Monthly Archives: July 2009

Too many yards, too few kitchens

by

A little while ago, Chris Leinberger and Arthur Nelson were making headlines by predicting that America would face an oversupply of millions of single-family homes. Households have changed; the “nuclear family in its castle” now accounts for less than one in four households. Yet housing production has been geared towards these households for decades, and almost all zoning ordinances strongly encourage that new housing fit families.

The result is a housing landscape that’s already vastly out of whack with housing demand. This is especially evident in thriving cities which draw young people. In many Sunbelt cities, a lack of apartments forces even white-collar thirtysomethings into fraternity-style group homes. Accountability for household chores (and dishes and taking out the trash pale in comparison to yardwork) is inversely related to the number of people sharing the space.

My own dense urban neighborhood has a similar dynamic at work: apartments built for working-class families with children are now unfit for the legions of young singles and couples who now inhabit them. There are nowhere near enough studio or one-bedroom apartments to satisfy demand, and Chicago’s low-rise zoning categories have conspired against the construction of many more around here. (A peculiar provision inserted to stop the “four plus one” explicitly discriminates against studio/efficiency apartments.) As a result, renters pay a significant premium for one-bedroom apartments; indeed, one can rent a two-bedroom for just a few hundred dollars more. At least Chicago has plenty of 2-BR apartments to go around, though.

Millions

by

There’s much, much more where I came from.

My ancestors, like those of many Chinese-Americans, hail from a pair of valleys about 100 miles west of Hong Kong. The conurbation rapidly rising between the two — standing astride the Pearl River Delta — is “the fastest growing region of the fastest growing country” in the world, with a population estimated at over 50 million. That’s akin to packing the population of the three West Coast states into an area smaller than the Phoenix metropolitan area. (That, in turn, is only a bit smaller than the three states of southern New England.)

(This reflection comes from the graphic comparison of metropolitan footprints in Peter Bosselmann’s book Urban Transformations.)

Of course, China’s vast population defies any attempt to put it into scale; after all, per Guinness, I share my last name with over 100 million Chungs. Just about as many people answer to just my last name as pledge allegiance to Mexico or Japan. Luckily, I’m the only living “Payton Chung” known to Google.

What does it all mean? We often hear about China becoming a larger economy, a larger polluter, a larger exporter, a larger whatever than [America, Europe, Japan, etc.] — meaningless statistics without accounting for the mind-bogglingly vast human resources that China has, both to offer and to support. Here’s a thought exercise: walk down the street and, for every single American you see, imagine an entire family of four. That might give you a sense of how crowded China is.

A great many narrow-minded observers from “the west” suffer from pot and kettle syndrome when pointing at China: “they pollute more, so why should we care?” Well, such observers sometimes neglect human rights in their own way: no human has greater rights to pollute than any other, and on a per-human basis Americans are still by far the greater environmental criminals.

Quizzed

by

Several weeks ago, I attended a hybrid meeting in Oak Park: a discussion on local historic preservation challenges (of which there are many) followed by a visioning session for GO TO 2040, CMAP’s current long-range regional visioning process.

The visioning session uses CMAP’s instant-polling process to develop a regional growth scenario based on the choices of those in the room. There’s pretty quick feedback, too — the system spits back a report card of outcomes right after the scenario’s basics have been set.

A few improvements I’d make, or general drawbacks to this approach:
1. The feedback metrics are still pretty darn wonky. It’s tough to avoid this, of course, since part of the entire problem with regional planning is that all of it is way too abstract. (Jane Citizen typically isn’t motivated by the idea of “there will be a few PPM less of air pollution in the sky if I do this.”) Metropolis 2020’s work on regional metrics came up with some good metrics that people can relate to, like “hours spent in a car”; maybe these could be brought into the scenario modeling.
2. The presentation format tried a bit too hard with the hokeyness, especially for what seemed to be a very buttoned-up Oak Park crowd. This was Unity Temple, after all.
3. The choices presented to the audience always were in groups of three. The three choices always ended up sounding like a Goldilocks scenario: “too hot — too cold — just right,” and it’s no surprise that answers flowed towards “just right.”
4. The presenters found themselves constantly apologizing for the illustrations for the choices; many were photographs of buildings or a neighborhood, when they were really aiming to illustrate region-wide approaches. Perhaps illustrations showing a broader approach would have been more appropriate.