October 2013 – Daniel Kay Hertz

Things about which I have to write, so I don’t get on the train Monday thinking, I really need to write about that

1. Two worthwhile pieces from Aaron Renn: “Well-Heeled in the Windy City” at City Journal, and “My Presence Is a Provocation” at New Geography. The question of what obligations the political class of a city like Chicago, or New York, or wherever, feels towards those residents, and those neighborhoods, that will never be glamorous is an important one, and I think it goes way beyond Emanuel or Bloomberg or Gilbert personally.

2. Moody’s finds that charter schools can cause a fiscal crisis for regular public schools just as Catalyst notes that Chicago’s neighborhood high schools are having an enrollment crisis. Which precipitates a fiscal crisis. Not much to say here other than Oy. Actually, there is, but I already said it: Is this the educational marketplace that charter backers had in mind, or are we just spreading students thin to the detriment of their education?

3. Chicago’s getting an independent budget office! Thank GOD. This is important because in instances when someone wants to, say, lease our parking meters, an independent budget office is pretty much the only outfit that might warn us, with the numbers to back up the claim, that such a lease would be a disaster. Basically, if this thing works, we will be much, much better-informed about the potential effects of future proposals before they happen. Then again, it may not work. It’s apparently getting $500,000 and a staff of six, which is double what Ald. Ameya Pawar initially proposed, but one-sixteenth of what Scott Waguespack seems to think is necessary. I’m not really in a position to evaluate. Although I will point out that New York City’s Independent Budget Office has a staff of 39.

4. A great four-part series on dream public transit reforms at the Beechwood Reporter. Main thing I would like to emphasize: METRA COULD BE SO GREAT BUT IT’S NOT. OY. Metra, and also BRT. Improving the first – getting trains to run at least every 15-30 minutes – and building a moderate-sized network of the second would pretty much revolutionize rapid transit and access in Chicago without digging any expensive tunnels or anything.

Addendum, or: race- and class-based segregation

I looked at my last post again and realized that, as written, it is entirely race-neutral. Is race beside the point of municipal-level policies that affect inequality? Obviously not. And yet.

And yet I have become aware, in the course of thinking about these things, that when I use the words “integration” and “segregation” in a contemporary urban context I mean, by default, integration and segregation by economic class, and not by race, which is obviously the default for most people. That is, when we want to talk about class-based segregation, we have to say “class-based” or “income-based.” We don’t have to say “race-based”; it’s implied. The opposite is now true for me, or at least the monologues in my head. My language has revealed that I believe class segregation is the more fundamental problem.

Why is that? And is it fair?

This, I suppose, is my thinking: There is something necessarily wrong with economically-segregated neighborhoods that is not necessarily wrong with racially-segregated ones. I can think of two things, in fact. Number one is that in any very roughly capitalist, modern society, it is hard to imagine a disproportionately low-income neighborhood that does not suffer the kinds of neighborhood effects on education, health, mobility, etc., that I mentioned in the last post. It just seems impossible. Number two is that economic class has not traditionally – at least not in the United States – been a dominant cross-generational cultural marker in the way that race or ethnicity has been. That is to say that being of a particular race puts you in a more defined community than being in a particular economic class, and so there seems to be more of a positive reason to have some amount of physical clustering along those lines.

(I don’t think I can emphasize enough, of course, that I AM NOT endorsing the segregation-exists-because-people-want-to-live-among-their-own-kind hypothesis, which is falsified by every possible empirical and non-empirical and imaginary investigation, from actually asking people what kind of neighborhoods they would like to live in, to a historical examination of how neighborhoods actually came to be segregated, and so on. But even in the absence of all of this, I am saying, there would be some push for some moderate amount of clustering, in the same way that, for example, being a young person puts you in a community that creates a push for clustering and the creation of neighborhoods that are somewhat disproportionately full of young people. These neighborhoods are not 98% young people, or anywhere near it, as so many American neighborhoods are 98% black. To get to 98% anything, or anywhere near it, you pretty much always need massive coercion.)

