Coming Soon: HPP Reviews Janowitz, "Culture of Opportunity"

posted by chicago pop

Read it. And in the meantime, go meet the author:

Hyde Park's Impending Health Care Desert

posted by chicago pop

University of Chicago Getting Out of Neighborhood Primary Care

The University of Chicago, according to this blogger's source, has recently sold it's primary care practice at 47th Street to Access Community Health Network. Access is designated as a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC), which allows it to receive Federal funding (Medicare/Medicaid) at higher rates than non-designated clinics, for the care of low-income and uninsured patients.

What does this mean? It means that within a few years, while the University completes its $700,000,000, interdisciplinary New Hospital Pavilion, most of the University's faculty and staff -- and a lot of the neighborhood's middle class residents -- stand a good chance of switching to Northwestern Memorial for their primary care.

If you're a nice middle class resident of Hyde Park, and accustomed to having a nice, extremely competent family doctor at the University of Chicago's 47th Street clinic, the kind who can take care of your daughter's strep throat, and refer you to the U of C Medical Center if you need specialized treatment, here's some news:

It's over.

The University of Chicago Medical Center is getting out of primary care. For rich and poor alike. So you might want to schedule your doctor's appointment on the North Side to fit with your next shopping trip, because unless you need a multiple organ transplant, or can get used to the high-volume, subsidized care at a community clinic, there will soon be no other options for Hyde Park residents.

In fact, your doctor may already be planning to leave. Which means more work for whoever is left to cover -- and who knows how long that will be. Michelle Obama, in her capacity as Vice President for Community and External Affairs at the Hospital, has been praised for working to steer large numbers of potentially expensive, low-income ER visits away from the Hospitals to South Side FQHC's, but it's not quite clear who will take care of the University's own faculty, or anyone else who happens to live in Hyde Park and can pay their medical bills.

As with so many other things, Hyde Park is outsourcing its own health care, possibly to the benefit of its own local competitor.

The reasons why this makes sense have all been laid out in a compelling essay by the current CEO of Chicago's Medical Center, James L. Madara, in which he argues that providing ER access and primary care to the primarily low-income neighborhoods surrounding urban Universities is bad for both research hospitals and the network of community-based clinics around it. It's inefficient and horribly expensive, Madara writes, for research universities to handle routine primary care for low-income people, and especially to run an ER in a poor neighborhood in which many patients will be uninsured. It also, he argues, cannibalizes the market of FQHC's, which are geared to preventive medicine and routine care at low cost.

The solution? Get out of primary care, and focus on being the best in "the complex specialized care academic medical centers provide." (*) Further, "This argument does not depend on defining groups by ability to pay or type of insurance; rather, it defines groups by the complexity of disease and the corresponding requirement for a facility dedicated to, and capable of treating patients with such illnesses."

That's not quite how it comes across in the local papers, however. Just in the last month, we've learned that the Medical Center is leasing space on E. Huron, in Streeterville, just steps from Northwestern's gargantuan concentration of 1,500 affiliated physicians. Just a few days ago, we learned that Chicago is also talking to Evanston Northwestern about an academic affiliation in the heart of the well-insured North Shore.

"Such a relationship could allow University of Chicago to tap into the wealthy base of patients the north suburban hospital operator is known to treat. University of Chicago has been reaching into areas for more affluent patients, recently confirming a lease of office space for U. of C. doctors in Chicago's Streeterville neighborhood near Michigan Avenue," writes the Tribune's Bruce Japsen ("Northwestern Ending its Academic Affiliation with ENH," June 16, 2008).

There are other signs of shifting priorities. The Hospital recently closed its ophthalmology and psychiatry units, and obstetrics is shifting away from low-risk, normal pregnancies to prenatal, fetal medicine (ask some local moms about the now-defunct hospital midwifes group).

Exiting primary care is part of the restructuring that underlies these changes. Where the Medical Center can't be world class, or where its services become a cost center, it is pulling out, the better to compete with Mayo or the Cleveland Clinic at the very top. The economics of the situation make perfect sense.

In the meantime, the Hospital is setting up shop to take care of insured men with high blood pressure on East Huron, and a lot of Hyde Parkers will soon have to leave the neighborhood to see a doctor.


*Laurence D. Hill and James L. Madara, "Role of the Urban Academic Medical Center in US Health Care," Journal of American Medical Association, November 2, 2005 -- Vol. 294, No. 17: 2219-2220.

