So, a press release (after jump) went out for an event launching DriveLessLiveMore.Com a few weeks ago, but there’s still nothing there. Sounds very promising, though: sponsored by IDOT, RTA, ISTHA, CATS, CTA, Metra, and Pace. Who would have thought these folks would ever actually sat down at a table together, much less promote something as radical as _driving less_?

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The Sun-Times has published a map (PDF) of the urban heat island (using infrared satellite data) that DPD and the Park District are apparently using to prioritize tree-planting efforts. The west side is indeed the hottest part of town; oddly, many areas along the river are pretty consistently warm.

NOTE: I’ve disabled comments, as this post gets an inordinate number of spam attempts (perhaps due to the suggestive title). If you really need to comment, please leave a comment at the CCC blog linked to below.

Wow, I’ve inadvertedly written law for Daley. Gary Washburn in yesterday’s Trib on Daley’s latest inclusionary housing compromise:

bq. “In projects of 10 units or more, 10 percent would have to be moderately priced if any city land is acquired; if zoning is changed to permit residential use; or if residential zoning is changed to increase the number of apartment and condominium units that can be built.”

As a policy analyst for CRN in 2002, I was tasked with finding some quick and dirty ways of getting a precedent for mandatory inclusionary housing into city law. I thought of upzones — hundreds of times a year, the city showers windfall density upgrades on developers and gets nothing in return. I then spent most of a week in Harold Washington Library combing through council minutes, tracking every single upzone passed in 2001 to calculate the potential impact of exactly these proposals. Indeed, after I’d drafted these proposals in a memo, a copy of said memo was literally given to selected City Council members, who offered them up as floor amendments (a very rare move at council) to the Mayor’s ordinance on 9 April 2003. They were, of course, defeated after much procedural intruige — they’d almost forgotten how to deal with floor amendments. (Any substantive change to a bill almost always happens before it’s even voted on in committee.)

Much of that memo was reprinted on page four of “this testimony given to the council’s Housing Committee”:http://www.chicagorehab.org/policy/pdf/1stQuarter2003Report.PDF (which I wrote on behalf of CRN):

Next we would like to present a few points regarding Mayor Daley’s Affordable Housing Commitment Ordinance that passed on April 9. With minor revisions, the ordinance has the potential to create thousands, not just hundreds, of additional affordable housing units every single year. Our analysis of the impact of these amendments is provided in order to inform you before they are considered in Committee.

Four amendments to the ordinance were introduced during City Council floor discussion:

1. Extending the 10% commitment to all zoning map amendments which create 10 or more housing units. In 2001, the City Council approved 216 upzones which increased permissible residential density: 142 residential and 114 mixed-use. We estimate that this would have created commitments to build 1,500 affordable units in 2001 alone – which would triple the Department’s annual creation of homeowner units.

2. Extending the 10% commitment to all Planned Developments approved by the City Council. In 2001, the Plan Commission approved 36 Planned Developments that included residential units. This would have created commitments to build 1,248 units in 2001 (excluding Planned Developments which already committed to providing more than 10% affordable units). This amendment would more than double the Department’s annual creation of homeowner units.

3. Extending the 10% commitment to all sales of city land, not just those at below market prices. As of 2001, the city owned 8,568 vacant lots. At two units per lot, this is enough land for 17,136 units as lots are built out, of which 1,714 would be affordable. Attached is a map showing where the city currently owns vacant land – predominantly on the west and south sides of the City in areas struggling from years of disinvestment. Though we know those communities in fact need good quality affordable housing, it seems incongruous with other city policies that promote mixing incomes and de-concentrating poverty. If the city is serious about creating affordable housing opportunities throughout the city, it will have to focus on more than just subsidized city-owned land. At a minimum, this ordinance should apply to all city owned land, regardless of value.

4. Lowering the income targets so that households earning less than 80% or 50% of AMI can benefit, instead of the current 100% or 60%. As mentioned above, the city’s average income is approximately 80% of AMI; targeting resources above this level (as the ordinance does by setting a 100% of AMI target for homebuyer units) makes little sense. Also, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit already generates rental units at 60% of AMI, but few under 50% of AMI.

The Chicago Rehab Network estimates the above noted amendments could result in a net increase of 1,600 affordable units produced annually, over and above those created under the ordinance as
currently written.

Today’s Trib has a cover package about the megamansions sprouting in Lincoln Park, roughly in the area between Old Town Triangle and Armitage & Halsted. I first noticed them this spring, when I detoured off Willow (a very pleasant east-west alternative to North) to check out a zoning variance sign. Rows of monster houses shoehorned onto standard city lots, many with hideous snout-house front-loaded garages, hiding in plain sight of two key historic districts. Why? Susan Chandler has the lowdown:

At first glance, it’s hard to see why Chicago’s most wealthy people have chosen this formerly nondescript area as their new enclave. It doesn’t have a lake view. It isn’t even that close to the lake. The houses were rundown. Many on Burling and Orchard were basically storefronts. But these drawbacks actually are what made the area a magnet for new development.

