Last November I admitted I started listening to podcasts and I shared my list of two essential and two extra urbanism podcasts. Since then I’ve added three more podcasts to my rotation.
Chicago urbanist. High-rise student housing and conference center, a 131-year-old elevated transit line (although running over the Harrison Curve track that was built in 2003 to replace two 90-degree turns), and an undeveloped surface parking lot.
Listen to the episodes where they interview my friend Eric Allix Rogers about what he appreciates in Chicago, and my sometimes conspirator Emily Talen (also an urban geography professor at University of Chicago). Other Chicagoans, Natalie Moore and Mary Wisniewski, have also been interviewed. Episodes are short!
This is one of Bloomberg media’s podcasts, with hosts Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal. I mostly appreciate the episodes where they explain financial topics I still have a hard time understanding, and I really liked the recent episode where they interviewed Saule Omarova to talk about the FDIC and the Federal Reserve.
Tracy and Joe also interviewed Stephen Smith and Bobby Fijan to talk about apartment building designs, unit layouts, and why the double-loaded corridor is fine for hotels but not fine building apartments for families.
This should have gone in my previous post because this is another urbanism podcast. The title is a pretty good summary and the three hosts – Sarah Goodyear, Aaron Naparstek, who cofounded Streetsblog, and Doug Gordon – discuss the many, many ways that cars ruin cities.
Currently, the Lightfoot administration has proposed spending about $188 million to support the construction of 318 affordable dwelling units in three office and hotel buildings that would accomplish a couple of goals. The housing would reduce the segregation of downtown living, and it would increase the population of downtown which could use more people to support all of the businesses and infrastructure that already exist.
The building at 111 W. Monroe St. From Block Club Chicago: “This proposal by Prime/Capri Interests, LLC, will create 349 apartments, 30 percent affordable, plus a hotel on the lower floors and 130 spots of underground parking. The hotel would be created without city funding, developers said.”
the city projects it will generate $120 million in in 2022 (source)
the city spent $76 million in 2021 ($63 million was surplused and the rest was spent on plans, studies, and “Costs of construction of public works or improvements”)
That’s a lot of money that the mayor’s office gets to choose how to spend!
It’s unlikely that the Lightfoot administration can rally the necessary approvals to dedicate the money before Brandon Johnson and a new city council is sworn in on Wednesday, May 15.
If the Johnson administration wanted to review the alternatives to that proposal, what would those be?
The alternatives
Spend $188 million to support the construction of 318 affordable units
Surplus the money; if the city did this, it would receive $44.81 million into the general budget.
Spend the same or less money on…something else. This could include beautifying the street or attracting residential development through another strategy that doesn’t spend the money on buildings construction (according to suggestions in a Crain’s article).
Do nothing. The money would stay in the account, grow, and generate interest.
What are other ways to spend the money?
With the cash flow shown in the “how much money” list above, it seems that the city could accomplish alternatives 1 and 2.
Chicago should have a rental registry, a database of dwelling units that are rented to tenants, for at least two reasons:
The city can know things about the rental units, including how much they cost, where they are, and if any are vacant and could be occupied if only people knew they were available and how to get in touch with the owner.
The city can know who the owners are and contact them to issue citations or advise them, or fill out for them, emergency rental assistance during pandemics and other times of necessity.
Building and administering a rental registry from scratch would be very expensive – probably tens of millions to start and more than one million annually.
I propose a kludgethat uses existing databases and modifies existing standard operating procedures amongst a small group of Cook County and Chicago agencies. A kludge is a workaround. It has other meanings and an uncertain etymology.
An ideal rental registry helps solve at least four problems:
A 9-unit apartment building in Little Italy is undergoing renovation.
The kludge has four parts
1. Incorporate data about the number of units declared on Real Estate Transfer Tax forms (which in Cook and many other counties are transmitted to the Illinois Department of Revenue digitally).
There is already a city office that reviews or audits these forms looking for instances where the buyer or seller incorrectly claimed certain exemptions from RETT, because of how the city can lose revenue. That office can also enforce that the number of units was correctly entered on the form.
