“Blair Kamin”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/arts/chi-0603040223mar05,1,7383557.story writes on “grit,” “soul,” whatever you want to call it, and its disappearance as cash sanitizes downtown:

bq. Now that we’ve figured out how to get people to invest in downtown, how do we maintain its diversity and vitality so it doesn’t become a sterile home for the super-rich? At issue is the survival of texture — the urban texture that makes cities endlessly fascinating, quirky, exotic and even a little wicked.

bq. You can see it along Ohio Street in an old narrow, four-story building wedged between the Michigan Avenue Gap store and the soon-to-be-demolished parking garage where Cambridge House occupied the ground floor, its green awning distracting the eye from the ugly garage. The little four-story building, which has a handsome facade of brick and stone ornament, packs more character than an entire vertical mall. First floor: an Armenian restaurant called Sayat Nova. Second floor: a dimly-lit gay bar. Third floor: an astrologer/psychic/tarot card reader, advertised by red neon signs and blue awnings. Fourth floor: an apartment occupied by the restaurant owner’s son.

Oddly, I’d been told about the Second Story Bar before but had never noticed it before the week before this article — when I happened to look up and see its ’70s-style lettering. A few days later, we stumbled in to find a tiny space (fire occupancy limit 36?), one of the few Chicago establishments that’s smaller than anything I’ve seen in New York. Perhaps expectedly, it’s pretty dive-y and cheap by downtown standards — and it will look so incredibly out of place once it’s squished between the Gap and the ice-queen glass condo box planned for the Cambridge House site.

(In this case, it’s small even compared to KGB, the tiny Stalin-themed bar in Greenwich Village where I first had a full bottle of beer — two months past 21 and I’d never moved past the wine list. Similarly, La Fontanella in Heart of Chicago almost matches the postage-stamp single-storefront spaces in the East Village, although I haven’t brought out any measuring tape yet.)

Kamin continues:

bq. Resolving messy urban vitality and architectural grandeur is an eternal challenge… But in the end, character can’t be manufactured or legislated or drawn up in some architectural recipe book. It comes from a long-simmering intermingling between a building and the human activity that goes on inside it.

In other words, it takes time to make things messy. Anything new, whether wine or landscape or “fabric”:http://latimes.com/news/local/la-me-jeans28feb28,0,4711785,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines, will inevitably be a bit too clean and fussy; it takes years of layering to develop complex flavors and subtle distinctions in both New Wine and New Urbanism.

Oh well. My dream site for an indoor public market, the old Cook Bros. warehouse (now called Cameron Tower) at the end of Fulton Market (Ashland & Lake, basically) is being converted to condos instead. Office condos, actually, but still condos. It’s a highly visible site just outside downtown with a good building: 44,000 feet (an acre!) on the first floor, 14′ clear ceilings, and 100 parking spaces in the back, plus a loading dock directly on Fulton.

A whiny post at YoChicago (the blog that’s subsumed “Loft Living”) complains about service on the #70. (Well, it is a crosstown half-section route and you’re boarding at the eastern end…) Anyhow, my response avoided the whole “well, technically Millennium Park funds came from a segregated TIF account not available for use elsewhere,”* but does dig on density.

bq. Mass transit requires a _mass_ of people to transit, and much of Chicago unfortunately doesn’t quite have the mass. The least crowded parts of Manhattan are still denser than the most crowded parts of Chicago—and even most of Brooklyn and Queens pack in as many residents as “overcrowded” Chicago neighborhoods like Lincoln Park. If you want NYC service, try moving to the one part of Chicago that approximates NYC density: namely, downtown. Or else we can hope that good developers will build so many new condos that we’ll have enough density to sustain really great transit—except that the annoying NIMBYs who want [dog] parks and parking lots instead of new neighbors will keep that from ever happening. Oh well.

(Millennium Park: the park received TIF special taxing district funds, not general tax revenue, and can only be spent on economic development activities downtown; MP certainly counts, as it’s substantially raised property values and thus could eventually pay for itself. Central Loop TIF funds could have gone to CTA capital improvements downtown, possibly freeing up cash for capital improvements elsewhere in the city, but not for operating. Furthermore, the park is operated by the private Conservancy, not the park district. On the other hand, sales tax revenue generated by new retail sales to tourists attracted by MP — and yes, they do actually come to see the park [CAF reports that half of tour participants on its park tours are from out of town], or at least extend their shopping to the Loop from NMA — probably ups CTA’s tax base, so it’s probably at best a wash.)

William Mullen in “the Trib”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-060306evolution,1,1449899.story?coll=chi-news-he writes about the Field Museum’s latest permanent exhibit, a step-by-step overview of that most misunderstood of natural history subjects, evolution:

bq. “I respect religion and other people’s beliefs,” said [biological anthropologist Robert] Martin, “but I am a scientist, and we are a science museum. We establish what we know from observable evidence.”

bq. Almost certainly it will be one of the museum’s star attractions, if for no other reason than _it remains the museum’s main dinosaur display_ , one of the most popular draws it has. The exhibit is free with normal museum admission fees, but tickets will be issued to help direct the expected large crowds.

bq. [T]he exhibit formally is named “The Kenneth and Anne Griffin Halls of Evolving Planet” after the two major donors backing its installation. The Griffins, both major hedge-fund entrepreneurs, donated $5 million to the exhibit’s financing.

