A TIF that will cover the entire 49th Ward is in the works, that will funnel $58 Million to connected cronies. This means increased property taxes and reduced services for 49th Ward residents.
Is Chicago broke enough from the quilt of TIF districts covering this city? How much more can we take?
There will be a meeting at the Loyola Park Field House tomorrow, Saturday October 30, at 3 PM.
Click on the title link above to go to the petition to ban TIFs in Cook County.
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Friday, October 29, 2010
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Midas Plague
Those of us who are fanatical Science Fiction readers might remember one of Frederik Pohl's more famous stories from the early 50s, during which period Americans experienced for the first time truly incredible affluence- remember the saying "you can't starve in America"? The Midas Plague projects a society so affluent and so awash in consumer goods of every description that you are forced by government edict to consume as much as possible, and your socio-economic status is measured by your relative freedom from forced consumption; as you ascend the ladder you are required to consume less, not more.
Pohl doesn't show the flip side of the story, which is a society broke and resource-depleted and burdened with towering debt to make and pay for this crap, to the point where many people are walking away from houses and apartments stuffed with decent, usable belongings simply because they can no longer pay the cost of housing them all and carrying them around. This is where our wealth and a major chunk of irreplaceable natural resources have gone, and we won't be able to reconstitute it into food, money in the bank, or the fossil fuels that made this incredible superfluity possible.I think about this story a lot when I contemplate the devolution of the country into a massive coast-to-coast resale store, as people buried under mountains of unwanted possessions and the debt they accumulated acquiring them, try to unload all the outdated clothing fads, obsolete electronics, multiple sets of china and stemware and turkey fryers and chocolate fountains and smoothie makers and yoga mats and kiddie pools and bric-a-brac and spare tires and multiple sets of tools and hobby kits and old kitchen cabinets and lawn furniture and whatever else they have stuffed into houses and garages and storage lockers, to buy food and pay rent.
It evokes revulsion, this seemingly uncontrollable urge to acquire and accumulate past any consideration of need or even visible benefit or pleasure that so many Americans seem to have, especially when it's financed by equity-stripping your house and running up credit card bills equal to four times your income. The phenomenon has become so prevalent in rich Western societies that it has triggered a reaction formation known as Minimalism, the paring of possessions to the most basic essentials and an aesthetic of utter simplicity.
In our condemnation of the "materialism" and "consumerism" we think we perceive in the compulsive shoppers and packrats of this country, we forget that the incredible abundance of Western countries in the past 100 years is anomalous in human history, and that for the 10,000 years preceding this period, it was all most humans could do to keep a few pieces of shabby clothing on their backs and acquire the rudimentary necessities of daily life. For most of the world, it still is. That's why status and achievement have usually been measured by how much and what kind of possessions a person acquires. Our urge to accumulate evolved in response to extreme and chronic scarcity that lasted until we learned how to harness the power of fossil fuels, and it is essential to our survival under normal conditions... and the conditions of extreme abundance under which we of the Western world have lived in the past century and half are not normal.
That's just the problem with so many of our basic "instincts". The behaviors we evolved in the long ages of hardscrabble existence that enabled us to thrive and build a base on which to build our civilizations have been rendered obsolete by civilization and are mostly more a threat to our existence than an aid. We once needed to reproduce endlessly because most children in pre-modern times didn't survive past the age of five, but in our present context, a large family is only so many more mouths to feed, and a major drain on the finances and energy of the parents. We once needed to hunt and fight endlessly just to maintain a hold on our territories and stave off predators both human and animal, but now our dominator urge could lead to wars that end up extinguishing the species. And until quite recently, most people needed to amass stores of food and other goods to survive through the long periods of shortages, the crop failures, and the scarcity of almost everything, in periods where nearly everything was made laboriously by hand and you had to settle for what was available to you in your own back yard because of the difficulty of travel and shipping.
We might still need the traits that seem so inimical to survival now, but which will could mean the difference between living and dying in a world of resource scarcity and vicious contests over the scraps of industrial civilization. The acquisitive urge is basically constructive, but we need to learn to channel it constructively, toward accumulation of things that are genuinely useful (like a large savings account, for example) and possibly will be essential as the affluence of the last century fades and the consumerist ethos with it. Unfortunately, we're still wed to that ethos, and haven't gotten past the idea that the best way to achieve prosperity is to buy and fill our houses with "luxuries" of no utility and little lasting pleasure that trick us into believing ourselves wealthy while the bills stack up, our bank accounts are empty, and we are more dependent than ever on fragile systems for delivery of essentials that could fail quickly and catastrophically. Our economists still believe that the best way to repair our economy is to stimulate spending, and borrowing to spend, on the things that are not only making our houses uninhabitable but are depleting the resources we can never replace and will badly need just to live in basic comfort, at the expense of the savings and investment in the ndustries and systems we will need to provide basic technological amenities and comforts in a future of permanent resource scarcity.
