Yonah Freemark just launched the biggest expansion of transit network mapping on Transit Explorer and I built a new feature for TE that allows users to visualize the size of a network by decade from 1970 to today.
When looking at a region of the world, change the era of transit network that you’re seeing by selecting a decade from the dropdown menu under the “Change the era” heading. In a moment, the map will automatically refresh.
I’ll show you three cities:
Salt Lake City
Hong Kong
São Paulo
Salt Lake City
The Utah Transit Authority opened its first modern light rail line in 1999 from Salt Lake City to the southern suburb of Sandy. It opened the second line, from downtown Salt Lake City to the University of Utah, in 2001, in time for the 2002 Winter Olympics. Some games and ceremonies were held at the university. FrontRunner commuter rail opened in 2008, and the third light rail line, to the airport, opened in 2011 and various line extensions opened in 2013. A BRT route that opened in 2018 in Provo is also mapped but not shown while a BRT route in Salt Lake City is shown under construction in 2024.
In 1970, the only rail transit that Hong Kong had were a tramway on Hong Kong Island and the East Rail Line, which opened in 1910 and was electrified in 1983. Every decade since there was a new line or two on the Hong Kong MTR network, culminating in the ten lines you see in 2024.
In 1970, São Paulo’s metropolitan network, Metrô, didn’t exist, but it had six regional train lines operated by three railroads – these kinds of trains are shown in brown on Transit Explorer. The metro, shown in blue, began in 1974, and now has six lines (including one monorail line) while the regional train network was modified to five lines. São Paulo saw its first bus rapid transit (BRT) line added in 1988, but added four more BRT lines since then – just five of the over 900 bus routes operated by EMTU.
Update: This ordinance passed out of licensing committee on Monday, January 22, 2024. Also, the link to the ordinance is not working and I can’t find another way to link to it on the City Clerk’s legislation database. The version that passed out of committee reduces the radius from 2 miles to 1 mile and reduces the threshold for fresh and frozen food to avoid the radius minimum from 40 percent to 10 percent.
Update 2, February 22, 2024: A substitute ordinance was passed by City Council yesterday; the thresholds described in the paragraph above were established but the distance separation clause was amended so that only dollar stores of the same owner are banned within one mile. In other words, and this is dependent on the definition of “controlling person” in the code at section 4-4-005, a Dollar General could not open within one mile of a Dollar General or a Dollar Tree, but a Family Dollar could. A new map is shown at the end.
Ald. O’Shea (19th Ward) has proposed an ordinance with 35 cosponsors that would ban dollar stores within two miles of another dollar store and within 1/8th mile of an “R” zoning district. The ordinance number is O2023-0004978; read the PDF of the proposed ordinance.
The ordinance would amend the zoning code in chapter 17 as well as add business license regulations in chapter 4 of the Municipal Code of Chicago. The new business licensing section would establish strict rules on “excessive loud noises” and trash accumulation at dollar stores, and even regulate what people outside the store could be doing, as well as require a site plan review by the planning and transportation departments (something usually only required when there is a driveway, drive-through, or larger development).
The city codes would include dollar stores under the new definition of “small box retailer”, which excludes Walgreens and gas station mini marts.
Specifically, “small-box retailer means a retail store (a) with a floor area between 5,000 and 17,500 square feet; (b) that sells at retail an assortment of physical goods, products, or merchandise directly to the consumer, including food or beverages for off-premises consumption, household products, personal grooming and health products, and other consumer goods; (c) that continuously offers and advertises a majority of the items in their inventory for sale at a price less than $5.00 per item; and (d) that does not: (i) contain a prescription pharmacy, (ii) sell gasoline or diesel fuel, (iii) primarily sell specialty food items, or (iv) dedicate less than 5% of shelf space and display areas to food sales.”
The proposal’s purpose is spelled out in the preamble, which makes some judgements about the prevalence of dollar stores in Chicago.
