This is basic chemistry

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Few things get my goat more than global warming deniers. Here’s the basic science, which I learned in college from Nobel laureates — but this is paraphrased from none other than Shell Oil Company’s website:
1. Carbon dioxide’s chemical bonds trap heat (infrared radiation); this is called the greenhouse effect, and was proven in the 19th century.
2. Burning fossil fuels and trees increases the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Over the past 200 years or so, human activities have released ~350 gigatons (almost 800 quadrillion pounds) of carbon into the atmosphere. It is utterly, completely impossible to dispute this.
3. As a result, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 has increased by 40% in 150 years, or in 0.000003% of earth’s history — if the earth was one year old, this would’ve happened in ~1 second. This concentration appears to be higher than it’s been in millions of years, and certainly since humans have been around. Projections based on current trends indicate that CO2 could go to ~300% above pre-industrial levels during this century, reaching levels considered toxic to human health. I’ve never seen a serious attempt to debunk these facts.
4. Numerous studies and models of climate systems, both micro and macro, of earth’s history and future and those of other planets, show that climate systems are sensitive to changes in carbon dioxide concentrations. That is, this stuff matters.
5. The earth’s climate is warmer today than it’s been in a very long while. Land, sea, and satellite records all independently verify this, despite recent attempts to spread FUD about individual data points.
6. Therefore, humans burning fossil fuels have enhanced the greenhouse effect and are warming the atmosphere. I find it very difficult to logically dispute this if one accepts the points above — which, as I’ve noted, are all well nigh impossible to dispute.

Many of the professional deniers have accepted #5 above, and now say, “so what?” Well, I don’t think it’s prudent to run an uncontrolled experiment on the only planet fit for human habitation. Systems often prove much more fragile than we might expect: a 40% increase in CO2 concentrations might not sound drastic, but consider that a mere 11% increase in the concentration of iron in your body can kill you. Given that the cost of heading off a climate catastrophe is (a) not that expensive, at perhaps a few percent of GGP, and (b) can move forward any number of wonderful side agendas, why should we not pursue these policies?

Up-and-coming, revisited

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I’m moving, so time to unearth a lot of stuff that’s been cluttering my shelves. (Back before the interwebs, I felt compelled to keep a lot of magazine back issues around for reference.) In 1997, the Utne Reader ran a list of Hip Hot Spots which listed first-tier and up-and-coming hip hoods nationally. Let’s grade them less on their ability to find hot spots but for their prescience in seeing where the trends were going. 12 years on, the “hip” spot should now be safely square, and the upstart should be where it all is, if still a bit quiet.

  • New Orleans: Lower Garden; Marigny/Bywater. Good pick, and the shift did happen — but nobody could’ve foreseen how Katrina would tilt the city uptown.
  • SF: Inner Mission; Hunters Point/Bayview. Didn’t happen. Even the hypercharged decade in between couldn’t dethrone the Mission.
  • NYC: Williamsburg; Red Hook. Didn’t happen. Red Hook might be the only neighborhood described in the Times as having its gentrification fail.
  • Montréal: Plateau; Little Italy. Close; Mile End isn’t quite Little Italy, but it certainly took over from the Plateau.
  • Toronto: College/Clinton; Kensington. Yes and no; College is hopeless, and Kensington resurgent, but who could’ve miss Queen?
  • Chicago: Wicker Park; Pilsen. Not so much. Wicker Park has lost edge, but still has dibs on hipster social life; Pilsen has been slow to mature, and the “Chicago Arts District” didn’t help matters along.
  • Seattle: Belltown; Pike/Pine. Spot on.
  • Philadelphia: Olde City; Northern Liberties. Spot on.
  • Vancouver: Commercial Drive; Mt. Pleasant. Correct.
  • Minneapolis: Whittier; Northeast. Correct, although the shift has been slow.
  • LA: Los Feliz; Echo Park. Can’t argue, but Echo Park still plays underdog to Silverlake.
  • Detroit: Hamtramck; Woodward. Can’t honestly comment, but I can’t imagine that many people get priced out of anything in the D.
  • DC: U Street; Mt. Pleasant. Yeah, can’t argue.
  • Boston: Davis Square; Jamaica Plain. No quibbles.
  • Miami: Lincoln Road; Buena Vista (Design District). Correct.

Verdict: investors, drop your Forbes subscriptions and grab the Utne instead.

crossover appeal

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Another one of those “oh gosh, is it a good thing that a good idea has crossed over to the commercialized, suburban mainstream?”: Darden Restaurants, more famous for Red Lobster, Olive Garden, and Capital Grille, is seeking to take its Seasons 52 “local, seasonal” concept national. New locations in suburban Chicago and Philadelphia will join 11 existing locations, mostly in Florida.

