Sox’ attendance woes in WSJ

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A Page One article by Erik Ahlberg gives some reasons why the winning White Sox still face a half-empty stadium in a sporting town. Personally, I think that fixing the urbanism could easily increase attendance, while generating additional revenues. I know that I’d be far more tempted to go to a game; surely someone who cared more about sports (even if she cared less about urbanism) would be similarly tempted.

The Chicago White Sox have the best record in baseball, and their best chance in years of ending an 88-year drought of World Series championships. But here in one of America’s great sports towns, hardly anyone seems to care.

When the Sox recently faced another first-place team, the Los Angeles Angels, only about 20,000 showed up, despite delightful weather and a 2-for-1 ticket special… Despite a mediocre performance most of the year, the second-place Cubs have played to 98% capacity, and nearly had a sellout April 23 when they lost to the lowly Pittsburgh Pirates in near-freezing temperatures with 25-mile-an-hour winds blasting off Lake Michigan.

At the heart of the Sox’s troubled wooing of Chicago lies a conundrum worthy of Yogi Berra: They haven’t been good enough to win, and they haven’t been bad enough to tap into baseball’s romance with hapless losers. The White Sox won their last World Series in 1917. Even before the Boston Red Sox exorcised their 86-year curse last year, the White Sox had the American League’s longest drought…

Many people fault Comiskey Park, which one local columnist has described as having the feel of West Berlin during the Cold War. The park, which replaced the old Comiskey in 1991 and was renamed U.S. Cellular Field in 2003, is bordered by a rust-stained concrete wall, train tracks and an interstate highway. Some of Chicago’s toughest housing projects loom beyond the outfield fence. There are only a few bars within walking distance… The Cell, as the team’s ballpark is often called here, was one of the last efficient but unappealing fields built before stadiums in Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and San Francisco showed how to design a park that’s equal parts ballfield and tourist attraction… But many Chicagoans prefer the cozy confines of historic Wrigley Field, with its ivy-covered outfield walls, hand-operated scoreboard and neighborhood teeming with saloons.

“Even if we win the World Series this year, Wrigley will still sell out next year,” Sox first baseman Paul Konerko says. “But I can’t guarantee we’d be sold out here…” White Sox General Manager Ken Williams says the team appreciates the mayor’s support. “We just need him to bring ten or fifteen thousand of his friends.”

Terror alert

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Terror alert

Originally uploaded by paytonc.

Seen on Meridian St in South Pasadena across from an open house for CNU attendees at Mission Meridian.

Someone (whose name escapes me, as names tend to) spent a few hours talking with the neighbors at the little block party reception they were having. Turns out they’re longtime neighborhood activists, having gotten 30+ years of practice at it while campaigning against the not-dead-yet 710 freeway (which would wipe out 1/3 of South Pasadena). Overall, the neighbors admitted that they preferred residential development to the long-vacant lot. The main issue is indeed the trees: despite repeated assurances from both the developer and the town planning officials, a row of truly giant street trees all came down just a few weeks ago — well after major construction was done. The developer’s people said that the trees were diseased; they’re 80 years into their 100-year life expectancy, and have been badly pruned in recent years. (I also have a photo of the street trees up on Flickr.)

A secondary issue is the bulk of the loft building. It is indeed a few feet higher than anything else in the vicinity, and retaining those trees would have done a lot to mask that bulk. Apparently, they really like the Craftsman maisonettes, which are a great way to insert density into the low-scale context.

However, the escalation of the attacks from one development and a half-dozen trees to the whole of New Urbanism, and the loaded addition of “terrorism,” is just inexcusable rhetoric.

The bourse and the city, updated

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I was re-reading my “Tickertape Tales” paper recently and thought it sounded dated. Among the changes since then:

* most obviously, the burst of the tech bubble kind of put an end to Nasdaq triumphalism;
* the residential price bubble, which is is consuming more GDP than the tech bubble did, and appears to be a major factor in investor-driven CBD condo markets;
* outsourcing FIRE work, first to back offices like Omaha (e.g., Ameritrade) and then to India; and
* the role of the shift from defined-benefit to defined-contribution retirement plans, which the paper completely overlooked as a reason for the explosion of financial-services advertising spending.

Busy summertime

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I’m presenting “Driving for Dollars” (downloads will be reposted in July) twice this week:
1. Greening the Heartland–Palmer House, Wednesday, 9am
2. Transport Chicago–IIT HUB, Friday, 11am

Next week, I’m off to Pasadena for CNU XIII, then taking some time after that off. So, I’ll be posting sporadically at best through, oh, maybe mid-June (before going on vacation again in July).

