“I think panic over gentrification is usually sublimated panic over risk or unfairness in the economy as a whole. We just think we can control the local housing market.”

Comment by clew at Cascadia Scorecard

I’ve been posting retouched Vancouver photos to Flickr, finally fixing some of the extreme shadow/highlight problems in the originals. (I took them late one afternoon near summer solstice; the high latitude means that the sun sets late, after many hours at a low angle. Further, I was trying to get shots catching both the gleaming towers above and the then-shadowed streets below. Quite a challenge, and they turned out pretty poorly.)

In any case, some research finds that the West End may not even be Canada’s densest neighborhood: although Statistics Canada won’t give me easy access to that info, Vancouver’s planning department says 31,360 per square mile for the entire downtown peninsula, including the West End; Montréal’s planning department says one census tract there (can’t tell which) nears 113,000, and the overwhelmingly low-rise Plateau arrondissement 33,918 per square mile. It pales compared to the densest tracts in Manhattan (200,000+) and Chicago (91,000), or neighborhoods (Upper East Side, 108,000; Near North Side, 48,500).

Further, Vancouver’s towers are tiny compared to those in Chicago, much less Manhattan. Their planning department cites new developments there as averaging a floor-to-area ratio [Yanks say “color” and FAR, Canucks say “colour” and FSR] of 2-4; in downtown Chicago, home of a famously lenient City Hall, many new towers reach 20 FAR, and we don’t even get the parks or schools or social housing that Vancouver demands of its developers. Sure, our apartments are larger, but not ten times bigger!

Anyhow, useful links:
* Atlas démographique et socio-économique de Montréal
* Overviews of housing development in Vancouver’s former industrial areas
* Photos of Vancouver’s skyline compared, 1978-2003
* A Seattle Times series on urban growth in Cascadia
* Alan Loomis’ essay on other urbanisms, a 2000 conference at Berkeley co-convened at CNU that partially explored West Coast urbanisms

And while we’re on a Cascadia kick, Marian Burros of the Times writes about New Seasons Market, a small supermarket chain in metro Portland which focuses on service and — surprise — locally grown food, sourcing 27% of its items from within the bioregion. Not too surprisingly, its second store is at Orenco Station, “considered a leading example of ‘New Urbanism.‘”

Doc Hatfield, a rancher, has a heartwarming quote: “Most of the ranchers are rural, religious, conservative Republicans. And most of the customers are urban, secular, liberal Democrats. When it comes to healthy land, healthy food, healthy people and healthy diets, those tags mean nothing. Urbanites are just as concerned about open spaces and healthy rural communities as people who live there. When ranchers get to the city, they realize rural areas don’t have a corner on values. I think that’s what we are most excited about.”

While walking through the newly built Ikea at Atlantic Station, I noticed a huge line for the restaurant — including many office worker-bee types, probably escaping Midtown for a cheap eat. I’d read somewhere before that Ikea is the tenth-largest restaurant chain in the USA by volume, and it certainly seems plausible given the persistent crowds there. Yet the food isn’t all that wonderful and no cheaper than standard mall-food-court fare. Sure, they have stuff you can’t get elsewhere (lingonberry juice, apple cake), but that’s not really the draw. What is, and what elements would a knock-off or spin-off Ikea restaurant have to keep?

1. Portion sizes. Part of the magic behind the low prices: you get what you pay for. Despite the low prices per menu item, a lunch there easily runs the $10 that it would anywhere else after adding on a drink and dessert. Yet each individual piece is quite affordable since it’s largely stripped of the bulk and fluff that surround typical American plates. Using the kids’ menu as a loss leader also makes eminent sense — something that McDonald’s does quite well.

2. Cafeteria, or better yet, Automat format. This cuts back on staffing and the latter perpetuates the whole Modern aesthetic; the a la carte pricing makes the prices deceptively low.

