The Daily Parker

The unpacking continues, but I still have too many boxes cluttering up the place:

It is, however, a gorgeous day, and my office window is open to this:

My goals are (a) do my work instead of going for a long walk in the perfect weather, and (b) finish unpacking my living room tonight. I may succeed in both. Updates as conditions warrant.

So, this happened last night about two blocks from my new place:

About 11:50 p.m., a 19-year-old man was fatally shot in Uptown on the North Side.

The man was standing in an alleyway in the 4400 block of North Magnolia Avenue when someone inside a dark-colored van fired shots. The teen was shot twice in his side, and the van fled north from the scene, police said.

The man was taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.

The 19-year-old man had [not] been identified as of early Thursday.

At least that explains all the sirens and police cars.

When the movers arrived at the former Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters yesterday morning, they remarked that it looked like I had everything organized well and they would hit their estimate. Mother Nature disagreed, giving us drenching rains that halted loading the truck for half an hour, and following up with this when we unloaded:

[T]he weather service issued a tornado warning for parts of central Cook County, activating sirens throughout Chicago, but no touchdowns were reported. That warning expired at 5:15 p.m. after the storm moved over Hillside and Westchester and weakened as it moved east.

A spotter at Midway International Airport reported seeing a funnel cloud about a mile east of the airport, heading east. There also was a report of a funnel cloud forming south of Millennium Park about 5:20 p.m., according to weather service meteorologist Bill Nelson.

I may have video at some point, and I still have some Italy photos to put up. And today, of course, is Parker's birthday, so I'll try to get a birthday portrait this evening.

Now I have to catch up on work.

Via reader EB, a Chicago Magazine article from 1980 wonders where the gentrification really is (because it was 20 years in the future):

Thus it was that Yuppies began regentrifying poverty areas along the lakefront, such as Lincoln Park, Old Town, New Town, Lakeview, and Uptown. As population expert Pierre de Vise has noted, these singles are able to establish beachheads in “the buffer zones separating the Gold Coast from the slum” because the singles are less concerned with poor schools and street crime than middle-class families. The families, which had been fleeing to the suburbs since about 1950, continued to flee—would you send your child to a Chicago public school? Between 1970 and 1975 alone, the number of white households in Chicago with children dropped from 488,000 to 447,000, a loss of 41,000 households and the biggest drop in any category of the Census Bureau’s housing survey. Nevertheless, the arrival of the Yuppies was the first spontaneous evidence of new urban life in 30 years, and so the “urban renaissance” was hastily proclaimed.

But the word “renaissance” usually implies a cultural rebirth pervading all of society. The renaissance in Chicago has, in fact, been limited to a few oases. Of the 30,000 new housing units constructed in Chicago between 1970 and 1975, nearly half are concentrated in just 28 of the city’s 840 census tracts; as you might have guessed, all 28 of those tracts are on or near the lakefront.

Despite the frantic real-estate activity along the lakefront today, a 1975 study by Pierre de Vise turned up entire neighborhoods—mostly in black ghettos or blue-collar areas—where there hadn’t been a single conventional house sale all year; virtually all of the conventional mortgage sales, de Vise found, were restricted to the North and Northwest sides, the Far Southwest Side, and lakefront houses and condominiums.

Only, the hated Yuppies moving into those communities actually did reduce crime and improve schools, but also drove out minorities and the poor. Chicago today would be unrecognizable to people from 1980. In fact, people in my own family who moved away from Chicago in the 1970s cannot comprehend $500,000 condos at Wells and Division, nor walking alone through Oz Park after dark. And they certainly would never send a child to Lincoln Park High School.

We've got a long way to go to have a truly sustainable city, but we're on the right track (despite pensions). I'm glad to be living here now.

WBEZ's Curious City has the story:

Every town that folded into Chicago, from Lake View to Hyde Park, had its own system for naming and numbering streets. Some towns counted out addresses starting from the Chicago River, while others started from Lake Michigan. Some placed even numbers on the north side of the street, others put them on the south. Some even let developers choose their own street names or numbers if there wasn’t a lot of local opposition.

Edward Paul Brennan was a delivery boy for his father’s grocery store, and later a bill collector for the music company Lyon & Healy. He was so frustrated with the chaos of Chicago’s address system that in 1901 he came up with his own. But it would take him years to get it implemented.