“Burling and Orchard had a bunch of stuff that was knock-down ready,” says Jay Metzler, a co-founder of Metzler/Hull Development Corp., a high-end builder that started building $1 million houses in Lincoln Park in the early 1990s.

Metzler/Hull built its first urban mansion home on Burling about 10 years ago. The widespread absence of alleys in the area was a positive, from the firm’s point of view.

“You could get these deep lots. You didn’t fill up the back of our lot with a 21-ft. garage. Your back yards became 40 to 50 feet deep. For Metzler/Hull, it was a business decision to offer something very unique: a house in the city with a nice big yard.”

Chicago’s arcane and archaic zoning system aided this kind of development. Burling and Orchard were zoned R5 under the old zoning code formulated in the 1950s. The “R” stands for residential and the 5 means that developers and builders could erect 2.2 square feet of structure for every 1 square foot of land, more than double what was allowed under the R3 rating of most of Chicago’s bungalow belt.

The R5 rating allowed a mix of three-flats and small apartment houses to grow up alongside single-family houses, generating more concentrated pockets of residents. It also was an invitation to teardowns, explains Joseph Schwieterman, a zoning expert at DePaul University and co-author of “The Politics of Place.” “The R5 districts were ravaged by new construction in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. In areas dominated by mansions and stately apartment buildings, you saw enormous demolition for much denser forms of development. Along the lakefront, the ambience was really lost,” says Schwieterman.

Unlike many suburbs, where teardowns are regulated, Chicago allows owners to combine lots and raze houses without zoning approval. The serial teardowns that hit Orchard and Burling also were helped by the fact that the homes weren’t protected by landmark designations and were cheaper than those a few streets over.

So, to review: it’s an overzoned little slice of “nice neighborhood, bad houses” right between two landmark districts. I repeat: this new Billionaires’ Row exists solely due to zoning. Gotcha.

Blair Kamin, in the sidebar, goes on the offensive:

I have no problem going after the mega-mansions that have invaded Burling, Orchard and Howe Streets south of Armitage Avenue. They’re not purely personal matters, like most houses. They’re turning what was a vibrant urban neighborhood into a collection of bloated, physically isolated, suburban-style manses…

[S]ome of the worst offenders on these streets are single-lot houses whose owners have draped them in all manner of frou-frou-columns, pilasters, balusters, even fake flickering gaslights-only to destroy their attempt at elegance with sunken garages reached via a curb cut and a steeply-sloped front driveway.

Yet warped style is just the beginning of what’s wrong here. The real damage these buildings do is to the public realm of the sidewalk and street. That’s where neighbor meets neighbor and neighborhoods really form, a fast-disappearing attitude… those sloping driveways, which, unlike the effect at Condron’s place, rid the street of the civilized buffer zones between the house and the sidewalk and substitute the equivalent of concrete moats. Not only are the driveways eyesores, they cut off the house from its surroundings. If you want to come over to borrow a cup of sugar, be sure to have the guard lower the drawbridge….

Many of these homeowners, it appears, contemplated living in Lake Forest, but couldn’t stand the hour-long commute. So they stuffed a suburban manse into the city.

As a result, the neighborhood feels crammed to the gills instead of offering true luxury, which is about the luxury of space as well as the luxury of size. How strange-and sad-that so many could spend so much and in doing so, still cheapen the public realm.

Gary Washburn reports on another mayoral press conference, this time about the lawsuit filed over red-light cameras:

bq. “If someone gives a gun to a 17-year-old and says, ‘Here’s my gun. You can play with it,’ it’s called responsibility,” the mayor said. “You have a responsibility for that car. If that car got into an accident, they would sue you.”

Came across a 2004 article in the “Chicago Fed Letter”:http://www.chicagofed.org/publications/fedletter/cflapril2004_201.pdf (pdf, by Robert DeYoung and Thomas H. Klier) about bank headquarters — written in the aftermath of Bank One’s takeover by Morgan Chase, it notes that bank headquarters (unlike HQs in general) almost always end up in the larger of the two headquarters cities. Illinois’ silly branch-banking laws have put Chicago at a disadvantage in this regard, as Chicago entered the deregulated banking era with many smaller banks (i.e., prey) rather than a few strong banks (i.e., predators).

bq. Today the largest U.S. banks are located in international banking centers, such as New York or San Francisco, where agglomeration economies are strong and high demand for financial services has allowed even purely local banks to grow large, or in states like California and North Carolina where geographic regulations have historically been less restrictive. For example, California has never prevented its banks from branching freely within its very expansive borders, and North Carolina began permitting (by interstate agreement) its banks to operate affiliates virtually anywhere in the southeastern U.S. over a decade before Riegle-Neal. In contrast, Illinois’s strict unit banking laws placed an effective upper bound on the size that Chicago hanks could attain-hence, when nationwide banking became legal in the mid-1990s, Chicago banks were at a disadvantage because they lacked the critical mass and experience to participate fully in the wave of acquisitions that followed.

