The Center for Urban Pedagogy is apparently bringing its fantastic “Urban Renewal: The City Without a Ghetto” exhibit to Chicago in late March. Mess Hall, a space under the Morse L, will host it. I spent a few hours at the tiny Storefront for Art & Architecture a few months ago, engrossed in the exhibit; it strikes a great balance with excellent exhibit design and content that is aimed at the right level, using the right words. Although there’s certainly a leftist bent, the peculiar political situation that drove urban renewal is explained.

Illinois has passed a “builder’s appeal” act, similar to “fair share” legislation nationwide [40-B “anti-snob zoning” in Massachusetts or Fair Share/Mt. Laurel laws in New Jersey]. The legislation is weaker than 40-B — it gives credit to municipalities for well-laid plans, even if there’s little chance of implementation — but the spirit of the law is undeniably important.

The “builder’s appeal” tack on fair and affordable housing is doubly interesting because it, like New Urbanist code reform projects, seeks quintessentially liberal ends through deregulatory means. That’s a cool way to bridge the political divide and to curry political capital with the building-trades crowd.

Last week, I got a random query about using private grants to offset rising property tax bills for long-term residents. A response, outlining some fairly simple, low-cost ways to structure a targeted property tax relief program:

Private grants typically wouldn’t be of sufficient size to address a need as large as property tax relief over the long term — even if only $20,000 is disbursed this year, within a decade (assuming ever-higher valuations), half a million dollars will have been spent.

I can think of two ways in which such a program could be structured, though. Locally, Cook County is willing to “defer” (with interest) property taxes until a property’s sale, by placing a lien against the property in the amount of the unpaid taxes (provided the property owner meets certain requirements: over 65, low income, etc.). The lien is written such that it can’t be used to, say, force a tax sale, but “lien” sounds sufficiently scary enough that few people are willing to try it. The program also doesn’t do anything to hold down valuations after the sale.

Private money could be used to place second mortgages against the properties in question: the second mortgage would generate cash up front to pay the tax bill, grants would pay the interest (and administrative costs — it would be cheaper if the taxing body were administering), and the principal would be repaid in a balloon payment upon sale of the property. Again, some long-time homeowners may object to the idea of having debt on their paid-off houses, even if it doesn’t materially affect them.

The other, more durable, way to go would be to use the grant to set up a land trust. Since the land is rising in value and thus causing the property taxes to rise, the private grant could fund a nonprofit to purchase the land out from under the houses. (The homeowners would still own the structures, which, I assume, are depreciating with age.) The nonprofit would hopefully qualify for a partial or full exemption from property taxes. If a TDR program exists, excess development rights could be sold to an adjacent parcel, simultaneously funding the program and reducing the market (and thus taxable) value of the property.

Like the lien system, this would involve the property owner losing some degree of control over their property. However, my own feeling is that property ownership comes with pros and cons; one of those cons is responsibility for things like taxes.

From Tribune columnist Dawn Turner Trice’s article on the libertarian Manhattan Institute’s recent survey analysis on teenage delinquency, suburban and urban. The longitudinal survey found that teenagers in both cities and suburbs were familiar with sex and drugs.

Surprised? That’s because we continue to idealize the more affluent suburbs and demonize the poorer sections of the city…

Most of us recognize that there is no hermetically sealed place to rear youngsters. But some people still think so, says [Jay] Greene, [co-author of the study and] a graduate of New Trier High School on the North Shore.

“A lot of the flight to the suburbs is still related to the perception that certain social ills are so concentrated in the city,” Greene said.

That perception is reinforced by television shows and movies about city life; by the news. It’s so ingrained that we tend not question it. We take it for granted.

The bottom line is that if parents and teens give up their responsibilities or are disengaged, no matter the reason, then these rates will continue to rise across the board.

Combined with the higher accidental death rate of suburban teens — driving is the #1 cause of death for young Americans, and suburbanites drive far more than city dwellers — and the case for moving “for the children” falls apart.

What’s more, a move to the socially alienated suburbs is a radical way to disengage from the public life of the city streets, a way to “give up the responsibilities” of being a citizen. Most obviously, it is a way to avoid paying city taxes, thus becoming a way to avoid the messy business of democratic cross-subsidization that comes with any large government with diverse interests to please. In the USA, suburbanites are fiscally disengaged from the real problem of fixing the social ills concentrated in cities: poverty, crime, deteriorating infrastructure.