So, when we're tempted to buy another toy or another overpriced trendy garment, or trade up to a bigger apartment to accommodate the swelling horde of consumer "stuff" we've maxed our cards to buy, we should take a look at our possessions and bank accounts, and ask ourselves the following questions: Would this money I'm spending on this item be better spent paying down a bill? Do I even really want this nonessential frill? Could I get this item for free or next-to-free off Craigsllist or Ebay? Do I have the stuff I really need, like a six-month supply of non perishable food and personal supplies for everyone in this house, and necessary emergency equipment like an electric generator and ample warm clothing and bedding on hand? Would it be better to pay off my mortgage than leverage myself into a bigger house I wouldn't need if I didn't have so much useless junk sitting around? Do I have enough money in my savings account? Is my retirement adequately funded? Would I be better off just getting rid of about half the stuff I have and stop spending money storing it and hauling it from one dwelling to another?
Our core urges and drives aren't corrupt or obsolete, just misdirected because we have not yet learned to deal with the incredible affluence of the modern era in our privileged country, nor do we yet grasp how fleeting this abundance may be. We will have to learn once more how to live with less, and make our resources serve our real needs instead of being diverted into useless consumption and the manufacture of billions of items that will spend the next few thousand years in landfills, the resources that were squandered making them lost to us forever. We'll have to relearn to make truly beautiful, durable things that can be passed down through four generations instead of stuff that breaks or obsolesces in two years. In short, we'll have to revert to the frugality that most people had to practice in the past just to live, while learning to conserve rather than waste.
Pohl doesn't show the flip side of the story, which is a society broke and resource-depleted and burdened with towering debt to make and pay for this crap, to the point where many people are walking away from houses and apartments stuffed with decent, usable belongings simply because they can no longer pay the cost of housing them all and carrying them around. This is where our wealth and a major chunk of irreplaceable natural resources have gone, and we won't be able to reconstitute it into food, money in the bank, or the fossil fuels that made this incredible superfluity possible.I think about this story a lot when I contemplate the devolution of the country into a massive coast-to-coast resale store, as people buried under mountains of unwanted possessions and the debt they accumulated acquiring them, try to unload all the outdated clothing fads, obsolete electronics, multiple sets of china and stemware and turkey fryers and chocolate fountains and smoothie makers and yoga mats and kiddie pools and bric-a-brac and spare tires and multiple sets of tools and hobby kits and old kitchen cabinets and lawn furniture and whatever else they have stuffed into houses and garages and storage lockers, to buy food and pay rent.
It evokes revulsion, this seemingly uncontrollable urge to acquire and accumulate past any consideration of need or even visible benefit or pleasure that so many Americans seem to have, especially when it's financed by equity-stripping your house and running up credit card bills equal to four times your income. The phenomenon has become so prevalent in rich Western societies that it has triggered a reaction formation known as Minimalism, the paring of possessions to the most basic essentials and an aesthetic of utter simplicity.
In our condemnation of the "materialism" and "consumerism" we think we perceive in the compulsive shoppers and packrats of this country, we forget that the incredible abundance of Western countries in the past 100 years is anomalous in human history, and that for the 10,000 years preceding this period, it was all most humans could do to keep a few pieces of shabby clothing on their backs and acquire the rudimentary necessities of daily life. For most of the world, it still is. That's why status and achievement have usually been measured by how much and what kind of possessions a person acquires. Our urge to accumulate evolved in response to extreme and chronic scarcity that lasted until we learned how to harness the power of fossil fuels, and it is essential to our survival under normal conditions... and the conditions of extreme abundance under which we of the Western world have lived in the past century and half are not normal.
That's just the problem with so many of our basic "instincts". The behaviors we evolved in the long ages of hardscrabble existence that enabled us to thrive and build a base on which to build our civilizations have been rendered obsolete by civilization and are mostly more a threat to our existence than an aid. We once needed to reproduce endlessly because most children in pre-modern times didn't survive past the age of five, but in our present context, a large family is only so many more mouths to feed, and a major drain on the finances and energy of the parents. We once needed to hunt and fight endlessly just to maintain a hold on our territories and stave off predators both human and animal, but now our dominator urge could lead to wars that end up extinguishing the species. And until quite recently, most people needed to amass stores of food and other goods to survive through the long periods of shortages, the crop failures, and the scarcity of almost everything, in periods where nearly everything was made laboriously by hand and you had to settle for what was available to you in your own back yard because of the difficulty of travel and shipping.
