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So one project also mentioned was turning Logan Square into a traffic circle configuration. That also seems interesting but it seems like it will get a lot of resistance.
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Originally Posted by chet everett
Drover is spot-on, mindless support of inappropriately dense developments will not be a good thing!
But Chicago is not that dense relative to other cities that rely on transit. I think it's far from being a limiting factor, but I do think it's something to be considered and the CTA will have to up its game accordingly. As another posted pointed out, the population density in these areas is actually lower than in the past.
The Blue line is notorious for being overloaded in this area, and given the necessity for all trains to run all the way out to O'Hare this can't be changed without a literal billion dollar investment in upgrading the line to make it possible to switch over inbound & outbound capacity. The city obviously has no money for that and a simple analysis of the overall ridership will clearly show that there is no way that fares could ever pay for such a massive upgrade.
I am the kind of geek that used to go all the Metra & RTA hearings. I have friends that work for transit agencies and the consultancies that they hire. The sad fact is whether you are looking at high speed inter-city rail or relatively slow intra-urban commuter lines / light rail the stuff is just so ridiculously expensive that it can never "pay for itself" . Take a look at price difference between just a single mile of rail and how many buses that'll buy. NO COMPARISON!
Of course the real issue with even buses on a street like Milwaukee Ave that is not just how it is narrow compared to other thoroughfares like North Ave or Ashland Ave but how it also slices across intersections DIAGONALLY so that even with state-of-art traffic control signal and rebuilding turn lanes you STILL could not increase total capacity without buying up dozens and dozens of the most "prime" chunks of real estate at the big intersections. Don't even need to go into the nightmare of excessive curb cuts for drive-through fast food places / stay-in-your-car banks & pharmacies, to say nothing of the excessive parking lots and garages of too many parcels...
The bottomline is that this ain't Manhattan, it ain't even Brooklyn or Toronto. It is Chicago. And that means "if it is good for the Alderman's campaign fund is gets built" regardless of what nightmares it creates.
Drover is spot-on, mindless support of inappropriately dense developments will not be a good thing!
The role of a true professional department of planning is to evaluate proposals and their overall impact on the whole range infrastructure. A development that is overly dense can and will HURT property values nearby -- people are not stupid, they won't pay a premium for a place that has crummy overcrowded El routes, is stuck on a street that is all but impassable and unsafe for even rent-a-bikes. Those problems will then depress demand / prices for adjacent vacant lots. These are well known principles that professional planners generally will use to influence development. Instead Chicago gives way too much power to Alderman that will green light idiotic development when it is for pals / poltical supporters. Yeah corruption.
You are positing outcomes that sound rational but do not reflect how people actually behave. What you suggest is based on your own gut feeling about how people think and are not based on any observations of similar development activities in other cities.
It sounds plausible, maybe, that dense yuppie developments are not desirable and "crowding" will hurt property values and that people "are not stupid" and "won't pay a premium" for these new developments. However, that is not how it has played out anywhere this kind of development has occurred. In Minneapolis, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco , Boston and other cities around the world, this sort of development has raised adjacent property values and attracted more residents and local small businesses. You always assume for some reason that Chicago is exceptional and this sort of development will have the exact opposite result as it does in other cities. Is this based on any evidence or is it just your own internal "Chicago school" of urban economics?
Can you point to anywhere in the Chicago where this sort of infill mid-luxury apartment development has occurred and depressed the property values of adjacent vacant lots? Can you point to anywhere in the country this has happened? Or the world?
You don't need to get much past O'Hare to see where acres of over built apartments and condos have led to crummy property values. Compare Elk Grove Village or Bensenville to Elmhurst or Oak Brook to see how over building high density hurts towns and much more tightly regulated high quality multi-family works to boost desirability.
Same thing comparing Schaumburg or Palatine to Barrington or Arlington Heights -- the former have allowed developers to plop down swaths of rentals and condos willy nilly while the latter have VERY stringent regulations about how the higher density buildings have to be confined to areas where they foster a desirable pattern of growth without stressing infrastructure.
