The Daily Parker

So says urbanist Pete Saunders on the economic bifurcation in Chicago:

[T]he two economic narratives emerging across two wildly different sets of Chicago neighborhoods are being reflected in changing demographics. The downtown and Near North Side, stretching from the Loop to neighborhoods such as Bucktown and Logan Square, has boomed in ways similar to superstar cities such as New York, D.C., Seattle, and Austin, while large stretches of the rest of the city have suffered from decreasing middle class populations, disinvestment, and in the worst cases, abandoned property and increased crime.

“On its own, the portions of the city that includes the Loop, north lakefront, West Loop, and Logan Square have the population of San Francisco, are about the size of Manhattan and nearly as dense, and have been booming,” he tells Curbed. “It’s as safe, vibrant, and walkable as any of the other cities you’d associate with success.”

[R]ecent economic growth has been unevenly distributed. According to recent UIC research, in 1970, roughly half the city was considered middle income. In 2017, that distinction applied to just 16 percent of Chicago. Income segregation and extreme, concentrated poverty have become more pronounced. Saunders called it Global Chicago versus Rust Belt Chicago.

“A few years ago, I published something on my personal blog that characterized Chicago as one-third San Francisco and two-thirds Detroit,” he says. “I caught some flack from Rahm Emanuel for that, and I get it. Nobody wants to be associated with Detroit; it’s my hometown, so I know how that goes.”

Saunders recently pointed out on his blog that we Gen-Xers started the Back-to-the-City movement, ultimately blazing a trail that our Boomer parents and Millennial (and now Gen Z) followers benefited from.

Humorist and writer Jamie Allen has counted all the squirrels in Central Park:

“We kind of know other animal populations, like rats, in cities,” he says. (The conservative estimate is one for every New Yorker.) “It immediately became comical to me. Squirrels are an animal that we interact with on a daily basis, they’re disease-carrying, and they’re so common that we don’t even pay attention to them.” (It’s worth noting that most of the diseases squirrels carry don’t transmit to humans. Still, don’t go petting them.)

With that, Allen assembled a team of scientists, wildlife experts, and graphic designers and began counting the squirrels in Inman Park in Atlanta. After two counts, the team set their eyes on a more ambitious location: Central Park, which measures more than five times the size of his neighborhood park.

Overall, the volunteers documented 3,023 squirrel sightings (this number includes squirrels that were likely counted more than once). Of that, 2,472 sightings (about 81 percent) were of gray squirrels, with various mixes of black, white, and cinnamon highlights. Another 393 were primarily cinnamon-colored, and 103 were black. All in all, they recorded 21 variations in fur color.

Don't confuse this work with earlier work to map all the incidents of squirrel-on-power line mayhem in the US.

So I wonder if Dug helped?

The North and South branches of the river have distinct personalities:

Multiple canoe and kayak rental outfitters operate from the river’s north branch, downtown and in Chinatown, just south of downtown. And enthusiasts are even planning a competitive swim in the river. In these areas, people worry not about pollution but rather the risk of collision between water taxis, tour boats, kayakers and pleasure boats.

In the dirtier water downstream, barges filled with limestone, sand or other heavy material dominate the river, and most residents keep their distance.

Both Little Village and the Calumet River corridor are designated industrial zones, and residents would like to see green industrial development such as solar farms and light manufacturing. They’d also love to have riverside cafes or parks, [resident Olga] Bautista said, but that dream feels far off.

Of course, the Potomac is so much cleaner, isn't it? Never mind the Anacostia...

Lakes Michigan and Huron (hydrologically one lake) are on course to have record water levels this month:

After late snowstorms and record-setting rainfall this spring, Lake Michigan’s water levels are projected to rise to a record level this month.

The rising water, which could swell more than 635 mm above its long-term monthly average, is expected to tie the previous June peak set in 1986.

May’s record-setting torrential rainfall was a catalyst for Lake Michigan’s surge in water levels, said Keith Kompoltowicz chief of watershed hydrology with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ district office in Detroit.

The National Weather Service’s Chicago office on Friday tweeted that water levels already had hit a record — but the service was referring to a daily measurement, and the Army Corps only counts a full month’s average levels for record purposes.

