Tag Archives: Chicago

The one man behind mapping the changing boundaries of Chicago neighborhoods

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WBEZ argued in November 2012 that one mapmaker is responsible for delineating the changing boundaries of Chicago’s 100+ neighborhoods:

Actually, many of Chicago’s neighborhoods are being updated and labeled by one man: Christopher Devane, a local mapmaker and president of Big Stick, Inc., a Naperville-based publisher.
Devane has been making neighborhood maps for the last decade and plans further updates as the city’s neighborhoods evolve.
But this is where things get a bit tricky. Devane claims the city has been copying his neighborhood borders (without his permission), beginning around 2005.
By surveying residents on the changing boundaries and the names used within them, Devane has essentially been doing what the Department of Planning did in 1978 when it conducted citywide interviews to create a map. But because the city hasn’t done such a survey in decades, Devane (a lifelong Chicagoan) has picked up the slack.

I would think the city would want to be more involved here in “officially” setting the boundaries, at least for attracting visitors and tourist dollars. Additionally, aren’t there any sociologists or other academics looking beyond the 77 official community areas (mostly set since the 1920s)?

All of this highlights the dynamic nature of neighborhoods. It can be easier to try to rely on fixed geographic boundaries but social life doesn’t necessarily always follow these. People can move, interact with people across boundaries, and change their collective perceptions of their own neighborhoods and those of others.

Illinois the first Midwest state to have majority of minority students in public schools

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New data shows that Illinois for the first time has a majority of minority students in the state’s public schools:

Whites fell to 49.76 percent of the student body this school year, the new data show, a demographic tipping point that came after years of sliding white enrollment and a rise in Latino, Asian and multiracial students.

The black student population also has declined, but it still makes up almost 18 percent of the state’s public school students…

If those numbers hold, Illinois would be one of a dozen states — and the first in the Midwest — to have a school system in which minority students are in the majority, according to the most recent federal education data. Included in that category are Western and Southern states with large Latino or black populations, as well as the District of Columbia, according to the National Center for Education Statistics…

Illinois’ diverse student population doesn’t match the diversity of its teaching staff. Based on 2012 state data, 83 percent of Illinois’ public school teachers are white.

This is a relatively common thing in the United States today though it is unusual for it to happen to a Midwestern state. Relative to whites, minority populations in the United States have been growing.

One way this happens is through immigration. This is a reminder that although certain states are associated with immigration – places like California, Texas, Florida – immigration is closely tied to big cities. Here are some bits from a 2012 Census report looking at foreign-born populations in the 2010 Census:

While the foreign born resided in every state in 2010, over half lived in just four states: California, New York, Texas, and Florida. Over one-fourth of the total foreign-born population lived in California…
In 14 states and the District of Columbia, the percentage of foreign born was equal to or greater than the national average of 13 percent. With the exception of Texas, Florida, and Illinois, these states were primarily in the western and northeastern parts of the country.
With the exception of Illinois (14 percent), the percentage of foreign born in all states of the Midwest region was below 8 percent, including North Dakota and South Dakota, each with about 3 percent.

The Chicago region draws a large amount of immigrants and drew a large number of black migrants during the early 1900s in the Great Migration. Without the draw of jobs and opportunities in Chicago, the demographics of Illinois children today might look much more like Iowa or Wisconsin.

Experts suggest Illinois has no chance of landing Boeing plant

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The State of Illinois may be putting on a hopeful face but experts suggest Illinois has little to no chance of enticing Boeing to open a new plant in the state:

But Richard Aboulafia, a longtime aircraft industry analyst, is among industry watchers who don’t believe Illinois has a chance.

“Zero, zilch, nada. Worst (possible location) I’ve heard yet, apologies to Illinois,” he said.

The state, he said, has almost no aerospace production or workforce with industry experience and has a heavy, strong union presence unlikely to appeal to Boeing as it goes through tense labor negotiations in Washington.