WHEREAS, The City of Chicago (“City”) is a home rule unit of government under Article VII, Section 6(a) of the 1970 Constitution of the State of Illinois and, as such, may exercise any power and perform any function pertaining to its government and affairs, including, but not limited to, the power to regulate for the protection of the public health, safety, and welfare; and
WHEREAS, There is a proliferation of small-box retailers, such as Dollar Tree, Family Dollar (which is owned by Dollar Tree), and Dollar General, in urban areas, including the City, where small-box retailers are clustered in and around South and West Side neighborhoods; and
WHEREAS, Although small-box retailers can fill a need in communities lacking basic retail services, growing evidence suggests small-box retailers are not merely a byproduct of this economic distress, they can often be a cause of it; and
WHEREAS, By saturating communities, particularly majority-Black urban neighborhoods, with multiple stores, small-box retailers’ business strategy often makes it impossible for independent and local grocery stores to open, or, indeed remain open, in a community; and
WHEREAS, Small-box retailers are not a meaningful alternative to local grocery stores, often devoting minimal, if any, floor space to fresh, wholesome foods, and offering low-cost, single serving, highly processed foods that are in actuality much more expensive per ounce; and
WHEREAS, In addition to these negative economic impacts, small-box retailers also tend to attract higher inc dences of crime, theft, and other negative effects on the public health, safety, and welfare, suc as littering and the accumulation of waste far exceeding the dumpster space provided by small-box retailers; and
WHEREAS, Regulating small-box retailers is necessary, desirable, and in the public interest by promoting stronger, more resilient neighborhoods and protecting the public health, safety, and welfare of our Cit ; now, therefore:
If this ordinance went into effect, new dollar stores would only be allowed in the green areas of Chicago. Additional areas would open up if the proposed dollar store would dedicate ≥40 percent of shelf space to fresh or frozen food. This map only considers “Big Dollar” stores and not independent dollar stores that might meet the parameters in the proposed ordinance.
The map below shows 150 locations of Dollar Tree, Dollar General, and Family Dollar stores. Family Dollar is part of Dollar Tree.
The green areas show the parts of Chicago where a new dollar store that follows the default “two mile minimum” rule would be allowed. The proposed ordinance has a provision that if 40 percent or more of shelf space is dedicated to fresh or frozen food then that new dollar store only has to be one mile away from any other dollar store.
It’s possible that dollar store companies could erect stores that are smaller or larger than the floor area standard in the proposed ordinance that would otherwise capture them into the “small box retailer” definition.
A map based on the approved substitute ordinance, showing 1 mile buffer areas, is shown below.
How many houses, buildings, units, and lots are vacant in Chicago depends on how you measure them. I’m aware of at least five ways to measure housing vacancy, using publicly available data, each with varying degrees of accuracy and coverage.
Each measurement method has its own TAKEAWAY so you can quickly scan to see how many units are potentially vacant. The bottom line, I believe, is that the vacancy rate in Chicago is quite low and vacant units is not a viable and scalable source for the additional housing that Chicago needs. However, I am compelled to add that it’s unclear how many additional homes Chicago needs because there are no analyses that uncover the shortfall or recommend a goal production number.
1. Vacant units, per Census bureau
The US Census Bureau says there are 1,258,704 dwelling units in Chicago, and that 10.2% of them are vacant (128,796 units). The Census bureau has two types of vacant, which generally break down into “listed for rent or for sale and temporarily unoccupied” and “all other reasons”. This data comes from American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year survey.
The Census says 37.3% of Chicago’s vacant units are “temporarily unoccupied” (38,450 units) and 62.7% are vacant for “other reasons” (64,589 units). This data comes from ACS 1-year data, which has larger margins of error than the 5-year survey data. The “other reasons” are what I am calling “truly vacant”.
