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Tag Chicago

Planned Manufacturing Districts: Planning the Life Out of Districts

They are called different things in different cities, but they are similar in form and intent among the cities where they are found.  For simplicity’s sake, a Planned Manufacturing District (PMD), as they are called in Chicago, is an area of land, defined by zoning, that prohibits residential development and other specific uses with the intent of fostering manufacturing and blue-collar employment. Proponent of PMDs purport to be champions of the middle-class or blue-collar workers, but fail to consider the unintended consequences of prohibiting alternative uses on that land.  At best, PMDs have little effect on changing land-use patterns where industrial is already the highest-and-best-use.  At worst, they have the long-run potential to distort the land use market, drive up the costs of housing, and prevent vibrant neighborhoods from emerging. A Race to The Bottom Before getting into it further, it is important to examine the economic decisions industrial firms make in comparison to other uses.  Earlier in the industrial revolution, industry was heavily reliant on access to resources.  Manufacturing and related firms were very sensitive to location.  The firms desired locations with easy access to ports, waterways, and later railways to transport raw materials coming in, and products going out. However, the advent of the Interstate Highway System and ubiquitously socialized transportation network have made logistical costs negligible compared to other costs.  Where firms once competed for locations with access to logistical hubs and outbid other uses for land near waterways in cities, they now seek locations with the cheapest land where they can have a large, single-floor facility under one roof.  This means sizable subsidies must be combined with the artificially cheap land to attract and retain industrial employers on constrained urban sites. Additionally, today’s economy has become much more talent-based rather than resource based, and patterns have shifted accordingly.  In contrast to industrial, residential and office uses are […]

In Defense of Chicago

First of all, I should start out by saying that I’ve only ever been to Chicago once, and I really don’t remember anything but the inside of my aunt’s house. I remember asking them if there was good mass transit, and they said Metra is good, but the L, which is near them, is not something they’d ride. My aunt, who led the family, was a financial services executive in Chicago, but they moved to the Research Triangle in North Carolina when she went into tech/healthcare. I imagine just the people Aaron Renn has in mind when he wrote “The Second-Rate City?” for City Journal. That anecdote aside, I think Aaron Renn is being a little too hard on Chicago. I’m sure my view of the city unduly weights its land use and transportation policies, but I do think it’s got more potential than Aaron gives it credit for. A lot of his article is based on this grim demographic observation, which I admit, is hard to stomach: Begin with Chicago’s population decline during the 2000s, an exodus of more than 200,000 people that wiped out the previous decade’s gains. Of the 15 largest cities in the United States in 2010, Chicago was the only one that lost population; indeed, it suffered the second-highest total loss of any city, sandwiched between first-place Detroit and third-place, hurricane-wrecked New Orleans. While New York’s and L.A.’s populations clocked in at record highs in 2010, Chicago’s dropped to a level not seen since 1910. Chicago is also being “Europeanized,” with poorer minorities leaving the center of the city and forced to its inner suburbs: 175,000 of those 200,000 lost people were black. Poor minorities abandoning the center to wealthy whites, while it has a lot of unfortunate aspects, doesn’t seem to me to be an altogether bad […]

Links

1. Maps of sprawl and gentrification in Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago, and Boston. At first the picture looks bleak for cities, but Jesus – even downtown Detroit is growing! (More here.) 2. A real, live Texan (just kidding – he lives in Austin) replies to O’Toole on parking. 3. Why aren’t (more) urbanists cheering on Jerry Brown’s attempt to kill sprawl-inducing California redevelopment agencies? (Streetsblog SF/LA, I’m looking at you!) 4. NY lawsuit alleges that LEED standards are meaningless, and Charlie at Old Urbanist takes the opportunity to review the case against America’s most popular “greenness” metric. 5. This is awesome: The DC Office of Zoning makes the code and all the overlays accessible on Google Maps. Is there any other city with anything like it?