We might still need the traits that seem so inimical to survival now, but which will could mean the difference between living and dying in a world of resource scarcity and vicious contests over the scraps of industrial civilization. The acquisitive urge is basically constructive, but we need to learn to channel it constructively, toward accumulation of things that are genuinely useful (like a large savings account, for example) and possibly will be essential as the affluence of the last century fades and the consumerist ethos with it. Unfortunately, we're still wed to that ethos, and haven't gotten past the idea that the best way to achieve prosperity is to buy and fill our houses with "luxuries" of no utility and little lasting pleasure that trick us into believing ourselves wealthy while the bills stack up, our bank accounts are empty, and we are more dependent than ever on fragile systems for delivery of essentials that could fail quickly and catastrophically. Our economists still believe that the best way to repair our economy is to stimulate spending, and borrowing to spend, on the things that are not only making our houses uninhabitable but are depleting the resources we can never replace and will badly need just to live in basic comfort, at the expense of the savings and investment in the ndustries and systems we will need to provide basic technological amenities and comforts in a future of permanent resource scarcity.
So, when we're tempted to buy another toy or another overpriced trendy garment, or trade up to a bigger apartment to accommodate the swelling horde of consumer "stuff" we've maxed our cards to buy, we should take a look at our possessions and bank accounts, and ask ourselves the following questions: Would this money I'm spending on this item be better spent paying down a bill? Do I even really want this nonessential frill? Could I get this item for free or next-to-free off Craigsllist or Ebay? Do I have the stuff I really need, like a six-month supply of non perishable food and personal supplies for everyone in this house, and necessary emergency equipment like an electric generator and ample warm clothing and bedding on hand? Would it be better to pay off my mortgage than leverage myself into a bigger house I wouldn't need if I didn't have so much useless junk sitting around? Do I have enough money in my savings account? Is my retirement adequately funded? Would I be better off just getting rid of about half the stuff I have and stop spending money storing it and hauling it from one dwelling to another?
Our core urges and drives aren't corrupt or obsolete, just misdirected because we have not yet learned to deal with the incredible affluence of the modern era in our privileged country, nor do we yet grasp how fleeting this abundance may be. We will have to learn once more how to live with less, and make our resources serve our real needs instead of being diverted into useless consumption and the manufacture of billions of items that will spend the next few thousand years in landfills, the resources that were squandered making them lost to us forever. We'll have to relearn to make truly beautiful, durable things that can be passed down through four generations instead of stuff that breaks or obsolesces in two years. In short, we'll have to revert to the frugality that most people had to practice in the past just to live, while learning to conserve rather than waste.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
We Will Kill for Oil
Honesty is so distasteful.
We'd so much rather see WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER, even if this sweet homily seems sort of hollow when affixed to the back end of something that weighs 6,000 pounds and gets 12MPG. Do these people think that there is no connection whatsoever between the 20% of our oil we import from various hot spots in the Middle East and Africa, and our 65-year-involvement and multiple wars there?
Was there ever any other reason for our cozy relationship with major human rights violator Saudi Arabia? Or for our presence in Iraq, which is expected to displace Saudi Arabia as the largest producer and exporter of oil over the next decade? Or Afghanistan, of great strategic importance in accessing and securing the estimated $12 Trillion in oil reserves projected to reside in the Caspian Sea.
And how many people here want to reckon with the consequences of a sudden, drastic reduction in available oil supplies? So far, there is no indication that our local leaders even consider the possibility, let alone how it would cascade through our systems to produce critical shortages and major system failures. Chicago has no emergency plans in place, and instead of making the improvements necessary to our critical transportation and utility infrastructure necessary to keep the city intact and functioning with decent levels of safety and sanitation in the event of a prolonged emergency, are searching for more paths by which to divert tax revenues from essential public needs to the back pockets of corporate cronies while starving our increasingly decrepit and inadequate public transportation. To date, I have not once heard the term "peak oil" pass the lips of Obama , who prefers to talk about "reducing our dependence on foreign oil", as though there were any other kind, especially since it has become glaringly evident that offshore drilling is not likely to offset the fading production of the super giants, and neither are the tar sands of Calgary,which require staggering quantities of fresh water and natural gas to work, which means that the oil from the sands is not only partially subsidized by Canadian taxpayers and would have a negative EROEI without that subsidy, but comes at the expense of natural gas supplies, which are subject to rapid and irreversible depletion just as oil is.