3. Limited, internationalist menu with gradual changes. I’m not even sure whether the generic Euro-bland menu — e.g., English-style “chicken masala” with vaguely Indian-Chinese overtones — would make sense outside the generic Euro-bland confines of the Big Blue Box. Yet the menu succeeds in selling processed, generic, not all that tasty fast food (tiger shrimp, farmed salmon, frozen vegetables) to a snobby audience, and the occasional shifts might keep them coming back. Or not.

A bunch of incomplete blog-able blurbs archived during the server transition — which, of course, took place while a major American city disappeared under the sea, American media actually sat up and noticed, and the Bush administration was exposed as the lying sack of incompetent cronies they are. Oops.

* Some surprisingly good reporting about the TV reporting (“available online”:http://www.crooksandliars.com for us TV-free folks) on Katrina comes from Maureen Ryan’s “Watcher” TV column, notably “this recap”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-tribtv,1,3096468.htmlstory#katrinatv of “a week when everyone’s mask dropped and raw honesty was everywhere.” Meanwhile, Oprah’s “endless well of empathy”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-tribtv,1,3096468.htmlstory#katrinaoprah boiled over into anger: “When it comes to what happened, and didn’t have to happen, to children, it’s pretty overwhelming. It makes me so mad. This makes me mad! This should not have happened.”

* Todd Purdum in “the Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/03/national/nationalspecial/03voices.html reports on the “outrage at the response” from the viewpoint of a revered big-city mayor. “Andrew Young, the former civil rights worker and mayor of Atlanta who was Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations, was born in New Orleans 73 years ago, walked on its levees as a boy and ‘was always assured by my father that the Army Corps of Engineers had done a masterful job.’ But, Mr. Young said, “they’ve been neglected for the last 20 years,” along with other pillars of the nation’s infrastructure, human and physical. “I was surprised and not surprised… I think we’ve got to see this as a serious problem of the long-term neglect of an environmental system on which our nation depends.” Mayors, more so than any other high-profile elected officials, know the minutiae of infrastructure and know how important it is to the proper functioning of a great city, state, or nation. Too bad that 30 years of anti-government rhetoric from Washington has deprived our nation of the chance to do some great things with its infrastructure.

* The National Review’s “Rich Lowry”:http://nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry200509021731.asp offers up a grand bargain that my New Urbanist conscience thinks acceptable: “If the tableaux of suffering in the city prompts meaningful soul-searching, perhaps there can be a grand right-left bargain that includes greater attention to out-of-wedlock births from the Left in exchange for the Right’s support for more urban spending (anything is worth addressing the problem of fatherlessness).”

* The “NY Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/opinion/08thu1.html has editorialized against Congressional pork in light of the disaster, particularly the “Sprawlway”:http://www.sprawlway.org/news/nytimes090805.html, er Hastert Highway, er, Prairie Parkway.

*Miscellaneous stuff*:
* Geoff Canada’s “latest idea”:http://nytimes.com/2005/09/09/nyregion/09promise.html is to bring Slow Food ideas to Harlem on a public-school budget: $5.87 a student buys two meals and two snacks a day of fresh, healthful food.

* Charles Shaw, who somewhat “confusedly conflates”:http://www.planetizen.com/node/148 public housing redevelopment, New Urbanism, the war on drugs, and the Creative Class, has “gone out of commission for a while”:http://newtopiamagazine.net/articles/58?POSTNUKESID=9d6121b529292a6621e24b12b2c46c02. It all makes more sense now, or maybe not.

Contrary to the claims of some, the retort pouch — the foil-and-plastic thing (essentially a can married to a Ziploc bag) that precooked Indian food, camping food, military or humanitarian Meals Ready to Eat (MRE) rations, and astronaut meals come in — were not invented for the Apollo program, but for the Nazis. True, they didn’t really work until the intersection of plastics research and the Apollo program in the 1960s, but still that MRE might not be as all-American as it’s made out to be.

