“Well, what do you do for this guy?… You got a pretty face. You’re a good-looking guy. Better looking than my Scott anyway.”
This, apparently, is the best come-on line that George W. Bush could muster. (This was two weeks ago, but not very widely reported.)
Update: The tall fellow standing to the left of “206B” at PM Martin’s nominating convention appears to be Reid. (Photo: Liberal Party of Canada.)
After many requests, I’ve started a gallery of photos of big-box retailers that have made a worthy attempt to fit into Chicago’s urban fabric. Many big boxes claim that they simply can’t have doors opening out onto the sidewalk, that they need to have a moat of parking out in front. That’s nonsense, especially in locations where many people arrive on foot, on transit, or on bikes. If you demand different designs, you’ll get them — and credit goes to the Department of Planning and Development for doing just that.
The gallery will be updated as I take more shots. Rumor has it that the new ex-Ward’s, now-Target at Addison and California (another fragment of the old Riverside streetcar-company amusement park) is a multi-level store; the recent sub-zero temperatures have sapped my wherewithal to snap photos so far.
The new store is just a mile away from the highest-grossing Target in the chain, at Logan, Elston, and Western. The multi-level Target on Colorado in Pasadena was also a conversion of an old department store (Broadway? Bullocks?), as is the Wal-Mart at Crenshaw Plaza in Los Angeles. One of Target’s first ground-up multi-level stores is on Nicollet Mall, the transit mall in downtown Minneapolis; it’s part of the corporate headquarters. The store under construction at Roosevelt and Clark will have one level, a corner entrance, and structured parking.
With Wilson Yard, Target will join a growing number of boxes that have moved past the riverside industrial corridors and onto the walkable commercial streets. Home Depot opened its first multilevel store there; the Brooklyn mini-Home Depot is in a strip center and has only a token mezzanine. Best Buy and Circuit City also took ground-floor, sidewalk-fronting spaces last year.
One reason why these chains are willing to adapt, besides (relatively) progressive management, is that the demographics of the market are too hard to resist. The new Target is within five miles of 1.5 million people — five or ten times more people than in the suburbs. (Typical population densities on the north side are about 20,000 per square mile.) The Home Depot on Halsted sits in a neighborhood where per-capita income is nearly twice the national norm. Retailers would be stupid not to jump through hoops to reach these customers. At the same time, it’s notable that these locations are not in downtown high-rises, but in real neighborhoods.
The desirable demographics are one reason why upmarket chains like Whole Foods Market have been leaders at adapting to gentrified urban environments. Whole Foods has opened two sidewalk-fronting stores here, with another under construction; similar designs are in Portland, Manhattan, Brooklyn, San Francisco, Austin, Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, Cambridge, and Baltimore.
The design of this page (finally) now applies to all the blog pages at West North.
Well, as a campaign strategy for Democrats at least. It’s hard to be the sunny candidate when Karl, er, George is on the other side acting deliriously, lunching-on-‘shrooms happy. And who would blame them? After carelessly (or is that carefree-ly?) throwing all caution — fiscal discipline, the “very serious” words of the Security Council, etc. — to the wind, they had better be happy. The rest of us, on the other hand, had better not be.
Polls consistently show solid support for cutting taxes, increasing spending, and balancing the budget. The only problem is that it can’t be done.
But, even taken purely as a campaign strategy, there is a problem here: It’s hard to see how any Democrat could possibly outflank the incumbent as the candidate of wishful thinking. The president, after all, is the one proposing to make his current tax cuts permanent; increase domestic discretionary spending by 4 percent; and increase military, homeland-security, and entitlement spending by more than that — all while adding new tax cuts and balancing the budget. In the meantime, he thinks we can fly to Mars, take on $1 trillion in transition costs as Social Security is partially privatized, solve the health-care crisis with tax cuts, help people pay for college with more tax cuts, and further strengthen the retirement system with even more tax cuts. It’s utter nonsense, of course, but it’s certainly optimistic.
Faced with Bush’s “candy for everyone!” politics, pessimism may be the Democrats’ only hope. If things look bad in Iraq and job growth remains weak through November, all the president’s promises will do him little good. But hoping for short-term failure isn’t very optimistic. It’s not a safe bet, either: Bush’s policies are calculated to maximize his short-term electoral prospects while pushing problems into 2005, 2009, or 2013 — when he won’t need to pay a price at the polls.
[Matthew Yglesias in The American Prospect]
And people wonder why I’m so dour.
frigid but sunny
shoveling snow seems useless
once sidewalk is trod
Just heard on WBEZ: in the wake of the Hired Truck Program scandal, the Cook County Republican Party has called on the city of Chicago to stop awarding contracts to political contributors.
Hah! Next up, they’ll tackle the Pentagon and the Department of Energy, right?
The program is yet another illustration of contract cronyism or pinstripe patronage, now the all-purpose way for corrupt, nepotistic officials — whether Democrats in Chicago or Republicans in Washington (or Baghdad) — to skirt civil service laws and fortify their political empires through patronage. I’d like to see more Republicans say “outsourcing saves money and improves service delivery” with a straight face these days.
Take a look at the left navbar: thanks to Feedroll, I can link headlines on the Break the Gridlock blog, to which I contribute stories on local transportation and land use issues, right here.
