Category Archives: Places

Seeing Houston as the quintessential American city of today

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A sociologist who has spent decades studying Houston argues that it illustrates the big changes in American society:

The essential thing to know is that Houston is at the forefront of America’s demographic revolution. Through most of its history, Houston was a biracial Southern city dominated by white men, who were riding the oil boom to continued prosperity until 1982.

After that year’s economic collapse, Harris County’s Anglo population stopped growing and then declined. All the growth over the last 30 years has been due to the influx of Latinos, Asians and African-Americans.

Houston has now become America’s most ethnically diverse metropolitan region. It is even more diverse than New York, coming closer than any large metropolitan area to having an equal division among Anglos, blacks, Latinos and Asians…

The first lesson is all of the United States will look like Houston and Texas in about 25 years.

So this is where the American future will be worked out. How we navigate that transition will be important not only for the future of Houston and Texas but for the American future.

Even as the shift in American population has been to Sunbelt metropolitan regions in recent decades, cities like Houston don’t seem to get attention proportionate to their size. On one hand, they don’t have the history of global influence as New York, LA, and Chicago. They are not viewed as cultural or media centers. On the other hand, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Austin, Miami, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and others may better represent where America is headed. There are a lot of opportunities for sociologists to study such cities as they continue to grow, attract immigrants, and face new challenges.

Countering blanket statements about cities and suburbs

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A Dallas columnist argues typical views of the city and suburbs are outdated:

Yet we seem to cling stubbornly to outdated city-vs.-suburb cliches and mutual suspicions that serve no purpose other than to make people think ill of one another.

On one side are quasi-racist Dallas baiters for whom “urban” is thinly veiled doublespeak for poor, minority, crime-plagued neighborhoods where government is unfailingly corrupt and public schools actually make kids stupider. It’s a segregationist stereotype that by now should be eroded by three decades worth of urban revitalization, crime reduction and development of spectacular public spaces.

On the other are sanctimonious hipsters who use “suburban” as an insult that describes selfish, conformist commuters who drive everywhere in super-sized SUVs, spend their leisure time at the mall, vote like the people next door and think “art” is a Thomas Kinkade print. It’s a myopic definition that hasn’t budged since Richard Yates wrote Revolutionary Road in 1961.

The truth is that the places we live are as individual as we are, and we choose them based on our individual priorities — entertainment, safety, good schools, friendly neighbors, what we can afford, what we want to see when we look out the window.

I agree with one conclusion but not the other. First, individual communities, whether they are urban neighborhoods with a sense of place or far-flung suburbs, are unique and have different characters. This is particularly true for a number of the people who live there and buy, in terms of housing but also symbolically and culturally, into the place. Both cities and suburbs are assumed to be all alike and this is simply not the case. There are distinguishing differences between these different types, such as population density, the number of nearby jobs and business, the kinds of housing, the history, etc. but it is silly to lump them all together.

On the second conclusion, it isn’t quite as simple as suggesting people make individual choices. This may feel like it is the case, particularly for those with means (money, status), but even those people are constrained by the lifestyles they desire. But, people with less means have fewer choices and then are restricted by cheaper housing options or what is close to jobs. In other words, residential choices tend to fall into patterns based on class and race, whether in the cities or suburbs.

Kotkin: “The Triumph of Suburbia”

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Joel Kotkin argues the suburbs have clearly won in the United States:

But the simple fact remains that the single-family home has remained the American dream, with sales outpacing those of condominiums  and co-ops despite the downturn.

Florida has suggested that simply stating the numbers makes me a sprawl lover. While he and other urban nostalgists see the city only in its dense urban core, and the city’s role as intimately tied with the amenities that are supposed to attract the relatively wealthy members of the so-called “creative class,” I see the urban form as ever changing, and consider a city’s primary mission not aesthetic or simply economic but to serve the interests and aspirations of all of its residents.

Clearly the data supports a long-term preference for suburbs. Even as some core cities rebounded from the nadir of the 1970s, the suburban share of overall share of growth in America’s 51 major metropolitan areas (those with populations  of at least one million) has accelerated—rising from 85 percent in the ’90s to 91 percent in the ’00s. There’s more than a tinge of elitism animating the urban theorists who think that urban destiny rides mostly with the remaining nine percent matters. Overall, over 70 percent of residents in the major metropolitan areas now live in suburbs…

While they’ve weaved a compelling narrative, the numbers make it clear that the retro-urbanists only chance of prevailing is a disaster, say if the dynamics associated with the Great Recession—a rise in renting, declining home ownership and plunging birthrates—become our new, ongoing normal. Left to their own devices, Americans will continue to make the “wrong” choices about how to live.