The most common survey response within “other reasons” is that the unit is currently being renovated or repaired (20.2%). Additional top “other reasons” are:
Currently being renovated/repaired: 20.2%
Personal/family reasons: 15.6%
Needs repairs: 14.6%
Preparing to rent/sell: 13.1%
Abandoned/possibly condemned: 10.1%
Up For Growth, a national policy organization, has assessed that Chicagoland has an underproduction of 129,218 homes (using 2019 data), and about 3.3 percent of the existing housing stock in the region. Assuming that 80 percent of this underproduction is “assigned” to the City of Chicago, then this underproduction represents about 1.6 times the number of vacant units (vacant for any reason in the Census Bureau’s survey) that likely exist in Chicago.
TAKEAWAY from #1: Fewer than all 64,589 units are “truly” vacant, however. About 21,508 of those units are purportedly being renovated or repaired and will be rented or sold soon.
A large number of the remaining 43,081 “truly” vacant units are unlikely to join the rental or sale market soon. Assuming that all of these 43,081 vacant units are rented or sold then Chicago, using that 80 percent assignment of the 129,218 underproduction, would still have an underproduction of 60,294 homes.
2. Vacant units, per Chicago’s Vacant Building Registry
From a February 2023 snapshot of the Chicago Vacant Building Registry, which requires landlords to register buildings as vacant once they are vacant for more than 30 days, there were 6,521 dwelling units that were reported by owners as vacant. Comparing this to the above Census bureau figure that nearly 65,000 units are truly vacant, this would mean that 90% of vacant units are not registered in the VBR.
The reasons for vacancy were not included in the VBR data I received from the city. Also, these units are likely already included in the Census figure above and not in addition to.
TAKEAWAY from #2: There are at least 6,500 vacant dwelling units in Chicago.
3. Buildings reported as vacant to 311
Chicagoans can report to 311 that they suspect a building to be vacant. There is no link to building violation citations or feedback on these reports as to whether the suspicion was founded by a city worker.
Notice how the number of reports dropped by about half from 2022 to 2023. I don’t know if there are fewer suspected buildings to be reported, fewer people are reporting buildings, or there are barriers to reporting and collecting the reports.
TAKEAWAY from #3: This data is probably not reliable to understand the number of vacant buildings in Chicago.
4. Buildings cited as needing to be registered in the Vacant Building Registry
In 2023, Chicago Department of Buildings inspectors cited 24 buildings with a violation for not being registered in the Vacant Building Registry.
TAKEAWAY from #4: If about 90% of vacant units are not registered then there are drastically few citations being issued to force registration.
5. Vacant lots, per Cook County Assessor Office
The CCAO classifies nearly every property in Cook County. The classification 1-00 represents vacant lots. At present there are 32,207 vacant lots in Chicago. 22,645 of these (70.3%) are in “R” zoning districts and allow only residential uses. Another 4,566 lots (14.2%) are in “B” and “C” neighborhood mixed-use zoning districts.
TAKEAWAY from #5: Tens of thousands of new construction homes could be built on vacant lots.
Addendums
In its Chicago monthly market update (from January 2024) for the multifamily housing sector, Colliers brokerage reported that the Chicago MSA “has a vacancy rate of 5.3%, which is below the national rate of 7.6%”.
Brookings Institution posted an article (in October 2024) describing other sources for housing shortage estimates, from The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), Freddie Mac, Moody’s Analytics (Mark Zandi), and National Association of Realtors (NAR). Brookings found that, nationally, the United States is short 1.5 to 5.5 million homes, according to the four sources.
A 2018 article from Freddie Mac determined that “the current pace of building is not enough to meet demand” and that 370,000 fewer units were built in 2017.
Danielle Allen is a professor of public policy at Harvard University. She also started the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard. Danielle was interviewed on the California YIMBY “Abundance” podcast, published December 21.
Danielle said something that I thought was extremely relevant to understanding why the way decisions on Chicago land use and zoning are made is defective and leads to bad outcomes (including segregation and lack of housing in higher-resource neighborhoods ).
Before I excerpt from the interview, here are three summaries of how Chicago land use and zoning decision making processes are, as I said, “defective”. They come from myself, Chicago Area Fair Housing Alliance (CAFHA), and the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development (better known as HUD).
