As I was saying about David Brooks' recent "Flood the Zone" column, much of what appears in the New York Times these days is a lot funnier and makes more sense if you read it as if it were a parody that I had written. For example, this op-ed is full of facts straight from the pages of iSteve but processed through a terminally SWPLest mindset. If you read it as a covert anti-illegal immigration essay, it makes a lot more sense.
Designing a Fix for Housing
By JEANNE GANG and GREG LINDSAY
RECENT efforts to fix the housing market — including Thursday’s $26 billion settlement with five of the nation’s biggest banks — have focused purely on the financial aspects of the slump. A permanent solution, however, must go further than money to address issues that have been at the core of the crisis but have been wholly ignored: design and urban planning.
... Take Cicero, Ill., a Chicago suburb that we studied as part of a new exhibition on the housing crisis at the Museum of Modern Art. The town may be infamous as the base of Al Capone or the site of anti-integration protests in the 1950s and ’60s, but today 80 percent of its residents are Latino, half of them foreign born.
Cicero is representative of a suburban transformation that went little noticed during the housing bubble and bust: suburbs have replaced inner cities as the destination of choice for new immigrants.
Indeed, nearly half of all Hispanics now live in suburbs, and new arrivals favor them over cities by two to one. Immigrants are one reason the number of suburban poor climbed 25 percent nationwide between 2000 and 2008. They’re also why Cicero was hit so hard by the housing crisis, with 2,049 foreclosures in 2009 alone — the second highest in Illinois, after Chicago.
Here’s where design comes in. Most of Cicero’s housing is detached, single-family homes. But these are too expensive for many immigrants, so five or six families often squeeze into one of Cicero’s brick bungalows. This creates unstable financial situations, neighborhood tensions and falling real estate values.
Too often, we see such mismatches as a purely financial issue. But instead of forcing families to fit into a house, what if we rearranged the house to fit them?
This doesn’t mean bulldozing Cicero’s housing stock. Instead, it means using existing, underused properties that might be renovated to provide a better fit. In Cicero’s case, that might mean turning to the scores of abandoned factories around it.
Such buildings are often no man’s lands thanks to fears of industrial contamination, which have left older suburbs pockmarked by blight while jobs and homes sprawl outward. But new techniques like “phytoremediation” — using plants like poplar and willow trees to absorb toxins — open the door to safer, less-expensive rehabilitation.
What remains is a wealth of steel, masonry and concrete that could be recycled into flexible live/work units. Rather than force Cicero’s residents to contort themselves to fit the bungalows, their homes can expand or shrink to fit them.
There’s one problem with such a plan: it’s illegal under Cicero’s zoning code. The town’s rules are typical of most suburbs, including the segregation of residential, commercial and industrial facilities; prohibitions on expanding and reusing buildings for new homes and businesses; and tight restrictions on mixed-use properties. Cicero’s code also defines “family” in a way that excludes the large, multigenerational groupings now common across the country.
... But new housing forms also demand new types of financing. Starting in the 1990s, subprime lenders targeted low-income and minority suburbs like Cicero, even when many residents would have qualified for prime loans. Latino homeowners tend to disproportionately invest savings in their homes, and as a result they lost two-thirds of their wealth between 2005 and 2009.
Jeanne Gang and Greg Lindsay are, respectively, an architect and a visiting scholar at the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University.
If Cicero is full of abandoned factories, why does Cicero need more immigrants to not work in them? If five or six immigrant families crowded into a single Cicero bungalow can't generate enough income to pay back the mortgage, is "design" really the big problem here?
Coming next? Perhaps Tyler Cowen will revive his call for America to be covered by vast Latin American shantytowns because they are so creatively vibrant.
Coming next? Perhaps Tyler Cowen will revive his call for America to be covered by vast Latin American shantytowns because they are so creatively vibrant.
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35 comments:
Jeanne Gang and Greg Lindsay's essay is full of charming blind alleys and dead-end ideas. This rococo quality adds to its allure. For instance, "phytoremediation" -- legions of volunteer SWPLs can position poplar and willow seedlings in the chromium and dioxin laden dirt, then invite their dusky hispanophone compadres to make themselves and their extended families at home on the former factory floor.
Only that iSteve refrain is missing: What could possibly go wrong?
"If Cicero is full of abandoned factories, why does Cicero need more immigrants to not work in them?"
The Occamite slash!
It's telling that the best thing these pundits can think of to do with a factory is make it a flophouse: as the number of good-paying American manufacturing jobs has declined steeply over the last ten years, the tack among elite pundits has been to downplay manufacturing's importance.