I would add that the purely race-based barriers to racial integration are less today, I think, than the purely income-based barriers to economic integration. Race-based barriers are very alarmingly high, of course. There is steering and lying and mortgage discrimination and so on. But if you are a black middle-income couple and you are committed to moving to a majority-white neighborhood, you will probably be able to do so, even if it takes longer and is more costly (and puts you in a less-affluent white neighborhood) than if you were not black.

Low-income people, on the other hand, also face a variety of discriminatory practices, but the most important one is simply the price of real estate, which makes discriminatory practices moot in many, if not most, instances. If you cannot pay the going rent for a given neighborhood or suburb, you don’t even have a theoretical recourse. Except Section 8, I suppose, if your income is low enough, which puts you back in the world of discriminatory practices – one in which it’s perfectly legal in most places for landlords to flatly state that you are not welcome. The fact that racial segregation is slooowly declining, while economic segregation is skyrocketing, is more evidence of this.

But. There are at least two very obvious problems with my argument. The first is that because race is still a characteristic that on its own provides privilege or the lack of it, there is something inherently wrong with racially segregated neighborhoods in the United States in 2013, and, in fact, there will be for the foreseeable future. The fact that it’s possible to imagine a world in which that is not the case doesn’t mean a ton. The existence of a massive number of communities in Chicago, and across the country, that are 95%+ non-white is itself evidence (if more evidence is necessary) that race continues to provoke coercion.

The other thing is that, largely because of point #1, race and class are so intermixed that it’s not really practical to talk about integration of what without integration of the other. Especially if we take into account wealth, and not just income, economic status is so skewed by race that serious integration along one of those axes would necessarily create integration along the other.

So I have built up an argument in favor of focusing on economic segregation instead of racial segregation, and then knocked it down. I think the wrongness – in both the ethical and the logical sense – of privileging the economic issue to the exclusion of the racial one is clear.

There is one last factor, though, which is practicality. From a policy perspective, at least, economic segregation looks much easier to deal with (in most instances). The issue is, on the one hand, about just giving lower-income people more money so they can pay rent; and, on the other, allowing developers to increase housing supply so prices go down. There are huge logistical and political obstacles to that, of course, but the basic ideas are there, and there’s a fairly diverse and vocal constituency for them, from the large number of people who would like to pay less for housing – or be able to afford better housing given their budget – to the ecosystem of affordable housing nonprofits and CDCs, to the developers who would like, selfishly, to make money from building more stuff.

On the other side, it’s not at all obvious how you significantly speed up racial integration. Increased enforcement of anti-discrimination laws would help, of course, but almost by definition it’s difficult to prove those cases without a huge amount of time, energy, and money. Real estate counseling programs help, but not that much, and plus it’s kind of paternalistic, which may or may not bother you. Moreover, there just isn’t any massive, organized groundswell in favor of racial integration. Steve Bogira has been doing a Ben–Joravsky–on–TIFs thing with racial segregation, which is terribly important, and he is one of the only people, if not the only person, with real media access who’s doing that in Chicago. But his own articles are often about the fact that it’s basically impossible to get anyone with power to even acknowledge that government might have some role to play in directly promoting racial integration.

I guess what I’m saying is that this, in the end, is why I spend more energy thinking about policy responses to economic segregation than policy responses to racial segregation, and probably will continue to do so: it seems less hopeless. That, and, like I said before, promoting economic integration will almost certainly push along racial integration as well. But I don’t think coming to that conclusion is an excuse for ignoring the very real relevance of race, and I think it’s important that in particular the wonkish conversations a la Glaeser and Krugman and Yglesias and Avent (all white, like me! a hint of more of the problem) don’t become so focused on pure economics that they forget that.

Is Inequality the Purview of City Government?

I haven’t paid an enormous amount of attention to Bill DeBlasio’s mayoral platform – although at some point I probably will – but his candidacy has had the pleasant effect of provoking a conversation about whether, and to what extent, city halls ought to grapple with economic and social inequality. Responses range from Yes, it’s about goddamn time, to No, that’s terrifying, to a sort of sickly cackle.

