Due to workload, the very light blogging schedule will continue until mid-June or so. Keep checking for new photos, though, and watch for live blogging from the floor of “CNU XIV”:http://www.cnuxiv.org in Providence — resting place of “General Burnside”:http://www.quahog.org/attractions/index.php?id=81, whose legendary facial hair gave us the Spoonerism of “sideburns.” I’ll grow mine out for the occasion.
Inclusionary housing should stay so
[posted to pro-urb]
Awarding windfall profits to those who “luck into” inclusionary housing (since nowhere near as many people end up with it as could qualify) strikes me as tremendously unfair to several groups, including:
* People who bought inclusionary units in areas that didn’t appreciate wildly. (Yes, these areas exist. A ca. 1925 Chicago bungalow that sells for $160K in a “good” south side neighborhood would sell for $360K on the north side, largely due to “the segregation tax.”)
* People who bought non-inclusionary units in the same buildings (especially for high rises). They paid $50, $100K more for their units and got something maybe a bit nicer inside. When resale time comes ’round, a buyer will look at an inclusionary unit and conclude it’s only worth $20K less — the cost of upgrading the interior, since the location is identical.
* People who didn’t buy inclusionary units, but could have, perhaps because of dumb luck or a technicality, whether not winning the allocation lottery or not having qualifying income or a sufficient down payment at that moment in time.
Affordable housing policy should seek to get people into, well, affordable housing. Similarly, a house is first and foremost a place to live, and then only secondarily an investment.
If we want policies to build household wealth, we can do that through much more efficient means — like tax credits that match savings contributions, e.g., line 48 on the 1040. Government should NOT be in the business of encouraging speculation in one investment type over another, and should not lead people to believe that they can be guaranteed better-than-market returns on any investment, housing or not.
Ogilvie Market
“Virginia Groark”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0605130220may13,1,2838462.story?coll=chi-newslocal-hed breaks the good news in today’s Trib: the bowels of Northwestern Station will soon host an indoor, year-round public market:
bq. Operating under the name French Market of Chicago, Bensidoun USA Inc., an international operator of fresh-food marketplaces, has been selected to open the 15,000-square-foot market in the northern end of Ogilvie Transportation Center, said the firm’s executive vice president, Sebastien Bensidoun.
Apparently, Bensidoun (a contract operator of markets) runs a few markets in the USA already, including contract farmers’ markets in “several suburbs”:http://bensidoun-usa.com/list%20market.pdf (and Lakeview?) and in “White Plains”:http://www.westchestercountybusinessjournal.com/archive/041204/041204wrop08.html. Those seem like pretty standard operations; maybe we can hope for something more like the famed “Blvd. Raspail organic market”:http://www.bensidoun-usa.com/marche%20de%20raspail%20bio.html.
Shorts season
bq. “We felt the dress would overpower shorts because it was something you could wear to work,” Ms. [Stephanie] Solomon [a women’s fashion director at Bloomingdale’s] said. But many women are buying shorts instead because, she said, they too “are acceptable now at the office.” (NY Times)
And herewith, a great gripe about the North: it gets to 95F here, just as it does down South. Yet shorts are completely verboten for any sort of occasion more formal than a picnic. Now, I don’t know about courtrooms, but certainly shorts are acceptable at many a Southern church dinner, _because it’s hot_. (There’s also a certain practicality thing for cyclists, called “I don’t want to get my pants dirty.”)
One of the few things I liked about visiting Texas (although I didn’t get to take advantage of it, burdened as I was with completely impractical “work clothes” from up north) is that people have that Southern attitude towards clothing: It’s hot. Wear what you need to.
I’ve always thought women had it easy during summer: they could wear knee-length skirts, which are *much* cooler than pants. And now, they can apparently wear shorts, too. Damn.
Ick
“Pedestrian friendly… lively” in “some places”:http://www.rosemont.com/rosemont_walk.shtml means something like “half-mile walks”:http://www.rosemont.com/images/rw2.jpg through antiseptic tunnels alongside monstrous parking garages, protected right turn sleeves, little single-use pods, and criss-crossing high-speed arterials outlining superblocks. No thanks.
Peak oil and YOUR city
A site called SustainLane trumpets the Cosmo-style headline Ten U.S. Cities Best Prepared for an Oil Crisis. The ranking draws on an eclectic (incorrect?) set of criteria: “recent city commute practices, metro area public transportation, sprawl, traffic congestion, local food and wireless network access.”
Honolulu was the first city that came to mind for me: they import a lot via ship, but in terms of many of life’s basic necessities (food, water, electricity) they’ve had the advantage of having had to think very hard about whether or not a local alternative is available before importing. Oh, and the perfect climate certainly helps: fresh food, solar electricity, and no HVAC year round.
Even though I live in the North, I have doubts about whether heating and air conditioning will be easily handled post-peak. Oil and natural gas prices are closely related, and cold cities pre-oil were filthy with coal or wood soot. The most technologically advanced solutions I’ve seen advanced — district cogenerated heating & cooling, with ground source heat pumps — still rely on natural gas.
On the other hand, electric heat is common in Canada, even though it’s the largest gas (and oil!) exporter to the USA. The province-owned hydroelectric systems apparently make it cost-effective, even in their bitter cold. Similarly, maybe the Pacific Northwest, with a mild climate and lots of salmon-killing hydroelectric capacity, might weather the storm well. That’s the deciding factor on why I strongly feel that Vancouver’s high rises, in particular, are quite sustainable: beyond the embodied energy of construction, the operation of elevators there will continue unimpeded long after oil.
