Monthly Archives: December 2005

Booming every day

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The Census Bureau has released “PHC-T-40”:http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/daytime/daytimepop.html, an estimate of daytime population by place. [Via “Urban Cartography”:http://www.urbancartography.com/2005/10/biggest_commute.html%5D

Places with daytime population over 500,000:

|Residents|Daytimepopulation ^1^ |%Chg ^2^ |% Localworkers ^3^ |Name|
|8,008,278|8,571,338|7.0|91.5 |New York city, NY|
|3,694,820|3,822,697|3.5|63.1 |Los Angeles city, CA|
|2,896,016|3,038,344|4.9|70.6 |Chicago city, IL|
|1,953,631|2,356,944|20.6|81.0 |Houston city, TX|
|1,517,550|1,607,780|5.9|75.4 |Philadelphia city, PA|
|1,321,045|1,417,165|7.3|69.3 |Phoenix city, AZ|
|1,188,580|1,416,135|19.1|65.3 |Dallas city, TX|
|1,223,400|1,365,327|11.6|77.7 |San Diego city, CA|
|1,144,646|1,212,635|5.9|87.3 |San Antonio city, TX|
|572,059|982,853|71.8|73.0 |Washington city, DC|
|951,270|950,611|-0.1|48.5 |Detroit city, MI|
|776,733|945,480|21.7|76.9 |San Francisco city, CA|
|781,870|903,832|15.6|81.9 |Indianapolis city (balance), IN|
|894,943|844,874|-5.6|49.6 |San Jose city, CA|
|589,141|831,233|41.1|66.4 |Boston city, MA|
|735,617|797,840|8.5|91.2 |Jacksonville city, FL|
|711,470|793,990|11.6|69.2 |Columbus city, OH|
|656,562|783,890|19.4|87.1 |Austin city, TX|
|650,100|752,843|15.8|84.1 |Memphis city, TN|
|651,154|743,779|14.2|61.9 |Baltimore city, MD|
|563,374|723,417|28.4|73.8 |Seattle city, WA|
|554,636|710,122|28.0|63.4 |Denver city, CO|
|416,474|676,431|62.4|59.3 |Atlanta city, GA|
|540,828|655,483|21.2|82.2 |Charlotte city, NC|
|545,524|651,726|19.5|83.8 |Nashville-Davidson (balance), TN|
|529,121|650,864|23.0|73.9 |Portland city, OR|
|596,974|632,838|6.0|60.5 |Milwaukee city, WI|
|534,694|609,520|14.0|61.1 |Fort Worth city, TX|
|506,132|600,777|18.7|80.7 |Oklahoma City city, OK|
|478,403|593,243|24.0|55.9 |Cleveland city, OH|
|563,662|570,680|1.2|87.5 |El Paso city, TX|
|484,674|544,478|12.3|78.2 |New Orleans city, LA|
|441,545|543,511|23.1|63.6 |Kansas City city, MO|
|486,699|530,153|8.9|79.8 |Tucson city, AZ|
|407,018|507,951|24.8|60.1 |Sacramento city, CA|

Few big surprises here, although Detroit is pretty jarring in its loss of residents each morning. As a rule, cities that import workers, and/or have local jobs for most of their residents, are generally better off economically — with the notable exception of Washington, DC, since it gains little tax revenue off the jobs it hosts.

Since that list turned out to be 35 cities, here are the top 35 cities (with daytime population over 30,000, the size of a good-sized Edge City) ranked by the percentage increase in their daytime population:

|Residents|Daytimepopulation ^1^ |%Chg ^2^ |% Localworkers ^3^ |Name (nearby central city)|
|16|30,774|192237.5|40.0 | _Lake Buena Vista city, FL_ (Orlando)|
|91|37,527|41138.5|47.2 |Vernon city, CA (LA)|
|777|52,760|6690.2|31.3 |Industry city, CA (LA)|
|12,568|57,253|355.5|21.1 |Commerce city, CA (LA)|
|8,702|39,212|350.6|14.4 |Oak Brook village, IL (Chicago)|
|11,035|46,392|320.4|27.1 |Greenwood Village city, CO (Denver)|
|18,540|72,651|291.9|22.6 |Tysons Corner CDP, VA (DC)|
|16,033|62,172|287.8|32.1 |El Segundo city, CA (LA)|
|17,438|61,265|251.3|17.8 |Santa Fe Springs city, CA (LA)|
|20,438|63,802|212.2|26.9 | _Doral CDP, FL_ (Miami)|
|12,513|38,666|209.0|23.6 | _Blue Ash city, OH_ (Cincinnati)|
|14,533|42,359|191.5|15.6 |Melville CDP, NY (NYC)|
|19,837|57,757|191.2|23.4 | Auburn Hills city, MI (Detroit)|
|12,825|36,850|187.3|25.1 | _Clayton city, MO_ (St. Louis)|
|16,500|46,947|184.5|23.5 | _Creve Coeur city, MO_ (St. Louis)|
|15,931|43,826|175.1|26.9 |Secaucus town, NJ (NYC)|
|14,166|37,534|165.0|12.9 |Addison town, TX (Dallas-Ft. Worth)|
|20,976|49,829|137.6|56.1 | *Naples city, FL* |
|17,181|40,589|136.2|17.4 |Tukwila city, WA (Seattle)|
|27,508|64,955|136.1|19.1 |Farmers Branch city, TX (Dallas-Ft. Worth)|
|18,511|42,772|131.1|27.4 |King of Prussia CDP, PA (Philadelphia)|
|15,550|35,869|130.7|21.3 | _Bridgeton city, MO_ (St. Louis)|
|22,979|51,083|122.3|27.7 | Romulus city, M (Detroit)|
|25,756|55,194|114.3|21.0 | _Maryland Heights city, MO_ (St. Louis)|
|20,100|42,695|112.4|17.1 |Hauppauge CDP, NY (NYC)|
|17,634|36,387|106.3|38.0 | _Ashwaubenon village, WI_ (Green Bay)|
|25,737|52,645|104.5|22.9 |Paramus borough, NJ (NYC)|
|45,256|91,937|103.1|40.7 |Redmond city, WA (Seattle)|
|33,784|68,476|102.7|26.3 |Beverly Hills city, CA (LA)|
|22,759|45,489|99.9|63.2 | *Myrtle Beach city, SC* |
|34,854|69,132|98.3|30.8 |Alpharetta city, GA (Atlanta)|
|25,578|50,641|98.0|56.6 | *Gainesville city, GA* |
|56,002|110,513|97.3|56.1 | *Greenville city, SC* |
|15,889|31,070|95.5|40.2 | _Greensburg city, PA_ (Pittsburgh)|
|15,600|30,493|95.5|65.8 | *Brunswick city, GA* |

*Bold* cities are the few on this list that qualify as (small) central cities. _Italicized_ cities are Edge Cities whose “host” cities don’t appear on the first list. Note the presence of multiple Detroit and St. Louis suburbs here — the super-winners in their bloody metropolitan games, with plenty of jobs to profit from and few residents to take care of — and the number of LA suburbs also listed, relative to other metros of its size. Upon first glance, many of these importing cities are Edge Cities, tourist meccas, or industrial hubs (the original Edge Cities).

*Notes*:
1. Estimated
2. Population change due to daily commuting
3. Residents of place who also work there

Socially irresponsible architects

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In a Metropolis Magazine interview with Martin Pedersen, pathbreaking architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable (and still among the best still working, thanks to her historian’s “long view” and clear style) lambasts the navel-gazing turn in architecture that has undermined its sense of responsibility:

bq. Having lost its sense of social responsibility, architecture must answer to something broader than just being the latest thing–edgy, trendy, chic. All this really turns me off. There’s something missing in architecture criticism today, which is a way of measuring the buzz against something bigger and more important. And there’s a kind of sycophantism. I find it kind of sickening, because so much is being missed that is important.

LA cottage housing

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The City of LA recently launched a design competition for prototype bungalow/cottage courts (which they’re oddly calling townhouses) called Small Lots, Smart Designs:

bq. In trying to meet the need for housing, the City of Los Angeles adopted the Small Lot Subdivision Ordinance #176354 that provides an entirely new housing option: allowing individuals or developers to purchase a lot zoned for commercial or multi-family residential use and subdivide into much smaller lots than previously required with no setback requirement between the subdivided lots.

