Tag Archives: Chicago region

Removing a mound and landmark to supply 1800s development

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The landscape of the Chicago region has a limited range of elevation. One of the natural mounds and an early landmark disappeared at the hand of a local company for local building:

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Long ago, a mound jutted up from the flood plain flatlands surrounding the Des Plaines River in what is now a mostly industrial area on the southwest side of Joliet.

It was a significant feature and guidepost for travelers plying the Illinois waterway in the earliest days of recorded history, and a mainstay on maps for decades. Some speculated it was a creation of the mound building civilization that had populated these lands for centuries, best known for its world class city at Cahokia.

Subsequent digging didn’t turn up valuable artifacts, but instead revealed valuable gravel and sand deposited during the ice age, and a short-lived company made quick work of Mount Joliet, dispersing its innards for use in roadways and other projects as the modern development of the region began in earnest in the second half of the 1800s…

Another feature used by centuries of travelers in the area has survived to the present day. In fact, besides giving river navigators a guide point, Mount Joliet may have been one of the landmarks as well along the Great Sauk Trail, an ancient roadway connecting the Mississippi River to what is now the Detroit area.

According to another source:

The mound was destroyed when it’s clay contents were mined to make sewer tiles by the Drain Tile Manufactory of the Joliet Mound Company in the 19th century.

White European settlers to northeast Illinois altered the landscape when they moved into the region in the 1830s. They altered waterways, cleared trees and forests, drained swamps, dug up prairie, made plowable farmland, laid railroad lines, and created plats for sale and development. It does not sound like this mound was in the way of anything; rather, it offered raw material for objects helpful to new development.

I am grateful for maps and other efforts that show what metropolitan regions looked like before white European settlers and then prior to all of the urbanization and suburbanization of the 1800s onward. For example, I have seen multiple versions of this for Manhattan and New York City, discussing and showing streams, hills, and habitats that are hard to imagine in such a large city. Likewise, maps and narratives of the Chicago region highlight a verdant area at the southwest edge of Lake Michigan – that just happened to be an easy portage point to connect the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. Today, it is hard to imagine significant hills or mounds in a region where the flat grid predominates.

All the construction at the same time + the other factors that increase traffic

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A “perfect storm” of traffic has hit Chicagoland:

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The recent traffic backups aren’t a mirage, say transportation officials. It’s really a perfect storm of ongoing construction projects occurring at nearly all points of the expressway system. This includes the Jane Byrne Interchange project, the behind schedule and over budget construction job that offers one of the worst choke points for congestion in the heart of downtown Chicago…

The last week in September saw some of the worst traffic in recent memory, thanks not only to the ongoing construction — including the start of three-weekend lane reductions on Interstate 57 to accommodate ramp patching and resurfacing — but also an emergency closure of the outbound Dan Ryan Expressway ramp to the outbound Stevenson Expressway that isn’t expected to completed until Sunday, according to IDOT…

Transit experts say that Chicago, which has some of the worst congestion of any American city, is also grappling with its return to normalcy following closures brought on by the pandemic. The added congestion comes at a time when many workers such as Cavanagh are returning to the office after two years of work-from-home protocols. Rider usage of transit systems such as the Chicago Transit Authority, Metra and Pace also haven’t yet returned to normal…

“In other words, drivers are making more trips, but they’re shorter trips on average,” Dan Ginsburg, TTWN’s director of operations said in an email.

So the old joke in Chicago, “there are two seasons: construction and winter,” rings true again?

But, this is a bigger issue than just construction. The infrastructure needs help. More people are driving. People live and work in different locations. Mass transit is not being used much. Mass transit does not necessarily reach where it needs to reach. People want to drive faster. There is a lot of freight and cargo moving through the region and so on.

This “perfect storm” could be an opportunity to ask how to address traffic and congestion throughout the city and region for the next few decades? How will this get any better?

Updated figures on Chicago as “the country’s largest freight hub”

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Freight and cargo continue to be important for Chicago and the region:

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Chicago is still the country’s largest freight hub, handling half of all U.S. intermodal trains and a total of $3 trillion worth of cargo each year, according to the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning.

