Is Chicago Underpopulated? (Naperville, Forest Park, Cairo: mortgage, how much, home)
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No, there are not "more jobs/employable head" in the city than there are in the burbs. This is not a matter of opinion that can be argued on the merits. It is a verifiable fact that there are roughly twice as many jobs in the suburbs than there are in the city.
You're talking about two different things in successive sentences. Jobs per employable head (or jobs/employable head) are greater in the city. Look at the link I posted later in the thread. The city has roughly 1/3 of the jobs in the IL metro, but less than 1/3 of the population in the IL portion of the metro. This means there is net inbond migration into the city for jobs every day. How you can even attempt to debate this is beyond me.
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Originally Posted by Drover
I'm sorry but there is simply no reason to believe there's this massive wave of people just waiting to move back into the city once the housing market recovers. And "the worst housing market in decades" only occurred during the last couple years of the last decade. For the previous 7 or 8 years, there was a huge run-up in prices where people could have taken their built-up piles of equity and moved anywhere with it. Did they take it and move to the city en masse as gasoline prices ran up? No, they didn't.
If anything the housing slump at the very end of the decade would solidified the trends that took place over the previous several years. If the "people will flock back to the city as gas prices rise" theory were true, the rise in gas prices through the 2000s would have caused a massive population shift back to the city and, then the housing slump would have locked them there starting circa 2008, and then that population jump would have then been reflected in the 2010 census. But as we now know, that is not at all what happened.
You've inserted so many strawmen and words into my mouth here, it doesn't even resemble what I said earlier. Earlier this decade, we didn't have sustained periods (meaning several successive years) of $4+ gasoline. Simple economics: the higher gas goes (and the longer it stays there), the more people are going to feel the pinch in their budgets and something will need to give. Living closer to your center of employment, whether those jobs are in the suburbs, the city, or wherever is one obvious outcome. Increased Metra ridership is another. Six months of gas at $4 gas 9 years ago followed by a few years in the $1.50-$2 range isn't going to change the behavior of many, but sustained high prices will. And those effects are exponential. At $2/gal, maybe 2 in 10 change their living preference/habits, at $4/gal, maybe its 10, at $6/gal, it might by 30, and so on. I said nothing about flocking or even going solely back to the city, specifically.
You're not going to see 20% of the housing market sitting abandoned overnight in the suburbs due to gas prices, because that's not how housing markets work. The transport cost will get factored into the price of houses on the outskirts of the market and their values will drop relative to more centrally located areas. This will continue to suck people into low density housing on the periphery, but over time, it will be less desirable. Hell, we've already seen this in some areas of the region, and we also have seen areas full of 1960s and 1970s housing near employment hubs torn down as employment proximity becomes more valuable to make room for larger homes...look at older section of Naperville. Or you could look at what's happened to housing prices in the last 5 years near central employment zones vs. comparable residences in the outer suburbs/those away from major employment centers. I'll save you the trouble: the former have held their value better because demand has shifted to those.
You're talking about two different things in successive sentences. Jobs per employable head (or jobs/employable head) are greater in the city. Look at the link I posted later in the thread. The city has roughly 1/3 of the jobs in the IL metro, but less than 1/3 of the population in the IL portion of the metro. This means there is net inbond migration into the city for jobs every day. How you can even attempt to debate this is beyond me.
You've inserted so many strawmen and words into my mouth here, it doesn't even resemble what I said earlier. Earlier this decade, we didn't have sustained periods (meaning several successive years) of $4+ gasoline. Simple economics: the higher gas goes (and the longer it stays there), the more people are going to feel the pinch in their budgets and something will need to give. Living closer to your center of employment, whether those jobs are in the suburbs, the city, or wherever is one obvious outcome. Increased Metra ridership is another. Six months of gas at $4 gas 9 years ago followed by a few years in the $1.50-$2 range isn't going to change the behavior of many, but sustained high prices will. And those effects are exponential. At $2/gal, maybe 2 in 10 change their living preference/habits, at $4/gal, maybe its 10, at $6/gal, it might by 30, and so on. I said nothing about flocking or even going solely back to the city, specifically.
You're not going to see 20% of the housing market sitting abandoned overnight in the suburbs due to gas prices, because that's not how housing markets work. The transport cost will get factored into the price of houses on the outskirts of the market and their values will drop relative to more centrally located areas. This will continue to suck people into low density housing on the periphery, but over time, it will be less desirable. Hell, we've already seen this in some areas of the region, and we also have seen areas full of 1960s and 1970s housing near employment hubs torn down as employment proximity becomes more valuable to make room for larger homes...look at older section of Naperville. Or you could look at what's happened to housing prices in the last 5 years near central employment zones vs. comparable residences in the outer suburbs/those away from major employment centers. I'll save you the trouble: the former have held their value better because demand has shifted to those.