Ditto for towns like Naperville, where they do allow higher density residential when it is compatible with transit capacities and such but discourage it in the more open parts of town where roads and buses just would be so overwhelmed to hurt the quality of life.
It is funny that you mention Boston and San Fransico -- both of cities are NOTORIOUSLY STRICT about what they allow developers to build and consequently have far higher average housing costs. The message is clear -- plan with a careful view of the consequences of development and you MAXIMIZE value, allow idiotic overbuilding and the blight is hard to shake.
The haphazard approval of poorly thought out higher density buildings that Chicago engages in is exactly why the city has overall lower property values -- there are idiotically placed apartments out near the Edens corridor that have zero appeal and the surrounding BLIGHT has killed off the local businesses. Where is the TIF money to redevelop that??? It ain't just Chicago that falls into the these stupid "let whoever build whatever" traps -- towns like Lincolnwood and Skokie have had plenty of ill-advised developments that were too dense and resulted traffic in killing off viable businesses becuase people were fed up with jammed roadways and too slow buses. It is similarly quite likely that large swaths of the nearer south suburbs should have had somebody say "whoa, how is this gonna work" when you see hideous bands of apartments in Oak Lawn, Worth, Alsip and other towns...
You don't need to get much past O'Hare to see where acres of over built apartments and condos have led to crummy property values. Compare Elk Grove Village or Bensenville to Elmhurst or Oak Brook to see how over building high density hurts towns and much more tightly regulated high quality multi-family works to boost desirability.
Look, I'll read the rest of your post in a bit because I respect your opinion, but I feel I can stop right here. What does development out by the airport or in Schaumburg have to do with development in Wicker Park, Bucktown and Logan Square? I concede that plopping condo developments out by airports and in the burbs hasn't worked out but that is not what was being discussed.
The point is that are some places where density is OK / desirable. I would argues strongly that there is still a whole lot of capacity to increase the density of some neighborhoods south of Stevenson and if that was done in a smart way it could be a HUGE plus for Chicago.
Converesly, allowing developers to put overly dense residential in parts of Chicago that are already straining the available infrastructure happens not becuase it makes sense but because some developers perceive this as a way to make a quick buck (even after donating to the appropriate Alderman's Campaign Fund / aka "greasing some palms"...) and they just don't care that these things will likely make such areas LESS desirable in the long run.
Heck look at the relative lack of demand for the high rises in Edgewater -- there is NO infrastructure up there are the main reason that they were attractive to old people was their kids forced into these crummy apartments where at least they would not have to worry about grandma breaking her hip while shoveling our the gangway so her bungalow looked "presentable" all winter even after grandpa died of gripper shoveling. Once all the lots on the east side of LSD filled up there was no real demand for any thing else. The relative width of some of the streets could accomodate more traffic, but the exposure makes waiting for a bus brutal and the access to the El ain't great. It is weird that things are so dead, but again it makes perfect economic sense that developers don't want to risk throwing away money in an area that is not a proven winner.
Developer love to try to going back to the "winning formula" more often than is wise. The whole process of getting commercial loans for construction is based on what sorts of rents one gets when the projects is approved and NOT so much on what happens down the road. It is a "live for today" mindest that is exactly why boomtowns spring in the cornfields and then sit half filled after a bust. If instead the developer was instead forced to either scale back plans so they'd make a little less upfront OR contribute more to infrastructure improvements I would have no problems with this. Of course that won't happen becuase NEITHER would mean more cash in the pockets of Aldermen (or stupid small time poltiicians in hick towns that basically behave the same way)...
