Dominick’s downtown

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Becky Yerak’s column in today’s Trib describes the sales success of Dominick’s (a Safeway unit) in downtown Chicago. The economics are too good to give up, even if theft is an issue when the groceries are upstairs and the employees are downstairs.

(And yes, I have photos of the Lincoln Park and West Loop stores here).

Dominick’s thinks outside its deli

?BECKY YERAK
Published March 2, 2004

When Dominick’s planned the deli section of a store in Lincoln Park, its eyes were bigger than shoppers’ appetite for convenience food.

“We used to talk about `home-meal replacement.’ That was the wave of the future. Everything you needed in a box …” recalled Michael Mallon, Dominick’s vice president of real estate. “Believe me, there’s a lot of business in home-meal replacement, but not as much as we originally set up in the store.”

So the Safeway Inc. chain downsized the deli, added a Starbucks and a bakery, and watched sales rise 20 percent. “More importantly, profits picked up also,” Mallon said at an International Council of Shopping Centers event last week.

Dominick’s landed the spot at Fullerton and Sheffield Avenues because it agreed to build a two-level store in the mixed-use development, owned by DePaul University.

“It’s the first two-level grocery store in the Chicago area,” Mallon said. The store does “in excess of $500 per square foot.”

But “shrinkage”–stolen merchandise–is a bigger problem in a two-story store. In fact, Dominick’s labor costs at the site are 2 percentage points higher than at single-level stores.

As a result, developers seeking tenants for a two-level store should brace for tougher rent talks. Nonetheless, “we’re looking at other two-level locations in Chicagoland,” Mallon said.

Meanwhile, near the West Loop, sales at Dominick’s at Madison and Halsted Streets “are way beyond our expectations,” Mallon said. “We’re doing in excess of $550 a square foot.”

A Dominick’s going up downtown at Columbus Drive, Illinois Street and St. Clair Street will be “something Chicago has not seen,” Mallon added. With roof-top parking for 150 cars, a cart escalator, and valet and dropoff, it “will be the flagship store for Dominick’s,” he said.

The immediate area’s average household income exceeds $150,000.

New job

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I started a new job two weeks ago, so apologies for not posting in a more timely manner. It might be imprudent to disclose for whom, but suffice to say that I’ll have even more time to think about urban affairs even if I have less time to write about it here.

Also, in case it wasn’t clear before: opining solely for myself (at the bottom of the left nav bar) means that all opinions expressed here are solely mine and do not represent the opinions of any organizations I may be affiliated with. If a particular article republished here was written by me for an organization, I’ll note that.

Cook’s demographic shifts

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A short explanation of demographic change in Cook County:

Cook County is still growing in population; it added 271,674 residents in the 1990s, more people than any other Midwestern county. As goes Chicago, so goes Cook — white population declining (Cook: 57% in 1990, 48% in 2000), black population steady but slowly trickling outwards, Latino and Asian populations growing and more than making up for the white decline. The region’s population is still growing, but out-migration and aging are slowly reducing the number of whites.

It’s the same white flight as before, although it’s happening nowhere near as quickly as in the ’70s or ’80s — and now the flight is more to the nation’s suburbs, the South and West, than to the region’s suburbs. Strong NIMBY sentiment to the north, northwest, and west has actually had an effect on growth at the fringe; the only sector in which sprawl is welcomed is in the southwest.

Pretty dramatic racial succession continues at the city’s northwest and southwest edges, in the south suburbs, and in the near west suburbs all the way into DuPage. Belmont-Cragin, Cicero, Berwyn, Little Village, Back of the Yards, Ashburn, and Harvey, among many other areas, are experiencing fast-paced succession right now. Oak Park, Skokie, and the near north suburbs are undergoing slow-motion white flight, but the trendline is still clear: whites are leaving, replaced by Latinos (mostly), Blacks (sometimes), and Asians (rarely). White population growth is in the city’s Yuppie Belt and in the far suburbs.

The other side of the story is immigration: a surge of mostly Latino immigrants is filling the northwest and southwest sides, but also spilling into many Cook County suburbs. Asian immigration is fairly well dispersed, but explains some of the declining white population in the near north and northwest suburbs.

The change in Cook’s demographics are a large factor in why Illinois has tilted Democratic. City Democrats and far-suburban Republicans balance one another out, Downstate is divided, and the near suburbs hold the balance. As the Cook suburbs have gone Democratic, they’ve taken the entire state with them. As recently as summer of 2000, Illinois was still considered a swing state.

(A rather depressing side note: see the clot of new African American residents in Little Village, by the south branch of the river? that’s the census tract housing the Cook County Jail.)

