Category Archives: Places

Height battle between Willis Tower and One World Trade Center reveals each city’s insecurities

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One World Trade Center may have been officially declared the tallest building in the United States but one writer argues the debate is really about Chicago’s and New York City’s insecurities:

What this whole thing really measures isn’t the size of a pair of buildings—it’s the size of each city’s insecurity. New York has its hollow confidence, and Chicago has its inferiority complex. Each is painful, but both can be soothed by the balm of the biggest building. Helpful reminder: The reason that Western Hemisphere asterisk has to be applied to the Willis / World Trade debate is because, among the tallest buildings worldwide, these two barely make the top 10.

The tallest building thing is just a stand-in for the real question: Which is the better city? You’ll need a different kind of Council on Urban Habitat to really get to the bottom of that.

Which is the better city? New York City is consistently ranked as the #1 global city. New York has more glamor, more of the global financial industry, more people than other cities in the United States, and one of the most impressive concentrations of people, buildings, and wealth in Manhattan. Chicago has its place as the quintessential American city (from its explosive growth in the late 1800s, its place as a transportation hub, the birthplace of numerous financial industry and commodity trade inventions, and its contrasts of wealth and poverty) and architecture.

But, all places have imperfections. See an earlier post about Chicago’s insecurities. And, it also depends on which other cities are in the comparisons: New York City is commonly compared to the world’s greatest cities including London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Chicago, on the other hand, contends with two larger U.S. cities (including Los Angeles, a city that doesn’t seem to get caught up in these debates) and perhaps the next tier of global cities.

How exactly a building settles these concerns is beyond me. As the article notes, there are other buildings around the world – in some that rank lower on the scale of global cities, places like Dubai, Mecca, and Shenzhen – that are as tall or taller.

Should all suburban teeangers want to experience the big city?

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A Hollywood actor who grew up in Naperville argues suburban kids should want to explore the big city:

Right there on Wikipedia, Odenkirk said that he grew up “hating” Naperville because “it felt like a dead end, like Nowheresville. I couldn’t wait to move into a city and be around people who were doing exciting things.”

We contacted the co-star of the hit TV series “Breaking Bad” (he plays sleazy attorney Saul Goodman) and Alexander Payne’s critically acclaimed domestic drama “Nebraska,” opening Nov. 22, and asked for an explanation for this unabashed Naperville bashing.

“Well, you have to remember I was 16 years old when I was in Naperville,” said Odenkirk, 51. “I felt like I was offstage when I wanted to be onstage. I felt like I was watching from afar all the people who were movers and shakers, the people who were living exciting existences. That’s what I wanted to do.”…

“I didn’t want to be in the suburbs when I was 16 and 17 and 18,” Odenkirk continued. “I couldn’t wait to get out and go to Chicago or some other big city. New York intimidated me. Frankly, Chicago intimidated me, but I wanted to be there! Come on! Doesn’t every teenager feel that way?”…

“I would worry if my teenagers said they liked (the suburbs), that they didn’t want to experience the big city.”

One of the critiques of American suburbs involves their lack of opportunities for teenagers. This can take several forms. One issue is with urban design. In spaces designed around cars, if you can’t drive, you are in trouble. Similarly, if you live in isolated residential neighborhoods that are not close to important areas, like school or shops or parks or friends, teenagers can’t go very far. A second issue is with the suburban mindset that tends to focus attention on the local level. The complaint here is that teenagers aren’t exposed much to the wider world, to interactions with people much different from themselves.

Cities offer solutions to both issues: there is a variety of mass transit option in many big cities and walking or biking can actually get you to somewhere interesting. They also tend to contain more diverse populations and opportunities compared to suburbs. Yet, the perception is that cities are not as safe for children/teenagers and this might limit their ability to explore big cities.

All that said, compared to other suburbs, Naperville has the sort of factors that can help make suburbs more exciting for teenagers – a lively downtown with restaurants, stores, and the Riverwalk; good schools; plenty of recreational activities and learning opportunities (good libraries); a growing non-white population. So, if it doesn’t appeal to teenagers, what suburb does? (Note: Odenkirk was 16 in 1978 Naperville, a time when the community was growing but didn’t necessarily have all of the amenities it does today.)