Roosevelt retail boom

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1,260 additional condos isn’t really news, not given the tens of thousands of units planned around town already, but a new 500,000 sq ft lifestyle center is noteworthy. Alby Gallun reports in Crain’s that Centrum Properties has purchased 11 acres of the “LaSalle Park” tract in the South Loop, which has had a tremendously generous PD (at least 2,500 units) attached to it for years, and has proposed lifestyle retail on the south and residential on the north. Other parts of LaSalle Park have been sold to D2 Realty and Terrapin for residential uses and to Target for its new Clark/Roosevelt store.

Combined with 320,000 sq ft at the Southgate Market mini-vertical mall and the approved 670,000 foot lifestyle component of Riverside Park, plus ~450,000 feet in existing big box retail (Dominick’s, Jewel, Home Depot, Target, State Place), that’s nearly two million square feet of retail between Wabash and Jefferson — more than half of it in vertical formats. (I don’t know if anyone tracks retail in the Clybourn corridor, but my estimate is closer to a million feet.) The city has long identified Roosevelt as a retail corridor good for big boxes, which makes sense given not only the growing local population but also its great accessibility from points further south and west.

However, I have serious doubts about whether that much vertical or lifestyle-format retail will work — or is desirable — less than a mile from State Street. More convenience retail is certainly desirable, but do Centrum and Harlem-Irving (the retail developers for the LaSalle and Riverside tracts. respectively) understand that leasing up >300,000 feet (with a rent schedule that will pay for the 30′ platform), with no direct transit, a mile from the Loop, is entirely different than leasing Riverside Park expire. Sign of the times?

Edit Feb 2007: This is completely cliché, but after visiting Portland’s Pearl and South Waterfront neighborhoods, I’m convinced. What this corridor needs is development oriented transit — a streetcar. At $20 million (the estimated figure to start a South Lake Union line in Seattle, home of the $200 million/mile LRT and $3.5B “light” tunnel, and a tiny fraction of the TIF subsidy ask from just Riverside Park), a mile-long Union Station-LaSalle Street Station-Riverside Park streetcar along Wells is a clearly worthy use of the Riverside South TIF. Indeed, it’s a far more worthy use of the TIF funds than further development subsidies, since it provides public infrastructure and a rationale for even higher density. It could also even link into a Clinton subway, er, West Loop Transportation Center.

More bubble trouble

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You know there’s a bubble when… people throw hugely expensive parties for no discernable reason other than “to build buzz.” A NYT dispatch by Abby Goodnough from Miami:

“The food’s got to be better, the lighting’s got to be better, the D.J.’s got to be really good. The new norm is the quarter-million-dollar party.” No expense is spared because the stakes are high: about 70,000 condo units are planned, under construction or newly finished in Miami proper, home to fewer than 400,000 people.

On the bright side, it’s nice to know that Aqua does exist in real life. I’ve never seen so much as a construction photo, only the same old renderings. (The article mentions that the townhouses are moving slowly; I suppose one could have figured that vacation-home buyers, who make up probably 70% of the market there, would prefer condos to townhouses.) As for the gates, the architect reports that it was the multifamily-fearing neighbors, not the style-conscious developer, who asked for them.

A closer look at the plan reveals a nice touch I hadn’t seen before: rotating the center block by about 15 degrees creates two wedges of space, to be planted with fruit trees (mango and citrus). Of course: fruit trees, like everything else, grow unassisted in Miami, and encourage interaction like no other planting, from fragrant flower to juicy harvest. They encourage almost too much interaction in public spaces — people climb up into the trees to grab fruit, breaking branches — but in a semi-private, well policed area they’re more likely to survive.

West or north?

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I believe that I live on the west side, primarily because I don’t want to be a “north sider.” (To date, I’ve never lived east of the river and north of Madison — only on the south and west sides.) Newspaper reports have ceased referring to Wicker Park as “west side” and just call it “near northwest” or don’t assign a side to it, assuming that everyone will know where it is.

In any case, Craig Z. picked up on the odd schism between west and north; in a comment to Eric Zorn:

The only reason people will argue with this is that they are going to say, “I live in a nice neighborhood! We are not on the West Side!”

In Chicago parlance, “West Side” means ghetto, crime, ignorance, hopelessness, decline, decay, futility. It means empty lots, shut-down factories, abandoned dreams. Most of all, it means the ’68 riots that broke out after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, from which some neighborhoods have never recovered.

In fact, these borders shift in the media depending on what type of story is being reported. In Chicago’s Near Northwest, if a trendy new restaurant opens, it’s on the “North Side,” but if someone gets shot, it’s on the “West Side.” This is true even if the shooting occurs north and east of the restaurant!