Iraq and Afghanistan were Bush's Wars, then became Obama's Wars, but they're really our wars, and they probably will not end until every last drop of oil has been extracted from every last well, or at least until the cost of extraction is a barrel in for a barrel out. That time may come sooner than we think as it is. Obama's promise to end these conflicts, so quickly reneged on, is being flung in his face by foes and former supporters alike and will no doubt be used as a major wedge in the 2012 election by the next pandering con artist who runs on promises to accomplish the impossible, but anyone who believes that we'll withdraw from these conflicts anytime soon is probably someone who believes in perpetually self-renewing abiotic oil, or that we can run our economy on wind turbines, used restaurant grease and corn liquor.
It is probably useless to consider that our resource wars are only hastening resource depletion, or that all combatants will eventually lose, for the oil will deplete remorselessly no matter who controls it. But in the meantime, we probably have no choice but to soldier on, since we are still in stone denial concerning our extreme dependence on petroleum and are in no way prepared to make the adjustments and arrangements that would enable us to withdraw from the Middle East and lose access to the bounty of Iraq, or the Caspian sea. Nor is the rest of the western world, which relies upon the U.S. to do the dirty work of securing the oil supplies for other western nations, and any political aspirant who suggests that we confront the inevitability of resource depletion and consider these wars already lost, and learn to live with much less energy, is committing career suicide.
So what it all means is that we will continue to kill and be killed for the oil in the Middle East, and Africa, too, just as we have for decades now, because the alternative, a rapid withdrawal with the possible sudden loss of 20% of our usual supply, would mean incredible chaos and violence, and random death on a mass scale,within our borders, as the systems we rely on to deliver electricity and clean municpal water and vaccines and medication and cheap, abundant food, all start to wobble and fail for lack of the necessary energy imputs to run them. It's an alternative that I'm personally not willing to accept if there is any way around it, and I'm sure you aren't, either, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for our leadership and general public to embrace the only alternative to "the war that will not end in our lifetimes", as Cheney put it, which is to downscale and rearrange our systems and our lives to enable us provide for ourselves at a decent level of modern comfort and amenity in the absence of copious quantities of oil.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Over The Cliff
While American policy makers pass energy bills designed to pander to various lobbies and to allocate the largest subsidies to the "alternatives" to oil that are least likely to be suitable replacements and provide us with even basic amenities in the energy-short future, a number of geologists and energy analysts are eying the rapidly dropping rates of new gas discoveries, and the steeply falling drill rig count with growing alarm.
Natural gas is now considered to be the most likely substitute for oil, in spite of the fact that it, too, is a fossil fuel that is almost always found in proximity to oil, and is also subject to depletion. Gas prices are at deep lows and consumption has dropped in recent years, and policy makers and the public alike are pacified by the assurance that we have enough natural gas in North America to last 100 years at current rates of consumption.
Energy writer Kurt Cobb at Resource Insights, among a number of other prominent prognosticators, believes that natural gas supplies are headed "over the cliff", that the drop could be rapid and precipitous, and its onset could take place in less than three years. In a recent article at SCitizen, he outlines the convergence of circumstances now in place that could cause seemingly plentiful North American natural gas supplies to plummet precipitously in the near future. These include not only the unexpectedly rapid rate of depletion in recently drilled wells, but the shutting in of existing drills due to extremely low current gas prices.
As I've pointed out in previous posts, a 100-year supply will become a twenty-year supply very quickly were consumption to increase by just 5% a year. That's something we need to be very concerned about, because at this juncture, our leaders, driven by the fossil fuel lobby and in deep denial concerning our ability to continue business as usual as that has been done sine WW2, are hell-bent on converting our fleet of 200 million cars and trucks to natural gas. The conversion of our gigantic fleet of petro-burners to natural gas would cause consumption to ramp up very steeply over the next decade, and drive this extremely valuable fuel into steep depletion, with dire implications for our ability to meet other critical needs, such as for food and heat.
Not only is natural gas used to heat most of the homes in the U.S. and is the most efficient and economical way to do that so far, our population of 305 million (and growing) people are extremely dependent upon mechanized agriculture for food, and natural gas is absolutely essential for manufacturing the nitrogen based fertilizers that made the "green revolution" possible.. Obviously, rapidly declining gas production could mean widespread food shortages, or even famines, in this country that has never experienced such a thing, and would also make many other essentials, such as ample home heat, unaffordable for a sizable fraction of our population. That the result would be unbelievable suffering accompanied by a steep increase in disease and hunger and rapidly falling lifespans, ought to be obvious, but our leaders don't seem overly concerned with the implications for our non-rich population, which is about 95% of us.
