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/