Category Archives: Places

Northwestern mounts ad campaign against preserving Prentice Women’s Hospital

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Driving home yesterday, I heard a curious radio ad: Northwestern University wants to build a new research facility and this involves rallying people against the Prentice Women’s Hospital.

Chicago has an opportunity to become a global leader in medical research and lead the way in finding tomorrow’s cures by allowing Northwestern University to build a new state-of-the-art research center on the site of the old Prentice Women’s Hospital. The geographical positioning of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine near world-class partners – industrial, commercial, entrepreneurial and academic – provides rare opportunities for discovery that few universities can even consider.

With the new research facility, the University would attract an additional $150 million a year of new medical research dollars, create 2,000 new full-time jobs and generate an additional $390 million a year in economic activity in Chicago. The new center would attract the world’s best medical researchers and go a long way in helping a world-class city find tomorrow’s cures…

Make your voice heard! Click to submit our form to tell the Chair of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks that you oppose the proposal to landmark old Prentice Women’s Hospital and that you support Northwestern’s new medical research center…

Beyond furthering research on cures, a new facility will create more than 2,000 jobs for scientists and technicians and bring in an extra $1.5 billion in federal medical research dollars over the next decade. Learn more about why this project is vital.

Northwestern is apparently going public in their campaign to use the Prentice Women’s Hospital site. As has been reported in the local media for months, there are a number of people interested in saving the hospital designed by Bernard Goldberg. Northwestern is fighting a monied group:

Less obvious is the primary source of funding for the preservationists: the Washington-based National Trust for Historic Preservation, which put old Prentice on its list of America’s 11 most-endangered sites in 2011 and has named it one of its “national treasures.”

Christina Morris, a senior field officer in the preservation trust’s Chicago office, declined to disclose how much the trust is spending on its campaign to save Prentice.

IRS records show that the trust held about $230 million in assets at the end of 2010. That amount still paints Northwestern as a goliath. But the trust’s participation would seem to deny preservationists the label “David.”…

The preservationists — Morris, Bonnie McDonald of Landmarks Illinois, architect Gunny Harboe and Jonathan Fine of Preservation Chicago — hired Eric Herman, managing director of issue- and corporate-advocacy firm ASGK. He’s also a Northwestern alumnus and former Chicago Sun-Times reporter. The team has worked to poke holes in a university poll conducted via telephone, which found — not surprisingly — that nearly three-quarters of those surveyed supported putting a new medical research center on the old Prentice site.

I know there is a big decision looming but I wonder about the need to take the fight public: as the poll cited above shows, how many Chicagoans really care? How many even know what the Prentice site is, notwithstanding the Bernard Goldberg retrospective hosted last year by the Art Institute?

Living in near poverty in the Washington D.C. suburbs

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The number of poor people in the suburbs is growing and the Washington Post takes a look at those just above the poverty line in the suburbs of Washington D.C.:

These are the folks hovering above the poverty line, just a few digits away from the cliff that drops them into the world of people we fret over and create government programs for.Poverty, in most of the cases we hear it discussed, means a household income of less than $23,000 for a family of four. But what if you make $25,000, $30,000 or even $40,000? Is that easy street?…

From 2010 to 2011, poverty rates jumped in Loudoun, Fairfax, Arlington and Prince William counties, the land of McMansions, gated communities and shiny, big-box stores.

The suburbs were built to accommodate prosperity and consumption, a life of big lawns, big cars and big dreams. It is a precipice so high that the drop — a missed mortgage that turns into a foreclosure, a repossessed car that results in a lost job — is dizzying.

Step into any thrift store and the pain is on display, right along with the used cake platters, tea sets and cocktail dresses nobody needs anymore.

A few thoughts on the full story:

1. The columnist uses an interesting term for this group living just above the poverty line: the pre-poor. Does this imply that they are inevitably on a path to poverty or could they also move upward out of this group with a new job or opportunity?

2. The story focuses primarily on thrift stores but assumedly there are other places where the pre-poor shop and gather? In other words, this sounds like an easy entree into this segment of the American populace but doesn’t give us much of the complex story of their lives.

3. Another angle on this would be to look at the social services available to those just above poverty. Are there local charities, religious organizations, and civic groups trying to help? Are these suburbs, places built for prosperity and yet seeing growing need for social services, able to help?

