Tag Archives: Chicago

Considering what the “green Loop” might look like

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Amidst talk of eco-cities, a Chicago architectural firm has put together a plan to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent within Chicago’s Loop. How to accomplish this: retrofit older buildings rather than building a lot of new, green buildings.

The architects break what they call the Central Loop into four types of buildings: heritage buildings (1880-1945), which are clad in heat-absorbing masonry and have operable windows; midcentury modern buildings (1945-75), which hog energy due to their vast expanses of glass and heavy reliance on air conditioning; post-energy-crisis buildings (1975-2000), which show greater energy-efficiency but are burdened by an unanticipated rise in computer use; and energy-conscious buildings (2000-present), which continue to improve efficiency but are in relatively short supply.

That brings us to the heart of the matter: The key to cutting pollution isn’t building new green buildings. There simply aren’t enough of them to make a difference. The only way to lower our carbon footprint is to make the buildings we already have more energy-efficient.

That’s possible, as evidenced by the recent transformation of the Merchandise Mart, the massive yet graceful Art Deco commercial and trade show building along the Chicago River. At 4.2 million gross square feet, it’s one of the world’s largest buildings. By taking a variety of steps — from installing energy-saving water pumps to promoting eco-friendly products to the building’s tenants — the Mart cut its overall energy consumption by 21 percent from 2006 to 2010, executives there say.

I wonder how this plan would be received by businesses and building owners. While they suggest energy costs will decrease in the long run and rents may increase, such retrofitting could be costly in the short-term and there could be some anxiety about doing these things in the middle of a tough real estate and business market.

And how much would the City of Chicago really get behind this? Mayor Daley has drawn plaudits in the past for promoting ideas like rooftop gardens but these are limited in number. The City itself faces significant financial troubles in the coming years and I imagine issues like jobs, pensions, crime and the number of police in the streets, will dominate conversations for a while.

I would enjoy seeing their charts or models to see which particular buildings in the Loop use more or less energy. The picture that leads this report on the plan probably shows carbon emissions or energy use by building.

MLK in Chicago

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While many of the tributes to Martin Luther King, Jr. talk about the important marches and speeches in the early 1960s regarding civil rights (and the subsequent legislation), the last three years of King’s life are less well-known. Having grown up in the Chicago area, I was not aware that King spent a significant amount of time in Chicago in 1966 until I was doing some research in recent years. The Encyclopedia of Chicago has a brief summary:

But in the summer of 1965, the nature of King’s connection to Chicago changed. Responding to requests from local civil rights forces, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) joined the fight against school superintendent Benjamin Willis and Chicago’s segregated public schools. By the fall, SCLC had allied with the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations to launch a campaign to end slums in the city, which would become known as the Chicago Freedom Movement.

King relied on his lieutenant James Bevel to energize the first phases of the campaign, but in January 1966 he captured national headlines when he moved his family into a dingy apartment in the West Side ghetto. It was not until June that King and his advisors, under pressure to produce results, settled on a focus for the Chicago movement. King himself participated in two dramatic marches into all-white neighborhoods during a two-month open-housing campaign during the summer of 1966. These fair-housing protests brought real estate, political, business, and religious leaders to the conference table for “summit” negotiations.

In late August, King and Mayor Richard J. Daley announced that an agreement had been reached: the marches would stop, while city leaders promised to promote fair housing. King hoped that the “summit” accord would be an important step toward making Chicago an open city, but black militants denounced the settlement and the Daley administration never fulfilled its promises.

Several things are notable about this effort:

1. This was a large-scale movement in the North. Most depictions of the Civil Rights Movement imply that all the action or the problems that needed to be solved were in the South. This was not the case then or now. Indeed, measures of housing segregation show that the most segregated cities in terms of race are still in the North.

2. Even with the passing of Civil Rights legislation, this issue of housing discrimination and segregation is one that has plagued America. While the housing discrimination of today is less overt than that of the past (exclusionary zoning, differential treatment, and high prices today vs. redlining, blockbusting, and restrictive covenants in the past), King’s efforts are notable. Of his efforts in Chicago, King said something like “if we can solve the issue of housing in Chicago, we can solve it anywhere.” Chicago was notorious then for its segregation and this is still the case today.

3. Perhaps we don’t hear about these issues from King’s later years, such as housing or his thoughts about Vietnam or his efforts on behalf of labor, because they don’t seem to have clear solutions. Civil rights is an issue that seemed to have been solved with the Civil Rights Acts (though this isn’t quite the case). But housing is a long-standing concern in many cities and metropolitan areas. Viewpoints on Vietnam are still mixed and get brought up again in discussions of current wars.