Universities as Urban Redevelopers

posted by chicago pop

University of Pennsylvania's 2.8 million square foot, $800 million Cira Center redevelopment project broke ground in late 2007

An article in last week's Wall Street Journal (EEEEK!!! CAPITALISM!!! SOMEBODY KILL IT!) raised an issue that might seem like old news to residents of neighborhoods surrounding the University of Chicago: Universities have an enormous stake in the economic and social vitality of their environs (WSJ, Nick Timiraos, February 27, 2008).

Universities, increasingly, are extending their reach to off-campus development in an effort to give their surrounding areas and town centers a vibrant and modern feel. In the process, they are becoming major drivers of economic development after concluding that their fortunes are directly tied to those of their cities.

That's been known for decades around here, and not always in a positive way. But what is striking about the new wave of university-driven urban redevelopment is the scale of the efforts on the part of such institutions as Case Western Reserve, Columbia, University of Maryland at College Park, and, most spectacularly, Penn. Also notable is the more recent ability of these institutions to partner with private sector actors to finance their projects.

UM College Park is plunking down $700 million to build an entertainment center (including a hotel!) Case Western Reserve is "developing an arts and retail district in a neighborhood on its campus border", while Penn, which for decades has struggled to hold fast against the forces of urban decline, is orchestrating a $2 billion partnership for "office towers, apartments, a hotel and restaurants" on a 42-acre site adjoining its patch of West Philadelphia already more vibrant than it was a mere 10 years ago.

Penn, together with its development partner Brandywine, "hopes to put a 40- to 50-story office tower and a 25- to 30-story residential tower on the site to complement its Cira Centre development, attached to 30th Street Station."

Safety in depressed urban areas is cited as one reason for many of these initiatives, but the prime mover is the close interrelationship between a flowering University culture and a vibrant city environment. And the impact of this relationship on faculty and staff retention.

[I]nstitutions are recognizing that, along with lucrative financial packages and strong academic reputations, they need to have attractive and exciting college towns to lure top faculty and students.

Although the recent credit crunch will most likely slow down all of these plans, at least in the near term, the era of Universities financing redevelopment out of their own pockets seems to have passed -- at least in the cases cited.

Developers are eager to join ventures with colleges, which they see as providing a steady stream of business. "Universities are fairly reliable partners," says Sal D. Rinella, president-elect of the Society for College and University Planning, who argues that universities are recession-resistant: "As the overall economy gets worse, higher education enrollments tend to go up."

Anything on a similar scale around here would most certainly spark cries of an "urban renewal redux". But would this reaction be justified? Urban Renewal was a federally-funded program; most of these ventures set up some kind of partnership with the private sector, assisted by local municipalities with tax abatements and other incentives, with the overall aim of attracting jobs rather than blocking decay, and of boosting density rather than reducing it.

Projects such as Penn's seem to be geared to bringing in a more diverse job-base, which is something that requires more than building new dormitories. If there's one thing that would help the near south side of Chicago, it would be the addition of several major employers. But more students can't hurt either.

We'll see how the University of Chicago's own South Campus Plan shapes up in comparison to the cases mentioned above. Could Chicago pull off a Cira Center project? Would anyone let it? Does Penn have anything like the "61st Street Pact" made ages ago with Woodlawn neighborhood organizations, by which it penned itself in? And does Chicago have the experience operating as a partner in such large scale projects?

The experience of Drs Hospital -- ill-conceived, ill-received, and ill-pitched -- does not bode well in that regard. But it may be a sign of the future nonetheless.

Time will tell. There is so much university-driven city development going on in America's older cities now that, at the very least, some know-how from these projects may eventually cycle back to the Midway.

Word on 53rd: Put a Mid-Rise at McMobil

posted by chicago pop

In the aftermath of what, by all accounts, including my own, was a smashingly successful community meeting on the future of the 53rd Street TIF District, it seems like a good time to revisit our favorite little stretch of 53rd.

Side Face of a 6-Story Building Behind McMobil Lot
(5220 S. Kenwood)

If you've been reading this blog for awhile, it will come as no surprise to you what we think should happen at the McMobil site on 53rd and Kenwood. We want to see a mixed-use, mid-rise building put right there. Like the buildings of similar height just yards away. Not surprisingly, a group of folks want a building here which allows for more cars, fewer and therefore more expensive units, with none of these preferences based on substantiated arguments as to why a bigger building would be worse.

