Tag Archives: Chicago

Forgetting the railroad tracks in downtown Chicago when they are covered up by developments

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As Chicago grew at a rapid pace in the nineteenth century, the railroad lines that helped make the city largely converged in one place: the south bank of the Chicago River alongside Lake Michigan where goods could be loaded and unloaded for the city or for ships. A 1948 image on the Maggie Daley Park website gives some indication of the scene:

Later development of land, such as Millennium Park, helped eliminate and then cover up more of the tracks. And a new proposed development south of Grant Park may cover up more:

Even as city officials weigh other proposed megadevelopment deals in and near downtown, a Wisconsin developer who played a key role in building Ford Field in Detroit and rebuilding Lambeau Field in Green Bay is pitching another: a multibillion-dollar plan to deck over Metra Electric rail tracks west of Soldier Field to build a mix of residential, office and retail space.

Several sources close to the matter say a partnership headed by Wisconsin executive Bob Dunn has briefed City Hall and other officials on plans, set to be officially unveiled next month, to build over 34 acres of Metra Electric tracks and storage facilities just west of South Lake Shore Drive, from McFetridge Drive south to roughly 20th Street.

Air rights to build over the tracks were acquired more than 20 years ago by developer Gerald Fogelson, who built the huge Central Station residential complex just to the north, south and east of Roosevelt Road and Michigan Avenue. Fogelson had hoped to develop the adjacent air-rights property himself as a sort of a Central Station 2.0, and as late as 2015 he was looking for a partner, describing then a $3 billion long-term plan with 3,000 apartments and 500 hotel rooms.

But Fogelson’s plans never jelled, and a new group named Landmark Development has emerged, with Fogelson still involved but Dunn, who is president of Milwaukee-based Hammes, now serving as lead developer.

Few would argue that the railroad tracks downtown and along the lakefront contributed to a beautiful aesthetic. Between the noise and the sights, most residents and leaders would prefer to see buildings, parks, and water than tracks. But, I wonder if the continued covering of tracks and building on the air rights might help lead Chicagoans to forget both the historical and current importance of the railroads to Chicago.

As Chicago grew, the railroads helped Chicago become the center of the Midwest as commodities came in from north, west, and south and were turned around for the Chicago market or markets out East. (See Nature’s Metropolis for all the details.) Today, Chicago is still a railroad center with numerous important railroad lines and a lot of freight traffic. The move in recent years to relieve accidents, ensure on-time trains, and traffic congestion is to move more and more of the railroad traffic to the outskirts of the region.

It might be easy today in a world of smartphones to forget the basic railroad infrastructure that helps undergird Chicago and the country. Chicago itself has shifted away from a commodity based economy and joined the ranks of finance and corporate capitals (and done so successfully). Yet, the railroad will continue to be important for Chicago even if it is no longer visible in some of the city’s most iconic locations.

Still looking for innovative solutions to empty big box stores

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As some South Side Chicago residents lament the closing of two Target stores, the Chicago Tribune calls for the city of Chicago to follow the lead of other communities and find productive uses:

In Waukegan, Cristo Rey St. Martin College Prep, a Catholic school that serves mostly middle-income and minority students, refurbished an old Kmart for a modest $10 million. Architects added windows and skylights, flooding the space with natural light while economically redeploying the building’s existing features.

In Cleveland’s Collinwood community, the city bought an empty Big Lots store and turned it into a recreation center with fitness classes and an indoor water park.

Milwaukee lured a light manufacturing company to an abandoned Lowe’s store. In another part of the city, Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin opened a clinic inside a former Office Depot.

In Muncie, Ind., U-Haul opened an office and storage facility in a former Kmart.

Wisconsin Rapids, Wis., hosts a senior citizen resource center with adult day care in a former Walmart. You’d never know, looking at the creatively adapted space, that it once included a garden center and aisles of baby diapers and toys.

