Sometime a long time ago, I led a discussion on gasoline for the “University of Chicago Environmental Center”:http://envirocenter.uchicago.edu/notes/gas.html. Discovered the notes for that discussion on the web recently; they’re reproduced after the jump, in case the original site goes down.
Mayor compares cars to guns
Gary Washburn reports on another mayoral press conference, this time about the lawsuit filed over red-light cameras:
bq. “If someone gives a gun to a 17-year-old and says, ‘Here’s my gun. You can play with it,’ it’s called responsibility,” the mayor said. “You have a responsibility for that car. If that car got into an accident, they would sue you.”
The architecture of branch banking (or lack thereof)
Came across a 2004 article in the “Chicago Fed Letter”:http://www.chicagofed.org/publications/fedletter/cflapril2004_201.pdf (pdf, by Robert DeYoung and Thomas H. Klier) about bank headquarters — written in the aftermath of Bank One’s takeover by Morgan Chase, it notes that bank headquarters (unlike HQs in general) almost always end up in the larger of the two headquarters cities. Illinois’ silly branch-banking laws have put Chicago at a disadvantage in this regard, as Chicago entered the deregulated banking era with many smaller banks (i.e., prey) rather than a few strong banks (i.e., predators).
bq. Today the largest U.S. banks are located in international banking centers, such as New York or San Francisco, where agglomeration economies are strong and high demand for financial services has allowed even purely local banks to grow large, or in states like California and North Carolina where geographic regulations have historically been less restrictive. For example, California has never prevented its banks from branching freely within its very expansive borders, and North Carolina began permitting (by interstate agreement) its banks to operate affiliates virtually anywhere in the southeastern U.S. over a decade before Riegle-Neal. In contrast, Illinois’s strict unit banking laws placed an effective upper bound on the size that Chicago hanks could attain-hence, when nationwide banking became legal in the mid-1990s, Chicago banks were at a disadvantage because they lacked the critical mass and experience to participate fully in the wave of acquisitions that followed.
The lack of branch banks in Chicago left an odd architectural legacy: a few leviathan banking halls downtown (notably the First Chicago headquarters, where the retail bank has recently been downsized quite considerably to a fraction of the first floor) and a great many opulent bank headquarters in the neighborhoods — Uptown Bank (now Bridgeview), Hyde Park Bank, Noel State Bank (now Midwest). Many of these neighborhood palaces match the finest downtown banks elsewhere in grandeur.
Another prototype on its way
Wild Oats brought People’s Market to Evanston, Supervalu just premiered Sunflower in Lincoln Park; Chicago’s underserved natural foods segment seems to be quite popular with small-city companies looking to test new concepts in the big city.
H. Lee Murphy at Crain’s Chicago Business reports:
bq. Roundy’s Inc. of Milwaukee, which operates 143 supermarkets in Wisconsin, plans to bring an upscale grocery concept called Metro Market to Chicago next year, sources say. “We’re in a growth mode and looking to expand,” a Roundy’s spokeswoman says.
Metro Market’s one 53,000 square foot location is on the east side (near north?) of Milwaukee. I stopped by (wholly incidentally) last year and don’t remember anything in particular; the press release description sounds promising but still quite Wisconsin specific (a dozen varieties of sausage made on the premises daily, adult-sized cupcakes, pierogies and a Friday fish fry with rye bread). Interestingly, Bob Mariano, current CEO of Roundy’s, was head of Dominick’s before its sale to Safeway.
Supervalu describes Sunflower as “efficient” and “convenient”; one of its most promising features is is compact footprint: 8-12,000 SKUs in 12-15,000 square feet.
Vancouver in the spotlight
Downtown Vancouver made the covers of _Governing_ and _Urban Land_ in July, not long after CNU gave a Charter Award to Larry Beasley in recognition of the 1991 Living First plan. Indeed, Alan Ehrenhalt writes in his Governing piece:
bq. If one event can be said to mark the beginning of the downtown revival that is moving across North America, it is the rezoning in Vancouver.
Since the new downtown residents pay high taxes and cost little to service municipally — they rarely have children and have private services like health clubs that relieve the strain on parks, libraries, etc. — their fiscal impact has been mostly positive to date. However, _Governing_ zooms in on the city’s looming shortage of commercial land, raising the specter that the city will become merely a resort town.