Matt Yglesias might be the latest one on this bandwagon; his Slate column about Chipotle today argued that those folks wrapping your burritos are working on an assembly line of sorts so why isn't that just as good as a manufacturing job? It's worth noting, though, that this idiocy isn't limited to Dems. W's economic advisers were whistling this tune past the graveyard as well.
Ultimately, this is symptomatic of an abandonment of the private sector working class by most mainstream Republicans and Dems. Dems cater to the rich and public sector teachers, social workers, etc.; GOPs cater to the rich and the servicemen, and others who earn their livelihoods, directly and indirectly, from the Department of Defense.
"A Catalyst Chicago analysis of 2011 scores on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test showed that in 4 of the 10 suburban districts with the highest percentages of non-English-speaking students, reading scores of eighth-grade Latinos lagged far behind scores of white students, with achievement gaps of 17 to 23 percentage points. Five of the other districts had smaller gaps, of 2 to 11 percentage points. Latinos outscored white students in one district, where Latinos are 96 percent of the population. "
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/education/suburban-chicago-schools-lag-as-bilingual-needs-grow.html
Cicero, IL is a sad sort of a toilet. It's one of those scary looking yet utterly boring places.
Yes.
Why not abandon all housing controls and regs completely (no doubt the far right libertarians would agree), and allow the worthy new residents of Cicero to build their own shelters out of plywood, old tires, perspex etc.Allow 'non regulated water and sanitation' (ie dig a pit as well and a hole as a cess pit), allow portable generators for power - and bingo a free market solution that allows the USA to compete with China and India!
What's the point of pesky high civilisation if the nation lacks clout in the market place due to high wages and over regulation?
The funny thing is, this trend is actually occurring right now, and will be very apparent later this century.
"Phytoremediation"- like "television" and "homosexual", a Latin-Greek bastardization. Nothing good can come of it.
However, "planting" sounds nice.
Cicero's new anthem: "Hey, Bungalow Bill, who did you kill?"
"But these are too expensive for many immigrants, so five or six families often squeeze into one of Cicero’s brick bungalows. This creates unstable financial situations, neighborhood tensions and falling real estate values."
Get ready for the "economics of shared living" in the suburbs. We'll see underutilized McMansions turned into boarding houses for retirees and illegal Mexicans.
Well, Mexicans came to Cicero when the factories were still going as well. Howw do I know that well in California about 30 years ago, most factory work that was non-union was done by hispanics illegal or legal. In factories in Irivne or Santa Ana that I worked in about 90 percent of the workforce was hispanic women not white hispanic. So, a look of factories before they went overseas were using immirgant labor.
Well, this is true. Let's compared Anaheim versus Portland. Anaheim isn't really a suburb since its over the 300,000 park but Portland is much larger city over 500,000. Anheim is around 53 percent hispanic and about 15 percent asian. Portland only has a higher percent of blacks around 6 versus about 2.8 precnet for Anaheim. Hispanics are only about 8 percent in Portland and asians around 6 precent.
I bet Dave never work in a factory. In California only the aerospace companies hired whites. The non-union jobs in Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego were done by hispanics or asians most of the time. In fact before companies went overseas in areas where their were a lot of immirgants they alrady kicked the white man out.
I take it that:
Tyler Cowen != Tyler Durden
?
You have to remember that the iSteve readership also spends a great deal of time at ZeroHedge.
More often than not it is cheaper to tear down and build anew when faced with an old building. And it is cheaper yet to find an undeveloped piece of ground on which to build. This is the dynamic that pushes towns like Cicero ever outward. The architect and resident scholar know this but don't deal with it, except for the implicit tactic of throwing more money at the issue.
"If Cicero is full of abandoned factories, why does Cicero need more immigrants to not work in them?"
Not to work in factories but to work as nannies, waiters, and grass cutters.
More like 'turning it into a joke'.
Now that's assimilation: re-design the whole country to accommodate the newcomers.
When I think of a suburb I think of something that is Sub-Urban. Cicero is a place that was completely built up by the 1920's that has housing and commercial strips that are identical to the neighboring West Side of Chicago. Little Village, which is just to the East of Cicero is a huge Mexican area of Chicago and Cicero is just an extension of it. I think that the media outside of Chicago uses places like Cicero to over dramatize how suburbs are changing when in fact, it really is just an inner city area that never happened to get annexed into the city.
"Get ready for the "economics of shared living" in the suburbs. We'll see underutilized McMansions turned into boarding houses for retirees and illegal Mexicans."
Hey, why not? I live in a very cheap, cute little studio, inside what used to be a large luxurious house, in a formerly beautiful historic district of a city in the South. There are a bunch of these huge gorgeous houses around here with windows missing and roofs caving in. My landlord buys such houses, fixes them up enough to make renting them out legal, splits these houses into small units and voila!