2. For banks that hold city deposits, amend legislation to require that their newly issued or refinanced mortgages specify the number of units in the required submitted documentation. The ordinance that regulates banks that hold city deposits was amended a few years ago to require that they report how many loans they issue in Chicago for both commercial and residential properties.
Databases 1 and 2 are checks for each other.
3. “Hire” the Cook County Assessor’s Office to create and operate the database for the unit count data from 1 and 2 (likely as an augmentation of their existing database).
The database would also store any data the CCAO collects through the commercial valuation data they obtain from third party sources as well as from the owners who volunteer it (Assessor Kaegi is already collecting and publicly publishing this information).
At this point, with features 1, 2, and 3, we are assembling a pretty broad but incomplete record of where rental units are. It will be come more complete over time as properties transfer (sell) and the details of the transfer (sale), and the properties themselves, are recorded.
It doesn’t have a clue as to the rental prices.
4. The Cook County Assessor’s Office creates new property classifications. Property classifications allow for the comparison of like buildings for the purpose of establishing assessed values for all properties that are not tax exempt.
One of the most common classifications in Chicago is “2-11”, for apartment buildings with two to six units. This means that, generally, the value of the ubiquitous two-flats and three-flats get compared to other each other and sometimes to four-flats, etc.
I suggest that there should be a few new property classifications, but I have only one idea so far: classify limited equity and Chicago Housing Trust properties differently.
Bickerdike is one organization that built a lot of limited equity row houses and detached houses in the 1990s and 2000s but I am not aware of a publicly accessible database identifying them.
These houses represent permanently affordable housing and we should have a better system to track them!
This screenshot of part of a spreadsheet is the apartments data that the Cook County Assessor’s Office collected for the 2021 tax year.
How broad is the kludge?
Using the Real Estate Transfer Tax data from 2022 Q1 to Q3, there were 3,550 buildings in Chicago having 22,217 units transferred. (I don’t know how many were arms length transactions, meaning they were sold to new owners.)
In the CCAO’s apartments data collected for the Rogers Park Township, there is semi-detailed information about 715 buildings that have seven or more apartments comprising 18,541 units. Details include the unit size breakdown by bedroom count.
Chicago has 556,099 rented dwelling units in buildings with two or more units (according to the ACS 2021 1-year estimate). In my limited analysis I’ve already found data about 7.4 percent of them, and that’s only for part of the city [1].
Notes, limitations, and updates
[1] There may also be duplicates between the buildings in the RETT database and the CCAO apartments dataset.
These databases would not have information about detached (“single family”), single-unit semi-detached (rowhouses and townhouses), and condos used as rentals. This severely limits the coverage of information. As it stands, Chicago Cityscape has data coverage of unit count information for about 37 percent of multi-family (apartment) buildings.
5th Ward Alderperson Desmond Yancy proposed an ordinance that would establish a rental registry (O2023-0004085). The rationale for such is shown in the screenshot below. (Go directly to the ordinance’s PDF.)
Screenshot of the proposed rental registry benefits.
I wouldn’t have guessed that this city simulation video game turned eight years old last month. I’ve known about it for a long time, and I even subscribe to the r/CitiesSkylines subreddit to see screenshots that people post showing their cities.
The screen grab above isn’t mine. It looks like u/Tramter123 got carried away trying to recreate Any American City and built a lot of surface parking lots. I will need to learn how that affects traffic flows and land values in the game’s mechanics.
What changed is that last week I was having dinner with a friend and he described the videos published by City Planner Plays, a practicing urban planner who resides in Madison, Wisconsin. I watched a video with a title that caught my attention (it was about monorails and trams) and a couple of days later I decided to try it out.
My first gaming session was a little frustrating or stressful…I don’t think having studied how cities happen and how they happened has given me any insight into how to be successful at this game.
I’m still learning how to manipulate the game yet I’m already familiar with the process of this game that it shares with many others: as something grows, you unlock more resources but have to respond to more needs. In Cities: Skylines, the population grows, a cemetery is unlocked, and then someone dies so you have to build a cemetery immediately.
