New CSA in town

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Just signed up for two weeks’ worth of produce from the Rainbow Farmers Co-op. Rainbow is a project of Growing Power, a Milwaukee-based nonprofit that seems to have its fingers in a lot of pots: urban gardening in Milwaukee and Chicago (here in conjunction with Gallery 37), a cooperative of small farms in southern Wisconsin, food-security programs in both inner cities, etc.

Anyhow, what’s cool about it:
– choices: all- or partially-organic, a half-share size at half price, and meat’s available upon request
– year-round: local produce in the summer, less local stuff in the winter
– variety: produce comes from many small farms, instead of one; includes vegetables, fruit, and other things (honey and eggs, for instance)
– small, flexible commitment: just drop off a check by the Monday prior and you’re good for that week
– competitively priced: $26 for a large organic box, $7 for a half-sized partially-organic box

The pickup location is Blackwater Caf�, a small operation inside the Acme Artists Lofts co-op a few blocks away. Right now, there’s not much local inside the box: basically, the earth around here is yielding nothing but some very early perennial herbs right now. (I can get sorrel and sage from the garden, and only a snippet of either.) Hopefully, that will change within a few weeks as the first spring greens show up.

My trendy name

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NameVoyager, a neat little tool making the blog rounds, shows that soft initials (vowels, consonants like “n”) are definitely trending in, along with odd initials–Q and Z, for instance. (for some reason, I remember that Infiniti chose those as model initials precisely because they were underused in the language.) In the history of initials, boomers received a lot of names with hard consonant initials (K, P, T), and those are fading.

And yes, my parents were really cutting edge with my name. Payton/Peyton now accounts for 2 in 1000 babies, from almost non-existent in 1980 to both spellings landing in the top 300 (soon top 200) names for both girls and boys. Indeed, Crate & Barrel is now advertising a “Payton” series of wine glasses — perhaps the ultimate indicator of its popularity with the yuppie set. And just last week or so, my yuppie neighbors across the hall christened their baby boy — yup — Payton, making the kid only the second Payton I’ve met, ever. (The other was an old-South scion in the All-State orchestra in, er, ninth grade?) Although I’ve long liked my name, it gets misspelled so often that I’ve taken to making up names at sandwich shops that tag orders with names. (My favorite: Theo, brother of Vincent van Gogh.)

That said, I’m glad that Payton doesn’t appear on Stephen Levitt’s list of most popular names of 2005. Does my name’s increasing popularity (and thus declining exclusivity) portend that, come middle age, I’ll be surrounded with déclassé hooligans named Payton/Peyton? Young children want to have common names, but older children and adults like unique names, and hopefully I won’t end up in the odd position of having had an exceedingly rare name as a young child and a boring, familiar name as an adult.

(Update 11/2005: Not only did my next-door neighbors name their kid Payton [shortly before moving out], but the Brookfield Zoo named their baby polar bear after me.)

Bubble trouble

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David Roeder writes today:

Some 46 percent of lenders believe there’s “significant overvaluation” in real estate, said the business turnaround specialists Phoenix Management Services. The firm surveyed 122 commercial lenders. “Belief in the existence of a real estate bubble appears to be gaining some momentum,” said E. Talbot Briddell, Phoenix managing director. Thirty-nine percent of the respondents disavowed belief in a bubble

Since a bubble is by definition a confidence game, it’s in big trouble if the lenders (the ones underwriting the game) begin to back away.

In other news, he also says that construction on the Kinzie Station North residential and supermarket components on the old Milwaukee Road land across/catty-corner from Blommer Chocolate should begin this fall, now that RDM Development and Jewel have cleared plans with the city. (This is remarkable only because Milwaukee, Desplaines, and Kinzie is an integral junction in my bike commute; Kinzie is a great low-traffic shortcut across River North/River West.) Jewel received TIF funds, apparently for infrastructure, a parking deck, and since it will straddle the Blue Line subway. Now that I think about it, though, the Blue Line should continue along Milwaukee Avenue’s alignment and thus under the residential block at the southeast corner of Kinzie/Desplaines, not under Jewel’s site on the southwest corner. Oh well.

