Race affects why Americans don’t like people walking on their property

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One writer contrasts the approach in Europe and the United States toward walking through the countryside:

In Sweden, they call it “allemansrätt.” In Finland, it’s “jokamiehenoikeus.” In Scotland, it’s “the right to roam.” Germany allows walking through privately owned forests, unused meadows and fallow fields. In 2000, England and Wales passed the Countryside and Rights of Way Act, which gave people access to “mountain, moor, heath or down.”

Nordic and Scottish laws are even more generous. The 2003 Scottish Land Reform Act opened up the whole country for a number of pastimes, including mountain biking, horseback riding, canoeing, swimming, sledding, camping and most any activity that does not involve a motorized vehicle, so long as it’s carried out “responsibly.” In Sweden, landowners may be prohibited from putting up fences for the sole purpose of keeping people out. Walkers in many of these places do not have to pay money, ask for permission or obtain permits.

We’re not nearly as welcoming in America. Travel across rural America and you’ll spot “No Trespassing” and “Private Property” signs posted on trees and fence posts everywhere. And even where there aren’t signs, Americans know they don’t have the implicit permission to visit their town’s neighboring woods, fields and coastlines. Long gone are the days when we could, like Henry David Thoreau on the outskirts of his native Concord, Mass., freely saunter “through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.”…

Roaming rights began to erode in the late 19th century, according to Mr. Sawers. In the South, states passed trespassing laws for racial reasons, seeking to keep blacks from hunting and fishing so as to starve them into submission. Elsewhere, wealthy landowners of the Gilded Era became concerned with game populations, and trespassing and hunting laws were passed to restrict immigrants, he said.

It is interesting to note both (1) the historical change in the United States toward property rights and exclusion and (2) European countries may allow walking through property but have restrictions such as committing damage, walking near homes, and hunting. But, perhaps even more noteworthy is the suggestion that race matters here as well: as the United States was moving toward more equality and racial/ethnic diversity, property rights were another means by which to keep groups separate. We know that this would soon matter tremendously in terms of restrictive covenants and segregated neighborhoods but even restricting the simple act of walking was seen as necessary to keep certain boundaries.

Embedding traffic lights in sidewalks to help pedestrians

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Incessant smartphone use is leading to urban adaptations:

That is why officials in the city of Augsburg became concerned when they noticed a new phenomenon: Pedestrians were so busy looking at their smartphones that they were ignoring traffic lights.

The city has attempted to solve that problem by installing new traffic lights embedded in the pavement — so that pedestrians constantly looking down at their phones won’t miss them.

“It creates a whole new level of attention,” city spokeswoman Stephanie Lermen was quoted as saying. Lermen thinks the money is wisely spent: A recent survey conducted in several European cities, including Berlin, found that almost 20 percent of pedestrians were distracted by their smartphones. Younger people are most likely to risk their safety for a quick look at their Facebook profiles or WhatsApp messages, the survey found…

But city officials say their work is justified: The idea to install such traffic lights came after a 15-year-old girl was killed by a tram. According to police reports, she was distracted by her smartphone as she crossed the tracks.

The direction of change is with the smartphone users: their safety matters and urban planners and officials must adjust.

I assume the future self-driving cars will be able to communicate with smartphones (or whatever devices we are all sporting at that point) to protect cars from the pedestrians. At that point, the cars will be far safer than the zombie or distracted or unpredictable activity of any pedestrian.

Replicating American style suburbs outside a growing Ugandan city

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In the United States, wealthier and whiter residents tended to leave big cities and their problems for the safety of the suburbs. Is the same process underway in Africa?

In many ways, Akright City, 15 miles from the capital city Kampala, feels like the anti-African city, a polo-wearing, golf-playing suburban inversion of the continent’s teeming metropolises. And that is exactly the point. Akright, like other private cities sprouting up across the Africa in recent years, offers a tantalizing answer to the question of how to fix the continent’s creaking colonial cities: Give up. Start Over.

It’s a trend repeated across the continent, from Johannesburg’s Steyn City — a walled town twice the size of Monaco — to Lagos’ Eko Atlantic, a beachfront cluster of skyscrapers and condos that bills itself as Africa’s Dubai. Private cities are not unique to Africa, but they have special significance on a continent where most urban infrastructure was designed for a long-gone colonial elite, rather than the millions who now crowd in searching for economic opportunity. By some calculations, this is the world’s fastest urbanizing region, and from Dar es Salaam to Luanda, its overtaxed cities are ill-equipped to keep up. By grafting entirely new cities onto the edges of these metropolises, their builders say they can leap-frog the region’s development challenges and create outposts of first-world luxury on the world’s poorest continent…

But it hasn’t quite worked out that way. Today, neighborhoods with dreamy names like “California Village,” “New World Village,” and “European Village” stand less than half full. Soaring mansions sit beside gaping construction sites, many on roads that are little more than a gash of dirt cut into the hillside. A lush golf course stands completely empty on a recent afternoon. Midway through the project, the money dried up, and many of Akright’s more grandiose components were abandoned, including a massive call centre that once ambitiously promised to help Uganda displace India as the world’s outsourcing darling. Kamugisha promises the slowdown is only temporary…

“Life is more or less like Europe: it’s enclosed, we don’t see our neighbors, everyone goes away during the day,” says Grace Amoah, who has lived in Akright for a decade and runs a small convenience store here, one of the few businesses open on a recent afternoon. “They want more people to come here, but I think the distances are too far, it’s too expensive.”