Park Slope, “where blonde people throw out working air conditioners and take Yoga classes and cook with wine and have assorted field greens instead of homefries for brunch, where they tote the Sunday Times and have laundry ‘dropped off’ and wear jogging shorts, and vote.”

A post diagnosing why, exactly, ethnic neighborhood retail streets are often so much more exciting than equivalent yuppie neighborhood retail, even after controlling for factors like residential density. In the end, I’m just channeling Jane Jacobs — although she, not having the luxury of writing after the flowering of postindustrial economic hyper-stratification, possibly mis-diagnosed “the need for old buildings.”

Perhaps my original post was a little shortsighted, but one thing I’ll still cling to is that ethnic neighbourhoods are much more resistant to the kind of negative gentrification that guts a lot of thriving neighbourhoods.

okay, so I’m thinking along the lines of something I just posted in another thread, but maybe this is because of social-class heterogeneity? that is to say, income and wealth diversity may be more important than ethnic or sexual or whatever diversity in terms of making “interesting” neighborhoods. many ethnic neighborhoods are cool because they’re entrepots: there are rich and poor, still intermingling because of language barriers or whatnot. (many immigrant neighborhoods have much higher household incomes than one might think at first glance; about 40% of households in Little Village, a Southwest Side neighborhood usually described as “lower middle class Mexican,” earn more than Chicago’s median HH income — $38K in 2000. yes, the families are larger, too, but there is wealth there.)

the more interesting gay ghettoes, IMO, are those which are socially mixed: girls and boys, for instance, instead of being completely overrun with the Chelsea/WeHo/etc. guppie circuit clone-boy crowd. (“Aberzombie” sadly never caught on.) meanwhile, there are some very wealthy Chinese towns in Southern California — say, San Marino or Diamond Bar — and their strip malls are almost as boring as any in lily-white South O.C.: Starbucks, Sav-On Drugs, Charles Schwab, Cathay Bank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, a seafood dim sum restaurant, bubble tea, a bakery, an antiquities shop, and Ranch 99 Market (a local Chinese supermarket chain; mildly interesting, but nothing you haven’t seen before*). and time and again, you hear older African Americans saying that the community stuck together during segregation; there were rich and poor shopping on 47th Street or Pettigrew Street, but after integration anyone who could moved away and so did the businesses. 125th Street in Harlem is still really fascinating even though the chains have found it: yeah, there’s Starbucks, but also wig shops.

once a neighborhood is economically homogenous at any level — Southside Homes with its dirty liquor stores and check-cashing shops behind bars; middle-income Rolling Hills Acres with its Mall-Wart and Oldtyme Rural Buffet; or prosperous Society Hill with Crockery Shed and Farstucks — it gets predictable and boring.

I wonder how it would be possible to quantify this. income quintiles are easily accessible from the U.S. Census (Summary File 3), but how do we define neighborhoods or even trade areas — for neighborhoods whose businesses rely on tourists?

or, perhaps there’s a “sweet spot” in terms of neighborhood social capital. too much, as in a small town, and not only does everybody know your name, but everybody knows that you didn’t go to church last week and cluck-cluck, shame on you. that’s boring.

too little social capital, and everyone walks around alienated and ignorant of their fellow man, talking on their cellphones or listening to MP3s, all while compulsively shopping, drinking, and/or popping SSRIs to assuage their spiritual emptiness. that’s also boring.

but in between? that’s cool.
— pc

* Leonard, I know what you mean about how two Chinese supermarkets in two cities can look similar but have completely different products. part of this may be because the importing business is still so highly fragmented (you’re dealing with lots of tiny little suppliers, some of whom you only know because Auntie Grace lives next to so-and-so), so different retailers — because they have different supply chains — will have access to a vastly different array of goods. but once you have a real chain, like Ranch 99 Market, that has centralized buying, you can say goodbye to that variability. case in point: Safeway is the same from coast to coast, but local farmer’s markets all sell pretty much the same thing, right? of course not.

then again, maybe that’s a crucial distinction between interesting or boring neighborhoods: how much of the local business is really local.