Even more innovative zoning and planning departments have required that developers that want to build something in a "hot area" can only do so when they agree to also to undertake efforts to redevelop areas that are still neglected, again this won't happen in Chicago where the various Aldermen from hipster driven north side area have nothing in common with folks from areas where locals are not at all interested in seeing rents skyrocket and culture identy weakened. Even money grubbing Aldermen know that if the only thing keeping them in office is low information voters that suck up some story of "their country man fighting Rahm to keep our neighborhood affordable" and there is redevelopment that attracts people that might instead vote with a new Alderman more attunded to the needs of the "small batch distellery" types the little bit of campaign funds they can squeeze out a developer required to "do a deal" in some area will ultimately not be as lucrative as their continued lock on the existing electorate...
There is only lens to view Chicago development through and that is the greed of aldermen.
Last edited by chet everett; 10-31-2014 at 11:51 AM..
Regardless of the plight of abandoned grandmas in Edgewater, what is happening on Milwaukee ave seems straightforward. People want to live there, so new condos are being added. This seems like it would happen whether or not Chicago was run by palm-greasing alderman. I do not agree with your ideas about how development should be guided, but they are sort of interesting.
Its interesting how much control Chet wants Chicago's government to have. Allow developers to develop where the demand is clearly there? Corruption! Forcing developers to invest in areas where there is no market just because you think they should? Innovative! Yet I bet if this actually happened, you and every suburban trib commenter would be screaming about corruption, socialism, blah, blah, blah.
Sheesh you folks just are loopy -- it is not that development is bad, it is like Drover said, when you allow developers to plop down poorly thoughtout buildings IN AREA THAT HAS AN OVERBURDENED TRANSPORTATION INFRASTRUCTURE that is not just bad planning it is something WILL DIMINISH THE AREA'S DESIRABILITY.
This is really standard planning that happens with any major development in a suburb -- when they redeveloped the old Toll Authority HQ site in Oak Brook for the Nordstrom Rack and other big retail uses they added lanes to the roadways, additional traffic control devices and reconfigured exit ramps. They could do all this becuase the site was HUGE and Oak Brook had money in the bank from the main Oakbrook Center Mall. In turn, the toll HQ built their new site a few miles further west they moved thing like the State Police facility to its own separate sub-plot with access to both I-88 and the newly built I-355. That is a whole lot more costly to do in a part of Chicago where there are no "green grass sites" and the private land owners are not going to sell any of their valuable retail frontage for less than a huge premium.
Adding hundreds of units might make sense if is there was capacity to run more El trains or buses or give people some other options but previous decisions to allow things like the CVS with its suburan style parking lot or the police facility with its similarly "Schaumburg-style" wasteful use of land area all point to the fact this is area is NOT equiped to handle the kinds of densities that are being allowed.
Once upon a time the city bent over backwards to try to entice developers to open stores in the Elston corridor. Those retailers all wanted big suburban strip mall parking lots. They got what they wanted and those strip malls are mostly doing well but the longer term future of Logan Square is now emperiled by a disregard for how keep land uses in balance. There are methods of looking at the traffic volumes and transit ridership and even pedestrian surveys that real professional planners are capable of producing. If the Alderman allow reckless overbuilding things will eventually lose their desirability. If it gets bad enough you eventually hurt the ability of businesses to get appropriate amounts of shoppers -- people are not going to Costco to bring home three dozen rolls of toilet paper on a Divy bike or to the Home Depot carrying a 4x8 sheet plywood back home on the El. The morons that want ever increasing levels of density must understand that too often that means too many vehicles packed into too small an area and such folks are either willful in the disregard for such basic principals or so blindly opposed to anyone whose opinion differs from their own that if they represent the majority of folkks in such area they are nearing the point where their own arrogance will soon bring about the area's demise. In the immortal words of John McNulty (often mis-attributed to Yogi Berra) -- "Nobody goes there are anymore. It's too crowded."....
Last edited by chet everett; 10-31-2014 at 08:18 PM..
The morons that want ever increasing levels of density must understand that too often that means too many vehicles packed into too small an area and such folks are either willful in the disregard for such basic principals or so blindly opposed to anyone whose opinion differs from their own that if they represent the majority of folkks in such area they are nearing the point where their own arrogance will soon bring about the area's demise.
Sorry, man, but you need an editor.
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It is not just the density!