Starbucks

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This past Sunday, I was amused to see that Starbucks had wrapped every Tribune with a wrapper with a “how to order coffee” booklet. The thing is a parody of itself, complete with detachable reference card for the paint-by-numbers (or is it Mad Libs?) set:
I’d like to have a…
[cup-leave blank if you’re getting it to go]
[decaf, number of shots and size]
[syrup, if any]
[milk and other modifiers-don’t specify a milk if you want whole milk]
[the drink itself]

Trader Joe’s marches on

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Trader Joe’s has hired Mid-America brokers to find five new store locations in and around Chicago — including two downtown (near north and near south) and Evanston and Oak Park.

Meanwhile, their expansion into the city has changed the market for specialty foods in north side neighborhoods. It’s true: I’ve probably cut back purchases at Dubby’s and Taste in the past few months; the lower prices at TJ’s are unmistakably appealing. The quality is acceptable, as well; I’m willing to buy $5 bottles of wine since most bottles I buy go right to parties (where no one cares) or into sauces. Not that I don’t feel bad about it, though:

‘”What is amazing to me is that people are not more dedicated to small businesses,” [Valerie] Grimbau [of Dubby’s] said. “The public doesn’t get that by supporting small businesses, they’re helping themselves.”‘

[FCG has a great list of specialty food shops.]

Main street tips & tricks

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The market is rarely capable of serving the best interests of a great Main Street. The recent explosion of branch banks nationwide, but particularly in New York City (and to a lesser extent here in Chicago) illustrates this: banks all like high foot traffic — more so for the advertising value, since the best billboard is one you can walk into (and extract $1.50 ATM fees from). Problem is, banks generate little foot traffic on their own.

So, one property owner maximizes his own value by kicking out the current tenant and leasing to a bank. He wins, since banks pay lots of rent.

Then, every other property owner at the corner does the same. They lose! Overall foot traffic declines, and the banks might eventually leave. (If the neighborhood doesn’t really decline, then the banks will remain a deadening influence there for decades — Lincoln/Belmont/Ashland is one good example.) In any case, the neighborhood is worse off.

One advantage malls have is that their centralized ownership can exploit synergies; they’re willing to sacrifice a little bit of revenue over here in order to get a lot more revenue over there — an unprofitable lease here (for a department store or movie theatre) can be subsidized by a wildly profitable lease over there (for a fast food joint). Main Streets under multiple ownership can’t do this, unless there’s a really aggressive manager who’s willing to strongarm folks into doing things.

Proactive management of Main Streets is one of the biggest lessons from the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Main Street Center work.

[Originally posted at urbanphoto]

Geography of murder

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[posted at urbanphoto]

The Chicago Tribune is running a series on murder here in “the nation’s murder capital.” (Gary has a murder rate three times as high; Detroit’s is twice as high. Chicago had the largest number of murders, even though it trails NYC and LA in population.)

Police have long recited the mantra that most murders are the result of a deadly trinity that runs rampant in Chicago: street gangs, guns and drugs. Concerned citizens, from parents and priests to social workers and professors, lay heavy blame on a violent culture that has gone unchecked, nurtured by poverty and a collapsed social structure. Reformed gang members say the city’s strong sense of neighborhood identification fuels territorial battles and allegiances to gangs. Others even point to the city’s colorful history of gangsters and rampant corruption.

The accompanying map shows how strikingly localized the crime is here, though. The massive redevelopment of public housing (I added blue notations for points of interest and public housing projects) has dispersed gang activity, and thus murders, from those sites and into adjacent neighborhoods.

Demographic figures seem to back up the police assertion that the murder is highly concentrated sociogeographically. Those killed are demographically almost identical to those suspected of doing the killing. Both are (+/- 3%) 90% male, 75% Black and 20% Hispanic. 72.6% of victims and 86.8% of accused have prior arrest records. 64% of victims were between 17 and 30. 80% of murders were committed with guns.

The parties are different

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A pre-emptive defense of the Democratic party, in light of Ralph Nader’s latest run for president:

If Al Gore were president, the Kyoto Protocol would likely be in force right now. Gore negotiated it on behalf of the US, and Russia was moving towards signing it (and thus activating it and making it legally binding) UNTIL the Bush folks leaned on them to not sign it.

As it stands, though, the world has still not implemented any meaningful action against climate change. Meanwhile, ice shelves are melting, coral reefs are dying, seas are rising, and the hope of stopping massive shift in the earth’s climate within this century is rapidly receding into the distance.

Similarly, many other Clinton-era environmental initiatives that the Bush administration has attacked — protecting roadless areas in national forests, reducing pollution from old coal power plants (I live within five miles of two of ’em), protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling, etc. — would not be under attack if Gore were president.

