Category: History

How an 18-unit building on a Chicago boulevard disappeared and was re-zoned to allow 7 units

December 5, 2022 / / 1 Comment

Several things happened in November that has inspired me to finally document the story about a building whose history I had previously researched but never shared. It’s the story of a rear-courtyard-style building two blocks from the Garfield Park Conservatory that had 18 dwelling units, was demolished in the 1990s due to unpaid water bills, and rezoned – along with many other buildings nearby and across the city – to allow the next owner to build only seven dwelling units.

Those three things, for the curious: A question was posed to the speaker at a recent real estate group luncheon about the prevalence of downzoning in Chicago and the impact that might have on limiting some redevelopment of vacant lots; the city’s launch of ChiBlockBuilder, a program that replaces and expands upon the former $1 Large Lots program; and a meetup I attended with other urban planners to discuss, among other topics, zoning, transit, and cannabis dispensaries.

I make a few contentions in this blog post about zoning in Chicago. Among them:

  • Downzoning is a municipal practice that reduces how densely a property can be developed; in this context, the number of dwelling units allowed.
  • The zoning text and maps have progressively downzoned the city between the first zoning code and today’s zoning code; this blog post reviews the zoning text changes using a case study of a single building.
  • The zoning text and map at the time allowed an 18-unit building to be built on a particular property in East Garfield Park but the current zoning text and map allows only a seven-unit building to be built.

Introducing the vacant lot at 3454 W Fulton Blvd

There is a vacant lot owned by the City of Chicago at the northeast corner of Fulton Boulevard and St. Louis Avenue in East Garfield Park, in view of the renowned Garfield Park Conservatory. The lot has an area of 7,500 square feet.

The property’s PIN is 16-11-404-025-0000 (open its Address Snapshot on Chicago Cityscape).

The group of six three-flats is at the northeast corner of Fulton & St. Louis, or at the top-left corner of the image. The image is a screenshot of a Sanborn map, volume 11, sheet 84, last revised in 1950. Access to the HIG – Fire Insurance Maps online database is via the Chicago Public Library (a library card is required).

For what it’s worth, the southeast corner lot had 15 units, the southwest corner lot had 18 units. Then there’s the northwest corner lot that had a rear-courtyard-style building with interior corridors with 45 units (that’s 250 percent more units on a lot that’s 150 percent larger). (See Sanborn map volume 11, sheet 83, to visualize the corners on the west side of St. Louis Ave.)

The timeline of construction to demolition to city ownership to resale

The flats were built between 1922 and 1949, according to Sanborn maps (link to 1922 map, volume 11, sheet 83, hosted by the Library of Congress, which shows a vacant lot, while the 1949 version above shows the building).

In February 1992, the City of Chicago’s water department filed a statutory lien on the property to claim and to notify the owner that there was unpaid water service balance of $2,593.89.

If the building was dilapidated and had been cited, I did not find evidence in the documents available at online Cook County and City of Chicago sources. There is evidence, however, that the property was sold in 1988 a five-year delinquent tax sale.

The lot had six adjoining three-flats for a total of 18 units until its demolition, by the City of Chicago, on February 12, 1992 (read the lien the city filed against Exchange National Bank, in the amount of $14,754, to cover the cost of demolition).

Seven years later, on March 1999, the City of Chicago acquired the lot after succeeding in its lawsuit against Exchange National Bank in the Cook County Circuit Court’s Chancery Division (case number 95 CH 3958).

I’m going to repeat this part: Available evidence shows that the City of Chicago demolished the building due to unpaid water bills. I believe that political and planning circumstances – and policies – have changed such that if the situation were repeated in 2022 the building would not be demolished. For example, there is a coalition program called the Troubled Buildings Initiative that the city helped found in the mid-2000s to place buildings in this and similar situations into “receivership”, to ensure that the building does not get demolished and can actually be stabilized and improved (renovated). This is a better way of handling the problem!

Fast forward twenty-three years from the acquisition in 1999 to now. The lot is for sale to eligible neighbors – for the second time this decade – for use as a landscaped space (side yard, garden, plaza) or redeveloped (anything allowed by zoning, but you may need assistance learning to decode the zoning code).