Today’s Plan Commission report

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– The undeveloped portion of Homan Square, Sears’ old headquarters in Lawndale, has been purchased by a developer proposing conversion (of a million square feet in the Sears administration and merchandise development buildings) and new construction for a total of 1,200 (!) housing units. Lawndale’s housing market is not booming; there’s no need to suck all of the somewhat rising housing demand into Homan Square. One resident testified at the hearing, saying first that Alderman Chandler had not presented this plan to the community — which is truly astonishing, given the scope of the proposal — and that other areas of North Lawndale needed investment first. She’s completely correct, but of course the proposal passed.

– Three downtown high rises garnered significant zoning bonuses of 2 FAR for “significant” contributions to the affordable housing trust fund — somewhere between $1-2 million. That’s the profit off of, what, five downtown units?

– The Jeweler’s Row tower [critiques by Lynn Becker | Blair Kamin] was approved, of course. (Of course, since Mayor Daley lives in its precursor, The Heritage at Millennium Park, and the mayor’s brother’s law firm provided counsel.) While preservationists may have thought well of the many landmark districts approved in recent years, it also seems that the Daley administration is undermining the protective authority of landmark status. Solomon Cordwell Buenz has designed a slender, lovely, Vancouver-esque building of greenish glass; the developer has proposed a nice restoration of the podium (the Art Institute and University Club have signed on for lower floor space–Mesa apparently learned from the Heritage that the base should be pre-leased) and yes, the Loop is the right place for density. However, essentially demolishing the existing buildings to insert a 770′ tower sets a dangerous precedent on two fronts. First, the scale completely overpowers both Jeweler’s Row and Michigan Boulevard; while there are already oversized Modern buildings along Wabash, like 55 E Monroe and CNA, the goal of landmarking was to stop future buildings from overpowering the visual unity of Central Michigan. Second, if we can’t count on the landmarks ordinance for protection from massive new buildings, what can we count on? Corfman reports in today’s Trib that the potential new owners of 55 E Monroe (across Monroe from the site) considering a condo conversion of that building’s upper floors — which makes sense as long as, say, National-Louis doesn’t put up its own 800′ tower through the People’s Gas building light court. As Martin Tangora said at the Landmarks Commission hearing last week:

I’m worried about the millionaires that have been coming to you for 25 years with a cottage in Old Town asking to put 5,000 square feet on top and in back — how are you going to turn them down? How are you going to tell the owners of 20 North Michigan, an eight story building that’s one of the oldest in the street wall — how are you going to tell them that they can’t building a 70 story tower on the back all-but-30-feet of that lot?

What the city council should do instead is pass an ordinance authorizing the sale of development, or air, rights from landmark buildings to adjacent or nearby sites. This would allow owners within landmark districts to cash out, provide the density elsewhere, and maintain the historic scale of landmark areas. That way, the Cultural Center could have gained millions to protect the Heritage’s views; Tree Studios’ gardens wouldn’t have had to be ripped out and excavated for a subterranean retail box, etc. We do have a never-used “adopt-a-landmark” zoning bonus provision, but TDR is much more direct and understandable to developers.

– A 51-story residential tower on midblock Ontario just east of Michigan was also approved. SOAR and GNMAA oppose the proposal on traffic grounds, which is entirely appropriate: the PD upzones the site by one third, from 12 to 16 FAR, and then applies bonuses for setbacks and an affordable housing trust fund contribution — for a total of nearly 22 FAR. The entire intent of the bonus provisions in the downtown zoning was to encourage public amenities in return for upzones, but in this case most of the upzone has no basis in public amenity whatsoever. The other Near North upzone, over at Ontario and Orleans, at least had some basis in public purpose: the developers will rehab an old loft building and keep it in commercial use, while using an adjacent vacant lot for their 455′ condo tower.

As a rep from SOAR stated, the traffic “impact of new buildings should not be evaluated on single buildings alone”–the neighborhood actually needs some sort of planning on a site-by-site basis. Natarus says that he’s proud of the neighborhood’s opposition, since it shows that he did have “an open process.” Um, an “open process” doesn’t mean that you asked, didn’t listen to, and finally ignored input.

– The condo boom continues, but for how long? Just today’s agenda:

Address Area Floors DU
110 W Superior River North/Cathedral 26 77
21 S Wabash E Loop/Jewelers 71 353
3517 W Arthington Lawndale/Homan 8? 1,200
301 W Ohio River North/Gallery 37 240
148 E Ontario Streeterville 51 165
2559 S Dearborn Bronzeville* 7 93
1255 S State South Loop 19 253
1454 S Michigan South Loop 30? 215
1001 W Van Buren** West Loop 24? 145
3600 S Western McKinley Park 4? 236
TOTAL citywide 2,977

Next month promises at least 163 more DUs, although given the way things have a way of magically appearing on the agenda at the last minute, I wouldn’t be surprised if that balloons to 1,000+.