Privatization is not NU

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{Posted to The City Fix}

[C]ritics conflate New Urbanism with the broader but contemporaneous neoliberal trend towards privatizing space. This is perhaps understandable, but neoliberalism well predates New Urbanism by many years. The plazas or lawns surrounding Modernist office buildings, the golf courses and greenways that wrap around Houston tract houses or Arizona retirement homes, the atria of 1980s shopping malls — none of these are New Urbanist in any way, and all arguably predated New Urbanism, but all involve private governance of what would otherwise be public space.

Diggs Town is a curious example. I don’t know the specifics there, but here in Chicago, the public sector had more or less abdicated control over the common spaces within and around the buildings. Without any clear understanding of who was in charge of these spaces, they fell into deep neglect, with dire consequences. Redevelopment of these sites places a clearer boundary around such spaces, either enclosing them into the private realm of yards or creating actual parks. I’m not sure how that “privatizes governance that was not previously private” so much as assigns governance over that which was previously ungoverned.

The false notion that New Urbanist subdivisions have stricter or more nefarious homeowner covenants than conventional suburban subdivisions is an unfortunate result of Celebration — which, I might point out, has CC&Rs that are in many ways less strict than many comparable Florida golf-course PUDs.

Line extensions

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(posted as Transport Politic comment)

Chicago was always a surface-lines town, which served it well when the region was essentially a series of factory towns orbiting around a commercial core. But travel patterns have changed; distances have increased and jobs have aggregated into centers and corridors (although not necessarily in transit-ready patterns).

Extending the principal cross-town rapid transit service (the Red Line) for “the last five miles” — it reaches the city’s north border, but stops well short of its south — should be a high priority. The largely low-income and transit-dependent far south side has lost countless heavy-industry jobs. Having gone there last weekend, it takes a double bus connection or infrequent commuter rail to get anywhere, compounding its distance from the N/NW “favored quarter.” These lines have been on transit plans for 100 years; the Orange Line “extension” proposed was even part of the original proposal but got value engineered out. (In the intervening 20 years, though, the original terminal area has declined economically, and I’m not sure whether it can really come back. The Yellow Line extension is interesting and restores access to a major job center, but pretty small in the grand scheme.)

Given the distances involved (12-16 mi. as the crow flies from downtown), there’s no way for surface transit to serve the same need. That said, there’s no local match money available for anything, anyways.

The Circle Line looks interesting on a map, but it’s an expensive solution in search of a problem. It serves a corridor of middling job/population density and limited growth potential, and offers minimal rider time savings. Other proposals to enhance downtown distribution, or improve crosstown buses, would offer better time savings and TOD potential.

Oh, and BRT? Impossible, since IDOT jealously guards its sacred freeway lanes, and Morgan Stanley is holding our parking meters hostage until our great-grandchildren come around.

(And an addendum on the Circle Line: a finding from a thorough calculation of its merits by Ritesh Warade finds that “the majority of the transit accessibility to households impacts of the Circle Line project have already been achieved after implementation of the Pink Line project… travel time reductions are not sufficient for the Circle Line project to have substantial accessibility impacts above and beyond those of the Pink Line project.” The marginal increase in transit riders’ accessibility to jobs that the Circle Line would achieve is 0.2%.)

Too many yards, too few kitchens

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A little while ago, Chris Leinberger and Arthur Nelson were making headlines by predicting that America would face an oversupply of millions of single-family homes. Households have changed; the “nuclear family in its castle” now accounts for less than one in four households. Yet housing production has been geared towards these households for decades, and almost all zoning ordinances strongly encourage that new housing fit families.

The result is a housing landscape that’s already vastly out of whack with housing demand. This is especially evident in thriving cities which draw young people. In many Sunbelt cities, a lack of apartments forces even white-collar thirtysomethings into fraternity-style group homes. Accountability for household chores (and dishes and taking out the trash pale in comparison to yardwork) is inversely related to the number of people sharing the space.

My own dense urban neighborhood has a similar dynamic at work: apartments built for working-class families with children are now unfit for the legions of young singles and couples who now inhabit them. There are nowhere near enough studio or one-bedroom apartments to satisfy demand, and Chicago’s low-rise zoning categories have conspired against the construction of many more around here. (A peculiar provision inserted to stop the “four plus one” explicitly discriminates against studio/efficiency apartments.) As a result, renters pay a significant premium for one-bedroom apartments; indeed, one can rent a two-bedroom for just a few hundred dollars more. At least Chicago has plenty of 2-BR apartments to go around, though.

Millions

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There’s much, much more where I came from.