The lot was first for sale in the Large Lots program during one or more of the tranches promoted between 2015 and 2018. The lot is now for sale since the ChiBlockBuilder program launched on November 17, 2022.

The property shown on the ChiBlockBuilder website. The property is highlighted in green on the map.

The rules are different between the former Large Lots program and ChiBlockBuilder. In the past, anyone who owned property on the same block or across the alley could apply to acquire the lot. All lots were sold for $1.

Now, through ChiBlockBuilder, interested buyers who want a low-cost acquisition must own and live in a property adjacent to the lot. This lot has only one eligible neighbor; I don’t know if the owner lives there. If they do, they can acquire the property for 10 percent of its market value.

That’s another difference between Large Lots and ChiBlockBuilder: All properties for sale (which is a subset of all properties that will eventually be for sale) have already had their market value appraised.

The market value for 3454 W Fulton Blvd is $29,953 or $2,995 for eligible applicants. There’s one other group of potential buyers that can obtain lots for 10 percent of market value and that’s non-profit organizations who have a proposal for a landscaped-based project.

The other day the City of Chicago added a wood fence around part of the vacant lot. The RV is parked on another city-owned lot, and the semi-trailer belongs to the water department because of underground work being conducted in the neighborhood.

What does zoning allow?

Successful neighboring owner-occupant buyers are able to do anything with the vacant lot that zoning allows. Although, without an expertise in reading the Chicago zoning code or a tool like Chicago Cityscape, it will be hard to know what that is.

A screenshot of ChiBlockBuilder showing the FAQs that provide links to identify a property’s zoning district and to the Chicago zoning code documentation.

My real estate information company, Chicago Cityscape, automatically generates a “Zoning Assessment” for every parcel in Chicago.

At 3454 W Fulton Blvd, the Zoning Assessment estimates that, currently, seven dwelling units are permissible, 11 fewer than what were extant there back in 1992.

Downzoning takes effect: Zoning codes of 1923, 1944, 1957, and 2004

Downzoning is a process – through either a change in the map (the zoning district assigned to a property) or a change in the text – that reduces the number of dwelling units permissible on a given lot.

1923

In the 1923 zoning code, Chicago’s first, the allowable density of building on this lot was controlled by the “2nd Volume District” which established very simple rules: a ground coverage limit of 75 percent, and a height limit of 66 feet. The building height could be higher with an upper floor setback.

A graphic from the 1923 zoning code shows how height limits varied based on upper floor setbacks and distance from the street.

Multiplying the lot size of 7,500 s.f. by 0.75 equals a maximum building footprint of 5,625 s.f. Multiply that by six floors and there’s a maximum floor area of approximately 33,750 s.f. This created an FAR of 4.5.

1944

In the 1944 zoning code, the allowable density of building on this lot was still controlled by the “2nd Volume District” but the maximum density had been reduced: a ground coverage limit of 45 percent, and a height limit of 45 feet (the current zoning code applies a height limit of 38 feet on the lot in question, while ground coverage is dictated by FAR and setbacks standards that the 1944 zoning code didn’t have).

Multiplying the lot size of 7,500 s.f. by 0.45 equals a maximum building footprint of 3,375 s.f. Multiply that by four floors and there’s a maximum floor area of approximately 13,500 s.f. This created an FAR of 1.8.

Yet neither the 1923 nor the 1944 zoning codes had a limit on the number of dwelling units. The number of dwelling units was thus limited by whatever building code standards there were and the unit sizes the builder wanted to market.

1957

The 1957 zoning code introduced a more stratified Use + Density schedule of districts more similar to the current zoning code than the two prior codes. The map was drawn to place 3454 W Fulton Blvd into an “R4” district.

1957 zoning code map sheet 1-J (which is the same grid index/sheet number as the current zoning code’s map). Image from the HathiTrust database, page number 171 of 348 (page 91 of the zoning code, though). 3454 W Fulton Blvd is outlined in a pink-colored box near the center of the image.

In 1957, the R4 zoning district applied a new density rule that there can only be one dwelling unit per 900 s.f. of lot area. This differs from the prior two codes which did not have a standard establishing a maximum number of units.