My position – in fact, the premise of this blog and of many, many hours of my time over the last few years – is that yes, local governance has an enormous amount to do with inequality. I would say there are at least four major ways, roughly in order of big-picture importance:

1. Housing policy. People who don’t believe that cities have a major role to play in the story of inequality tend to emphasize the national and global economic trends that brought us to this point, like offshoring and automatization, which they say can only really be effectively dealt with – to the extent they can be dealt with at all – by high-level policy organs. This is true, I guess. But the experience of poverty and the replication of poverty both heavily – HEAVILY – depend on where you live. Specifically, whether or not you live in a high-poverty neighborhood. Up and down the line – physical and mental health outcomes, educational outcomes, employment and income outcomes both in a single generation and over multiple generations – an enormous body of research shows that neighborhood effects are pretty massive. And income segregation has increased faster over the last 40 years than income inequality, meaning right now cities are actually exacerbating those global-trend-derived problems. A housing policy that promoted income integration would not only help to decouple miserable living conditions with being on the lower end of the income distribution, but also, most likely, improve social mobility.

2. Transportation policy. Places where public transit isn’t an option force low-income people to pay massively more for transportation than they would otherwise. The actual number is something on the order of $10,000 a year per household. Those people who truly cannot pay for a car – or choose not to because they would like to, say, buy their kids new clothes for school, or go to the doctor instead – end up incredibly isolated, both from the broader metropolitan society, and from necessary amenities like stores and jobs. The average American, willing to travel up to 90 minutes each way on public transit, can only reach 30% of all jobs in their metropolitan area. That’s a disaster if you need a job and can’t afford a car.

3. Education policy. The obvious one, but all the way down here because so much of what matters is wrapped up in housing policy. Segregated neighborhoods equal segregated schools, most of the time. Which equals major operational and pedagogical challenges, most of the time.

4. Constituent services. James Fallows wrote once that wealthy people live pretty well all around the world, and so the difference between a developed and developing country is in the quality of life of people who need some kind of direct support from the state. Something similar goes on with cities. If you are middle class, and have always been, you probably are not very upset by, say, the closure of public mental health clinics. If you are not middle class, and need mental health care, you’re devastated. (The situation is made worse, let’s point out, by lackluster transit access to the remaining clinics.) The public services cities provide are a real and important part of the safety net. Without them, more people fall to the point where it’s almost impossible to pick themselves back up, and mobility – at least upward mobility – suffers to some extent. City services are about more than just street-sweeping.

Gentrification in the Public Schools

This is an ovewhelmingly great essay in The Atlantic by Maria Bloomfield Cucchiara about the many problems with having middle-class and professional families move into previously segregated and poor public schools. I’m particuarly excited every time I see someone mention that Milliken v. Bradley is one of the most disastrous Supreme Court cases of the last 50 years.

But I’m worried that the title – “Cities Are Trying to Fix Their Schools by Luring the Middle Class: It Won’t Work” – isn’t cynical enough. What if, in fact, it works exactly as well as it needs to? The evidence suggests that when a committed group of middle-class parents integrate a public school, as long as there are enough other gentrifiers around to keep their numbers strong, test scores at that school skyrocket. Does it increase segregation? Does it fail to address the needs of schools not fortunate enough to be located in gentrified neighborhoods? So what?

Urban politicians have weathered the problem of school systems that fail the poor and non-white for many decades now. What has clearly animated them – and the sort of moneyed business class that holds a lot of influence with them – instead is the fact that a lack of decent public schools is chasing away middle-class parents who might otherwise live in the city. But in many places, we appear to have found the solution to that. Given a critical mass of middle class families in a given neighborhood, there’s a pretty clear path to gentrifying the local school – not easy, maybe, but it’s been done at least a dozen times in Chicago.

From the mayor’s perspective, the problem has, in fact, been “fixed.” But that’s because he’s not talking about the same problem that Bloomfield Cucchiara is.