Rapid depletion of existing wells could easily cause crippling shortages and steep increases in prices in the next few years even if we don't increase our consumption. Therefore, it would be sheer insanity to double the demand for this fuel by adding the load of our entire transportation system, if indeed we could even begin to convert our fleet of gasoline burners, or put into place the delivery system needed to make the fuel widely available.
The promotion of natural gas as the silver bullet that will save our energy-intensive way of life is just the next stage of denial. Our business and government leaders now recognize that peak oil is a fact, and we are understandably frantically casting about for a "solution" that will permit business as usual to continue, forgetting that all resources
have a depletion curve. This is why our political leadership and business elite not only will not be of any help in dealing with the vicissitudes of life in a rapidly contracting economy and increasing scarcity of necessites, but will actually be major obstacles to successfully managing the massage shift in our economy and its physical underpinnings now underway.
Natural gas is now considered to be the most likely substitute for oil, in spite of the fact that it, too, is a fossil fuel that is almost always found in proximity to oil, and is also subject to depletion. Gas prices are at deep lows and consumption has dropped in recent years, and policy makers and the public alike are pacified by the assurance that we have enough natural gas in North America to last 100 years at current rates of consumption.
Energy writer Kurt Cobb at Resource Insights, among a number of other prominent prognosticators, believes that natural gas supplies are headed "over the cliff", that the drop could be rapid and precipitous, and its onset could take place in less than three years. In a recent article at SCitizen, he outlines the convergence of circumstances now in place that could cause seemingly plentiful North American natural gas supplies to plummet precipitously in the near future. These include not only the unexpectedly rapid rate of depletion in recently drilled wells, but the shutting in of existing drills due to extremely low current gas prices.
As I've pointed out in previous posts, a 100-year supply will become a twenty-year supply very quickly were consumption to increase by just 5% a year. That's something we need to be very concerned about, because at this juncture, our leaders, driven by the fossil fuel lobby and in deep denial concerning our ability to continue business as usual as that has been done sine WW2, are hell-bent on converting our fleet of 200 million cars and trucks to natural gas. The conversion of our gigantic fleet of petro-burners to natural gas would cause consumption to ramp up very steeply over the next decade, and drive this extremely valuable fuel into steep depletion, with dire implications for our ability to meet other critical needs, such as for food and heat.
Not only is natural gas used to heat most of the homes in the U.S. and is the most efficient and economical way to do that so far, our population of 305 million (and growing) people are extremely dependent upon mechanized agriculture for food, and natural gas is absolutely essential for manufacturing the nitrogen based fertilizers that made the "green revolution" possible.. Obviously, rapidly declining gas production could mean widespread food shortages, or even famines, in this country that has never experienced such a thing, and would also make many other essentials, such as ample home heat, unaffordable for a sizable fraction of our population. That the result would be unbelievable suffering accompanied by a steep increase in disease and hunger and rapidly falling lifespans, ought to be obvious, but our leaders don't seem overly concerned with the implications for our non-rich population, which is about 95% of us.
Rapid depletion of existing wells could easily cause crippling shortages and steep increases in prices in the next few years even if we don't increase our consumption. Therefore, it would be sheer insanity to double the demand for this fuel by adding the load of our entire transportation system, if indeed we could even begin to convert our fleet of gasoline burners, or put into place the delivery system needed to make the fuel widely available.
The promotion of natural gas as the silver bullet that will save our energy-intensive way of life is just the next stage of denial. Our business and government leaders now recognize that peak oil is a fact, and we are understandably frantically casting about for a "solution" that will permit business as usual to continue, forgetting that all resources
have a depletion curve. This is why our political leadership and business elite not only will not be of any help in dealing with the vicissitudes of life in a rapidly contracting economy and increasing scarcity of necessites, but will actually be major obstacles to successfully managing the massage shift in our economy and its physical underpinnings now underway.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Eliminating Housing Subsidies Will Improve the Economy
Excellent article at Irvine Housing Blog
Eliminating housing subsidies may cause house prices to drop, says Irvine Renter, but it will free up capital for more productive uses.
How many "more productive uses" can you think of for the $3.4 Trillion that we've committed to mortgage assistance,
tax credits for new buyers, backstopping the GSEs like FMAC and FNMA against their hundreds of billions of dollars in losses on bad mortgages, and other assistance and subsidies for the sinking housing market? How much do FHA loans with their average 20% delinquency and default rates cost the taxpayers? How much do we lose to the mortgage interest deduction?
And how many poor people are living any better with Section 8 subsidies than they would be without this welfare program for slumlords?
$3. 4 Trillion would repair every dangerously deficient dam and bridge in this country. It could rebuild St. Louis' collapsing sewers, and rebuild Chicago's lakefront and rail system.
