The sky is falling

A couple of months ago, a blogger by the name of Hertz wrote a piece about Unecessary population loss in Lincoln Park. It got picked up by Crain's and splattered all over the web faster than cat pictures.
You can read it here:

http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20150323/OPINION/150329972/who-would-have-guessed-that-lincoln-park-was-seeing-population-loss
or here
http://danielkayhertz.com/2015/03/16/unnecessary-population-loss-on-the-north-side-is-a-problem-for-the-whole-city/

Ordinarily I have better things to do than debunk every blowhard on the internet, but now I have developers spouting it like chapter and verse and I want to go on the record as saying "this is unadulturated BS."

He noticed a slight decline in both the population and the housing unit count for the Lincoln Park community area between the 2000 and 2010 censuses. Rather than look closer at these numbers, he took it as proof of his thesis that zoning is killing the city and now McMansionization sucking up precious dwelling units. Then he ran around like Chicken Little yelling "the sky is falling"

How big were these losses, he didn't say, but the population loss amounted to 204 people (0.3% of the pop)
Given that the city on average lost 6.9% of it's population in the same period, I'd say that's pretty darn good.

http://www.cityofchicago.org/content/dam/city/depts/zlup/Zoning_Main_Page/Publications/Census_2010_Community_Area_Profiles/Census_2010_and_2000_CA_Populations.pdf

The housing loss was a whopping 534 units. But when you drill down to the actual data, the bulk of this loss (over 400 units) occurred in 3 census tracts dominated by the DePaul campus who started expanding and restructuring their planned development just before 2010. Hardly gentrification and more than adequately compensated by this project:
http://www.usa.com/IL0318325002001.html

Smithfield's 1237 West Dorm project. It came on line before the census and is so big it has it's own census block. It housed 481 people, but through the vagaries of census definition it only constitutes 5 housing units.

Here's a chart to illustrate the situation.

The red area indicates LP's unit count, the blue area LP's pop and the green area the city's pop (divided by 40 to bring it into scale)

Hardly the end of the world.

Certainly gentrification has consumed some units but it is a drop in the bucket and not necessarily a bad thing.
Lincoln Park is approaching the Units/mile it was designed for and now it's time to grow up. It's problem is not its unit count but its puny household size of 1.73. It's time to start procreating, maybe then they achieve a higher population density than Albany Park, a mature RS-3 district which, despite a population decline of over 10%, still manages a density 35% higher than Lincoln Park (which for the most part is zoned for densities 3 to 7 times as high).

The article also pines for the glory days of the 1950s but the author seems oblivious to the fact that in the fifties, Lincoln Park was a frickin slum. I imagine he pictures the fifties as all "Leave it to Beaver" and "Happy Days" but it wasn't, it was more like "Blackboard Jungle"
It would never have become a fashionable neighborhood until the Dept of Urban Renewal bulldozed half of it down.
Lets look at one census tract from the 1950 Census of housing.

It had 2447 DUs (it would be more now, until 1960 SROs, Residential Hotels and Rooming houses were each one DU)
300 of them had no heat
10% still used ice boxes and 5% had no refrigeration.
747 had no washroom, 337 had no running water at all.
Those were the days.
By 1970 it was down to 1700 DUs 20% of those were vacant.
You'll be happy to know that they all got running water. But 10 still used an outhouse
In 2010 it was down to 1477 DUs.
The good news is that the median rent went from $20 to $2000.

There is some kind of fantasy that Joseph and Mary are on the west side of Harlem waiting to live in Chicago but there is no room in the inn.
This notion that "if you build it they will come" is a fallacy
In reality we have about 99% of the DUs we had our peak in 1960 and the difference in household size doesn't explain the difference in population.

Except in Lincoln Park. If they got their Household size up to the current Chicago average they would have over 90,000 people living there.

You young people should be humpin' like bunnies. I don't know what the problem is, maybe you should try some candles or scented oils.

Paul K. Dickman


A kindred post for further reading
http://yochicago.com/crains-deeply-misleading-article-on-lincoln-parks-population/38674/

No highway in the sky

You know, I can't go to a meeting, or even have a discussion, about the Bloomingdale trail (AKA The 606) without someone asking the question, "When will they extend it to the river?".

I'm here to tell ya, quit askin'.

The answer to that question is "Not in our life times."

The people building it won't tell you that. When asked, they hem and haw around it like a politician being asked about taxes.
I'm not sure why they do that. One guess is that a lot of money for alternative transportation is backing the construction and they don't want to admit that it is the bicycle version of the Amstutz Highway (AKA The road to nowhere) until they finish this part.

The problem is that on the other side of Ashland the ROW makes a grade crossing with a commuter railway. In fact with two lines of the Metra UP. On the average week day, during park hours, over 130 trains cross there. About 1 train crossing every 8 minutes. A crossing gate isn't an option.

How about a bridge? To build a bridge to clear the bi-level rail cars to ADA standards (slope of 1 in 12 and landings every 30" in rise) will require ramps around 250 feet long. The good news is that there is enough land there to do that and connect to another underused track that crosses over Clybourn and runs directly to the river.

The bad news is that they don't have the headroom.