Mid-Rise, 8-Story Versailles a Block Away from McMobil Site
(5254 S. Dorchester)

In previous posts, we've gone over the reasons why we think a mixed-use mid-rise is a good idea, and in fact fits with the character of the neighborhood. The alpha and omega of this issue -- something which goes against the very core of the NIMBY soul -- is that Hyde Park needs more people. We've gone over the demographics here, and made it clear that the decline in neighborhood retail is linked to the decline in neighborhood population, and not just here but throughout the South Side.

We've also pointed out the research demonstrating that, as household density goes up, auto ownership goes down. That means fewer people actually chose to own cars. That's good for congestion. And the environment. And when retailers decide to locate nearby concentrations of shoppers, that means fewer trips by car are necessary. If NIMBYs don't want a building here, congestion is not going to be a convincing bogeyman.

Hyde Park is in fact full of such buildings, sprinkled liberally among low-rise structures. This is the case on 53rd as well, and a building here would in no way depart from the historic texture or precedent of the street or the neighborhood.

Here are a few examples of other mid-rise buildings amid low-rise housing. Does anyone have any complaints about these towers near the intersection of 56th and Kenwood? Can anyone argue that they contribute to congestion on 56th Street?

Residential Mid- and High-Rise Buildings at Intersection of 56th & Kenwood

After the 53rd Street community visioning meeting this past Saturday, I sense that people are starting to realize this, that the Old-Timer resistance to change may be ebbing. Hyde Park needs more people. It needs new people. And it needs new, modern housing to hold them in sufficient numbers to make streets busier and safer.

When you get a chance to build new housing on a major artery of the neighborhood, if you don't try to match what the neighborhood historically supported, you're perpetuating the suburbanization of the inner city that was the vision of Urban Renewal. It's something a lot of NIMBYs still cling to.

A lot of holes have been ripped into the neighborhood in the last 50 years, and the NIMBY crowd has grown accustomed to them. They like their vacant lots, dead space in public parks, empty streets with anemic urban densities, and marginal retail amenities. And they especially like their free street parking.

But none of those things are fundamentally good for the neighborhood. And there is as yet no good reason that has been offered as to why an 8-10 story building shouldn't go on this spot.

When we get a chance to fill one of those holes, and turn some of these things around, we should make the most of it, and in a big way.

Crossing 61st Street

posted by chicago pop

Keeping Vacant Lots Vacant in Woodlawn?

The University of Chicago has a longstanding promise, made to representatives of the Woodlawn neighborhood to its south, not to expand south of 61st Street. This agreement was made in 1964, 43 years ago.

At that time, there were two Germanies. China was closed to the outside world. Personal computers did not exist.

Is this pledge, and the anxieties to which it responds, out of date?

I have a feeling it might be. But there's no question that the issue is complicated.

After all, there is expansion through the urban renewal methods of razing and displacing, which did happen in Hyde Park, and didn't happen in Woodlawn; and there are other methods of expansion, through erecting buildings on vacant lots that would otherwise remain magnets for crime, and bringing jobs to a community that will help pay for rents and mortgages.

The University can without a doubt play a role in the latter strategy. It certainly requires sensitivity and open communication with neighbors on the part of the University, but it also requires and openness to change south of 61st Street, with change understood to mean that not all of the people in Woodlawn will always be poor, and that the neighborhood might one day approach the balance of household incomes it has known historically.

Take another look at the above picture of a longtime Woodlawn resident taken near her home. The University, in the end, never did expand south of 61st Street. In fact, it didn't do a thing in Woodlawn during the heyday of urban renewal, when it kept itself busy instead bulldozing solid chunks of Hyde Park.

Hyde Park, comparatively speaking, is now flourishing. Woodlawn has vacant lots the size of city blocks like the one above, not far from where Amadou Cisse was murdered.

The picture is taken from Monday's column by Chicago Tribune writer Dawn Turner Trice, who did the service of pointing out that Amadou Cisse was not the only one murdered recently nearby the University; in fact, two women have been found strangled and burned beyond recognition in garbage cans in or near Washington Park.

Trice spoke with two longtime Woodlawn natives who think the Washington Park homicides would have gotten a lot more media time if they had involved University students. They are probably right. The fact that the Cisse murder got such immediate and sustained attention from the media and from police, Trice argues, is part of why there are powerful racial and class tensions between the University and neighboring Woodlawn to the south.

That's certainly true. But things get a little less clear when the column takes a further turn, and as with so many issues in this part of town, brings it back to real estate. In particular, to the Big Bang of urban renewal, to which so many things around here can be traced back.

