Author: Steven Vance

Chicago’s entitlement and permitting approval times are not nearly as bad as in Los Angeles

Researchers at ULCA studied permitting and entitlement approval times in Los Angeles. They are pretty terrible compared to Chicago.

tl;dr: Los Angeles, 500 days; Chicago, 180 days. Read on for some low-level discussion of our methodologies.

I learned about this development-slowing phenomenon from episode 59 of the Housing Voices podcast (one of my favorites). The paper – download it – was written by Michael Manville, Paavo Monkkonen, Nolan Gray, and Shane Phillips.

They found that the median time to permit for discretionary (i.e. not permitted as of right) developments in Los Angeles “transit oriented communities” (which are not equivalent to Chicago’s transit-served locations) was 495 days; the timeline was 747 days for by-right developments outside of transit oriented communities.

While my study is less rigorous, I programmed Chicago Cityscape to constantly calculate the time between the day the zoning change application is submitted to City Council and the day a relevant building permit for that project is issued.

I believe that this is roughly the same metric that their study used; however, it doesn’t account for potential variations between the two cities’ staff review processes and how much time a project in Chicago may be entertained by planning staff prior to a zoning change application being submitted to City Council.

I find that the median time to permit for discretionary developments in Chicago is 180 days. That’s compared to 495 days in Los Angeles!

This metric includes projects that (a) were approved by Chicago City Council within the last two years (the calculation is updated daily), (b) received a new construction or renovation permit having an estimated construction cost of $100,000 or more, and (c) was issued after the zoning change application’s approval date.

Both of our studies do not have information about the length of time a project spends in a “pre-approval” or “ideation” stage. And their study does not account for the time that a permit application (prior to issuance) is spent outside of a plan examiner’s review time (what Los Angeles calls “hold days”). However, my study accounts for the total time from permit application start to permit issuance date (because that is the value that the Chicago Department of Buildings published), so if their study accounted for that time then the number of days between application start and issuance would be even longer in Los Angeles!

Reading “climate-fi”

Climate-fi is a genre of novels in which the effects of climate change are central to the plot. I have become more of a fan of climate fiction commensurate with the frequency of books being published.

The first climate-fi story I read – before I knew the genre name – was “The Water Knife” by Paolo Bacigalupi. That came out in 2015 and it wasn’t until 2020 that I picked up the genre again.

Here are books I recommend:

  • The Water Knife explores the realistic issues of freshwater supply and who has the right to water sources in the Southwest. This is especially relevant to problems and discussions today, given that people in Arizona are having to buy water from the private market, governments are not approving proposed developments unless they come with new water sources, the state continues to usurp water from upstream freshwater sources, land use is single-use and sprawling, and historic water rights are still a source of conflict.
  • Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler. The protagonist and her family live in a tenuous gated community in the near future of a United States ravaged by climate change and other economic and political upheavals. She eventually travels towards a place to establish a better community based on a religion she invents.
  • Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson, opens in the “almost present” day describing a heat wave in South Asia during which the wet bulb temperature challenges the body’s ability to cool itself and many people die. A climate terrorist group forms to force the world to adapt to and mitigate climate change globally otherwise the poorest people will suffer the most during the crisis. (KSR personally sees cities as a climate change solution.)
  • Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson opens with a riveting story of the Dutch queen’s plane crashing in Texas and then winds around the world narrating seemingly unconnected climate change-related events. The story then focuses on how shooting sulfur into the atmosphere has an effect on how much energy of the sun reaches Earth, something that actually happened last year.

What climate fiction books and stories do you recommend?

“Termination Shock” by Neal Stephenson

Traffic calming around Chicago schools and parks

Reducing the number and speed of automobiles near schools and parks is a proven way to reduce the number of traffic crashes involving children, part of a practice known as “traffic calming”. In Chicago a key way to do that has been to “cul-de-sac” (which I’m using as a verb) a street to prevent through traffic (reducing the number) and preventing speeding (reducing the speed).

My study of this was inspired by the above tweet, where the person is accurate when they say, “it works with any street”. Indeed: Full access to the school or park and to every property on the block is maintained, but drivers are not able to go through while pedestrians and bicyclists can (another practice called “modal filtering“).

My favorite example in Chicago is Hadiya Pendleton Park, at 4345 S Calumet Ave. This project created two mid-block cul-de-sacs and a park in the middle of a block, using vacant city-owned land on both sides. Creating new open space is a common corresponding outcome of the cul-de-sac application, which is what occurred at Funston Elementary School (see the before and after aerial photos below).

two black and white aerial photos taken of Funston Elementary School, one in 1998 showing a 4-way intersection of McLean Ave and Central Park Ave and one in 2003 showing a cul-de-sac on McLean Ave west of the school and landscaped area between the cul-de-sac and the three-way intersection of McLean and Central Park.

Through Twitter I solicited additional examples of where the city has created traffic calming near schools and parks using cul-de-sacs. Examples were submitted by RolandEmily (who mentioned Funston), Matt, Steven, and another tweeter.