Illinois is also short on several requirements Boeing wants any new home to provide, aerospace industry consultant Scott Hamilton of Leeham Co. said…

Those requirements include a site adjacent to a “major international airport,” one with a runway at least 9,000 feet long, according to a copy of the company’s site selection criteria obtained by The Associated Press…

The area around O’Hare has almost no available land, said Brent Pollina, vice president of Pollina Corporate Real Estate in suburban Chicago.

Boeing also wants 300-400 acres of land “at no cost, or very low cost,” and buildings totaling several million square feet under the same or similar terms.

Without offering details, the company says it would like its corporate income tax, property tax and other taxes to be “significantly reduced.”

While Boeing is asking a lot (leading to a very good question of how much states or local governments should give up to entice companies), it doesn’t sound like Illinois has much to offer for this new plant. In a global age, the headquarters of Boeing may be in Chicago but that doesn’t mean a new plant has to be anywhere near it.

This offer to Boeing should also lead to broader conversations about what Illinois does offer, not including tax breaks and financial deals, compared to other states. Chicago and the surrounding region is likely the biggest asset with a global city (particularly financially), plenty of educated employees, other important companies and organizations, and a central location in the United States with the necessary transportation infrastructure (airports, railroads, highways, and water access). Illinois has lots of space outside the Chicago area and some rich farmland. The whole state is centrally located and has access both to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. But, is Illinois perceived as good for business? How do its assets line up with those of other states?

Chicago’s once-thriving streetcar system

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Like many American big cities, Chicago once had a large streetcar system:

Those cable cars were preceded by horse-drawn streetcars, which began service in 1859, and were replaced by electric-powered trolleys, beginning in 1890. By the mid-1930s, 3,742 streetcars were running on tracks laid along 529 miles of streets in a grid that provided Chicagoans a streetcar stop within a few blocks of where they lived, worked or shopped. Trolley wires extended into vast areas of the Northwest, Southeast and Southwest sides far from the nearest “L,” making it the adventurous Chicagoan’s system of choice for exploration…

For their part, aldermen and legislators knew the value of changing a “no” to a “yes” vote on a streetcar-line franchise. Each innovation in motive power brought with it safety concerns, upon which politicians could hang a price tag for overcoming their reservations.

The advantage of streetcars compared to the “L” or railroads, both of which helped make Chicago famous, was that it could cover more land and fill in the development gaps between the more infrastructure intensive types of transportation. While the streetcars were eventually replaced by cars, which could serve the same function and allow drivers more independence and privacy, streetcars helped kick off mass suburbanization in the late 1800s.

See more about Chicago streetcars here on this page about Chicago Surface Lines which operated Chicago’s streetcars until 1947. According to this, Chicago had quite the system that quickly went from peak to bust:

The continuous reorganization was finally completed by the Unification Ordinance of 1913, which stipulated that all lines would come under the management of a single operating association called the Chicago Surface Lines (CSL), and unified operations commenced in 1914. Four companies formed the CSL: the Chicago Railways Company, Chicago City Railway, Calumet and South Chicago Railway, and Southern Street Railway. At this time, Chicago had the largest street railway system, the longest one-fare ride, the longest average ride, and the most liberal transfer privileges in the world.

The 1920s saw continued growth despite the increasing competition from the automobile, and while the 1933-1934 World’s Fair and wartime demand supported ridership, the underlying companies were bankrupt. Creditors’ bills were filed against the Chicago Railways in 1926 and the Chicago City Railway and Calumet and South Chicago in 1930, resulting in the appointment of receivers and bringing their property into the custody of the Federal District Court. In 1944, the proceedings were converted to those under the Bankruptcy Act, and trustees were appointed. By 1958, the Chicago Transit Authority, which took over the Chicago Surface Lines in 1947, had abandoned the remaining trolley lines, which were “bustituted.” Before that, CSL had introduced gasoline buses for light routes in 1927,and trolley buses to the northwest side starting in 1930.

In Crabgrass Frontiers, a classic on American suburbanization, historian Kenneth Jackson gives reasons for the decline of streetcars: the automobile started taking away customers and many streetcar lines were locked into municipal contracts that didn’t allow them to raise fares even as they needed money to maintain infrastructure and compete with the automobile.