Like the idea that, instead of helping to get rid of those vacant lots, provide jobs, and partner with local organizations and developers to build market-rate and affordable housing, the University should be kept out. It all sounds very familiar to anyone who pays attention to Hyde Park politics, because in so many ways the terms of the debate were cast at this historical moment for both neighborhoods.

Trice quotes longtime resident Helen Latimore:

"People still see the University as harboring dreams of taking over our property." Latimore said. "Of waiting until Woodlawn is in such disrepair that all they have to do is swoop down and take it over."

It didn't help that a few years ago, the University hired a planning consultant that recommended the University expand south of 61st Street, which it has long said it wouldn't do. University officials quickly nixed the idea. But not before it reignited the suspicions and the mistrust among some Woodlawn residents.

Woodlawn residents, organized into the vibrant community and civil rights activist organization TWO, helped block University-led urban renewal plans in Woodlawn, and eventually elicited a sort of "61st Street Pledge" from the University in 1964.

But then, in the 1970s, long after most whites had left, most of the black middle class left, too. A neighborhood numbering 81,279 people in 1960, Woodlawn declined to 27,086 in 2000, a loss of 54,193. That kind of loss is not unlike that resulting from the incendiary carpet bombing of a large urban area. It constitutes the death of a neighborhood, if not a large part of a city. The number of vacant lots in Woodlawn and other similar neighborhoods attests to this massive depletion of human capital out of the neighborhood.

But without bringing human capital back in, and allowing investment from outside, things are never going to change.

So does this ban on University development south of 61st Street make any sense today, in the 21st century? Woodlawn may be able to fend for itself, with some of the indirect kind of help and support from the U of C described in a 2006 Chicago Magazine article. And, over the last decade or so, the market has finally started to notice Woodlawn; as the Chicago Reporter notes, "Between 2000 and 2004, the number of single- family attached units sold in Woodlawn tripled."

But this movement represents only a slow nudge towards what Woodlawn used to be. It's been hearly 50 years since things began to slide downhill for Woodlawn, and it may be another 50 before it returns to anything like what it was before it became pocked with vacant lots.

Considering that the University never did tear anything down south of 61st Street, maybe it's time to revisit this old treaty that keeps it behind an asphalt curtain.

Word on 53rd: Don't be Jack

posted by chicago pop

You may remember this ill-fated and short-lived ad campaign run by the CTA a few years ago to discourage vandalism. We don't know if they want it anymore, but we think it might be usefully recycled here in Hyde Park, where "being Jack" is starting to get a bit wearisome, among other places on troubled 53rd St.

You may also remember the late-summer outbreak of classic NIMBY-ism that centered on what to do with the vacant lot at 53rd and Kenwood, the McMobil site. As we detailed in a post of September 19, a group of neighbors petitioned Alderman Preckwinkle with a list of restrictions they felt should be applied to any future development. This included building at variance with Chicago City Code by raising the number of off-street residential parking spaces per unit to 1.5 from 1.1.

The petition also called for a restriction on the height of the building to 4 stories, so as to not breach an unspecified level of "population density," although the site sits immediately to the south of a 6-story building at 5220 S. Kenwood, and is down the street from an 8 story building at 5254 S. Dorchester. This would mean fewer units in the development, which would make each individual unit more expensive.

The petitioners supported these demands with assertions that a larger building with less parking for fewer cars, as originally proposed, would increase congestion, threaten children, block light, and impose other ills for which they could provide no empirical evidence based on concrete site studies or comparable examples.

It turns out that Alderman Preckwinkle agrees with us. It's not hard to see why. The South Side is not the North Side. Given the geography of her ward, she recognizes that the problems north of 47th are not that different from the problems south of 47th: lack of critical mass, too small of a market area to attract retail, support small business, and provide the larger population of solid homes that underlie high-achieving schools. In this context, blocking much-needed development in neighborhoods that have been stagnant for decades seems like the height of lunacy.

But that's just what Jack Spicer is doing with this project.

Jack Spicer obviously doesn't like being told what to do. That comes across pretty clearly in his letter to the Herald (October 31, 2007) in reference to a closed-door meeting between Preckwinkle and the signees of the above-mentioned petition.

At the meeting, the Alderman told us her zoning change would benefit the whole neighborhood, not just a few isolated neighbors. She instructed us to learn to accept change.

That last part was the part Jack didn't like. Here's why.

Whereas Jack has no problem changing the zoning to allow for more parking, he seems offended that a building taller than 4 stories could be allowed there, even though several similar buildings exist within blocks and it would allow for the sale of more affordable units. But, rather than addressing the issues of parking or affordable housing, he makes a different case, that "This "planned development" zoning change would be unilateral and outside of our community's planning history."