Thank god that our side (the science side) is pretty good at educating whizzes like Ken Griffin — who might be the city’s second biggest employer of mathematicians — who are also willing to stick up for good science. It’s a bit strange that he chooses this venue to make a big philanthropic splash, but all the better.

Chronic under-assessments with little basis in reality, a confusing multiplier system that penalizes some and confuses all, and a sky-high but phantom tax rate — sound familiar? The property tax system in Philadelphia looks a lot like that in Chicago, except they’ve got it easy — lower overall rates and no mind-bending system of playing favorites among land uses with obscure, completely arbitrary “multiplier values.”

Yet the fix that civic groups and an independent tax reform commission have proposed is an actual, fair fix: fair revaluation back to market values, a lower overall tax rate, limited buffer mechanisms, and a shift toward land-value taxation. Indeed, one civic group actively rejects the assessment-cap system that has so many fans in the Illinois legislature:

Assessments must keep pace with changes in value or the system will become even more unfair. Rate reductions or tax deferments are better tools to help homeowners.

Unfortunately, TRAC has made it known that they think the “ultimate solution” to the “property tax problem” (really more the property _value_ problem) is a Prop 13-style abolition of periodic assessments, in favor of fixed-at-sale assessments. This is a volley in the coming generational war: older, established, often wealthy property owners want to slice their own tax payments sharply. The unspoken other half of that equation: deep cuts in government services (schools’ primary funding in Illinois comes from property taxes), coupled with dramatically higher taxes on the young, new arrivals, and anyone unfortunate enough not to have been owned the right place at the right time. The racial overtones: wealth, especially property wealth, is far more racially concentrated in White hands than even income — especially since African American and Latino neighborhoods pay “the segregation tax” of lower property values — while public services in entrepot states like California and Illinois disproportionately benefit non-white children, in particular.

Meanwhile, as any Californian can attest, Prop 13 hasn’t slowed gentrification in the least. Of course, gentrification without the tax bills — maybe that’s what TRAC wants, after all. One generation after Prop 13, some original homeowners have tax bills one-tenth of their younger neighbors’. Dan Z in the Bay Area (from email discussion) argues that Prop 13 merely enhances the monopolistic, anti-density tendencies of entrenched homeowners:

By freezing the assessed value of their homes and thus freezing their property tax rates, Prop 13 creates an odd situation where long time homeowners feel all of the benefits of a housing shortage without feeling any of the pain… Outrageous home value appreciation gives long-time homeowners magnificent equity wealth without hurting them on a day-to-day basis with higher property taxes. I can’t help but wonder: if their property taxes were skyrocketing, maybe they wouldn’t be so hostile to new housing which would bring prices under control… Insulating people from the negative consequences of their actions (in this case fighting new housing) tends to cause them to act very selfishly and strangely.

Warren Buffett tried to speak up about how obscenely silly Prop 13 is by pointing out that he pays $2,264 a year in tax on his $4 million vacation house in Laguna Beach — less than I pay on my condo, and less, Buffett pointed out, than a working, “non-billionaire” family living in a $300,000 house in the Central Valley exurbs. That family “faces real estate taxes materially higher than those borne by this nonresident billionaire on his $4 million house in Laguna. This family, because of Prop 13, has been selected to subsidize me.” Even more disgusting: since commercial property owners can pay for legal help to create tax loopholes and prevent revaluation, the commercial properties that in Cook County pay the lion’s share of the property tax burden will be able to shove their taxes back onto homeowners under such a system.

An article by Lee Green in the LA Times Magazine last year (17 April 2005) paints this picture:

Many of the best and the brightest in economics, law, public finance, public policy, planning and tax theory believe that Proposition 13 — born out of homeowners’ anger over rocketing property taxes and government indifference — has caused or contributed to some of the state’s most pressing problems. Granted, it didn’t unleash the economic Armageddon prophesied by its opponents, and we certainly can’t hold it responsible for the state’s current fiscal fiasco, which owes its existence to executive and legislative mismanagement several magnitudes greater than anything Proposition 13 could conjure. Still, the measure’s untoward consequences — from the disempowerment of local government to the decimation of a once-proud educational system, unequal taxes on equal properties and yawning tax loopholes for business — demand a rigorous reexamination of Proposition 13 and its legacy. In tax lingo, a reassessment.

Lay all of the above over Illinois’ severe structural deficit — an antiquated state and local tax system critically wounded by the crises of the Nixon-Reagan years (deindustrialization leading to slower and narrower growth, metropolitan fragmentation and stratification, the elimination of federal aid) — and it’s a recipe to eviscerate a government that’s levying a tax burden that’s actually quite middling by national standards.

“In Boston, everyone you meet is in school and studying something interesting. In Chicago, everyone you meet works, selling something boring.” — Jeff B

I sometimes forget how much my initial impression of Chicago was mediated by arriving as a student.