Hyde Park Urbanist

Marshall Order

I was just mindlessly reading along in this article about how Pres.-elect Obama is taking his time naming a Secretary of Labor when I was suddenly reminded of a regret I'd forgotten:

(T)he power of the position had risen and ebbed since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s high-profile labor secretary, Frances Perkins, reaching lows of obscurity in Republican administrations, and perhaps its highest modern point under Jimmy Carter, whose labor secretary, Ray Marshall, was a well-connected union figure and an important inside player.

I took an undergrad class from Ray Marshall at the University of Texas in the early eighties.  Or, more accurately, half a class.  I'd started out with six classes, figuring I'd drop one and that was the one I ended up dropping-- for a stupid reason, really.  It was almost mid-term and we hadn't had any tests yet, so I was uncomfortable because I didn't know how I was doing.

I remember Secretary Marshall being a little unsure what he had to do to drop me from his roster.  Apparently, it hadn't come up for him yet.  And he didn't try to talk me out of it, probably figuring correctly that anyone who dropped his class wasn't worth wasting breath on. 

So, that's how I became a member of what's probably a very small-- yet definitely not elite-- group of people who've dropped a class taught by a former United States cabinet secretary.

Zulu Time Loses Warrior

I'm a big fan of James Fallows, Jr., a Beijing-based expert on Asian affairs and political rhetoric.  His blog is one of about a dozen I try to peruse daily and I read both Looking Into the Sun and More Like Us. 

About a year and a half ago, he complained about communist China's one big time zone, which means that folks in the western sections arise well before dawn to get to work, due to the nation's adherence to top-down governance & unilateral conformity.  If China asked me how to solve this problem, I'd suggest staggering the working day a bit, but Fallows made the mistake of suggesting that China split itself into more time zones.

I soon dashed off a note to him arguing the opposite-- that what the world needs is one big time zone,  Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), aka Zulu Time.  The concept of noon with the sun directly overhead was fine when most people worked outdoors and got by without our modern timekeeping devices.  In fact, our current time zones were established during the railway age, reducing the number of time zones from next-to-infinite to a mere 24.  We're now so globally connected that they cause more harm than good IMO and we should reduce from 24 to 1.

He graciously replied to my complaint and promised to sin no more.  Not only did he say he understood my arguments (he's a pilot), but his father was a longtime proponent of just such a change.  I basked in the knowledge that at least one other intrepid soul was out there advancing this important cause.

James Fallows, Sr., was taken from us last week.  My heart goes out to his friends & family.  And while I realize I could not possibly share the depths of their sorrow, I'd like to assure them that in this small way, I too feel the loss.

Lessons Learned: Hyde Park is Quite Walkable

I began this blog on October 11, 2007, and while researching & analyzing articles for it, I've learned a few things.  So, in no particular order of importance or subject matter, I thought I'd share a few of the most important lessons I've learned over the last year

Hyde Park is quite walkable-- in the sense that we have many amenities within walking distance.  But don't take my word for it; check out the Walk Score index for Chicago.  While the Walk Score index is far from perfect, it's at least an independent measure, one that treats all neighborhoods more or less alike.  We don't have to judge our neighborhood thru the prism of HP politics or even the anecdotal evidence of our daily lives.  Note that HP ranks 10th among Chicago's 77 neighborhoods for walkability.  We just edge out Logan Square and Lincoln Square, but finish a bit behind West Town and Rogers Park.

I have a few friends who had connections to Hyde Park, but have chosen to live in Lincoln Square, where rents seem pretty close to what they are here.  They've usually explained their choice by some variation of the "amenities I can walk to" argument.  But here we have an independent source saying Lincoln Square is actually more walkable.  So, what gives?

Well, check out the walkability scores for the neighborhoods around HP: Woodlawn 45th, Kenwood 25th and Washington Park 57th.  And the neighborhoods bordering Lincoln Square: West Ridge 18th, Edgewater 6th, Uptown 5th, North Center 17th, Albany Park 16th and North Park 19th.  Sure, it helps to have the Brown Line run thru the neighborhood, but having vibrant neighborhoods around your neighborhood helps, too.

Janette Sadik-Khan

The American Prospect writer Dana Goldstein contributes a lengthy & thoughtful feature article on Janette Sadik-Khan, the darling of progressive urban transportation folks like myself.  Sadik-Khan has been commissioner of New York City's Department of Transportation since April of 2007.  Goldstein writes:

Sadik-Khan's policies have attracted national attention from transportation reformers, and she has been discussed as a possible transportation secretary in Barack Obama's Cabinet. Last April, state legislators in Albany dealt a body blow to the Bloomberg agenda by scrapping congestion pricing. But Sadik-Khan has pressed on with a slate of piecemeal reforms that are transforming, however slowly, the landscape of New York.  As Ron Schiffman, a former commissioner of New York's De-partment of City Planning, puts it, "She's a guerilla bureaucrat."