Last week’s absence of posts was due to a vacation last weekend (NYC–as always, photos eventually, once I’ve had time to pick through them with a fine toothed comb and then crop, resize, optimize, and adjust the contrast and angle and exposure) and a flurry of work ahead of a few deadlines this month. In particular, I’m presenting at Greening the Heartland and Transport Chicago (thankfully the same paper, but it’s not done yet!), all in the week just prior to CNU XIII.

More simply, I’m going to have to leave some things unfinished until the tide passes, sometime in June.

I picked up a carton of Organic Valley soymilk at Whole Foods the other day; it was new and I’m a sucker for their products, since I know it’s at least local to the Upper Midwest (and their cultured butter is so darn good). The side panel invited me to enter details about my carton into their web site, which promised details about the farmers who grew the beans which made my soymilk. Of course, I can’t resist wanting to know more about my farmers, especially if it proves that we’re only a few hundred miles apart, and especially if they’re organically farming soy (which my family knows a bit about).

Sure enough, there they were: three sturdy Iowans. Farmer Erwin Henderson’s bio mentions that he’s doing what his grandfather did by farming the family land organically. It’s odd to think that in one generation, the business of farming (as with everything else, really) has been turned upside down by the “green revolution” or by the Oil Age in some other manifestation, and that we’re just now trying to turn it all back.

The Northern snakehead is the “invasive species of the month,” even before one was caught in Lake Michigan last week. Talk about a scary fish: eats anything up to a foot long, looks like a snake, can even “walk” overland between water for three days! Together with the bighead carp (a massive herbivore that has the nasty habit of jumping up onto motorboats), the Asian longhorned beetle, and the various nasty influenza strains arising from southern China, three long-shot scenarios emerge:
– China is waging biological warfare of some sort
– wildlife in China is exceptionally well evolved
– or the zeal for just-killed fish is getting a bit out of hand.

As much as I respect the Asian notion that fresh fish must be killed right before the consumer’s eyes (and yes, the fish is tastier that way), shipping live fish across continents has proven to be an incredibly effective way to diminish the earth’s biodiversity. It’s possible to have fresh fish that’s local, too.

Traps set up in Burnham harbor after the snakehead was identified have caught several large Pacific salmon, among other non-native species. I’ve heard of salmon in Lake Michigan, although the thought initially seemed strange. (Apparently, they’re stocked there to fill the alewife-eating position on the food chain formerly fulfilled by lake trout, which were hurt by sea lamprey. The GLFC reports that Atlantic salmon were once common in Lake Ontario (quite a long ways inland!) and would have made it further up the Lakes if the Niagara Falls weren’t so damned tall.)

To the credit of European and Atlantic species, the most destructive invasive species in the Great Lakes include the common carp, round goby, ruffe, and zebra mussel from the Caspian Sea and the sea lamprey and zebra mussel from the northern Atlantic.

From Chicago magazine’s Dish dining newsletter:

“Crew Bar + Grill (4804 N. Broadway; 773-784-2739), a 3,000-square-foot gay sports bar, recently opened next to The Green Mill with a signature drink called a �beergarita,� which, unfortunately, is exactly what it sounds like. . . .”

I tried picking up some regular groceries at three lovely yet pricey new delis/grocery shops within three blocks of me, two of them just days or weeks old. The newest one, Olivia’s, is tucked away on Wabansia a few steps west of Damen. It’s very convenient and carries perishables (produce, milk, eggs) and some essentials, like soap. The Goddess & Grocer, which replaced Zoom Kitchen, has been open for a few weeks; it’s a sandwich & salad deli with a selection of groceries to match. (Sandwiches average $8.) Down North is Cooking Fools, which is even more of a deli with a very limited selection of dry goods.

However, the prices!