A question and a link list

Hey guys, before I start this link list, I wanted to ask: Has anybody had trouble posting comments here with Disqus lately? Either you can’t post them, or once you do they disappear? I’ve gotten two complaints in the last few days, so if you’ve been experiencing any problems please don’t hesitate to let me know so I can try to get to the bottom of it. If you can’t post a comment, email me at smithsj[at]gmail[dot]com. 1. DC gets upzoned. Why the Washington City Paper chose to bury that behind items about “neighborhood branding” and “supporting the enactment of pending federal legislation to ensure that insurance reserves are held and invested in the U.S.” is beyond me. 2. DC has, unfortunately, also started to cap the number of cabs in the city. American politicians just can’t get enough of screwing over Somalis, I guess. 3. Jamaica, Queens gets downzoned. The Post tells us joyfully that the city is implementing the “innovative and critically important” FRESH initiative to deal with the area’s lack of supermarkets – which will be sorely needed now that the city is guaranteeing that there will be no new demand for food. 4. “Vertical parking lot” in Chicago, circa 1930. 5. Communism in America: Roosevelt Island. 6. Matt Yglesias and Megan McArdle discuss bars and clustering, but Ryan Advent has the best post in my opinion. 7. Chicago’s Metra boosts home values (duh). 8. India fails at urbanism. 9. One Tea Partier thinks that only property owners (read: homeowners) should be allowed to vote. “If you’re not a property owner, you know, I’m sorry but property owners have a little bit more of a vested interest in the community than non-property owners.”

Irrationality Towards Shortages

Brendan Crain at Where tipped me off to a great post by Ryan Avent at The Bellows. Here’s a little snippet of Shortage: For whatever reason, we’re not built to naturally internalize negative externalities. When riding on a crowded highway, no one (no non-economist, at any rate) curses the government for not making the road more expensive; they demand more capacity — fewer traffic lights, higher speed limits, more lanes, more roads. And when free parking results in no available parking, no one demands market pricing for spots; they ask why the lot’s so small and the garages so scarce, and they get angry about those two new developments that just went in, bringing new residents who unsurprisingly use the valuable, yet free, parking spots when they’re open. We see a shortage of a public good, and we think more, not more expensive. And as a result, the failure to price public goods appropriately leads to an inefficient use of existing resources, and an inefficient allocation of new resources. We don’t use existing roads well, and we spend too much valuable capital building new roads. We don’t use existing parking well, and we spend too much valuable capital building new parking OR we allow shortage concerns to undermine good investments. This type of anti-market bias which seems to be the natural default in humans creates unhealthy positive-feedback loops such as the highway -> development -> congestion -> widen/extend highway, etc. loop. But in that light, we should be glad modern society has been able to overcome so many of its anti-market biases such as making profits, charging interest, and trade between strangers. Hopefully, as society adapts to deal with issues of scacity of land, resources, and time, it will overcome the unhealthy biases it needs to shed to sustain growth. […]

Chicago Privatizes Parking Meters

Of course, Chicago is just privatizing the revenue from meters, not the actual parking spaces. Plus, the city will regulate rate increases, but it’s a step in the right direction. (right?) For today’s politicians, this is a great way to get windfalls of money today for revenues of future generations in order to mask their fiscal irresponsibility. I think we’ll see more of this during the current mess as other municipalities catch on. Ideally, cities should auction off the spaces (including the land), with no regulations on rates or use of the land. Let market mechanisms determine the highest-and-best use of the spaces and land. Chicago Tribune: Most city parking meters to cost $1 an hour [Hat Tip: reader, Dan M] City Hall officials said that after the first five years of the 75-year parking meter lease, rate hikes will be subject to approval by alderman and are expected to be at the rate of inflation. The $1.1 billion to city coffers will come from Chicago Parking Meter LLC, which is made up of two Morgan Stanley infrastructure funds. The Daley administration said $400 million will go into a long-term reserve, $325 million will be spent in city budgets through 2012 and $100 million is earmarked for programs helping low-income people. An additional $324 million is headed toward a fund city officials said “may be used to help bridge the period until the nation’s economy begins to grow again.” and a video:

Cook County (Chicago) Sheriff Won’t Evict in Foreclosures

Cook Co. sheriff won’t evict in foreclosures from Associated Press Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart says he’s ordered his deputies to stop taking part in evictions of properties that have been foreclosed upon. Dart says the change goes into effect Thursday. He says the decision comes because many of those being evicted are people who’ve been faithfully paying rent and didn’t even know about the foreclosures. Dart says he thinks he’s the first sheriff in a major metropolitan area to stop such evictions during what’s become a major foreclosure crisis around the nation. Dart says the number of mortgage foreclosures in Cook County has skyrocketed this year and that he expects that number to climb much higher. — It’s really tragic that renters who have otherwise valid lease contracts, lose that right because of their landlords’ failure. But, I don’t have the same sympathy for the defaulters themselves. What do you think will result from this move? Will banks stop foreclosing in Chicago without the rule of law on their side? Will defaulters squat?

Housing + Transportation Affordability Index

affordability in New York City Play with the HUD-Brookings Institution’s new index maps here: The Housing + Transportation Affordability Index, developed by CNT and its collaborative partners, the Center for Transit Oriented Development (CTOD), is an innovative tool that measures the true affordability of housing. Planners, lenders, and most consumers traditionally measure housing affordability as 30 percent or less of income. The Housing + Transportation Affordability Index, in contrast, takes into account not just the cost of housing, but also the intrinsic value of place, as quantified through transportation costs. I enjoyed playing with the maps to see the interplay of accessibility and affordability. In New York, some very accessible places are not-so affordable, such as many areas of Manhattan. Same goes for upscale parts of Chicago. At the same time, very affordable housing locations in exurbs become less affordable when considering transportation costs. I plan to spend more time investigating how they produce the index. [tip of the hat to Peter Gordon]

Glaeser: State of the City

I’m a little slow picking up on this one, but the Wall Street Journal recently interviewed Harvard Urban Economist, Ed Glaeser. Here are some excerpts from State of the City: THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: What effect will higher gasoline prices have on urban planning in the U.S.? MR. GLAESER: I would be very surprised to see a wholesale change in the nature of American urban development. We should certainly see changes in the short run, [such as] a slight decrease in demand for housing that’s particularly far away from city centers and dependent on long drives. That [type of housing] won’t be abandoned entirely, but it will certainly be cheaper. WSJ: What about the idea of having the government purchase foreclosed homes and convert them into affordable housing? Would that be good for the economy? MR. GLAESER: The government’s track record as a property owner is not so great. I am less enthusiastic about the government getting into this business. If we want strong policies towards taking care of the least well-off in our society, we should make sure supply is unfettered and continue working on the Section 8 [low-income housing] voucher program — that’s the right strategy. Glaeser discusses Chicago’s success: MR. GLAESER: I think Chicago has been remarkably successful in lots of ways. The city has managed to stay pretty affordable and Mayor [Richard] Daley has been extremely pro-growth. Chicago, for many years, has had a relatively pro-growth environment, at least relative to California and New York — especially [before current Mayor Michael Bloomberg]. The climate in Chicago is, of course, far less pleasant than San Francisco and wages are lower than New York. Still, it is somewhat remarkable that condo prices in Chicago [a median $232,000 in 2007] are less than those in Trenton, N.J. [$248,000], and […]

Video: Driven to the Brink

I enjoyed this short video that compares Chicago’s Lincoln Square, where I have lived and Buffalo Grove, which is a suburb similar to where I grew up. The video was produced by CEOs for Cities, a Chicago based organization that advocates for cities. Their website gives this description: A new analysis shows that high gas prices are not only implicated in the bursting of the housing bubble, but that the higher cost of commuting has already re-shaped the landscape of real estate value between cities and suburbs. Housing values are falling fastest in distant suburban and exurban neighborhoods where affordability depended directly on cheap gas.

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