4. This part of Chicago’s history is not one that is widely talked about. King and his followers led numerous marches in 1966 that were met with much resistance, particularly when marching in white neighborhoods. Chicago and the region has a longer history of negative incidents: one, in particular, in Cicero in the 1950s is often cited as a black family who moved into an apartment was met by an angry mob (including many housewives) who firebombed the apartment building. As the Encyclopedia entry suggested, the older Mayor Daley did meet with King but didn’t follow through on his promises. These sorts of moments are often scrubbed or ignored in history as they don’t reflect too favorably on communities. At the same time, we need to know about these to help understand the present reality.

Quick Review: The Devil in the White City

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I’m not sure what took so long for me to read The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. I have had it on my shelf for years and it revolves around the 1893 Columbian exposition in Chicago, a topic that is greatly appealing to me. Here are some thoughts about this book that tells the story of both violence and urban history:

1. The setting of the Columbian Exposition is fascinating. The amount of planning and work that had to be carried out in order to transform Jackson Park, then a outlying and relatively unimproved area on the South Side of Chicago, was tremendous. There are certain moments in history that I wish I could have been a part of: attending this fair at its peak (late summer/early fall 1893) would have been fantastic.

2. I’m less certain that the mixing of these two stories, a murderer named Holmes plus the building and holding of this fair, was done well. Early on in the book, we know that Holmes is a murderer and the details trickle out throughout the rest of the text. This is a difficult task to accomplish: it is hard to be a murder story when we already know who did it. But Holmes’ particular story and end is still intriguing. I’m not sure exactly what the contrast between these two stories is supposed to be: the best of human accomplishment (the exposition) plus the darkest part of humanity (Holmes)? The murder illustrates the difficult settings in which the exposition had to be organized? Both events are meant to provide a portrayal of the City of Chicago, a rapidly changing and growing place at this time?

3. Daniel Burnham is a main character in this text as he moves from being a co-chairman of the exposition to the full director/czar. While we learn about his struggles in putting together the fair (and his triumph in having a successful fair), we don’t learn all that much about his architecture, planning, or what makes him tick. Burnham is a renowned figure in Chicago but I wish to have learned more about him.

4. There are a couple of interesting struggles in this book: between New York and Chicago and between the elites/professionals of Chicago and the working/lower classes. Regarding the cities, the book plays up the angle that this exposition was the opportunity for Chicago to show that it could compete with New York. In fact, New Yorkers did not think Chicago could pull it off. Chicago in this time was the upstart, the place with what seemed like unlimited potential. New York was seriously concerned about this and the growth of Chicago prompted New York a few years after this fair to annex more territory and develop its five boroughs system. What is lost in some of this is some of the big Chicago boosters in its early decades were Easterners themselves. In regard to social class, there is some mention here and there about labor struggles. But perhaps this could have been the other story instead of the murder plot line: as the elite of Chicago put together this marvelous fair to showcase their city, the city was roiling with an influx of laborers and labor unrest. The Haymarket event had taken place in 1886. And yet, this fair was intended to bring Chicago together in a way that had not occurred in previous decades. There is an interesting chapter toward the end about the aftermath of the exposition: the impression is that life went back to its bleak normalcy in the big city rather quickly.

5. Did this exposition really change America? I’m skeptical. The Ferris Wheel is an interesting invention, but ultimately a diversion. The buildings were impressive – but similar style and size can be found elsewhere. This exposition was certainly consequential for Chicago, cementing it is a world class city. The exposition also brought together an incredible variety of well-known people. But what is its lasting legacy?

On the whole, I enjoyed reading this book. The setting is interesting and the myriad of storylines is engaging. But it is hard to know what it all means. As a mix of history and story, this book is entertaining but lacks depth and significance.

How to respond to the demise of Borders

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With negative business news about the bookstore Borders, a number of commentators have weighed in with opinions about how to respond. On one hand, Borders is a big box bookstore that helped push independent and smaller bookstores out of business. On the other hand, the demise of Borders suggests that bookstores in general are on the way out in favor of online retailers.

Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich writes about how the closing of the Borders store on Michigan Avenue in Chicago affects the shopping district:

By Saturday, Borders’ marquee Chicago store, at 830 N. Michigan Ave., will be closed for good. And — here’s what I think is the real news — the city’s premier shopping street will be without any bookstore for the first time in decades…

Borders was hardly a landmark on par with the old limestone Water Tower that stands just outside the store’s windowed walls. It had occupied its prime corner for only 16 years, barely a blip in Chicago history.