Again, something we already have evidence of.
Do you have any identifiable point to all this rambling?
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Re: crosstown expressway.
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It may seem "harmless" to put a below grade or an expressway flyover through a neigborhood,
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I don't think you understand what I'm proposing. What I'm proposing is not at all like the Dan Ryan or the Ike, which each tore out a long path a couple blocks wide and sunk it with nothing above except for bridges at major streets. That was a gash that separated the two sides because it severed so many cross-streets.
What I'm proposing is different. Have you been to Shanghai? Have you seen their elevated highways like the Yan'an Elevated Road (Yan'an Zhong Lu - 延安中路)? Put something like that over the existing rail, and you'd maintain the rail and add expressway capacity and not add any additional barriers to the neighborhoods. That would make it faster and easier for residents of those central neighborhoods to get around the region. It would make those neighborhoods more desirable from a transportation (if not transit) standpoint.
I agree that nothing like the Ike or Dan Ryan should ever be built again. But an elevated expressway over existing rails, or even over an existing major high-capacity street, would not have anywhere near the negative impact that those old below-grade ones have. Ask people who live in Shanghai if they think the elevated expressways detroy their neighborhoods, and while a few won't like them, the vast majority think they're a great addition. But, honestly, the only real objection to what I'm suggestion would be made on terms of cost. But even there, elevating it is unlikely to cost more than buying out a bunch of landowners, losing tax revenues, digging a gash, and building dozens of cross-bridges. In actuality, an elevated one like that probably ends up costing the city less overall than something like the Ike or Dan Ryan would. Done right, it's win-win. And I wouldn't rule out adding BRT-only lanes or even elevated rail (thought I still think rail in those areas would be too underutilized).
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Originally Posted by Chicago76
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Most of neighborhoods on that corridor are 10K to 20K per square mile density areas. Austin may seem "not dense" to you, but it's at 14K/sq mi and Hermosa is at 21K. Even Pullman is over 8K. These are more dense than Oak Park, Cicero, and Melrose Park, respectively.
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See what I wrote above. The problem with engineering in the U.S. is too many people are so knee-jerk, dogmatically opposed to old solutions that they can't even consider new solutions that bring the benefits of the old solutions while greatly mitigating (or even eliminating) the drawbacks.
A density of 14k per square mile is on the low end, but can be okay for rail - IF the rail is going to central or other very popular destinations. If the office parks near O'Hare were well-integrated with the north end of the line and the office parks and manufacturing districts south of Midway were also well-integrated, then a cross-town rail line could actually work, because it wouldn't so much be cross-town as it would be a feeder to jobs centers. That would require the City to continue to encourage commercial growth in both ends of that.
In other words, it would work best only if coupled with a strong push from the city to allow very dense development near rail stations. An "easily walkable" area around a train station is usually between 1/4 and 1/3 of a square mile. For a good density, that should translate into a residential unit density of 5-7,000 in that area. Depending on the makeup of those units, that could mean a population density of anywhere from about 30,000 per sq/mi to as much as 112,000 per sq/mi (this high end might be theoretically possible, but extremely unlikely because it would require 7,000 units with an average household size of 4, which would be nearly impossible to reach as an average in a highly urban part of North America). The likely highest average density for the easily walkable area near such a station would likely be something around 40-45,000 per square mile, which is about what the Gold Coast is, or the eastern-most parts of the North Lakefront. That density in the closest part to the station would guarantee efficient ridership, while in the still-walkable, but not immediately next-to areas, you could have lower density and more of a family-oriented commuter lifestyle. A 5-minute walk for those in the densest station core would be good for carless people who always used the train to go places. A 10-minute walk in the next ring around the station would be fine for the commuters who mostly drove when they weren't going to work.
For commercial areas, a jobs density of 50k+ per sq/mile near jobs stations would be best. That translates into about 12,500 jobs within a 5-minute walk of any primarily commercial stop. Stops with 15,000 jobs and 10,000 people (or vice-versa) would be a great balance of jobs and people for rail-served areas. If outside of the 5-minute ring, you had a 10-15 minute walking residential area, then you'd have a lot of people who could move close enough to walk to work, while still having access to rail transit.
Political leadership needs to be able to sell that idea to people. I suspect that even most suburbanites could get on board with that. In my experience, it's primarily the City's Aldermen who seem opposed to such a development model, for reasons I really can't fathom.
I don't think people who have been in the suburbs a long time are going to flock into the city due to gas or the like. Not anytime soon anyway, maybe in 20 years. That being said younger people are moving into cities and the suburbs in lots of major cities are hurting. Whether or not the young people remain in cities long term remains to be seen. I do think it's possible that we will have the opposite of what happened 1950s and see reverse white flight into the cities.
