Dollar; cities already below carbon cap?

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Two thoughts on larger themes:

1. The FT tells us that “Republican politicians have highlighted the dollar’s slide as evidence of waning US power,” going on to quote that superpower of economic analysis, Sarah Palin. Oh, that’s rich, especially seeing as how some of us had noticed years ago the “longstanding bearish case against the currency” (Economist), caused by the Bush era’s reckless-at-best inflation of a colossal debt-and-overconsumption bubble.

There is a lovely comeback from AEI’s Norm Ornstein, though: “there may be a legitimate debate to be had… but Sarah Palin is not qualified to participate in it.”

Of course, we also have reasonable voices on the left (here’s Chris Hayes) calling for “a forceful, unequivocal, ‘yes to inflation,’ ” so let’s just say that I’d like to get my international travel over with sooner rather than later.

2. The idea of a per-capita carbon cap — versus a per-country limit, the idea being that each of us humans has an equal right to the sky above all our heads — has apparently come back. “The authors suggest setting a cap on total emissions, and then converting that cap into a global per-person limit… The paper suggests that the personal emissions target would be set at around 10.8 tonnes of CO2 per year.” (Economist)

Getting everyone’s emissions down to urban levels would be a great start, of course: Chicago nearly clears the bar with 12 tons per capita, while NYC and London easily clear it with 7 and 6 tons apiece, respectively.

a highly suggestible setting

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How stupid! Why didn’t I just phone my internist or the person taking calls for him? When I didn’t do that and went to the ER instead, why didn’t I just answer the first physician, ‘No, that’s not necessary,’ when she suggested referring me to a couple of specialists?

In most settings, the doctor has far greater incentive than disincentive to order excessive services — that is, those that aren’t indicated by practice guidelines or evidence-based medicine. – Jack Coulehan in Health Affairs, reprinted in the WaPo

This reminds me of my own ER story.

I travel a lot for work. A few years ago, during a convention in Denver, I began feeling a little ill. I called off the evening plans and went to bed early. The next morning, I had incredible nausea which ended with projectile vomiting — think “Ren & Stimpy.” It was actually kind of funny, in the few clear-headed moments I had. All throughout the day, I attempted the usual things (principally ginger ale) but couldn’t keep anything down at all. By the end of the day, I was beyond lightheaded — I’d now gone 20 hours without fluids, my abdomen was sore from all the retching, and in the most recent episode (at a bagel shop) I’d noticed flecks of blood amidst the soup. I needed fluids, and fast. I somehow managed to pack up what I was doing and told a cab driver to take me to the nearest hospital.

That hospital turned out to be Denver Health, the recently privatized county general hospital — but still the city’s primary safety-net provider. (Where I was on 17th was actually a bit closer to St. Joseph’s or St. Luke’s, it turns out, but the drive down Speer is faster.) I walked into the ER and waited as the triage nurse saw patients. He was doing an admirable job: although his Spanish was no better than mine, he maintained his composure far better than I would’ve in the face of a parade of misery that included gunshots and gangrene among other ailments. Quite a lot of them looked to be in much worse shape than I, but when I was called up I pretty quickly gained admittance to the ER. I suspect that I might have been turned away had I been just another one of the uninsured out there.

Once in, I did get an I.V. drip for fluids and a couple pills of a strong antiemetic; after a brief nap, I felt okay. Yet the attending physician, not seeing any obvious cause for this, said that perhaps the abdominal pain was from appendicitis (when no, it was just sore after spending a day violently vomiting) and that a CT scan might be in order. Even at that moment, I highly doubted it, but ended up playing along. Soon after the CT scan, I was discharged and told to follow up back at home in a week. Several weeks later, I get some confusing statements from my insurance which clearly say “do not pay” — and soon thereafter, a notice from a collection agency, even before I was instructed to pay anything. Since I was out of state, the reimbursement rate was lower than it would have been at home, and that pointless little trip through the CT cost me $1,000.

Contrast this with my most in-depth experience with a single-payer system of sorts: Kaiser Permanente. A month before I left for college, my brother and I went mountain biking on some trails near home and I endo’d on a downhill — braked too suddenly up front, flipping myself over the handlebars, and breaking my right collarbone upon landing. (This is a common injury among cyclists, since the clavicle is a pretty wimpy bone.) I didn’t know it at the time; all I knew was that I couldn’t really move my right arm, and therefore couldn’t bike out of the park. We walked our bikes along a few miles of equestrian trails — the most direct, if muddy, way back out. It just happened that the Kaiser medical center was not far from the park entrance, so we stumbled in — bloody and smelling of horse shit — scanned the little ID cards that brought up our records, and waited a little while. I got called from the waiting room, got a bit of cleaning up and an X-ray, and got a bit of joking from the staff as they pointed to the fracture. There’s not much one can do about a clavicle, anyhow, but what was equally notable was how there weren’t huge bills afterwards. Our premiums (and co-pays) covered basic services like, well, X-rays for broken bones.