Since the lot has an area of 7,500 s.f., that equals eight dwelling units allowed.

The 1957 zoning code introduced the minimum lot area per unit standard. The standard in R4 zoning districts was that there had to be 900 s.f. of lot area per unit the owner desired to build. That number increased to 1,000 s.f. in the 2004 (current) zoning code, reducing the number of units allowed to be built on this vacant lot. Scan is from the HathiTrust (scanned page 24).

The 1957 zoning code also introduced a floor area ratio (FAR) of 1.2 to control building size, and front, side, and rear yard setbacks that controlled lot coverage. Remember that this lot had an effective allowable FAR of 4.5 in 1923 and 1.8 in 1944.

I think it needs to be pointed out that the most dense residential-only zoning district in the 1957 zoning code – R8 – allowed more than twice the number of units on a given lot than the most dense residential-only zoning district in the current zoning code – RM-6.5. It was a matter of requiring 135 s.f. of lot area per dwelling unit prior to 2004 and 300 s.f. of lot area per dwelling unit since 2004, respectively.

In practical terms, if the lot was zoned R8 in 1957-2003 then 55 units would be allowed; if it was zoned RM-6.5 in 2004-2022 then 25 units would be allowed.

2004

In the current zoning code, adopted in 2004, the lot’s “R4” zoning district designation was converted to “RT-4”. The code was updated to reduce the density rule from requiring 900 s.f. of lot area per dwelling unit to requiring 1,000 s.f. of lot area per dwelling unit. Since the lot has an area of 7,500 s.f., that means seven dwelling units are allowed here (also, the zoning code says the number must be rounded down in instances where there is a maximum standard). That’s a difference of one unit, so hardly an indictment of the downzoning of this lot that occurred between 1957 and 2004.

The current zoning code has a table in 17-1-1406-A that instructs readers how to convert from the 1957 zoning code districts to the current zoning code’s districts.

The FAR stayed the same between the 1957 and 2004 zoning codes, at 1.2 (far below 4.5 in 1923 and less than 1.8 in 1944).

Allowed zoning summary

I contend that there was a severe decline in the number of dwelling units allowed between Chicago’s first and fourth (current) zoning codes, manifested through a reduction in reduced height limits and lot coverage between 1923 and 1944 and the introduction of the maximum number of units standard (called “minimum lot area per unit”) in 1957. The zoning code in 2004, as it pertains to this lot, looks very much like the zoning code in 1957.

chart of four zoning codes and how they regulate, or would have regulated, density and parking at the location in this blog post
Chart that compares the zoning standards of height, lot coverage or FAR, and units allowed, amongst the four iterations of Chicago’s zoning code. Thank you to Daniel for compiling the different zoning codes’ standards.

Miscellanea

  • Another big change between the 1957 and 2004 zoning codes was the amount of parking required: in the equivalent zoning districts, the 1957 zoning code required 0.75 spaces per dwelling unit while the 2004 zoning code requires 1 space per dwelling unit, which is still the case as proximity to transit has no bearing on RT-4 zoning districts.
  • The 1923 had a cap on the number of garage parking spaces of one space per dwelling unit. This cap went away at some point, and has been reinstated in a limited basis in the “Connected Communities” ordinance adopted in 2022.
  • The 1923 zoning code allows more “auxiliary” uses in “apartment districts”, such as the one governing the vacant lot in question, compared to the current RT-4 zoning district, including: a boarding or lodging house, and an apartment hotel with a restaurant or dining room that is entered from within the lobby. (I don’t think apartment hotels exist anymore in Chicago.)
  • In 2022, the Chicago City Council adopted a zoning code amendment called “Connected Communities” which would allow the next owner of this vacant lot to build housing without any car parking – like it was in the 1920s – if they were to also obtain an upzone (that is, a zoning map amendment to a higher-density zoning district) to RM-5 or higher. This is because the lot is near enough to an eligible transit service.

P.S. The other type of downzoning (or upzoning) is to change the map. This means to reassign certain parcels to a different zoning district. Chicago city council members do this constantly, often for unknown or unexplained reasons. When it is explained, it’s often to ensure that a property owner must proposed a project to the alderperson and then obtain their permission to (usually) upzone.