The expressway crosses over the Bloomingdale line about 60 feet from the Metra tracks. In fact the height of the expressway bridge at this point was designed specifically to to clear the loading guage of a boxcar on the Bloomingdale line. I estimate it to be no more than 20 feet above the railbed. But that doesn't matter, the trail bridge would need at least as much structure gauge to clear the commuter line 60 feet away.

60 feet, one landing. You will have a maximum of 57 inches of headroom when you pass under the Kennedy.

You could build a bridge that rises 10 feet under the expressway, turns 90 deg, goes another 125 feet, turns 90 deg again over the tracks and does it all over on the other side. This is a lot more complicated and involves rights of way they do not own.

In some ways, a viaduct would be a better solution. It only needs to be eight or ten feet deep. That would still be above the street level so drainage would be easy.  But you would need a bridge to support the rails. I can't imagine that happening without interrupting all rail traffic on those lines for at least a couple of weeks, Not bloody likely.

Getting the trail to the east side of the Metra tracks will probably cost more than all the other bridgework on the trail, and CDoT won't be doing much of it. Until a river trail runs all the way downtown, the impetus to fund such an undertaking will not exist.

Accept the 606 for what it is. A nice park, someplace to take a stroll on a sunny morning and maybe a bicycle shortcut from the "K" streets to the Metra station. But it's no highway in the sky.

Paul K. Dickman

Bicycle Birtherism

In Jan of 2014, The Tax Foundation published this study that showed that user fees on cars only paid 51% of road construction costs.
http://taxfoundation.org/article/gasoline-taxes-and-user-fees-pay-only-half-state-local-road-spending

This was bandied all over the Internet by the usual suspects as proof that auto-mobiles are a losing proposition and that non-drivers property taxes are subsidizing the drivers' lifestyle.

For what it's worth the original study was true, but they construed user fees pretty narrowly (MFT, tolls, licenses). That is like saying that the news stand price doesn't cover the cost of publishing magazines. Everyone knows that, like roads, other revenues makes up the bulk of their income.

In fact, the Tax foundation's previous study showed that cars only covered 1/3 of road costs because the felt that licenses and the Federal Motor Fuel Tax were not dispersed proportionately and shouldn't be called user fees.
http://taxfoundation.org/article/gasoline-taxes-and-tolls-pay-only-third-state-local-road-spending

A more in depth study from 2007  looked at a much wider range of revenue sources like sales taxes, fines and income taxes and corporate taxes from the auto and gasoline industries, and even this study showed that income and expenses were pretty close to even until you started adding intangible expenses like the wars in the Middle East.
http://ti.org/delucchiinpress.pdf

That may be how it plays in Peoria, but I'm here to tell you that's not the Chicago way.

Here in the Windy City, the auto-mobile is a major cash cow and my bona fides are as close as the city's 2015 budget.
http://chicityclerk.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/2015OV.pdf

I didn't try to track the path of the MFT or the City sticker revenues to their final destinations. That would be a fools errand, and frankly I don't care how the Department of Buildings justifies 6 full time employees being funded by the Illinois motor fuel tax. My approach was simply X amount of income comes from auto-mobile related sources and Y amount is spent on maintaining the roadway.

Income sources include, State, Federal and Municipal Fuel taxes, City sticker revenues, impound fees, Fines for parking and red light/speed camera infractions and a variety of taxes on taxis, parking lots, etc,. I ignored less verifiable sources like sales taxes on gasoline and cars, and property taxes on gas stations and parking lots.

Expenses are simply the gross budgets of CDoT and Streets and San, including infrastructure and administrative costs, minus trash pickup, rat abatement and those infrastructure projects solely for pedestrian, transit or bicycling. Certainly there are other costs, like fire and police calls related to autos, but these departments benefit from the roadway as well. The Fire Dept's budget would be a lot different if they had to limit each stations range to a distance they could transport their equipment on a rickshaw. A few years ago, (to double check a private traffic study), I took a series of rush hour traffic counts on North Ave. An unexpected observation was that 10% of all vehicles and 25% of all heavy vehicles, belonged to the city. Buses, garbage trucks, police cars, Water Dept dump trucks all depend on the pavement to do their job.

But enough of that, Here are the numbers.

Expenses:

+$258,865,234   Streets and San Total budget
- $156,645,516   Less Solid waste (but including street sweeping)
+$598,286,287   CDoT Total budget
 -$206,643,000   Less Bike, Transit, Pedestrian improvements

  $493,863,005  Total Auto spending


Income:
    $99,100,000 State MFT
  $205,100,000 Vehicle tax(Sticker, towing, impound)
  $188,000,000 Transportation taxes (City MFT, Garage, Taxi)
      $6,400,000 Motor Vehicle Lessor Tax
     $4,100,000 Municipal auto rental tax
     $6,400,000 Municipal Parking
  $256,000,000 Fines, Forfeitures, Penalties (auto related)
  $298,800,000 Infrastructure Grants (sourced from Fed or State MFT)

$1,063,900,000 Total Income

$570,037,000 Profit

Just for perspective, top income sources listed in the Budget are:
$1,299,000,000 Airports
$1,150,400,000 Water and Sewer
  $831,500,000 Property Tax Levy

So, the gross revenues collected, make the auto-mobile Chicago's 3rd highest income generator and the profits are on par with the $647,900,000  the city hopes to receive from its share of the State and local Sales taxes.

Paul K. Dickman