The relaunched AlderTrack has a curious organizational scheme and a maddening lack of search function, but what a concept! The opaque world of Chicago zoning, without having to go to the meetings!

A rant on the Olympics, written as a blog comment for nowhere in particular.

hey folks, cynicism and negativity have nothing to do with why I oppose an Olympic bid. (personally, I don’t usually read blog comments for fear of all the whiny, sourpuss snark.) I have worked professionally as an advocate and activist in this city for a decade now, even getting unceremoniously thrown out of a community group for offering constructive dialogue rather than the knee-jerk reaction preferred by its leaders. so, here’s my constructive solution: drop the Games bid and instead think creatively about how we can work here to fix our problems today.

if we want to invest billions of dollars for transit or housing or parks, we could raise it ourselves instead of wishing upon Washington’s or the IOC’s stars. and trust me, a billion dollars spent on better moving Chicagoans around will have a much greater long-term economic impact than even two billion spent on moving Olympian hordes around — and, mind you, the feds only paid half of SLC’s and Atlanta’s bills, so we’d probably be looking at a billion dollar bill anyways. want to raise a billion dollars?

besides, repairing our existing transit system (for starters) will result in greater economic impact than building new. for instance, a 2003 study estimated that $X spent on road repair will create 21% more jobs than $X spent on new road construction. “fix it first” — leveraging and enhancing prior generations’ investment in infrastructure — is fundamentally more cost effective than building new from scratch, just like renovating an existing house is cheaper than knocking it down and building new.

to sum it up in a bumper sticker: NO sports welfare!

Some old Break the Gridlock policy statements (most of which I wrote, all PDFs) that I found in the stacks, linked here so that they’re indexed:
* “Response to initial draft of city’s new zoning”:https://westnorth.com/freelance/BTGonZoning.pdf
* “Central Area Plan response letter”:https://westnorth.com/freelance/btgCAPltr.pdf
* Zoning for Transportation Equity Coalition’s “City in a Garden or a Parking Lot?, latest version without cover art”:https://westnorth.com/freelance/CityInGarden8NC.pdf
* ZTEC’s “one-page factsheet”:https://westnorth.com/freelance/zfactsheeta.pdf

ZTEC was largely responsible for getting the city to back down on a proposed increase in parking ratios during the 2002-2004 code rewrite. I don’t think that my letter on the Central Area Plan ever had an impact, but I still like it anyways:

bq. The people-friendly modes that we advocate are space efficient, thereby conserving the Central Area’s most scarce resource; create street-level vitality, enhancing the key to the Central Area’s unique character; and, best of all, are self-reinforcing. Busy sidewalks are safer and more pleasant to walk down; busy bus lines have more frequent, reliable service. Busy roads, on the other hand, merely create traffic congestion that maddens everyone. If total traffic is to grow, should that growth improve or paralyze the surface transportation network?

In short, walking, cycling, and riding transit create positive feedback loops: an increase in traffic yields better conditions (safer, livelier streets with better transit service). Driving creates a negative feedback loop: an increase in traffic degrades conditions for *everyone*, drivers, walkers, cyclists, and transit riders alike.

Preliminary 100% results from “the runoffs”:https://westnorth.com/2007/02/27/elections-woah/ indicate that *five* incumbents have been defeated:
2nd: Fioretti over Haithcock (wide margin)
3rd: Dowell over Tillman
16th: Thompson over Coleman (conceded)
24th: Dixon over Chandler
32nd: “Waguespack”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/paytonc/463696414/ over Matlak

Added to the three decided in February and the one open seat (15th, won by Foulkes), and that’s nine new faces — 18% of the 50! We have some great new aldermen, too, with plenty of opportunities for a fresh urban agenda.

Just for future reference:

(70 ILCS 3615/4.03) (from Ch. 111 2/3, par. 704.03)
Sec. 4.03. Taxes.
(a) In order to carry out any of the powers or purposes of the Authority, the Board may by ordinance adopted with the concurrence of 9 of the then Directors, impose throughout the metropolitan region any or all of the taxes provided in this Section. Except as otherwise provided in this Act, taxes imposed under this Section and civil penalties imposed incident thereto shall be collected and enforced by the State Department of Revenue. The Department shall have the power to administer and enforce the taxes and to determine all rights for refunds for erroneous payments of the taxes.
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The relevant passage:

bq. *Continued support for northeastern Illinois mass transportation*. Through the Department of Transportation, the state will continue to provide significant funding for mass transportation in the northeastern Illinois region. The governor’s fiscal year 2008 budget recommendation includes $419.9 million in total appropriations that include funding at the statutory maximum for the Strategic Capital Improvement Plans (SCIP I and SCIP II), 25 percent state match on all Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) Sales Tax revenue collected in the six-county, Chicago-area region, reimbursement of reduced fare subsidies for students, the elderly and the disabled, and paratransit services provided in the region.

So, no new operating (beyond paratransit, which was new last year) and some new bonds.

updated after midnight:
Burt Natarus and Darcel Beavers are headed to defeat! Oh, and Arenda “we be ho’s” Troutman, but we knew that.

A lot of runoffs (higher vote total first, *incumbent):
2nd: Fioretti vs. Haithcock*
3rd: Tillman* vs. Dowell
15th: Foulkes vs. Simmons-Stoval (open seat)
16th: Thompson vs. Coleman*
18th: Lane* vs. Stewart
21st: Brookins* vs. Jones
24th: Chandler* vs. Dixon
_32nd_: Matlak* vs. Waguespack
_35th_: Colon* vs. Colom
43rd: Daley* vs. Smith
49th: Moore* vs. Gordon
50th: Stone* vs. Dolar

_ward_ = a sure thing, with 100% of precincts reporting

I wrote earlier about how the Kennedy and Dan Ryan are perfect opportunities to introduce congestion pricing — with separate express lane infrastructure, parallel transit, and I-Pass already in place.