The lack of branch banks in Chicago left an odd architectural legacy: a few leviathan banking halls downtown (notably the First Chicago headquarters, where the retail bank has recently been downsized quite considerably to a fraction of the first floor) and a great many opulent bank headquarters in the neighborhoods — Uptown Bank (now Bridgeview), Hyde Park Bank, Noel State Bank (now Midwest). Many of these neighborhood palaces match the finest downtown banks elsewhere in grandeur.

[posted to “carfree chicago”:http://carfreechicago.com%5D

Last week, a friend of mine rented a shared car to get to the Farnsworth House, the famous glass house designed by Mies van der Rohe on the banks of the Fox River, about 60 miles southwest of the city. Two years ago, a few months after it was purchased by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and before Metra allowed bikes on board, a friend and I decided to bicycle out there. It made a truly rewarding destination for one of the best bike routes out of the city: the Illinois Prairie Path — the nation’s first rail-to-trail, built on the remains of an old electric interurban.

We had breakfast in Chicago, rode out past Oak Park to pick up the Prairie Path all the way out to its Aurora terminus (getting lost exactly once, in a lovely forest preserve in Warrenville where the leaves were just starting to turn), and continued along the Fox River trails to Oswego, stopping for lunch. From there, it was another five miles or so down Route 34, bypassing Yorkville, to River Road and finally to Farnsworth. For the return, we saved a few miles (as it was already past dark) by taking the Blue Line from Oak Park — today, a new bridge over the Desplaines River connects the Blue Line directly to the path’s terminus in Forest Park.

For the less athletically inclined, the good news is that now there are two rail options that will get you mostly there. Metra’s BNSF service to Aurora stops about ten miles short of Farnsworth, and allows full-size bicycles. Amtrak will get you closer — downtown Plano, just two miles north of Farnsworth — but currently the only train headed there (ultimate destination Quincy) is scheduled for day trips into Chicago. Starting next month, though, funding from Illinois will allow Amtrak to add a morning-west, evening-east roundtrip to Quincy, making a day trip via Amtrak possible.

I went in late summer, but I imagine that it’s even better in fall and equally lovely in mid-winter, with the huge trees around it either ablaze with color or with the pale white house blending into snowdrifts. Regardless of season, I recommend going with a small group rather than on a tour bus: its tranquility would be ruined by a group of 40.

Wolf Point

Originally uploaded by paytonc.

WGN-TV happened to send along a camera crew the night that we signed up for the “skyscraper canyon” canoe trip down the Chicago River. Their little local color commentary finally aired last week.

Daniel Engber in “Slate”:http://www.slate.com/id/2149240 finds that Chicago is only third in the nation in federal corruption convictions, after southern California and southern Florida. Well, gee, that’s a letdown. Besides, we have so many more local governments than either of those metro areas — 371 municipalities here, compared to 201 in Los Angeles-San Diego and 61 in Miami (according to “Metropolitan Area Research Corporation”:http://metroresearch.org/projects/national_report.asp), with more elected officials per capita besides (compare 50 Chicago aldermen to 15 LA council members).

Well, this particular number crunching makes me realize that I’m now part of the problem: an official in one of those 1,500-odd local governments that have taxing authority in Chicagoland. (That was before LSCs were invented, too.) Ah well.

This month’s “Dwell magazine”:http://www.dwell.com/now/currentissue has two features on Chicago: a flattering, if coldly photographed, “travelogue”:http://www.dwell.com/learn/detour/3788777.html with Brad Lynch (interviewed by Lee Bey), which calls out Bari Foods with the title photograph. Elsewhere, Robert Sullivan’s paean to the “L” (wrapped in Saturn ads) calls out a notable editing error: my former coworker Heather Campbell is introduced correctly as Heather Gleason first, then as Campbell (her maiden name) later. Oh well — not that I understand the whole marriage thing, anyways.

The Regenstein’s “Map Collection”:http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/maps, among a goodly number of assorted (mostly sociological) maps of Chicago from 1890-1935 and 1990-2000, has a population density map of Chicago, circa 1930 online. It appears to be based on section (mile grid), rather than community area. Four major sectors of the city had more than 50,000 persons per square mile, even before “high-rises”:http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/maps/chisoc/G4104-C6-1933-U5-o.html sprouted outside downtown: the north lakefront (east of Halsted/Clark to Lawrence); west and east Ukrainian Village/Wicker Park, from Humboldt Park to the river; Pilsen and Lawndale; and the Black Belt, Washington Park, and Woodlawn. Now, perhaps two CAs would come close; most of the above areas now average 20-30,000 per square mile, with the abandoned South Side much lower.