It could rebuild the aging water treatment infrastructure in all the older cities.
We could build a completely electrified rapid-rail (not High Speed) to every city and town in this country with a population of more than 5,000.
It could be put against our towering public debt load, most of all.
We might once again have productive industries making the things we badly need, to the benefit of every socio-economic group in this society, while housing costs would drop steeply. Poor people could find more "first-rung-on-the-ladder" jobs, and our middle classes could have more opportunities for advancement and more job niches utilizing a greater variety of skill sets and talents, while the rich would have more profitable investment opportunities where their capital would be utilized building new industries providing the technologies and systems we will need to maintain our technological amenity while transitioning to a low-energy regime.
Eliminating housing subsidies may cause house prices to drop, says Irvine Renter, but it will free up capital for more productive uses.
How many "more productive uses" can you think of for the $3.4 Trillion that we've committed to mortgage assistance,
tax credits for new buyers, backstopping the GSEs like FMAC and FNMA against their hundreds of billions of dollars in losses on bad mortgages, and other assistance and subsidies for the sinking housing market? How much do FHA loans with their average 20% delinquency and default rates cost the taxpayers? How much do we lose to the mortgage interest deduction?And how many poor people are living any better with Section 8 subsidies than they would be without this welfare program for slumlords?
$3. 4 Trillion would repair every dangerously deficient dam and bridge in this country. It could rebuild St. Louis' collapsing sewers, and rebuild Chicago's lakefront and rail system.
It could rebuild the aging water treatment infrastructure in all the older cities.
We could build a completely electrified rapid-rail (not High Speed) to every city and town in this country with a population of more than 5,000.
It could be put against our towering public debt load, most of all.
We might once again have productive industries making the things we badly need, to the benefit of every socio-economic group in this society, while housing costs would drop steeply. Poor people could find more "first-rung-on-the-ladder" jobs, and our middle classes could have more opportunities for advancement and more job niches utilizing a greater variety of skill sets and talents, while the rich would have more profitable investment opportunities where their capital would be utilized building new industries providing the technologies and systems we will need to maintain our technological amenity while transitioning to a low-energy regime.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Skewed Priorities
SEND MONEY!!!
That's the overriding message from the northwest corner of Iowa, where the Lake Dehli Dam breached and drained the recreational lake behind it this weekend. There was no loss of life and no one was seriously injured, thankfully, but the resulting deluge pretty well gutted the value of the area to the vacationers who own the 900 or so homes that fronted the lake... which was all most of the folks there could think about.
Nobody, not one person, said, Thank God there were no fatalities or injuries, which is the first thought you have when something like this happens. There didn't seem to be a lot of sympathy or concern for the people downriver whose businesses and permanent homes were wrecked by the torrent, and a local official said in passing that his town would of course apply for funds for cleanup, which is going to be a big job. But that seemed to be a peripheral concern to most of the people interviewed.
What most people talked about first and the most was how they hoped the Feds would step in with the money to rebuild the dam, because otherwise their vacation homes- mostly second homes worth from $50,000 to $500,000- will be almost worthless without the lake it created.
Like the rest of the taxpayers in this country have nothing better to do with $200 million or so than to rebuild a small dam solely to restore a recreational lake, to rectify the economic losses of a handful of second-home owners.
Our pols and economists are sending the public a lot of mixed messages mixed with hope fastened to very doubtful metrics, but the message we most need to be trumpeted from the rooftops is already printed on our increasingly decrepit and dangerous infrastructure, our $13 Trillion in public and private debt, our gutted manufacturing sector, and our failing war efforts in the part of the world on which we depend for most of our liquid fuels; is that the party is over. We can't even afford to repair the things whose catastrophic failure would cause thousands of deaths; at this time there are over 3500 large dams and 8000 bridges classified as dangerously deficient, and whose catastrophic failure would easily kill thousands of people, that we are dragging our feet on because we already spent the $16 Billion required for minimal remediation on things like highways to nowhere and mega-sports arenas, supporting the government-financed mortgage market, paying subsidies to farm owners to not grow food, and paying people to buy new cars and build ever more houses that nobody can afford to buy, among many other wasteful expenditures too numerous to list here.
We have extended ourselves financially into the next century, well beyond our childrens' probable lifetimes, since the post WW2 era in order to finance things that not only are too big and too complex to maintain as we start down the other side of the fuel supply curve, but continue to squander massive amounts of our remaining wealth, or rather, our remaining borrowing power, on things that cannot be considered public purpose and are flatly extravagances that we never really could afford and that are now crowding out urgent public needs that we don't have much time to meet before energy costs place them beyond our reach forever.
