Category Archives: Places

Chicago to collect big data via light pole sensors

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Chicago is hoping to collect all sorts of information via a new system of sensors along main streets:

The smooth, perforated sheaths of metal are decorative, but their job is to protect and conceal a system of data-collection sensors that will measure air quality, light intensity, sound volume, heat, precipitation, and wind. The sensors will also count people by observing cell phone traffic…

While data-hungry researchers are unabashedly enthusiastic about the project, some experts said that the system’s flexibility and planned partnerships with industry beg to be closely monitored. Questions include whether the sensors are gathering too much personal information about people who may be passing by without giving a second thought to the amount of data that their movements—and the signals from their smartphones—may be giving off.

The first sensor could be in place by mid-July. Researchers hope to start with sensors at eight Michigan Avenue intersections, followed by dozens more around the Loop by year’s end and hundreds more across the city in years to come as the project expands into neighborhoods, Catlett said…

While the benefits of collecting and analyzing giant sets of data from cities are somewhat speculative, there is a growing desire from academic and industrial researchers to have access to the data, said Gary King, director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences at Harvard University.

The sort of data collected here could be quite fascinating, even with the privacy concerns. I wonder if a way around this is for the city to make clear now and down the road how exactly they will use the data to improve the city. To some degree, this may not be possible because this is a new source of data collection and it is not entirely known what might emerge. Yet, collecting big data can be an opaque process that worries some because they are rarely told how the data improves their lives. If this simply is another source of data that the city doesn’t use or uses behind the scenes, is it worth it?

A quick hypothetical. Let’s say the air sensors along Michigan Avenue, one of Chicago prime tourist spots, shows a heavy amount of car exhaust. In response to the data, the city announces a plan to limit congestion on Michigan Avenue or to have clean mass transit. This could be a clear demonstration that the big data helped improve the pedestrian experience.

But, I could also imagine that in a year or two the city hasn’t said much about this data and people are unclear what is collected and what happens to it. More transparency and clear action steps could go a long way here.

Fighting over the fate of the Lathrop Homes, one of the remaining public housing projects in Chicago

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While Chicago’s public housing high-rises (like Cabrini-Green) have been torn down, there is a current debate about the fate of the Lathrop Homes:

Lathrop’s two-story row houses and three- and four-story walk-ups occupy 35 acres on the western edge of Lincoln Park, and are often noticed by passersby on Diversey owing to the thick, white plumes of steam that rise from ground vents like jets from primordial geysers—the result of aging heating pipes. When the 925-unit development opened in 1938, it was one of the first public housing developments in the country and only the second in Chicago, built by a dream team of architects for the Public Works Administration’s New Deal program. For 30 years it was one of four all-white public housing projects managed by the Chicago Housing Authority. When the first African-American families were finally allowed to move into Lathrop in the late 1960s, they were segregated in the buildings on the south side of Diversey. The project didn’t become the melting pot Suarez describes until the 1970s…

Though Lathrop was supposed to be rehabilitated—and to remain 100 percent public housing—the CHA’s position shifted over the years. In 2000 the CHA stopped accepting new residents (in anticipation of rehabbing the property), and each subsequent year families were encouraged to move out. The buildings were shuttered one by one as Lathrop shrank from 747 occupied units in 2000 to about 140 today.

In other words, at a time when affordable housing in Chicago was becoming more and more scarce, hundreds of low-rent apartments were sitting vacant in a prime neighborhood.

In 2006 the CHA announced that Lathrop would become a mixed-income community with 400 public housing units, 400 tax-credit-subsidized units, and 400 market-rate ones. Demolition was scheduled for 2009.

But the housing market collapse, the recession, and persistent leadership turnover at the CHA has stalled those plans. To this day, not a single one of Lathrop’s 30 buildings has been demolished.

Interesting read about a project that is on the National Register of Historic Places and doesn’t get much attention despite some unique features. The story of the slow-moving CTA is not unusual; that has been the story for decades and it is understandable why residents aren’t always optimistic about better outcomes.

Manhattan population increasing, affordable housing decreasing

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One of the wealthiest areas of the world continues to see a decrease in affordable housing and the population keeps going up:

The latest estimates put the population at more than 1.6 million people, up slightly from the 2010 census.

According to NYU’s Furman Center, in the last year alone, Manhattan lost nearly 3,000 rent-regulated apartments…

In many cases, those stabilized, often affordable homes are being replaced by “market rate” units.

From 2002 to 2012, the number of stabilized or controlled apartments in the borough plunged more than 19 percent. The number of “market” rate and ultimately significantly more expensive apartments soared more than 19 percent…

Nearly 29 percent of the borough’s population is foreign born, but experts say the wave of change could drive that number down even in traditionally immigrant neighborhoods.