On that subject, someone (I don’t remember who) tied the multistory industrial loft building’s rise and fall to energy costs. Lofts are from an era when on-site power & steam generation, usually through coal, was common, and refining oil into gasoline was almost unheard of. The multistory layout of lofts powered elevators or conveyor belts directly by angular momentum from the coal turbines, with little energy lost in converting that energy to electricity or moving it off-site. Those elevators often only moved product up; gravity usually brought product down. Industrial users switched en masse to horizontal production after gas made it cheaper to drive internal combustion engines across large factory/warehouse floors. (I wonder if someone could outfit a rooftop wind turbine with some kind of flywheel, thereby storing the angular momentum for use in an elevator. Hm.)
Any peak-oil situation will impact neither renewable electricity sources (fortunately) nor coal generation of electricity and steam (unfortunately). Energy uses which can easily switch to either of those two, and high-margin uses of petroleum (like plastics) will be able to adapt. Energy uses which are reliant upon liquid gasoline, particularly cars and trucks, will be hurt.
Dubious Schmap
Got another email from “Schmap”:http://www.schmap.com/photos/p=41813589N00/c=SC20151031 about how my CC-licensed Flickr photos have made it into their online travel guide. I’ve noticed (in the course of vanity Googling) my Flickr shots appearing at sites like “43places”:http://www.43places.com/places/view/622165 . While it’s certainly flattering, sometimes the shots chosen are rather, ah, curious at showing the actual place — they’re of tiny details or silly people or other things that I regularly photograph. Well, whatever.
Speaking of Flickr, photos from recent travels have started making their way up there. Go take a look!
O’Hare gripe
The CTA concourse at O’Hare has four pairs of moving walkways — two from Terminal 1 (north) to the station, and two from Terminal 3 (south) to the station. (Terminal 2 is nearly in front of the station.) Let’s number these A, B, C, and D, north to south. When rebuilding the walkways, crews could shut B & C or A & D, thereby leaving one walkway in service in either direction. But… no. Last winter, when I was on a bunch of American (Terminal 3) flights, C & D were closed. This spring, when I have a bunch of United flights, A & B are closed. “Sprinting across the vast plains of terrazzo,” as the AIA Guide puts it, is no fun.
‘City information’ kiosk
The JCDecaux people came through last week, years after finishing the bus shelter and newsbox installations, to add more useless advertising clutter to the sidewalks, under the guise of “city information.” (Hey guys, where are the public loos? the public bicycles? Or how about a deal with CTA, er, CDOT to help cover the cost of new subway elevator housings? And how come empty “newsstands” arrived years ago, while the old newsstands haven’t budged an inch?) Here at Dearborn & Washington, the billboard blocks some real city info — although a week later, that panel has vanished, while the billboard now “flips.”
Improving urban logistics
Ted Smalley Bowen in Metropolis Magazine reports on how an EU pilot project has implemented of “e-Commerce Enabled Demand Responsive Urban Logistics” (eDRUL) to manage freight delivery traffic within urban cores. IT has monumentally improved the efficiencies possible in the logistics business, given proper coordination and staging, making this a ripe market. Just imagine if such a system could have been applied by the old Chicago Tunnel Company.
Bubble trouble
[posted at craigslist forums/housing]
“In 2004, 36% of properties sold were second homes, the bulk of them purchased as investments.”
a cautionary tale:
my uncle sunk a few $mil into apartments overlooking downtown LA during the late ’80s boom. since WW2, LA real estate had consistently returned great yields, and he’d racked up a fortune in small deals. the ’80s saw a tidal wave of money wash up on the beach: defense contracts rained from the sky, the bubble in Japan spun off billions that completely remade downtown, interest rates were way down, new tax laws encouraged speculative construction, thrifts were practically giving away cash, it was an up and coming neighborhood with strong population growth from immigration. it was a CAN’T LOSE proposition. everyone was doing it! and it had worked for so long!
fast forward to 1990. the aerospace industry was in freefall, the dozens of new skyscrapers and malls downtown were eerily dark at night, people were fleeing the city, racial tensions were about to boil over into the streets, and prices were down 30%–if you could find a buyer.
when the tax lawyers came in to process his estate, the entire thing was underwater. it all went back to the banks–well, sort of, since many of the banks had also drowned. prices were stuck in the gutter until the late ’90s.
just a warning.
(Illy) latte-swilling…
David Brooks’ pop-sociologist attempts to tie yuppie consumption patterns (and the mere idea of the status game) directly to political leanings mean little in the USA, where most of our corporate class keeps a studied public distance from politics. (In private, of course, they shower Republicans with the proceeds from their tax cuts.) Yet Tobias Jones reports in “The New Republic”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060508&s=jones050806 that Italy’s limousine liberal set really can live it up in chic leftist style:
bq. Wearing Tod’s shoes (made by Diego Della Valle, a fierce critic of Berlusconi) suggests you lean left; so does facial hair (Berlusconi famously demanded that his parliamentarians shave off beards) and drinking Illy coffee (coffee magnate Riccardo Illy is the left-wing president of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region).
west north 