How would allowing a building taller than 4 stories, behind one that is 6, and steps away from one that is 8, be "outside of our community's planning history?"

...there are only two buildings on the street taller than four stories is the Versailles at Dorchester Avenue and the Hyde Park Bank building ... They are both more than seventy five years old and zoning law, for good reason, has not allowed tall buildings on 53rd Street since 1957.

What that "good reason" is, is not specified, and there are plenty of things in the '57 code that would freak Jack out if he were held to them -- like its projection of a population of 5 million people living within City limits.

But most interesting given Jack's historical bent is the argument that nearby tall buildings are no precedent because they are so old. We wish he were so easily relieved of attachment to the past in the case of Doctors Hospital; we may remind him of that when it comes in handy.

But what gets to the heart of the matter is the attitude towards development, which speaks for itself. An "outsized" building (no definition of "outsized" being given) "benefits only two individuals [the property owner and the developer]" and "takes public value and transfers it to a private property owner without compensation to the public."

With an attitude like this towards developers, it's no wonder we all have to do our shopping half-an-hour away. What is the public value that is being transferred, and how is a private property owner who provides homes for people to live in, new residents to walk, shop, eat, fill the street and pay taxes in the neighborhood, equate to a lack of compensation to the public?

Jack makes a lot of hay about the sanctity of zoning, but ignores it when it comes to parking; he pays a lot of attention to the history of Doctors Hospital, but ignores historical precedent when it applies to 53rd Street. Distracted by a contempt for developers, he ignores the multiple benefits of greater density and having more households living in the neighborhood.

If you're tired of driving everywhere to do your shopping, you'll agree that it's time to Stop Being Jack.

Development Beat: Prospects for Retail on Cottage Grove and in Hyde Park

posted by chicago pop

That's just a tease, of course; no one expects Target on Cottage Grove within the next 6 months, 6 years, and some may say we need to wait 6 decades. After all, it took 30 years for Grand Boulevard to lose 52,000 people, about as much time as it took Hyde Park to lose a comparable number.

But there are signs of positive change. As we highlighted back in August, Alderman Preckwinkle is helping to bring an exciting mixed-use development to the corner of Cottage Grove and 47th. And an estimated 10,000 folks are expected to move into the area as it continues to attract middle-class home buyers, and as 3,600 new mixed-income units come on line by 2010 as part of the Chicago Housing Authority's "great transformation."

Some changes, in the right circumstances, can be bracing. Look at Evanston, which only a few years ago had a rather torpid downtown area with little-to-no advantage taken of its excellent and centralized transit infrastructure. It now has a booming downtown commercial district, high-rise residential clustered around METRA and "L" stations, and a combination of local and national, large and small-scale retail. All while preserving its historic, single-family neighborhoods. This took forethought, planning, and a commitment to change.

Similar transformations, though more limited, have occurred around rail hubs in Arlington Heights, and Palatine, both on METRA lines.

Hyde Park is indeed a different species, not being a distinct municipality, cut up into several different political jurisdictions, and like everyone else subject to byzantine City bureaucracy. But it does have a METRA line with multiple stations, and good bus service, and, as many readers of this blog have commented, a fair amount of pent-up demand.

So what's the deal?

A few factors are mentioned in a 2005 interview with Hank Webber, VP of Community Affairs at the U of C: prevalence of relatively small spaces discourages larger retailers, as does the suspicion that a local store would lose out to competition from the Loop, or the growing commercial strip along Roosevelt Road. From a demographic perspective, Hyde Park's high student population is viewed as more or less equivalent to an impoverished community like Grand Boulevard, with 25,000 people living below poverty. Though aggregate buying power is there, both neighborhoods have to work hard to convince retailers that they are viable markets.

A 2005 Urban Lands workshop on redevelopment in Grand Boulevard highlighted Cottage Grove as a key element in any revitalization. One crucial factor: there is land available. Public transportation, as well as under-utilized road capacity, make the area ripe for future commercial development as the local population grows and average household incomes rise. Hyde Park doesn't have this kind of real estate to offer, but it would only benefit from the development of a neighboring community that did.

While Hyde Park will most likely have to piggy-back off of neighboring communities for large scale retail, it's not too soon to think about how to improve the climate for smaller businesses. The participants at the above-mentioned workshop agree that, in any of the lakefront, South Side neighborhoods, there is a shortage of small retail space, but building it out is an expensive proposition that will require subsidy (from TIF funds, for example), and a commitment to providing top grade retail space in a mixed-use project.