Atlanta Braves bucking the baseball trend by moving to the suburbs

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While the new baseball stadiums of recent decades tend to be located in urban neighborhoods, the Atlanta Braves made an announcement that they are moving 15 miles outside of the city:

On Monday, team president John Schuerholz and two other executives told reporters that the franchise will build a new stadium in Cobb County, roughly 15 miles away from Turner Field, and begin playing there in 2017, after their current lease expires, with construction to start in mid-2014.

That’s a shock, in that the Braves have only been playing in Turner Field — which was built for the 1996 Summer Olympics — since 1997. Such a move will make it the first of the 24 major league ballparks to open since 1989 to be replaced, and buck the trend of teams returning to urban centers. The proposed park is in the suburbs and closer to the geographic center of the team’s ticket-buying fan base, a much higher percentage of which happens to be white. US Census figures from 2010 put Fulton County at 44.5 percent white and 44.1 percent black, while Cobb County is 62.2 percent white and 25.0 percent black…

So instead of sinking $350 million into fixes to modernize Turner, the Braves are spending $200 million for a new park, with much of that cost likely to be covered by the development of the surrounding area and the sale of naming rights. Notably, Turner is one of just eight venues that doesn’t have such a deal in place. According to a New York Times piece from July, the Atlanta Hawks get $12 million a year for the naming rights to their venue, currently known as Philips Arena. The largest baseball deal is that of the Mets for Citi Field ($21 million per year), though the dropoff from that figure to the second-largest, Houston’s Minute Maid Park ($7.4 million), is steep.

The new venue is at the intersection of Interstates 75 and 285, said to be a major traffic snarl, “the place so congested we Cobb Countians know to avoid if at all possible,” as the Journal-Constitution‘s Mark Bradley described it. The county has resisted the expansion of the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) into its domain since its inception in 1971, so it’s not served by light rail, and while the team claims “significantly increased access to the site” via Home of the Braves, it offers no specifics on the matter.

While this goes against ballpark trends, it also fits some other trends:

1. Suburban expansion in Sunbelt cities. Many of the new ballparks have been built in Northern cities, Rustbelt places where downtown development is needed. Think Camden Yards in Baltimore or Jacobs Field in Cleveland or PNC Park in Pittsburgh. In other words, Sunbelt cities have different settlement patterns including beltway highways around the city and not that dense of an urban core to begin. Turner Field wasn’t exactly in an urban neighborhood and other reports suggested it would have been quite difficult to expand parking and nearby amenities.

2. Matching ballparks with nearby development projects that can also bring in money. A baseball team can be profitable but developing nearby real estate can be even more profitable. For example, look at the deals suburbs tried to make with the Cubs earlier this year: you can have land and access to transportation and we would be more than happy to develop land around your ballpark. And the Cubs are trying to do this with Wrigley Field as well by developing nearby properties into a hotel to increase their revenue streams.

3. It sounds like Cobb County is giving the Braves a good deal by financing some of the project. This is a longer trend: companies, sports or otherwise, moving to where they can get a good tax deal. This has happened with urban ballparks – cities have financed parts of those stadiums because they can’t afford to let the team out of the city. In this particular case, it sounds like the Braves thought they got a better suburban deal whereas other cities have pushed harder to keep teams with incentives.

I suspect this is a more isolated case of ballpark construction in the suburbs.

Analyzing the SuperZips of the Washington D.C. region

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There are a lot of wealthy and educated people living in SuperZips around Washington D.C.:

Clarksville sits in one of the nation’s “Super Zips” — a term coined by American Enterprise Institute scholar and author Charles Murray to describe the country’s most prosperous, highly educated demographic clusters. On average, they have a median household income of $120,000, and 7 in 10 adults have college degrees…

A Washington Post analysis of the latest census data shows that more than a third of Zip codes in the D.C. metro area rank in the top 5 percent nationally for income and education. But what makes the region truly unusual is that so many of the high-end Zip codes are contiguous. They form a vast land mass that bounds across 717 square miles. It stretches 60 miles from its northern tip in Woodstock, Md., to the southern end in Fairfax Station, and runs 30 miles wide from Haymarket in Prince William County to the heart of the District up to Rock Creek Parkway.