The figure in the foregoing paragraph does not include private debt, which maybe doesn't mean anything anyway since so much of the public debt was incurred in backstopping the financial institutions against the losses they incurred from this private debt. Municipal shortfalls and state deficits are also not included, nor are future pension and entitlement program obligations.
Suffice it to say that recreational lakes in Iowa and 850-unit luxury condo towers in Chicago's laughably glutted north lake front condo market, among thousands of other costly private indulgences that come at public expense, are costly frills that benefit few, and that neither the country at large nor this city can accommodate any longer without making steep sacrifices in the things we need to live decently and safely. But the American middle classes, steeped in delusion and fantasy, and possessed of a swollen sense of entitlement, are the people least apt to get the message broadcast by the ever-increasing numbers of boil-water days, extended power outages, critical infrastructure failures, and the general decrepit and brittle condition of the country's systems, which is that we're at the end of our ability to pretend that we're still a wealthy country with unlimited resources and the competence to manage either our physical resources or finances so that we'll be able to keep the lights on and the trains running when energy supplies become critical.
That's the overriding message from the northwest corner of Iowa, where the Lake Dehli Dam breached and drained the recreational lake behind it this weekend. There was no loss of life and no one was seriously injured, thankfully, but the resulting deluge pretty well gutted the value of the area to the vacationers who own the 900 or so homes that fronted the lake... which was all most of the folks there could think about.
Nobody, not one person, said, Thank God there were no fatalities or injuries, which is the first thought you have when something like this happens. There didn't seem to be a lot of sympathy or concern for the people downriver whose businesses and permanent homes were wrecked by the torrent, and a local official said in passing that his town would of course apply for funds for cleanup, which is going to be a big job. But that seemed to be a peripheral concern to most of the people interviewed.
What most people talked about first and the most was how they hoped the Feds would step in with the money to rebuild the dam, because otherwise their vacation homes- mostly second homes worth from $50,000 to $500,000- will be almost worthless without the lake it created.
Like the rest of the taxpayers in this country have nothing better to do with $200 million or so than to rebuild a small dam solely to restore a recreational lake, to rectify the economic losses of a handful of second-home owners.
Our pols and economists are sending the public a lot of mixed messages mixed with hope fastened to very doubtful metrics, but the message we most need to be trumpeted from the rooftops is already printed on our increasingly decrepit and dangerous infrastructure, our $13 Trillion in public and private debt, our gutted manufacturing sector, and our failing war efforts in the part of the world on which we depend for most of our liquid fuels; is that the party is over. We can't even afford to repair the things whose catastrophic failure would cause thousands of deaths; at this time there are over 3500 large dams and 8000 bridges classified as dangerously deficient, and whose catastrophic failure would easily kill thousands of people, that we are dragging our feet on because we already spent the $16 Billion required for minimal remediation on things like highways to nowhere and mega-sports arenas, supporting the government-financed mortgage market, paying subsidies to farm owners to not grow food, and paying people to buy new cars and build ever more houses that nobody can afford to buy, among many other wasteful expenditures too numerous to list here.
We have extended ourselves financially into the next century, well beyond our childrens' probable lifetimes, since the post WW2 era in order to finance things that not only are too big and too complex to maintain as we start down the other side of the fuel supply curve, but continue to squander massive amounts of our remaining wealth, or rather, our remaining borrowing power, on things that cannot be considered public purpose and are flatly extravagances that we never really could afford and that are now crowding out urgent public needs that we don't have much time to meet before energy costs place them beyond our reach forever.
The figure in the foregoing paragraph does not include private debt, which maybe doesn't mean anything anyway since so much of the public debt was incurred in backstopping the financial institutions against the losses they incurred from this private debt. Municipal shortfalls and state deficits are also not included, nor are future pension and entitlement program obligations.
Suffice it to say that recreational lakes in Iowa and 850-unit luxury condo towers in Chicago's laughably glutted north lake front condo market, among thousands of other costly private indulgences that come at public expense, are costly frills that benefit few, and that neither the country at large nor this city can accommodate any longer without making steep sacrifices in the things we need to live decently and safely. But the American middle classes, steeped in delusion and fantasy, and possessed of a swollen sense of entitlement, are the people least apt to get the message broadcast by the ever-increasing numbers of boil-water days, extended power outages, critical infrastructure failures, and the general decrepit and brittle condition of the country's systems, which is that we're at the end of our ability to pretend that we're still a wealthy country with unlimited resources and the competence to manage either our physical resources or finances so that we'll be able to keep the lights on and the trains running when energy supplies become critical.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Loyola-Morgan Retail District: Gains and Losses
We can't fail to be impressed by the recent transformation of the formerly forlorn stretch of Sheridan between Devon and Albion. The strip of disused buildings and vacant lots has blossomed into a lively and attractive retail district with the addition of the Morgan at Loyola Station rental apartment building, a good-looking and appropriately scaled mid-rise building with small ground-floor retail shops; and a pocket that used to be ugly and a little forbidding is now cozy and inviting. This pocket of Rogers Park is now the most successful and attractive retail district in the neighborhood, and it is helped a lot by the proximity of two major grocery stores and other retail in Edgewater a few blocks south.