That is a lot of money and traffic.

Whether the Chicago region is acting as a good steward of all of this is another matter. The figures come from an article about pollution from idling trains and truck plus increased freight traffic. Additionally, is the Chicago area prepared to be a freight leader in the future? If so much traffic passes through the region, there is a lot riding on facilities and infrastructure making sure everything gets to its destination.

In the consternation over Caterpillar moving from Illinois to Texas, a reminder that the company moved from Peoria to a Chicago suburb in 2017

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Caterpillar Inc. recently announced plans to move from Deerfield, Illinois to Texas. This prompted concerns about another big company (following the announced exit of Boeing’s headquarters) leaving the Chicago area and Illinois.

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While this fits one narrative of Chicago, the region, and Illinois losing residents and companies to places with growing populations and more conservative business climates, this is not the only move Caterpillar has made in recent years. The company started in 1910 in Peoria and stayed there for a long time before relocating to Deerfield in 2017. Here is how the Chicago Tribune described that move:

Caterpillar will take over the former headquarters of premium spirits maker Beam Suntory, which announced plans last year to move its 450 employees and global headquarters to Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, joining corporations including McDonald’s, Motorola Solutions, Kraft Heinz, Wilson Sporting Goods and Conagra Brands that have recently moved or made plans to relocate downtown. Beam Suntory’s move will be completed by the end of June.”

“Following a thorough site selection process, we chose this location because it is approximately a 20-minute drive to O’Hare airport and convenient to the city of Chicago via commuter train, achieving our goal to be more accessible to our global customers, dealers and employees,” Caterpillar CEO Jim Umpleby said in a news release Wednesday. “This site gives our employees many options to live in either an urban or suburban environment. We know we have to compete for the best talent to grow our company, and this location will appeal to our diverse, global team, today and in the future.”…

In 2011, Caterpillar’s then-CEO Doug Oberhelman talked of moving jobs out of Illinois because of the state’s tax and spending policies. But in 2015, the company said it would stay in Peoria and build a new corporate headquarters, reassuring employees worried about a move. That changed again in January, when the company said it was abandoning plans for the new downstate headquarters.

So is this a story about Chicagoland and Illinois losing important companies or a broader example of companies responding to global markets and leaving behind long roots? Caterpillar is a company started and based in a smaller Rust Belt city for decades and now will move to two of the biggest metropolitan areas in less than a decade. How long will it be in Irving, Texas before again seeking greener pastures and business advantages?

More warehouses coming to the Chicago region

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Chicagoland will be adding a lot more warehouse space in the near term:

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Molto plans to break ground this month on a 1.1-million-square-foot distribution facility, the first phase of its 110-acre Minooka Ridge Business Park in Minooka, a village near I-80 and southwest of Joliet. The company is also developing Weber55 Logistics Park, a two-building complex on 60 acres at the northeast corner of Weber and Taylor roads in Romeoville, another Joliet suburb. That site will include distribution facilities of 627,840 square feet and 270,000 square feet…

Other developers are just as active. At the end of March, 44 buildings of more than 200,000 square feet, a record-breaking 23.7 million square feet in total, were underway across the Chicago metropolitan area, according to Colliers International.

And tenants are plentiful. In the second quarter alone, Amazon leased a 1-million-square-foot warehouse in Joliet, and another in Kenosha, while other companies, including NFI, SC Johnson and RJW Logistics, signed deals for more than 500,000 square feet.

The amount of big-box industrial space that is vacant in the Chicago area tanked during the first quarter of 2022 because so much space was leased or occupied. The industrial vacancy rate fell ”by more than a full percentage point to 2.61%, a record low by a wide margin,” Colliers reported.

As shopping malls and downtown brick and mortar sales struggle, warehouse space is booming. This helps service online shopping as well as big box stores.

Elsewhere in the article, the increase in warehouse space is tied to jobs and possibly cheaper prices for consumers. But, adding such space may not always work out so well in comparison to how else land could be used. And the locations cited in the article suggest Will County is a warehouse center as are other locations more on the edges of the Chicago region.