Cottages give people the opportunity to own single family, possibly (semi-)detached housing — which, for better or worse, does carry a market premium — without the financial or time costs of a large yard. Low-rise construction is subject to less stringent building codes and potentially greater design flexibility, which could also further reduce the cost of housing.

70 years after Berenice Abbott

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Three things that struck me when viewing the New York Changing exhibit at the City Museum in NYC:

# The amount of texture in the city has decreased thanks to Modernism, and perhaps proportional to increasing clutter in the rest of our mindscape.
# Industrial decline has opened up waterfronts, for better or worse. (I’m too young to remember the working waterfronts of yore.)
# The invasion of cars has changed the city in truly profound, but now forgotten, ways. More obviously, their sheer bulk makes streets feel unpleasantly crowded, as a view down Seventh Ave. shows. More subtly, their unprecedented (and ever increasing) momentum, and thus their capacity to injure those in the public way, resulted in an alarming increase in regulation of street use, as government attempted to mitigate the invading cars’ size and speed — most notably parking restrictions, one way designations, and the ubiquitous all-way stops, all seen in this otherwise unchanged view at 39 Commerce Street. Two way streets were converted to one way operation to remove the annoyance of yielding when passing on narrow streets; stop signs and speed bumps appeared to keep speeds down and to avoid crashes, as intersections could accommodate only one car at a time; licensing of drivers and vehicles began only after the first cars were involved in deadly hit-and-runs.

In that brief-but-glorious era when bicycles were the second most popular vehicles on American city streets (after shoes), there was precious little need for such over-regulation of traffic flow. Critical Massers understand that large numbers of cyclists can pretty spontaneously organize and police themselves. Even if bicyclists (with 2% the weight and 0.2% the horsepower, and thus about 0.004% the motive force of an SUV) who slow down and yield, rather than stop, at stop signs violate the letter of laws created to regulate autos, I’d argue that we respect the intent of the law (i.e., slow, quiet traffic flow with orderly queueing). Just because we don’t trust drivers to drive politely and let one another in in traffic — which we might accomplish with, say, yield rather than stop signs — hardly means that pedestrians or bicyclists can’t be trusted with the same.

I understand that the laws we have now are the laws we should observe, but a fairly good historical — not just logical — argument exists to grant bicycles leeway on traffic regulations. And if today’s federal judges can “revive the Constitution in exile” and impart judgment based on “historical intent,” then surely we can find some judges to revive 19th century, pre-Auto Plague traffic codes for bicycles!

Guess where: compass rose

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Compass rose

Originally uploaded by paytonc.

A web of silvery tracings emanates from an angular design recently circumscribed in a very well-trod public building as part of an update to some dreary, if efficient, Modern spaces. (So well trod, in fact, that I’m surprised that the original terrazzo could receive this inlay without requiring extensive refinishing, although I suppose the material’s quite durable.) Interestingly, and probably unintentionally, the hexagonal shape of this design complements the overall building — a rare one in Chicago which often rejects rectilinearity in favor of flowing 60/120-degree turns. This particular space has its own name; better yet, describe where the arrows might lead someone. Yes, that’s a bit of a trick question.

The feet may be a hint; I cropped out anything obvious, but that’s not a pair of shoes you see: rather a single shoe, the other midflight, with something else. (I’ll replace with the uncropped photo after it’s guessed.) Also note the grain of the original terrazzo; you may already have spent hours elsewhere in this building staring at it out of exasperated boredom.

Daley dome envy, migration, High Line boom

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* A few years after knocking down Soldier Field to build the new Bears stadium (one of the smallest in the NFL), Daley has suggested “getting a new NFL team”:http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=18914 — not because they’d win more than the division-leading Bears, but because he wants an Olympic dome. Uhm, okay, so why didn’t he support LPCI’s plan to leave well enough alone at Soldier Field and build a new dome in Bridgeport, next to the Sox stadium? As Roger Ebert pointed out in the Sun-Times lately, _Detroit_ got the Super Bowl this year because they have a dome. Meanwhile, a dome in Bridgeport would solidify opportunities to build more sports-related entertainment venues there, give more weeks of life to the often-empty Sox parking garages, and provide the city with a new indoor venue with better transportation than the lakefront.