Anchovy paste: $1.89
One chunk fresh mozzarella: $4.29*
Two beefsteak tomatoes: $1.70*
Quart of peanut butter ice cream: $6.49*
Half gallon organic milk: $4.89*
Dozen eggs: $4.49*
Baked tofu: $5.69*
Red pepper powder: $2.89*
Quart of yogurt: $3.99*
Small box of cookies: $2.99
Box of biscuits: $3.99
Bag of granola: $6*

As much as I like the idea of shopping locally (and yes, the * indicates high quality products from Illinois, Wisconsin, or Iowa), I really can’t keep this up; even Whole Foods looks like a bargain. Yet the usual corner stores carry only liquor, cigarettes, and the usual selection of processed food. Well, I suppose I’ll keep going to Clybourn for Trader Joe’s, then.

And to think that I thought Zoom Kitchen was pricey when it first opened. (That didn’t keep me from running up from downtown after work for a portabella sandwich, then returning to Hyde Park.)

Nina Simonds, in the Times’ food section, describes a series of “speakeasies,” or tiny, limited-menu restaurants set up in nontraditional spaces — art galleries or even people’s apartments.

A Hong Kong friend who is an avid foodie took me to Mum Chau’s Sichuan Kitchen, which is definitely an insider’s type of place — just one room in an undistinguished apartment building at the top of D’Aguilar Street in the heart of Hong Kong. A colorful but discreet red sign reads, “Mum Chau’s Sichuan Kitchen, Members Only,” in Chinese and English. Lunch is served promptly from noon until two, first come first served, and tables fill almost immediately, as word has spread of its superb but simple Sichuan-style fare. Dinner is by reservation.

Mum Chau’s specialties are homemade dumplings and hand-thrown noodles, but she also offers other traditional items. To order, customers are given a small yellow paper menu in Chinese and asked to tick off their choices. (You can go to other people’s tables and point if you are stumped.)

I’m not sure whether it’s a trend or not, but I like the notion of less choice when eating out. Restaurants with set, prix-fixe menus — from palaces like Charlie Trotter’s or French Laundry down to homey spots like Savoy Truffle — express and highlight their owners’ or chef’s unique background and talents, which are increasingly worth seeking out in a world with ever more (but ever more bland and processed) dining options.

Of course, these speakeasies could only thrive in Hong Kong: tightly packed, rolling around in money, in love with food, gossipy, and freewheeling in the ways of regulation.

One question I’m frequently asked is where one can find a community garden in the city. Sadly, they’re concentrated in a few parts of town which happen(ed) to have serious abandonment problems, but there’s still probably one near you. NeighborSpace, which owns the city’s community gardens, has a handy (if not exactly accurate) map; CNT’s NEWS map server can also show you where NeighborSpace gardens are — as well as many other things, like Starbuckses… er, “boutique coffee shops.”

Well, there go my chances of getting a reservation at Green Zebra anytime soon: plaudits from The New York Times food section and Crain’s in the same week. From the Times: “To date, there have been barely a handful of vegetarian restaurants in the United States that would tempt the average nonvegetarian; most might as well post a ‘meat-eaters keep out’ sign on their doors… But a new restaurant, Green Zebra, offers what amounts to four-star vegetarian food almost exclusively. In business since April, it is not in New York or San Francisco but in Chicago, a city best known for its steak houses and hot dogs (which are piled so high with pickles, lettuce and tomatoes that everyone jokes that they are the citizenry’s primary source of vegetables).” Writer Mark Bittman goes on to compare the food to French Laundry, Charlie Trotter’s, and Jean Georges

The Times has a charming article in the food section about a chef who bicycles his purchases between the Union Square Greenmarket and the restaurant. Speaking of which, my recent purchases have included mushrooms, asparagus, mustard greens, and a lemon verbena plant. I’ve also planted micro greens in the garden, which have taken well — however, they’re now too big and too bitter/spicy for salads. Well, they’re still damn tasty.

Alas, the Wicker Park farmers’ market hasn’t started yet. One nice addition this year is a new evening market on Randolph in the West Loop — bringing the street back to its Market District origins in the best way. Also, I’ve found a pay-per-box CSA that delivers organic boxes just a few blocks away. Angelic was great, but the quantites really were ridiculous. Growing Power seems to offer a wider variety of goods (it’s a coop of many farms), and only when you want them.