Using OpenStreetMap, Overpass Query Language, and Overpass Turbo, we can find all of the schools and parks that are within a specified distance of a cul-de-sac. It turns out there are 153 schools and parks in Chicago that are within 150 feet of a cul-de-sac. (This considers only schools, parks, and cul-de-sacs, tagged as “turning circles”, currently mapped in OSM, and I have not verified each of the 153 instances.)

Map showing parks, schools, and adjacent cul-de-sacs, the results of the Overpass Turbo query.
Map showing parks, schools, and adjacent cul-de-sacs, the results of the Overpass Turbo query. An inset map shows a zoomed in portion of the map to illustrate the different types of features captured in the Overpass Turbo query (specifically it shows Graham Elementary School and McInerney Park).

The query below will find all of the cul-de-sacs (mapped as “turning circles” in OSM parlance) that are in Chicago, all of the schools and parks in Chicago, and then all of the two categories of features that are within 45 meters of each other. (Run the query and show the map, which will always grab the latest data.)

/*
example from OSM wiki: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API/Overpass_API_by_Example
*/
[out:json][timeout:25];
// fetch area “Chicago” to search in
{{geocodeArea:Chicago}}->.searchArea;

// get cul-de-sacs
(
  node["highway"="turning_circle"](area.searchArea);
)->.turning_circles;

// get parks and schools
(
  way["amenity"="school"](area.searchArea);
  way["leisure"="park"](area.searchArea);
)->.schoolsParks;

// find parks and schools near cul-de-sacs
(
  way.schoolsParks(around.turning_circles:45);
)->.matchingSchoolsParks;

// find cul-de-sacs near parks and schools
(
  node.turning_circles(around.schoolsParks:45);
)->.matchingTurningCircles;

// output results to the map
(.matchingSchoolsParks; .matchingTurningCircles;);
out geom;

Read the three other blog posts I’ve written about using Overpass Turbo to quickly sift through and extract desired mapping data from OpenStreetMap.

Netherlands, day 2 (day 11 of the trip)

My friend and I took an afternoon ride around Zoetermeer and Bleiswijk, two suburbs of The Hague with 125,000 and 10,000 people, respectively. Read other posts from this trip.

Day 11

Friday, May 12, 2023 – 195 photos takenfind more on Flickr

  • I don’t remember what I did in the morning – I probably worked.
  • My friend and I left his flat on our bikes at 15:00 and met my other friend to eat at Mecca, where Zu, a neighborhood cat, wandered in.
  • After this late lunch my friend and I started our bike ride along the Rotte River (how Rotterdam got its name) towards Bleiswijk.
  • We biked atop a lot of dikes, through several rural neighborhoods, and past the Willem-Alexander Baan (a rowing course in an artificial lake).
  • We also biked under a temporary bridge. As I’ve written before I believe the Dutch are very good at building infrastructure, and that extends to temporary infrastructure as well including modular and prefabricated pieces like a bridge!
  • At one point it was time for a McFlurry. We turned off of the intercity bike path, through a comfortably large bike tunnel under a motorway, and into the McDonald’s parking lot, where was plenty of bike parking and e-bike charging points (I suspect that many of the bikes parked here belonged to the employees).
  • The McDonald’s was in a commercial area full of fast food restaurants and logistics and distribution centers nestled in one corner of a motorway interchange but throughout all of this was well-designed, separated bike and pedestrian infrastructure.
  • After the ice cream break we headed over to an odd new transit interchange station called Lansingerland-Zoetermeer. Here people can change between a small park and ride, a kiss and ride, buses, sidewalks, and bike paths, to a ground-level intercity train station (to The Hague or Gouda) or to an elevated light rail station to The Hague. Service to Rotterdam is also possible via two bus routes to a nearby Rotterdam Metro station but I’m not sure why you would have gotten into a situation where you would need that connection.
  • (I’m calling it light rail for simplicity, but if you’re looking at how the street and sub-street rail transit networks overlap in Rotterdam-The Hague-Delft you could get easily confused. For example, there is a Rotterdam Metro [light rail] line to The Hague but which is also called RandstadRail, a RandstadRail line from The Hague to Zoetermeer, trams in The Hague, and different trams in Rotterdam, as well as a single tram line from The Hague to Delft but no Rotterdam Metro and no Rotterdam tram to Delft – there are Sprinter and Intercity services instead.)
  • I think something that is really neat about the station’s design: if you arrived there for the first time via the light rail then it would be very hard to tell that you would be standing on a bridge over an intercity track and a motorway after disembarking. The station looks very typical and uses vegetation and a wall to block the sound of high-speed vehicles below.
  • Next we arrived into Zoetermeer, greeted by two cats. (There are a lot of cats roaming the traffic calmed neighborhood streets in the Netherlands.)
  • Zoetermeer is a “new town”, in that its prime development period was in the second half of the 20th century after many urban planning principles had changed, the automobile was a major factor in city design, and European countries were still rebuilding many cities after World War II – growth started in earnest in the 1960s when new housing was needed.
  • The population growth, in typical modern Dutch fashion, happened in a way that planned residential, commercial, and retail land uses, transportation, and green space, in concert with each other. These compact and mixed-use patterns – where most of what one needs is accommodated for or provided nearby – are repeated easy to discern even if you only visit a few towns, including Zoetermeer, Almere, Houten, Diemen, and the newer, outer parts of Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and Utrecht.
  • At this time we had been cycling for less than three hours but it felt like longer because of the seemingly large gaps between stops (in fact, they’re not that large, it’s that they’re separated by wide expanses of open space or industrial areas rather than continuous low-density built up area like you would see in the United States).
  • We turned around to go home, via another way (see the Strava map below). The return route took us on a path that paralleled the bus-only road that carries two routes between the Lansingerland station and the nearest Rotterdam Metro station at Berkel en Rodenrijs, adjacent to where I was trainspotting yesterday (as well as some intermediate stops to reach the greenhouses).
  • The bus-only road has a self-enforcing design. There is a “bus sluis”, or “bus sluice”, or “bus gate” (see my photo), which is a dip in the road where car wheels go but a height increase in the road between the wheel area. This means that if you’re driving a vehicle that is not high off the ground like a bus or a farm equipment you will severely damage the underside of the vehicle.
  • Oh, yeah, this area is the greenhouse zone of the country where lettuce and tomatoes and other vegetables are grown for the country and for export, propelling the Netherlands to have one of the highest agricultural GDP in the world.
  • Amidst the greenhouses is the HSL (the high-speed line between Amsterdam Schiphol airport and Rotterdam Centraal). I stopped at least once to take some photos and videos of the Thalys, Intercity Direct, and Eurostar trains that ply this route.
  • Along the route I saw what looked like an amazing playground called Tuin van Floddertje. Floddertje is a children’s book character, a girl who gets into all kinds of dirty messes immediately after washing up.
  • We rolled back into the neighborhood where my friend lives and said hi to “Loofje”, the yellow tabby cat that I named “Little Loaf” using a fake Dutch word I invented that’s pronounced “loaf-juh”.
  • This is also when I saw the neighborhood square that helps make this a complete neighborhood, since it’s 20 minutes away from the city center.

