The Plan Commission has received a proposal (end of agenda) to loft-convert (440 units!!) a cold storage building at Damen and Pershing — the north end of the Union Stock Yards, across from McKinley Park.
Also, a 110-unit conversion is slated for Bloomingdale and Spaulding. Time’s running out to TIF the Bloomingdale industrial district to generate funds for the trail conversion.
Peter Dreier makes the case against Reagan’s urban policy in Newsday, but doesn’t even plumb the full depths:
Reagan also presided over the dramatic deregulation of the nation’s savings-and-loan industry, which allowed S&L’s to end their reliance on home mortgages and engage in an orgy of commercial real estate speculation. This ultimately led to a federal taxpayer bailout that cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
the S&L debacle was only half of it — the Tax Reform Act increased depreciation allowances, allowing commercial real estate developers to rack up huge paper losses (really profits) on developments of dubious merit. huge swaths of countryside, especially in the Sunbelt, were scraped for the biggest construction boom in office parks, shopping malls, and garden apartments ever. meanwhile, cities cleared away thousands of city blocks for redevelopment schemes of shimmering but street life-killing office blocks.
transit subsidies stalled in the 1980s, and the retrenchment in federal urban spending stalled many a city’s true recovery. “smart growth” anti-sprawl movements had an initial flowering in the 1970s, but were pretty much discarded in the 1980s and somewhat rediscovered in the 1990s as political winds shifted once again.
Reagan’s most dramatic cut was for low-income housing subsidies. Soon after taking office, he appointed a housing task force dominated by developers, landlords and bankers. Its 1982 report called for “free and deregulated” markets as an alternative to government assistance. Reagan followed their advice. Between 1980 and 1989, HUD’s budget authority was cut from $74 billion to $19 billion in constant dollars. The number of new subsidized housing starts fell from 175,000 to 20,000 a year.
and thus was born today’s affordable housing crisis.
The Project for Public Spaces has an online guided tour of beautiful, functional Parisian public spaces — so friendly to the public that even young children and seniors feel comfortable expressing affection and joy in public. PPS also warns that the unfriendly, overdesigned new parks and ever-expanding roadways threaten the vitality of
“When we compare examples of public spaces in Paris to other cities, we often get the response: ‘Oh… well that is Paris,’ meaning that no other city can compare. Our reply is that Paris is a laboratory for learning about all types of public spaces, both good and bad. Each individual public space, each building, and each street can teach us something important.”
Sure, Paris owes much of its beauty and most of its grand parks to the unprecedented investment lavished upon it by the French state, but many of its finest details cost no more than standard highway street treatments.
Coming events in NYC: Open House, self-guided tours of buildings all around town, and Green Home Open House of smaller green buildings.
The Times has a charming article in the food section about a chef who bicycles his purchases between the Union Square Greenmarket and the restaurant. Speaking of which, my recent purchases have included mushrooms, asparagus, mustard greens, and a lemon verbena plant. I’ve also planted micro greens in the garden, which have taken well — however, they’re now too big and too bitter/spicy for salads. Well, they’re still damn tasty.
Alas, the Wicker Park farmers’ market hasn’t started yet. One nice addition this year is a new evening market on Randolph in the West Loop — bringing the street back to its Market District origins in the best way. Also, I’ve found a pay-per-box CSA that delivers organic boxes just a few blocks away. Angelic was great, but the quantites really were ridiculous. Growing Power seems to offer a wider variety of goods (it’s a coop of many farms), and only when you want them.
It’s June, so Ravinia will soon be in season — this weekend, in fact. However, I haven’t had a chance to sit down and scrutinize the schedule for days to ride out there and picnic. This summer, though, I think it’d also be fun to visit some out of the way parks within the city limits — say, Columbus Park, Ping Tom Park, or Wolf Lake. The curvilinear town of Riverside might be a fun place to get lost in, and it’s not far away.
Ideas for dates? I’ve opened up comments for this one.
At Urban Center Books last week, I picked up a book called “Sustainable Everyday: Scenarios of Urban Life” (looks like a good chunk of the text is available online) — really an exhibition catalogue from the Milan Triennial, with ideas from univerisites around the world on how to create sustainable communities. Many of the ideas aren’t all that new, but examining the common threads between them: local co-ops, skill sharing, applying smarter logistics to local passenger and freight travel, telework centers, managing the use of space (and capital, like tools) through networks — makes for a fascinating read.
Also interesting is the worldwide focus on food. I’m so darn excited about slow food/slow cities as an organizing concept for sustainability that I’m just speechless about it. I managed to write a bit yesterday explaining how slow food (in this case, a public market) embodies the new urbanism, and hope to be able to expand on that soon.
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Good ol’ Raleigh’s deserved descent to punchline status — as shorthand for provincial dullery — passed me by while I wasn’t watching television.
Sideshow Bob from the Simpsons, several years ago: “Ah, for the days when aviation was a gentleman’s pursuit. Long before every Joe Sweatsock could wedge himself behind a lunch tray and jet off to Raleigh-Durham.”
…in Las Vegas, of all places. The median price of an existing house is now nearly $225,000, 32% above the national norm and rivaling prices in Chicago, Denver, Baltimore, and even Portland. Dumb growth apparently isn’t the best way to ensure low housing prices.
The LA Times has a comprehensive, nicely written Column One article on the High Line. Excerpts:
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I’ll be in NYC and away from the fearsome computer screen until Tuesday.
$40,000 a year for 10 years, apparently, is what it takes to convince a developer to lease to a small, local retailer instead of a large chain. I’m all for interesting little local shops downtown, but surely there’s a more effective way to do this — a publicly owned public market, perhaps?
west north 