When the zoning is changed one parcel at a time, or several parcels for a single property owner, this process of downzoning – or upzoning – gets an additional name: spot zoning. This is generally bad urban planning and development policy and has been part of political corruption. Chicago used to have a department policy that rezonings (changes to the zoning map) had to cover at least 10,000 s.f. of contiguous parcel area at a time (just a little bit larger than three standard size lots).

Several examples of alderperson-initiated downzoning in the 2010s include (from memory):

  • Former alderperson, and chairperson of the City Council’s zoning committee, Danny Solis, downzoned a large residential property in Pilsen to “M” (industrial); the property owner, PMG, sued Solis and the City of Chicago. The settlement was that the city would buy the land from PMG at market rate. This is now the 18th & Peoria development site, and the city is conducting public meetings to determine how to develop it.
  • Alderperson Roberto Maldonado submitted dozens of downzoning ordinances to City Council in ~2020, to change vacant lots in Humboldt Park and Logan Square from RT-4 (which would allow a three-flat) to RS-3 (which would allow a single-detached house, and in rare locations, a two-flat). The planning department staff had to limit his submissions to a few per month because they could not handle all of his ordinances amongst their other work processing real zoning change applications.
  • Alderperson Carlos Ramirez-Rosa downzoned a commercial district along Milwaukee Avenue north of Diversey Avenue to allow a lower density and lower height. Any developer that proposed more than allowed has to go through the 35th Ward Community Zoning Process (I have not personally experienced this process but I appreciate that it’s well-documented and seems to be applied consistently). The scope of the downzoning was reduced after some pushback.
Meigs Elevated Railway

Chicago’s Lake Street ‘L’ was originally supposed to be a monorail

April 18, 2020 / / 0 Comments

I bought a copy of The “L”: The Development of Chicago’s Rapid Transit System, 1888-1932, written by Bruce Moffat, a historian of electric trains in Chicago. Moffat currently works for the Chicago Transit Authority. (If there wasn’t a pandemic, you’d be able to request a hold on one of the 50 copies at the Chicago Public Library.)

The book is about the elevated trains that were built in Chicago, in competition with the street omnibuses (horse drawn), railways (cable cars and streetcars), and suburban trains (okay, some competition), prior to establishing the Chicago Transit Authority. The CTA is a State of Illinois authority, created by the legislature, that today owns and operates all of the historic and since-built elevated, subway, and at-grade ‘L’ transit as well as buses. It acquired all of the assets of all of the ‘L’, streetcar, and bus companies that were operating when it was established in 1945.

On with the story!

Back in December 1888, the Chicago City Council approved a franchise for the Lake Street Elevated Company to build a Meigs Elevated Railway above Lake Street from Canal Street to 40th Avenue (later named Crawford and now Pulaski Road), then the western border of Chicago. A tract of land west of 40th Avenue (Pulaski Road) was incorporated into the City of Chicago four months later on April 29, 1889.

If you go to the intersection of Canal and Lake Streets today you’ll see the Union Pacific railroad tracks above, heading into and out of Ogilvie Transportation Center, a skyscraper at 444 W Lake Street, a cigar store, and a vintage loft office building.

The Meigs Elevated Railway was a steam-powered elevated monorail – meaning each track had one rail to support a train.

You may not know this: I love monorails. When my family visited Walt Disney World my favorite ride was the inter-park and world famous monorail. I’ve also ridden the monorails in Disneyland (but I don’t remember my time there), Las Vegas, Seattle, Düsseldorf airport, Wuppertal, and three in Tokyo, Japan (Chiba City, Shonan, and Haneda airport; I missed the one in Tama).

I used to be obsessed with monorails. I became a member of The Monorail Society when I was a teenager and my first eBay purchase was a Disney monorail motorized toy in March 2000. I was jealous of my friends in elementary school who had a Lego monorail, and now they regularly sell for $200. I also built a SAFEGE-style monorail out of K’NEX in high school.