I used to work in affordable housing finance, another field in which the administration has great discretion in setting targets and priorities. (Also, most affordable housing money in the US comes from the feds, not from state or local government.) The repeated cuts to various crucial programs — HOPE VI public housing redevelopment and Section 8 come to mind immediately — have seriously impacted the ability of cities like mine to help the least fortunate. Indeed, the Bush administration has broken twenty years of bipartisan agreement and slashed funding for Section 8 vouchers, leaving tens or hundreds of thousands of families and seniors without any way to pay the rent.

In all of these instances, the policies I’ve mentioned are led and implemented by the administration with little input from Congress (besides budgetary review), so Republicans controlling Congress would have little impact on how a Democratic president would have done things. Further, Bush has already announced plans for policies that merely await approval from a Republican Congress — e.g., his proposals to block-grant Medicaid and Section 8 and to change TANF, thereby allowing states to cut into already the already weak social safety net, or further tax code tweaking that will *permanently exempt* the hereditary aristocracy (e.g., trust fund babes like Jenna and Babs Jr.) from ANY income tax on their unearned inheritances and investments (thereby shifting the entire tax burden to us working stiffs), or the hundreds of billions of dollars in social spending, from LIHEAP to food stamps to public housing to veterans’ benefits, that are right now being axed out of the budget to pay for rescinding taxes on millionaires:


Courtesy Center on Budget & Policy Priorities

There ARE major differences between the two parties. ALL of these measures have been actively opposed and voted against by the Democratic minority (most of it, at least). These differences may not be as immediately obvious as many would like, but they are there, and they DO affect the world we live in. That’s why it’s so important to elect Anyone But Bush in 2004, and to not get distracted by sideshows like Ralph Nader. The notion that “the left could use a cold shower” is ridiculously self-absorbed in light of the very real pain that Bush and his cronies have already inflicted on America.

The Greens sometimes find ways to work within the political system for genuine change, often at the local level. Most of the Greens’ political work in the US, though, has been useless grandstanding, and it seems that every day the Greens find ways to become ever more useless through infighting. In order to gain political traction, the Greens must find ways to energize, not antagonize, their allies, with thoughtful, idealistic candidates and positions.

Bush trailing badly in Illinois

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A new poll from the Tribune indicates that Bush’s mediocre approval rating among Illinoisans has sunk with remarkable speed. Hopefully, this will dissuade the GOP from investing resources into a state that, thanks to Democratic consolidation in multiethnic Cook County, is rapidly trending Democratic.

For the first time in his presidency, there are more Illinois voters of all political stripes who disapprove than approve of the job Bush is doing, and more than half don’t want to see him elected to a second term, according to the poll.

The survey not only found widespread voter dissatisfaction with the president over the economy and jobs, but more than four in 10 Illinois voters said they believed the Bush administration purposely misled the public about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as he led the nation to war.

If the election were held today, Kerry would be backed by 52 percent of the state’s voters while Bush would get 38 percent, the poll showed. Another 10 percent were undecided and 1 percent opted for another candidate.

That 14 percentage-point advantage for Kerry compares to the 2000 election result in Illinois in which then-Vice President Al Gore received 55 percent of the vote, compared with 43 percent for Bush.

The survey results among general-election voters show them to be polarized heavily along partisan lines.

With 92 percent of voters who called themselves Democrats backing Kerry and 86 percent of those who identified themselves as Republicans supporting Bush, there appears little opportunity for either side to pick off crossover votes.

In addition, independents are almost evenly split between the two men.

The survey found Bush trailing heavily in the Democratic enclaves of Chicago and suburban Cook County and leading only slightly in the traditionally Republican-leaning collar counties.

Downstate voters were almost equally divided.

The poll also showed signs of a gender-gap problem for Bush. Male voters were divided between Kerry and Bush, but Kerry held a 24-percentage-point advantage among women. White suburban women, the so-called “soccer mom” demographic, favor Kerry over Bush only slightly, 44 percent to 40 percent.

Four new stripmalls!

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The highlight of today’s Plan Commission meeting: four new strip shopping centers, all with a moat of parking in front, many with “green roofs.” (Agenda item 12, which was left off due to a typo, was a Target.)

Why does black parking lot + green roof = green? Wouldn’t there be a much greater environmental impact, at much lower cost, if the parking lot were green (pervious surface, at least, or maybe no parking at all!) and the roof were black, or white, or silver?

Urban renewal exhibit coming to town

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The Center for Urban Pedagogy is apparently bringing its fantastic “Urban Renewal: The City Without a Ghetto” exhibit to Chicago in late March. Mess Hall, a space under the Morse L, will host it. I spent a few hours at the tiny Storefront for Art & Architecture a few months ago, engrossed in the exhibit; it strikes a great balance with excellent exhibit design and content that is aimed at the right level, using the right words. Although there’s certainly a leftist bent, the peculiar political situation that drove urban renewal is explained.