Personally, I think such fears are a bit overblown: the condo wave, like all others, will eventually pass; Vancouver’s east side is both adequately transit served and has plentiful vacant industrial land for expansion; and opportunities for further densification do exist on the downtown peninsula, perhaps by refilling low-rise areas with mid-rises or inserting taller point towers on sites identified for high-rises. Current mayor Sam Sullivan has launched “the Vancouver EcoDensity Initiative”:http://www.mayorsamsullivan.ca/ecodensity/ecodensity03.html in an attempt to get a conversation going about further densification (framing such as the path to a more sustainable city); many looking at the new downtown overlook the fact that upzoning downtown was part of a grand 1980s political tradeoff that also resulted in downzoning most of the city’s single-family residential neighborhoods.
However, part of the goal of planning is to balance future needs against current opportunities, and given Vancouver’s global desirability, it needs to ensure that future economic development has a place in the city. Similarly, I wonder whether new residential development in the very near West Loop is a good thing, given that the area may be better suited to offices.
More broadly, what are all these jobs being created out in the suburbs and why do they do go there? Holding the commute constant, many employees (especially younger ones) prefer the convenience and choice that a downtown location bring — and those concentrations of human capital (particularly as certain dense cities pull well ahead in education) should result in “Jane Jacobs externalities” of innovation and creative destruction. Trophy towers in the CBD may not appeal to the next generation of job creators, but not all urban spaces are that fussy and expensive. What kinds of buildings (and neighborhoods and regulations and ideas) _should_ planners and developers be concocting to house today’s entrepreneurs? During the dot-com boom, the obvious answer was the lofty flex space or maybe the biotech lab (as seen in office parks in Palo Alto and around MIT’s campus alike), but those were extenuating circumstances. Yet today, many of the surviving technology giants (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Sun) have large suburban corporate campuses, while others (like Adobe, in San Jose, San Francisco, and Seattle) fit into urban towers.
An even bigger question: how can cities foster organic, entrepreneurial economic development within neighborhoods? After all, small businesses create more jobs than big ones, but only big business is capable of snagging big tax breaks in the name of “job retention.” The “Center for an Urban Future”:http://www.nycfuture.org/content/policy_areas/policy.cfm?area=ecopol consistently advocates such an approach (“a five borough economic development plan”) in place of corporate subsidies in NYC; closer to home, it’s interesting to see how the public-private “Midtown Community Works Partnership”:http://www.midtowncommunityworks.org uses microfinance, cooperative marketing, local hiring agreements, infrastructure investments (like an enclosed public market, light rail, and a rail-to-trail), and public finance (much through EZ grants) to help start and sustain small businesses.
Houses no better than condos
bq. “A lot of times these buildings are replaced with multi-unit buildings that are limited in space,” said Ward Miller, president of Logan Square Preservation. “Couples move in, find themselves running short on space and within a short period of time, leave. We’re looking for long-term stakeholders.” (quoted by Johnathon E. Briggs in Chicago Tribune
I know Ward and have long supported his efforts to preserve key buildings and areas within Logan Square, but this notion — that those who live in single-family buildings (vs. condo owners) or owners (vs. renters), stay in the neighborhood longer, are more invested in the community, and thus are more deserving — is a myth, plain and simple. Oddly, the wealthy north-side neighborhoods with higher rates of homeownership also have much higher rates of transience; in Bucktown, the millionaires in the single-family houses are not necessarily in for the long run and most definitely do not have the time to spare to get involved with the community. Heck, they don’t even add “eyes on the street,” as they just drive in and out, hiring others to deliver their pizzas and walk their dogs. I’d hazard that a high-rise housing low-income seniors would bring in many more involved community residents than an entire block of million-dollar McMansions.
Hastert and l’affaire Foley
The best summation I could find of l’affaire Foley, from an anonymous poster to the St. Pete Times’ Buzz blog: “Republican Leadership appoints pedophile to lead caucus on exploited children”
Okay, Foley’s closet door has been ajar for a while, and after “Jim West”:http://www.spokesmanreview.com/jimwest we expect nothing less than weirdly inhibited pederastic cybersex from any single, male Republican elected official of a certain age. What’s shocking here is not the crime, but the coverup: the GOP leadership was confronted with this a year ago and yet believed his denials, right up until ABC News forced Foley’s hand.
In any case, the transcripts are mildly amusing, but “the video”:http://www.wonkette.com/politics/mark-foley/foley-on-abc-204362.php is hilarious.
Wilmette considers feebate
Dan Gibbard reports in the Tribune that Wilmette is considering a car-registration fee hike — to repay bonds for street reconstruction — balanced by a cut in fees for more environmentally friendly cars. It’s a rather clunky version of a feebate, which ideally would be tied instead to the weight of the car (providing a clear nexus: bigger cars cause more wear and tear on the newly rebuilt roads), but still the opposition to this is silly. Really, guys, would a $25 tax increase bankrupt many families in Wilmette, where the median income stands at a cool $106,773?
