What does the city of chicago need to do in order to grow (Forest Park: apartment, lawyers)
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1) Streamline the process of getting permits and doing other kinds of business with the city. For some things, that means just getting the city out of the process. For other things it may result in stronger regulation, but more clear, easier to understand and work with regulations.
The complexity and slowness of dealing with the city is a huge disadvantage for businesses of all sizes. It takes most businesses a really long time to get permits to do things if they aren't part of a big corporation with lawyers to handle it all.
2) Do a better job of describing the education available in a Chicago Public School. Yes, the schools should be better. However, many kids still get an excellent education, much better than the statistical averages would have you believe. The City needs to figure out how to advertise that fact, and reach out to parents about how to make sure their kids get that good education in the City.
3) As part of item 1), the City needs to come to accept that in order to be a city it needs to let itself look and function like a city. No more allowing gas stations on the same block as an "L" station. No more allowing an Alderman to block a 6-story building 1 block from an "L" station because he personally thinks it's too dense. What am I talking about? TOD - Transit Oriented Development doesn't just need to be a part of our zoning, it needs to be the *focus* of our zoning. People shouldn't move into the densest parts of the city and expect it to be like the suburbs. The suburbs do offer some advantages over the city, but the City still has many advantages that the suburbs can't offer. By not emphasizing and requiring TOD standards, the City is destroying some of it's best assets and increasing the costs for everyone because we already have infrastructure designed for dense living, so if we only build low-to-mid-density, we don't have the tax structure to pay for the existing things. This drives up taxes and discourages people from moving in.
4) At the State level, fund UIC more in line with UIUC. UIC serves 70% as many students as UIUC, and is a more expensive location, yet has an endowment only 20% the size of UIUC. Chicago is Illinois' portal to the world, and the state University here should better reflect that.
5) Continue to encourage a local film industry. There is really nothing better in the modern world for free advertising that comes with a thriving motion picture industry. Vancouver and Toronto benefit a lot from being in movies.
6) Push Congress to vastly improve the current immigration process. We as a nation are simply being stupid when it comes to immigration. Most other advanced countries use a simple points system that anyone can look up and figure out. The process here is just archaic and it hurts not only Chicago, but almost all cities in the U.S. Even though immigrants are moving directly to suburbs more often than they used to, cities are still giant assimilation factories and can't do that well when there isn't a stream of immigrants. This would allow us to reach out and target regions of the world that won't be scared away from Chicago's weather, like north China, Russia, Scandinavia, and Chicago's historic strength, central and eastern Europe to encourage growing companies there to open their North American headquarters here, or young entrepreneurs to move here to start their businesses.
Would the quality of life in Chicago with its under 3 million residents and Chicagoland with its approximate 10 million improve with growth in population?
Is there some kind of competition out there for population growth? Don't get me wrong. Redevelopment can often be a good idea. And there are vast areas of the West and South sides that could sorely use it.
But in no way am I convinced that sheer growth in population is a recipe for functionality. Indeed if Chicago were merely to redistribute its population as it brings under and poorly utilized areas to life, we might indeed see a very good thing.
I love the concept of Smart "uncar" commercials regarding BIG (and the new one on clutter).
Some god awful cities on the face of this planet suffocate on population numbers on steroids. And some very good cities, NY and LA, live with numbers that we don't have in Chicago....and I am more than happy we don't.
Is big always better? And given the limited and finite resources on this planet, is constant and unending economic growth a good thing?
Would the quality of life in Chicago with its under 3 million residents and Chicagoland with its approximate 10 million improve with growth in population?
...
But in no way am I convinced that sheer growth in population is a recipe for functionality. Indeed if Chicago were merely to redistribute its population as it brings under and poorly utilized areas to life, we might indeed see a very good thing.
...
Is big always better? And given the limited and finite resources on this planet, is constant and unending economic growth a good thing?
So many contradictions and illogic.
Limited resources, but you think we should take existing people in the same city and move them to a different part of the city just to spread things around. Same number of people, same taxpayer base, greatly increased active infrastructure, greatly increased private investment. Right, that meshes perfectly with the idea of limited resources.
The average density of the city is under 12,000 ppsm. In the parts of the city where people frequently walk and successfully use transit to do most of their daily lives, the density is generally at least double that. So if you wanted to spread people around so that we just had a nice, even density of around 12,000 ppsm, far more people would get cars and drive for a lot of their daily activities. And you were saying we have limited resources?
