Crain’s has had an odd number of articles on neighborhood retail in recent months, capped (it would seem) by a feature by Sandra Jones on the chain invasion now in progress:

The foray has already begun, with lesser-known chain stores opening on Milwaukee Avenue. Urban Outfitters, the 73-store clothing chain aimed at twentysomething metropolitan hipsters, plans to set up shop on Milwaukee this summer � just down the street from American Apparel, the rapidly expanding Los Angeles-based fashionable T-shirt chain that bowed in November. Dutch jeans boutique G-Star Denim and New York’s funky apparel store Scoop, both small but growing chains, also plan to open stores on Milwaukee later this year…

Urban Outfitters has been looking for a site in Wicker Park and Bucktown for the past four years, says Tedford Marlow, president of the Philadelphia chain, whose parent also owns Anthropologie.

Well, there goes the neighborhood. (Again.) I’m a bit surprised about Gap or J. Crew, since they’re both serving the neighborhood just fine from locations just across the river. Gap even closed two locations in Lincoln Park (Armitage/Halsted and Clark/Fullerton) to shift over to North/Sheffield.

Update 2 May: stumbled across Scoop in the Meatpacking District last week and, well, ugh: it’s like Barney’s Co-op, down to the holier-than-thou staff, lack of inventory, and $300 sun dresses.

Also, the best line from “Prairie Home Companion” yesterday:
“I suffer from an addiction to cheese, as a result of which I must maintain a cheese-free home and avoid any contact with those who have eaten cheese in the past three weeks. This has made for a lonely life…”

The Trib has a story on Brian Palm, a photographer who’s volunteered to take photos of buildings that get put on the depressingly long Demolition Delay List. Among other sites, Palm snapped a photo of the old St. Boniface school before it went:

At any point in the 15 years since that was abandoned, the archdiocese could have sold that building (with its arches, high ceilings, and huge south facing windows) to a loft converter for millions. Instead, they let it decay and eventually condemned it, a fate that will likely befall the church as well.

Other pictured buildings include many single-family cottages in fast-gentrifying Lakeview or Bucktown, one handsome three-flat in Lincoln Park, and a neat flats-above-shops across from McCormick Place.

I suppose that the advantage that demolition delay has conferred upon us is that we can at least rush out to see what’s about to be lost before it is. Maybe someone will be adventurous enough to rip out some nice detailing from a condemned building.

(There are some misleading bits on Palm’s site, though; for instance, the First Unitarian Church on Woodlawn in Hyde Park was not demolished, but did lose the copper spire. Sometimes, the text at the demo-delay site isn’t all that clear on those details.)

Starbucks is negotiating to bring another location to a HOPE VI project: this time, at 35th & State on the site of what was Stateway Gardens. Presales at Park Boulevard have reportedly hit the 50% mark.

Someone passed along a link to the city’s aerial mapping application, which is better than the USGS/Terraserver maps because they’re:
– higher resolution, and zoomable to a ridiculous degree
– newer — about a year old
– and taken from a low-altitude airplane, not a satellite, so they have a weird SimCity Classic-like angle to them.

(It starts with a main-streets map; zoom to about 2×2 mile and the photos start to show.)

Here’s one of the ’60s amoeba-shape parks in Sandburg Village, whose angles have been considerably softened in recent years:

Today’s Trib carries a curious story by John Handley on how high gas prices may eventually slow the spread of sprawl. (With oil prices stuck well above $50 a barrel for the foreseeable future, not even invading Iraq and drilling under every playground in Alaska will keep American drivers from fondly reminiscing about $2.50 a gallon next year or so.) It’s curious because the quotes switch from (suburban-based) real estate analysts who point out the possible link between gas prices and sprawl — after all, metropolitan transportation and housing costs are strongly and inversely correlated — and far-edge-exurban commuters (Minooka, Rockford, DeKalb, somewhere near Beloit) who looooooove their big houses and their looooooong commutes. (Hey, life is suffering, right?)

“Gas prices above $2.50 might start to kick in a slowing of the outward movement of housing in the Chicago area,” said real estate analyst Tracy Cross…

For Marianne Hall, who commutes 73 miles–2 hours and 15 minutes on the road each way — from DeKalb to her job in downtown Chicago, “it would take a really big increase in gas to offset the long-term gain we got by moving farther out.”

She and her husband, Randy, a bookkeeper who works from home, and their three children moved from Oswego to DeKalb a year ago.

“It’s a dream home,” Hall said. “We have a huge yard and the kids have the run of the neighborhood; there’s not a lot of traffic.”

Yeah, and if idiots like you keep moving out there, you’ll lose all of it.

But real state analyst Steve Hovany believes that a move toward shorter commutes has begun in the Chicago area.

“People are paying extra to reduce their commute. They’re moving to closer-in, infill housing in the suburbs and to downtown,” he said. “Right now, that inward move is major. It’s being driven by older buyers. Commuting doesn’t grow on you. Empty-nesters won’t buy in the middle of nowhere.”

He also worries about gasoline prices. “The rising price of gas is a jolt that could affect residential sales,” said Hovany, president of Strategy Planning Associates in Schaumburg.