Yet, as you travel south on Sheridan into Broadway and consider the moribund two-block stretch of Broadway just south of Sheridan, and spotty Devon Ave, you're reminded of how much easier it is to destroy a neighborhood than it is to build it, and how important is appropriate development, for Broadway Blvd is an essay in the destruction wrought by ugly, auto-oriented, anti-urban development; a wilderness of strip mall slums and drive-through food outlets and self-storage facilities. Actually, the street contains a number of interesting small businesses, including a couple of antique stores and a wonderful day spa as well as several interesting small restaurants, but they're a little lost among the seas of parking, fast food outlets and other auto-oriented garbage. Just a couple of blocks south, Broadway between Granville and Sheridan is still a cold, lackluster corridor of drive-through food outlets and parking lots, and Devon is pocked with disused parking lots fronting the street and vacant storefronts. But attractive, interesting, lively urban neighborhoods don't develop in a day, and it will take quite a few more years and an improved economic climate for this area to develop fully, and to reverse 75 years of atrocious urban planning and deterioration.
And that's just as well. Maybe we need to move a little more slowly, and build more carefully, with every building built with care and love. We Americans tend to go way too fast at way too big a scale, with no consideration for unintended consequences and no regard for feedback along the way that is signaling that things aren't working out according to plan. And now that nobody has the money to go forward with big plans except for Loyola University, the people involved in developing this area need to take a breather and consider the progress made so far.
Some of things we hope they think about before they do too much more demolition include the block of Sheridan just north of the Loyola el station. This block still contains a couple of really interesting buildings and a number of businesses that have been in the neighborhood for many decades, like Carmen's Restaurant and Affordable Optical. However, in the past fifteen years, this block has lost a lot of its charm and cohesion, having been decimated by fires that destroyed a couple of charming old buildings, and Loyola University's demolition of a decrepit but lovely two story building and corner building. The University has rights of eminent domain in this area, which is part of the Sheridan/Devon TIF district, and the buildings that remain are in increasingly decrepit conditions, and according to one commercial tenant, are renting their commercial spaces out on a month-to-month basis, while Beck's Bookstore vacated its old building and moved to a space in the Morgan apartment building.
This would all seem to indicate that the university has plans for this block that very likely don't include the restoration of the remaining buildings on this block, including the incredible little beauty pictured below, which contains Affordable Optical and Carmen's. Chicago is fairly stuffed with buildings covered with wonderful embellishment, but I've never seen anything quite like the decorative terracotta ornamentation on this quirky little charmer, and the destruction of this building would be a tragic loss to the neighborhood. Buildings like this are what lend a neighborhood charm and character, and another bland new building, no matter how luxurious and loaded with amenities, would not replace a structure like this.
From here forward, the developers here need to take small, careful steps. There's no crying need for more retail space at just this point in time, given the number of empty spaces available in the area already and the extremely unfavorable business climate. Therefore, the developers might want to consider "infill" buildings for this block, small one-to-three story buildings with commercial space on the ground and perhaps second floor, and apartments above, and more important, some attention to architecture and decorative detail. The recent renovation of a row of one-story storefronts in the 1100 block of Granville in Edgewater is encouraging. These ugly, run-down spaces were recently re-fronted with attractively styled facades capped off by the attractive deco corner store, shown below.
These stylish renovations, and recently constructed mixed-use buildings allover town, while not architectural masterpieces, are major improvements on the hideous, utilitarian,suburban-style commercial development that blighted so much of the city during the 30-year period of urban destruction following WW2. Let's hope we can do even better with whatever gets built in the 6500 block of Sheridan, where the builders will be starting from scratch. Not every building, or even most buildings, has to be a masterpiece, or terribly "original", just reasonably attractive and well-designed, and perhaps possess some charming decorative details. We might still have a long way to travel before we build with the same spirit and love of beauty that inspired the magnificent buildings of the early twentieth century, but we've at least turned the corner and left the dreadful post-war period behind us.
Whatever gets done, let's hope it gets done slowly. And most of all, lets work to preserve the beauty and charm our neighborhoods still possess after 65 years of maliciously anti-urban modernist destruction.
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