Category Archives: Places

Inequality reproduced in new NYC bike sharing program?

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An early report from the new bike sharing program in New York City suggests it might be reproducing existing inequalities:

And yet this was hardly the most dispiriting aspect of the whole adventure. The line for helmets was very long, and yet few of the people I spoke to were actually residents of the Rutgers Houses or any of the neighboring public housing. I did, however, meet a svelte Argentine woman in running clothes who had come from the Upper East Side. There were also two young women who taught at Bard High School Early College and lived in brownstone Brooklyn, and a woman named Barbara Becker in the company of two sons who, she said when I inquired, attend Friends Seminary in Manhattan, where annual tuition is roughly 296 times the price of an expensive bike helmet (and 1,850 times the price of a helmet you can buy at Han’s Market, a convenience store next to the Clark Street kiosk that has quickly expanded its business from milk, soda and frozen foods to biking gear).

Raulo Jeffers did live in the Rutgers Houses, as he has for 38 years. He was waiting to get a helmet for a bike he already owned. The price of annual membership to Citi Bike is $95, but the city was giving a $35 discount to residents of public housing and other low-income New Yorkers. Even with the reduction, the price was too high, he believed. “People here don’t have a lot of money,” he said. Although more than 400,000 people live in the city’s public housing, only 200 people have signed up for the discounted membership, out of a total enrollment of more than 33,000, according to the Transportation Department. A spokesman for the department said that some public housing residents may have joined at the full price.

Another man in line, Alejandro Brown, a student from the South Bronx, said he was dismayed that the bike share program had not made it “above what I call the 96th Street border.”

It is still early in the program so these issues may still be ironed out. But, should we be too surprised when those who already have more social and economic capital are more in position to take advantage of a new program that also plays into middle- and upper-class sensibilities such as being green and getting exercise? For all of the talk of bike sharing in European cities, I haven’t seen much comment about how it interacts there with social inequalities. Perhaps this is a bigger issue all around…

Trying to craft a singular business message in a multicultural Chicago neighborhood

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The Argyle section of Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood has residents from many different countries but wants to craft a coherent message to attract businesses:

Now, the two men and their neighbors have embraced a city-sponsored plan to promote the area with a broader name: Asia on Argyle.

“It really gives us a chance to showcase Argyle Street … and bring people to a very unique cultural destination within the city,” said Ald. Harry Osterman, whose 48th Ward represents the neighborhood.

The campaign is the city’s latest effort to brand neighborhoods beyond the downtown business district as commercial destinations for tourists and Chicagoans. The effort includes sprucing up Argyle’s appearance and opening a night farmers market that eventually would include Asian businesses.

Such branding strategies have worked for some neighborhoods like Greektown, Andersonville and Boystown. But others have spawned clashes as people of different cultural backgrounds disagree about how the neighborhood should be promoted. What’s more, if a neighborhood becomes too popular, gentrification can dislodge immigrant settlers…

Argyle’s greatest asset, its diversity, has also presented some of its biggest challenges. Chinese immigrants were among the first newcomers to try to brand the neighborhood.

There are several things going on here:

1. The neighborhood may look to outsiders to have Asian residents but this is a broad category that comprises a number of different cultures and backgrounds. For example, immigrants from certain countries have different levels of education and income as well as unique social and religious practices.

2. Creating a singular pro-business approach is not just about internal coherence within a neighborhood but also appealing to a wider audience in Chicago and the region. It would be fascinating to get down to some numbers and see how many people might visit such a neighborhood and how it stacks up to other ethnically and socially known neighborhoods profiled in this article like Pilsen, Chinatown, and Boystown. Do you need a slogan? A logo? How unique does the neighborhood have to be?

3. One academic quoted in this story notes that we should ask who will benefit from new economic development and business in Argyle. The city of Chicago? Local residents? Real estate moguls? There are development and businesses choices to be made that move more towards the people of the neighborhood. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a zero-sum game where only one party can come out ahead but it is easy in such situations for people with power and investments to come out even better.

Better to expand Metra service to Oswego and Yorkville or use money to solve problems within the region?