Drawing of the Meigs Elevated Railway monorail.
A drawing of the Meigs Elevated Railway monorail, originally published in Scientific American, July 10, 1886. Via Wikipedia; also printed in Moffat’s book where it is sourced from Railway Age, a trade journal founded in 1856 that still exists today.

It was invented by Josiah V. Meigs in Cambridge, Massachusetts; a 227-foot long demonstration line was built in 1886 on land that is now a Fairfield Inn hotel and before that was the Genoa Packing Co. (demolished in 2013).

The Meigs Elevated Railway Wikipedia article has two photos of a plaque that was on the exterior wall of the Genoa Packing Co. The new hotel building does not have the same plaque.

The Lake Street Elevated Company organizers (seven incorporators are listed in the book) hired Morris H. Alberger to be the president. According to Moffat’s book, “Alberger had convinced his fellow directors that their railroad should use an experimental and relatively complex elevated railway system developed by Joe V. Meigs”. Alberger was also the president of the Meigs Elevated Railway Company.

Moffat discusses an eighth company organizer: Michael Cassius McDonald, “politically well connected and influential”. He was the “chief sponsor” and “promoter” of the Lake Street elevated proposal which came to be known as “Mike’s Upstairs Railroad”.

The Meigs Electric Railway – the monorail – was never built. Moffat says that the reason the monorail was never built was because it was difficult to promote and raised funds by selling shares.

Almost a year after City Council approved the MER to run over Lake Street, they “deleted the Meigs requirement” in November 1890 so that the Lake Street Elevated Company could build a traditional iron structure. The trains would also be “traditional”. (The first elevated train started running in Manhattan and the Bronx on August 26, 1878 – that was the Third Avenue Elevated – ten years prior to the Meigs monorail being approved in Chicago.)

Even before City Council “deleted” the franchise’s requirement to build a monorail, the Lake Street Elevated Company had already started building the iron structure for a train in December 1889, at Lake and Clinton Streets, where the Clinton Green Line station is now.

That’s the end of the story for the monorail, but I’ll continue talking about the Lake Street ‘L’.

The Lake Street Elevated opens!

Construction had reached “just west of Ashland Avenue” by October 1892, less than three years after the first iron girder was erected at Clinton. A year after that last construction milestone at Ashland, the tracks for service were completed to California Avenue (2800 West).

The Lake Street Elevated Company’s first service was set to begin on October 30, 1893. The opening was delayed, however, until an inauguration on Saturday, November 4, 1893, to mourn the death of Mayor Carter Harrison, who was assassinated during his fifth term. Passenger service began two days later on Monday, November 6, 1893.

Service was extended into the Loop elevated tracks in 1895.

Map of the Lake Street Elevated, from Market Street (now Wacker Drive) to Harlem Avenue and South Boulevard.
Map of the Lake Street Elevated, from Market Street (now Wacker Drive) to Harlem Avenue and South Boulevard.

Heading closer to downtown Chicago

In early 1893, the Lake Street Elevated Company wanted to run their trains down Market Street (now Wacker Drive) from Lake Street to Madison Street.

Photograph showing the elevated stub track on Market Street. The view is looking east along Lake Street at Market Street, where the elevated train would turn south.
Photograph showing the elevated stub track on Market Street. The view is looking east along Lake Street at Market Street, where the elevated train would turn south. Photo taken by a Chicago Daily News, Inc., photographer in 1908. The caption in the Explore Chicago Collections database says,

The Market Street “stub” ran past the future site of the Civic Opera Building, opened in November 1929. Operagoers and workers in the office tower of the building would have ridden the ‘L’ here until the Chicago Transit Authority

The Lake Street Elevated’s Market Street stub terminated at Madison Street. The Civic Opera Building is on the left. Image is from the CTA’s collection. Market Street was renamed Wacker Drive when the street was reconstructed as a double decker street starting in 1948.

Extending further into the Garfield Park neighborhood

Tracks were built six blocks west of California Avenue, to Homan Avenue, but the stations were incomplete. Service to the Homan station started November 24, 1893, and four blocks further west to Hamlin Avenue in January 1894.