The correlation between density and efficiency is very, very strong. Certainly it's not the only factor - if you have 100,000 ppsm in a shantytown in a cold climate, you're going to use enormous amounts of energy to heat people in the winter, for example. But if you're adding people in an advanced economy, the efficiency of people in dense areas is strongly evident.
You can easily get to 35,000 ppsm with a mix of 6-flats, low-rise apartment buildings and single family homes with a lot of leafy streets that many people find comfortable and not feeling overly congested. If most of Chicago's areas were at that density, with the Central Area most like 50,000 ppsm, and areas with a lot of industry more like 10,000 ppsm, you'd end up with a city-wide average of about double what we're at now.
So, if we planned right, we could end up with a highly functional, very efficient city with twice as many people as there currently are without any real sacrifice in livability. If anything, livability would go up, because more people could live their daily life without a car, and there would be more interesting neighborhoods for people to choose from or to visit. A Chicago city with 5,000,000 people would not be a congested mess, it would be an efficient, lively place that makes full use of the infrastructure it currently has.
Anyone who thinks that's crazy simply has no idea just how depopulated parts of the West and South sides have become. There are places that were 50,000 ppsm 60 years ago that are around 10,000 ppsm today. With today's smaller households, if those neighborhoods returned to the built form they had then the population would be about 35,000 ppsm, and it would be a mix of low-rise apartment buildings, single family homes, and 3-6 flats with a lot of parks and trees and no "food deserts."
With that many more people in the city, there'd be more jobs just to support the additional services. And taxes would likely be the same or maybe could even be lower because we'd be making more efficient use of existing infrastructure. The North Red Line and the Brown Line, for example, may be close to maxed out, but the Forest Park branch of the Blue Line, the Pink Line, the Green Line and the Orange Line could easily handle double their existing ridership and maybe even triple with minimal infrastructure changes. So the CTA could increase their budget by 20% and capture 50% more operating revenue. Fares would rise less, and subsidies would be stable. And that's conservative. In reality, if there were twice as many things easily accessibly via the "L" and three times as many living near an "L" station, you'd probably see double the ridership at rush hour, but four times the off-peak ridership, resulting in something more like 150% more revenue for that 20% increase in budget.
So, while I agree that bigger is not always better, Chicago is set up to be a city with a density of about 2 times what it currently averages, a density that is a comfortable, efficient level of population for this city. There's no reason that a population that results in that density shouldn't be the target.
Population growth would help greatly in digging us out of our pension debt hole.
Even without any radical changes, we are already seeing signs that businesses/jobs are reversing their outward migration to the suburbs and rediscovering the benefits of being in the city (Loop).
Limited resources, but you think we should take existing people in the same city and move them to a different part of the city just to spread things around. Same number of people, same taxpayer base, greatly increased active infrastructure, greatly increased private investment. Right, that meshes perfectly with the idea of limited resources.
The average density of the city is under 12,000 ppsm. In the parts of the city where people frequently walk and successfully use transit to do most of their daily lives, the density is generally at least double that. So if you wanted to spread people around so that we just had a nice, even density of around 12,000 ppsm, far more people would get cars and drive for a lot of their daily activities. And you were saying we have limited resources?
The correlation between density and efficiency is very, very strong. Certainly it's not the only factor - if you have 100,000 ppsm in a shantytown in a cold climate, you're going to use enormous amounts of energy to heat people in the winter, for example. But if you're adding people in an advanced economy, the efficiency of people in dense areas is strongly evident.
You can easily get to 35,000 ppsm with a mix of 6-flats, low-rise apartment buildings and single family homes with a lot of leafy streets that many people find comfortable and not feeling overly congested. If most of Chicago's areas were at that density, with the Central Area most like 50,000 ppsm, and areas with a lot of industry more like 10,000 ppsm, you'd end up with a city-wide average of about double what we're at now.
So, if we planned right, we could end up with a highly functional, very efficient city with twice as many people as there currently are without any real sacrifice in livability. If anything, livability would go up, because more people could live their daily life without a car, and there would be more interesting neighborhoods for people to choose from or to visit. A Chicago city with 5,000,000 people would not be a congested mess, it would be an efficient, lively place that makes full use of the infrastructure it currently has.