Here's the official chart as of yesterday:

Meanwhile, Lake Ontario has broken its record already, and by a lot:

And all that fresh water just goes down the St Lawrence right into the Gulf Stream...

Developers have learned to game New York City's zoning laws to construct buildings far larger than the plain meaning of those laws should allow:

Now, in a Second Gilded Age with magnates looking to park their millions in Manhattan real estate, developers stop at little to deliver the high-status goods, which these days are calculated in height and views.

As a result, New York is facing the “mechanical void” problem. It may sound like an embarrassing medical condition, but the voids are actually just air above floors occupied by equipment (mainly heating, ventilating, and cooling systems). That air becomes extraordinarily valuable when it can boost apartments higher above view-blocking neighbors. Raising the ceiling of mechanical spaces (which usually need only 10- to 15-foot ceilings) to as high as 350 feet becomes not absurd but savvy.

New York City does not generally limit building heights, but instead controls bulk and density by what’s called the floor area ratio (FAR). This means that a residential developer can build nine times the square feet of the lot area in an R-9 district. Depending on how the building bulk is arranged, the usual result is a building of about 15 stories.

Ridiculously tall mechanical spaces, which are not counted toward FAR, are not the only abusive (though ostensibly legal) tactic developers use to push buildings to ever greater heights.

If you think this through, however, these developments still go through the zoning board. So yes, the legal interpretations twist the law into painful shapes for the sake of bragging rights, but also a city agency lets them do it.

This reminds me of one of Chicago's ugliest buildings, at 2314 N. Lincoln Park West, which juts out from the rest of the buildings on the block (some of them historic) and looks like someone measured wrong. I haven't confirmed this, but I think the error was measured in thousands of dollars, and involved an alderman or two.

If only it weren't another beautiful early-summer day in Chicago, I might spend some time indoors reading these articles:

• On the 40th anniversary of the Flight 191 disaster in Chicago, Ask the Pilot draws comparisons between the troubles of the DC-10 and the 737-MAX.
• Does ride-sharing increase traffic congestion? Uh, yeah. Duh.
• Yesterday was the Chicago El's 127th birthday.
• Scott Hanselman remarks on "clever little C# features" that make him happy.
• A 68-year old survey, the Public Policy Mood estimate, found that public sentiment in 2018 was "the most liberal ever recorded" by the survey.
• Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) manufacturer DJI will add ADS-B, a safety feature that broadcasts the aircraft's location, to all its models weighing over 500 grams starting in 2020.
• Andrew Sullivan says my party can learn something from Steve Bannon.
• And finally, the president said in an interview Wednesday that he's compensating for his cowardice in ducking the draft as during the Vietnam War by increasing military spending now. (He also said the Moon is part of Mars, which I won't try to understand right now.)

Time to go outside...

Just a few things in the news:

• The Illinois legislature has approved an amendment to the state constitution that, if approved by voters in November 2020, will allow the state to set up a graduated income tax. The current proposal would slightly lower taxes for most people but dramatically increase taxes for people making over $500,000 per year.
• James Fallows has a look at the real complexities of the urban-rural divide in the US.
• James Comey has an Op-Ed in the Post about the dumb lies the President keeps telling. E.J. Dionne simply says "the emperor has no money."
• A seaplane accident earlier this month reminds the Economist why seaplanes have gone out of favor for general transportation.
• Cranky Flier went to Islay recently, and...well, he knows more about travel than whisky.
• Then there's Europe...

And hey, summer begins in three days.

People who thought moving to far suburbs made economic sense in the 1990s and 2000s can't seem to sell their ugly, too-large houses:

"For most of the 1990s, if you looked at the geographic center of jobs in the Chicago area, it was moving steadily northwest, out from the city toward Schaumburg," homebuilding consultant Tracy Cross says. Like the corporate campuses that popped up in that era, the houses were often built big.

A generation later, tastes for both have faded: Corporations have shifted their offices to downtown Chicago in unprecedented numbers, and once-stylish suburban luxury homes are derided as McMansions. Affluent people now show a well-documented preference for living in or near the city, a preference that's fueling the vigor in the high-rise condo market downtown as well as in Bucktown and in Wilmette, among other places.