Should oil reserves be used to build developments in “glittering cities”?

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A commentator looking at Venezuela and the use of the money from its oil reserves suggests oil money should be spent on development in “glittering cities”:

While oil has ushered in spectacular construction projects for glittering Middle Eastern cities, including the world’s tallest building in Dubai and plans for branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums in Abu Dhabi, it’s brought relatively meager changes to Venezuela, which holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves.

Nearly 14 years after President Hugo Chavez took office, and despite the biggest oil bonanza in Venezuela’s history, there’s little outward sign of the nearly one trillion petrodollars that have flowed into the country.

It would be interesting to hear experts talk about whether the urban development projects in the Middle East are really the best use of money from natural resources. On one hand, the cities look impressive. Dubai is now on the map partly because of the Burj Kalifa. American universities and European museums want to locate in such new cities. The buildings are all so new and exciting. At least in appearance, these cities can now compete with the best big cities in the world. Going further, some would argue cities are the engines of innovation and growth so spending money there on infrastructure and facilities could go a long way. Similarly, glittering cities might the result of financial and economic power.

On the other hand, money spent on buildings and cities is money that could be spent on education, health care, the development of human capital, and sustainable projects that will outlive the oil reserves. Cities may only be as good as its workers and residents who can contribute to social, economic, and political life. Could glittering cities simply be facades that mask a host of underlying social ills papered over by mineral wealth? Money may be spent in urban centers and yet residents in slums and in more rural areas may be essentially forgotten. More broadly, does a city necessarily have to be “glittering” to be successful? Indeed, are there cities in the world that are clearly successful and offer a high standard of living but are not glittering such as the Scandinavian capitals?

With the rise of single-person households, why would Money magazine report family income for their best places to live?

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I was recently looking at Money‘s 2012 list of the 2012 Best Places To Live and noticed something strange: they report family income and not household income. For example, look at the figures for Naperville, Illinois, #53 on the list (how Naperville has fallen so far on this list after being very near the top less than 10 years ago is another topic for another day): the median family income is $123,511.

Why does this matter? The median family income is generally higher than the median household income because the first only counts households with relatives living together while the second can include single-person households (as well as households with roommates and non-relatives.) This is not a small issue: tied for the most common household type in the United States today is the single-person household.

According to 2011 census data, people who live alone–nearly 33 million Americans–make up 28% of all U.S. households, which means they are now tied with childless couples as the most prominent residential type, more common than the nuclear family, the multigenerational family and the roommate or group home. These aren’t just transitional living situations: over a five-year period, people who live alone are more likely to remain in their current state than anyone else except married couples with children.

Perhaps Money‘s readers are primarily in family households but this still skews the data for the best place to live. Perhaps the feature should really be called the “Best Places for Families to Live”?

(Note: there is another issue for Naperville. The population in Money is listed at 152,600 while the Census reports a 2011 estimate of 142,773.)

Portland: the city where the young retire/are underemployed

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Researchers have found that Portland, Oregon is indeed a place where young workers are often underemployed:

Portland may not be “a city where young people go to retire,” but it’s the place they go to be underemployed, a new study found.

A famous quip by Fred Armisen on the television show “Portlandia” led Portland State University researchers to investigate the reality behind the comment. The quirky IFC network series pokes fun at the Oregon city’s many eccentricities.

The researchers’ review found that Portland is a magnet for the young and college educated from across the country, even though a disproportionate share of them are working part-time or holding jobs that don’t require a degree.

In short, young college grads are moving here, and staying, because they like the city’s amenities and culture, not because they’re chasing jobs. Their participation in the labor force tracks with other cities, but they make 84 cents on the dollar when compared to the average of the 50 largest metropolitan areas, the research found.

Not exactly a shining place for the “creative class.” I don’t remember Richard Florida talking much about the employment or economic struggles of the creative class; rather, such cities are often depicted as tech hubs with lots of exciting companies and opportunities. A city may be a cultural magnet but it also has to have enough jobs so that people can stay.

What is most interesting to me about this is that it appears the migration of young adults to Portland has continued in the last few decades even when there are not enough full-time jobs. Is there a threshold point when people will stop going to Portland? At what point do economic realities trump the cultural vibrancy of Portland?