One in four households in the region are in a Super Zip, according to the Post analysis. Since the 2000 Census on which Murray based his analysis, Washington’s Super Zips have grown to encompass 100,000 more residents. Only the New York City area has more Super Zips, but they are a much smaller share of the total of that region’s Zip codes and are more scattered…

Yet many who live in these rapidly evolving communities do not think of themselves as rich or elite. The cost of living, particularly for housing, eats up a large chunk of the two incomes it typically takes to afford a comfortable home in a good school district.

Interesting look at social class today in America; those on the upper end tend to argue they worked hard to get there, deserve what they have, and they aren’t really rich (though comparisons to much of the U.S., let alone most of the world, suggests otherwise). As the article goes on to note, a number of people are concerned about what the lack of interaction with others might mean down the road.

This is a story that has developed in recent years. For example, a number of people have noted that a large number of the wealthiest counties in the United States are in the Washington region. While conservatives tend to tie this wealth to the growth of big government (and the businesses associated with it), how come scholars haven’t looked at this more closely? There have been some studies of a few areas in the Washington metropolitan area, such as Prince George’s County and its large suburban black population or the growth of the edge city of Tysons Corner or responses to growing immigrant populations in Prince William County, but little look at the region as a whole. Perhaps this is a lingering artifact of American urban sociology’s emphasis on some “traditional big cities” like Chicago, New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia and not paying as much attention to newer big cities like Washington D.C., Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and others. Do we need something like a “Georgetown School” or “Brookings Institution School” of urban sociology?

Chicago good at attracting the creative class, not good at keeping them

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Recent data suggests Chicago attracts a good number of the creative class – young, college graduates – but they don’t stay in the city long-term:

And still the 20-somethings swarmed to the city. If you drew a circle with a 2-mile radius around Chicago’s City Hall, as the Census Bureau did, you’d find the population in that ring had grown by 48,288 residents — 36 percent — between 2000 and 2010, even as the overall population fell. Census researchers measured the growth within similar rings in other metro areas. Chicago outpaced them all…

Chicago demographer Rob Paral points out that the 25- to 34-year-olds counted from 2007 to 2011 are even better educated than those in 2000. The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey found 46 percent of the residents in that age bracket had a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 36 percent in 2000. Among America’s top 10 cities, Chicago recorded the highest percentage of young college grads and the largest increase since 2000…

Then what? This is a demographic with choices. If the city looks less appealing once the babies come along, many of them will leave. Big-city crime is sometimes the explanation, but in truth most of these young adults live in neighborhoods largely insulated from the violence of the South and West sides.

More often, the deal breaker is the public schools. Staying in Chicago can mean spending thousands on private tuition, or working the system to get the kids into one of the city’s selective-enrollment high schools. Suddenly it’s easy to see the attraction of smaller suburban districts, their tax collections enriched by higher property values…

How can the city hold on to those families? One way, it turns out, is to suffer a massive recession. Census data show that from July 2010 to July 2012, Chicago’s population inched up again — by about 19,000 residents — as out-migration slowed to a trickle. Meanwhile, two decades of double-digit exurban growth lurched to a near standstill.

Since having a recession isn’t a good long-term growth strategy, the city will have to try something else. Most American big cities would love to have more young college-educated adults, particularly those involved in industries like the technology sector or those willing to move into and improve less well-off neighborhoods. Yet, this article highlights a second issue: how exactly do all these cities then retain these adults as they age? One irony not noted in this article is that many American urban neighborhoods offer the ability to own a home, even a single-family home with a yard. But, getting over this idea that cities are not good for children is more difficult. Whether it is an issue of schools (and Chicago has some of the highest-performing schools in Illinois) or safety and crime or a perceived need to interact with kids like them, these will be tough to overcome. Additionally, fighting these perceptions might include creating and maintaining kid-friendly pockets in the city, but this leads to other issues such as very different experiences of urban residents (for example, compare the life chances of kids from Lincoln Park in Chicago versus those from Englewood) and this is still different than fleeing to an exclusive suburban community where the wealthier and more-educated don’t have to interact with anyone other than them.

I don’t remember Richard Florida, the main proponent of the creative class, talking much about this issue…

Bill de Blasio the first ever New York City mayor to send his kids to public schools?

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A look at how the new mayor of New York City identifies with the working class and forgotten elements of the city includes this interesting piece of information about where de Blasio’s kids go to school:

The Brooklyn resident says he would become the first mayor in the city’s history with children enrolled in public schools. “He knows our issues because he has children in the trenches with us,” said Freddie Sneed Jr., 55, a truck driver.

