Category Archives: Places

Decrease in young people in Illinois; how might suburbs be different with less children?

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The Chicago Tribune leads today with a story of demographic change in Illinois: along with some other states, Illinois has experienced a drop in its young population.

Demographers have long known that the baby boom of the 1950s was giving way to a baby bust nationwide. Now Illinois and the Chicago area are providing a vivid example of the trend: According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, from 2000 to 2010, Illinois had a 6.2 percent drop in children under 10, among the biggest declines in the country.

The impact is being felt in declining school enrollments and refashioned youth programs, officials say. In coming years, it will be felt in a workforce with fewer workers to replace retirees and help replenish pension coffers.

Changes in the youth population are especially pronounced in Chicago, which lost one-fifth of its young residents, particularly along parts of the lakefront, in Hispanic neighborhoods and in places where public housing high-rises once stood. But the trend is also under way in suburbs in Cook and DuPage counties…

Even suburbs such as Naperville and Winnetka — traditionally magnets for families — saw relatively sharp declines in their populations of children.

The impact of this could last for quite a while. I’m most interested in the bits about suburban communities. Since the post-World War II suburban boom, suburbs have been generally regarded as the best setting for children. With more space and good schools, kids could be safe and experience the middle-class life. This image coincided with a baby boom where lots of young families, including those of military veterans who had returned from the war, moved to the suburbs. So how would suburbs be different without as many children?

To start, as the article suggests, this would have a big influence on school districts. Communities that once had to build multiple schools to keep up with new developments might now have to contract schools. What will happen to the old buildings? Might this lead to smaller school district budgets which could then lead to less money from property tax bills going to school districts? I imagine a number of suburban residents would be happy at the thought that schools would cost less. Even as communities like Naperville were expanding, some existing residents were pushing for fewer houses so that their tax bills wouldn’t increase.

Going beyond schools, this could lead to changes for other taxing bodies such as park districts and libraries. But, even more broadly, this could change the character of many suburbs. Without as many children, the main focus of suburbs might change from familialism to something else. One big trend in American life today is the rise of single-person households, which could also become the plurality in the suburbs. There have also been rumblings about older suburbanites whose kids are growing up or have already left the house wanting to move to denser areas. Neighborhoods and communities that once revolved around children and their activities would have to shift their focus elsewhere. Imagine a Chicago suburb that becomes known as a haven for the 50+ crowd. Or a suburb where young professionals have a hopping cultural and entertainment scene.

Behind the suburban scenes: Warrenville asks Naperville School District 203 to stop expensive lawsuit

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I posted last November about a Warrenville newsletter where the mayor expressed his displeasure that a new Cantera business had invited the mayor of Naperville to its opening but not the mayor of Warrenville. I was surprised at the reaction, which was quite unusual to see in a newsletter to the whole community, but I wonder it might be tied to a eight-year expensive lawsuit over tax revenue from Cantera:

Warrenville officials are campaigning to end an eight-year court battle over taxes with a Naperville school district.

The case returns to court Thursday, two days after leaders of five government bodies in Warrenville presented the Naperville Unit District 203 school board with a letter saying the lawsuit concerning a special taxing district has cost all parties involved more than $803,000 since 2005…

The lawsuit was filed by the district in March 2005 over the use of funds from the Cantera tax increment financing district. The Cantera development now includes a theater, shops, restaurants and corporate offices and provides about $3.2 million a year in revenue to District 203. Dave Zager, the district’s chief financial officer, said the Naperville district will continue to collect property tax revenue from the development into the future, but the amount will vary.

However, the school district alleges in the suit it is owed more than it has received. Brummel maintains the funds from the TIF district have been distributed legally and at the advice of attorneys.

The case has been dismissed twice, but the school district appealed twice, and litigation has continued.

Warrenville, its park district, fire protection district, Wheaton-Warrenville School District 200 and the public library district have spent a combined $357,000 defending the case. Naperville Unit District 203 has spent about $446,000. Part of the Cantera site is in District 203, and part is in District 200.

On one hand, this sounds like a lot of money to spend on a lawsuit that has still not concluded, but, on the other hand, tax revenue is hard to come by these days and lots of school districts could use this kind of money. I wonder if the length of the lawsuit is also tied to the economic crisis of recent years; in better times, District 203 might be better able to lose this revenue.