A Market in Education

An incredible story from WBEZ about how the skyrocketing number of public high schools in Chicago – up 50% over the last decade – has left those with poor reputations struggling to maintain enrollment:

Roberto Clemente Community Academy in Humboldt Park is one of those. It’s an eight-story building. Until recently escalators carried 1,800 kids from floor to floor. There are just 130 freshmen enrolled today. Another 473 freshmen live in the area but go to high school somewhere else. In fact, the Noble Street network of charter schools, with its various campuses, enrolls more students from Clemente’s attendance area than Clemente.

On the one hand, whatever you think about it, this is exactly what the charter folks said would happen: under competition, weak schools would shrivel and die. The only question from the reform perspective is whether or not the dying schools are actually weaker in their academic and social support for students than the ones that are “winning.”

#crimeisdown

I saw that hashtag in the headline of a DNAinfo story and got excited. Maybe truth in crime reporting was going viral! But no.

You won’t hear Lakeview’s top cop talk statistics at community meetings anymore — even if numbers suggest that crime is down from the year before in the neighborhood…. At a heated August policing meeting, residents both decried the statistics showing crime was too high — a beat in Lakeview led the city in robberies — and questioned whether the official data could be believed…. The [Lakeview] blog [Crime in Wrigleyville and Boystown] has taken on a popular hashtag, #crimeisdown, to express frustration.

So some group of Lakeview residents have taken a factual statement and turned it into a slogan for a bizarre form of trutherism, and then whipped up enough fear around that (again, factual, even though it is meant to be ironic) slogan to bully their local police contacts into tiptoeing around the fact that this supposedly ironic slogan is, in fact, non-ironically accurate, because to do otherwise would be too upsetting for those residents. This is hyperlocal news by Orwell.

There is the mandatory caveat that, of course, it is very possible to use statistics to callously dismiss the victims of crime. Individual experiences matter, obviously, even in the context of an overall crime decline. It’s even possible that some police officers at earlier Lakeview meetings were callous in exactly that way; I don’t know, because I didn’t attend them. If that’s the case, then shame on them.

But sometimes I think there is the opposite problem, which is people thinking that statistics have nothing to do with individual experiences. In fact, the “statistics” at issue are simply the result of counting how many people have been victimized by crime. There is no fancy manipulation. If the statistics go down, that means fewer people have been made victims. That means that you, personally, might be one of the people who weren’t robbed, or broken into, or shot. It’s impossible to prove that a given individual is the one who escaped that fate, of course; but it is a fact that had Chicago’s murder rate held steady over the past 20 years, for example, many thousands of people who are still alive would have suffered violent and tragic deaths. That is an amazing and wonderful thing.

The Lakeview residents quoted seem to think that the official statistics greatly undercount the real number of victims; it’s almost certainly true that the police numbers are at least somewhat low, since not every victim reports their crime to the police. But there’s absolutely no evidence that I’ve heard of that would suggest this problem has been getting bigger, and certainly not so much bigger that it would offset the truly enormous declines in assaults and robberies the city has seen over the last two decades. There’s also no reason to believe, as far as I can tell, that this problem would be especially severe in Lakeview as opposed to elsewhere in the city. In fact, I would tend to think that the residents of Lakeview would be much more likely to report a crime than in one of Chicago’s many non-white neighborhoods, where relations with the police are considerably more fraught. That means that the official statistics, if anything, probably understate how safe places like Lakeview are compared to the rest of the city.

As for the fact that, in the second quarter of 2013, the beat that encompasses the Southport and Halsted bar scenes in Lakeview had the highest number of robberies in the city – well, yes, that’s true. And maybe that suggests there ought to be some extra police presence there. But it also seems likely that the number of robberies in that precinct has something to do with it being one of the premier night-life areas in the entire city. That means that 1) there are a huge number of people there, several nights a week, which raises the total population and therefore should raise the total number of crimes, and 2) there are a huge number of people stumbling around drunk late at night, probably with cash, which is checking pretty much every box you need to increase your chance of being robbed. Not, of course, that you shouldn’t be able to feel safe at any time, anywhere, but the reality of pretty much every big city in the U.S. is that lots of drunk people with money late at night = some increased number of muggings. My guess is that if you are a non-drunk person, not spending a lot of time walking around by yourself very late at night, Lakeview is an incredibly safe place to be.