* An interesting, if dated, table found in a 1999 paper by Dowell Myers entitled “Demographic Dynamism and Metropolitan Change” shows that, among other things, NYC is really no more of a national draw than Chicago, and that Blacks in large metros actually have higher mobility rates than Whites. Wouldn’t be hard to get Census 2000 numbers; some numbers I’ve seen for LA have shown that Asian and Latino immigration has slowed, and a new generation of second(+) generation immigrants has matured. (Left out a line about migrants from US territories, i.e., Puerto Rico, and numbers for DC.)

*Place of Birth of 1990 Adult (>24) Residents, by Race-Ethnicity*
|*Los Angeles* region|Total|White|Black|Asian|Latino|
|California|27.5%|31.7%|27.8%|9.3%|23.2%|
|Other states|42.2%|57.5%|66.7%|6.2%|9.8%|
|Other nations|30.1%|10.8%|5.3%|83.5%|66.1%|
|*New York* region|Total|White|Black|Asian|Latino|
|NY, NJ, CT|57.6%|73.4%|37.2%|3.9%|17.6%|
|Other states|14.0%|12.0%|37.3%|1.9%|1.4%|
|Other nations|24.5%|14.6%|25.0%|93.9%|50.9%|
|*Chicago* region|Total|White|Black|Asian|Latino|
|IL, IN, WI|60.5%|71.0%|47.4%|4.2%|19.2%|
|Other states|23.7%|19.7%|50.5%|5.1%|9.5%|
|Other nations|14.7%|9.4%|2.0%|90.6%|58.4%|

* Claire Wilson in the “Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/realestate/18cover.html reports on how developers have swooped down upon the High Line, proposing 13 towers with 5,500 apartments, media offices, star-chef restaurants, new gallery spaces, and a Standard Hotel. Assuming an average of $1M per apartment (modest even after accounting for a 20% inclusionary set-aside), just the residential development spurred by the $130M High Line project would be worth $5.5 billion!

“Developers balked — and some who wanted it torn down threatened to sue — when Friends of the High Line was formed in 1999 and proposed the idea of turning the railroad bed into an elevated park. Six years later, the corridor is like catnip to the same developers, with more than a dozen projects planned and countless others being considered.”

Honolulu

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Waikiki’s physical form is a row of ’60s slabs perpendicular to the beach; as JCB-toting Japanese tourists have displaced fat, ugly Americans, “boardwalk” has evolved (partly, which is the fun part) from t-shirt shops to marquee-name couture boutiques. Prada sits three doors down from a peep show joint. The truly wild thing is that Ala Moana, the near-downtown megamall less than a mile west, has all the same shops, plus oddball Hawaiian locals like the “Crack Seed Center” (a bulk candy and roasted-nut shop). Since the economy’s tied more to Tokyo than DC, there’s a lot of ’80s glitter but surprisingly little new since then, save a few monuments to the very latest real estate bubble.

High property values, high value agriculture, consolidated local government, and lack of buildable land (between coast and mountain, as they say in Vancouver) means relatively compact sprawl and bad congestion, even in the absence of any noticeable job center. Only downtown and the adjoining Chinatown have any real historic-district merit; it’s overwhelmingly a postwar city, and the “real” neighborhoods have that sunstruck, run-down look of, say, San Diego. (Not as dirty as LA, much less rain than Miami.) Ethnic restaurants are aplenty, but bohemia seems in little evidence: the only band posters I saw were in Hale’iwa, the little surfer town at the gateway to the North Shore’s heroic waves.

Bus transit is excellent, many intersections have scramble signals, and downtown has a ped mall, a bike/bus mall, little surface parking, and an old-line department store, besides the usual government offices in an old royal palace.