My ancestors, like those of many Chinese-Americans, hail from a pair of valleys about 100 miles west of Hong Kong. The conurbation rapidly rising between the two — standing astride the Pearl River Delta — is “the fastest growing region of the fastest growing country” in the world, with a population estimated at over 50 million. That’s akin to packing the population of the three West Coast states into an area smaller than the Phoenix metropolitan area. (That, in turn, is only a bit smaller than the three states of southern New England.)

(This reflection comes from the graphic comparison of metropolitan footprints in Peter Bosselmann’s book Urban Transformations.)

Of course, China’s vast population defies any attempt to put it into scale; after all, per Guinness, I share my last name with over 100 million Chungs. Just about as many people answer to just my last name as pledge allegiance to Mexico or Japan. Luckily, I’m the only living “Payton Chung” known to Google.

What does it all mean? We often hear about China becoming a larger economy, a larger polluter, a larger exporter, a larger whatever than [America, Europe, Japan, etc.] — meaningless statistics without accounting for the mind-bogglingly vast human resources that China has, both to offer and to support. Here’s a thought exercise: walk down the street and, for every single American you see, imagine an entire family of four. That might give you a sense of how crowded China is.

A great many narrow-minded observers from “the west” suffer from pot and kettle syndrome when pointing at China: “they pollute more, so why should we care?” Well, such observers sometimes neglect human rights in their own way: no human has greater rights to pollute than any other, and on a per-human basis Americans are still by far the greater environmental criminals.

Quizzed

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Several weeks ago, I attended a hybrid meeting in Oak Park: a discussion on local historic preservation challenges (of which there are many) followed by a visioning session for GO TO 2040, CMAP’s current long-range regional visioning process.

The visioning session uses CMAP’s instant-polling process to develop a regional growth scenario based on the choices of those in the room. There’s pretty quick feedback, too — the system spits back a report card of outcomes right after the scenario’s basics have been set.

A few improvements I’d make, or general drawbacks to this approach:
1. The feedback metrics are still pretty darn wonky. It’s tough to avoid this, of course, since part of the entire problem with regional planning is that all of it is way too abstract. (Jane Citizen typically isn’t motivated by the idea of “there will be a few PPM less of air pollution in the sky if I do this.”) Metropolis 2020’s work on regional metrics came up with some good metrics that people can relate to, like “hours spent in a car”; maybe these could be brought into the scenario modeling.
2. The presentation format tried a bit too hard with the hokeyness, especially for what seemed to be a very buttoned-up Oak Park crowd. This was Unity Temple, after all.
3. The choices presented to the audience always were in groups of three. The three choices always ended up sounding like a Goldilocks scenario: “too hot — too cold — just right,” and it’s no surprise that answers flowed towards “just right.”
4. The presenters found themselves constantly apologizing for the illustrations for the choices; many were photographs of buildings or a neighborhood, when they were really aiming to illustrate region-wide approaches. Perhaps illustrations showing a broader approach would have been more appropriate.

Not as cosmopolitan as one might think

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A rebuttal to two common conceits about NYC vs. Chicago, in an attempt to clarify.

1. “Chicago is more segregated than New York.”

From CensusScope analysis of 2000 Census data, this is false. The usual measure of segregation is called the dissimilarity index; an index of 100 implies total segregation between two groups. The New York PMSA in 2000 had a black-white dissimilarity index of 84.3 and a Latino-white dissimilarity index of 69.3. Chicago’s comparable indices are 83.6 for black-white and 64.8 for Latino-white.

2. “You only find Midwesterners in Chicago. New York draws from all over the country.”

An admittedly dated (from 1999, using 1990 Census data) analysis by USC professor Dowell Myers [PDF, pp. 934] found that a similar proportion of New York and Chicago region residents* were born within their respective tri-state areas. 57.6% of New Yorkers were born in New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut; 60.5% of Chicagoans were born in Illinois, Indiana, or Wisconsin. For all its claims to be a national draw, only 18% of New Yorkers moved from other states/territories, while 24.8% of Chicagoans moved from outside its region (but within the country). By comparison, in the Washington, D.C. region, “long believed to be a region of transient residents who came to town for short tours as students, military officers or federal workers” (as the WaPo wrote in 1991), only 34.5% of residents were born within D.C., Maryland, or Virginia.

This particular complaint is often levied against the Lincoln Park area, with its “Big 10 frat party” feel, although fewer than 1 in 120 Chicago region residents live there. Yet the New York region’s white population is even more provincial than the Chicago region’s: fully 73.4% of New York’s white residents were born within the tri-state area, vs. 71% of the Chicago region’s.

Far more of New York’s population was born abroad (24.5% vs. 14.7%), although Los Angeles easily beats both with 30.1% of its residents being foreign-born — which, in turn, pales against Toronto’s 46%.

* Over 25.