These are all good examples but it downplays the difficulty of the task at hand: everywhere from Manhattan to suburbs to small towns are dealing with empty retail and big box locations. Just a few of the issues at hand:

  1. Will the new use generate taxes in the same way as the retail use? Religious groups and community centers are not going to bring in similar monies even if they are helpful sites for the community.
  2. What will it cost to redevelop the property for other uses and who will pay that cost?
  3. Will neighbors always approve the new use? They moved next to what they thought was one thing and even the exit of a big box store may not automatically lead to a more desirable land use in their eyes.
  4. In the long run, how can a community overcome the loss of status and revenues from losing businesses? Again, community uses are good but many communities build their reputation on having businesses and certain revenues.

Perhaps one of the best answers to this issue is to not approve as many retail and big box uses in the first place or to require that the buildings be built or connected to surrounding neighborhoods in such ways that a new use would not be a major shift. The typical warehouse, strip mall, concrete box option surrounded by large parking lots is not easy to fix up.

Chicago’s clout extends to receiving more news coverage of cold even as Minneapolis was colder

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Despite concerns at times, Chicago is indeed a leading global city. This week suggests another way this might play out: the cold temperatures and wind chill in Chicago received a lot of media attention while the colder temperatures in Minnesota and north of Chicago received less.

 

There are several ways to think about this:

  1. People expect Minnesota and places north of Chicago to be colder so when they are extremely cold, this is less noteworthy.
  2. Fewer people live in the cities north of Chicago so the cold affects fewer people.
  3. Chicago is a much higher-status city and any news in Chicago is going to outweigh news in Minneapolis.

Perhaps all of these factors may be at play and interrelated. Reasons #2 and #3 are connected: Chicago has a higher status in part because of its larger population. Similarly, leading global cities tend not to be located too far north or south (connecting reasons #1 and #3).

This may help Chicagoland residents feel better about the severe cold: people throughout the United States and even the world note the cold you are experiencing because of your city’s status.

Confronting and remembering Chicago’s 1919 race riots

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It can be hard for American communities to acknowledge bad moments in their past. Numerous museums in Chicago are planning to help the city and region think about the 1919 race riots one hundred years later:

One hundred years ago this summer, a black teen on a raft crossed an imaginary line into a “white” section of a Lake Michigan beach, was stoned by white bathers and drowned. The interracial battle on city streets that followed caused 38 deaths and set the stage for decades of segregation, discrimination and civic dysfunction.

Yet if you search the city for a commemoration of the Chicago Race Riots, as the events of July 1919 are known, you’ll find just one small marker, according to organizers of an upcoming series of events. Along the lakefront near 29th Street, affixed to a boulder there is a plaque — funded by suburban high school students — that says, “Dedicated to All the Victims of the Race Riot That Began Near This Place.”

The city’s collective neglect of this dark and seminal moment in its history is a topic that the Newberry Library and 13 other Chicago institutions hope to address with the yearlong project “Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots,” an initiative that the partners in the project will announce formally next week.

The goal is to use seminars, film, spoken word performance and even a bicycle tour to help “understand a history that frankly has been forgotten, has purposely not been remembered and certainly has not been commemorated,” said Liesl Olson, director of Chicago studies at the independent research library. “Most historians are kind of appalled by how little is discussed about this moment. There’s a lot of shame in it, really.”

My own research in suburban communities suggests this neglect of certain past events is often deliberate misremembering, particularly when these events involve race. Typically, a community’s history is presented as a collection of high points: the area was settled, the community was founded, good things happened here, here, and here, and all this helped make the great community we have today. Yet, communities are often shaped by negative events, moments involving conflict, disagreement, and even violence. Chicago’s engagement with race involves many of these moments and these exhibits have the ability to suggest much of that later activity – think bombings when blacks moved into white neighborhoods, riots in poor neighborhoods in the 1960s, virulent reactions to MLK marching in Chicago in 1966 – has its roots in the 1919 riots. The true measure of a year of exhibits may be how much the future retellings of Chicago’s history includes the 1919 riots as an important moment.

Other cities learned from Chicago’s privatization of parking meters

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Failures in one city can help other cities learn what not to do:

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel aggressively pushed to privatize 311 in 2015, telling journalists it would save the city “about a million dollars a year” to run the system using contractors. Hiring an outside operator would save the city from shouldering the cost of sorely needed improvements to a 20-year-old system, he suggested.