** for those paying attention, I’ve covered the following chapters in “The Death and Life”:
Chapter 11, “The Need for {henceforth, TNF} Concentration” — in talking about residential density
Chapter 10, “TNF Aged Buildings” — principally because aged buildings provide for economic diversity, because “I mean not museum-piece old buildings” (p 187). little could she predict the still-to-come fashion of paying a lot to be in an old building.

elsewhere, I’ve mentioned a quirky street grid as one element that keeps an area interesting; that’s Chapter 9, “TNF Small Blocks.” and I think we all take for granted now Chapter 8, “TNF Mixed Primary Uses” — although that may also be a significant contributor. I was just in a party in Little Village, and my, there are a lot of factories left there. today’s gentrified neighborhoods are little more than commuter housing and shopping, just like the pre-Edge City suburbs.

A tad polemic and wistful for my tastes, but still spot-on:

Something stranger and even more disheartening to the lover of city life is becoming clear: the new in cities not only isn’t new, it isn’t very urban. Although we’ve resurrected the forms of our cities, we’ve animated them with a culture straight from the suburbs…

Today’s neighborhood is different from the older one that’s supposed to inspire it. For one thing, gentrifiers and loft-dwellers live much less of their lives in their neighborhoods than those who lived there 50 years ago… Like a postwar subdivision, today’s retro neighborhoods lack ethnic clubs, nearby in-laws or grandparents, and merchants who have watched a generation of youngsters grow up. They lack the culture that once provided city neighborhoods with a sense of continuity and identity, and forced people to develop ties over time, across generations, even across ethnic differences…

The car in itself is not suburban. But it is suburban to expect your very own parking space in the city…

By the 1950’s, American cities were losing the vitality that had made them such forceful and creative places for nearly a century. American society today, Marx might say, is about “the suburbanization of everything” — including our retro cities.

Michael Johns in today’s NYT

Speaking of retro cities, Sylvain Chomet, director of The Triplets of Belleville, has this to say about the ’50s in an interview:

From a design point of view, the ’50s were more inspiring. Town planning, cars, clothes were creative and interesting. Drawing and design were an important part of life, on posters, in schoolbooks. It was also a period when people relaxed after the trials of the Second World War. They were less cynical, keener on their freedoms.

(Well, yes, ’50s town planning was “creative,” but “interesting”?)

The film does a marvelous job at portraying both booming, de Gaulle-era Paris and the fantasy of Montr�al reimagined as New York. (Chomet points out that the bridge to Belleville is the Jacques Cartier, from Montr�al, “surrounded by typical Qu�bec architecture”: “we used many details from Qu�bec and Montr�al in trying to show how these cities might have turned into New Yorks.” The fat people, though, are American.)

The plot’s almost nonsense and the style transcends mere caricature, but particular visual moments — RER trains zooming by, a bicyclist dodging a “Mairie de XXIe” bus, meticulously computer-animated spokes whizzing by, ridiculous floats in the Tour de France, a parting shot of the basilica in Marseille, and of course a boy on a bicycle besting evildoers in their cars — make it well worthwhile.

One of the latest, most far-reaching school reform ideas that has reached the experimental stage is the small schools movement: breaking up large, urban public high schools into smaller, themed academies. In theory, smaller schools provide more individual attention to students and parents, while a theme connects the students to the wider world — opening up educational resources outside the classroom and making learning more relevant to students. The approach combines elements of magnet and charter schools, but is planned for a much more far-reaching rollout: 100,000 students in New York City alone.

The Wall Street Journal (paid subscription required) is keeping a diary of the New York Harbor School‘s first year. Halfway into the school year, parents and teachers have noticed that enthusiasm from the students is still strong, but that academic performance shows no signs of marked improvement.

[from The Observer]

Prince backs new housing bonanza

Prescott wins royal approval for 200,000 homes

Nick Mathiason Sunday October 19, 2003

Prince Charles and John Prescott are to join forces to create a framework
for what will be the biggest housebuilding drive Britain has seen for 50
years.

The prince will share a platform with the Deputy Prime Minister in east
London next month when they will reveal the design principles behind the
building of 200,000 new homes in the south-east of England. They will be
flanked by an elite group of international planners who will help create a
new generation of towns for key workers unable to get a foot on the housing
ladder.