The overall feel crosses Las Vegas with Miami Beach and Myrtle Beach, but filled with pushy Asians. (whites are less than 25% of the population, and maybe half of the 100,000 tourists.) Just as strangely un-American as Canada in many ways, like the lack of major crime, residential high-rises in odd places, indifference to the Protestant work ethic and news from the mainland, and an oddly communitarian local political culture — apparently dating from the early days, of Japanese settlers, New England missionaries, and money-grubbing Yankee capitalists mingling with famously laid-back native Hawaiians.

Photos Flickr-ed to my “West Coast”:http://flickr.com/photos/paytonc/sets/462801/ set.

Metro briefs

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* “Metropolis 2020”:http://metrojoe.org/joe.htm has posted a quiz game featuring “Metro Joe.” It has annoyingly slow animated transitions, questions that are pretty tough given the 8th grade target audience (although I haven’t seen the accompanying curricular materials), and the scoring’s a bitch: you actually lose points for incorrect answers, instead of just not winning them.
* Found a site that appears to “take credit for”:http://counterproductiveindustries.com/ much of the street theater that’s gone on in Chicago in recent years — except Critical Mass.
* Beerfly Lew Bryson has “a heartwarming read”:http://www.lewbryson.com/buzz703.htm for the “Draught Beer Preservation Society”:http://www.westnet.com/~kbehrens/lsdbps/manifesto.html:

bq. Who’s the villain here? Zoning and NIMBY. Zoning is NIMBY, which is policy-speak for Not In My Backyard… What [overly restrictive zoning in the suburbs produces] is a noisy bar that’s creating drunks. The owner may not have had that in mind, but that’s where business and zoning has driven him. Bars are caught between rising costs, public disapproval, and stiff chain competition. Is it any wonder that corner bars owners are cashing out left and right, taking big bucks for their licenses and folding up?

bq. Here’s what I’d like to see instead. If we’re going to live in the suburbs, I’d like to see subdivisions with an in-built commercial area: a grocery store (not a supermarket, a grocery store, with food), a coffee shop/deli, and a bar. And they’d have no parking. None. Just bike racks. You’d have to walk or ride there. The bar would have to close at 11, no loud music allowed. It would be a special license, a neighborhood tavern license: non-transferable, stuck to that address, and cheap, say $300 a year. They’d have to serve food: simple sandwiches, soup, stews, salads. It wouldn’t be a nuisance, it couldn’t be a nuisance.

bq. Sound like much ado about nothing? After all, do you really have to have a neighborhood bar? Consider this. Do you ever get together with neighbors and talk politics? Have you met your state legislators, your township supervisors, your school board? Your parents did, your great-grandparents did, the country’s founders did: at the local tavern.

Going away for a week to celebrate Solstice in sunnier climes. Happy Holidays, damnit.

Starting to get it

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One neighborhood group seems, kind of, to get it about parking: the “Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference”:http://www.hydepark.org/transit/parkingwoes.htm#uofc, and apparently also the university, sees that parking demand and parking supply both matter. Maybe that Chicago School economics comes in handy after all.

Clear across town, the “Andersonville Chamber of Commerce’s”:http://www.andersonville.org/ crusade against chain stores (following similar efforts in cities like “Austin”:http://www.ibuyaustin.com) has morphed into “Local First Chicago”:http://www.localfirstchicago.org/ (link not yet working), a cooperative marketing program for those “Signs of a Vibrant Community”: local, independent businesses. The little logo shows The Bean superimposed on a “Chicago flag”:http://introvert.net/2005/chiflag, and the back lists 46 businesses in Andersonville, Lincoln Park, Lincoln Square, and Wicker Park/Bucktown.

No smoking

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The new “smoking ban”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-051206smokebanpass,1,161125.story?coll=chi-news-hed (hooray!) includes an interesting performance-based exception that I hadn’t seen before: “if a restaurant bar or tavern can show it has installed air purification equipment that ensures the same air quality inside as outside, it will be granted a permanent exemption from the smoking ban.”

Well, if the goal is to ensure indoor air quality, I suppose that regulating the actual air quality rather than how you get there (banning smoking, purifying air) gives the same result.

What’s most remarkable about this, of course, is that the mayor largely stayed outside the entire debate. City Council hasn’t had a good floor fight in years, since most legislation (including, in the end, the smoking ban) sees the arms twisted behind the scenes. But this time, we got real politics.