Tag: map

The sizable impact of requiring Chicago homeowners to get special use approval to build an ADU

Show your support for a version of the proposed ordinance that enables equal access to ADUs in all residential zoning districts and does not have the carve out explained below by emailing your alderperson and asking that they support ADU expansion into every residential zoning district without special use approval (reference ordinance SO2024-0008918, and then sign this Urban Environmentalists Illinois petition). I spoke about this issue with Mike Stephen on Outside The Loop radio on July 27, 2024 (skip to 6 minutes).

It’s possible that the Chicago City Council votes to approve an ADU expansion ordinance that would require about 38 percent of small-scale residential property owners, specifically in RS-1 and RS-2 zoning districts, to obtain a special use from the Zoning Board of Appeals to build an ADU. Special use approval is intended for limited and certain businesses and building types that can have an adverse impact and may require mitigations that are reviewed and approved by the ZBA.

ADUs have not been demonstrated to have adverse impacts and this potential future requirement would impose burdens on a scale above and beyond anything else the Chicago zoning code imposes. A special use is described in the city’s code as having “widely varying land use and operational characteristics [and] require case-by-case review in order to determine whether they will be compatible with surrounding uses and development patterns. Case-by-case review is intended to ensure consideration of the special use’s anticipated land use, site design and operational impacts.”

Yet an ADU is a residential use; its operational characteristics could not be incompatible with other residential uses. This requirement would be extremely unusual and especially burdensome. There is only one other special use approval that a residential property owner would have to seek, which is to allow housing on the ground floor in B1, B3, C1, and C2 zoning districts.

Applying for a special use for a small home presents a major obligation to the property owner, and requires them to perform the following:

  • Submitting a full building permit application with plans and obtaining a “certificate of zoning denial” before being able to start this process.
  • Paying a $1,000 application fee to the City of Chicago.
  • Hiring an expert witness to write a report and provide testimony at the ZBA hearing.
  • Preparing the finding of fact, a report which (a) describes how the ADU complies with all applicable standards of the Chicago Zoning Ordinance, (b) says that the ADU is in the interest of the public convenience and will not have a significant adverse impact on the general welfare of the neighborhood, (c) explains that the ADU is compatible with the character of the surrounding area in terms of site planning and building scale and project design, (d) states that the ADU is compatible with the character of the surrounding area in terms of operating characteristics, such as hours of operation, outdoor lighting, noise and traffic generation, and (e) outlines that the ADU is designed to promote pedestrian safety and comfort.
  • Preparing the application (which is extensive).
  • Complying with onerous legal notification requirements including determining property owners of record within 250 feet of the subject property, paying for and posting public notice signs and ensuring they remain posted until the public hearing, and mailing notice letters to surrounding property owners within the 250 feet notice radius.
  • Presenting the project to the Zoning Board of Appeals at an undeterminable time during an 8-12 hour meeting in the middle of a Friday, possibly facing one’s neighbors who are present objecting to the project.

Not to mention, this will gum up staff time and expertise.

Scale of impact

I analyzed the number of small-scale residential-only properties in Chicago that would and would not be subject to the special use approval requirement in RS-1 and RS-2 zoning districts if that version were to pass.

The map below shows where the proposed ADU expansion would set a different standard for homeowners in RS-1 and RS-2 zoning districts than for homeowners in all other zoning districts. It covers large parts of 40 percent of the city’s 77 community areas (read more about my thoughts on this in my letter to the Chicago Sun-Times editor).

The table below shows the results of my analysis: the owners of nearly 171,000 small-scale residential properties in RS-1/2 zoning districts would be required to undergo a costly and difficult process that would likely result in burdens so great that very few families would actually be able to take advantage of having an ADU.

About the analysis

“Small-scale residential” comprises Cook County property classifications that represent detached houses, townhouses and townhouses, two-to-six flats, courtyard buildings, and small multifamily buildings, up to 99,999 s.f. with or without commercial space up to 35 percent of the rentable square feet.

The full list of property classifications:

  • 2-02
  • 2-03
  • 2-04
  • 2-05
  • 2-06
  • 2-07
  • 2-08
  • 2-09
  • 2-10
  • 2-11
  • 2-12
  • 2-13
  • 2-25
  • 2-34
  • 2-78
  • 2-95
  • 3-13
  • 3-14
  • 3-15
  • 3-18
  • 3-91

Bicyclists in Chicago can travel pretty far in 15 minutes

Mapzen* released Mobility Explorer last week. It is the graphical user interface (GUI) to the Transitland datastore of a lot of the world’s transit schedules and maps.

It also has isochrones, which are more commonly known as “mode sheds”, or the area that you can reach by a specific mode in a specific amount of time.

I wanted to test it quickly to see what these mode sheds say about where I live, a block north of Humboldt Park. From my house, on a bicycle, I can reach the edges of an area that’s 25 square miles in 15 minutes.