But 16 years is half an eternity in retail time, and Borders had come to seem as basic to the street as traffic.

Back in 1995, when it opened, spinning through its revolving doors was like stepping into a literary Oz, a unique place that, even though part of a chain, pulsed with ideas, people, cappuccino.

Even people who sniffled that it was killing smaller bookstores — most memorably the cozy shop just up the street run by the legendary Stuart Brent — came for the books and the buzz.

I myself have spent a good amount of time in this store, browsing books and music. This location was a nice change of pace from the typical retail store (clothing, in particular), a place to get out of the heat or the cold, watch people go by on Michigan Avenue, and enjoy browsing.

Instapundit provides a different perspective. After some comments about how Borders leftist leanings might have driven some customers away, Instapundit quotes an email from a reader who cites the irony of people lamenting the end of Borders:

Is this — like much of the newspaper industry — a case of the leftist 20% of the populace chasing a way a lot of potential customers over politics? Or is it mostly just technology and convenience?

STILL MORE: Reader Gary Rice has thoughts on the sudden onslaught of Borders-nostalgia:

Re; Borders…. Wasn’t it just a few years ago that Borders and Barnes & Noble were the bad guys? Corporate behemoths destroying the local independent bookstore with their Wal Mart like pricing models ? Wasn’t there even a Tom Hanks romance movie about this exact subject?

So Amazon comes along with a better pricing model and now we are all supposed to mourn liberal Borders’ demise? It is a wonder these people remember how to read, because they sure can’t remember anything else….

Heh.

A good point: can we lament the end of Borders today after criticizing it for over a decade? Perhaps we can: bookstores could be considered “third places,” a middle location between home and work where citizens could gather to read the news, talk to each other, and shop. I suspect there will always be people who like going to bookstores (I will still enjoy it though I’m not sure I would go out of my way to go there) but perhaps they simply can’t survive on the scale and size of a Borders or Barnes & Noble.

These sorts of strange juxtapositions may one major marker of our globalized and fast-paced economy. Do we want any bookstore or a big box bookstore or an online bookstore or an independent bookstore? People vote with their dollars and visits and within twenty years, the entire landscape can change.

But I doubt we would see the same kind of mourning if Walmart suddenly went out of business in favor of online retailers. There is something unique here about bookstores.

The current problems of mixed-income development in Chicago

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The challenges facing a new Chicago mayor are large. Within a story about how growing Chicago’s middle class will prove to be one of these challenges, the Chicago Tribune summarizes the progress of the mixed-income developments that replaced a number of public housing high-rises:

For years, miles of high-rise public housing buildings stretched across the city’s skyline, blocking off entire neighborhoods from any hopes of improvement and further defining Chicago as an urban failure.

Today, much of the city’s stability rides on the success of the $1.6 billion effort launched by Daley in 2000 to tear down those public housing towers, sending thousands of Chicago’s poorest residents to new neighborhoods.

As part of the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation, the mixed-income developments going up in those neighborhoods are meant to be cornerstones for further growth, luring urban pioneers whose presence there would then attract new stores, restaurants, better schools and even more residential development.

The plan has worked in some neighborhoods, most notably, the area near the Gold Coast that was home to the infamous Cabrini-Green housing complex. Synonymous for decades with urban despair, the community has been transformed to a bustling center of urban chic, even before the CHA began demolishing the last high-rise building there last month.

But in other Plan for Transformation communities, the weak economy has altered plans for new development, generating concerns about an effort that has been blamed for destabilizing some neighborhoods.

Unable to attract enough interest for the middle-income homes that are the linchpins of those developments, several developers have recently won approval to instead build more rental homes, including public housing units and other low-income apartments.

That has stirred worries that pockets of poverty are being re-created, though a federal judge overseeing the effort has emphasized the importance of including the mixed-income units.

“If you get too much rental, and too much of it is low income, the neighborhood can get fixed with an image that is hard to change, so that’s an ongoing concern,” said Alexander Polikoff, a director at Business and Professional People for the Public Interest, a law and policy group that has monitored the Plan for Transformation’s efforts as part of a federal court settlement stemming from a 1966 class-action lawsuit.

In a 2009 report, BPI criticized developers for the “slow pace” of building on middle-income homes that could have been sold when the housing market was still strong.

Some thoughts about this summary:

1. We will still need time to assess the full impact of the Plan for Transformation.

2. For sources like the Chicago Tribune, just getting rid of the public housing high-rises is an important enough feat. Because Chicago no longer has these high-rises, is it now not an urban failure?