A world where “the city talks back”

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Taking part in a conference in Germany about megacities, sociologist Saskia Sassen makes an interesting comment linking technology and cities:

The effects of the digital revolution shape the urban space and the access of city dwellers to their environs. The focus here is on technologies that allow us, within and with the city, to communicate with buildings and objects. “The city talks back,” says the renowned sociologist Saskia Sassen, one of the most distinguished authors who has published on the sociology of urban development and shaped the term ‘global city’. Felix Petersen, who has recently triggered a trend with his opinion platform Amen, will get together with other innovators to discuss his visions of location-based services. A brief run-down of new technologies will be presented in the “Elevator Pitches” session. Raul Krauthausen provides a new kind of access to cities by way of his Wheelmap application.

I’m intrigued by the idea “the city talks back.” This could simply refer to material objects; city residents and visitors will be able to quickly see more about buildings and objects. For example, Google is working on developing maps of building interiors. Or perhaps all buildings will be equipped with Siri-like voices that can respond to basic questions. However, I wonder how much of this is really about creating another avenue for interacting with other humans in the city. Buildings don’t “talk” – even the artificial intelligence of today has to be programmed.

More broadly, this reminds me of Simmel’s early 1900s ideas about “the stranger” in the city and the general lack of intimate relationships. Through apps and new technologies, we may have more people to “talk to” or “interact with” but are these deep urban relationships or even helpful ones? Or is this just more clutter, another category of urban stimulation that leads to a more “blase” attitude (following up with Simmel)? I suspect Sassen is right that new technology will change how we see cities and the objects and people within them but I also suspect it will have a mix of positive and negative consequences.

Let’s just hope the city talks backs in forms other than advertisements…

A mass transit revolution in Los Angeles?

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Matt Yglesias argues that Los Angeles has turned the corner in promoting mass transit and is poised to become “America’s next great mass-transit city”:

The process started in earnest with the construction of the often-scoffed-about Red and Purple subway lines in the 1990s. This began to create the bones of a major rapid transit system. But it’s kicked into overdrive in the 21st-century thanks to the confluence of three separate incidents. First, Rep. Henry Waxman, the powerful House Democrat who represents L.A.’s Westside, went from being a NIMBY opponent of transit construction to an environmentalist booster. Second, Antonio Villaraigosa  was elected mayor in 2004. Third, in 2008, L.A. County voters passed Measure R, a ballot proposition that raised sales taxes to create a dedicated funding stream for new transit. Thanks to Measure R and Waxman, a new Expo Line connecting downtown to some of the Westside is already open, and work will begin on a “subway to the sea” beneath Beverly Hills soon. The same pool of money also finances expansion of the light rail Gold Line and the rapid-bus Orange Line while helping hold bus fares down…

Perhaps most importantly of all, the city is acting to transform the built environment to match the new infrastructure. A controversial plan to rezone the Hollywood area for more density has passed. The city has also moved to reduce the number of parking spaces developers need to provide with new projects, following the lead of the smaller adjacent cities of Santa Monica and West Hollywood. A project to reconfigure Figueroa Boulevard running south from downtown toward Exposition Park as a bike-and-pedestrian friendly byway is in the works, and pending the outcome of a November ballot initiative, a streetcar may be added to the mix. At the northern end is the massive L.A. Live complex of movie theaters, restaurants, arenas, hotels, condos, and apartments—the biggest downtown investment the city had seen in decades, constructed between 2005 and 2010. At the southern end of the corridor is the University of Southern California, which is planning to redevelop its own backyard to look a bit more like a traditional urban university village.

Los Angeles continues, like almost all American cities, to be primarily automobile oriented. But the policy shift is having a real impact on the ground. The most recent American Community Survey showed a 10.7 percent increase in the share of the metro area’s population that relies on mass transit to get to work, matched with a 3.6 percent increase in driving. And that’s before several of the key Metro projects have been completed or the waning of the recession can drive new transit-oriented development.