We all know that a few of those are set to come on line, or are in the planning stages, and how important they therefore are to advancing Hyde Park to its small retail "tipping point."

"The most important thing a community can do is to set the table," remarked a local developer at the 2005 workshop. The deck is stacked against a lot of South Side neighborhoods, for historical, racial, and other reasons. But this is all the more reason to make it attractive for the small retailer to locate here by building the best quality and most plentiful new space that can be provided, whether in the ground level of a new hotel, the street level of a new residential tower, or by upgrading and expanding existing properties.

The Transit Crisis and Hyde Park

Damen Blue Line platform*

Next Sunday Chicago residents will experience a significant curtailment of one of the City's most fundamental services: transit. Six hundred CTA employees will be let go, 39 bus routes will be eliminated, with a loss of an anticipated 100,000 riders daily. Fares will increase from $0.50 to $1.00 depending on the service.

Hyde Park, for the most part, will be spared the direct impact of cuts in bus service routes. In contrast, several adjacent north-south express lines that had experienced very impressive growth between 2006 and 2007 will be cut:

X3 King Drive Express (growth of 1303.7% from 2006-2007)
X4 Cottage Grove Express (627.7%)
X55 Garfield Express (141.2%)
X28 Stony Island Express (104.3%)

Hyde Park's major bus connector to the Loop, the North Side, and Chicago in general, the X6 Jackson Park Express, will remain. Its ridership increased 7.2% between 06 and 07, the lowest increase of the lot. The key difference, and probably what saved it, is the fact that it has higher annual ridership than any of the others.

What's the upshot of all this for neighborhood politics?

The upshot is that it's all about transit, not parking. If Hyde PARKERS lose what transit service they have, they'll rue the day they worried about insufficient street parking. Congestion and tight parking are classic NIMBY issues because they focus on individual inconveniences, while sidestepping the broader social problem.

Parking is not the primary congestion issue in dense urban environments. Public transportation is the primary congestion issue in dense urban environments. If public transportation is removed from a major city, congestion will become infinitely worse. If public transportation is improved, congestion will be mitigated.

The reason Hyde Park will retain the X6 Jackson Park line probably has to do with its stable ridership, which in turn is guaranteed by the corridor of density along Hyde Park Boulevard between Lake Park and Lake Shore Drive. According to the classic study of ridership and density (Pushkarev and Zupan 1977 -- see Table 1), express bus routes typically require 15 households per acre.

Example of Transit Supportive Density

Think about how to fit at least that many households on one acre and you have an idea of the minimum build-out that Hyde Park and neighboring communities will require to keep this kind of bus service in an age of funding cutbacks. Some corridors -- like Hyde Park Boulevard and stretches of Lake Park -- already have this. But there's no way around this fact: if we want public transportation we have to accept high urban densities. The alternative to this publicly shared good is privately experienced inconvenience.

NIMBYs who block higher density developments -- well represented in Hyde Park by the Council of Neighborhood Pomposities familiar to readers of this blog -- are therefore directly undermining one of Chicago's greatest public assets, its public transportation system. Acting on the basis of claimed entitlements to private space and free parking, NIMBY obstruction makes it more expensive, more time consuming, and just more difficult for everyone else to get around the City of Chicago.

Be sure to think about that this winter when you're waiting -- and still waiting -- for the next bus.

*Photo from the amazing pool at CTA Tattler

Leakage

It seems like a good time to post the map below, together with a link to an interesting piece from The Chicago Reporter on the city's "Commercial Chasm." It gives cartographic expression to what we all already know, but also attaches a few useful numerical values to familiar commercial trends.

This map represents "leakage," or "the amount of consumer spending that exceeds retail sales for a given market."


The general drift of the Reporter piece is that the dearth of retail on the South Side -- made graphically clear in several other illustrations not reproduced here -- is due in large part to racism. The most evident correlation, after all, is that money flows from black areas on the South Side to white/mixed areas on the North Side. I suspect that racism on some level certainly plays a part, though straight-up demographic factors related to economic class and urban geography, I believe, are more likely to be the root cause nowadays.

Chicago is a centralized city, and always has been. For most of the 20th century, neighborhoods that aspired to host anything more than a local retail district had to face competition with downtown. Then came the suburban malls, adding to the outflow of spending dollars from local neighborhoods.

