Tax swap advancing in Texas

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Surprisingly, the front page headlines in San Antonio last week included a $6 billion school tax-swap deal (“latest news collected by TexasISD.com”:http://www.texasisd.com/cat_index_11.shtml ) that’s rapidly moving through the state legislature with the governor’s backing. The plan would cut school property taxes by a promised one-third by raising business income and cigarette taxes and using part of the state’s $8 billion surplus. (I don’t know how much of that surplus is recurring revenue, or how the state is doing so well in the first place.) Texas, like Illinois, has traditionally paid for schools mostly with local property taxes rather than statewide taxes, but unlike Illinois has no state personal income tax whatsoever.

Of course, the activist judges at the Texas Supreme Court provided an impetus and deadline (1 June) for reform with _Neeley, et al. v. West Orange-Cove Consolidated Independent School District, et al._, just as judges have instigated most statewide school funding reform efforts that shift away from property taxes. Yet if Texas can do it…

Selection of eulogies

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Jeff Gray and Hayley Mick writing in “the Globe & Mail”:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060426.JACOBS26/TPStory/?query=jeff+gray :

bq. Former Toronto mayor David Crombie, an ally of Ms. Jacobs in [the Spadina Expressway] fight and others, said not even he was spared from her activism. Once, Ms. Jacobs brought a demonstrating crowd *in favour of* (emphasis added) an infill housing development right to Mr. Crombie’s front door at 11 p.m., rousing the mayor from his bed…

bq. Robert Lucas, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago and long an admirer of Ms. Jacobs’s work, praised her yesterday in an interview as a “natural-born social scientist, for sure.” […] Harvard University economics professor Edward Glaeser, co-author of a paper in 1992 that tested and supported Ms. Jacobs’s theories about how the industrial diversity in cities drives economic growth, called her the greatest urbanist of the past century. “There is no more creative innovative scholar that has been thinking about cities. . . . She is in a class by herself.”

bq. [Larry Beasley, city planner for Vancouver] and others from the planning department took Ms. Jacobs on a tour, pointing out what they felt were the most important elements of the city. But it was a small playground filled with children in the city’s core that caught her eye. She made them stop the car so she could leap out and have her photo taken in front of it. “She said, ‘This is the city of the future,’ ” he recalled. “And we were thrilled.”

Warren Gerard in the “Toronto Star”:http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1146001826801 gives more thoughts from Crombie:

bq. “The most important thing she did for me and us was remind us that ideas matter, and the ideas that were most important are the ones that mattered to us,” Crombie said. “She also believed you take action. You don’t have ideas and go away. There is a direct connection of thought and action.”

Incidentally, 4 May marks both what would have been Jacobs’ 90th birthday and the 10th anniversary of the Charter of the New Urbanism.

Excuses for the absence, but as always, check the photostream for some evidence of what I’m up to — in this case, enjoying the spring and visiting Texas for APA.

CHA’s history in a nutshell

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Stateway’s swan song, an article by Antonio Olivo of oral histories of Stateway Gardens (with “accompanying multimedia slideshow”:http://chicagotribune.com/stateway ), included this succinct recollection of the rise and fall of CHA housing courtesy of Harold Woodridge, 64, a Stateway resident since 1959:

Sitting on his couch, he remembers when this portion of State Street was lined with clapboard shacks, a few markets and clothing stores. After Stateway Gardens opened in 1958, people were in awe of all that modernity and open space.

“You could sit on the grass and just enjoy yourself,” he says. “It was safe. Upstairs, people used to bring out their cots and sleep on the porch all night.”

But years of neglect by the Chicago Housing Authority eventually took their toll, Woolridge says.

“They didn’t do nothing to maintain the buildings. They didn’t even cut the grass. Before you knew it, [people] were selling drugs downstairs.”

Soon, as gun violence became rampant, residents learned the best way to survive was to look the other way.

“Nobody even trusts the police. The police snitch on you, telling the drug dealers you the one who gave them their information. Then, the gang is on you for telling. It got to be real bad.

“A few years back, the line for drugs downstairs would stretch 50 people. The dealers would walk up the line, keeping order, saying `Have your money out! Have it ready!’ Like they were having a department store sale.”

Springtime for Garrison

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A letter I wrote at Salon.com responding to “Garrison Keillor’s latest column”:http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/04/05/keillor/index.html (“The people who are getting reamed by this administration are people under 30, and they are, like, OK with that… Flowers will bloom in whatever wreckage we make. Take the day off, dear reader, and ignore the world and let the president play his fiddle. If that be ignorance, make the most of it.”) received an Editor’s Choice star:

bq. Well, I suppose that no one under 30 (at least among fellow commenters) has a sense of humor, or has experienced the rebirth of a Midwestern spring the likes of what I see outside. Even the sullen office drones streaming onto the sidewalks have a sense of purpose and camaraderie in their strides, a vast change from the downward shuffles and anxious sighs of last month’s parting blizzards.

bq. I’ve tried several times to politically mobilize other young people in my trendy city neighborhood. People here have a vague and frightfully cynical notion of politics, but alarmingly few are invested in it or even believe that anything could change. Our generation has been raised on a steady diet of distrust or even disbelief in government, society, and community, in any form of collective action, and after all that it’s tough not to retreat into a hedonistic, individualist shell. The countless, 24/7 distraction available makes it even simpler to not reach out.

bq. In any case, this column falls along the lines of Keillor’s “We’re All Republicans Now” songs. Those as thoroughly dispossesed of political power as we Democrats might find it temporarily uplifting to turn the tables and laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, to find new inspiration for why we fight, and to learn new ways to connect with one another.