“It doesn’t happen all at once; what happens is that neighborhoods change in pieces,” says City College of New York Sociology Professor William Helmreich.

The wealth flowing through Manhattan is incredible so it is little surprise that real estate prices are going up. This isn’t a phenomenon limited to Manhattan: the ultra-wealthy are developing and buying real estate in numerous big cities like London and Miami. The bigger issue is what happens to these cities. Do they become primarily the province of the wealthy or is there still space for average residents and immigrants? This discussion or struggle has been illustrated in recent years in San Francisco where actions by tech companies to bus employees to Silicon Valley has been met with resistance. The answers are not easy as many politicians need to keep and attract the jobs and wealth that help keep the city coffers full as well as look attractive to other firms. In other words, it is hard to fight growth machines.

When housing values rise, so do property taxes and concerns about how those taxes are collected

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Austin, Texas is a hot real estate market which means housing prices are going up – which means property taxes are also rising and this has some homeowners up in arms about how the city and state pursue property taxes.

The arrival of this year’s appraisal notices — which in Travis County showed homes’ average market values jumped 12.6 percent and average taxable values rose 8 percent for 2014 — is sparking a push for reform. Similar jumps have occurred in Williamson and Hays counties.

Real Values for Texas, a statewide group advocating for property tax reform, local officials and others say they believe enough momentum is building around the state to put pressure on the Legislature to fix what they say is a flawed property tax system. The issue is an especially hot one in Austin, where property values have risen at a much faster rate than wages in recent years, leaving more and more area homeowners saying they are struggling to pay their property tax bills.

At issue is what can be done. Market forces generally dictate home values. And with no state income tax, the state government and local taxing entities rely heavily on property tax for revenue to fund schools and many local services…

A key problem, critics say, is that the current system has shifted a disproportionate share of the burden of paying for schools and local services on homeowners, in favor of commercial and corporate interests who can afford to appeal their values and win big reductions year after year. The share of property taxes from homeowners to support public schools grew from 45 percent to 54 percent over a 12-year period, while commercial and industrial owners’ share has declined to less than 20 percent. (Other sectors, from oil and gas to personal property, make up the rest.)

One way to read this would be to see this in a long line of American homeowner complaints about property taxes. This has been a common theme in recent decades, famously illustrated by the Prop 13 campaign in California in the 1970s. Homeowners may enjoy owning a home but they tend to resent continually rising requests for money for local governments, even as they tend to want good, or even better, local services. Most homeowners want rising housing values as this increases the value of their investment yet don’t necessarily want to pay for it while living there.

Yet, the property tax reform suggestions here are interesting. Just how much should local homeowners pay compared to corporations? Is the best comparison to look at the rates each pays or the cumulative percentages each group contributes to the local pot of tax money? This could be related to a larger issue that goes beyond property taxes: what kind of tax breaks should corporations get from municipalities? This is a difficult issue to sort out as communities like jobs and important businesses yet homeowners tend to resent “handouts” for corporations that they think could afford to pay more.

Chicago to get its own “Carmageddon” on the Kennedy in June

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Major repair work on the Kennedy in June is being dubbed Chicago’s own Carmageddon:

Chicago-area drivers are being urged to steer clear of the downtown stretch of the Kennedy Expressway during the last three weekends in June, officials said Thursday. That’s when bridge demolition on the Kennedy interchange at Ohio and Ontario streets will require shutting down expressway lanes, first in the inbound direction, then outbound and finally the Ohio and Ontario feeder ramps…

Officials hope the stern warning will help prevent hourslong snarls along the expressway that carries an average of 260,000 vehicles a day, avoiding what some traffic engineers have referred to a “carmageddon.”…

The work to tear down sections of the bridge, drop the concrete pieces onto the Kennedy and haul away the debris is scheduled for a series of tightly choreographed 55-hour periods on the weekends of June 13-15, June 20-22 and June 27-29, according to IDOT plans…

On an average project, IDOT tries to “scare away’’ 15 percent of the traffic to compensate for lane closures, officials said. During the Kennedy work, they hope to divert about 25 percent of traffic elsewhere.

There are echoes here of the Carmageddon in Los Angeles several years ago that ended up working out pretty well. While this location is a key part of the Chicago highway system, there are alternative routes either in the downtown area or different highways that can route people further around the city. At the same time, this does highlight the importance of fixing the Circle Interchange nearby to have better traffic flow.

It will be interesting to watch the PR for all of this. In fact, is two weeks enough time to start alerting people to Chicago’s own Carmageddon? Yet, I imagine local news outlets will eat this up.