Kotkin has been saying this for a quite a while now. On one hand, he appears to be correct: a good number of Americans like suburbs. On the other hand, others would argue there is much more going on than just individual preferences. Perhaps the whole system, from funding for highways versus mass transit, government programs intended to help people purchase homes, to a culture that idealizes autonomy and driving, is rigged in favor of the suburbs. And if this system is rigged, then people aren’t exactly making completely unconstrained choices.

The key here is that one doesn’t have to argue Kotkin’s individual choice argument is necessarily or completely wrong just because the system may be set up in a certain way. Yet, urban sociologists would tend to put the emphasis on the second explanation, that there are a number of larger social forces that promote the suburbs and have helped convince many Americans that the suburbs are the place they want to be.

Book review revives battle between Chicago and New York City

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A recent piece in the The New York Times Book Review reignited the debate between Chicago and New York:

Rachel Shteir, writing in the New York Times Book Review, took aim this week at both the city of Chicago and the people who defend and promote it. “Boosterism has been perfected here because the reality is too painful to look at,” Shteir postulates, while reviewing (mostly unfavorably) a handful of new books about the city for Sunday’s cover.

Fortunately, we don’t have to wait for the angry letters to be printed in the next Book Review. The counter-manifestos are already here! In the past few days, it seems, everyone from Gary to Milwaukee has read Shteir’s “Chicago Manuals” piece, resulting in a groundswell of angry rebuttals. (Even New York City reached out: New York deputy mayor Howard Wolfson tweeted that he was “mystified by the offensive, mean spirited & inaccurate attack on Chicago… a great city deserves better.”)…

But, Shteir digresses, she has a bone to pick with Chicago that’s bigger than any book review. She singles out Chicago’s early 20th century optimism, which nearly every Northern and Midwestern city shared (Burnham and co. also made grandiose predictions for New Haven, among other cities), and also its destructive urbanism of the mid-century, which, again, was hardly particular to the Windy City. She groups some real issues—last year’s shameful murder rate—with some not-so-serious problems, like the continual failures of the Cubs. She implies that Chicago is going the way of Detroit, when in fact the city’s population has been more or less stable for the past 20 years. Her praise, and there is some, seems deliberately facetious: “Thanks to global warming, the winters have softened.”

But her central beef with Chicago is how resolutely proud everyone seems to be of the city, despite its issues. It’s the opposite of New York, where everyone complains about everything all the time. In Chicago, per Shteir, the city’s unshakeable sense of greatness is wildly incongruous with its problems, a willful blindness that has become something of a civic calling card.

This sounds like a battle of urban “personalities”: a more critical viewpoint of New Yorkers versus a more optimistic Midwestern view in Chicago. Both cities have very real problems to face even as they are both major global cities.

But, it is not surprising to see this battle flare up again. Chicago is somewhat skittish about its position vis a vis other major cities, Chicago already lost its status as “Second City” to Los Angeles, and recently fell behind the population of Toronto, and New York is the clear lead city in the United States (if not the world). These “personalities” may be affected by these relative statuses: New Yorkers can afford to be critical because they are already at the top while Chicago is competing with other cities and has a long history of boosterism (including its early booster efforts in the late 1800s that were aided by some transplanted New Yorkers).

Rahm Emanuel fires back at Texas Governor Rick Perry

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Texas Governor Rick Perry tried to entice Illinois businesses to Texas with recent radio spots but Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel fired back yesterday:

Emanuel made pointed reference to a campaign gaffe Perry committed while running for president. At a Republican debate late in 2011, Perry said he had plans to eliminate three federal departments, but could remember only two.

Asked about Perry’s visit at a Monday news conference, Emanuel used the opportunity to tout Chicago’s infrastructure improvements and wealth of well-educated residents thanks to its universities, both of which he said were lacking in Texas.

He pointed to the 14 major businesses that have moved their headquarters to Chicago during his administration, and also drew attention to Texas’ drought.

“In the City of Chicago, we don’t have to measure our showers like they do in Texas,” said Emanuel, a Democrat who served as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff…

After a similar effort earlier this year in California, that state’s governor, Jerry Brown, called Perry’s $26,000 ad buy there “not a burp…it’s barely a fart.”

“If they want to get in the game, let them spend $25 million on radio and television,” said Brown, according to the Sacramento Bee.  “Then I’ll take them seriously.”

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn lashed back at Perry last week, telling reporters “We don’t need any advice from Gov. Perry.”

If Perry’s main goal was to draw the fire of Democratic leaders, he seems to have succeeded. I’ve seen some experts suggest ads like those Perry was in do little to attract businesses. At the same time, they might help insert Texas into conversations in a way that often don’t happen in the Chicago area.

It is interesting to note Emanuel’s defense: Chicago has well-educated residents and well-regarded colleges (the University of Chicago and Northwestern are a pretty good pair), has plenty of corporate headquarters, has spent on infrastructure, and don’t have droughts (but apparently does have flooding). Is this the best case for Chicago? I could imagine adding Chicago’s standing as a global city, transportation advantages, central location in the United States, continued leadership in commodity trading, beautiful parks along Lake Michigan, tourism, and well-developed metropolitan region.