As work continues, people will find that Los Angeles has some attributes that make it an ideal transit city. Consultant and planner Jarrett Walker notes that the city’s long straight boulevards make it perfect for high-quality express bus service. And then, of course, there’s the weather. Something like a nine-minute wait for a bus, a 15-minute walk to your destination, or an afternoon bike ride are all more pleasant in Southern California than in a Boston winter or a sweltering Washington August. As a quirk of fate, the East Coast of the United States was settled first, so cities with large pre-automobile urban cores are clustered there. But the fundamentals of climate and terrain are more favorable to walking and transit in Los Angeles than in New York. The city could have simply stuck with tradition and stayed as the first great metropolis of the automobile era. But it’s chosen instead to embrace the goal of growing even greater, which will necessarily mean denser and less auto-focused. While the Bay Area and many Northeastern cities stagnate under the weight of oppressive zoning codes, L.A. is changing—by design—into something even bigger and better than it already is.

Three other factors I think are in Los Angeles’ favor:

1. The metropolitan region is actually denser than all others in the United States:

The nation’s most densely populated urbanized area is Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, Calif., with nearly 7,000 people per square mile. The San Francisco-Oakland, Calif., area is the second most densely populated at 6,266 people per square mile, followed by San Jose, Calif. (5,820 people per square mile) and Delano, Calif. (5,483 people per square mile). The New York-Newark, N.J., area is fifth, with an overall density of 5,319 people per square mile

Mass transit works best in denser conditions when more people are within reach of mass transit stops/stations and it is more difficult to maintain and park a car. Los Angeles is rightfully known for sprawl but it is denser sprawl.

2. Los Angeles does have an earlier history of mass transit: streetcars were widely used in the early 1900s.

During the early and mid-1900?s the historic streetcar served as a popular mode of transportation along Broadway.  The Los Angeles Streetcar system was primarily operated by Pacific Electric (1901-1961) and developed into the largest trolley system in the world by the 1920?s. This breath of scale enabled residents and visitors alike to routinely traverse the Los Angeles region, and connected many of Southern California’s communities. The system operated for over half a century, and at its peak traversed over 1,100 miles of track with  900 electric trolley cars; this dense network produced a rate of public transit usage higher than San Francisco does today on a per capita basis.

For years the system was considered by many to be “the vital cog in the city’s transportation system,” and according to author Steven Ealson, provided transportation for millions who enjoyed the streetcar so much they would “ride for miles simply for fun or for transportation to places of amusement.” The demise of the streetcar began with the unprecedented development of single-family tract housing designed and built to accommodate automobiles. This pattern of development quickened during post-war housing construction, and accelerated the demise of the streetcar system as the region became dependent on private transportation.

Read more about how General Motors was involved in dismantling the streetcar system in many large cities, including LA.

3. I wonder if a larger proportions of Los Angeles residents and leaders are simply fed up with highway traffic and want to now look at different options. Remember “Carmageddon“?

h/t Instapundit

Latinos in American cities “Latinize” homes and use parks like plazas

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As part of a larger article about Latinos in American cities and suburbs, here is an interesting section about how Latinos adapt American houses and parks:

In 2005, the California State Assembly published a paper by then Senior Legislative Assistant Michael Mendez titled “Latino New Urbanism: Building on Cultural Preferences.” In the paper, Mendez notes that in established Latino communities in California, Latino living preferences are often carryovers or hybrid forms of living preferences typical of Latin America.

For example, Mendez noticed that “the adaptive reuse of homes” in established Latino communities — and in particular, East Los Angeles — was often “neither entirely Mexican, nor Spanish, nor Anglo-American.” Instead, Mendez writes, “the introverted American- style homes are transformed to extroverted, Mexicanized, or Latinized homes.”

Mendez also discusses the role of the public plaza in Latin America as a community’s essential social hub. In Latin America, the plaza is a place for people to gather to talk, play, party, and do business. Citing a 1995 survey of behavioral patterns in California’s public parks, Mendez notes that Latino use of public parks as “a surrogate for the misplaced plaza…is a great contrast to Anglos, who primarily participated in mobile, solitary activities such as jogging, walking, bicycling, or dog walking.”

In 2009, Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty formally dedicated Columbia Heights Plaza. “Before, the plaza was an open lot full of drunks,” Toledo recalls. Now young people gather in the plaza after school and hipsters walk their dogs. During the summer, parents bring their children to play in the fountains surrounded by seating areas for people watching. Despite the decline in the neighborhood’s Latino population, Columbia Heights Plaza acknowledges the Latin American preference for public plazas in urban spaces.

It is too bad there aren’t more examples about residents and cities changing the physical form of space to accommodate Latinos and other groups. How far are cities willing to go to do this? In visiting such neighborhoods, would the average American pick up on the fact that the space has been altered or is used differently?

