Bracewell, the city’s manager of transportation planning. A $2 billion plan to expand TransLink, Vancouver’s mass transportation network, was approved last month by the mayor’s council, and stands to bring active transit options to parts of the city that haven’t had them before.

Three quick thoughts:

  1. Such efforts do not happen overnight. This explanation involves decades of consistent efforts to provide other transportation alternatives. Many American places could benefit from less driving but quick fixes are difficult.
  2. Related to #1, how many places could sustain such efforts over decades? Are certain places like Vancouver more predisposed toward such ideas? There could be multiple reasons for this. Perhaps different urban cultures enjoy less driving. Perhaps the government here was particularly effective in funneling funds and resources to mass transit rather than roads. Perhaps the housing in Vancouver is so expensive that it is unrealistic for a lot of people to also pay for cars.
  3. Vancouver is often said to have a very good quality of life. Would Americans made the trade of a better life overall for people versus the individual freedom they often value to drive around when they want?

Could bad traffic in Manhattan lead to fewer cars on the road?

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One way to reduce traffic might be to make it so unpleasant that people stop driving so much:

City officials have intentionally ground Midtown to a halt with the hidden purpose of making drivers so miserable that they leave their cars at home and turn to mass transit or bicycles, high-level sources told The Post.

Today’s gridlock is the result of an effort by the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations over more than a decade of redesigning streets and ramping up police efforts, the sources said…

The goal of the jammed traffic is to shift as many drivers as possible to public transit or bicycles.

An added benefit was supposed to be safer streets, but city officials have said that while 45,000 fewer cars and trucks now come into Midtown daily than in 2010, pedestrian deaths are on the uptick this year.

The city denies such efforts with the mayor’s spokesperson saying, “The notion that we want or are somehow ‘engineering’ traffic congestion is absurd.” But, there is little argument that the city has tried now for over a decade to introduce additional transit options beyond people driving cars.

The real question we should ask is whether such efforts can reduce congestion. Even though the public may not like it or believe it, there is some evidence from road diets and closing highways (in places like San Francisco or Seoul) that traffic is not static: limiting roads can affect the choices people make regarding how to get around. In other words, build more highway lanes and more people will drive.

Perhaps Manhattan itself is simply too crowded for the transportation options Americans currently have. Even the sidewalks are supposedly overrun. Could this be remedied with a new, innovative regional transit plan that would work on ways to get people in and out of Manhattan more efficiently? Would affordable housing help so fewer people have to make long commutes to Manhattan?