From Roeder’s column in the Sun-Times:

NEED PARKING? Yes, there are a lot of unsold condos in the downtown area. But that also means there are unsold parking spaces, and some developers are eager for cash. So the auction firm Rick Levin & Associates Inc. has been hired for a multi-property auction of parking spaces… Most will be sold regardless of price, a sign of seller desperation.

Funny thing is, he mentions buildings where the condos have sold just fine — in particular, 111 E. Chestnut, immediately behind the Escada/H&M/Borders block of Michigan. (Other parking spots have recently sold at 340 W. Superior, 910 W. Madison, and other otherwise successful developments.) Obviously, this means that the unsold parking spaces have no market value, because people living downtown don’t always want to drive downtown.

It’s time to let the market, not outmoded zoning regulations, decide whether residents want parking or not. Each auctioned parking space is a $30,000 hit to the developer — money which could developers could put to much better use by writing down affordable housing or sprucing up sidewalks. Beyond that, even many of the parking spaces that are sold are sold at a substantial discount to the actual construction cost. The new downtown zoning cuts residential parking requirements by up to 45%, but that’s just a start.

A group opposing “fair share” housing legislation has sprung up on the North Shore, according to the Tribune (in an article by Trine Tsouderos, who covers development in the suburbs). Rob Faurot from Wilmette, president of New Trier Neighbors, says: “Our answer is if you want those sorts of things and the home values in the town that you live are too expensive . . . the options are you have to move somewhere else or you have to make more money.”

Oh, sure. It’s really easy to just “make more money.” If that’s the case, then, Mr. Faurot, can we raise your taxes so that the rest of us can shoulder that social burden for you?

In a dramatic illustration of how infill construction often just barely keeps pace with Americans’ insatiable demand for more living space, a three-story, 15 unit apartment building near the lakefront in Lakeview will soon give way to another apartment building — 40% more units (a total of six more) but nearly eight times taller (23 floors).

Incidentally, the through-block site will allow the developers to choose an address on Stratford, which has a more properly Anglo name than Cornelia. Cornelia, Elaine, and other femme street names in the area seemed more appropriate when the neighborhood was gayer, I suppose.

The Wall Street Journal ran an “oh no, gas prices are too high” article on the Monday front page, but with an interesting twist:

The pain at the pump only intensifies a deeper problem for America’s low-paid workers: sprawl. In dispersed metropolitan areas like Tampa, the new jobs often are far from the affordable housing. Public transit isn’t a viable option because it isn’t keeping up with the growth. That leaves low-income workers with little choice but to shoulder the cost of a car — and, when the price of gas shoots up, to bear it.

The postwar modern American city was built on a foundation of cheap gas that allows even low-paid workers to drive to and from their jobs. Take away the cheap gas and the foundation begins to crack.

“We’ve always known that sprawl has a cost,” says Bruce Katz, an urban-policy analyst at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “But now we’re seeing it, as a result of higher gas prices, in a visceral way.”

The article profiles Tampa, where an average household spends 23.2% of its income on transportation — more than they spend on housing. (The poorest 20% of Americans spend over 40% of their income on transportation!)

[New York City] Council Member David Yassky (D-Brooklyn) has introduced a bill that would make inclusionary zoning mandatory. He is unequivocal in his thinking. �When there is a change from manufacturing to residential, property values increase 500 or 600 percent. When you have that kind of wealth created by a government action, it is only fair to use some of it for the public good. The Department of City Planning came to Brooklyn and told the residents there would be affordable housing in new developments. If they really intend to keep their promise, then they should have no problem putting it into writing and guaranteeing that it will be done.�

Planners Network, Spring 2004

Inclusionary zoning is usually a good idea, but planning for public benefits is most appropriate — indeed, most necessary — in instances where government “gives” substantial windfall profits to the private sector. Upzoning in a deindustrializing city like New York, as has been done in Vancouver, provides a great opportunity to extract tremendous concessions from developers: new parks, schools, affordable housing, community facilities, and transit should top the list.

At the Highway 15 border crossing, from Blaine to Surrey. The guy directing traffic sent me to the empty “pass holder” lane, past the long lines of cars and trucks. Instead of parking and walking in, I rode up to a window.

RCMP border crossing agent [strong jaw, red hair]: Where are you from?
Me: Chicago, Illinois.
RCMP: Did you bicycle all the way from Chicago?
Me: No, I came from Seattle…
RCMP: And what do you do in Chicago?
Me: I’m an urban planner.
RCMP: Is that why you’ve cycled from Seattle instead of driving?

Photos of Seattle, Bellingham, Vancouver, and Victoria (and some of the countryside in between) coming when I get back.

“Charles Besser, a man with lots of money to strike a small blow against multitudinous multi-family-ism,” has purchased a 16-unit apartment building on Dearborn in the Gold Coast and plans to build a single-family house there. Never mind that, less than ten years ago, he tore down a four-flat to build his current house.