In fact, I don’t have to guess: Looking at the incident log at the Chicago Data Portal, I can confirm that, for example, of the 22 robberies committed in this beat during the second quarter of 2013, exactly three happened between 5 am and midnight. Three. That means 19, the overwhelming majority, happened at some time between midnight and five in the morning.

The other thing I’d like to say about all this is it indicates one problem with conventional approaches to “democratic” community interaction with local government. If the police hold a community meeting, by definition the people who show up are going to be the people who are most alarmed about crime. In some parts of the city, that’s fine, because they actually have serious crime problems by almost any metric, and I think most residents – even those who appreciate the many other positive things about their community – would agree. In Lakeview, though, this dynamic can lead to some pretty skewed demands. An unscientific survey of friends who live in/frequent Lakeview suggests that very few of them consider that neighborhood particularly dangerous. In fact, most of them say they appreciate how safe it is. But these meetings are full of angry people shouting about how terrible crime is. If you’re a public official or community leader at that meeting, how do you respond to that?

“Sprawl, A Compact History”: The Liveblog, part 3

A more curated set of my reactions, because the point-by-point thing can get kind of tedious. This time we cover Bruegmann’s history of anti-sprawl campaigns.

The first is that I have made a certain peace with this book, having realized that what really animates Bruegmann, I think, is less the sort of policy questions that I take to be of major importance, and more a kind of cultural and aesthetic criticism about What We Talk About When We Talk About Sprawl, or thereabouts. And he’s on much more solid ground making those kinds of anti-elitist critiques about the use of the word “sprawl,” tying it to the history of elitist urban reform programs, disdain for the striving mass middle class, and all of that. Then again, there’s a certain amount of “well, yes”-ism, if you get my drift: I have the same thoughts about this as I had about other critiques of urbanism’s progressive cred, which is that the general rule is that basically all ideological and political projects are used by the governing class for their own aims, and pointing out that some particular project has been co-opted isn’t really that interesting or damning. Then again, there are clearly a number of people in the urbanist community for whom this would be news, that many things labeled “urbanist” are in fact very problematic. So okay.

I will say that making this sort of cultural criticism, especially if you are (as Bruegmann is) an academic in a rarified urban setting (Chicago), carries the risk of mistaking cultural power in upper-middle-class social circles for the only, or the most important, kind of power. That mistake seems to drive a lot of Sprawl. Time after time in this section, Bruegmann slips in – as if it were unimportant – that he actually comes down on the side of the anti-sprawlers on their most fundamental criticisms of postwar urban policy. “There are probably good reasons to provide more subsidies to some forms of public transportation in the United States today,” he says at one point. “A very good argument can be made that automobile owners should pay more to compensate for the costs to society associated with their driving,” he says at another point. Really? Then why write an entire book defending the status quo?

The answer, I think, is that Bruegmann and I have very different senses of what the status quo is. For Bruegmann, the status quo is the politically correct thought you would find at a professor’s dinner party in Chicago, or in an academic journal. It’s absolutely true that in those contexts, the anti-sprawl position is pretty hegemonic. Thinking within those contexts – and only those contexts – is the only way it makes sense to write something like, “By the middle of the 1990s the anti-sprawl forces had become quite powerful,” as he does.

Because from almost every other perspective – the laws that govern what development looks like, the policy positions of the vast majority of elected and unelected officials in the United States, the mainstream practices of the development industry – anti-sprawl forces were anemic in the 1990s, and are only somewhat less so today. For Bruegmann, looking at the leftist bons pensants, the country has gone too far in the anti-sprawl direction, and needs a counterweight; for me, looking at public policy and changes in the actual urban environment, we haven’t gone nearly far enough.