I know different parts of the political spectrum might interpret this information differently but it struck me as quite surprising. Not one mayor in NYC history would have their children attend public schools? Here is more on de Blasio’s claim as he used it on the campaign trail:

This week, at a televised debate between the 2013 Democratic mayoral candidates, the issue of parental school choices came up again. But this time the topic was brought up voluntarily, by Public Advocate and public-school parent Bill de Blasio.

De Blasio pointed out that if he wins, he will become the first mayor in the city’s history with children in public school.

It’s not a claim I could substantiate. I can say with certainly, however, that he would be the first mayor with a child in public school at the time he was mayor in at least 50 years…

None of the other leading candidates from either party who have children made the decision to send them to public school: Bill Thompson sent his daughter to private school and his step-children are in boarding school, while Republicans Joe Lhota and John Catsimatidis sent their children to private schools.

Read on for more history of NYC mayors and their choices of where their kids went to school. Did de Blasio’s claim make a difference in the election?

It’s hard to tell just how much it will matter when it comes time for people to vote, though, since there’s so little precedent for becoming mayor on the strength of being a public-school parent.

Since he won, I suspect more people will claim this choice mattered more.

The balloon-frame building invented in Chicago in 1833

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The building technique that helped give rise to mass-produced suburbia was invented in Chicago in 1833:

But traditional building methods required hand-hewn beams, hand-wrought mortise and tenon joints, lapped half dovetails, and something more crucial — labor-intensive construction at a time when labor was spread too thin.

Then in Chicago, Augustine Taylor got credit for creating balloon-frame construction, a hammer-and-nails forerunner to the light-frame construction that still dominates U.S. housing…

Experienced builders supposedly derided Taylor’s St. Mary’s Church in Fort Dearborn as “balloon-framed” because it looked like a stiff breeze would blow it away. But many accounts suggest the name came from a similar French Missouri type of construction called maison en boulin…

Chicago architect John M. Van Osdel attributed the invention to Chicago carpenter George W. Snow in 1832. The Chicago History Museum and other scholars point out that Virginia carpenters in the 17th century — facing similar pressures to build fast — employed similar techniques. But it wasn’t mass-produced like Chicago was prepared to do. Between 1866 and 1875, the Lyman Bridges Company of Chicago sold pre-fab balloon-frame structures to western settlers, one of several purveyors of so-called “sectionalized housing.”

This technique was perfectly suited for mass produced suburban housing in the post-World War II era as it could involve standardized parts, be constructed quickly, and be done cheaply. Builders like the Levitts could quickly construct the frame of a home (after a foundation was laid) and then have a series of other workers come through to complete the home. The majority of American homes rely on wood studs nailed together – not complicated but relatively sturdy.

It is interesting to see that this is the #5 innovation from Chicago’s history. Considering the work that went into some of the others (like #8 Reversing the Chicago River), the balloon-frame structure had an outsized impact on American life.

Focus less on how all of Manhattan’s 120,000 blocks can be walked and spend more time with the sociological findings

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A sociologist who has walked every block of Manhattan shares what he learned in a new book:

The result is his new book, The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City. The expansive sociological study relies on Helmreich’s on-the-ground research, culled from thousands of hours of observation and casual conversations with local residents, to help parse hot-button issues like immigration, assimilation, and gentrification. But more than that, the miles and miles clocked – he wore out nine pairs of shoes in his trek across the city – come through as a sort of extensive love letter to the frenetic energy and diversity of New York…

For non-New Yorkers, the time the book spends on the outer boroughs is a fairly obvious corrective for what Helmreich sees as the tourism-generated, Manhattan-centric view of New York. And for all its diversity – the book spends hundreds of pages on the immigrant communities of the city – New York comes off as an inextricably linked web of groups that constantly must interact, change, and adjust. “It’s almost as if you dropped a hundred towns in Nebraska into the middle of the city,” Helmreich says. But what sets New York apart, he adds, is that “there’s this duality to New York that you can be in these places, but you can also be in the city.” Even those who live in more isolated pockets, such as the waterfront community of Edgewater Park in the Bronx, have a sense of connectedness…

By necessity, given the size of the city, Helmreich calls his book no more than a much-needed “introductory work” to the diversity of New York City. His method is, in some ways, a throw back to a much earlier form of social criticism, when walking was curiously in vogue for the self-styled intellectuals and elites of 19th century Europe. Think of Charles Dickens’s night walks through London or the well-dressed flâneurs of Paris. And it’s one that anyone can learn from. “If I accomplish anything besides sociology,” Helmreich says, “it’s to encourage people to walk through what I call the greatest museum in the world.”