Illinois’ Kendall County the fastest growing US county between 2000 and 2010

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While digging through some 2010 US Census reports, I came across this table of the most populous and fastest growing counties between 2000 and 2010 (page 9 of this PDF):

Two thoughts came to mind at seeing this list of the fastest growing counties:

1. Kendall and Loudoun are the only two counties in the top ten not in the Sunbelt. While this isn’t a complete list of counties, it does suggest that the most rapid growth continues to take place in the Sunbelt. Similarly, look at the list of the most populous counties: the three non-Sunbelt counties barely grew or even lost population while some of the Sunbelt counties gained quite a few people.

2. Kendall County is at the far southwest edge of the Chicago region and thus, we should not be surprised that it is growing. Just to the east is Plainfield, a rapidly growing suburb. Just to the north is Aurora, now the second largest city in Illinois at nearly 200,000 residents. Additionally, there are three nearby interstates, I-88, I-55, and I-80 that can help residents get to other places.

A Costa Rican explains why the country’s #1 ratings in the Happiness Index is due to its culture

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The Happy Planet Index puts Costa Rica at number one in the world. A Costa Rican first describes what makes up the index and then how Costa Rican culture led to the top ranking:

Have you ever heard of the Happy Planet Index? As a Costa Rican, I hear about it quite a lot. Both the HPI, a project of the New Economics Foundation, and the lesser-known World Database of Happiness, assembled by a Dutch sociologist, put Costa Rica at the top of the rankings. This officially makes Costa Rica the most content country on the planet. (For once, we’re first in the world at something other than potholes per capita.)

The HPI is calculated from a combination of three factors: life expectancy, self-reported well-being, and ecological footprint. Thus, according to its own website, the HPI measures “how many long and happy lives [countries] produce per unit of environmental input.” That sounds like a mouthful at first, but once you think it through for a bit the concept seems to make sense. Traditional measures of wellbeing, such as GDP per capita, simply measure output. They don’t take into account environmental devastation brought about by industrialization or unhappiness stemming from social or economic inequality. The HPI, on the other hand, rewards countries with healthy, satisfied citizens for living within their ecological means. Thus, the HPI tells developing countries they shouldn’t aspire to the living standards of the United States or France, but rather to the smile production of Costa Rica…

My point here is that, in Costa Rica at least, happiness seems to stem partly from culture. It’s not at all controversial from an economic viewpoint to suggest a link between happiness and culture, and this is somewhat validated by the fact that five of the top ten countries in the latest HPI ranking are located in Central America, a relatively small and homogeneous region. One of those, El Salvador, has the highest murder rate in the world, and another, Nicaragua, displays levels of poverty one would expect from a war-ravaged Sub-Saharan nation. Living in either one of those (and I have for a time, in both) actually sounds like a pretty grim prospect to me, yet the HPI would have us believe that these countries are worth emulating.

Thus, we approach the core problem with the Happy Planet Index: Happiness and wellbeing are inextricably linked, but they cannot be reduced to the same thing. If Costa Rica got its act together and built better infrastructure (even at the expense of causing a little bit of damage to the environment) our wellbeing would be much higher—we would no longer have to endure endless traffic jams brought about by rock slides or sinkholes, for instance. Yet—here’s the key—our happiness wouldn’t change that much, because it’s largely a consequence of who we are as a people. Improved infrastructure is precisely the sort of advancement that shows up in measures like GDP per capita, and which the HPI ignores completely—forms of progress that undoubtedly change us for the better, though we remain as content as ever.

I’ve written about measuring happiness before (see here and here) but I don’t remember seeing this argument before about the Happy Planet Index: it is more dependent on culture than measures of material conditions. If you carry this argument to its conclusion, then great changes for the better or worse in Costa Rica wouldn’t affect people much.

I suspect it doesn’t exactly work this way. There are probably some thresholds that would affect happiness in Costa Rica and a lot of other countries. These would be similar to findings in the US that above a certain point, having more income doesn’t really change people’s happiness or well-being. There is an interplay between culture and material conditions; Marx may have suggested that culture is derived from those who control the means of production but others, including Weber, would argue that there is more of a back and forth. If the conditions changed a lot, the culture would have to respond and might change quite a bit as well.