In Rollercoaster Tycoon, the goal was to increase your park’s visitors by building more rides. As attendance grew so did the level of trash and the number of janitors that had to be hired, but sometimes you had to wait to earn more revenue because you couldn’t afford a third janitor yet.
My little town in CS is called Springvalley, which started with being connected to an expressway interchange. The water source is a river. I tried to build a quay and some waterfront property but the city is on a cliff and I wasted a bunch of money trying to level and reshape the earth.
Since Springvalley reached a population of 2,500 people this evening (during my second session of the day) the game unlocked transit. Okay, I think this is why I want to keep playing – I want to see if I can design a transit network bound by whatever constraints the game has implemented.
City-building in real life
I posed a couple of questions to myself after playing. City-building is kinda fun [yeah, duh] but is it possible to make real-life city building fun and more broadly enjoyed?
Relatedly, are there ways I can modify and use Chicago Cityscape to guide people through the local city-building process using the fun and mechanism games like Cities: Skylines (and its predecessor, SimCity)? Read Anthony Moser’s response.
Like you could be looking at a property map and be like "I want to make this parcel a grocery store/adu/ whatever" and get walked through what it would take: do you request a zoning change or file for a thing? Is there a series of required approvals or meetings?
It’s possible to use 1950 U.S. Census records to establish a number of historic dwelling units at a building in Chicago for the purposes of the city generating a “zoning certificate”. That’s a recognition of the number of legal dwelling units especially useful when that number of dwelling units is greater than the current zoning code allows. They’re required to be generated (i.e. requested from the city’s planning department) during the sale of a small-scale residential property.
This Chicago zoning certificate was generated the “normal” way (which I don’t know how to describe), while this blog post is about digging up evidence in case the normal way doesn’t affirm the number of dwelling units you want it to affirm.
However, based on a recent experience of a client of mine, the zoning certificate – while supposedly valid for one year – is subject to dispute later! Finding Census records showing the same or more dwelling units in a given building has helped re-establish the validity of the number of units stated in a zoning certificate.
It will take you some time to research Census records! (I would budget at least one hour. There is a painstaking process to find the webpage that has the enumeration (counting) sheets for the address you want, and it will take some time to sift through those sheets (and you may have to look at multiple pages for the same address).
Here are the steps involved
Find the enumeration district (ED).
Review that ED’s set of sheets in the National Archives 1950 Census website.
Page through and read every sheet until the address is found.
Tip: I recommend doing this, especially step 3, on a computer with the largest screen possible as it’s easier to view the scanned Census sheets that way.
Once you locate the ED (following the instructions in “Generate an ED number”) I would say stop reading the NYPL blog post.
Alternatively, for Chicago address lookups, you can browse these maps of the enumeration districts and then search for those ED numbers directly on the National Archives website.
2. Review that ED’s set of sheets
The instructions will advise you to use Steve Morse’s third-party Unified Census ED Finder (which is the most useful part of this process). The ED Finder has a wizard asking you to select state, county, city, and street name and cross street. It will then produce a set of one or more ED numbers under the heading, “1950 ED numbers corresponding to your location”.
A screenshot of the ED Finder “wizard”.
Tip: ED Finder will likely show you multiple ED numbers; you may need to look at all of them to find an address. I think this happens because the link between each enumeration district and a city’s streets is imprecise
Click each ED number, which opens a new tab in the ED Finder website with links to three different image viewers. These are databases where scans of microfilm are shown online. One of them, NARA, is public – that’s the National Archives & Records Administration. I recommend that one as it’s free and doesn’t require an account.
3. Read each enumeration sheet
Once you arrive on the NARA website click on the “Population Schedules” to reveal the enumeration sheets. Start paging and reading!
Tip: Street names are written vertically on the left edge of the page.
A screenshot of the 1950 Census database and website of NARA. It’s necessary to click the “population schedules” button to display the enumeration sheets.
The NARA viewer isn’t the best – it doesn’t allow you to make it full-screen; I was constantly having to zoom in to read the street names and house numbers.
A screenshot of a 1950 Census enumeration sheet with two annotations.