Anyone who thinks that's crazy simply has no idea just how depopulated parts of the West and South sides have become. There are places that were 50,000 ppsm 60 years ago that are around 10,000 ppsm today. With today's smaller households, if those neighborhoods returned to the built form they had then the population would be about 35,000 ppsm, and it would be a mix of low-rise apartment buildings, single family homes, and 3-6 flats with a lot of parks and trees and no "food deserts."
With that many more people in the city, there'd be more jobs just to support the additional services. And taxes would likely be the same or maybe could even be lower because we'd be making more efficient use of existing infrastructure. The North Red Line and the Brown Line, for example, may be close to maxed out, but the Forest Park branch of the Blue Line, the Pink Line, the Green Line and the Orange Line could easily handle double their existing ridership and maybe even triple with minimal infrastructure changes. So the CTA could increase their budget by 20% and capture 50% more operating revenue. Fares would rise less, and subsidies would be stable. And that's conservative. In reality, if there were twice as many things easily accessibly via the "L" and three times as many living near an "L" station, you'd probably see double the ridership at rush hour, but four times the off-peak ridership, resulting in something more like 150% more revenue for that 20% increase in budget.
So, while I agree that bigger is not always better, Chicago is set up to be a city with a density of about 2 times what it currently averages, a density that is a comfortable, efficient level of population for this city. There's no reason that a population that results in that density shouldn't be the target.
don't know about that contradictions and illogic, emathias. I can only offer you perspective. forgive me as this is something I've stated before.
I operate on the subject of population in Chicago based on what has happened to population of the human race. That's my paradigm.
I know we went thousands of years as a species with minimal growth and that started to change when we hit our first billion around 1800, our second around the time of the Depression. We're at seven now, arguably headed for 10 this century.
What we are doing is unsustainable and will kill off as a species as we destroy both planet and ourselves. There is no future for us on a finite earth with the path we follow.
Thus, I question pure population growth as a goal. Density indeed can serve purposes as you note with critical mass around rapid transit stations. But the basic paradigm and elevation of the concept of growth is still highly flawed.
Even our cities, which we celebrate for keeping surrounding lands free of sprawl can be disasters. Cities require the mass movement of materials as they "produce" nothing of their own. The need to extract and transport for and to cities is a dangerous thing.
That's where I'm coming from. Can we arguably make a more fortuetous situation for our city vis-a-vis others with growth? Yes. But in the end...and not necessary that far off of an end....what we are doing is highly destructive.
Earlier I mentioned how I like the commericals for the Smart....the whole BIG, BIG, BIG thing........and then small. Maybe we've reached the time we need to elevate the notion of small over big.
don't know about that contradictions and illogic, emathias. I can only offer you perspective. forgive me as this is something I've stated before.
I operate on the subject of population in Chicago based on what has happened to population of the human race. That's my paradigm.
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But you need to stick to the subject. The subject is the growth of population *in Chicago*. No one asked about the population of the globe at large, so why are you bringing it up? It's irrelevant.
Moscow is adding 200,000 people per year, despite the fact that Russia as a whole is losing at least that many per year. Likewise, Japan overall is losing population but Tokyo is still gaining population. The population of any given location is independent of the population of the country it's in or planet it's on. So there's really no reason for you to be confusing the issue.
Population growth for a city means that city has better opportunities than other options. It will draw people to it because it's better than alternatives. Growth in the context of cities has virtually nothing to do with organic growth through births, but about creating a place that people want to live in and will choose to live in.
If you do care about global population then you should care about quality of life for people, because infant mortality, quality of life and life expectancy are three of the biggest factors in determining population growth. When people know their babies will make it to adulthood and live healthy, fulfilling lives, they choose to have fewer kids. This is exactly why the Gates Foundation switched from focusing on providing birth control to the developing world to providing vaccines and health care. Short of physically forcing people to have fewer kids, the surest way to slow or stop population growth is to ensure that kids become adults and that adults are able to enjoy life.
Chicago already has good healthcare, so in a very real way, making sure Chicago offers an attractive place to people to make their life contributes to controlling global population growth even if Chicago's local population increased dramatically.
As for "small," when people lived in the smallest practical groups, the birth rate was necessarily higher because you needed kids to support you in your old age and would have extra kids in anticipation of some dying and prevention of being stuck with no care in your old age. In larger groups, care is shared and the need for "extras" is diminished. In modern cities, people can even choose to have no kids and know full well that there will be people available to care for them when they're old. Small is good for some things, but it has very little to do with controlling global population growth and in many ways small localities translates into more population growth.
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