3. The emphasis here is on neighborhoods, collectivities of institutions and individuals, and their status. What about the residents who left the public housing high-rises. What sort of neighborhoods are they in?

4. Within the Plan for Transportation, how much planning was there for harder economic times? When the Plan was conceived and put into practice (late 1990s-2000s), it seems imperative that middle-class professionals would want to purchase in the mixed-income neighborhoods. If this pool of buyers is not available or is not as big, then the neighborhoods can’t be what they were intended to be.

Millennium Park: an example of how growth machines work

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Within a story about whether Chicago will be able to move forward with large development projects in the next few years, a historian describes how Millennium Park, a significant undertaking, came about:

Indeed, as Chicago ponders its future, it may be useful to view Millennium Park not as a triumph to be repeated, but as a shining exception, one that occurred only because the stars aligned and Daley had created order in Chicago’s turbulent political universe.

After years of fruitless talk, the story goes, the park got its start in 1997, when the mayor peered down from his dentist’s office along Michigan Avenue and decided to turn that dusty railroad yard in Grant Park’s northwest corner into an urban showcase.

By then, Daley had been mayor for eight years and had consolidated his grip on power. Key figures in the park’s creation, including major donors like the Pritzker and Crown families, were “in many ways indebted to, dependent upon and allied with the mayor,” Gilfoyle said. They wanted to please Daley, he explained, partly because their real estate and other holdings might benefit from future city action.

All roads, in other words, led to Daley. And the economic winds were at his back. The late 1990s dot-com boom gave the park’s chief fundraiser, former Sara Lee Corp. CEO John Bryan, enormous wealth to tap. Without it, Gilfoyle said, the 6-year-old park might never have happened.

Today, with such favorable conditions a distant memory, Chicago’s builders are scrambling to find new paths to get things done. One is to push projects ahead step by step rather than in a single, expensive rush, as at Millennium Park.

This sounds like a classic description of growth machine development: the mayor wants something to get done, major donors and partners are sought and found, and a large and impressive park is able to be built on a spot that had been an industrial location/blighted site for years.

This is an interesting example considering the context of the rest of the story: Chicago will have a new mayor (with less consolidated power) and also is facing significant budget issues. Growth machine politics may not be possible at least with the new mayor for a while though other power brokers could emerge. Growth machines are also more limited when money from businesses and local governments is scarce.

Another question one could ask after reading this story: how unusual was it for both Mayor Daleys to undertake so many significant projects? Around Chicago, they are known for having significant building legacies. Are there mayors in other major cities with similar records or are they truly unusual?

ASA 2011 Chicago cancellation makes the Chicago Tribune

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ASA members received the email earlier this week: the 2011 ASA meetings scheduled for Chicago are going to be moved to a new location. This was the official explanation in the email (and press release):

The contracts between Chicago union hotels and UNITE HERE expired August 31, 2009. Since that time, there have been 11 bargaining sessions but contract negotiations are stalled. We have waited as long as possible to see if the contract situation would be resolved in deference to the importance of Chicago as a venue to the 2011 program. Without any resolution clearly in sight, the ASA Council voted unanimously to move the meeting from Chicago because ASA cannot guarantee that the facilities and environment necessary for our scholarly deliberations will be available.

The Chicago Tribune had a story on this decision on the front page of its business section Friday. While the ASA email was somewhat coy about the reason why the Chicago was not an acceptable site, the newspaper article has the more complete story:

More than 5,000 people were expected to attend the conference at the Hilton Chicago and Palmer House Hilton.

The association’s decision came one day before a one-day strike Thursday by workers at the Palmer House Hilton — members of Unite Here Local 1 whose contracts expired in August 2009.

While the association said the hotels pledged to be able to accommodate the conference, “our members have been concerned that we meet in hotels where workers are treated properly in terms of wages and other working conditions,” Hillsman said.

It sounds like there are some widespread issues between workers and Hilton.

It is too bad this happened as I was looking forward to having the conference be close to home this year. And now the wait is on to see where the conference will actually be held…

Last resident out of Cabrini-Green high rises

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Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune chronicles the sage of the last family to move out of the 1230 N. Burling building, the last occupied high-rise at Cabrini-Green. Here is how Schmich sums up the legacy of the housing project:

Cabrini, with its history of murdered cops and slain children, was the housing development that came to symbolize the squandered hope of them all. It was a Chicago name known to the nation. It was also unique, sitting as it did on prime land near downtown and the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods…

In Cabrini’s heyday, 15,000 people lived in its white high-rises, red high-rises and brick row houses. Born as a hopeful haven for the poor, it devolved by the 1970s into an oasis of poverty in which guns-gangs-drugs melded into a single demon…

Whether life has changed for the better for the majority of people who have moved out remains a question, but the neighborhood is clearly better.