Even so, proportion of spending over sales in South Side neighborhoods is striking. Between 25 to 50% of all dollars spent by Hyde Parkers go outside the neighborhood. And they're not going to Woodlawn or Oakland. In the ring of community areas around Hyde Park, the proportion of spending to sales is even higher -- 75% or more of local dollars go outside the community. And these shoppers aren't spending their dollars in Hyde Park, either. There are a handful of neighborhoods that appear to be in equilibrium, but almost none of them are on the South Side.

Hyde Park is not economically self-sufficient. While it would be interesting to know how leakage breaks down by all sorts of demographic categories, the fact is that in aggregate, there is not enough gravity in local commerce to capture all local spending. There is not even enough gravity to capture the spending of folks in neighboring community areas.

While racism should not be dismissed, it seems clear that the absence of supermarkets, discount retailers, restaurants, and apparel stores has a lot to do with relatively diffuse purchasing power across the South Side, a much larger area geographically than the North Side. Until purchasing power begins to concentrate more heavily -- through higher incomes, higher populations, or both, this will be the status quo for some time.

Which is why all those proposed condo towers might not be as evil as Hyde Park NIMBY's think they are.

Can We Green the Food Desert?

Fellow HPP blogger Elizabeth Fama passed along a Tribune article that I missed earlier this spring, detailing the success that Peapod.com is having in inner-city areas known as 'food deserts.'* The dearth of mainline grocery stores otherwise so common elsewhere in the city and suburbs is proving to be a boon for the online delivery service. What the article finds surprising is that Peapod has experienced its biggest growth in pockets of affluence in the South Side, an area usually thought of as mostly poor and therefore not worth servicing.

My guess is that the negative experience of living in a food desert is probably the single biggest shared concern of people living in Hyde Park-Kenwood. What's more, it's probably one of the biggest concerns that Hyde Parkers share with the folks in Woodlawn, Englewood, Bronzeville, and Oakland, and other adjoining South Side neighborhoods. For Hyde Parkers, the lack of accessible and competitive groceries is primarily a hassle. For lower-income folks in Hyde Park and surrounding neighborhoods, the problem can be much more serious. The lack of cheap, fresh food -- especially produce -- has been linked to a host of public health issues that afflict inner-city populations, from skyrocketing rates of obesity, early-onset diabetes, to low birth-weight from inadequate prenatal nutrition.

So the problem of the 'food desert' isn't just a question of middle class inconvenience in Hyde Park and the gentrifying parts of surrounding neighborhoods. It's a public health problem for a big chunk of the City populace, one that will affect us all one way or another, through lost productivity and higher burdens on the health care system as new generations incur all the health problems associated with obesity and poor nutrition.

"Food desertification," as it were, is not a new problem, neither in Hyde Park nor the rest of the City. If you pull out any of the Chicago Community Area Fact Books, starting in the late 40s, you can see that the number of small grocery stores was once far larger than it is now in each of the 77 designated community areas. So was the number of taverns. Both went into precipitous decline after 1960, though the drop was faster and went farther on the South Side. The suburbs were booming, people were leaving the City, and the spatial configuration of commerce was evolving more towards malls, large-format supermarkets, and the "big boxes" of today.

One thing stands out, though: small retail, including groceries, dropped with population. And no parts of Chicago were depopulated in the Post-War era like the South Side. The small retail is notoriously hard to get back -- hence the proliferation of suburban-style big box retail in an urban setting. But even the large-format supermarkets like Dominick's and Jewel will need a certain minimum market area, and in an urban context the only way to get that is to achieve higher residential densities.

So how do we get practical grocery shopping back into the area?

An experiment like the Hyde Park Co-Op only makes sense in the context of urban disinvestment and depopulation, in which an abandoned group seeks to fend for itself. This may have made some sense in the 50s and 60s. But certainly those aren’t the conditions that we’d like to see prevail over the long term. The goal should not be to figure out how to make institutions like the Co-Op work, it should be to establish conditions that make institutions like the Co-Op unnecessary.

In concrete terms, what that means is enlarging the market area by bringing in more people. And only so many of those people are going to fit into new construction in Hyde Park. Ultimately Hyde Park’s market area will have to blend with that of surrounding neighborhoods – as it already does for the restaurants at 53rd and Harper, and for the University's labor pool.

Beyond the economics, however, is the moral issue of fairness: how fair is it that some are able to prepare and eat healthier foods in part because of where they live? The desire to ban grocery chains of any kind from Hyde Park only abets this structural inequality, and is itself a function of social privilege.