Why is Midway nowhere close to the food options of O’Hare?

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Eater rates the restaurants at O’Hare and Midway Airports and it isn’t even close: O’Hare is a lot better. Here is the top 8 at O’Hare:

1. Tortas Frontera;  2. Wicker Park Sushi Bar; 3. Wolfgang Puck Cafe; 4. Berghoff Cafe; 5. La Tapenade; 6. Big Bowl; 7. Beaudevin; 8. Garrett Popcorn.

City institutions plus big names at O’Hare. In contrast, the top 8 at Midway seem like what you would find at a shopping mall food court:

1. Manny’s; 2. Potbelly; 3. Pegasus on the Fly; 4. Harry Caray’s Seventh Inning Stretch; 5. Lalo’s; 6. Gold Coast Dogs; 7. Reilly’s Daughter

Perhaps there are some good reasons for this like more passengers at O’Hare (the 6th most passengers in the world), more space at O’Hare (more and bigger terminals plus more passengers provides more room for restaurants while Midway has one food court and then some scattered small options), and a wider range of passengers at O’Hare (Southwest dominates Midway, more first-class and international passengers at O’Hare). One way to boost Midway’s profile would be to improve these food options. It is the smaller airport and has more budget flight options but it was the first passenger airport in Chicago and has a unique place as such an urban airport in a global city.

But, knowing that this is Chicago, I wonder how much food contracts differ between the two airports. Even as O’Hare is more lucrative, why doesn’t Midway have any major name or food choice? Harry Carey’s might have the biggest name recognition (ironic it is located in the South Side airport) but it isn’t exactly known in the restaurant world for great food. Is there something odd about how restaurants at these airports are chosen?

Chicago region produces 4th most Peace Corps volunteers

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Here is one sign of civic virtue: the Chicago metropolitan area compares well in producing Peace Corps volunteers.

Chicago, including Naperville and Joliet, again this year ranks among the top metropolitan areas for producing Peace Corps volunteers. Currently, 239 Peace Corps volunteers call Chicagoland home, making it the fourth-highest-producing metro area nationwide in 2013.

Illinois also ranks among the top states for Peace Corps volunteers. With 300 residents now serving overseas, Illinois is No. 6 among all states and No. 1 in the Midwest.

This looks good – though Chicago is the third largest metropolitan area in the United States and ranks fourth on this list. If these figures are correct, I imagine there are some politicians who would enjoy using this data for their purposes…

Social network analysis of Chicago violence show differences in risk, differences compared to Boston

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Read a summary of recent research by sociologist Andrew Papachristos about social networks and violence in Chicago:

Take, for instance, a 2013 paper, published with Yale colleague Christopher Wilderman in the American Journal of Public Health. It’s set in a community in Chicago with a litany of familar risk factors: half of all households were led by a single female; 43 percent of the 82,000 residents had less than a high-school education; a third of households were below the poverty line. And the homicide rate, over the five years of the study, was 55.2 per 100,000, about four times the citywide rate (Daniel Hertz’s maps of homicide rates by police district are a good way of putting that in context; it’s high.)…

Simply being arrested during this period increases the aggregate homicide rate by nearly 50%, but being in a network component with a homicide victim increases the homicide rate by a staggering 900% (from 55.2 to 554.1)…

Even in this extremely abstracted form, from a third paper by Papachristos you can see a remarkable contrast between gang violence in Chicago and Boston. Each node is a gang; each line is a homicide or shooting; each bidirectional line is a reciprocal homicide…

Chicago’s social network of homicide is a knotty mess: 98 percent of all Chicago gangs were connected within the city’s homicide network during that timeframe, 32 percent higher than Boston’s shooting network. The network density of black gangs in Chicago is particularly intense, 30 percent compared to 4.5 percent for Latino gangs…

And a place to start for gathering more data—as Papachristos points out, his analysis is limited to people doing bad things. Robert Sampson, the Harvard (by way of Chicago) sociologist, has done pioneering work, most recently in his book Great American City, showing how positive social networks reduce crime and improve public-health outcomes in socially-organized neighborhoods like Chatham. Another possible implication is figuring out what kinds of networks “inoculate” people from violence.