Fabric

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bq. This goes to the heart of Chicago’s glaring shortcoming: its failure to recognize that urban fabric is the lifeblood of all great cities. When I go to New York and walk around SoHo with its wealth of glorious industrial architecture, Greenwich Village with its intoxicating Left Bank ambience, and Brooklyn Heights with its picture-perfect blocks, I come back here and literally ask myself where is the city? What part of Chicago really lends itself to casual strolling? I think the best cities strike the right balance between architectural fabric and architectural monuments.

bq. It’s most unfortunate that Chicago has yet to learn what may be the most important architectural lesson of all: that great architecture is not enough. This is a city whose trophy buildings have become its consolation prizes.

— David Sikon, writing to the Chicago Tribune in response to a Kamin article citing the recent wave of bland cement boxes as one of “Chicago’s Seven Blunders”

Maybe Americans don’t hate taxes?

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So it might not be the best source, but Levitt & Dubner (in their latest Times Magazine piece) cite a poll saying that Americans just might understand Holmes’ notion that “taxes are the price we pay for civilization”:

bq. In an independent poll conducted last year for the I.R.S. Oversight Board, 96 percent of the respondents agreed with the statement “It is every American’s civic duty to pay their fair share of taxes,” while 93 percent agreed that everyone “who cheats on their taxes should be held accountable.”

Chinatown’s staying power

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Kristin Ostberg recently wrote an article for Chicago Journal on how Chinatown has quietly resisted gentrification (new link). The article partially arose out of conversations we had years ago while working on the Rehab Network’s Affordable Housing Factbook; it turns out that Chinatown, er, Armour Square is a complete statistical anomaly — growing economically, attracting new investment, adding proportionally many new units, but without an increase in housing stress (e.g., rising rents or overcrowding). Much of this success stems from recycling capital within the community, through informal and formal financial networks, “a circuit of reinvestment that has maintained Chinatown’s vitality through decades when neighboring communities declined.”

No one knows how long this little miracle can last, but it will probably last just long enough to withstand the current South Loop speculative bubble. Maybe that bubble, though, has helped to keep the pressure off Chinatown by pre-empting housing demand.

2017 update: WBEZ recently did a story about how Chinatown landlords typically use informal networks to recirculate apartments within the community.

Death of a Mountain

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Stumbled across an online copy of Erik Reece’s “Death of a Mountain,” an article I sharply remember from the April 2005 Harper’s as a paragon of well-written environmental journalism:

September 26, 2004, Lost Mountain

It was one year ago this month that I first came to Lost Mountain. When I look back at the pictures I took then, I see dense stands of trees and rolling ridgetops painted orange and yellow by autumn coolness. Now I see a long gray plateau piled with mounds of wasted rock and soil. It’s drizzling as I start up the eastern slope. Today is a Sunday, as it was a year ago, and the rain has kept even the smaller weekend crews away. At about 1,400 feet, I begin walking along the top edge of a long highwall that marks the eastern boundary of the land permitted for mining. This cliff line drops about 100 feet down to the number 10 coal seam, where several pyramids of coal stand ready to be loaded away.

I’m walking along a thin strip of soil here at the edge of the highwall that divides the strip mine from the forest. The oaks and maples descend down into the watershed on my right, and the highwall drops away abruptly to my left. The sharp contrast between these two landscapes, heightened by the fall color and the gray mine site, gives me the strange sensation that I am walking on the edge of Creation, on a thin membrane between the world and the not-world. Everything past this point is an abyss, a lifeless canvas, a preternatural void.

It’s also a book.

Preview upcoming shows

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I’m perpetually confusedly by concert listings — whether tiny flyers or full-page _Reader_ ads, they all amount to a tightly packed, practically illegible list screaming a bunch of punny band names, dates, and times, perhaps with a meaningless photo of rocker dudes in some weird getup or a tiny bit of explanatory text that means almost nothing and/or references yet more bands you’ve never heard of. (I know, it’s only because I’m not cool enough to be a total record snob and/or don’t regularly sleep with talent scouts.) Surely there’s a better way, like a by-day list of acts with little MP3 previews built right in, like Podbop. It doesn’t have 100% coverage, but does answer the question “where to go on Thursday?” much better than anything else out there.

Shimmering boxes do not a city make

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Paul Goldberger, writing in Metropolis, sees an opportunity for urbanism lost amidst the gleaming curtain-wall residential towers:

bq. When glass residential buildings were rare, they had a graceful effect on the cityscape: light objects playing off against masonry. But just as the Seagram Building lost some of its luster when its masonry neighbors on Park Avenue were replaced by inferior glass buildings, we are beginning to run the risk of seeing glass become not the appealing counterpoint to the stone city but the new standard. And it doesn’t work well at that. The allure of glass — its brittleness and precision, the way it seems to bedazzle and at the same time keep you at a distance — can sometimes make beautiful buildings, but it’s less likely to make appealing street-scapes. This is not the place to get into Modernism’s urbanistic failings, which involve far more than material choices, but walking alongside a glass building doesn’t provide the subtle embrace that richly textured stone or even brick does. It is a paradox: stone, heavy and opaque, pulls you closer; glass, light and transparent, keeps you at a distance. I have tried to avoid using words like warm and cold, but it is hard not to conclude that glass is cold and masonry warm. A cold object can be stunningly beautiful, but one cannot make a whole street out of them, and streets are the mortar of civilizing cities. Masonry buildings make streets; glass buildings make objects.

Vancouver has partially solved the problem by requiring heavier materials toward ground level while allowing the towers to float into the sky, but not quite: the overall feeling (perhaps intentional) is still far too airy and light, with little of the intimacy one expects of urban spaces. The literal lack of dirt and grit in the glass and steel confines of recent spaces, unrelieved even by the ubiquitous textured cement of Brutalist-era modernism, makes one wonder how these places will age.