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Discussion is growing about expanding Metra commuter rail service to Oswego and Yorkville but where the money will come from is an issue:

Metra board directors on Friday supported increasing a consulting contract by $439,631 for a total of $2.26 million to review the Yorkville option. The funding for the engineering study comes from a federal grant, earmarked in 2003 by former House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Yorkville.

The agency has been considering locating stations in Oswego but Yorkville is being added since it offers an optimal site for a yard to house trains. Montgomery is also in the mix as a new station.

But how to pay for operating the expansion and related construction — since most of the route is outside the six-county region that Metra serves — is an unknown. A sales tax in Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry and Will counties subsidizes part of the costs of running Metra, but it isn’t levied in Kendall County…

Oswego Village Administrator Steve Jones said the Metra station was “extremely important. Up until the housing crash, Oswego and the immediate area was one of the fastest-growing areas in the country. As residents move to the area, they have some expectations for transportation for employment and cultural matters … just being linked to the city.”

Since Oswego and Yorkville have been growing, this makes some sense. Yet, I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to find money, grants and otherwise, to expand train service within the six county region. As currently constituted, Metra service is based on a hub and spokes model where riders have to go into the city before heading back out. Why not find money to develop belt lines where riders can move between job centers, particularly places like Naperville, Schaumburg, and Hoffman Estates as well as O’Hare Airport? Indeed, there are already plans for such a line that involve expanding an existing beltway rail line. Read more here about the STAR Line.

More broadly, this is a question of whether officials should encourage continued expansion of metropolitan areas through the construction of new infrastructure or help deal with the existing issues of metropolitan regions. People may choose to move to places like Oswego or Yorkville but officials don’t necessarily have to find the money to support it.

Wrigley Field and the suburbanization of sports stadiums

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Cheryl Kent looks at the proposed plans for renovating Wrigley Field and concludes it makes the ballpark less urban:

The trouble is the Cubs are also pitching a plan for a kind of baseball theme park that pretends to authenticity while proposing to damage the integrity of the real deal: Wrigley Field. The Cubs want Ye Olde Baseball Mall, except with a Jumbotron and a rival entryway to the stadium…

The proposal is modeled after the “festival marketplace” approach launched in Boston with the renovation of historic Faneuil Hall as Faneuil Hall Marketplace by Benjamin Thompson in 1976. In a series of legendary projects, including work on Navy Pier in the mid-’90s, Thompson enticed people to visit the cities by promising safe, orchestrated experiences, with an emphasis on charm over authenticity and spontaneity.

In time, and as cities regained cachet, the marketplace approach came to represent a suburban take on cities that downplayed genuine urban diversity and vitality while assuming a defensive, apologetic crouch when it came to design.

Thompson was brilliant and a visionary, producing work more nuanced than subsequent formulaic applications reflect. But his work was driven by a condition that has disappeared — white flight to the suburbs. The planned renovation of Navy Pier, intended in large part to downplay its carnival aspects, is evidence the formula is outdated.

In other words, the proposed plans are a Disneyfied version of Wrigley Field and truly urban areas. It might look urban but it is a theme park version meant to encourage consumerism. This reminds me of sociologist Mark Gottdiener’s book The Theming of America as well as the work of other urban sociologists about public spaces. Genuine public spaces, like the ones Elijah Anderson talks about in The Cosmopolitan Canopy, allow all people the opportunity to enjoy and interact. In this proposed Wrigley Field, it is all about the Cubs and expanding their revenue base.

Kent doesn’t say as much about how the Cubs might renovate Wrigley Field to better fit with the city. The biggest problem here seems to be that the Cubs are likely to insist their changes are necessary because they will cover the costs of the renovation as well as make them money. Sports team owners don’t exactly have a good record of truly caring whether their teams and properties fit with the city.

Smart Midwesterners flock to Chicago?