Isochrones map of transportation distance from my house

The distance you can travel from my house at the north end of Humboldt Park in 15 minutes by three modes, assuming you leave at 2:21 PM today (in increasing distance/area): Transit (dark purple) Bicycling (burgundy) Driving (pink)

You can request these isochrones through this API call for any location and they’ll be returned as GeoJSON.

I’m still learning how isochrones work, and how they can be adjusted (to account for different rider seeds and route costs or penalties). One difference between bicycling and driving is that the driving area is increased by expressways while the bicycling area has a more uniform shape.

The bike shed is 25.7 square miles, and the driving shed is 52.0 square miles.

*I do contract work for Mapzen and maintain parts of the Transitland Feed Registry.

Big Marsh Bike Park is the coolest new city park

Big Marsh Bike Park opening day from Steven Vance on Vimeo.

Rahm Emanuel has opened a lot of cool new parks – Maggie Daley, Northerly Island, 606, and Grant Park Skate Park – since he became mayor. (Making arguments that the parking lot south of Soldier Field can’t be anything but a parking lot pretty lame.)

This morning Emanuel cut the ribbon on the Big Marsh Bike Park, first announced in July 2014. It’s still known as Park 564, until the Chicago Park District board adopts a new name.

It’s located at 11599 S. Stony Island Ave. in the South Deering community area in an area already known as Big Marsh. I mapped the park into OpenStreetMap based on a map from the architect, Hitchcock Design Group*.

I've traced an architect's map of the park into OpenStreetMap.

I’ve traced an architect’s map of the park into OpenStreetMap.

The single-track trails, terrain park, and pump track, are free and open to the public every day from dawn until dusk. It resembles the Valmont Bike Park in Boulder Colorado, which I visited in 2014.

Big Marsh was listed in the city’s Habitat Directory in 2005, noting, “Big Marsh is the largest individual wetland in the Calumet Open Space Reserve with approximately 90 acres of open water. Hiking and biking trails and canoe launch are ideas for this area in the future. As of this writing, the site is undeveloped.”

A map of the Big Marsh wetland in 2005 in the City of Chicago's Habitat Directory.

A map of the Big Marsh wetland in 2005 in the City of Chicago’s Habitat Directory. The bike park is mainly in the cleared space east of the #2 on the map.

The area is also part of the the State of Illinois’s Millennium Reserve program, a group of projects to restore natural areas, create new economic development opportunities in the area, and build more recreational sites.

There is no bike infrastructure to access the site, and many roads leading to the site are in bad condition, or have high-speed car traffic. There is a large car parking lot at the site.

* If you would like to help me map the bike park into OpenStreetMap, you can load the architect’s map of the site into JOSM using this WMS tile layer.

Panorama of the bike park, and the landfill to its south

Panorama of the central plaza of Big Marsh Bike Park.

A rider on the terrain park small trail

Chicago’s TOD rule is the only reason multi-family is being built in neighborhoods

This is the ordinance that says residential developments have to provide 0.5 car parking spaces per home, and that the minimum home size can be smaller.

How many units? At least 1,500. Here’re the 19 buildings I know about that are being built within 600 and 1,200 feet* of a Chicago Transit Authority ‘L’ station – the only areas, essentially, where multi-family housing can be developed.

Why can’t dense housing be built elsewhere? Because the most desirable living areas in Chicago – along retail streets in Logan Square, North Center, Lincoln Park, Lakeview, and West Town – are zoned for single-family use. (And ad-hoc zoning districts taking the place of community land use planning.)

How do I know popular neighborhoods are zoned for single-family use? Because Daniel Hertz’s new Simplified Chicago Zoning Map makes it easy to see. Yep, even along those dense business districts and even outside the train stations.

Do the single-family home zones contain single-family homes now? Absolutely not! Much of the buildings in areas zoned for single-family homes have everything but! The particular view of the map that Hertz uses in his blog post shows that even adjacent to CTA stations, and within 1 block, there are only single-family zones (in red). There are many multi-family buildings in these red zones.

Red areas are zoned for single-family homes only.

Red areas are zoned for single-family homes only. View the map.

What ends up happening there? Teardowns. And the Lakeview Chamber of Commerce finds believes that non-matching zoning – it matches neither the existing uses nor the needs for the neighborhood – and teardowns are going to cut into consumer spending on its lively retail streets. Lakeview is seeing a population change to families which tend to have less disposable income.

More housing in a popular neighborhood means more shoppers, more property taxes, more “boots on the ground”, more “pedestrian congestion” in front of our local businesses.

Doesn’t the ordinance make station-adjacent parcels friendly to multi-family housing because of the TOD ordinance? Yes, and no. As Hertz points out, “virtually every sizable development involves a zoning variance or planned development process that goes beyond the zoning you’ll see on the map”.

The TOD ordinance is 19 months old and working exactly as intended, building more housing next to train stations, and giving more people the opportunity to have access to affordable transportation. So it needs an upgrade to be able to do more. Since, in Chicago, zoning is our land use plan, we need the best kind of zoning rules and this is one of the best.