Phil Chiricotti felt the double-barreled blast when he sold his home in Burr Ridge. Chiricotti, who was a retirement-planning executive, built the four-bedroom, 6,800-square-foot home on 77th Street in 2002, "when Tuscan-style homes were what everybody was doing," he says. The house has arches, columns and balconies made of stone.

"I had murals painted in that house, I had exotic Romanesque stenciling done," Chiricotti says. "Everyone told me my taste was spectacular. But the operating costs to live in that house were $25,000 a year." He put the house on the market in 2009, asking just under $2.7 million, and sold it almost six years later at a real estate auction for $1.47 million.

("Exotic Romanesque stenciling?" Yes, that would qualify as spectacular taste, just not good taste.)

Schaumburg, Ill., is about 50 km northwest of the Loop in western Cook and norther DuPage Counties. It spreads west from I-290 along a spiderweb of ugly strip-mall-encrusted stroads, and contains a giant mall and a huge IKEA. The village adopted, without irony, "Progress Through Thoughtful Planning" as its motto when it incorporated in 1956, and then thoughtfully planned winding residential roads without sidewalks that appeal to people who drive to their mailboxes.

I've joked before that "Schaumburg" is German for "Why would anyone live in this town." (It actually translates to "foam town," which amuses me.) Schaumburg epitomizes Suburbistan to me: a place that tries to take the best parts of rural and urban life and, missing the point entirely, creates something entirely horrific instead. A place where no one really wants to live.

These sad people paid millions for houses so ugly they don't so much rebuke good design as represent the antithesis of design itself, in suburbs so soulless just writing about them makes me want to clap on one and three. So this news fills me with a feeling described by another German word: Schadenfreude.

The Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, just 50 km from downtown Chicago, became Indiana Dunes National Park in February:

Supporters of the switch, who have watched the proposal ebb and flow like Lake Michigan along the shoreline over the past few years, said they are excited by the change and hope the already popular attraction draws even more people, particularly those who make it a point to visit designated national parks.

Operations at the park, other than a change in signs, won’t be any different, said Paul Labovitz, park superintendent.

“There’s no real budget implications but perceptually, the change will probably result in more attention and more investment outside the park,” he said, adding the National Park Service also may invest more in the park’s infrastructure over time.

Also upping its marketing will be the South Shore Line, which is working on plans to encourage more people from Chicago, Michigan and Indiana to come check out the park using commuter rail, Nicole Barker, director of capital investment and implementation, said in an email.

“Thanks to the South Shore Line’s Bikes on Trains program, which allows bicycles on select off-peak trains, it is easier than ever to come visit the dunes by bike,” Barker said.

Trains from Chicago's Millennium Station to the Dune Park station take about 80 minutes and cost $9 each way.

Due to climate change and gentrification, rat sightings in North America have gone up:

New York has always been forced to coexist with the four-legged vermin, but the infestation has expanded exponentially in recent years, spreading to just about every corner of the city.

Rat sightings reported to the city’s 311 hotline have soared nearly 38 percent, to 17,353 last year from 12,617 in 2014, according to an analysis of city data by OpenTheBooks.com, a nonprofit watchdog group, and The New York Times. In the same period, the number of times that city health inspections found active signs of rats nearly doubled.

Milder winters — the result of climate change — make it easier for rats to survive and reproduce. And New York’s growing population and thriving tourism has brought more trash for rats to feed on.

Chicago — crowned the nation’s rat capital in one study — has more than doubled its work crews dedicated to rats, who set out poison and fill in burrows in parks, alleys and backyards. It also passed ordinances requiring developers and contractors to have a rat-control plan before demolishing buildings or breaking ground on new projects.

Yah, thanks for that "rat capital" thing, New York Times.

Rats don't bother me, despite their urine often containing deadly bacteria. They clean up after us, feed crows and coyotes, and spread disease less than other local rodents. (Rabbits have made Parker sick a lot more often than rats.) And squirrels? Just ask a moose.