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An excerpt from a new book about the Rust Belt looks at why Chicago attracts so many educated Midwesterners:

The North Side of Chicago is such a refuge for young economic migrants from my home state that its nickname is “Michago.” In 2000, a quarter of Michigan State University graduates left the state. By 2010, half were leaving, and the city with the most recent graduates was not East Lansing or Detroit but Chicago. Michigan’s universities once educated auto executives, engineers, and governors. Now their main purpose is giving Michigan’s brightest young people the credentials they need to get the hell out of the state.

In the 2000s, Michigan dropped from 30th to 35th in percentage of college graduates. Chicago is the drain into which the brains of the Middle West disappear. Moving there is not even an aspiration for ambitious Michiganders. It’s the accepted endpoint of one’s educational progression: grade school, middle school, high school, college, Chicago. Once, in a Lansing bookstore, I heard a clerk say with a sigh, “We’re all going to end up in Chicago.” An Iowa governor once traveled to Chicago just to beg his state’s young people to come home…

As Chicago transformed itself from a city of factories to a global financial nexus, its class structure was transformed in exactly the way globalization’s enemies had predicted. “Many Chicagoans live better than ever, in safe housing in vibrant neighborhoods, surrounded by art and restaurants, with good public transport whisking them to exciting jobs in a dazzling city center that teems with visitors and workers from around the world,” wrote Richard C. Longworth in Caught in the Middle, his 2008 book on the modern Midwest. “And many Chicagoans live worse than ever.

I look forward to reading the more complete argument. This excerpt suggests the changes that have made certain Chicago locations so attractive, places like the Loop, Lincoln Park, Wicker Park, Bucktown, etc., come at a cost as other areas of Chicago have seen little improvement.

This also seems related to the ideas of Richard Florida and the creative class. Florida tends to rank all US cities on his creative scale indexes. Could there be regional creative class cities? Chicago isn’t at the top of Florida’s rankings but it might attract a sizable number of the Midwest creative class. A city doesn’t necessarily have to attract the creative class from throughout the United States to experience some of their influence.

It would be helpful to see data on this. Who exactly is moving to Chicago? For example, looking at a place like Michigan, where do college graduates and other young adults go if they leave the state? Or, looking at the Chicago area itself, do they tend to stay in the metropolitan area at similar rates to other major cities like New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas, Philadelphia, and others (and there could be very different patterns going on in each of these major cities)?

Experts: cities like Chicago may lose population but they don’t shrink

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A group of experts at a recent conference suggest Chicago may have lost population but it is not shrinking:

Chicago’s population may have dropped 20 percent since 1950, but experts who gathered at the DePaul Center yesterday said the rise of developments on the city’s south and west sides are promising signs that the city isn’t “shrinking,” according to Medill Reports.

“Physically, cities don’t shrink,” said Brian Bernardoni, director of government affairs for the Chicago Association of Realtors. “What does shrink is productivity, jobs and job opportunity, tax bases and population.” The Chicago Association of Realtors’ seminar that looked at the concept of “shrinking cities” (places with sustained population loss and spiking levels of blight and abandoned properties) found recent developments like Oakwood Shores and Park Boulevard, and potential future megaprojects such as plans to convert the old South Works steel mill site to a mixed-use city within a city or McPier’s McCormick-area arena and hotel proposal, may protect us from the unflattering moniker.

According to Medill’s recap, “of all North American cities with a million people, Chicago recorded the greatest population loss in the last census,” but the city officials, urban planners, and developers at the event – including Ald. Ameya Pawar (47th); Scott Freres of The Lakota Group; Joe Williams of Granite Companies, Myer Blank of True Partners Consulting; and DePaul professor Joe Schwieterman – seem to hold a hardy optimism.

This may be parsing words. In a popular sense, cities that lose population do not look good. For example, Rust Belt cities that have lost population, including Chicago, are seen as having major problems. On the flip side, cities that gain population, like Sunbelt cities in recent years, are seen as successful and making progress. In a more technical sense, these experts are probably right: it takes a long time for the physical footprint of a city to significantly decrease. This is an issue Detroit is facing right now. The population has dropped significantly but what is to be done with vacant houses and land? And what happens if development blooms at one spot in a city, like at the old South Works steel mill site, while other parts of the city really languish?