This is the first time I’ve heard of this lawsuit. Large battles between suburbs or suburban governmental bodies are fairly rare.

The winner of NYC’s micro-apartment contest

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With more cities interested in micro-apartments, the announcement of a winner of the New York City micro-apartment contest may be influential:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the winner of the city’s adAPT micro-apartment competition yesterday, a contest to design a 250- to 370-square-foot living space that launched last July. The winner, chosen from 33 applicants, is a collaborative effort between Monadnock Construction, the Actors Fund Housing Development Corporation, and nARCHITECTS called My Mirco NY, which will have its design implemented in a 55-unit building scheduled for completion in 2015…

Like many others, the winning design incorporates high ceilings and dual-use furniture to make the space seem larger. Although the press release called the winning proposal “fresh”, “striking”, and “innovative”, the long, narrow floor plan is similar to comparable projects like San Francisco’s SmartSpace, with fold-up furniture, micro kitchen, floor-to-ceiling storage, and loft space.

The mayor’s office had to waive some zoning regulations to make My Mirco NY legal, but it did not release any information about the competition’s runners-up or what their designs were like…

nARCHITECTS designed the building around prefabricating the units and stacking them on a foundation, then adding a brick facade. It will be the first multi-unit prefab building in Manhattan.

It will be interesting to see how people living in the units as well as people in the neighborhood respond. It is one thing to win a design competition, another to put it into practice and achieve the desired results.

It is also worth noting that the city had to bend some zoning rules. If communities are serious about micro-apartments and other similar smaller housing units, they have to find room in zoning regulations. This could be a more difficult task as zoning changes can draw the attention of neighbors and others in addition to stirring up political discussions involving elected officials, city employees, and builders and architects.

Remembering MLK in Chicago

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The story of the time Martin Luther King, Jr. spent in Chicago in 1966 is not well-known. While many think of King as leading a successful Civil Rights Movement that culminated in the “I Have A Dream” speech in 1963 and then the passing of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, his efforts in his last years faced more opposition. In Chicago, he unsuccessfully fought for an end to residential segregation. Read two longer posts about King’s time in Chicago:

–MLK in Chicago – Jan 17, 2011

–More on MLK in Chicago in 1966 – Aug 7, 2011

The Chicago Tribune has this short summary of what King faced in Chicago:

On this muggy Friday afternoon, Martin Luther King Jr. stepped out of the car that had ferried him to Marquette Park on Chicago’s Southwest Side to lead a march of about 700 people. The civil-rights leader and his supporters were in the white ethnic enclave to protest housing segregation. Thousands of jeering, taunting whites had gathered. The mood was ominous. One placard read: “King would look good with a knife in his back.”

As King marched, someone hurled a stone. It struck King on the head. Stunned, he fell to one knee. He stayed on the ground for several seconds. As he rose, aides and bodyguards surrounded him to protect him from the rocks, bottles and firecrackers that rained down on the demonstrators. King was one of 30 people who were injured; the disturbance resulted in 40 arrests. He later explained why he put himself at risk: “I have to do this–to expose myself–to bring this hate into the open.” He had done that before, but Chicago was different. “I have seen many demonstrations in the South, but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today,” he said.

Not Chicago’s best day or season.

From modest homes in a Canadian prairie town to McMansions

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R.J. Snell returned to the Canadian prairie town of his youth and was surprised to find that its modest homes had been replaced with McMansions:

Having just returned from a two-week visit, I’m struck by the visible demise of modest restraint, particularly in the homes. Driving about the countryside, for this is what one does there, I saw many new homes of a preposterous scale, many thousands of square feet (one even had an outbuilding to house all the mechanicals), with multiple garrets and turrets, all jutting conspicuously from the fields and into my purview. They could not be hidden, nor were they meant to, and on the treeless flatness were visible for great distances.

Right beside them, sometimes just across the road, stood the old farmhouse, diminutive, overshadowed. In the towns, a kind of segregation had taken place, with the older neighborhoods a mix of homes smaller or larger (but of a kind), but new developments on the far side of town housing looming monstrosities dwarfing the older places.