My own summary: There are 51 ways – at least – to legalize housing in Chicago. The first is the collection of ordinances, regulations, and processes administered by City Hall (as well as the division of power within City Hall amongst the mayor’s office and the departments, and the influence exerted by same); the other 50 are the individual and idiosyncratic ways of the 50 alderpersons. Projects are entitled (approved) on a project by project and lot by lot basis. Every lot is zoned and its zoning district is fungible depending on if the local alderperson supports the change.
CAFHA: “The City of Chicago’s longstanding policy and practice of ‘aldermanic prerogative’ – whereby the City of Chicago delegates to the City’s 50 aldermen and alderwomen (“aldermen”) unfettered power over zoning, land use, city lots, and public financing, in order to decide where, if, and how affordable housing is built in their wards – discriminates on the basis of race, color, national origin, familial status, and disability, and perpetuates segregation on those bases, notwithstanding the city’s certifications it would overcome such segregation. These same policies and practices violate the City of Chicago’s duty to affirmatively further fair housing.”(CAFHA et. al. submitted this complaint to HUD in November 2018)
HUD: “The Department’s investigation indicates that the City affords each of its fifty wards a local veto over proposals to build affordable housing, and that many majority-White wards use the local veto to block, deter, or downsize such proposals. As a result, new affordable housing is rarely, if ever, constructed in the majority-White wards that already have the least affordable housing. The City acknowledges this effect of the practice, its historical use for the purpose of creating and maintaining patterns of racial segregation, and its continued use as a tool that effectuates racially motivated opposition to affordable housing. The City’s use of the local veto despite understanding its effects raises serious concerns about the City’s compliance with Title VI and Section 109.
“The Department understands that the local veto over affordable housing proposals is not a law or formal policy, but a practice arising from (1) the requirement that City Council approve all such proposals, and (2) the custom of only approving those proposals which have the affirmative support of the alderman for the ward in which the development is proposed. This investigation identified three ways in which aldermen wield the local veto to block, deter, or downsize proposals to build affordable housing:” [read the rest of they response to CAFHA’s complaint]
On to the interview!
This excerpted part of the conversation starts at 11:14.
Screen grab from the interview of Danielle Allen by Nolan Gray and Ned Resnikoff.
Ned Resnikoff: Nolan [Gray] and I have talked a lot about this idea that we need to, we need to bring back actual planning. So the idea that you have a sort of democratic process for for a citywide general plan, but then if something if a project conforms to that general plan, it’s like, well, the city, the community has already sort of planned to allow for that. And so I guess I’m curious how you think about that, like, is there? Is there a role for project by project planning? Or is it the sort of thing that should happen more at the citywide level or neighborhood level?
[Note that Chicago does not have a general or comprehensive plan. Another way to look at this is that Chicago’s zoning map is its comp plan.]
Danielle Allen: I think it can be either city wide or regional, it sort of depends on what the issue is, or neighborhood. If you take the case of land use in renewable energy contexts, it could literally be like the folks who sort of share the same wind footprint. And so do you think this is the hardest? Well, there’s many hard problems in this space.
But one of the hardest problems in the space is the fact that our current jurisdictional structures don’t always map the footprints of the affected community for a given issue.
[I bolded that statement. I think the issue where this is most relevant is housing production – the people who need or would use proposed housing is the affected community not mapped to the footprint of the Chicago alderperson’s jurisdiction and the application of that alderperson’s power is defined by one of 50 ways, leading to the outcomes of not building enough housing which are outlined in CAFHA’s complaint and HUD’s general agreement of the nature of the complaint.]
Danielle continues… So that’s the kind of thing I’m wrestling with, and my lab is working on, is kind of having concrete cases where that’s true. And then how do you start to actually give people access to a governance structure that aligns with the actual footprint of impact? And how would you make that work given the existing legacy jurisdictional structures? So I don’t think we have answers to that question yet. But I feel like that’s the problem we have to solve.