Zoning bonus abused, again

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It may come as a surprise to readers outside Chicago that the Sears Tower, still the tallest building in the Americas and longtime tallest building in the world, was built as-of-right. It required no planning approvals, no design review, no zoning change, no Planned Unit Development review. Yes, indeed, Chicago’s old zoning ordinance was so very generous with the bonuses for plazas and upper-floor setbacks that the tower achieves 110 stories and an FAR of about 40, with more floor space than the original Mall of America — all as of right. (Its construction did require that the city vacate an alley.)

Now, Todd J. Behme reports in Crain’s that the owners wish to replace the Wacker Drive plaza with what looks to be a 50-story hotel. Anywhere else, this would be a huge building, but next to the since-renamed Willis Tower’s heft it’s rather puny. Of course, there are already huge hotels down the street and vacant lots across the street, but no! This has to be on *our* property.

And the zoning bonus? The so-windy-it’s-useless public space that was our public payout for allowing an extra two million square feet of offices? Ah, screw it.

A hundred years later

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[Oh, wow, I’ve been seriously delinquent about blogging. I have dozens of links for a link dump, but in the past few months my life has gone topsy-turvy in quite a few ways. I apologize. Here was one neglected but substantially complete post that I’d saved as a draft.]

[A follow-on to Twenty Years]

Philip Nobel, writing in Metropolis in March 2007, banishes “all arguments based on ‘authenticity’… to the postmodern echo chamber” based on a comparison between two widely known examples of “fake places” and one of the world’s most-visited “authentic” places:

There’s really nothing wrong with Santana Row. There should be, of course: we’ve all been bred to hate malls, and what could be more hateful than a mall masquerading as a chic, vaguely European town? […]

It was visiting [Santana Row and Easton Town Center,] those two sprawl-patching hot spots within a few months last year that began to erode my knee-jerk aversion to malls: fake places, captive minds, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah… in San Jose and exurban Ohio, there is scarcely a center to mourn, and the “malliers” should be credited for responding to a human urge that looks as if it will easily survive the decentralizing effects of multiuser gaming and Netflix[:] people like to gather and not just to shop…

Walking around the center of Munich for several days last winter, I found it increasingly untenable to prefer one form of regulated commercial experience to another, to damn the American solution and reflexively embrace the European.

This echoes, of course, the way elite Manhattanites nostalgically whine about the “Suburbanization of New York.” It’s only fitting, of course, that the city which rose as the United States coalesced from regional to a national economy — and which has long economically colonized the rest of the U.S. — should now feel threatened as the tide runs the other way. (Of course, it always has, as [for instance] regional food brands were replaced with national ones; it’s just that retail brands are that much more visible in everyday life. And don’t New Yorkers see Macy’s or Subway whenever they leave NYC? Oh yes, I forgot: they don’t.)

New Urbanists are often criticized for creating places which look “realistically urban” but feel antiseptically suburban. This criticism misunderstands the new urbanist intent: the intent is not to create an instantly authentic city, an impossible task since layers of human history and diverse interpretations thereof need to be laid down to create a city. (Honestly, think about it: creating instant authenticity would necessarily require exponentially more frightful social engineering.) What New Urbanists seek to do is to create places that will be able to ride the tides of history, to age well and to adapt to the necessarily shifting sands of urban history. Indeed, quite a few of today’s shining examples of urban authenticity were once themselves Planned Communities of a sort, relics of an earlier era of town planning which, at the time, must have seen more than a little contrived but which have grown into their roles with age.

Shed some daylight

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When riding north on N. Oakley, between St. Mary’s parking lot and Clemente High School’s playing fields, I always hear the sound of rushing water. Even in entirely dry months, a long-forgotten stream can be heard through a storm drain at the intersection with Potomac. Did this creek ever have a name? Does it flow more or less where it was, or has it been routed through the grid? Where are its headwaters, where does it meet the river?

Such lost streams have been well-documented in, say, London where countless old maps show the terrain as it existed centuries before industrialization wiped it all away. I haven’t spent much time looking (it’d be a great excuse to sit at the Newberry for a day), but it seems that many 19th century maps of pre-subdivision Chicago wanted to show the city as the speculators hawked it (a vast blank slate ready for development) rather than as it actually was.

(On a side note, I did find this 1898 bike map at the Regenstein’s web site. Back then, an “appropriate” road for cycling was a paved one.)

I’m also struck by how the buildings around it have been wiped away by urban renewal. I vaguely remember a presentation from years ago — I don’t remember by whom — which overlaid a map of abandoned properties in a Philadelphia neighborhood with a map of its subterranean stream. Homes located nearest the stream were much more likely to be abandoned, perhaps in part because of costly foundation troubles — but perhaps, also, the old hydrology’s “miasma” is taking revenge.