Just how much blight there is in Detroit

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A recent report shows the patterns of blight in Detroit:

These numbers come from a report released this week by the Detroit Blight Removal Task Force on the results of a manual survey of 377,602 property parcels in the city. Nearly one in three structures in Detroit needs some kind of intervention, according to the analysis. That covers 78,506 structures that the report has deemed “blighted” or showing indicators of blight, as well as 6,135 lots that have effectively become neglected dumping grounds…

“We need to recognize the volume of blighted structures did not happen overnight,” the report declares. “Detroit’s conditions are the physical result of dire economic and social forces that pulled the city apart over many decades.”…

The empty lots, vacant homes and shuttered industrial plants that attest to this exodus are not evenly spread across the city. And so Detroit — as New Orleans did after Hurricane Katrina — will face difficult decisions about where to focus its efforts, prioritizing those places where investment will have the greatest impact on people who still live in the city. By Detroit’s reckoning, no city has ever addressed more than 7,000 blighted structures in a year. The task force is proposing to eradicate all blight in the city in the next five years, lest blight beget more blight, with the problem continuing to spread beyond the city’s ability to keep up…

Detroit Blight Removal Task Force

This could provide an interesting comparison to urban renewal projects of the 1950s and 1960s in numerous major cities that many scholars and residents would see mostly as land grabs. Some of those projects were justified with blight as a cover to push people out. The situation today in Detroit is quite different as there is a large number of blighted properties that not too many people want and few would argue that blight is not a legitimate problem. Of course, as the article notes, these properties drain resources from a city that needs more resources. Yet, dealing with all the blight is not easy…

Chicago second in nation, fifth in world for Starbucks

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Chicago is a world leader in Starbucks, even if it is sometimes insecure about its place on the world stage:

Chicago is home to 164 Starbucks, ranking the city second in the United State behind New York City–and fifth in the world, according to Starbucks store data compiled by Chris Meller.

There are 64 locations in an area bounded by DesPlaines, Oak Street, Congress Parkway and Navy Pier. That’s 40 percent of the city’s total…

At O’Hare International Airport alone, there are 17 Starbucks locations, including spots in baggage claims, terminal concourses, food courts and near gates.

The South Side has only nine stores south of 33rd Street. There are no Starbucks on the West Side–at least none west of Ashland.

The common factors behind the Chicago locations seem to be the wealth and number of tourists in different locations. In other words, Starbucks tends to locate where there are more people with more money to spend on coffee. This may be a little different than the vision the store promotes for serving as a “third place” – these third places are for certain kinds of neighborhoods.

Presenting big data about Chicago

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The Chicago Architecture Foundation has a new exhibit highlighting the use of big data in Chicago:

Architects, planners, engineers and citizens, it contends, are increasingly using massive amounts of data to analyze urban issues and shape innovative designs…

But data, the show argues, is useful as well as ubiquitous. We see some classically gritty Chicago stuff to back this up, though it’s not quite powerful or precise enough to be fully persuasive…

More convincing are the show’s examples of “digital visualization,” which is geekspeak for using digital technology to present and analyze urban planning data.

Take a monumental, crowd-pleasing map of Chicago, 15 feet high and 30 feet wide, which presents the footprints of thousands of buildings, even individual houses, and color-codes them by the era in which they were built. We see the impact of the city’s three great building booms, from Chicago’s earliest days to 1899, from 1900 to 1945, and from 1946 to 1979. The recent surges that filled downtown with new skyscrapers look puny by comparison.

Also worth seeing: Video monitors which display data for Divvy, the city’s bike-sharing program. They offer neat tidbits: Divvy’s most popular station, for example, is at Millennium Park.

Sounds interesting. Big cities are complex social entities who could benefit from large-scale and real-time data collection and analysis. Of course, as Kamin notes at the end, there still is a human side to cities that cannot be ignored but getting a handle through data on what is happening could go a long way.

Another dimension to this is how to best present big data. While the online presentation of maps has grown popular, how can this be done best in person? I look forward to seeing this exhibit in person as I already like what the Chicago Architecture Foundation has done with this space. Here is part of the gallery a few years ago:

CAFChicagoAug11This is a great free place to learn more about Chicago and then choose among the cool offerings in the gift shop or sign up for one of the architecture tours that cover all different aspects of Chicago.

Chicago area homebuilders, buyers expanding into cheaper Indiana

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Some homebuilders and homebuyers are seeking out locations in northwest Indiana that are still within the Chicago region but offer lower costs:

Casting aside long commutes, higher home prices and often mind-boggling property taxes, some Illinois residents are branding themselves as Hoosiers, and more Chicago-area builders are thinking of expanding into Lake County, Ind., to capture that business. Their arrival will change a housing market dominated by local companies for generations and prompt municipalities to act to make sure the growth comes on their own terms.