Chicago is a global leader in data centers

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The Chicago region is a world leader in data centers:

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The Chicago area is tied with Atlanta as the fourth-largest data center market in the world, behind Northern Virginia, Silicon Valley and Singapore, according to a new study by Cushman & Wakefield. The study cites low cost of land, a robust development pipeline and lower power costs than most large data centers as advantages for Chicago.

The study also notes that Chicago-area sites come with “sizable incentives,” a factor that helped bring Facebook/Meta to DeKalb.

In 2019, Illinois created the Data Center Investment Program, offering an exemption from state and local sales and use taxes for companies that invest at least $250 million and create 20 new operational jobs in a data center. The program also requires the data center to be carbon-neutral.

In other words, there is money to be made by putting data centers in the Chicago region.

But, what do data centers offer back to the community? They might sit in buildings that the public does not know are data centers. They may not offer that many jobs; the data center under discussion in DeKalb in the article cited above is a more than 2.3 million square foot facility on 505 acres that will employ 200 people. They are getting tax incentives.

Of course, this is the way the development game is played in the United States. If these deals are not cut, companies will claim they will go elsewhere and they can find more favorable conditions elsewhere. The new data center will end up in Iowa or a “business-friendly climate.” The tech companies are desired by many communities so they will get good offers.

More positively, part of Chicago’s strength over the decades is its position in key infrastructure. The center of important railroad routes. Busy airports. The convergence of commodities from the whole Midwest. The creation of financial instruments. And now data centers.

How many people want to buy the split-levels and Colonial Revivals that need rehabbing in higher-end Chicago suburbs?

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A look at women seeking homeownership suggests they might not be interested in many of the homes in more expensive Chicago suburbs:

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“They are not going to sacrifice,” Spaniak said. “They don’t have the time to rehab. And they want something newer, with quality, that expresses who they are.”

That’s a tall order that often isn’t in line with the split-levels and Colonial Revival houses common in higher-end Chicago suburbs. The scarcity of polished, modern houses in established suburbs further drives up the prices of the few houses that do meet that narrow criteria, Spaniak said.

This is an issue facing many suburban communities and potential homebuyers:

  1. Many existing homes do not have the features, finishes, or architecture preferred by homebuyers now.
  2. More mature suburbs have a limited number of newer homes as new construction is limited to small developments or teardowns.
  3. The housing prices in more expensive and mature suburbs are not that low that it will attract people drawn by fixer-uppers. The people who can buy and rehab homes in the wealthier suburbs have enough capital to buy in and fix or teardown the homes for a tidy profit.

Roughly five years ago, we were in a similar position looking for a larger home. Homes within our price range often needed updating or had disagreeable and unchangeable traits. The style of homes available fit into what is described above: split-levels, raised ranches, ranches, Colonials, and a few older structures. We had time and flexibility so it all worked out but I could see how the available options and at the particular prices available would frustrate some homebuyers.

The Chicago region has a lot of human capital…and the workers have a stronger work ethic?

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A recent article discusses the potential workers in the Chicago region and how hard they work:

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“Probably the strongest work ethic of laborers is the folks in the Midwest,” the Houston-based founder of SparrowHawk Real Estate Strategists said, definitely not rhyming. “They’re just, I don’t know what they put in the water there, but they’re hard workers. And so you’ve got a good labor force.”…

Illinois Manufacturing Association president and CEO Mark Denzler recalls a businesswoman who recently moved her small manufacturing operations of about 50-70 workers to Mississippi with the goal of saving on costs. She regrets the decision, he said…

“When I’m around the warehouse workers in the Midwest — Chicago and all these other Midwestern cities — they’re different than the folks in the southeast and the folks in the West Coast. They just have a different work ethic,” he said…

“It would be really hard. I’d be suspicious of anybody who said they can do it,” Bruno said. “But there is this strong experience with work in the Midwest that it’s part of your development. It’s connected to your health and well-being.”

Contrary to the final paragraph above, I bet this could be measured. But, what would it show? And how would workers in Boston or New York City or Atlanta or San Francisco respond to the argument that Chicago workers have a stronger work ethic? Or, within the Midwest and Rust Belt, how about workers in Milwaukee, Cleveland, or Pittsburgh?