Apparently, the G.W.Bush-in-a-flight-suit action figure is more flexible than most: he can pose easily as a yoga instructor.
Only a day after its launch, I’m in at Orkut. Not exactly a fantastic honor, I guess, to join another social networking site that blatantly plays off Google’s failed attempt to buy Friendster (and co-opts questions from Spring Street), but hey — if you want an invite, just ask. And, as the techies point out, Friendster has some serious scalability issues (the database just isn’t up to handling five million users, the search capabilities aren’t capable of generating useful results), whereas Google is excellent at keeping on top of the world without a hitch.
Crain’s reports that Target has signed a letter of intent for a two-story store at Wilson Yard, the hotly contested parcel under the Red Line tracks in the middle of Uptown. Landmark Theatres has already signed its intent; Target will go below the theaters. Needless to say, the neighbors are worried about traffic, etc., and many wrongly think the result will be a stripmall. Ah well.
My favorite reaction to the endless posts whining about how “we need a posh boutique row just like Andersonville with my favorite retailers, blah blah” comes from a poster named Jeremy:
Ever since Bendel’s left Michigan Avenue I have been at a loss. Crate & Barrel is for street urchins, and the unwashed masses. I know Harrod’s was talking about the block across from Marshall Fields & Co., but to be alone in the Wilson Yards would make them the crown jewel of the neighborhood, and our neighborhood the envy of the Americas. I picture Broadway as the new High Street. And what better place to walk the streets before stopping in for High tea…
I understand everyone has their own “pet” store for Wilson Yard. But until we get Ed Bowie’s underground subway put in, really what is the point? […]
I just don’t buy [a boutique strip] for Broadway, the scale of the street and buildings are not conducive to light retail. Alderman Smith fought with Schiller on this point at one of the early development meetings for the Phoenix — she argued for Big Box retail. The neighborhood was designed as an entertainment district, but live action theatres are almost out of the question, (see the struggling Chicago Theater, downtown theatre district, the shuttered Uptown and the stuggling Riv). I don’t think the ballrooms will return and that pretty much leaves the taverns and speakeasys. We could probably get some more of those. Maybe a movie theatre is on the way. DisneyQuest was a dismal failure, our tourist area is well established. That would leave casinos, and gentlemen’s clubs for us though. Maybe we could approach the alderman about a provisional ward legalization of gambling and prostitution. Pshaw to the secondary effects.
Two important points: first, Target has shown a willingness to adapt its store formats to urban locations; their flagship in downtown Minneapolis is the most obvious example. It sits along Minneapolis’ transit mall, and most customers — as at big boxes and department stores in downtown Chicago — arrive via transit. (Wilson Yard straddles the Red Line.) DPD and Alderman Shiller will make sure that new construction there will respect the existing urban fabric; even if both parties are often known for missing the forest for the trees, they’re not that stupid.
Second, everyone loves small, independent shops — even if many Uptown gentrifiers don’t love the small, independent pawn shops and dollar stores that predominate there and instead long for cute, upscale boutiques like those in Andersonville. However, that’s just unrealistic for this particular site: the developer is up against a wall: building new buildings on literally toxic land, paying for a new parking garage for Truman College (at $30,000 a space) and a new CTA station, and selling the housing at below cost. In order to make the development work at all, there’s got to be big money involved — just to break even on the investment needed to build a new building will require rents far, far higher than small businesses can typically pay. Hence, the scores of new buildings on, say, Lincoln in Lincoln Park have empty shop space at street level (or else mortgage brokers’ or dentists’ offices). Even in a neighborhood which loves boutiques and spawns them by the boatload, the boutiques can’t afford the rent on those spaces.
And Target’s interest in the neighborhood introduces a new potential savior for the Uptown Theatre: conversion to large-format retail. Medinah Temple, after all, is now a Bloomingdale’s. Since the economics of running the theatres as entertainment venues is so weak now, retail conversion — which would save the exteriors and significant interior features — could be a very real possibility in the future.
Looks like the Sun-Times has uncovered another source of patronage contracts: the generically named “Hired Truck Program,” which pays truck drivers to, well, sit around city construction sites for no apparent reason. This program costs $40 million a year, with most of the proceeds going to mob-connected firms located in (where else?) Bridgeport.
While looking up references for the above entry, I stumbled across a blogger who had confused the R’s “ownership society” with the D’s “opportunity society.” Whoops.
The Bush “ownership society,” of course, is just another way to sell Social Security privatization as a good thing, rather than something that will either (a) sink Social Security just as demand for payments rises to record levels, (b) cost an extra few trillion to launch just as deficits rise to record levels, (c) force payroll taxation into the sky just as I enter my peak earning years, or (d) all of the above. “Medical savings accounts” so far have been a boon to LASIK eye surgeons; if properly expanded, we could see a boom in all sorts of cosmetic surgery! Hooray for economic progress! Hooray for the profits to be made by starving the public and enriching the private!
And oh, I shan’t forget to mention how the Rs plan to increase the exemption of investment income from taxation, thus shifting the tax burden from the privileged coupon clippers onto the lowly working classes. But no, that’s because income from capital is income from Ownership, which is Good. The proletariat, oops, no, lucky duckies, no, Regular God-Fearing Americans should pay more taxes, anyhow. That will inspire them to become part of the Ownership Society, which they can do by, well, you know.
Geesh.
west north 