On 47th

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One of the more funny-if-it-weren’t-sad local tales of planning gone awry* is the “47th Street Blues District,” so christened in a strange economic development effort by former Ald. Dorothy Tillman and her odd version of an edifice complex. (Sometimes, it seemed more like a de-edifice complex, given the countless vacant lots in her ward.) 47th was the celebrated commercial artery of Bronzeville once upon a time, the retail cornerstone of “The Stroll” boulevardier circuit. This Trib article by Antonio Olivo gives some background about the grand plans for a street that’s not even a ghost of its old self, and how those plans are adjusting under a new, reality-based alderman. Here was a street which could have been a great case study for an incremental, historic preservation-based and transit-oriented approach to revitalization — these buildings tell great stories — but which fell victim to venal local politics which sucked away key resources (buildings, businesses, money, time), and now has that much further to go.

A few key foibles along the way:
1. Neighborhood historian Timuel Black insists that 47th was a street for jazz, not blues, so the entire premise rested on pretty thin ice.
2. The only remaining viable business from the street’s heyday as an entertainment destination, the Palm Tavern, was unceremoniously shuttered by eminent domain in 2001 and subsequently demolished using promised TIF funds — and replaced with nothing.
3. Now, we find out from Tom Corfman in Crain’s that the much-heralded, expensive, and strangely quiet cultural center which was to be the centerpiece around which the district would grow (pretty much from scratch, seeing as half the urban fabric thereabouts has disappeared) is not just in violation of its city grant terms, but in foreclosure as well.
4. And lest anyone forget, the Rosenwald Garden Apartments will soon face another long winter of abandonment and decay.

* even in a city where the feds launch investigations with names like “Crooked Code.”

quick hits

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Every once in a while, I try to remember that currency is the currency of the internet — and therefore that quick blog posts are just as worthy as detailed thoughts — but I still get hung up on doing justice to good ideas. Anyhow.

1. Good riddance, Olympic mania. A prime example of the worst possible “project planning” (to use Roberta Brandes Gratz‘s term) — for a temporary event, no less. What annoyed me most was that the organizers not only suckered local corporations and foundations out of millions of dollars (which did not, btw, fall from heaven but was ultimately taken from the pockets of other local charities), but that they sold some magical expectation that the Olympics would somehow magically solve the CTA’s woes. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Not only did the Bid Book explicitly state* that no transit improvements were planned (and you can’t get what you don’t ask for!), but even the most optimistic figures about what sort of money could indeed fall from the sky (i.e., the feds) fell far, far short of the region’s eye-popping $50 billion in unfunded transit capital needs. (If the broad outlines of what’s being discussed in Congress for TEA4 happen, we might have a good start on getting that funded — without the hassles of the Olympics.) Besides, if there really is money falling from the skies, let it fall upon Brazil — they need it more than we do.

* the comments on that story are actually pretty on-topic. Too bad that disillusionment didn’t spread as far as the implied lies did.

2. Proposition 13 really is a tax on newcomers and the young, according to research by Dowell Myers. Senior homeowners get an average of $1,000 a year, paid for by homeowners under 45.

3. Daimler’s car2go offers one-way car sharing, which sounds like an intriguing concept. That’s possible for bike sharing systems only due to their ubiquity; is that also the intent here?

4. Phoenix wants to be carbon neutral? “Dementia.”

5. Most of the examples of “circle lines” (circumferential rapid transit lines) that I’ve seen distribute passengers through sprawling downtowns from commuter rail terminals that, due to imperial dictate, have been located outside the CBD. (This is the pattern in Buenos Aires, London, Moscow, Paris, and Tokyo.) As I’ve argued before, the proposed CTA Circle line does not fit this model, and thus becomes “an expensive solution in search of a problem.” Even the Illinois Medical District isn’t that focused an employment center (the Longwood Medical Area packs twice the employees into half the space, and the Boston Urban Ring is projected to be a BRT project. It also won’t work as a Metra connector, since most Metra trains will never stop at the Circle Line — most Metra customers will continue to the downtown terminals. (The line also has limited TOD potential since it runs through many built-out neighborhoods; arguably, the Clinton subway has greater TOD bang for the buck.) The line also wouldn’t serve many circumferential trips well; changing from a single bus-rail transfer (or a single rail-rail transfer one mile down the line) to a double rail-rail-rail transfer wipes out any potential time savings.

One exception I found: in Santiago, L4/L4A (which require a transfer) link the Providencia-Las Condes business district, via a peripheral freeway median line, to the high-density southern suburbs — laden with Pinochet-era public housing. Not a great example.

6. Two impressions that I gathered from a quick look at Dallas:
– Ample illustrations of the problem with putting the right thing in the wrong place. Victory and West Village might have looked fine on the drawing boards, but in practice they’re difficult to reach from anywhere else (except by driving, of course). West Village, in particular, would be exactly the sort of development to place next to DART — not a few blocks away.
– The boom/bust cycle of Texas development results in some interesting half-built stuff. Local developers hitch on to the latest planning fads with great enthusiasm (and the local “BEAN: Build Everything, Anywhere, Now” planning culture encourages it), but the market collapses before anything actually gets completed. With proper phasing, you could have a few good blocks here and there, but no.

7. A scale comparison: HOPE VI spent $6 billion in total. The Livable Communities Act bill introduced by Sen. Dodd authorizes over $4 billion over the next 3-4 years. This could have a significant impact.

8. Filed under “fun endeavors that I wish I’d thought of”: Will Cycle For Charity, creators of events that exercise people and brains, while building goodwill for cycling and raising charitable donations.

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.