This was not neighborly. This was not modest. This was a thumbing of the nose at those with less, a demand to be noticed, seen.  Roger Scruton writes of the bad manners of much contemporary architecture compared with older patterns, saying:

The principal concern of the architects was to fit in to an existing urban fabric, to achieve local symmetry within the context of a historically given settlement. No greater aesthetic catastrophe has struck our cities—European just as much as American—than the modernist idea that a building should stand out from its surroundings, to become a declaration of its own originality. As much as the home, cities depend upon good manners; and good manners require the modest accommodation to neighbors rather than the arrogant assertion of apartness.

Rod Dreher follows up with an interesting question:

The question is, did money cause this cultural revolution in domestic architecture, or did the arrival of wealth happen to coincide with a cultural revolution in the way people thought about themselves and their desires, causing them to build their houses in a certain way now as opposed to then?

Which comes first: the cultural values or the material conditions? If looking at this from the production perspective in the sociology of culture, changes in material conditions like how architects are viewed, how single-family homes are viewed (as Snell suggests, should homes fit into the neighborhood or stick out?), how houses are constructed, how the real estate business operate, how zoning laws and local regulation encourage or discourage larger homes, etc. In other words, architectural styles or consumer desires don’t just change because individuals desire this. Rather, they change in conjunction with material and cultural change.

I also wonder about larger factors affecting this community. Where did residents get this money to spend on bigger houses? I ask this after lecturing this week about the Ferdinand Tonnies’ ideas about gemeinschaft and gesellschaft as well as Emile Durkheim’s concepts of mechanical and organic solidarity. Both theorists were interested in the shift from small town life to more urban life. Both suggested urban life contained fewer strong interpersonal relationships and systems where people were joined together by interdependence and external constraints rather than tradition, family ties, and shared values. Is a similar process taking place in this prairie town, perhaps through suburbanization or the rise of a good nearby job source or the Internet which opens up more possibilities for residents to connect to the outside world?

Canadian housing market may be headed for a crash

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The troubles of the US housing market have been well documented and now it looks like the Canadian housing market may also be headed in the same direction:

A housing correction—or, possibly, a crash—is no longer coming. It’s here. And you don’t have to own a tiny $500,000 condo in downtown Toronto or a $1.3-million bungalow in Vancouver to get hurt. With few exceptions, the impact will be indiscriminate as the euphoria of rising house prices is replaced by fear. The only question now is how bad things will get. If the decline picks up speed, as many believe it will, there could be a nasty snowball effect. Construction jobs will be lost. Homeowners will end up underwater. Consumers may stop spending. “I’m getting very nervous,” says David Madani, an economist at Capital Economics, who has been predicting a drop in housing prices of up to 25 per cent in Canada. “I know I’m a bear, but the housing market itself has the potential to put us in a recession, let alone what’s happening in Europe and the U.S.”

Canada could be setting itself up for a devastating one-two punch: a painful domestic housing slump just as Canada’s export and resource-driven economy is hit with falling global demand. The most acute threat is the U.S. debt crisis, which, if handled poorly, could tip the world’s largest economy back into recession, taking Canada along with it. Meanwhile, Europe remains mired in a recession and concerns about China’s growth persist. “I feel like Canada is in the path of a perfect storm here,” Madani says. Other than housing, “the key pillar of strength is our booming resource sector,” says Madani. “If you take that away, it’s just going to knock the lights out.”…

Eight months later, the story has been reversed. And not just in Toronto and Vancouver. In Victoria, existing home sales were down by 22 per cent in November from a year earlier. In Montreal, sales were down 19 per cent last month. Ottawa’s sales were down nine per cent and Edmonton’s were down six per cent. With all those houses lingering on the market, prices dipped in 10 of 11 big cities across the country between October and November, according to the Teranet-National Bank index. It was the first such drop since 2009.

The weakness is also evident in new home construction. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation reported a third straight month of falling housing starts in November. The trend is expected to continue next year.

I wonder if anyone will ask whether the Canadian housing market should have applied more lessons from watching the travails of the US housing market. This article suggests there are some similarities and differences in the two situations: a similar overextension of credit and the involvement of speculators alongside a market more insulated from a collapse since more mortgages are guaranteed by taxpayers and a glut of urban condos. But, it would be helpful to have more comparison points: what are the differences in government policies regarding mortgages and homeownership? What are the policies about encouraging sprawl versus urban residences? What percentage of the economy is tied up in construction, housing starts, and real estate sales? Of course, there is also the difference in having a significantly smaller economy (Canadian GDP of $1.4 trillion, just over $15 trillion GDP in the US) and population (over 34 million in Canada, over 311 million in the US).