Check out Streetfilms' Sadik-Khan archive.  I liked the short piece on bike rack designs.

Street Fight-- 2002 Newark Mayoral Election

I caught the documentary Street Fight Sunday morning via Netflix streaming.  Excellent entertainment, but also an interesting glimpse at a generational political struggle within majority African-American locales.  In the 2002 Newark mayoral election, a 32-year-old Rhodes Scholar Cory Booker challenged the 4-term incumbent Sharpe James.

Mayor James was part of a first-wave generation of African-American politicians, elected to the Newark city council just a few years after key civil rights legislation passed congress and was 66 years old by this 2002 election.  Councilman Booker graduated from Stanford and then Yale Law School before upsetting a coasting city council incumbent at 28 years old.  While he'd grown up in the suburbs, he chose to live in a housing project in his ward.  James drew endorsements from Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson while Cornell West and Spike Lee stumped for Booker.

I won't tell you how the election turns out, but I would like to call your attention to what seems like an important trend in African-American majority districts-- well-educated young blacks raised in majority white suburbs moving to inner city neighborhoods and taking an active role in politics.  That fits the Barack Obama life story, but also a few twenty-somethings I've run across in my southside travels.

Still, the two personalities-- James and Booker-- are larger than mere generalizations.  The intimidation the James campaign resorts to is as bad as I've ever heard documented in my lifetime in the United States.  And Booker's a commanding presence, incredibly focused on what I can only describe as a mission.

Hyde Park Urbanist Sexiest Man Competition

Not counting Donald Shoup, of course, it might well be Gordon Price.  I'll let Jude Galligan at Downtown Austin present the relevant argument:

In October I was fortunate to be included in a delegation of Austinites sent to Vancouver in order to learn about how they’ve managed rapid growth and become one of the most admired cities in the world. One of their council members, Gordon Price, delivered one of the most impassioned orations about smart urban planning.  He made one particular comment that struck me…

“Show me your parking ordinance, and I’ll show you what your city looks like!”

Jezebel bases their sexiest men list on a somewhat different set of standards-- a set I find it difficult to argue with, actually.

Texas

Daniel Libit at Politico has an interesting article about the loss of power the state of Texas will be dealing with now that President Bush is leaving and the Democrats securely control both houses of Congress.  As you may remember, when Republicans captured the legislature in Texas in 2002, Cong. Tom DeLay engineered an extremely partisan congressional redistricting measure.  Libit:

And while The Hammer’s redistricting crusade in 2003 certainly helped Texas Republicans at the time, it has come back to haunt the state under Democratic rule. If not for DeLay’s machinations, three Texas Democrats would likely be sitting pretty these days as chairmen of powerful House committees: former Reps. Jim Turner (Homeland Security), Martin Frost (Rules) and Charlie Stenholm (Agriculture).  Instead, they’re all now exes, living in Texas, having lost their elections in 2004.

In Illinois, of course, a similar opportunity presented itself in 2002 when we elected a Democratic governor.  We could have passed a partisan redistricting plan and gained a coupla-three Democratic representatives.  I argued at the time that we should not; let Texas be foolish on its own.  So, we protected our Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert for our own good.  Once he retired, his seat was won by Democrat Bill Fisher, Melissa Bean turned a north suburban congressional district blue and in 2008 the Joliet district has been picked up by Debbie Halvorson-- a three-seat shift that happened on its own without our choosing to sacrifice important regional influence.

And while I'm on the subject of Texas, let me point out Calvin Trillin's November 24th New Yorker article on Texas barbecue.  The relevance here is that the magazine Texas Monthly has successfully promoted a regional specialty (and we should look for lessons on how we could promote Hyde Park specialties like our Midwest-best retail books sector or the bike shops in the neighborhood or our huge collection of seminaries & churches).

I have mixed feelings about Texas barbecue because it ultimately relies on huge slabs of meat from domestic animals who are a leading cause of global warming-inducing methane.  I also try to keep my meat-eating in check just on humanitarian grounds.  However, great Texas barbecue presents a quandary that folks will have to resolve individually.  For me, it's like being in a monogamous relationship and then getting the chance to sleep with Antonio Banderas.  Choose the regrets you think you can live with.