This is part of a bigger narrative about Chicago. it is part of its character. Even as it is a global city with an important finance sector and many professional and white-collar workers, it imagines itself as a blue-collar city relying on manufacturing. The loss of manufacturing jobs in the last sixty years hit Chicago hard, as it did many cities, yet the narrative continues.

I would be interested in a more recent study that looks at how residents of the Chicago area think about the purported work ethic. Does the narrative hold across locations, groups, and occupations? Does the idea of “the city that works” extend throughout the region and different kinds of workers?

Chicago suburbs continue the fight against railroad mergers they say will negatively impact their communities

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This started years ago in response to the purchase of the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern Railway and continues now as eight Chicago suburbs challenge the potential merger of the Canadian Pacific and the Kansas City Southern railroads:

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Bartlett, Bensenville, Elgin, Itasca, Hanover Park, Roselle, Wood Dale and Schaumburg formed the Coalition to Stop CPKC last week in a bid to convince the board that the merger would bring so many additional trains to the Milwaukee West Line that it would dramatically alter life in their communities…

The merger would create the first single-line rail network linking the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The railroads filed the merger application in October.

Each of the eight suburbs conducted evaluations and determined what mitigations would be needed to protect their residents and businesses from the increase in freight traffic. Pileski said Roselle alone would need at least $30 million to create pathways and modify roads to get around the freight trains.

The coalition filing says the potential price tag for mitigations in all eight suburbs could reach $9.5 billion, and negate any benefit to the railroads.

Railroad traffic in many suburbs is viewed negatively due to an increase in blocked crossings or waiting for trains, more noise and pollution, and a disruption to a quiet suburban life. On the other hand, rail traffic helps deliver a lot of goods, can be more efficient than other shipping options, and might limit traffic – train or on roads – elsewhere.

In the larger picture of the Surface Transportation Board, where do the concerns of these 8 suburbs fit with other concerns or advantages regarding this potential merger?

In a region built in part on railroad transportation and that continues to see tremendous amounts of railroad freight traffic, it will be worth watching this outcome.

The presence of mobile homes in the Chicago area

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Remembering a small mobile home community not too far from the suburban home in which I grew up, I was interested to see numbers on how many mobile homes are in the Chicago region and read about the experiences of people living in mobile homes:

Yes, we do! It turns out hundreds of families live in Chicago’s only trailer park, Harbor Point Estates, which is in the far southeast corner of the city. It sits along the shores of Wolf Lake in the Hegewisch neighborhood, just off 134th Street. The community is so close to Indiana you can fly a kite there, a property manager says.

And beyond the city’s borders, there’s another 18,000 mobile homes in the seven-county metro area, according to estimates by regional planners. Mobile home communities are squeezed between expressways and plopped down in exurban cornfields, from the North Shore to Peotone…

Curious City got a question about trailer parks from a listener interested in affordable homeownership. “What is life like in Chicagoland trailer parks?” the listener wanted to know.

So we visited manufactured housing communities in Chicago, Blue Island and Des Plaines to ask residents that question. And we met people with a whole range of experiences. We found some who had moved to the trailer park as a way to make ends meet. We found families looking for peace and safety and a quiet place to raise their kids. We found residents who liked the trailer park because they could live near extended family — adult siblings, cousins — and others who’d adopted neighbors as extended family. We found people living in their familiar mobile home deep into old age. We found folks looking for a foothold to the American Dream.

Many suburban communities and urban neighborhoods would not want or approve mobile homes. As communities tend to prefer development (if they prefer any new development) that matches or exceeds the prices and styles of existing residences, mobile homes can be hard to find in metropolitan regions.

This also reminds me of sociologist Matthew Desmond’s findings about urban mobile home communities in Evicted. Such communities do exist, their landlords can and do make money, and residents in mobile home communities can face a number of issues.

Yet, because of their cost, they can be a housing option for many. Looking to address affordable housing in the Chicago region? Mobile homes could be part of a comprehensive answer.

(Bonus: the title of my published study on religious zoning in Chicago suburban contexts refers to someone saying that would prefer mobile homes nearby rather than a possible Islamic Center.)