Highlights from the “Illinois’s 33%” poverty report

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A new report from the Social Impact Research Center, “Illinois’s 33%,”  looks at poverty in Illinois. Here are a few highlights:

1. Something I did not realize: the preamble to the Illinois Constitution mentions “eliminat[ing] poverty” (p.1).

“We, the People of the State of Illinois…in order to provide for the health, safety and welfare of the people; maintain a representative and orderly government; eliminate poverty and inequality; assure legal, social and economic justice; provide opportunity for the fullest development of the individual; ensure domestic tranquility; provide for the common defense; and secure the blessings of freedom and liberty to ourselves and our posterity—do ordain and establish this Constitution for the State of Illinois.”

2. The report is not just about poverty; it is also about people in near-poverty. The income thresholds for this are here (p.5):

This methodology of measuring people with low incomes or near poverty seems to be growing. The Census reports the median household income in Illinois is $56,576.

3. There is definitely some geographic disparity in these figures. Here are the numbers for the Chicago region which clearly shows wealthier and less wealthy counties and Chicago neighborhoods (p.7):

I did not see any calls for metropolitan approaches to poverty. In the Chicago region, it would be difficult to deal with a particular problem, say affordable housing, in just Chicago or a few of its neighborhoods without cooperation and input from others in the region.

4. The report has more figures and possible solutions in five areas that could help people move out of poverty: employment, education, housing, health & nutrition, and assets (p.3-4, 15-17).

Gated crime-free “private city” under construction in Guatemala

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A new gated community under construction in Guatemala is upfront about being exclusive and crime-free:

Guatemalan developers are building a nearly independent city for the wealthy on the outskirts of a capital marred by crime and snarled by traffic. At its heart is the 34-acre (14-hectare) Paseo Cayala, with apartments, parks, high-end boutiques, church, nightclubs, and restaurants, all within a ring of white stucco walls.

The builders of Paseo Cayala say it is a livable, walkable development that offers housing for Guatemalans of a variety of incomes, though so far the cheapest apartments cost about 70 times the average Guatemalan’s yearly wage. It’s bordered by even costlier subdivisions begun earlier. Eventually, the Cayala Management Group hopes to expand the project into “Cayala City,” spreading across 870 acres (352 hectares), an area a little larger than New York’s Central Park .

Cayala’s backers promote it as a safe haven in a troubled country, one with an unusual degree of autonomy from the chaotic capital. It also embraces a philosophy that advocates a return to a traditional concept of a city, with compact, agreeable spaces where homes and shops are intermixed.

Detractors, however, say it is a blow to hopes of saving the real traditional heart of Guatemala City by drawing the well-off back into the urban center to participate in the economic and social life of a city struggling with poverty and high levels of crime and violence…

Pedro Pablo Godoy, one of the 25 architects who worked on Paseo Cayala, said it is the first project in Guatemala that adheres to New Urbanism, a movement that promotes the creation of walkable neighborhoods with a range of housing types and commerce.

Sounds like a fairly typical gated community that may simply be unusually frank about the reasons it is built and why wealthy residents would want to live there: to avoid the problems of society. I imagine some New Urbanists would not anything to do with such a project that is hardly about mixed-income development or being integrated into the fabric of normal society.

While we could focus on the exclusiveness of this new development, it would also be interesting to study whether and how a community forms in such a setting. It sounds like the developers expect some sort of streetlife, partly due to the architecture and design as well as a younger generation they are hoping to attract that want a lively urban setting. Will this actually occur? Will the perceived safety lead to more vulnerable social interactions? If so, what will this community end up looking look?

This also is reminiscent of plans to build several cities in Honduras that would have their own government and oversight.

Could a new Chicago casino be a cultural hub?

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Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones argues that the inevitable Chicago casino should be more of a cultural hub than a gaming paradise:

Instead, it should be viewed as a major new cultural hub, which happens to have a little gambling going on alongside its many other attractions.