* interestingly, this WAS the old Lyric Opera warehouse, site of the legendary costume sales that brought thousands to a dumpy area right by Dearborn and Ickes (?) Homes.
** amending a long-stalled proposal of around 300 units; numbers are for the additional DUs allowed by the amendment. Student housing across the freeway from UIC? Who would have thought?

Winneconna Parkway

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In his parting column, Lee Bey mentioned that a childhood bike ride past a little street called “Winneconna Parkway”:https://westnorth.com/img/winneconna.jpg, a little jog in a wedge-shaped part of the South Side’s relentless grid with a pond in the middle of it, was the first time he was really awakened to the possibilities of urban design. I still haven’t seen it — don’t get out to Grand Crossing that often — but it was quite interesting to read about how many nearby properties have been saved through CIC’s innovative Troubled Buildings Initiative in their “recent newsletter”:http://www.cicchicago.com/htdocs/resources/documents/CICnwsltr_Spring05.pdf (large PDF).

Reinvestment news wire

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Smart money is finding its way to smart growth; investors are finding that once distressed urban areas offer considerable upside in a largely tapped out real estate market. Some have raised concerns that once the tide turns, the new investors will turn out to be just another set of absentee landlords.

1. Big money finds Bronzeville. Central Station’s corporate developers, Forest City Fogelson, have purchased eight acres (about two blocks) from Mercy Hospital for a $150 million market-rate development called Eastgate Village: “on the east side of the hospital campus, located between 25th and 26th streets, and from Michigan Avenue to King Drive. The estimated 550 townhomes, duplexes, senior living units and condominiums will be priced from $185,000 to $450,000.”

Loft conversions first moved south to Cermak maybe 3-4 years ago, as converters ran out of buildings closer to the Loop. A few small developments have taken place south of the McCormick Place/I-55 blockade that separates Bronzeville from the Near South; this is by far the biggest non-HOPE VI development on the mid-south side since the days of urban renewal.

2. Magic Johnson is investing in a 216-unit conversion of the 1929 Williamsburg Savings Bank. Brooklyn’s tallest building has long stood alone over Fort Greene and offers both commanding views of Manhattan and great subway access within the building; it’s also around the corner from BAM.

Canyon-Johnson Urban Funds hopes to deliver $1.5 billion in investments in 25 cities by year’s end. Additional financing comes from Citibank Community Development.

“H. Thomas O�Hara has been tapped as the architect. He has been instructed to maintain the landmark property�s exterior fa�ade, interior bank vaults as well as its famous clock tower perched atop the building, according to a spokesman for CJU. K. Robert Turner is a managing partner of Canyon-Urban Johnson Funds, an equity investment fund that is devoted to revitalizing apartment buildings and mixed-use projects in inner cities. He is a partner with Johnson.”

Odd that Magic Johnson seems to have succeeded in raising a higher profile nationally than, say, Andrew Cuomo or Henry Cisneros.

3. Phil Angelides leverages yet more funds for smart growth, in cooperation with foundations and private investors. From GlobeSt:

“Phoenix Realty Group and the San Diego Capital Collaborative have launched a new venture called the San Diego Smart Growth Fund with a $90 million investment that they plan to leverage into $500 million in market rate housing and commercial development. The $90 million includes $60 million from CalPERS, the California Public Employees Retirement System.

“The partners describe the new fund as an effort to revitalize urban centers and to create affordable housing for middle-income residents. It will provide funding to build approximately 2,000 market-rate housing units throughout San Diego County as well as neighborhood retail centers that would serve the housing.”

“The Smart Growth fund will be capitalized only with private sector capital, and will operate in accordance with market disciplines to produce an equity return from mid to high teens.”

Car-free Sundays

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The Bronx borough president recently annouced that car-free Sundays might return to one of America’s most elegant boulevards, Grand Concourse, soon.

Sunday street closures are a great way to have an “everyday festival,” draw people outside to spend some extra dough in the neighborhood, and plant the seed for future traffic calming. (If it can be this nice once a week, why not all week?) Memorial Drive in Cambridge and the park drives inside Golden Gate Park, Central Park, and Prospect Park are examples of weekend street closures. Why not, say, Grant Park?

Encyclopedic

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The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago launched today, with all of the features of the Encyclopedia of Chicago plus more — like the complete text of the 1909 Wacker Plan.

Oddly, I never noticed this in my six months of having a print copy around, but Chicago Critical Mass is now officially one for the history books! From the entry on bicycling, by Allyson Hobbs:

Bicycle advocacy groups including the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation and Chicago Critical Mass have promoted the bicycle as a viable means of transportation. Since September 1997, Chicago Critical Mass has sponsored monthly rides from Daley Plaza to busy intersections and expressways in order to challenge �car culture� and to assert bicyclists’ right to the roads.