There are important long-term issues to consider. Chicago still faces an uphill battle in terms of fighting the trends of recent decades and it will take quite a bit of money and work to pull off these new projects. In cities growing at faster rates, growth does not necessarily lead to good outcomes even if it is often viewed as a good sign.

Chicago suburb to raise revenue by selling guns

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St. Charles, Illinois has one solution for communities looking to raise revenues: sell confiscated and used guns back to the public.

But while some Chicago-area communities host buybacks where weapons are turned in and destroyed, one suburban police department is poised to sell about 20 firearms to two licensed dealers, including some guns seized from criminals.

“There’s value in these guns,” said police Chief James Lamkin of west suburban St. Charles. “They’re not illegal guns. Quite honestly, it’s a bottom line for us.”

Though Arizona has just enacted a controversial state law requiring local departments to sell firearms that are surrendered or go unclaimed, the practice appears to be unusual in the Chicago area. The Chicago Police Department and several suburban law-enforcement agencies, as well as Illinois State Police, say they destroy weapons after they’re turned in or no longer needed as evidence…

The choice for a public agency to sell or destroy seized weapons underscores the push in many suburbs to find new ways to generate revenue without raising taxes. The issue also places St. Charles in an unusual position among law enforcement agencies at a time when the gun control debate has been re-energized by the Sandy Hook school shooting and, in Illinois, by the current effort to enact a concealed carry law before a court-imposed June deadline.

My guess is that the negative publicity from a story like this – having a fairly well-off suburb make the front page of the Chicago Tribune for selling guns – outweighs the revenue that may come from selling 20 guns. This is the sort of negative attention that suburbs try to avoid. Yet, this is what happens when many American communities are desperate to find revenues. It would be interesting to see what St. Charles residents think of this. Does this story that could make their community look bad overpower the efforts the local government is making to avoid raising taxes?

Former downtown Wheaton Jewel store demolished, makes way for medical building

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The closing of the Jewel in downtown Wheaton in 2008 upset a number of residents but the building is being demolished and making way for a new medical building:

Bulldozers have arrived at the former Jewel Osco site in downtown Wheaton, demolishing the building that has been vacant for several years.

It’ll make way for a new DuPage Medical Group building, which is expected to bring in new jobs and more activity into the city’s downtown…

Just south of the site, construction of a new Mariano’s grocery store is ongoing, along with an apartment complex called Wheaton 121 being built a few blocks north. Both are slated to open in the fall.

The DuPage Medical Group building, which will be three stories and span 40,035 square feet at Main Street and Willow Avenue, is expected to be done by April, said Dennis Fine, Chief Operating Officer. The project will relocate 45 employees and 12 physicians from their current location at N. Main Street and W. Cole Avenue.

Fine expects to add at least 15 jobs and three to five more physicians to accommodate the services being added at the new location.

The city has been looking for years for a way to utilize this site and help the part of downtown south of the railroad tracks. It doesn’t sound like this new building will be a huge source of jobs but it does reinforce the image that downtown Wheaton is a place to be. Medical offices fit the image downtown Wheaton is looking for: more upscale residences, offices, and business establishments. Plus, the new grocery store will provide a more upscale business so the downtown will have gained a better grocery store plus this new medical office. I would guess that a lot of downtowns in the Chicago area would be happy if a medical facility redeveloped a vacant retail site.

However, this does lead to a newly vacant building on the north side of Wheaton in a more commercialized corridor. What might go at this site at Main and Cole?

Poor Chicago neighborhoods have fewer businesses compared to the average American poor neighborhood

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Chicago’s poor neighborhoods aren’t just lacking businesses. These Chicago neighborhoods have significantly lower numbers of businesses compared to poor neighborhoods in other American cities.

Translated: that means Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods are tremendously business-poor, even compared to other cities’ poorest neighborhoods. As the author, Marco Luis Small, puts it: “In some cases, the difference is stark. Chicago has 82% fewer small restaurants, 95% fewer small banks, and 72% fewer small convenience stores than a black poor ghetto in the average city…. The average black poor neighborhood in the U.S. does not look at all like the South Side of Chicago.”