Imagine what the TOD ordinance could do if it were expanded. Think, making the parking requirement relief and allowing different unit sizes by-right instead of going through an arduous and expensive zoning change process. Then, expanding the rule to include more than just 600 feet (which is less than a block) from a train station – people walk several blocks to get to CTA stations, and bike even more. And, beefing up the affordable housing requirements.

Let’s do this, Commissioner Andrew Mooney. Let’s do this, housing advocates. Let’s do this, transit advocates. I’m looking at you, Latin United Community Housing Association (LUCHA), Logan Square Neighborhood Association (LSNA), We Are/Somos Logan Square, Pilsen Alliance, Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC), Active Transportation Alliance, and the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT).

* The distance depends on existing Pedestrian Street zoning. If the property is on a designated Pedestrian Street then the station can be up to 1,200 for the ordinance to apply, double the normal 600 feet.

Meet Chicago’s newest street view fleet: bikes

Bicycle holds an iPhone to take street view-style images

This position gives the smartphone an unimpeded view of the street but prevents the user from manipulating it.

I first used the Mapillary app on iPhone last fall, in August, and I uploaded one photo, of my arm, which I can’t delete from the website. I uploaded a couple more photos from a street in Roscoe Village in November.

This week, though, I uploaded 500 photos from a three mile journey on California and Milwaukee Avenues in Chicago – streets that no one else had photographed for the Mapillary street view service.

Mapillary is an open source (sort of) street view service, originally developed in Sweden, which allows the public to contribute photos taken with their smartphone app.

What’s “sort of” about Mapillary being open source is that it appears that the company owns the photos once you upload them. People are free to use the photos to edit OpenStreetMap, or publish elsewhere – for personal use only – with attribution that adheres to Creative Commons 4.0. People who want to use the photos in a commercial application must subscribe to a pay service.

Mounting an iPhone to a bicycle

I took the jump from contributing nothing to uploading a whole lot because I bought an iPhone mount for my bicycle. After months of research – okay, chalk it up to my being lazy and it being really cold outside – I settled on the DgRock Universal Bicycle Mount from Amazon for $9. I was perplexed that there was a gap in choices between this decent $9 product and the next group, hovering around $30-40.

After three days of use, I’m satisfied, despite limitations that are present in all mounts I surveyed. The DgRock mount is solid, barely moves even as the bike bounces along Chicago’s pothole-ridden streets, and securely holds the iPhone with a strong, spring-loaded grip. It’s universal in two ways: it holds nearly any smartphone (it probably can’t hold one with a screen 5″ or larger) and it attaches to most bicycle handlebars.

The first day I used the DgRock mount Mapillary complained with a red icon that it couldn’t get a proper fix on its location and therefore it wouldn’t start photographing. Fine, I was in downtown Chicago where connecting to GPS satellites can be hard. I figured the wifi positioning system that all smartphones and tablets use would suffice.

There are problems with the mount, but I think these apply to all bicycle smartphone mounts: When the phone is in position to take photos, meaning its horizontal and level to the ground, you can’t see the screen. That’s because the screen, mounted on the handlebars, is much lower than your eyes and faces vertically, instead of angled towards your face. The only way around this, I believe, is to either get an upright bicycle (like my WorkCycles Fr8) or an adjustable lens (I can’t find any).

Smartphone mount holding an iPhone on a bicycle

This position allows the user to manipulate the smartphone but you cannot take street view-style images.

The possible position angles of the smartphone when held by the mount was my main concern as I was shopping on Amazon: The mount need to have the flexibility to position the smartphone so its rear camera could be level with the ground. Smartphone mounts, though, are made to put the device in a position to be used and viewed frequently by the bicycle rider – it was unclear if many of the other smartphone mounts could accommodate the street view angles requirement.

The DgRock has no issue moving the iPhone into the right position, as you can see in the photos from my journey (or scroll to the end). Its issue, though, is that you have to put the smartphone in “backwards” so that the claw covers up part of the screen. I call it an issue but it doesn’t disturb the mount’s primary purpose when using Mapillary – the phone still has a clear view of the street.

Even with an upright bike like mine, though, it’s difficult to see the screen. I believe that Mapillary can actually design its app to help overcome this physical limitation.

Using Mapillary

The Mapillary app has improved greatly since the first version. It allows you to delete bad or undesired photos before uploading, and it has a simpler interface to go from opening the app to making your own street view. There are a couple changes I think would improve the user experience and lead to more contributions.

I would like to be able to turn off the screen while using Mapillary to save battery life. I think that the screen could fade to black and a small white dot or halo appears frequently to remind you that it’s working. I’d also like it to chime when iOS throws the “low storage” warning. Otherwise I may be riding along, thinking Mapillary is capturing the street, when iOS had actually run out of storage 10 minutes ago.