Apologies for the absence: I was in Boston last weekend (photos soon) and have been putzing with a new Treo this week. Can’t figure out how to post from it yet, though.

Tour results

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Results, checkpoint locations, and photos from Sunday’s Tour da Chicago have been posted. Stumping the messengers was fun if exhausting — setting up the checkpoints took about eight hours, and even once they were off I logged 38 phone calls from lost riders.

Some ideas for another race, some thanks to Lucky and Jon:
– slots at the East Chicago casino
– exploiting Easter Sunday craziness, which I did not do this year
– something involving now-worthless, cast-off Kryptonite locks and keys, maybe also involving a coffin filled with prizes

I left the manifesto off the manifest, but the sites were chosen from a menu of locations I’ve collected over the years — primarily leftovers from anti-urban, street-phobic Modernist planning ideology. One strange thing I noticed in setting it up, though, was that even though the planners of Illinois Center, the Circle Campus, etc. had the opportunity with their giant superblocks to consign the grid to the ash-heap, they instead still lined up many of the structures along the old grid lines. Hence, “Beaubien Mall” in Illinois Center, the Federal Center mezzanine pedway running exactly along the line of Quincy Place, Sandburg Terrace raised above the old alley between Clark & LaSalle, or UIC’s walkways lining up with what was Green Street.

Another group of checkpoints were tucked away inside quasi- or actually gated residential compounds from the 1990s: the odd pedestrian walkways in University Village, parks hidden inside Kinzie Park and Central Station.

Deficit hawk(ing)

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bq. “[L]eave Social Security intact. Paying down debt now is fiscally useful but politically useless. Instead, be bold, invest for future productivity growth in a way that the private sector cannot do, and in ways which (given the dearth of public investments recently) are very expeditious, offering high rates of return… What should the government do, with the present blessing of low long-term interest rates? Obviously, it should borrow! But for a purpose, please — not merely to keep 150,000 soldiers on a mission impossible in Iraq. It should borrow to repair and rebuild our cities, our transport, our schools, our environment — either directly or through state and local government. That’s the only way the country as a whole can become materially richer, a generation from now, than it would otherwise be.

James Galbraith, in “Salon”:http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/03/21/greenspan_deficits/index1.html

City aerials

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Someone passed along a link to the city’s aerial mapping application, which is better than the USGS/Terraserver maps because they’re:
– higher resolution, and zoomable to a ridiculous degree
– newer — about a year old
– and taken from a low-altitude airplane, not a satellite, so they have a weird SimCity Classic-like angle to them.

(It starts with a main-streets map; zoom to about 2×2 mile and the photos start to show.)

Here’s one of the ’60s amoeba-shape parks in Sandburg Village, whose angles have been considerably softened in recent years:

Latent impact fees

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Now, here’s a nice twist on growth: Virginia Groark from the Trib reports that the tollway authority is suing a developer for causing traffic backups and, more importantly, reneging on a promise to pay for tollway improvements. This case is exceptional because the traffic jams can be pinpointed on one cause, but it’s perhaps a foretaste of a libertarian future, where social costs like traffic congestion get parceled out via the courts. Hooray.

Gas prices not yet slowing sprawl

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Today’s Trib carries a curious story by John Handley on how high gas prices may eventually slow the spread of sprawl. (With oil prices stuck well above $50 a barrel for the foreseeable future, not even invading Iraq and drilling under every playground in Alaska will keep American drivers from fondly reminiscing about $2.50 a gallon next year or so.) It’s curious because the quotes switch from (suburban-based) real estate analysts who point out the possible link between gas prices and sprawl — after all, metropolitan transportation and housing costs are strongly and inversely correlated — and far-edge-exurban commuters (Minooka, Rockford, DeKalb, somewhere near Beloit) who looooooove their big houses and their looooooong commutes. (Hey, life is suffering, right?)