I wonder if the lesson is this: it is difficult to develop and maintain American-style suburbs without an advanced economic system that can support lots of private housing away from employment and cultural centers. In other words, this represents an attempt to take a shortcut through the development process by which cities in the United States were successful and then gave rise to suburbs. The sorts of American suburbs we have today couldn’t have developed without the rapid growth of cities from the mid-1800s onward. (This leads to interesting questions for today such as whether suburbs can continue for long periods with a decaying or dead urban core – think the suburbs of Detroit where many are well-off even as the city has struggled for decades.)

Can McMansions count as affordable housing in some markets?

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A New Jersey fair housing group highlights a recent report that argued thousands of homes $300,000 and up counted as affordable housing.

On the face of it, this seems absurd: expensive large suburban homes might count as being within the reach of many Americans? Yet, there is the matter of the particular housing market that may affect such calculations. The priciest markets tend to be on the coast and whether one is examining the median sales price or the average list price (and this does matter – the median suggests half the homes sell for above and below that price and all 15 on this list are around $300k or higher), a $300,000 home might be difficult to find.

Now, whether such a home is within the reach of many in the region is another matter and it is likely not. Even with higher incomes in these metropolitan regions, there are still plenty of workers and residents who don’t see as much of a relative bump in their salaries. McMansions might be some of the cheaper homes available in pricier markets but that does not mean they are attainable.

Do any of these more expensive regions have interest in suggested plans to alter McMansions (see here and here) to make more cheaper housing? This would likely face opposition from nearby owners who would fight tooth and nail against any efforts to introduce multi-family housing.

Claim: white Americans unwilling to sacrifice for poor African Americans

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A review of Mitch Duneier’s new book Ghetto ends with one of the book’s claims:

Despite the program’s vaunted successes, Mr. Duneier concludes that its limitations reveal a cognitive and moral dissonance at the heart of American life: No project to end the ghettos can work if it requires the white community to make tangible sacrifices on behalf of black people.

It is one thing to not intentionally commit racist acts and another to make certain sacrifices.

The negative effect of loneliness on health

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Loneliness is not just a social or emotional condition; it affects physical health.

The scourge of loneliness has been with us since time immemorial, but only in recent years has its toll on human health gained appreciation. New research shows that feeling lonely or socially isolated bumps up a person’s average risk for coronary heart disease and stroke — two of the developed world’s most prolific killers — by 50%.

As a risk factor for heart attack, clogged arteries or stroke, those statistics put loneliness on a par with light smoking, anxiety and occupational stress. And they make social isolation a more powerful predictor of such vascular diseases than are either high blood pressure or obesity…

The new research, published Tuesday in the British Medical Journal’s publication, Heart, aggregated the findings of 23 separate studies that asked people to characterize their level of social engagement. Each of those studies then tracked participants for periods ranging from 3 to 21 years and noted whether they had a first stroke or were newly diagnosed with, or died from, coronary heart disease…

As a result, it’s hard to know whether loneliness is a contributor to, the result of, or just another symptom of poor health. And for the same reason, it’s hard to know whether programs aimed at getting the socially isolated to re-engage will improve their health, and how.

Social relationships matter, not just for using weak ties to get a job but also to improve your health.

The article hints at interventions at the end, primarily suggesting that doctors can ask about social networks and relationships. However, how possible is it for doctors to incorporate more social factors into their analysis, whether that involves asking people about social behaviors or recommending treatment? Doesn’t a finding like this suggest we need a more holistic approach to health that would incorporate physical conditions as well as emotional and social conditions? Perhaps we need more of the biopsychosocial approach. Maybe this requires having multiple professionals – doctors, social workers, psychologists – working together as units to address conditions.

$8 billion to reroute most freight traffic around Chicago suburbs

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The railroad bottleneck in Chicago is real but a new proposal suggests a way to route much of the freight traffic around the outer edges of the region:

In the 21st century, the plan by Great Lakes Transportation Inc. is rare to the point of being unbelievable: Building an $8 billion, 278-mile-long, two-track freight railroad through northeastern Illinois…

But most of the more than 400 people who showed up Tuesday morning at a federal “scoping” hearing in Belvidere weren’t thinking about convenience to people living 50 miles to the east in the suburbs. Many wore stickers showing their opposition to the project, called the Great Lakes Basin Rail Line.

Instead, they told the U.S. Surface Transportation Board’s environmental studies staff that such a railroad would split up farms that have been owned by their families for 100 years. That it would threaten underground water supplies with pollution from spilled chemicals, would slow local ambulance crews and firefighters, would take the world’s best soil out of agricultural production, would lower their property values, could cause drainage problems on their farmland and would fill their quiet rural townships with train noise.