Looks like a good summary of some interesting research. On one hand, this should be reassuring to the public: the perception is that crime rates in Chicago are out of control (even as they have declined in Chicago over the years and in many American cities) yet much of the violent crime is in the hands of a relatively small group of people. On the other hand, the density of violence in Chicago suggests there are some serious issues in particular social interactions and locations that are not easy to solve.

I’m also reminded of the work of sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh who has argued in several books that gangs in Chicago as well as more informal black market networks might be considered “efficient” or “rational” in what they do because of a lack of legitimate opportunities in poor neighborhoods. Whereas legal businesses might seek the best way to make profits, social networks in disadvantaged neighborhoods make do with what they have, even if the means are not legitimate. This doesn’t condone violence or other illegal behavior but Venkatesh’s work shows these aren’t haphazard or chaotic social networks and interactions.

Is there an invisible wall keeping $1 million homes east of Western Avenue in Chicago?

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One person in Chicago real estate argues $1 million homes on Chicago’s North Side stay east of Western Avenue.

It’s as if there is an invisible wall running through the middle of Chicago, along Western Avenue all the way south of Montrose. When buyers of million dollar homes specify their search criteria they will often specify that they want to stay east of Western Avenue – or if they specify Ukrainian Village, Bucktown, Wicker Park, Roscoe Village, or St. Ben’s those neighborhoods technically stop at Western Avenue so again you are staying east of Western. And it almost doesn’t matter anyway because over the last 7 years there have been very few homes above $1 MM for sale west of Western anyway as you can see in the map below. It’s pretty dramatic isn’t it?

What could be behind this?

Well, for one you are typically getting further away from public transportation options as you move west. But then again public transportation isn’t really that much more accessible just east of Western than it is just west of Western. If you can’t walk to the el stop in 10 minutes in January you may not feel like you have good access to public transportation regardless of which side of Western you live on.

The other thing that happens as you cross Western Avenue is that you cross into a few lower income census tracts. For example if you look at the heat map from RichBlocksPoorBlocks.com you will see that there are are a few sections of Western Avenue where the median household income drops pretty dramatically as you cross the street. In the map below as the color transitions to darker green median household income goes up and as it transitions to darker red it goes down. From Fullerton to Armitage the median income is $66K on the east side of the street but $35K on the west side of the street. And from Armitage to Bloomingdale it’s $107K vs. $66K. And then from Division to Chicago it’s $67K vs. $42K.

Might this change in the future?

There is no question that eventually the area west of Western will become populated with million dollar plus homes but at that point the disparity between the east and west sides of the street may persist and the east side may just be populated with homes priced well above $1 MM. And, regardless, it looks like that day is still several years into the future. In the meantime, if you are willing to be a pioneer you can definitely find cheaper living just a couple of blocks further west.

My interpretation: neighborhoods west of Western Avenue aren’t trendy or gentrifying yet and have different demographics. In other words, there isn’t demand yet among the creative class or young professionals for nicer housing west of Western.

This could lead to some discussion about the limits of gentrification on Chicago’s north side. Just how much can it expand? What happens when it moves out of hipper neighborhoods and comes up against more lower-class or non-white neighborhoods? Right now, there are some gentrifiers who want to live on that edge between the expensive homes and poorer neighborhoods, places they might consider more gritty or authentic. But, would large numbers of people move further west? And are there enough of them? (This, of course, doesn’t even consider the negative effects of gentrification which include making housing more unaffordable, a problem in a region that needs much more affordable housing, and white residents pushing out non-white residents.)

Anger directed at urban cyclists and city bike lanes really about fears that younger Americans don’t want sprawling suburbs?

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Complaints about urban biking and new bike lanes might be less about biking and more about what younger Americans don’t want: the sprawling suburbs.