The Homan Avenue station no longer exists. Today’s Green Line over Lake Street was rebuilt from 1994 to 1996 and the Homan station was abandoned. According to Chicago “L”.org, the CTA decided to move the station two blocks west to Central Park Drive (3600 West). It was “completely deconstructed in spring of 2000 and put into storage”. It was renovated, made accessible, and opened as the Conservatory-Central Park Drive station in June 2001.

Chicago “L”.org notes that this visitors access to the Garfield Park Conservatory, evens out stop spacing, but does not intersect a bus route which Homan Ave does. The CTA closed Hamlin station on March 18, 1956. I don’t know when it was demolished.

Onward, to Austin and Oak Park!

Back to the Lake Street elevated timeline. Serviced operated to Hamlin Avenue in 1894. The next year it was operating to 52nd Avenue (now Laramie Avenue), the western boundary of Chicago. On the other side of that boundary was the Township of Cicero. Austin, a township neighborhood, was annexed by Chicago in 1899. The Village of Oak Park eventually emerged from the township, incorporating in 1902.

Austin was location of Cicero’s town hall. The town hall building, at the Central and Lake station, is now part of the Austin Town Hall Park and Cultural Center, owned and operated by the Chicago Park District.

Austin Town Hall in Chicago, Illinois
Austin Town Hall, the former town hall of the Township of Cicero. Photo taken in 2019 by Eric Allix Rogers.

Moffat’s book describes a lot of political controversy about extending the Lake Street Elevated into Cicero, which seems fitting for the Chicago region. Passenger service to Austin Avenue (now Boulevard) started April 19, 1899.

The next month, on May 14, 1889, trains that ran east-west above Lake Street came down a ramp – to the surface – onto north-south Lombard Avenue a couple of blocks south to Randolph Street. They turned west onto Randolph Street and continued until Wisconsin Avenue/Marion Street. The tracks on Randolph Street were in the middle of the street, and owned by Suburban Railroad, an interurban railway company.

The tracks were previously owned by Chicago, Harlem & Batavia Railway. I’m including that information because I grew up there. However, the railroad never made it that far: “No effort was made to extend the railroad to that distance place, but money was spent to purchase new locomotives and passenger cars and make other improvements.”

Residents here had the option of taking trains into downtown Chicago on the Chicago & Northwestern Railway. Those tracks are now owned by Union Pacific, which also operates the former C&NW lines as Metra’s UP-West Line. The line terminates at Ogilvie Transportation Center, which used to be called Northwestern Station, which was C&NW’s second location for their downtown terminal.

Moffat discussed these passengers’ choices, writing, “Although a ride on the nearby Chicago & Northwestern was faster, the “L’s” more frequent schedule, convenient Loop stops, and lower fare drew many riders away from the steam railroad”. The same is true today; the ‘L’ costs less than Metra but takes longer to reach the West Loop.

The story about the construction and operation of the Lake Street Elevated is almost done. I’m going to end it as soon as the train reaches the current terminus at Harlem Avenue in Oak Park.

Service to Marion Street started in late January 1901, on the street level of South Boulevard, thus ending service on Randolph Street a few blocks south. Trains started servicing the Harlem station on May 20, 1910. Remember that the reason the trains are now on South Boulevard is because Lake Street runs with a slight northwest diagonal, ends at the Chicago & Northwestern Railway embankment, and resumes a few blocks west. In 1961, the line was elevated onto C&NW’s embankment.

Even though the station is currently called “Harlem/Lake”, the station is at Harlem/South Boulevard, and Lake Street is one block north.

N.B.

Meigs’s railway was mentioned in an op-ed in the Boston Globe Magazine on Sunday, February 23, 1992, as the newspapers’s architecture critic, Robert Campbell, and Peter Vanderwarker, an architectural historian, lamented the towering car infrastructure proposed in the Central Artery/Tunnel Project (also known as “Big Dig”, the most expensive highway construction in the country), as well as the darkening effect of the elevated trains. It’s really quite an essay.

The op-ed in the Boston Globe Magazine, 2/23/1992

But competition was vicious. Arson and vandalism hampered Meigs, as did his insistence on old-fashioned steam power instead of electricity. Nothing besides the Cambridge test line was ever built. The Meigs monorail made its last run in 1894. Conventional elevated trains, modeled on those of Manhattan and far more massive than Meigs’, soon darkened Boston’s streets.