Trillin's an excellent writer.  The characters who run Snow's BBQ in Lexington (and I know people who live there, btw) are folks I think we can all appreciate.  They have day jobs and only open on Saturday mornings until all the meat runs out.  When they found out they won Texas Monthly's best BBQ competition, they "just set there in each other’s arms and we bawled."

Ok, I know how they feel.  I'm crying inside, too.  If the market economy functioned the way it should, the best Texas BBQ would be available in franchises across the country, preferably with a storefront on 57th Street near Harper.

Biking Advocacy, 53rd St. Workshop, Transit Fare-Paying, an Alderman's Life

I'll get the griping out of the way first.  The organization formerly known as the Chicago Bicycle Federation has changed its name to the Active Transportation Alliance and broadened its mission to include walking & transit.  An impetus for these changes is that there are more grants available for broader missions.  I'm far from thrilled about this, but now there's an opening for a bicycle advocacy group who'll actually push our avid-cycler Mayor until he says no to something cyclists need.

I attended the 53rd Street visioning workshop last Saturday, but haven't written about it mostly because George Rumsey (photos here) and Eric Allix Rogers covered it very well.  The presentation made use of some of Eric's photos of the area and you should check out his blog on a regular basis-- it's in my Mutual Linking Society list on the left.  The pic here is one of George's-- that's Jay Mulberry in the blue denim shirt, Alderman Preckwinkle sitting with her back to us and me in the green shirt behind the architect/planner.  The not-so-hidden agenda of these workshops is to grease the skids for increasing Hyde Park's density by explaining its advantages.  I'm all for that, of course, but people who are skeptical of density should make a point of attending these workshops (preferably with an open mind) to press their points.

You may be able to pay your CTA fares with your own credit card in the next year or so.  The truly cool thing here is that where this has already gone into effect, the credit card companies have been very motivated to get on board (so to speak).  The card you use to pay your fares will likely be the first one you reach for to pay for other things.

I was shocked last year when a constituent complained to  Ald. Preckwinkle about a post office problem.  Seems like a federal issue to me.  I was even more shocked that the alderman has a protocol for handling post office issues.  So what else are Chicago aldermen expected to do?  Apparently, give out free turkeys!  Check out this ChiTownDailyNews interview with Alderman Hairston:

Q: What is the most frequent request you receive from residents?
 
A: There’s not one most frequent, there are several…Disabled handicap placards…more police, what are we giving away?  "Turkeys, are you giving away turkeys?”  After the winter it’s always potholes, in the summer it’s always tree limb trimming ... Come the fall people are moving in, so it’s temporary no parking signs.

I love Chicago.  Need something?  You aldermanic office offers one-stop shopping.

Matthew Yglesias: A Shoupista PowerVoice

(Update: Irene Sherr sent me this link to an article concerning a street parking plan that San Francisco will be trying out.  Note the Donald Shoup quote at the end.)

Think Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias gulps down the most delicious Kool-Aid ever and joins up with the Shoupistas:

...(T)o my way of thinking an enormous amount of good could be done if conservatives were more interested in applying really basic free market principles to transportation policy. For example, why not allow developers to build as much or as little parking as they want to build when they launch a new development? Why not charge market rates for curbside parking on public streets? How about fewer restrictions on the permitted density of development? Why not reduce congestion on the most-trafficked roads through market pricing of access? It happens to be the case that most of the people who are interested in these issues have liberal views on unrelated political issues, but the specific set of views at hand don’t draw on any deep ideological principles, it’s just application of basic economic thinking to the issues and, as such, is something that should be completely accessible to conservative politicians looking to show that conservative ideas can be relevant to the concerns (environmental concerns, quality of life concerns, economic growth concerns) of a set of people who are disinclined to think of themselves as conservatives.

Exactly.  I can come up with plenty of reasons to argue that the government should subsidize public transportation or education or health care, but parking?

Southside Rail Transit Gets Some Press

The newest issue of the Chicago Weekly features a cover article by Sam Feldman entitled "Next Stop: The future of the CTA on the South Side".  It's all about proposed rail enhancements-- the Red Line extension to 130th Street, a Green Line stop somewhere between 18th St. and Cermak, the Orange Line exension to Ford City and a little thing we like to call the Gold Line.

The Gold Line portion of the article focuses on the proposal itself.  However, anyone can come up with a plan, but it takes teams of people to get something like a rail enhancement done.  The organizers & leaders at SOUL deserve just as much credit as I do and our local politicians are moving this along nicely.