Interesting findings that could suggest how disparate communities within a larger community understand their place in the whole. Additionally, there is a lot of potential here to detail the New York that most of its residents know, not the big money Wall Street/hedge fund world or the celebrity/glamorous crowd.

However, this article goes more for the human interest angle than the actual findings of the book. While it may be interesting to detail how a single person was able to walk the whole city, it may not mean much if they weren’t very observant or didn’t find much of interest. Rather then calling this an “epic quest,” how about thinking through what this methodology leads to compared to traditional ethnographic work that calls for spending extended time with a more limited group of people? How does this compare with other studies of American streets, such as the work of Jane Jacobs looking at places like Greenwich Village and Rittenhouse Square (Philadelphia), Elijah Anderson examining street life in poor Philadelphia neighborhoods, or Mitchell Duneier analyzing how black street vendors utilize public sidewalk space in New York City? Even as New York City gets a lot of attention, this seems like a lost opportunity to highlight how a sociologist (versus a journalist or a reality TV show or an academic from another discipline) views the street-level operation of the world’s #1 global city.

Smokey the Bear is needed in urban areas like Chicago

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Smokey the Bear is present on billboards in Chicago – and he is needed. According to the Chicago Tribune several days ago:

Helene Cleveland, fire prevention program manager for the U.S. Forest Service, said wildfires are more common in the Chicago area than people think…

Tom Wilson, forest protection program manager for Illinois, said a study by the Chicago Wilderness organization noted more than 1,500 wildfires from January 2005 to March 2011 in the six-county Chicago area.

There are plenty of houses adjacent to forests and grassland areas that have potential to catch fire, Wilson said.

Such a message might seem out of place in Chicago but there are plenty of urban areas that are more visibly affected by wildfires more frequently: Los Angeles and other cities in the American Southwest or the fires currently outside of Sydney, Australia. Chicago might not see fires like this but there is still plenty of open land near the metropolitan area or within it as part of forest preserves and other entities.

These Smokey the Bear billboards are also a reminder of the relationship between cities and nature. The average Chicago street  might appear to have little nature beyond a few trees and a few small animals. Yet, cities can’t quite get away completely from nature, whether it is dealing with wildfires, water and flooding issues, responding to natural disasters, or the limited exposure children have to the natural world in books.

Can a pleasant suburb like Naperville have medical marijuana facilities?

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Naperville officials are looking into how to regulate future medical marijuana facilities in their community:

Naperville will begin considering zoning regulations for medical marijuana businesses Tuesday night as councilmen review staff recommendations to limit such facilities to industrial parks, set a distance requirement from residential areas and require all medical marijuana operations to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis instead of allowed outright.

The proposed zoning code updates, which also would prohibit medical marijuana cultivation centers or dispensing organizations from opening in downtown and general commercial areas, are set to be considered during a council meeting at 7 p.m. in the municipal center, 400 S. Eagle St…

Naperville’s possible zoning changes are in addition to state restrictions that say cultivation centers cannot be within 2,500 feet of the property line of a school, day care center or residential area, and only one can open in each of the 22 state police districts statewide…

He said keeping dispensaries out of downtown and allowing only one in each strip mall or collection of buildings under the same ownership will help prevent the new businesses from being too widespread…

“The dispensaries are more like a pharmacy and should be allowed in retail areas,” Chirico said. “Legal, prescribed medication shouldn’t be restricted to an industrial park.”

It will be interesting to watch how wealthier suburbs treat medical marijuana facilities which are legal but probably not very desirable in these communities. Are the dispensaries better or worse than tattoo parlors? (If I had to vote, I’d go with better.) The interest in putting a dispensary only in industrial areas certainly would help keep it out view and away from impressionable people.

But, I could imagine a scenario where a resident of such a community is able to effectively tell how they need the marijuana to relieve pain from a life threatening illness and they don’t want to be made to feel like a ne’er-do-well in their own suburb. Telling that story in the right setting might make the community leaders and residents look uncaring and callous.