All this sounds like a nightmare scenario if you live in the suburbs. Gas prices rise and housing prices fall, eating into liquid capital and equity. Families with the ability to move return back to the city, depressing housing prices even further. Declining property tax revenues and a fleeing upper-middle-class undermine previously excellent schools. At best, suburbanites take a huge hit on depreciating houses; at worst, they’re stranded in decaying neighborhoods, cut off by isolating new infrastructure…That’s where I see an undercurrent of Millennial resentment (we’ll spot Kass a decade or so on “grunge;” when you’re out across the county line, the news travels slower). The boomers escaped cities in decline, investing sweat equity earned in office parks into a house and two cars, the gas taxes they paid into epic interchanges, and their high property taxes into excellent schools.

And the little bastards who went to those excellent schools don’t want that inheritance. They want to ride their car shares from their rented apartments to mass transit, making the last-mile commute on shared bikes (they don’t even own bikes!) to virtual startups in work-share spaces.

From the perspective of postwar America, it looks like a whole lot of nothing, an unsettled and rootless future. Where they’re going, they don’t need… roads…

But it’s the future we’re being promised by a lot of people in position to make it happen, who threaten to reverse—to invert—what their parents spent a lifetime building. It’s scary, and not just on a merely economic level. And the people out there who are so angry about it aren’t just trying to outrun a few three-speed, step-through shared bikes; they’re trying to outrun the future, and you’re in the way.

Moser is arguing the bike lanes are just a sign of bigger trends at work, as suggested in books like The Great Inversion and The End of the Suburbs. This is really about a changed way of life, a different way of thinking about the American Dream, trading suburban spaces for new iPhones and exciting urban experiences the creative class desires. I think Moser is right to be skeptical; these changes will take time as well as a lot of collective action. At the same time, there is a lot of conversation about denser suburbs and returning to cities. Of course, this doesn’t mean such moves solve all the problems; there are still plenty of poor urban neighborhoods and suburbs that are left behind in the movement of what might be largely middle- to upper-class residents who can afford these changes.

How much irony is there here that the suburbs might have actually provided the “unsettled and rootless future” that younger Americans may now not want? Think about classic suburban critiques like American Beauty or the Arcade Fire album The Suburbs. The suburbs were viewed by many as the places to escape the problems of the city – everything from corrupt morality, dirtiness (factories, pollution, horses in the street everywhere, etc.), new populations – and yet the suburbs clearly have their own problems.

Height battle between Willis Tower and One World Trade Center reveals each city’s insecurities

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One World Trade Center may have been officially declared the tallest building in the United States but one writer argues the debate is really about Chicago’s and New York City’s insecurities:

What this whole thing really measures isn’t the size of a pair of buildings—it’s the size of each city’s insecurity. New York has its hollow confidence, and Chicago has its inferiority complex. Each is painful, but both can be soothed by the balm of the biggest building. Helpful reminder: The reason that Western Hemisphere asterisk has to be applied to the Willis / World Trade debate is because, among the tallest buildings worldwide, these two barely make the top 10.

The tallest building thing is just a stand-in for the real question: Which is the better city? You’ll need a different kind of Council on Urban Habitat to really get to the bottom of that.

Which is the better city? New York City is consistently ranked as the #1 global city. New York has more glamor, more of the global financial industry, more people than other cities in the United States, and one of the most impressive concentrations of people, buildings, and wealth in Manhattan. Chicago has its place as the quintessential American city (from its explosive growth in the late 1800s, its place as a transportation hub, the birthplace of numerous financial industry and commodity trade inventions, and its contrasts of wealth and poverty) and architecture.

But, all places have imperfections. See an earlier post about Chicago’s insecurities. And, it also depends on which other cities are in the comparisons: New York City is commonly compared to the world’s greatest cities including London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Chicago, on the other hand, contends with two larger U.S. cities (including Los Angeles, a city that doesn’t seem to get caught up in these debates) and perhaps the next tier of global cities.

How exactly a building settles these concerns is beyond me. As the article notes, there are other buildings around the world – in some that rank lower on the scale of global cities, places like Dubai, Mecca, and Shenzhen – that are as tall or taller.