By the way, it is fair to compare a state to a city or region? Sure, Chicago may be the center of Illinois life but there still is the rest of the state that may take exception (and vote with Perry to boot).

Chicago’s explosive 19th century growth driven by excrement

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Whet Moser argues Chicago’s remarkable growth from frontier town to big city was the result of excrement and new sewers:

The city was literally shaped by excrement. Its biggest single period of growth, the growth that turned Chicago into the Second City by population, came in the late 1800s, when the city’s sewer and sanitary systems were the envy of what were then suburbs. Lake View Township (the whole of the northeast side from North Avenue up to Rogers Park), Hyde Park Township (the south side between Pershing, State, and 138th), Lake Township (the southwest side bordered by Pershing, State, 87th, and Cicero) all latched on to the city when sophisticated sanitary systems were beyond the reach of booming townships, which were tightly restricted by the state’s limits on local debt.

Read on for more of the story of Chicago’s sewers.

This story in Chicago was not wholly unique. The late mid- to late-1800s were a period when numerous suburban communities outside big cities like Chicago, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were annexed into the city. This annexation was approved by suburban communities for several reasons. First, as Moser notes, sewers and other infrastructure improvements like water and electricity were too expensive for small communities. Second, these communities wanted to be part of the big city and the status that came with that.

Yet, the story changes quite a bit from the 1880s onward when suburban communities started rejecting annexation efforts from big cities. The price of the infrastructure improvements dropped, putting them within reach of smaller suburbs. Cities were growing so fast that they couldn’t keep up with social problems as well as infrastructure improvements, limiting the status appeal of being part of the big city. Finally, an idealism was developing among the suburbs themselves as places people wanted to move to in order to escape the big city. By the 1920s, annexations had basically stopped.

This was a major turning point for most Northeast and Midwest big cities. Once annexations stopped and suburbs decided to go on their own, the boundaries of big cities became fixed. Later, as wealth and jobs fled the city for the suburbs, there were few opportunities for Rust Belt cities to expand their boundaries. In contrast, cities in the South and West (the Sunbelt) have had different annexation histories and many are much bigger in land area.

Texas Governor Rick Perry advertising for Illinois businesses to move to Texas

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There is a new radio spot running in the Chicago area featuring Texas Governor Rick Perry suggesting Illinois businesses should move to Texas. Listen to the radio spot here and check out the associated web site texaswideopenforbusiness.com. Here is what the website says:

If you’re a business owner in Illinois, I want to express my admiration for your ability to survive in an environment that, intentionally or not, is designed for you to fail.

With rising taxes and government interference on the upswing, your situation is not unlike a burning building on the verge of collapse. If you’re thinking of “just riding it out” you might want to reconsider.

There is an escape route to economic freedom… a route to Texas. The Lone Star State has proven that limited government, low taxes, and a pro-business mindset work wonders when it comes to job creation and a robust economy. If you’re ready for a fresh start in a place that appreciates job creators like you, it’s time to check out Texas.

This echoes the glee in Indiana and Wisconsin when Illinois raised taxes several years ago.

Texas is indeed growing at a rate that a number of states, including Illinois, can only envy. Texas is known for warmer weather (actually, quite hot weather), lower taxes, and is a Republican-dominated state in recent decades. Metropolitan areas like Dallas, Houston, and Austin are booming. And yet, there are still businesses that are willing to locate in and near Chicago. Perhaps it is the world-class city with international connections as well as unique character. Perhaps it is the base of human capital with both high-skill and low-skill workers. Perhaps Chicago’s location in the middle of the country and at the center of transportation networks still matters to some.

I imagine many businesses are already aware of the business climate differences between Illinois and Texas. Is this just an attempt to trumpet the successes of Texas and poke Illinois in the eye?

A new way to fight pollution in Chicago: cement that absorbs smog

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Chicago is the first American city to lay concrete that absorbs smog:

There are many sustainable technologies designers can utilize these days to make a project more Earth- and people-friendly, but smog-eating cement isn’t the most talked-about – until now. The City of Chicago is pioneering the use of a revolutionary type of cement that is capable of eradicating the air around it of pollution, potentially reducing the levels of certain common pollutants by 20 – 70% depending on local conditions and the amount of exposed surface area.

Photocatalytic cement isn’t exactly news – it was developed by the leading Italian cement maker Italcementi for the Vatican in honor of the 2,000th anniversary of the Christian faith. The Seat of the Catholic Church commissioned the construction of a new church to commemorate the event and wanted surface material that would retain its new appearance despite Rome‘s high levels of air pollution.