Beginning in the 1890s he started a scrapbook, collecting newspaper articles about problems with city navigation or delays due to address confusion. Articles had headlines like “Streets in a Tangle. Visitors Lost.” One report tells about a doctor who couldn’t find a patient during a house call emergency.

Today, Chicago addresses increase by 100 per block, 800 per mile. (Miles are significant because of the way land is surveyed in Illinois.) It's an easily-understood system that makes it hard to get lost in the city.

• Thomas Cook needs to apologize
• Is the novel dead?
• Chicago Magazine has a guide to O'Hare and Midway that seems useful. (There's a Wow Bao in Terminal 5? Right, I've never flown out of T5.)
• Some people just won't lower the price on their houses. I know the feeling.
• Attention, David Cameron: You bloody well know austerity doesn't work, unless you're already wealthy.

The Economist quotes a study finding that a quarter of American schoolchildren believe Canada is a dictatorship:

Most of the closed [Chicago Public School] district schools were in deprived areas. Nearly three-quarters of the children were black and more than 90% were poor. The report [from the Thomas Fordham Institute] concluded that “though fraught with controversy and political peril, shuttering bad schools might just be a saving grace for students who need the best education they can get.”

They do. And nationwide, many are not getting it. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, which periodically tests sample-groups of America’s children on various subjects, this week released disappointing results for history, geography and civics for 13-year-olds. Pupils showed no improvement since 2010. Most know little about history: only 1% earned an “advanced” score in that subject. Geography scores are even worse. Most did not understand time zones, and a quarter thought Canada was a dictatorship. Results have been flat since 1994.

Speaking of Chicago public services, now that Illinois actually has to follow its constitution and pay the pensions it promised, the only way to make up the deficit is (obviously) to raise taxes. Crain's takes a look at what that would mean. Despite the newspaper's general right-wing slant, even they see the logic in it:

Gov. Bruce Rauner had proposed reducing state employee retirement payments to partly close a nearly $6.2 billion deficit in fiscal 2016. But there also are big pots of money to tap, if the governor and legislators can overcome their distaste for raising taxes.

For instance, raising income tax rates 1 percentage point would bring in nearly $4 billion, eliminating two-thirds of the deficit in one fell swoop, according to one estimate. Taxing services, such as those provided by lawyers and consultants, could yield more than $900 million annually, while taxing some retirement income could produce between $1.5 billion and $2.0 billion.

“Given the state's politics and short amount of time between now and the start of the state's fiscal year, it's hard to see how some sort of temporary tax increase or tax-base broadening could be avoided,” says Carol Portman, president of the Taxpayers' Federation of Illinois, a Springfield-based fiscal policy group.

We had a 5% income tax for a short while until the legislature allowed it to lapse. Now we're back to 3%, one of the smallest in the country (of states that have income taxes). Even though it would affect me directly, I'm not only in favor of increasing state taxes to 5%, but also of adding a 1% income tax for Chicago workers (not residents) that would work the same way New York's does.

Stop trying to destroy state and city services in order to make tax cuts seem reasonable. Well-funded public services, including pensions, make cities better to live in, as Europe has demonstrated for 60 years.

A pile of Gulf moisture has arrived in Chicago making the otherwise-comfortable 22°C feel like a sauna. I'm using the day to do some planning for my next trip (11 days, 22 hours!) and move (28 days, 22 hours!), client work, and taking Parker to an interview of sorts at a new daycare facility. Yes, an interview: he has to play with the other dogs for two hours so they can decide whether to allow him to come back. I hope he passes.

Results from that, as well as a probably thunderstorm (unrelated), later today.

I went to the NPR show's taping last night:

The show will be broadcast tomorrow. It's going to be hi-larious.

After Moody's cut our credit rating this week, people are starting to compare Chicago with Detroit:

here are five reasons, now more than ever, that suggest Chicago is akin to Detroit—or, by some measures, even worse. Or, as Illinois Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner put it last month: “Chicago is in deep, deep yogurt.”

BIG, SCARY NUMBERS: Chicago's unfunded liability from four pension funds is $20 billion and growing, hitting every city resident with an obligation of about $7,400. Detroit's, whose population of about 689,000 is roughly a quarter of Chicago's, had a retirement funding gap of $3.5 billion, meaning each resident was liable for $5,100. A January 2014 report from Morningstar Municipal Credit Research showed that among the 25 largest cities and Puerto Rico, Chicago had the highest per-capita pension liability.

Yes, it's bad, but wow. Has the author ever been to Detroit?

But yeah, it's pretty bad.