PID advancing in Logan Square
The Logan Square Chamber of Commerce is advancing a Parking Improvement District along Milwaukee Avenue. Preliminary studies indicate that quadrupling parking rates would raise over $300,000 for local improvements, even after turning 50% over to the city general fund. Aldermen Colon, Flores, and Preckwinkle have introduced “a resolution”:http://www.loganchamber.org/Docs/Resolution.pdf directing city staff to research ways to implement the program.
This program has much to offer the neighborhood: shop owners will get better turnover of spaces, visitors will be further encouraged to consider not driving, meter maids will provide additional “eyes on the street,” and the new revenue will allow the SSA to invest more in the area while reducing its property tax burden.
One wrinkle: unlike Wicker Park & Bucktown, much of Logan Square currently has side street resident parking permits. I’d prefer to go without the “insanely underpriced RPPs”:https://westnorth.com/2006/06/28/parking-on-my-street/, but mitigation techniques (requiring permits only in the evenings, creating a mechanism to grant permits to businesses [allowing pay stubs from companies with city business licenses as proof of “residence”], creating one large permit district instead of many small ones, raising permit prices overall and for large cars in particular) could make them palatable.
Yesterday’s automated alerts
IDOT has launched “SMS traffic alerts”:http://iltrafficalert.com, which on the surface sound absolutely stupid. (Encouraging people to text while driving?) It’s probably one step along the road to a unified 511 traveler information system, which has potential — but why, oh why, must we continue to wait when voice response technology to get bus times has existed since “ShuttleGirl”:http://www.secondkiss.com/why_shuttlegirl.asp in 2000?
Farnsworth House by bike or train
[posted to “carfree chicago”:http://carfreechicago.com%5D
Last week, a friend of mine rented a shared car to get to the Farnsworth House, the famous glass house designed by Mies van der Rohe on the banks of the Fox River, about 60 miles southwest of the city. Two years ago, a few months after it was purchased by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and before Metra allowed bikes on board, a friend and I decided to bicycle out there. It made a truly rewarding destination for one of the best bike routes out of the city: the Illinois Prairie Path — the nation’s first rail-to-trail, built on the remains of an old electric interurban.
We had breakfast in Chicago, rode out past Oak Park to pick up the Prairie Path all the way out to its Aurora terminus (getting lost exactly once, in a lovely forest preserve in Warrenville where the leaves were just starting to turn), and continued along the Fox River trails to Oswego, stopping for lunch. From there, it was another five miles or so down Route 34, bypassing Yorkville, to River Road and finally to Farnsworth. For the return, we saved a few miles (as it was already past dark) by taking the Blue Line from Oak Park — today, a new bridge over the Desplaines River connects the Blue Line directly to the path’s terminus in Forest Park.
For the less athletically inclined, the good news is that now there are two rail options that will get you mostly there. Metra’s BNSF service to Aurora stops about ten miles short of Farnsworth, and allows full-size bicycles. Amtrak will get you closer — downtown Plano, just two miles north of Farnsworth — but currently the only train headed there (ultimate destination Quincy) is scheduled for day trips into Chicago. Starting next month, though, funding from Illinois will allow Amtrak to add a morning-west, evening-east roundtrip to Quincy, making a day trip via Amtrak possible.
I went in late summer, but I imagine that it’s even better in fall and equally lovely in mid-winter, with the huge trees around it either ablaze with color or with the pale white house blending into snowdrifts. Regardless of season, I recommend going with a small group rather than on a tour bus: its tranquility would be ruined by a group of 40.
Taking traffic enforcement seriously
Somehow, I missed this the first time around, but Hilkevitch had a column in August about a tiff between Daley and the council over devoting city resources to enforcing traffic laws. Sounds like those of us who worry about criminals on wheels might have some allies on Council.
bq. The City Council subsequently passed an ordinance that [Ald. Thomas] Allen (38th) proposed to hire 100 more police officers to handle traffic duties citywide, using fines collected from drivers running red traffic lights, who were caught by cameras. Only 32 police officers are on the traffic detail currently, and mostly downtown, Allen said…. Daley is balking, however. Daley accuses aldermen — including former Chicago police officer William Beavers (7th), who has said traffic enforcement is as important to public safety as fighting crime — of overstepping their authority about how the administration budgets city resources. Daley said he thinks more police officers are needed to catch drug dealers and other criminals in the neighborhoods instead of blowing whistles on street corners.
west north 