And that won’t happen unless Chicago’s creative professionals — its architects, entertainment executives, chefs, artists, actors, music promoters, cultural officials — hold their noses and overcome, as did the former street performers of the Cirque du Soleil more than two decades ago, whatever qualms they may have about becoming involved with gambling, which will arrive with or without them. They must grab hold of this civic debate right now, before the chance is lost for good.

The main energy of a Chicago casino should have everything to do with experiencing architecture, watching spectacular shows, eating at world-class restaurants, interacting with thrilling technological art and the like, and as little as possible to do with gambling. When winners are few, the core activity, experience elsewhere has shown, is more frequently depressive than ecstatic. The casinos’ commercials showing constant excitement at the slots are, as anyone who has spent time in a casino late at night will attest, illusions.

The only thing the actual gambling would bring to the table is the revenue that will make other great things possible in what could be an intensely creative building, one of the few big-ticket cultural developments that actually could pay for itself and get built in a barely recovering economy, rather than languishing as a costly, unfunded dream.

This is an intriguing idea – and one that might be too aspirational. The conversation about casinos in Illinois has been primarily about money as state and local governments are in desperate need of cash. My primary question to Jones would be whether there are actual models to follow here – are there urban casinos, outside of Las Vegas, that meet the goals he suggests or would Chicago be doing a whole new thing here? What would it take to have both a profitable casino as well as one that could be a cultural center? Where would such a cultural casino be located that could build upon existing tourist flows while also attracting new crowds that would be drawn to a casino? Historically, casinos tend not to have the best reputation as they attract certain kinds of crowds so building a world-class casino and cultural hub would be a big coup if done well in Chicago.

A hard look at Washington, DC’s economic boom

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In light of the recent fiscal cliff showdown, Annie Lowery at the New York Times writes a long profile on “Washington’s Economic Boom, Financed by You“:

Billions in federal spending, largely a result of two foreign wars, were pouring into the local economy by the early 2000s. Then came the housing bubble. But after it burst, a remarkable inversion occurred: as the country withered, Washington bloomed. Since 2007, the regional economy has expanded about three times as much as the overall country’s. By some measures, the Washington area has become the richest region in the country. It is now home to the three highest-income counties in the United States, and seven out of the Top 10.

The growth has arrived in something like concentric circles. Increased government spending has bumped up the region’s human capital, drawing other businesses, from technology to medicine to hospitality. Restaurants and bars and yoga studios have cropped up to feed and clothe and stretch all those workers, and people like [developer] Jim Abdo have been there to provide the population — which grew by 650,000 between 2000 and 2010 — with two-bedrooms with Wolf ranges.

Despite its recent success, however, the article suggests that “Peak Washington” is already here, that there is nowhere to go but down:

And yet there is a sense that the capital is headed for a slowdown. Among the Pentagon’s plans to cut nearly $500 billion over the next decade could be reductions not only in materiel but also to all manner of support staff. The homeland-security budgets look certain to see significant reductions, too. One recent estimate noted that more than two million jobs would be at stake if the sequester comes into effect.

Lowery suggests that a tempering of expectations in metro DC would, on balance, be a good thing:

There’s something unsavory about having a capital city doing outrageously well while the rest of the country is limping along — especially when its economy is premised in part on capturing wealth rather than creating it.

To the extent that DC’s economy is indeed “premised in part on capturing wealth rather than creating it,” I agree.  Nevertheless, Lowery cites plenty of evidence that “creative” (as opposed to “capturing”) work is being done in metro DC (“Google has opened an outpost….LivingSocial owns a huge, hiply decorated space….Audi, Intelsat, Hilton Worldwide and dozens of other firms have opened up offices or moved their headquarters to the region”).  Presumably, every urban area “captures” some of its wealth and “creates” some.  How much “capture” is too much, thus making a whole region “unsavory”?

Along these lines, I’m also intrigued by the quote from Virginia Congressman Jim Moran (D), who observes that “Maryland got the life sciences [centered around the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD], and Virginia got the death sciences [centered around the Pentagon in Arlington, VA]….Of course, NoVa [Northern Virginia], given the two wars, it’s done even better than suburban Maryland.”  Does this suggest that DC’s Maryland suburbs are less “unsavory” than DC’s Virginia suburbs?  Or does it only matter that the National Institutes of Health and the Pentagon both spend tax revenue, making them equally offending because they “capture” the country’s wealth?