The effects go beyond mere economic loss. In Heat Wave, Eric Klinenberg notes the differences between North and South Lawndale and their effects on the death rate during the 1995 heat wave:

“In North Lawndale, the dangerous ecology of abandoned buildings, open spaces, commercial depletion, violent crime, degraded infrastructure, low population density, and family dispersion undermines the viability of public life and the strength of local support systems,” he writes. “In Little Village, though, the busy streets, heavy commercial activity, residential concentration, and relatively low crime promote social contact, collective life, and public engagement in general and provide particular benefits for the elderly, who are more likely to leave home when they are drawn out by nearby amenities.”…

What struck Small when he moved to Chicago was this absence of activity—compared to, say, Harlem, which is poor but tremendously vibrant: “What I first noticed, and what took me months to get used to, was the utter lack of density, the surprising preponderance of empty spaces, vacant lots, and desolate streets, even as late as 2006. Repeatedly, I asked myself, where is everyone?”

This is part of Chicago’s exceptionalism: gleaming downtown and struggling poor neighborhoods amidst residential segregation (as discussed by Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton in American Apartheid and others). One strange aspect of all of this is the lack of conversation within the Chicago area itself about these disparities. Plenty of people are willing to discuss murders and crime rates. But, while sociologists like Mario Luis Small, Sudhir Venkatesh, Robert Sampson, Eric Klinenberg, and others have provided clear data about the lack of economic opportunities (as well as other kinds of opportunities) in poor Chicago neighborhoods, this is rarely discussed in public.

American suburbs continue to grow

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A Bloomberg analysis of recently released Census data shows suburbs continue to grow:

After a five-year slump spurred by the collapse of the U.S. housing bubble, record gasoline prices and deepening poverty, the nation’s largest suburbs showed increasing signs of life in 2012. More than half of the 20 municipalities with the fastest-growing populations between 2010 and 2012 were suburbs, according to U.S. census data compiled by Bloomberg.

That means growing suburban communities will continue to get their share of the approximately $400 billion in funds the federal government annually spends based on population data provided by the Census Bureau. It also points to the durability of the suburban experiment, begun six decades ago on Long Island, New York, even after millions of home foreclosures, greater numbers of single-person households and delays by young adults in starting families.

“Suburbia has become so deeply embedded in the cultural DNA of our nation that it is nearly impossible for us to organize our life on the landscape otherwise,” James Howard Kunstler, author of “The Geography of Nowhere,” a 1994 history of suburbia, said in an e-mail. “We’re just too deep into it to change.”…

“In fast-growing regions, there are signs of suburban revival,” said William Frey, senior demographer at the Washington-based Brookings Institution. “Las Vegas is an example where the suburbs are leading the way back — though well below the heyday of the past.”…

John Logan, a Brown University sociologist, said suburbs remain attractive because “concerns about school quality and crime levels still affect cities more.”

This is an article with an interesting narrative. It begins with the idea that people who thought suburbs would decline were mistaken: they continue to grow. Then, it goes into the idea of the “suburban experiment.” I haven’t seen it quite phrased this way before and it suggests America’s suburbs are unique – and they generally are compared to most countries around the world. But, the term experiment also suggests it could still fail down the road as conditions change. Yet, the context of the article is that even after an economic crisis where gas became more expensive, Americans started driving less, and housing starts dropped quite a bit, the suburbs are still growing. James Howard Kunstler, a well-known critic of suburbs and featured in the film Radiant City, seems resigned to the idea that suburbs are the default in the United States. Does this suggest the social experiment is over? There are also some other odd bits thrown in including a short comparison to population changes in big cities, the idea that suburbs will also get federal funding, the number of poor residents in the suburbs is increasing, and higher rates of growth in the suburbs is linked to growth in the American economy as a whole.

In the end, I’m not sure about how people will respond to this article: the suburbs are growing despite critics and economic issues in the United States…and we should be happy? Disappointed? Intrigued by this great American experiment?