City officials weren’t thrilled at the idea. A famously unpleasant privatization effort was still in people’s minds. About 10 years ago, Chicago made an 80-year deal to pass control over its parking meters to a private firm in exchange for a $1.2 billion lump sum. The firm promptly made more than half that lump sum in revenue for itself—and still has 70 years of returns. (I wrote about this in WIRED last year.)

But that parking meter deal has been remarkably generative: It has dampened enthusiasm for privatization in cities around the country. Left to its own rational profit-making devices, a private company will systematically squeeze services to the bare minimum and avoid additional investments. That’s fine for margins, but not always great for the public.

And so when Emanuel proposed privatizing 311, scores of Chicago aldermen felt emboldened to fight.

At least other cities and Chicago now think twice before privatizing certain services. This could also lead to at least a few interesting interesting research questions:

  1. Part of the pitch for privatization was increased efficiency. Would more reluctance for such deals hold back cities in certain ways?
  2. How have private companies shifted their efforts now that cities may be wiser about making such deals? I assume this means that profit margins on such deals are smaller…

Deep Tunnel as the wrong solution to water issues (plus alternative uses)

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Henry Grabar poses an interesting question: what if the Deep Tunnel project, one of the largest civil engineering feats in the world, does not solve flooding and stormwater issues in the Chicago region?

What if Chicago took a wrong turn in 1972 when, in the spirit of civic grandee Daniel Burnham (“Make no little plans”), it opted to build the world’s largest sewers instead of making all possible efforts to keep rainwater out of them? Scott Bernstein, the founder of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, says that the Deep Tunnel imposed a massive opportunity cost because the city and the district did little else to adapt. The MWRD spent billions on what engineers call “gray infrastructure” (pipes, tanks, pumps) and virtually nothing on “green infrastructure”: rain barrels, detention ponds, green roofs, porous pavements, and other adaptations that would have kept water out of the system…

The project proceeded regardless. Even with downsized reservoirs and a longer time frame, Chicago’s ambition captured the attention of civil engineers around the world. Today, most U.S. cities whose combined sewer overflows are governed by consent decrees with the EPA are working on Chicago-style digs. St. Louis, which has the fourth-largest sewer system in the country, is under a consent decree to commit $4.7 billion to ending its overflows through deep tunnels…

While engineers’ penchant for megaprojects endures, some American cities are preaching deterrence. If Chicago built a bathtub, Philadelphia is trying to transform itself into a sponge with park space, street trees, and permeable pavement. The city is spending $2.4 billion to implement the nation’s largest green infrastructure plan, an experiment that positions it as the anti-Chicago. The city thinks keeping water out of the system will save billions of dollars compared to a rejected tunnel proposal—and that green initiatives will produce positive externalities, like improving air quality and creating verdant streets.

In Chicago, meanwhile, the MWRD has committed to creating just 10 million gallons of green infrastructure capacity under its EPA consent decree. Compare that to neighboring Milwaukee, a deep-tunnel city that now believes its green infrastructure will, by 2035, surpass the capacity of the tunnels and hold up to 740 million gallons of rain where it falls.

Hindsight may always be a little tricky in these cases as we have the advantage now of being able to see the Deep Tunnel project in action. Does it actually accomplish its goals? Was all the spent money worth it? At the same time, a project of this magnitude should have generated plenty of discussion and at least a few alternative options.

If Deep Tunnel does not work as intended or does not solve all of the flooding and stormwater problems, I wonder if it could be used in other ways. I’m thinking of other major infrastructure projects that have been reversed or reused, like urban highways that are torn out (like in Boston or San Francisco) or former railroad lines turned parks or recreation areas (think the High Line). Some other options for the Deep Tunnel:

  1. Underground roads. With Elon Musk’s Boring Company working on underground roads plus Chicago’s legacy of Lower Wacker Drive, perhaps traffic could be rerouted deep underground.
  2. Underground freight movement. Given Chicago’s railroad bottleneck, this could be an interesting solution.
  3. An underground park and recreation area. It would certainly be unique. Think a combination of spelunking, rock climbing, and exploration.
  4. A military installation and testing area.