As the era of the public housing high-rise winds down, now we can turn and see if newer forms of public housing development or aid, such as mixed-income developments or Section 8 vouchers or other options, are better in helping people leave poverty.

Chicago’s crime rate down for 23rd straight month – but is this the public perception?

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The Chicago Tribune reports that the November crime statistics for Chicago look good. Here are a few of the important statistics:

Superintendent Jody Weis announced November’s crime statistics Sunday, saying the decrease amounted to the 23rd consecutive month of lower overall crime in the city.

Property crimes dropped overall by 2.2 percent compared with last year’s figures, officials said…

There were 12 fewer slayings in November compared with last year’s figures, a 2.8 percent dip. This year there were 412 slayings reported compared with 424 for the same time last year, officials said. These numbers were lower than figures reported in 2007 for the same time frame; that year had the lowest number of slayings since 1965, police said.

Overall violent crime dropped 9.8 percent, with criminal sexual assaults dropping by 8.5 percent compared with last year, robberies dropping 11 percent and aggravated assaults 11.9 percent, officials said.

This sounds like good news. In fact, how have I not heard about this before – now 23 straight months of decreasing crime rates? One would think that Chicago officials and police would be trumpeting this all over the place: crime is going down!

But on the other hand, this reminds me that the public perception of crime rates is what really matters. In recent years, there has been a lot of talk about teenagers being shot. The nightly news and local media still seems to revolve around ghastly crimes. Does the average Chicago citizen or resident of the region know that crime in Chicago has gone down for nearly two years?

And ultimately, what would the crime rate need to be so that people wouldn’t see Chicago as a den of crime? A place like Celebration, Florida can experience one murder and people wonder if it has all gone wrong. Would Chicago be seen as a relatively crime-free place with 350 murders a year? 300? The crime rate could go down for another 6 months or a year but there has to be a lower number where people (and perhaps the media) start perceiving Chicago differently.

Still a few residents who are choosing to stay longer at Cabrini-Green

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The notorious housing project known as Cabrini-Green is nearly gone. Due to plans begun in the 1990s, nearly all of the buildings have been torn down. But one building, at 1230 N. Burling, is still occupied and today, a few residents said they wanted to stay longer even though the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) wanted to move them out:

CHA spokeswoman Kellie O’Connell-Miller acknowledged that a court-approved, 180-day notice for the residents to leave the Near North Side housing complex does not expire until Jan 4, 2011. But because there were fewer than 10 families remaining in the building, the CHA and the Cabrini-Green Local Advisory Council agreed that they would try to speed up the relocation, she said.

O’Connell-Miller would not say exactly how many families still lived in the building. Richard Wheelock, housing supervisor at the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago, which represents the Cabrini-Green Local Advisory Council, said five to seven families were in the building at the start of the day, but two families refused to leave because they objected to the accommodations they were offered…

Legally, there was no order forcing people out today, but the CHA and the LAC had worked to speed up the relocation for safety reasons, O’Connell-Miller said.

I can imagine that some people would ask, “Why in the world would people want to stay in a near empty building, let alone the last occupied one in the Cabrini-Green project?”

The article hints at one reason: the new accommodations for those moved out of Cabrini-Green might not be any better. This has been one of the sticking points since demolitions efforts were announced in the 1990s: where exactly would these public housing residents be moved? A small number could qualify for new mixed-income housing built on or near the Cabrini site, some might be moved to other public housing projects in Chicago or given Section 8 vouchers to use with private housing, and then some simply disappeared from the public housing rolls. But overall, there was not enough public housing to take in all of the people who would be displaced from Cabrini-Green. Moving out of public housing yet ending up in substandard housing in a hyper-segregated city neighborhood is not necessarily better.

Another issue may play a small role: few people like to be told where or when to move. Even when the conditions aren’t that great, home is home and the home you know might seem better than a new place. Middle-class or upper-class people also don’t like to be told to move when the government exercises eminent domain and those people even get a fair price for their property. These two issues are related: if you feel like you don’t have a choice and your options aren’t very good, moving may be undesirable.

Thinking of all this, we need more media attention on what has happened to these notorious public housing projects like Cabrini-Green or the Robert Taylor Homes. What has happened to the former residents and have their lives been improved? What do these sights look like now and who has benefited from making use of the land?