He noted, though, that not everyone can pay for a close-in location, and economics forces many younger couples to start their families on the edge of the Chicago area.

The location of jobs is a key to where new homes are built, Hovany said. “If a new housing development wants volume sales, it has to be within a 35- to 40-minute drive from major job markets.”

And because of growing employment around Schaumburg, Aurora-Naperville and other areas, suburb-to-suburb commuting is on the rise.

Hovany’s company did a study on Waterman, a town 60 miles west of Chicago on U.S. Highway 30. “Though it may be far from the city, it’s only a 35- to 40-minute drive to the Aurora-Naperville job corridor,” Hovany said.

Third wave edge cities like the East-West Corridor will spawn fourth wave sprawl, which will give rise to fourth wave edge cities in places like New Lenox, which will… Well, duh, that’s the way suburban growth paths work. However, what will ultimately break this particular path dependence? The Metropolis Pledge? Employers realizing that locating closer to the center of the region offers them the best access to the largest, most competitively priced labor pool?

Speaking of growth paths, someone pointed out during the development of the Metropolis Plan that the Chicago region’s growth paths have strayed so far from the center that even sprawl at current rates doesn’t look all that dramatic on a map. (The growth path gets wider as it progresses outwards and therefore appears to slow down; each mile of lateral travel encompasses a steadily larger surface area.)

Posted to “Chicagoist”:http://www.chicagoist.com/archives/2005/03/10/cta_threatens_imminent_doomsday_crappy_lives_for_passengers.php regarding the CTA cuts:

EVERYONE: If you’re as ticked off by the situation as I am, call your state legislator. Go to vote-smart.org and enter your zip+4 (look at your junk mail) to find out who. In most of America, the entire metropolitan region jointly funds mass transit. In most of the rest of the world, mass transit is a national priority and everyone, especially drivers, pay taxes for it. Here in Chicago, city taxes (mostly) fund CTA and suburban taxes go to suburban transit. This is completely stupid, since transit benefits the entire region: by keeping cars off the roads, by making the Loop a central place to do business, by getting people where they need to go, by allowing many of us to live car free. This way of funding things is stupid, and it’s time for all of us to bang down the doors in Springfield and tell them so.

Sure, CTA could fix some problems within its own house — but $55 million is a lot of money, and CTA runs an almost break-even operation these days (so making up a small deficit requires deep cuts). Even if Wilson Yard sold for an extra million dollars (which it wouldn’t; $30 a square foot wasn’t out of range when the deal was struck), that’s still only a tiny fraction of the amount of cash needed. In fact, CTA runs a tight ship relative to other transit agencies: among American transit agencies, it has the lowest per-hour rail operating costs and the second-lowest taxpayer subsidy per passenger (second-highest farebox recovery ratio, after NYC Transit).

Furthermore, it isn’t just CTA. Several other large cities (those with equally stupid funding mechanisms) are also facing transit funding crises: in New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, state cutbacks are threatening equally severe measures: in Philadelphia, the transit board actually passed a budget with $2.50 base fares and NO service on weekends or nights, before the state rushed a bailout. Boston recently completely revised its transit funding, resulting in substantial fare hikes. And Washington’s Metro is threatening vastly higher fares if it can’t secure more dedicated operating funding. Even in the suburbs, Pace and Metra have warned that they face similar cash crunches within the next few years if the situation doesn’t improve — that is, if tax funding continues to decrease in real terms (adjusted for inflation), as it has for the past 20 years.

Most of the money for capital projects comes from the federal government and is earmarked as such; it really can’t be spent elsewhere. The state or local funds in the capital pool are there to “match” the federal money 50-50: divert it and an equal amount of federal money disappears. Yeah, it’s stupid, but Washington is like any big money donor: they like to build things, but don’t care about maintenance. Or you could blame it on the Republicans, who eliminated federal operating subsidies in 1997, and of course want to cut deeply into capital funds today.

Keith: trains, simply put, are much cheaper to run than buses, especially when carrying hundreds at a time. The biggest single cost of running transit is labor — a train can carry a thousand people with one driver, while the same number would have to take ten buses. Plus, the electricity from the rails is cheaper than gas, and rail cars require less maintenance. There are many cases where buses are cheaper than trains, but CTA’s train lines aren’t them.

Katie: the ridership numbers are counted at the farebox. The supplemental paper surveys that are distributed on buses from time to time are not what the ridership numbers are based on.

Crain’s this week included what might be the ultimate in real estate pornography: thirty pages devoted to $1-million-plus houses. Included was a list of every single sale in the six-county region that topped $1, $1.5, or $2M (broken down by area), and photos of a few representative samples. Now, I personally can’t even begin to understand the appeal of suburban living, but I can understand why someone else paid $1.7M for this horsey-set estate:

What I don’t understand is $2.7 million (yes, one million more smackeroos! that’s a three-mile-high stack of 200,000 sandwiches!) for this overgrown snout house:

…and it’s on Denali Ridge Drive, in aptly named far-west exurban Plainfield, miles from nowhere but right up against the freeway to Joliet. Probably named after the middling (but huge) SUV, not the Alaskan range, of course.