So for example, again, renewable energy is basically a land use issue, right? Because it takes so much more land to source energy through renewable sources, whether solar or wind. So at the end of the day, it’s like, anybody who thinks about land use, we need you in the kind of climate conversation because it is just fundamentally a land use question. I think what we’re working on is the different structures, that kind of collective ownership, so that the benefits that could come from harvesting the renewable energy resource that you are somehow connected to either because you’re upwind or downwind or someplace in between, but if the wind gets used, you’re going to be affected by it. You know, those kinds of things might give us some new governance structures that can kind of come in and help us break through some of our impasses. That’s the sort of thing we’re trying to figure out, to align the need for that participatory element that does deliver the appropriate kind of empowerment, but is also driving towards something effective.
Saturday, May 13, 2023, in the Netherlands on day 3 (day 12 of my trip).
Day 12
I had discussed with my friend that I wanted to go somewhere new and do something significant, likely distant from Rotterdam. I had long wanted to visit one of the Dutch islands that curves the country’s border in the North Sea from the area north of Amsterdam to Germany. The largest and easiest to visit one is Texel Island.
We left the house at around 8 AM to cycle to Rotterdam Centraal and ride the Intercity Direct train, with our bicycles, to Amsterdam Centraal station, where we changed to an Intercity train to Den Helder, a city at the tip of the Dutch mainland north of Amsterdam. The train arrived in Den Helder at 11 AM, where we picked up some snacks and cold sandwiches at Albert Heijn (the largest supermarket chain in the country), and rode over to the TESO ferry’s terminal.
Like many other ferries in the world, tickets are purchased only in one direction because of the assumption that you’re going to use the ferry to return (and Texel Island has no road crossings so a boat is the main way on and off). Another neat thing about this ferry is that pedestrians and bicycles are able to disembark and board simultaneously because outgoing bicycles are parked only on the right side of the boat and there is a one-way on and one-way off system for pedestrians and bicycles.
On the ferry
I wasn’t prepared to board this ferry. After we parked our bicycles in the designated area and went upstairs to the cabin I was floored at the cruise ship-like appearance. There was a self-service café, enormous bathrooms, a children’s play area, artificial trees, and a variety of seating options – single seats, seats with tables, couches to look out the side and couches to look out the front.
Ferry bike parkingArtificial tree inside the TESO ferry between Den Helder and Texel
After inspecting the map of cycle routes on the island my friend and I decided to ride around the whole island clockwise. (An advantage of riding clockwise that day was to have a tailwind in the second half of the journey, when we would be tired.)
On the island…
…we saw everything.
sheep
dunes
polders
Scottish Highlander cattle
forests
farms
tons and tons of e-bikes – I think that acoustic bikes were in the minority!
a lighthouse
beach cabanas
tulips
sea protection walls
passed through the towns of De Koog and De Cocksdorp
According to the tracking I did on Strava we rode 37.6 miles.
Heading home
On the return ferry my friend consulted the NS Travel Planner app to figure out the best itinerary of trains back to Rotterdam, as well as to figure out the time between the ferry’s arrival and the next train’s departure. It would be close, he said. We would need to exceed the Google Maps estimate of cycling time between the terminal and the station. And, he said, it’s likely that other people with bikes on this ferry also want to take the train and Dutch trains have a very small amount of space for bikes.
We cycled fast, and we made it onto the train about two minutes before departure. At Zaandam we changed to a Sprinter to Hoofddorp via Amsterdam Schiphol airport and at the airport station we changed to an (older) Intercity Direct train to Rotterdam. (The Intercity Direct train we took from Rotterdam in the morning was the new ICNG – next generation – set, and these trains have space for more bikes.)
An ICNG train at Rotterdam CentraalBays of 4 seats have a small tableCouches in the new ICNG trainMood lightingLuggage rack in the ICNG, in addition to the standard overhead racks. This train serves the airport and the new design should better serve airport passengers, and improve the comfort of everyone else not going to the airport who must encounter all of the luggage everywhere.