I think younger people are moving into cities primarily due to a difference in preference. The city and the suburbs represent basically two different lifestyles, with places like Berwyn and Oak Park representing an attempt to kind of compromise between the two. Despite the increase in the price of gasoline, most people I know, young and old alike, seem to choose whether they live in the city or suburbs based on a combination of which lifestyle seems more appealing to them, and where their employment is located.
A lot of people from older generations have some really bad memories of all the violence that went down from 1960 through 1995. The white flight, the way the neighborhoods turned, and so on. They seem to associate the city with danger and the suburbs with security. So, even if some aspects of the urban lifestyle would appeal to them, they probably live in the suburbs due to those memories and associations in their heads. Younger people, especially those born after 1985, have little memories of how dangerous the cities really were. Therefore, those who would prefer urban lifestyle move to the city.
However, there are still younger people who prefer the suburban lifestyle and live there. If this lifestyle remains desirable enough to enough people, they will find a way to live it, whether it be through finding alternatives to oil, or extracting oil from different places. I am not convinced that we are on the verge of ending the suburban lifestyle.
Do you have any identifiable point to all this rambling?
What are you trying to say?
I'll break it into easy to digest points.
-We have a lot of congestion in the city/metro. More than we did a decade or two ago.
-In the last couple of years, we also appear to have entered the first sustainable period of extremely high fuel prices since the 70s.
-People don't like paying high fuel costs, because it causes them to cut their budgets elsewhere.
-With sustained high fuel costs, there will be an additional premium and demand on housing in close proximity to major employment centers. Think of it this way, I can buy the same house in two different locations, one with a $1500/mo mortgage. The other with a $1700/mo mortgage. The problem with the $1500/mo place is that I will pay $200 more a month in gas to live there, so you're really paying the same thing. All else equal, you will pay for the more expensive house, which really doesn't cost you any more when you factor in transit + you get the added benefit of a shorter commute. Prices therefore go up on infill, while prices don't in outlying areas, leading to builders putting up less of those vinyl boxes on the edge of the metro.
-The future = more wealth and people pushing towards employment hubs: Downtown, Midway, O'Hare, Medical Campuses, Oak Brook, Central DuPage, etc. Some of it will be in the city, some of it will be outside. We're already seeing densification and/or premiums on teardowns in Naperville, areas in the city core, condos/midrises going up around freeway junctions, etc. More businesses will also relocate from sprawling suburban campuses into employment hubs.
-No one is saying (to my knowledge) that the suburbs are "dead". They're just going to look a bit more like mini cities in the coming decades.
And sure Chicago metro area certainly has grown more than Detroit metro in the last 40 years, but Chicago metro growth is certainly sluggish compared with the sunbelt.
Sure the sunbelt grew faster, faster than most of the country. Chicago metro had larger growth than NY metro and LA metro.
They aren't leaving in the same numbers they used to, and there are a number of forces that are making more stay. The biggest one is the over supply of condos. There are loads of parents who planned on bolting for the suburbs when their kids turned 3, but they can't unload their condos. Combine that with an uncertain job market and a lack of equity in a house/condo and you have a lot of people looking at CPS who wouldn't have 5 or 10 years ago. There also isn't the same automatic fear of cities that existed 10 or 20 years ago. People in their 20's who complain about strollers and kids in restaurants end up considering staying in the city when they have kids in their 30's because they saw all those kids around. It also doesn't help that Catholic Schools are raising tuitions and lowering standards due to shrinking parishes and settlements for sex abuse cases.
I'm seeing some evidence to back that up on the North and Northwest sides. They are loads of elementary schools that white professionals never would have sent their kids to 10-15 years ago, but they're doing it now. Many schools (like Audubon, Ravenswood, Coonley, Burr, Pulaski, Waters, Alcott, Goethe, and Prescott) are seeing enrollment increases and dramatic shifts in the demographics of their student bodies. It definitely seems to be the beginning of a wave - when I was touring a lot of elementary schools they would have stats showing that 15% or so of the students were white. When you go to sit in on classes or to school assemblies you find that K-2nd grade is 50% white and the higher grades are more like 5% white. Expansions of TBPK programs is also introducing parents to the schools early, and is working well as a way to funnel more kids into the neighborhood schools.
Also, the number of applications to both magnet and neighborhood schools skyrocketed this year. CPS changed the application process so it's hard to figure out the exact increase, but the number of students applying may have doubled. Also, schools use the number of students enrolling in SNAP programs as an indicator of the poverty level of the school, and if enough kids in a school are enrolled the school can qualify for Federal assistance programs. I know of at least two schools on the NW side that were blind sided by losing that funding due to students' families making too much money. I've heard rumors that the same thing has happened at 4 or 5 other schools, but can't really confirm it. It will be interesting to see what the final numbers are when the school year starts.
Very true. I was looking at enrollments the other day. It's amazing how some of these schools have changed in like 3 years.
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