Gautreaux remediation may end soon in Chicago

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Filed in the 1960s, decided in the 1970s, and with remediation lasting decades, a case involving a class-action lawsuit charging racial discrimination in public housing in Chicago may end in 2024:

The Chicago Housing Authority and lawyers representing CHA residents have asked U.S. District Judge Marvin Aspen to approve the agreement creating a road map for the CHA to complete its obligations under the so-called Gautreaux litigation.

Under the plan, the nearly 53-year-old case would come to a close by July 2024, marking an end to a landmark chapter in the national civil rights movement.

The settlement agreement provides a detailed timeline for the CHA to complete all planned mixed-income units and strengthen its housing voucher program to better enable families to move to more affluent areas if they choose to do so…

The lawsuit changed the face of public housing by instituting “scattered site” projects built on a small scale and dispersed in neighborhoods throughout the city — a stark contrast to the high-rise buildings constructed in the 1950s and 1960s.

This important lawsuit and ruling has both had significant effects on how policymakers have addressed concentrated poverty (more emphasis on scattering poor residents) as well as likely had limited effects because of the limited number of poor residents who have had and taken advantage of new opportunities to live in wealthier communities.

What is also striking about this is that the era of large-scale public housing and its associations with concentrated poverty are likely over. Hopefully, this does not mean less attention is paid to residential segregation and affordable housing issues but it is easier for the general public to ignore problems that are less visible.

Yahoo News leads with Chicago murders and then says it is not the murder capital

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If the point of a news story/video is to say something is not true, would you lead with the data from the not true side?

ChicagoMurderCapital121818.png

Here is the way this seems to work: grab your attention with a publicly available statistic that stands out. Oh my, how could there be so many murders in one city?? But, several sentences later, tell the reader/viewer that multiple other cities have a higher murder rate. And include in the last sentence that the murder number in Chicago has been down in recent years. So, wait: Chicago really isn’t the murder capital?

I’m trying to figure out how this adds to the public discourse. Here are a few possibilities:

  1. It is simply about clicks. Get people’s attention with a statistic and a video, throw in some data. Easy to produce, not much content.
  2. The goal is to highlight the still-high number of murders in Chicago.
  3. The goal is to point out that other cities actually experience more murders per capita.
  4. To give those who teach statistics an example of how data can be twisted and/or used without telling much of a story.

 

Comparing 4 years to finish rebuilding a major interchange to other major undertakings

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After the Illinois Department of Transportation recently announced construction on the Jane Byrne will take four more years, the Chicago Tribune compared this time frame to other tasks:

Two world wars were fought and won in less time. Rows of skyscrapers went up in less time. The transformation of Navy Pier, less time. New Comiskey Park, less time. Dan Ryan reconstruction, less time. Millennium Park, less time. The Deep Tunnel Project — oh, wait. That engineering feat began in the mid-1970s and isn’t expected to be completed until 2029. Somebody, go pick on them…

Still, four years is a long delay. Especially for a network so central to Chicago. We’ll never understand why IDOT didn’t order more intense work or bigger crews around the clock and on weekends. Let’s just say that if Gov.-elect J.B. Pritzker shares Emanuel’s devotion to penalties and accountability, he’ll make new friends by the thousands.

Is this part of a larger trend of major infrastructure projects today running over schedule and over budget? There are hints yet people are unlikely to hear much about or celebrate projects that are completed on time and near budget.

Comparing the completion time to other projects may not be fair. Some of these sites were closed or not in use when the construction happened. Some happened with some private money at play. Others had more space to work with. Doing the work when the state and other taxing bodies had more money (or were less worried about debt) could help. And World Wars have their own logic compared to construction projects. (That said, I am still amazed how much the United States was able to mobilize and produce in a roughly 5 year span during World War II. Such devotion to the war mission led to unbelievable change.)

Would it simply be better for the Chicago region to accept a Carmageddon week where the interchange is closed and all the possible crews are brought in for 24 hour shifts for that time to rush work forward? Find a week with less traffic, probably a summer week, and give drivers plenty of notice about other options (ranging from mass transit to alternative highways, such as I-294, that can route traffic around the center of the city). Suffer short-term pain, make some serious progress, and show that efforts are underway to reduce the long-term burden of the interchange construction.