Great Lakes Basin Transportation Inc. is headed by former software entrepreneur Frank Patton and reportedly is supported by 14 investors. The proposed railroad is designed to give the area’s six “Class I” railroads — BNSF, Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, CSX, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific, plus the small Wisconsin & Southern Railway — a way to send long-distance freight trains around metropolitan Chicago rather than through it.

This is still is years from becoming a reality with the number of studies that would need to be completed as well as the actual funding and construction. Yet, it will be interesting to see how the concerns of these property owners are weighed against the interests of the entire Chicago region. Many communities would be very happy with this chance to see fewer freight trains. For some reason, this reminds me of some of the property owners near O’Hare Airport who have put up a consistent fight against expansion even as such plans would benefit the entire region.

In the long run, I would assume the interests of these property owners will matter less than the funding and completion issues that come from such a massive project.

IL legislator drops tax by miles driven plan

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Following up on last week’s post, it now appears Illinois will not have a new driving tax anytime soon:

The Illinois Senate president says he will not pursue a proposal to pay for road construction by taxing motorists by the miles they drive.

John Cullerton is a Chicago Democrat. He floated the idea last week because revenue from taxes on gasoline is declining. Cars are more fuel-efficient but they still wear out roads…

Cullerton posted on social media Friday that he intended the plan — which the Executive Committee aired on Wednesday — to spark debate about more efficient ways to fund road-building.

He says he “received a lot of constructive feedback” but will not pursue his plan.

Such a move was likely unpopular but withdrawing the idea doesn’t help the state move closer to the issue: how are roads going to be maintained and improved? Few people like to pay increased costs for infrastructure but they will certainly dislike it if the roads are not in good shape or major repairs cause headaches and future borrowing down the road.

With gas at a relatively cheap point, isn’t it time to at least consider raising the gas tax?

Expanding Chicago’s downtown zoning; a good deal for poor neighborhoods?

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Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel just released his plans to expand Chicago’s downtown which could provide new monies to help other parts of the city:

This week more details have emerged regarding Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s ambitious plan to expand the high-density “downtown” zoning designation to approximately 1000 additional acres outside the city’s central core to help fund improvements in underserved neighborhoods.

Under the scheme, the city will charge developers for the privilege of increased height and density permitted under the expansion. Each payment will be calculated by multiplying amount of additional space sought by 80 percent of the median price per square foot. In other words, if a builder wants to build an additional 5,000 square feet beyond what’s allowed under old zoning in an area where the median price is $30 per foot, the city will net an extra $120,000 for neighborhood reinvestment…

This week’s announcement also sheds some light on how the mayor plans to spend the extra cash. As reported by Greg Hinz of Crain’s, the administration plans to spend 80 percent of the money to help incentivize the construction of new grocery stores and cultural facilities in otherwise deprived neighborhoods. The remainder of the fund is earmarked for historic preservation efforts and streetscape and transit improvements.

The creation of this new value-capture mechanism is also aimed to supplement — if not help replace — Chicago’s reliance on its controversial TIF districts.

It sounds like Emanuel hears the criticism that poorer neighborhoods in Chicago need more resources and capital. However, is this the best way to do that or is it a deal with the devil? The idea seems to be that developers want new spaces to create downtown-like buildings and some of the revenue from this can be sent to help poor neighborhoods. The Neighborhoods Opportunity Fund – a description starts on page 2 of the proposed ordinance – can provide a unique pot of money to provide basic services, cultural and recreational opportunities, and help launch small businesses.

How much money will this generate?

The city says the plan will pull in about $50 million over the next several years. Eighty percent of the money would go to develop grocery stores, restaurants and cultural facilities in underserved neighborhood commercial corridors. The remaining 20 percent would be split among preserving landmark buildings, neighborhood streetscapes and public transit facilities.

I’ll leave it to others to consider how this money balances out with the goodies developers and others will get from the expanded downtown zoning…

McMansion may be a positive term for those conducting estate sales

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I ran across this listing for an estate sale in Naperville:

Upscale, High-End Downtown Naperville Sale!
$1.8 Million Home Has Beautiful Things
Saturday, April 16th 9AM-3PM
Sunday, April 17th 10AM-2PM
330 W. Douglas Naperville, IL 60540
7,200 Square Feet of Bliss!…
This weekend’s sale is at an incredibly beautiful McMansion in Downtown Naperville and you won’t want to miss it. What a house! Here’s some of what we’re selling…
As always, we know you have an abundance of choices of where to spend your hard-earned time and $$$, and we thank you in advance for sharing some of both with us. You will not be disappointed.

One of the critiques of McMansions is that they are symbols of American consumerism, both in terms of the size of the house and the items within the home. Yet, if you are an estate sale company, a McMansion could be exactly what you are your customers are looking for: a place with plenty of good things to sell and buy. Arguably, these items won’t be the highest-end goods – those with $1.8 million homes in Naperville may not be able to or want to buy the best of the best – but there should be plenty to look at. Perhaps people wouldn’t want to have such a large teardown built next door but they would be happy to buy the things in the home in an estate sale.

In addition to the items for purchase, some may want to know about the home itself: see pictures, the price, and other info (there is supposedly an offer pending) here.