S-T columnist David Roeder makes some more snide remarks about how useless, unloved, and passe multifamily housing is:

Single-family living is under attack from the right, the developers who want to stack people like pancakes, and the left, dewy-eyed planners who think the stacking preserves precious resources.

Well then, I guess we have our coalition cut out for us.

Again, let’s reiterate that gentrification is economic growth combined with population decline. Deconversion and much larger living spaces result in fewer residents, except when there’s plentiful new construction.

Thanks to a session at AIA, now I know who designed that cool-looking condo on Broadway in Edgewater. Add one more to the rather short list of cool architects doing small multifamily in Chicago. You’d think that the infill boom (~70,000 units in 10 years!) would have generated a new Chicago School by now, just as the 1880s boom brought a host of talents (from Sullivan to Wright) from the countryside to try their hand here.

Or, one would at least expect the local architects and developers to draw on the city’s rich history of stamping out perfectly good versions of our vernacular housing types: cottage, bungalow, rowhouse, two-flat, three-flat (with or without stores), corner six- or twelve-flat, courtyard, or palazzo high-rise. (As Dennis McClendon says, Chicago is a city of mass production: the same twelve buildings copied ten thousand times over; only the details ever changed.)

But no; 90% of the competent buildings I see are by a few firms: Brininstool + Lynch, Landon Bone Baker, Pappageorge Haymes (on their good days), or Sullivan Goulette.

Others have pointed out to me that Chicago’s matchbox three-flats are still a damn sight better than the equivalent ones sprouting in almost similar numbers elsewhere — say, in Lubavitcher neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Well, yeah, but mediocrity is not its own excuse.

“Innovation Briefs” has an editorial concluding (largely, it seems, on the basis of anecdotes and David Brooks’ awful generalizations) that “the most recent Census Bureau data, documenting demographic trends since the 2000 Census, suggest that the “smart growth” movement is having little influence on reshaping America’s urban landscape. The demographic and economic forces driving metropolitan expansion are too powerful to be reined in by the entreaties of smart growth advocates.”

Well, yes. “Smart growth” entered the lexicon in, oh, 1996 or so. It takes an achingly long time to stop a train, much less throw it into reverse, so one wouldn’t expect smart growth to have an immediately huge impact on the way Americans live. Sprawl has been the status quo for the better part of a century now, really, and no crisis moment has arisen to give it the good kick in the rear that it needs.

I sometimes point out that the residential boom in Chicago, for instance, doesn’t reflect an actual boom in population. It reflects increased wealth, for one, but more importantly it reflects the turnaround: the slowdown and gradual reversal of 40 years of population losses. If this is just what the slowdown of the losses — just a change in the rate of change (in calculus, the first derivative) looks like, just imagine what a real boom would look like. The train is decelerating, all right, but it’s been chugging along so fast that the naysayers can still say that we’re moving right along.

Heard on “Wait Wait”: infill housing in Vancouver runs into a novel set of NIMBYs: naturists.

In the Fresno Bee, about Forest City Ratner’s job at Central Station.

My reward for staying after hours, I guess.

An interesting bill now before the California General Assembly would better inform municipalities’ decisions about big-box retailers:

“[S]tate Sen. Richard Alarcon (D-Sun Valley) has introduced legislation that would require large retailers that sell groceries to pay for economic impact studies that could be used to kill any future expansion. Unions and other Wal-Mart critics say such stores hurt the economy because they pay low wages and squeeze out smaller retailers.

The bill would prohibit a city or county from approving any store larger than 100,000 square feet that also devotes at least 10% of its space to selling groceries, if an economic report shows that the surrounding community would be harmed.

It would require Wal-Mart or other superstores to pay for the studies, although they would have no say in choosing which independent consultant would be hired by local officials. Economic and environmental impact reports can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Alarcon said local communities, dazzled by the prospect of huge sales tax revenues, sometimes don’t think rationally before accepting big-box stores. When he was a Los Angeles city councilman in the mid-1990s, Alarcon said, he helped steer a Wal-Mart to a mall in Panorama City rather than to a former General Motors plant, which became a mall. He said the compromise allowed both places to flourish.

“Wal-Mart almost literally has the effect of creating a black hole and sucking all the economic energy of some of the smaller businesses in the community,” Alarcon said. “A mistake some smaller communities make is they fail to take into account the effect on the community as a whole.”

[Robert Salladay writing in the LA Times, via Chicago Tribune]

The article also mentions that Gov. Davis had signed a law barring tax incentives for big boxes — a huge problem in California, where municipalities fall over themselves to snag sales taxes in a state deprived of property taxes — unless “sales tax revenue from the big-box store is shared by the winning and losing cities.” Tax base sharing, but on the sly. I like it.