Yet right now we’re moving the other way. A Crosstown truck route would only funnel away through-traveling trucks that should be on I-294 (Tri-State Tollway) anyways, and if it were a tollway (as Madigan suggests, to raise the tens of billions necessary) it wouldn’t do anything to keep the freeloaders off 90-94. Meanwhile, Chicago wants to use $117 million in PFC charges [ticket taxes] to widen I-190 to O’Hare — charging everyone, including connecting passengers and those of us who take the [achingly slow, 15-mph, in need of $54 million to replace faulty, disintegrating ties] train, to speed drivers off the Northwest Tollway. Huh?

If freeloading trucks are a problem, then stop the freeloading: toll 90-94. If I-190 needs $100,000,000 to unsnarl traffic, then make the drivers along that route pay: simply move the toll barriers half a mile and add I-190 to the tollway network. Airport-goers are a remarkably price-insensitive bunch, anyhow.

update 26 Feb: one week after revealing the I-190 plans, Jon Hilkevitch writes that fixing up the Blue Line (now up to 22% in slow zones) will cost… $100 million, which, of course, CTA doesn’t have in the absence of an Illinois FIRST successor. It took 70 minutes to get from O’Hare to Monroe this morning, a full 55% longer than the “scheduled 45 minutes” that Mr. Friendly Announcer used to promise to passengers boarding at O’Hare and which signs inside the terminal walkways still proclaim.

Also, Dennis Byrne writes of the Crosstown in a Trib op: “As if Daley doesn’t have enough concrete to pour to keep him and his contracting buddies content for the rest of his lifetime reign. Maybe the city should buy up a bunch of vacant lots that he can pave over just to keep him and his pals happy. It certainly would be a better use of the money.”

UPDATE: comments closed due to spam

Katharine Grayson reported a while ago in the Chicago Journal about a survey on “social capital”:http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/saguaro/primer.htm in Bucktown and Schaumburg. Actually, my household participated in the research; I got a letter and my brother did the phone interview.

Curt VanderWaal, a professor of social work at Andrews, said one quote, offered by a 40-year resident in a telephone interview, seemed to sum up that finding: “The whole neighborhood identity is changing. That’s a challenge. It’s not like a neighborhood that has to deal with a lot of crime. The larger issue here is economic and cultural identity.” […]

She did note, however, that residents in Bucktown are also more open to having affordable housing built in their neighborhood than their Schaumburg counterparts, though only about a quarter strongly agreed that it was necessary.

What is somewhat surprising about the study, however, noted VanderWaal, is that residents of Schaumburg are just as happy—if not more pleased—with their neighborhood than Bucktowners. There are, of course, some key demographic differences, he said, including that the suburban residents are more likely to own their home and have lived in the neighborhood longer. They also have more children. However, he said, they also are more likely to believe that their neighborhood is tight knit.

What’s also important to note, however, is that Bucktown residents are more likely to spend a social evening with their neighbors—and have friends that live just a few blocks away.

It’s an undergraduate project, to be sure, but the two neighborhoods differ in so many ways that it’s difficult to impute any differences found to one factor or another (notably neighborhood form, which they mentioned — several Andrews professors have admirable New Urbanist inclinations). One confounding factor is governance, notably with regard to schools. It would be far more prudent to have chosen two neighborhoods within the same municipality: say, comparing “old” Wheaton or Naperville with new subdivisions a mile or two away, or maybe more interestingly, someplace like historic Kenwood with modernist Prairie Shores.

“David Roeder”:http://www.suntimes.com/business/roeder/152528,CST-FIN-roeder29.article in the Sun-Times casts a skepitcal glance at the Green Exchange:

ECO- ECHO: In Logan Square, there’s an alderman, Manny Flores (1st), who has insisted that anybody who wants to redevelop the old Cooper Lamp factory, 2545 W. Diversey, at least replace the 125 jobs lost when it closed last year. This stance has been somewhat inconvenient for developers, who see any usable old factory inside the city as a place to live, not as a place to make something.

Despite this obstacle, an affiliate of Baum Realty Group Inc. bought the 250,000-square-foot building for $7.5 million in 2005.

With Flores’ blessing, principal David Baum has announced plans to turn the building, a familiar sight to drivers stuck on the Kennedy Expy., into a kind of Merchandise Mart for businesses that promote environmental sustainability. He calls it the “Green Exchange”:http://www.greenexchange.com/ and his marketing materials say he has tentative lease deals with Greenmaker Supply, which provides ecologically friendly building materials, and a so-called “green” printer, Consolidated Printing Co.

Baum has asked for zoning that would let him build “live-work” units in the building strictly as residents for people who have a business on the property. He has stressed that he wants most of the space to be commercial because it’s cheaper than residential to refurbish.

Grr. Libby Sander writes in the New York Times about our local preservation battles:

bq. What people do want, [Alderman Ted Matlak] said, is room to grow. To accommodate developers looking to build structures whose dimensions fall outside the parameters of zoning requirements, Mr. Matlak said he frequently changed the zoning of a particular lot. According to city tradition, aldermen have exclusive authority to change zoning requirements — often called spot zoning — to allow construction that would otherwise violate the city’s zoning ordinances.