“Gas prices above $2.50 might start to kick in a slowing of the outward movement of housing in the Chicago area,” said real estate analyst Tracy Cross…

For Marianne Hall, who commutes 73 miles–2 hours and 15 minutes on the road each way — from DeKalb to her job in downtown Chicago, “it would take a really big increase in gas to offset the long-term gain we got by moving farther out.”

She and her husband, Randy, a bookkeeper who works from home, and their three children moved from Oswego to DeKalb a year ago.

“It’s a dream home,” Hall said. “We have a huge yard and the kids have the run of the neighborhood; there’s not a lot of traffic.”

Yeah, and if idiots like you keep moving out there, you’ll lose all of it.

But real state analyst Steve Hovany believes that a move toward shorter commutes has begun in the Chicago area.

“People are paying extra to reduce their commute. They’re moving to closer-in, infill housing in the suburbs and to downtown,” he said. “Right now, that inward move is major. It’s being driven by older buyers. Commuting doesn’t grow on you. Empty-nesters won’t buy in the middle of nowhere.”

He also worries about gasoline prices. “The rising price of gas is a jolt that could affect residential sales,” said Hovany, president of Strategy Planning Associates in Schaumburg.

He noted, though, that not everyone can pay for a close-in location, and economics forces many younger couples to start their families on the edge of the Chicago area.

The location of jobs is a key to where new homes are built, Hovany said. “If a new housing development wants volume sales, it has to be within a 35- to 40-minute drive from major job markets.”

And because of growing employment around Schaumburg, Aurora-Naperville and other areas, suburb-to-suburb commuting is on the rise.

Hovany’s company did a study on Waterman, a town 60 miles west of Chicago on U.S. Highway 30. “Though it may be far from the city, it’s only a 35- to 40-minute drive to the Aurora-Naperville job corridor,” Hovany said.

Third wave edge cities like the East-West Corridor will spawn fourth wave sprawl, which will give rise to fourth wave edge cities in places like New Lenox, which will… Well, duh, that’s the way suburban growth paths work. However, what will ultimately break this particular path dependence? The Metropolis Pledge? Employers realizing that locating closer to the center of the region offers them the best access to the largest, most competitively priced labor pool?

Speaking of growth paths, someone pointed out during the development of the Metropolis Plan that the Chicago region’s growth paths have strayed so far from the center that even sprawl at current rates doesn’t look all that dramatic on a map. (The growth path gets wider as it progresses outwards and therefore appears to slow down; each mile of lateral travel encompasses a steadily larger surface area.)

Schadenfreude for Detroit

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An update on the idea of raiding dying but beautiful cities (like Detroit) to dress up today’s drab new construction: a few years ago, the theft of a set of stone lions from the facade of an abandoned Detroit apartment house made the papers after the lions ended up in a set of Edgewater rowhouses, courtesy of brokering by none other than Architectural Artifacts.

The apartments had previously been occupied by subsidized seniors. Senior housing gets such rich subsidies (comparatively speaking; it’s hard to get, but about as dependable an income stream as any imaginable) and has such a bottomless pit of demand that if you can’t keep that up and running, then there’s little chance anything will work.

Bill McGraw writes in the Detroit Free Press:

It’s never easy being a Detroiter in Chicago.

We travel around the big lake and see thousands of charming old buildings there that look like thousands here, except that the old buildings there have windows and roofs and people inside.

That’s why local preservationists are so upset about the discovery that Chicago is the new home for six stone lion heads stolenfrom a once-elegant Detroit apartment tower.

Podiatrists rank walking cities

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Oddly enough, the American Podiatric Medical Association is in favor of smart growth — hence, their survey of municipalities where people walk to work (including those who presumably walk to transit), or walk for exercise, or even own dogs or athletic shoes, which presumably go along with walking:

Arlington, VA
San Francisco, CA
Seattle, WA
Portland, OR
Boston, MA
Washington, DC
New York City, NY
Eugene, OR
Jersey City, NJ
Denver, CO