[snipped]

By the end of this decade, the view will have changed radically. A dramatic Babel of steel and concrete, perhaps resembling a great sports stadium, will rise like a gray mountain in the middle distance at the left of the photo. The introverted automobile will have won its long battle for supremacy over the sociable train.

“MEIGS ELEVATED RAILWAY – Changing TRACKS”, By Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker

Meigs Field, a former airport in downtown Chicago that existed between 1948 and 2003, was named after Merrill C. Meigs, a pilot and former head of the Chicago Aero Commission. He believed that Chicago needed a third airport, within 10 minutes of downtown. The airport was built and named after Meigs in 1949. I haven’t found a relationship between the two Meigs.

Is it possible for us to “greenline” neighborhoods?

May 24, 2018 / / 0 Comments

(I don’t mean extending the Green Line to its original terminal, to provide more transportation options in Woodlawn.)

Maps have been used to devalue neighborhoods and to excuse disinvestment. There should be maps, and narratives, to “greenline” – raise up – Chicago neighborhoods.

The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation “residential lending security” maps marked areas based on prejudicial characteristics and some objective traits of neighborhoods to assess the home mortgage lending risk. (View the Cook County maps.) The red and yellow areas have suffered almost continuously since the 1930s, and it could be based on the marking of these neighborhoods as red or yellow (there is some debate about the maps’ real effects).

The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and its local consultants (brokers and appraisers, mostly) outlined areas and labeled them according to objective and subjective & prejudicial criteria in the 1930s. Each area is accompanied by a data sheet and narrative description. The image is a screenshot of the maps as hosted and presented on Chicago Cityscape.

The idea of “greenlining”

I might be thinking myopically, but what would happen if we marked *every* neighborhood in green, and talked about their strengths, and any historical and current disinvestment – actions that contribute to people’s distressed conditions today?

One aspect of this is a form of affirmative marketing – advertising yourself, telling your own story, in a more positive way than others have heard about you in the past.

In 1940, one area on the Far West Side of Chicago, in the Austin community area, was described as “Definitely Declining”, a “C” grade, like this:

This area is bounded on the north by Lake St., on the south by Columbus Park, and on the west by the neighboring village of Oak Park. The terrain is flat and the area is about 100% built up. There is heavy traffic along Lake St., Washington Blvd. Madison St., Austin Ave. (the western boundary) and Central Ave. (the eastern boundary).

High schools, grammar schools, and churches are convenient. Residents shop at fine shopping center in Oak Park. There are also numerouss small stores along Lake St., and along Madison St. There are many large apartment buildings along the boulevards above mentioned, and these are largely occupied by Hebrew tenants. As a whole the area would probably be 20-25% Jewish.

Some of this migration is coming from Lawndale and from the southwest side of Chicago. Land values are quite high due to the fact that the area is zoned for apartment buildings. This penalizes single family occupancy because of high taxes based on exclusive land values, which are from $60-80 a front foot, altho one authority estimates them at $100 a front foot. An example of this is shown where HOLC had a house on Mason St. exposed for sale over a (over) period of two years at prices beginning at $6,000 and going down to $4,500. it was finally sold for $3,800. The land alone is taxed based on a valuation exceeding that amount. This area is favored by good transportation and by proximity to a good Catholic Church and parochial school.

There are a few scattered two flats in which units rent for about $55. Columbus Park on the south affords exceptional recreational advantages. The Hawthorne Building & Loan, Bell Savings Building & Loan, and Prairie State Bank have loaned in this area, without the FHA insurance provision. The amounts are stated to be up to 50% and in some cases 60%, of current appraisals.

Age, slow infiltration, and rather indifferent maintenance have been considered in grading this area “C”.

Infiltration is a coded reference to people of color, and Jews.

My questions about how to “greenline” a neighborhood

  1. How would you describe this part of Austin today to stand up for the neighborhood and its residents, the actions taken against them over decades, and work to repair these?
  2. How do you change the mindset of investors (both small and large, local and far) to see the advantages in every neighborhood rather than rely on money metrics?
  3. What other kinds of data can investors use in their pro formas to find the positive outlook?
  4. What would these areas look like today if they received the same level of investment (per square mile, per student, per resident, per road mile) as green and blue areas? How great was the level of disinvestment from 1940-2018?

