A rebuttal to two common conceits about NYC vs. Chicago, in an attempt to clarify.

1. “Chicago is more segregated than New York.”

From CensusScope analysis of 2000 Census data, this is false. The usual measure of segregation is called the dissimilarity index; an index of 100 implies total segregation between two groups. The New York PMSA in 2000 had a black-white dissimilarity index of 84.3 and a Latino-white dissimilarity index of 69.3. Chicago’s comparable indices are 83.6 for black-white and 64.8 for Latino-white.

2. “You only find Midwesterners in Chicago. New York draws from all over the country.”

An admittedly dated (from 1999, using 1990 Census data) analysis by USC professor Dowell Myers [PDF, pp. 934] found that a similar proportion of New York and Chicago region residents* were born within their respective tri-state areas. 57.6% of New Yorkers were born in New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut; 60.5% of Chicagoans were born in Illinois, Indiana, or Wisconsin. For all its claims to be a national draw, only 18% of New Yorkers moved from other states/territories, while 24.8% of Chicagoans moved from outside its region (but within the country). By comparison, in the Washington, D.C. region, “long believed to be a region of transient residents who came to town for short tours as students, military officers or federal workers” (as the WaPo wrote in 1991), only 34.5% of residents were born within D.C., Maryland, or Virginia.

This particular complaint is often levied against the Lincoln Park area, with its “Big 10 frat party” feel, although fewer than 1 in 120 Chicago region residents live there. Yet the New York region’s white population is even more provincial than the Chicago region’s: fully 73.4% of New York’s white residents were born within the tri-state area, vs. 71% of the Chicago region’s.

Far more of New York’s population was born abroad (24.5% vs. 14.7%), although Los Angeles easily beats both with 30.1% of its residents being foreign-born.

* Over 25.

It may come as a surprise to readers outside Chicago that the Sears Tower, still the tallest building in the Americas and longtime tallest building in the world, was built as-of-right. It required no planning approvals, no design review, no zoning change, no Planned Unit Development review. Yes, indeed, Chicago’s old zoning ordinance was so very generous with the bonuses for plazas and upper-floor setbacks that the tower achieves 110 stories and an FAR of about 40, with more floor space than the original Mall of America — all as of right. (Its construction did require that the city vacate an alley.)

Now, Todd J. Behme reports in Crain’s that the owners wish to replace the Wacker Drive plaza with what looks to be a 50-story hotel. Anywhere else, this would be a huge building, but next to the since-renamed Willis Tower’s heft it’s rather puny. Of course, there are already huge hotels down the street and vacant lots across the street, but no! This has to be on *our* property.

And the zoning bonus? The so-windy-it’s-useless public space that was our public payout for allowing an extra two million square feet of offices? Ah, screw it.

[Oh, wow, I've been seriously delinquent about blogging. I have dozens of links for a link dump, but in the past few months my life has gone topsy-turvy in quite a few ways. I apologize. Here was one neglected but substantially complete post that I'd saved as a draft.]

[A follow-on to Twenty Years]

Philip Nobel, writing in Metropolis in March 2007, banishes “all arguments based on ‘authenticity’… to the postmodern echo chamber” based on a comparison between two widely known examples of “fake places” and one of the world’s most-visited “authentic” places:

There’s really nothing wrong with Santana Row. There should be, of course: we’ve all been bred to hate malls, and what could be more hateful than a mall masquerading as a chic, vaguely European town? [...]

It was visiting [Santana Row and Easton Town Center,] those two sprawl-patching hot spots within a few months last year that began to erode my knee-jerk aversion to malls: fake places, captive minds, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah… in San Jose and exurban Ohio, there is scarcely a center to mourn, and the “malliers” should be credited for responding to a human urge that looks as if it will easily survive the decentralizing effects of multiuser gaming and Netflix[:] people like to gather and not just to shop…

Walking around the center of Munich for several days last winter, I found it increasingly untenable to prefer one form of regulated commercial experience to another, to damn the American solution and reflexively embrace the European.

This echoes, of course, the way elite Manhattanites nostalgically whine about the “Suburbanization of New York.” It’s only fitting, of course, that the city which rose as the United States coalesced from regional to a national economy — and which has long economically colonized the rest of the U.S. — should now feel threatened as the tide runs the other way. (Of course, it always has, as [for instance] regional food brands were replaced with national ones; it’s just that retail brands are that much more visible in everyday life.)

New Urbanists are often criticized for creating places which look “realistically urban” but feel antiseptically suburban. This criticism misunderstands the new urbanist intent: the intent is not to create an instantly authentic city, an impossible task since layers of human history and diverse interpretations thereof need to be laid down to create a city. (Honestly, think about it: creating instant authenticity would necessarily require exponentially more frightful social engineering.) What New Urbanists seek to do is to create places that will be able to ride the tides of history, to age well and to adapt to the necessarily shifting sands of urban history. Indeed, quite a few of today’s shining examples of urban authenticity were once themselves Planned Communities of a sort, relics of an earlier era of town planning which, at the time, must have seen more than a little contrived but which have grown into their roles with age.

When riding north on N. Oakley, between St. Mary’s parking lot and Clemente High School’s playing fields, I always hear the sound of rushing water. Even in entirely dry months, a long-forgotten stream can be heard through a storm drain at the intersection with Potomac. Did this creek ever have a name? Does it flow more or less where it was, or has it been routed through the grid? Where are its headwaters, where does it meet the river?

Such lost streams have been well-documented in, say, London where countless old maps show the terrain as it existed centuries before industrialization wiped it all away. I haven’t spent much time looking (it’d be a great excuse to sit at the Newberry for a day), but it seems that many 19th century maps of pre-subdivision Chicago wanted to show the city as the speculators hawked it (a vast blank slate ready for development) rather than as it actually was.

(On a side note, I did find this 1898 bike map at the Regenstein’s web site. Back then, an “appropriate” road for cycling was a paved one.)

I’m also struck by how the buildings around it have been wiped away by urban renewal. I vaguely remember a presentation from years ago — I don’t remember by whom — which overlaid a map of abandoned properties in a Philadelphia neighborhood with a map of its subterranean stream. Homes located nearest the stream were much more likely to be abandoned, perhaps in part because of costly foundation troubles — but perhaps, also, the old hydrology’s “miasma” is taking revenge.

inevitable Originally uploaded by Payton Chung

Cook County has had a 7% annual cap on assessed value increases since 2002. Property tax bills will rise this year, despite falling property values; this graph explains why property taxes will in fact take a while to catch up with market values.

‘A cap, which gives homeowners comfort in a rising market, can, however, create the opposite effect in a down market. In Texas, which sets a 10 percent limit, property values rose by as much as 18 percent per year during the past decade, but assessed valuation could go up by only 10 percent per year. As a consequence, a large gap exists between real market value and taxable value. Because of that gap, assessed value may go up this year even though market value is coming down. Until the two come together — the market value falls to the level of the taxable value — 5 to 10 percent increases in assessments are a real possibility. “That’s going to be another contributory factor in taxpayer frustration,” says [Guy] Griscom, who is the assistant chief appraiser for Harris County. “Legislatures didn’t look at that side of it when they gave property owners the benefit of these caps. Ultimately you have to pay it back. This is not what people want to hear.” ‘ – Penelope Lemov, Governing magazine

(Assumed $100K property in year 2002 [and that assessed value equaled market value, which is probably not the case in Cook County], using 2002-2009 price appreciation trendline reported for zip code 60647 at Zillow.com, then assuming a 30% drop from 2008 peak by 2010.)