(Photos by Brett Kramer for Crain’s Chicago Business)

Update! explained after the jump
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According to a WSJ article by Sheila Muto, Chicago beat New York on one retail count: 17.6% of all new bank branches built nationally in the past two years were built here, vs. 16.2% there.

In the past two years, banks in the Chicago metro area alone added 488 branches — more new branches than any other area in the U.S. During the same period, 447 new bank branches opened in the New York metro area [out of 2,765 branches nationwide, according to a survey from First Manhattan Consulting]…

“I can empathize with civic leaders that fear a run of vacancies,” says Steve Reider, president of Bancography Inc., a banking-industry market-research firm. Some banks are reluctant to retrofit a former bank location to fit their own design criteria, which can be as expensive as building another bank from scratch, he says. And with the exception of a jewelry store, he says, “there’s not a lot of demand from retailers for a space where a good chunk of it is taken up by a cast-iron and concrete vault.”

William Presecky reports in today’s Trib on an IDOT commissioned survey of far southwest suburban residents that revealed little passion for new freeways, and a sanguine view of growth:

Critics of the expressway are heartened by the survey results, which show “building new freeways or expressways” ranked fifth among the “top five solutions” chosen by respondents as the best for relieving traffic.

According to the poll results, 57 percent cited widening existing roads as the best solution to traffic congestion. Improving intersections, signals or turn lanes was ranked second with 34 percent, followed by better coordination and planning (28 percent) and building other new connecting roads (25 percent).

Building new freeways or expressways garnered 21 percent, according to the results.

“This survey dramatically reinforces our position that IDOT should focus on improving existing roads and adding new connections to meet current and future traffic needs,” said Jan Strasma, chairman of Citizens Against the Sprawlway.

Water quality was the top concern related to the effects of transportation improvements, followed by cost to taxpayers, air quality, loss of natural areas and loss of farmland.

Seventy-five percent said traffic congestion will get much worse in the next 10 years and many believe that residential construction and economic development have not been effectively coordinated with long-term transportation planning, Powell said.

The Trib recently carried a story by Russell Working on a steel museum that’s been proposed for the former Acme Steel site on the Calumet River, way down on the south side. A coalition formed by the steelworkers’ union has purchased the structures from a scrap dealer, but the legal status of the land is questionable. Alderman Pope has his doubts about the plan, particularly regarding the location — which I share, having looked in vain for a way to see these up close. (I’ll try again this summer.)

Still, the museum would be a nice complement to the ongoing plans to create an industrial heritage corridor for the Calumet region.

Representatives of Chicago’s Steel Heritage Project envision exhibits that would teach the public about steelworkers’ lives and their unions’ struggle during tours of the old Acme Steel Co. Chicago Coke Plant at 11236 S. Torrence Ave.

Chicago’s Steel Heritage Project is a non-profit that includes groups ranging from the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois to the United Steelworkers of America. The Calumet Heritage Partnership, an umbrella group of environmental, nature and historical organizations in the southeastern Chicago area and northwest Indiana, is acting as the fiscal agent.

Of the $250,000 cost, the project has raised $65,000, which will more than cover the down payment. The largest donation, $40,000, came from the United Steelworkers of America. The Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois named the facility one of the state’s 10 most endangered historic places and gave a $10,000 grant toward the project.

For steelworkers, the project is a means of preserving a common heritage of hard work and a struggle for rights. In its heyday, there were 85,000 steelworkers on the industrial belt of Lake Michigan running from the mouth of the Calumet River to Burns Harbor, Ind., said Sadlowski, who is the retired director of United Steelworkers of America District 31.

Any hope that the 355 extension would result in anything other than typical suburban sprawl (accompanied by the usual economic-development backstabbing) swallowing up huge swaths of Will County farmland are already disappearing under an advancing slab of cement. Okay, so the proposal sounds more like a “lifestyle center” than an enclosed mall (that dying breed, even here in the frigid north), but it’s sprawl nonetheless. Stanley Ziemba reports in the Tribune:

A regional outdoor shopping mall larger than the one in Oak Brook is being planned for land now used for agriculture near U.S Highway 6 and Cedar Road in New Lenox.

Village officials said Thursday they are negotiating with a major commercial real estate developer for the development near a planned interchange along the Interstate Highway 355 extension under construction…

The development — which could include a half-dozen or more major retailers and dozens of smaller retailers, restaurants, theaters and other amenities and attractions found in upscale malls — could be larger than Oakbrook Center, the west suburban mall that opened in 1962, which is about 2 million square feet…

Earlier this week during the village annual breakfast meeting at Lincoln-Way Central High School in New Lenox, Smith said the developer already has a contract to buy 280 acres near the proposed Interstate 355 interchange. Because the site is not near homes, no major outcries from local residents are anticipated, he said.

The construction of the center could be completed by the time the U.S. 6-Cedar Road interchange is finished in 2007, Lowman said.

The 12.5 mile Interstate 355 extension, linking Interstate Highway 55 near Bolingbrook with Interstate Highway 80 in New Lenox, long has been viewed as a potential catalyst for economic development within and near the communities of Lockport, Lemont, Homer Glen, Bolingbrook and New Lenox.