“Sprawl, A Compact History”: The Liveblog, part 2

So after the last installment, I actually raced through the next 80 pages or so in two days, and my brain was overflowing with things to say about them, but life has a frustrating way of proving that the things you are excited about doing are, as the government shutdown managers would put it, non-essential.

But here we go. I’m now halfway through the book, and have finished all of Part 1, Bruegmann’s history of sprawl, which is a nice place to stop and reflect before going on to new themes.

These last 80 pages largely pick up where the Introduction and beginning chapters left off, which is assembling the evidence that sprawl is a normal (in the sense that it has occurred in every era of human history, and in nearly every civilization), and healthy, process for economically maturing cities to go through, and that most of the received wisdom in urbanist circles is either exaggerated or entirely false.

It’s an odd and frustrating read, alternating between important and incisive critiques of anti-sprawl motifs – usually cultural or aesthetic – and factual claims that it’s hard to believe the author believes accurately represent reality. It feels a bit too often like the presentation is being shoehorned into the thesis, and there are a few moments when the author sort of winks at the reader – so fast you could miss it if you weren’t looking – to indicate that he knows he’s not being entirely fair. More on that next time. This time, just a few notes on Bruegmann’s “history of sprawl,” which takes up the rest of Part 1.

Bruegmann tries to take on the popular urbanist narratives about the causes of urban sprawl; I guess it’s worth reminding people about the big picture, or part of it, which is just economic growth: People consume more resources (i.e., a car, a detached house) because they can. For most people, making the jump to a single family home and their own car is a triumph. B. is right that urbanists who don’t want to be assholes shouldn’t sneer at that, whether or not those are the material things they happen to prize most.
But we need to be careful about writing things like: “Another common explanation of…the rise of sprawl is that it was caused by white flight fueled by racism. Although no one would deny that race has played a key role in many aspects of American life, it is significant that urban areas with small minority populations like Minneapolis have sprawled in much the same way as urban areas with large urban areas like Chicago.” First, it is unfortunately characteristic for Bruegmann to dismiss the entire history of race-based urban policy with the single clause quoted here. (This is the sort of wink that suggests B. actually knows the immensity of what he is omitting, but it is not fair to assume that all of his readers do.) Second, this book’s perpetually loose definition of “sprawl” is doing an awful lot of work here. It is certainly true that the growth of suburban-style communities did not anywhere depend on racial animosity. But it’s also true that the counterpoint to the growth of those communities – that is, the collapse of inner-city communities – is highly correlated with racial politics. The parts of inner-city America that have had catastrophic population declines are, in fact, largely those neighborhoods that became segregated black ghettoes during the first or second Great Migrations. Given that Bruegmann has taken pains elsewhere to point out that suburban sprawl has had effects on urban neighborhoods, it’s curious he doesn’t feel the need to make that point here.
About claims that government policies – redlining, highway construction, zoning, and so on – have furthered sprawl, Bruegmann says: “None of these arguments are very convincing.” But he brings up arguments about transportation spending and highways during his discussion of federal influence, and dismisses them by pointing out that state and local governments had plans to build even before federal money came; then when he gets around to talking about state and local influence, he forgets (?) to bring the subject up again.
Bruegmann claims that “the self-amortizing mortgage…could have benefited any homeowner, whether in the central city or suburbs,” before admitting only a few lines later that in practice, banks refused to lend to “poor and racially changing neighborhoods,” and then justifying it by claiming that “a great deal of evidence [indicates] that property values did tend to drop as neighborhoods got older and experienced ethnic or racial turnover.” Well, yes. But why did those prices decline? Because in the context of mid-20th century America, a “changing” neighborhood meant a place that, in a matter of a few years, would be an all-black ghetto deprived of capital and given inferior city services. Because of, you know, racism. And, in fact, nearly the entire central cities of many American metropolises were redlined on those grounds during that period, up through the 1960s. How exactly does this jive with the claim that race played little role in the decline of urban areas?
Staying on the subject of government influence, what is with the admission – again, given a single sentence – that “in city after city across the country, old zoning codes have been downzoned time and again to reduce the ultimate possible population and prevent existing densities from rising”? Should that not maybe come up when we use changing population patterns as the evidence for people’s “preference” for sprawl? If cities have capped their populations, that would seem like a relevant confounding variable.
The book continues to suffer from not considering the idea – which is not exactly obscure – that car-dependence is a line, maybe the only one, that very clearly divides one type of development from another. As a result, a lot of arguments get confused. For example, at one points he claims that cars can’t possibly cause sprawl, because “the Los Angeles region has become dramatically denser since the 1950s in an era when the vast majority of people have relied on the private automobile.” It’s true that there isn’t any linear relationship between car-reliance and low population density (look at Houston); but that doesn’t mean cars are irrelevant. There is absolutely an upper limit to the density at which cars can function in any kind of efficient manner, and designing for maximum car efficiency almost always makes it much more difficult to design for efficiency or safety for pedestrians and public transit users. There is absolutely a trade-off involved, and one that has very serious consequences for the low-income and anyone else who can’t or doesn’t want to drive; but Bruegmann’s resort to population density as the ultimate arbiter of sprawl in this case papers that over.
Later, apparently deciding that cars are a good proxy for sprawl – this sort of goalpost-moving, depending on what point needs to be made, is annoyingly common – Bruegmann argues that the advent of personal automobiles is a good thing, since it improves mobility and “allowed a dramatic expansion of educational and employment opportunities.” Maybe. But why doesn’t he even mention the difference between mobility (how much physical ground you can cover) and access (how many resources you can get to)? Cars absolutely improve mobility, but highly car-dependent development tends to work against access, since residential, institutional and commercial uses are separated and you have to cover much more physical ground to get to them than you do in an urban area where the pharmacy, grocery store and neighborhood school are all within half a mile of your house. The costs of car-based mobility are also radically higher than any other form of urban transportation, which reduces access to anything that requires the money you just spent on insurance and gas. And none of this applies to people who can’t or choose not to drive because of their age, disability, or income level, whose access and mobility are dramatically cut down by car-dependent development. That’s how you get a situation where the average low-income person in the Chicago metro area can only get to 14% of the region’s jobs within a 90 minute public transit commute.