In the midst of writing this, Paola Aguirre pointed me to another kind of greenlining that’s been proposed in St. Louis. A new anti-segregation report from For the Sake of All recommended a “Greenlining Fund” that would pay to cover the gap between what the bank is appraising a house for and what the sales price is for a house, so that more renters and Black families can buy a house in their neighborhoods.

That “greenlining” is a more direct response to the outcome of redlining: It was harder to get a mortgage in a red area. My idea of greenlining is to come up with ways to say to convince people who have a hard time believing there are qualities worth investing in that there they are people and places worth investing in.

The Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond digitized the HOLC maps and published them on their Mapping Inequality website as well as provided the GIS data under a Creative Commons license.

Where do those weird Chicago place labels on certain maps come from?

March 9, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Andrew Huff pointed out some archaic neighborhood names he saw on a map that was generated using Carto. The company’s map “tiles” use free and open source data from OpenStreetMap, “the Wikipedia of maps”.

I’m going to tell you where these names come from!

Chicago cartographer Dennis McClendon has also written about the names.

I had a similar question as Andrew several years ago. (Note: I’m a very active OpenStreetMap editor, and I add/change/delete things from the map multiple times a week.)

First, we have to find that place name in the OpenStreetMap database, after which we can discover its provenance. The best way to do this is to search Nominatim, the “debugging search engine” for OSM.

I searched for “Summerdale” because that sounds unique. The fourth result is the right match, so go ahead and open that place name’s details page.

That details page still doesn’t tell us what we need to know, but there’s a link called that starts with “node” that leads deeper into the OSM database.

On the page “Node: Summerdale (153430485)” there are a bunch of “tags” that describe this place’s record in the OSM database. Some of those tags start with “gnis”, which is an abbreviation for “GeoNames Information System”, commonly shortened to GeoNames.

GNIS is managed by the U.S. Board of Geographic Names, which is part of the United States Department of Interior’s U.S. Geological Survey (commonly known as USGS).

We can use the GNIS Feature Search site to look up Summerdale by name or ID. (Using name is easier, and I recommend narrowing it to the state of Illinois.)

There are four results for “Summerdale” in Illinois, and two are in Cook County, and one of these is a church, and the other a “populated place”. We want the populated place result.

Here’s where our journey ends, because this result page tells the citation of how “Summerdale” got to be in a United States federal government database of place names.

Hauser, Philip M. and Evelyn M. Kitigawa, editors. Local Community Fact Book for Chicago 1950. Chicago, Illinois : University of Chicago, 1953. p18

Finding the original source

You can find that book in the Newberry library in Chicago. Request it on their computer and a librarian will fetch and bring it to you. I did that in 2015 (which was also the first time I visited the library).

Uptown community area page in the 1950 Local Community Fact Book

Here’s what that book looks like, and you can see “Summerdale” mentioned at the end of the third paragraph on the page for the Uptown community area (which is an official place with a permanent boundary):

During the 1870’s and 1880’s, Uptown was still predominantly open country. The area east of Clark Street, from Montrose to devon, was a farming community. At each of the station that had been opened on the Chicago and Milwaukee line –at Argyle, Berwyn, Bryn Mawr and Devon Avenues–there were a few frame residences. West of Clark Street, a substantial portion of the land was swampy. Scattered settlements, chiefly the frame cottages of railroad employees, appeared along the Northwestern railroad tracks. An important factor in the growth of this area was the opening of the Ravenswood station at Wilson Avenue. The opening of another station on this line at Foster Avenue, eventually gave his to the settlement of Summerdale.

I haven’t answered Andrew’s other question, on why Lincoln Square or Uptown, official community areas with permanent boundaries, don’t show on Carto’s map.

That’s because no one has imported these boundaries or these place names into OpenStreetMap. You can do it, and here’s how.

Big Marsh Bike Park is the coolest new city park

November 6, 2016 / / 7 Comments

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