Three years ago, the region caught the attention of D.R. Horton, the nation’s largest homebuilder by revenue, and it began buying lots in established subdivisions and building homes. Finding success, the Fort Worth, Texas-based company this spring is seeking the zoning necessary for it to move forward with a deal to acquire about 90 acres of former farmland on the east side of Interstate 65 in Crown Point for a 200-home subdivision…

Between 2007 and 2011, a net total of more than 5,600 people relocated from Cook County to Lake County, Ind., according to census figures. More than 55,000 residents of the northwest Indiana county worked in Cook County in 2012, according to state figures obtained by Metrostudy, a housing consulting firm.

Commuting may become easier in years to come. Last week, Illinois and Indiana signed an agreement regarding the development of a 47-mile toll road, the Illiana Expressway, that would connect I-65 near Lowell, Ind., to Interstate 55 near Wilmington.

A few quick thoughts:

1. As the article notes, this might require Illinois residents to rethink their stereotypes of Hoosiers. I enjoyed living in the South Bend area during graduate school but I do remember being struck by the number of people who drove pickup trucks and smoked when I first moved there.

2. There are certain areas of the Chicago region that still have plenty of room for growth: northwest Indiana as well as south and southwest of Chicago in Illinois (roughly between Plainfield and Chicago Heights).

3. This article focuses on areas further in Indiana like Crown Point. According to Google Maps, driving from Crown Point to State and Madison in Chicago is just over 47 miles. That is quite a trip.

4. How much does the presence of Gary affect the willingness of people to move to northwest Indiana? Despite efforts to revive Gary, it still has a negative reputation. Imagine Gary and the surrounding area were nicer suburbs – how many people might want to live that close to Chicago as well as be near the shores of Lake Michigan? Instead, there is a community known for industry, depopulation, and a poor quality of life.

The difficulties in addressing poverty in the Atlanta suburbs

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Here is a look at how poverty is being addressed in the Atlanta suburbs:

This is not an indictment of Cobb County in particular. Rather, what’s happening in Cobb is a microcosm of the dilemma facing suburbs nationwide: a rapid spike in the number of poor people in what once were the sprawling beacons of American prosperity. Think of it as the flip side of the national urban boom: The poverty rate across all U.S. suburbs doubled in the first decade of the millennium—even as America’s cities are transforming in the other direction, toward rising affluence and hipster reinvention. If the old story of poverty in America was crumbling inner cities and drug-addled housing projects, the new story is increasingly one of downscale strip malls and long bus rides in search of ever-scarcer jobs. We can’t understand what’s working in America’s cities unless we also look at what’s not working in the vast suburbs that surround them.

And there’s a lot about Atlanta’s suburbs that isn’t working. Suburban poverty exploded here between 2000 and 2011, rising by 159 percent. Now, 88 percent of the region’s poor people live in suburbs. On its face, there is nothing remarkable about that statistic; after all, metro Atlanta is huge (8,300 square-miles, about the size of Massachusetts), and its population keeps rising (it’s now almost 6 million, equivalent to the population of Missouri). But fewer than 10 percent of us live in the city of Atlanta itself. So it would stand to reason that most poor people are suburbanites; most metro Atlantans are suburbanites, period…

For suburban Atlanta, as in suburbia nationwide, this shift presents some vexing problems. Designed around a car-centric culture of single-family homes clustered in cul-de-sacs served by strip centers and shopping malls, and fueled by jobs reached by commuting to downtown or suburban office parks, suburbs like Cobb County have struggled to respond to denser populations, increased congestion and, as a result of the 2008 recession, a decline in the middle-class jobs that made it all possible. Suburban Atlanta voters, including in Cobb County, have consistently rejected mass transit that might relieve their car dependency. And county zoning ordinances have continued to favor single-family housing over denser development, exacerbating the problem for the poor who are clustered there in ever greater numbers…

Here’s the most complicated problem with poverty in the suburbs: It’s almost invisible. There are 86,000 people in Cobb County who live below the poverty level. But you could live in Cobb your whole life and never see them, or at least not knowingly. Cobb County covers 339 square miles and is home to 717,000 people. Its poor residents can be lost in the crowd—and lost in all that space.

An interesting look at the myriad problems that makes addressing suburban poverty harder: lack of transportation options besides cars, limited social services that tend to be spread out, race and class differences that get reified through political and economic decisions, and limited recognition of suburban poverty.

Just a note: we need more sociological research on suburban poverty and suburban patterns in Sunbelt metropolitan regions that may be less segregated than Northern cities but are also more sprawling.