Get yourself an air purifier

The air quality in the Midwest sucks a lot right now, due to smoke coming from forest fires in Canada. You need an air purifier to clean the air inside your home.

I’ll describe what I personally look for in an air purifier and guide you to a couple of models. I can only recommend the one I have, since it’s one of two that I’ve used, but I would rather have a different model.

I use a Coway Airmega 200S. I bought it for about $180. I bought this model because it can cover a large room (my entire studio is about 550 s.f.), has “auto” and “eco” modes, an air quality sensor, and three filters (a washable screen, a charcoal filter to remove odors, and a HEPA filter).

ComEd customers should look for Energy Star-rated air purifiers because there is a $50 rebate. Even if the manufacturer doesn’t specify or show the blue logo, it may still be rated, including the Coway Airmega 200S!

What I look for in an air purifier

  • Auto mode. I want the machine to have a sensor to turn itself on to clean the air when it detects the air is dirty, and to run at the fan speed commensurate with the dirtiness.
  • Eco or sleep mode. This runs the fan at an even slower speed and I use this when I’m not home.
  • Washable screen or pre-filter. This catches larger objects like dirt and hair and presumably prolongs the life of the other filters. It also satiates the desire to clean and know that things are clean after you’ve cleaned them.
  • HEPA filter. This should go without saying. If it doesn’t have this, it shouldn’t be labeled an air purifier.
  • Reasonable filter prices, and available. I am skeptical of the proliferation of identical looking air purifiers on Amazon and their ability to consistently stock replacement filters six months and 12 months from now. I don’t want to be in the position where I’m questioning if a given filter is the right one for my air purifier model.
  • Filtration rate, expressed as CADR (higher numbers are better). There are many ways that air purifier companies will describe this, the most common or first shown being the floor area of a room. The floor area, however, is not a filtration rate. My favorite way is when the manufacturer has a graphic showing how many air changes per hour the air purifier can manage.

In the graphic below, the air purifier was advertised as being able to cover a living area up to 1,837 s.f., which is the size of a four-bedroom apartment, but it could only change the air once per hour, which is too slow to respond to changes in air quality. On the other hand, in a 527 s.f. space, which is about the size of my studio apartment, the air purifier can manage five air changes per hour – I think that’s more than sufficient.

Which air purifier should you get

Note that many air purifiers have a “smart” option, which means they come with wifi and an app. Sometimes these apps connect to Google or Alexa voice assistants. Rarely will they connect with Siri, due to higher Apple licensing or certification costs. This is unnecessary but could be fun to use to track PM2.5 levels in your home if you don’t have a standalone air quality measuring device.

All models listed are Energy Star rated and are ones I would get my for studio apartment

IKEA also sells air purifiers but I haven’t determined if they are Energy Star rated.

ComEd customers can apply for their $50 rebate as soon as they purchase an Energy Star rated air purifier.