I don’t mean to be quite so relentlessly negative; this is still a book worth reading, especially if you feel yourself nodding along with most of my criticisms, because it forces you to consider which of your feelings are cultural prejudices, and which are actually linked to some non-aesthetic conception of the good. I’m generally on board with the American liberal idea that the freer people are to choose how they want to live their lives, the better, and my own ideas about the good life shouldn’t matter in those calculations. It’s worth remembering, if you feel the same way, that suburbanization, broadly speaking, enormously increased the average person’s choices about how to live. But it’s also worth remembering – if you find yourself nodding along more often with Sprawl – that car-dependent development has had a dramatically shrunk the options available to many other people. The way forward, I think – and so far I’m disappointed that Bruegmann hasn’t moved this direction – is to acknowledge that the argument should not be between urban elitists and defenders of the status quo. It should be about finding the policies that best allow people to live their lives the way they want. Ultimately, single family homes and decent public transit access are not mutually exclusive. More on that in future installments.

An evilness still possesses this town and it continues to weigh down my heart.

Via the miracle that is link-hopping, I stumbled on a thirty-year-old essay by the late Leanita McClain last night. It was written in 1983, shortly after Harold Washington’s first election as mayor. It ought to have a place in the Chicago nonfiction canon, I think, next to books like Making the Second Ghetto and Boss, and Studs Terkel’s work. The only website I could find with the full essay is here. More about Leanita McClain here.

Bitter am I? That is mild. This affair has cemented my journalist’s acquired cynicism, robbing me of most of my innate black hope for true integration. It has made me sparkle as I reveled in the comradeship of blackness. It has banished me to nightmarish bouts of sullenness. It has made me weld on a mask, censor every word, rethink every thought. It has put a face on the evil that no one wants to acknowledge is within them. It has made me mistrust people, white and black. This battle has made me hate. And that hate does not discriminate.