*"Delivery is oasis in food 'desert'".
Chicago Tribune - Chicago, Ill.
Author: Johnathon E Briggs
Date: Apr 1, 2007
Start Page: 1
Section: Metro

Development Beat

Stony Island Tower: Local Establishment types will probably have a tizzy once they get wind of this proposed tower for 64th and Stony Island:

Word-on-the-street has it that a few developers are assessing the viability of high-rise developments on the Lakefront from Bronzeville going south, a market that hasn't been active since before World War II. We're not holding our breath for this one, and recognize that most such deals fail to get farther than a nice computer rendering.

But the fact that such a project has even occurred to someone is a sign of changing times.


Vista Homes, or "The Brick Zebra": This property, of course, is not undergoing any renovation or addition. Seeing as how it is next-door to the proposed Marriott Hotel on the site of the current Doctor's Hospital, and also home to a good number of folks who have strenuously objected to the proposed hotel's utter aesthetic worthlessness, we thought it might be fun to see just how well Vista Homes holds up under aesthetic scrutiny. (Curiously enough, given the insistence of some that the area is not meant for a hotel, it is worth noting that Vista Homes was originally intended to be just that.) Let's look at the Vista Homes in profile:


Like a lot of residential towers built in the 20s and early 30s (Vista Homes was built in 1926), its developers obviously expected it to be sandwiched, Park Avenue style, by neighbors of equal height on both its south and north faces. Developers being a speculative lot and not always the best fortune tellers, this never happened. One result is that Vista Homes presents only one architecturally finished face to the world, that facing east over Jackson Park.

The remaining 3 faces of this building are unfinished and utilitarian, and indeed present the spectacle of something resembling a giant TIC-TAC-TOE board looming above the Midway, akin to the external appearance of the old CHA blocks at Cabrini Green. Several towers of the same vintage in Indian Village were left in a similar, though not quite so comprehensive, state of incompleteness.


How anyone who lives in or near THIS could complain about the proposed Marriott tower next door being architecturally déclasée is beyond me. S/he who lives in a building that looks 3/4 like a housing project should not throw stones at a moderately pleasant proposed commercial building that, at the very least, is finished on all four sides.

Of course, in keeping with the champagne-taste-and-beer-budget of local NIMBYs, neighbors at the 5th Ward community meeting on July 23, 2007 conceded that if the likes of Helmut Jahn, or Rafael Viñoly (of the GSB Building) were doing the proposed Hotel, then it might be OK. Otherwise, they would prefer not to have an off-the-shelf retro-modern building next to their quirky brick zebra. They are ENTITLED to world-class architecture in their back-yard, you see, even though they have had nothing to do with attracting the world-class architecture in the first place.

Cottage Grove Development

I don't know about you, but it's easy for me to get up to 47th Street and every time I do, I wish there was more there. It's certainly got history going for it, as anyone who knows about Chicago's musical heritage can tell you. And "it's got good bones," as a stroll up or down the nearby mansion districts of Drexel Boulevard, Cottage Grove, or King Drives will convince. Broad boulevards that lead directly to the South Loop, solid public transportation infrastructure, and a spectacular architectural heritage are all tremendous assets for this area.

Which is why recipients of Alderman Toni Preckwinkle's 4th Ward newsletter can't help but be ecstatic over the announcement of the big mixed-use project slated for the corner of 47th and Cottage Grove. If the partnership between the Midwestern regional specialist in mixed-use development, Silken, and the South Side Quad Communities Development Corporation holds up, this could be the biggest reinvestment in the South Side in decades and a spectacular feather in Preckwinkle's cap. It would represent exactly the kind of thing that 5th Ward Alderman Leslie Hairston has been unable to pull off just a few miles to the south, along equally promising Stony Island Avenue, which, admittedly, has not experienced a similar rate of residential infill, nor is starting off from as strong a base in housing stock.

Both Cottage Grove and Stony Island, as well as most of the major east-west thoroughfares (47th, 63rd, 79th) were historically major commercial strips and their geography still favors redevelopment along those lines. This can only benefit the lakefront communities adjoining Hyde Park-Kenwood.

No neighborhood is an island, not even the Ivory Tower community of Hyde Park. Commercial development is much needed in surrounding communities, and this is a win-win for everybody. By bringing services to under-served South-Side communities, we also alleviate some of the stresses that intensive development focused within Hyde Park would generate.

Hyde Parkers would do well, instead of stonewalling the prospect of change and reinvestment, to contemplate the urban landscape surrounding them. Our neighbors are embracing positive, progressive mixed-used developments that are viewed with suspicion just a few blocks south, where the focus is less on improvement of the entire community than in guarding one's own little slice of the urban pie.