The cement that Italcementi developed uses titanium oxide that, when exposed to natural sunlight, triggers a chemical reaction that catalyses the decomposition of dirt or grime on the cement’s surface; thus, it is self-cleaning. What further research in Europe uncovered, however, was that this cement possessed pollution reduction properties that not even Italcementi could have foreseen, capable of cleaning up smog in adjacent air – up to 2.5 meters away – by breaking down the nitrogen oxides which are the result of burning fossil fuels.

Naturally, this makes the photocatalytic cement a perfect paving material as it successfully reduces the amount of toxins expelled by vehicles and inhaled by pedestrians. Italy and other areas of Europe have already paved many of their roads with the revolutionary material, but Chicago is reportedly the first city in America to adopt it, laying down a thin, permeable pavement for the bicycle and parking lanes on Blue Island Avenue and Cermak Road.

There might be a few issues associated with this:

1. What is the relative cost of laying down this kind of cement compared to other road surfacing material? In Illinois, I’ve read before that laying asphalt is cheaper in the short term compared to concrete but more expensive in the long term because it has to be replaced more frequently.

2. Some may not like this news because if the cement can help fight pollution, people may pay less attention to the effect of cars.

Here is more information on this concrete from an article last October:

According to Nguyen, the titanium dioxide on the cement surface absorbs UV light and uses this energy to react with water vapor in the surrounding air.

The result of this reaction is a highly reactive particle known as a hydroxyl radical.

It is these unstable hydroxyl radicals that in turn decompose a host of other compounds in the surrounding air, including nitrous oxide, a harmful greenhouse gas released in car exhaust…

David Leopold, project manager for the Chicago Department of Transportation, did say the photocatalytic cement is more expensive than regular pavement, but the city expects to see considerable improvement in street-level air quality as a result…

Based on pre-installation estimates, “on a windless day up to about eight feet from the pavement’s surface, you can see demonstrated improvements in air quality,” said Leopold. “Coincidentally, that’s about the height of a person on a bike.”

We’ll see what happens if this concrete is used more widely.

Hoping Chicago can become a big data hub

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A fundraiser held by Tom Pritzker this weekend in Chicago was part of a plan to make Chicago a center for big data:

University of Chicago computer scientist Ian Foster pressed the clicker and up popped a map of the most sophisticated fiber-optic networks in the world.

On that map, at least, Chicago appeared to be the center of everything, a crossroads of information dwarfing Beijing, London and New York in importance.

Fiber-optic lines lace this city — because they are often laid along railroad lines. And the University of Chicago is working to use that geographic advantage to build the largest storage hub in the world for genetic and medical information, called the bionimbus cloud. The goal is to harness massive amounts of data and computing power to solve the riddle of diseases such as cancer.

Last week, Hyatt Hotels Corp. Chairman Tom Pritzker and his wife, Margot, hosted a fundraiser at the Park Hyatt Chicago to introduce the project to about 50 friends, including CDW Corp. founder Michael Krasny; Melvin and Ellen Gordon, the CEO and president of Tootsie Roll Industries, respectively; Crate and Barrel founders Carole and Gordon Segal; Wheels Inc. Chief Executive Jim Frank; and Charles Evans, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago…

Grasping the magnitude of the data the medical community needs to collect and analyze is almost impossible.

But understanding a railroad hub — and the transport of grain, meat or oil — is not.

“Business, innovation, discovery, jobs still depend on taking raw materials and turning them into refined products,” Foster said. “Often, nowadays, the raw material is data and the refined material is knowledge.”

This is an interesting comparison to make in Chicago, a city that heavily depends on its transportation facilities such as busy airports and the large percentage of US rail traffic that goes through the region and has served as a commodity trading center for decades. So why not data analysis and infrastructure? At the same time, I’m guessing Chicago has a ways to go compared to other tech and data centers like Silicon Valley and Seattle, let alone other places like Austin and Boston.

Fighting McMansions in Miami

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The group “Save Miami Beach Neighborhoods” is looking for help in fighting McMansions:

Miami Beach homes comprise a variety of architectural styles that reflect the history of our City, which is not yet 100 years old. Unfortunately, recent zoning changes have allowed for out-of-scale McMansions which threaten the historic character, authenticity and desirability of our single-family neighborhoods.

Our goal with Save Miami Beach Neighborhoods is to ensure that new construction is in line with existing neighborhood context. We want to stop oversized McMansions that are popping up seemingly all around us…

As homeowners and concerned residents, we must act to limit new construction size and scale before our neighborhood character is lost forever.

I would say the one photo of an 18,000 square foot McMansion in the neighborhood is pretty emblematic of what critics do not like about McMansions: large, taking up much of the lot, unusual design compared to the house next to it, and much larger than the next house (which is probably only 5,000 square feet).

At the same time, I wonder if outsiders would look at this and say it is simply an argument between wealthy people about something nebulous like “community character.”