The project will be seen as a valuable endorsement of Labour’s far-reaching
housing plans by the heir to the throne — and a blow to conservationists,
who fear a concreting over of the countryside in the South East. The
unprecedented move will also show that the prince’s ideas on sustainable
developments on a human scale have been taken on board by government.

Prescott is expected to outline proposals to create a strict design code for
communities using local materials to enhance identity and reduce the risk of
new homes becoming soulless estates.

The Government has identified four growth zones: Milton Keynes,
Buckinghamshire; Ashford, Kent; Stansted, Essex; and an ambitious Thames
Gateway linear city spanning east London, Kent and Essex.

Prime Minister Tony Blair is chairing a Cabinet committee to kickstart the
building of thousands of new homes on largely derelict and contaminated
land. Settlements are expected to be compact, with homes built close to
shops and amenities to minimise car use.

Prescott has been influenced by the New Urbanism design movement flowering
in the States and earlier this month visited America to see new towns and
cities. This chimes with the prince’s long-held theories. A royal aide said:
‘Charles wants to be seen as useful, and Labour wants kudos by royal
association. It makes for a marriage of expedience.’

Charles’s forays into the architectural world have not always proved
successful. Plans for an eco-friendly model village in the Hebrides were
scrapped because they cost too much. His Poundbury development in Dorset has
split the property world, with many saying it is too twee and impossible to
replicate elsewhere.

Gordon Brown has signalled that booming house prices in the south-east are
hampering economic growth as key workers leave the region because of the
cost of homes. Fewer homes are being built now than at any time in the past
80 years yet more households are being created as people live longer,
divorce or choose a single life.

The ‘Not in My Back Yard’ lobby has railroaded local councils into refusing
planning permission for new houses, and a cumbersome planning system has
also been blamed for stifling new homes. The result is rocketing house
prices in the south.

A series of announcements over the next three months will push forward the
housing agenda. Plans to use more urban brownfield land instead of
countryside will be published in 10 days’ time, and reform of the planning
system and measures to finance new roads, rail lines, schools and hospitals
needed by new communities need will be outlined.

Prescott’s plans have been costed at �22 billion over 20 years and there is
concern that this is unrealistic. The Treasury is looking to introduce a
windfall tax on agricultural land which has increased in value once planning
permission for development has been granted.

Farmland can fetch �1,500 an acre, but once houses are earmarked for such
plots the price can shoot up to �1m, said the Town and Country Planning
Association.

Critics say that too much growth is centred on the south and that the
Government should move jobs to the the north where there is no shortages of
houses, and build new rail lines connecting northern cities.

“The age-adjusted death rate is twice as high in East Harlem as on the neighboring Upper East Side. Obesity is three times as common in the central Bronx as in Greenwich Village and SoHo.” So reports the Times on the widely divergent health outcomes in NYC’s neighborhoods.

Needless to say, Las Vegas left me completely dispirited. The Strip is effectively completely unregulated; all the infrastructure (including the new ped bridges and monorail and bollards lining the sidewalks) results from collusion between the casino bosses, installed as a customer convenience. The searing heat, labyrinthe [and mind-numbingly identical, varying only in which rococo theme was pasted on] buildings, and herds of Middle Americans waddling about — all added up into a frustration not even the only-legal-here carousing (which wasn’t even that cheap!) could assuage.

Los Angeles didn’t help much, although I did get a chance to glimpse some prettier residential streets this time. The juxtapositions still startle, the weather (smog aside) still pleases, the people are still lovely. The sense that a city is waiting to emerge hangs around some of the 1920s parts of town, but it’s overwhelmed by comically segregated suburban desolation that continues to march over the high passes into ever more remote, sometimes inhospitable valleys (Victorville, anyone?).

Bike stuff seen: a protected turn lane & bike lane on State in Santa Barbara, a bike lane on the 101 freeway near Montecito, and advanced stop lines on Santa Monica in West Hollywood.

California’s latest export: poor Californians. Even in the late ’90s, California sent over 100,000 residents a year to other states — including a growing number of third-generation Latinos and Asians. (But is L.A. as good a “factory for Americans” as Brooklyn was?) Those moving into California from other states, like gentrifiers anywhere, have fewer children and more money than those they’re replacing. Incidentally, more Californians moved to the Midwest in the 1990s than vice versa, even though Illinois is the largest exporter to the Golden State (60,000 residents).