Lets raise taxes so we can double the income of academics producing this product for the rest of us to consume.
"...Cicero, Il...may be infamous as...the site of anti-integration protests in the 1950s and ’60s, but today 80 percent of its residents are Latino, half of them foreign born..."
Seems those anti-integration protesters were right about where the winds of "integration" were blowing their community.
Their reward for being right is eternal infamy.
What a world.
@ AMac:
"...legions of volunteer SWPLs can position poplar and willow seedlings in the chromium and dioxin laden dirt, then invite their dusky hispanophone compadres to make themselves and their extended families at home on the former factory floor...What could possibly go wrong?"
La summation juste. I wish *I* had written that.
OT: Steve, what do you think of James Heckman's review of The Bell Curve in Reason?
http://reason.com/archives/1995/03/01/cracked-bell/singlepage
Angry.
"OT: Steve, what do you think of James Heckman's review of The Bell Curve in Reason?"
Shouldn't Reason be called Treason? Indeed, it could be said we are living in the Age of Treason.
And from rationalism to trashionalism. Lady Gaga, slut walks, and men-dressing-as-women are the face of progressivism.
The idea to move the poor from chaotic, crowded multi-family surban houses into more spacious single-family apartments in existing large industrial buildings is a brilliant idea. There will be an efficiency of scale and management. Also the planting of fast-growing trees would add much-needed "green"
We could even come up with a catchy name --- like Cabrini Green or something.
I'll go further, and suggest that a good place for such high-density housing is the south-east side of Chicage, near the lake. They recently tore down some old buildings there, and so there is plenty of underused land to build on.
Shouldn't Reason be called Treason? Indeed, it could be said we are living in the Age of Treason.
Go back to Prussia, goose-stepping robot.
Their reward for being right is eternal infamy.
Sounds like something Céline would say. And by the way, Vinteuil, your name is the most pleasant surprise I've come across on the internet, if that's worth anything. My madeleine/cobblestone moment on isteve. ;)
Those abandoned factories in Cicero probably aren't being completely underutilized. They're in Cicero, after all. Pretty sure that at least some of them are still used by the mob and by Mexican drug traffickers.
They're probably not zoned for whatever activities go on inside, though.
Then again, it's Cicero. So you never know.
But new techniques like “phytoremediation” — using plants like poplar and willow trees to absorb toxins — open the door to safer, less-expensive rehabilitation."
Is this what they are teaching in architecture school now?
No wonder nothing is getting built.
Dahinda makes a good point. Calling Cicero is a "suburb" is a stretch. It borders an especially gritty part of the West Side of Chicago and, aside from its flamboyantly corrupt/criminal municipal government, functions essentially as another Chicago neighborhood. It even has Chicago Transit "EL" stations!
Cicero may technically count as a "suburb," but it's really just an extension of the inner-city. It's a far cry (geographically and culturally) from anything that remotely resembles what most people think of as "the suburbs."
If I didn't know better, I might start to wonder if the NYU professors who wrote the Times article weren't just "new urbanism" partisans who were intentionally stretching the truth to besmirch "suburbia."
This might be "off topic" by a bit, but since the nice SWPL at the NYT have made the unlikely case study choice of Cicero, IL, in order to to slam suburban America, yours truly can't resist dusting off an old, failed media narrative Re: Cicero.
For background: Al Capone took over Cicero's government in the 1920s. Since then, the Chicago mob has essentially run the town. Cicero's population is overwhelmingly Mexican (Puerto Ricans have been moving in recently, thanks to gentrification-induced displacement in Chicago), but its police force and city government have always been solidly Italian (and at the least, Mob-connected).
In the 90s and early 2000s, Cicero's mayor (called the "Town President") was Betty Loren-Maltese, widow of Cicero's former Township Assessor, deceased mobster Frank Maltese. The Chicago media started to notice how corrupt Cicero was when Ms. Loren-Maltese, some of her Cicero political buddies and and a few "friends of ours" went on trial for scamming Cicero out of $12 million (they were eventually convicted).
Now for the media narrative: The conventional wisdom among those in the Chicago media and polite society was that the only hope for ridding Cicero of its endemic corruption was to make sure that Latinos -- then known as Hispanics -- replaced whites in positions of power (yes, polite society actually exists in Chicago -- it's just not always where the real power brokers congregate).
Cicero was, after all, 90% Latino, and since the city was run (as ever) by Italian mobsters and friends of mobsters, SWPL liberals and journalists believed that the obvious solution to Cicero's corruption was to transfer power to the disenfranchised Latinos.
For journos and polite liberals, that seemed like a no-brainer, since everyone apparently knows that Latinos are famously corruption-free ... especially the new arrivals from Mexico who are so numerous in Cicero (c'mon, just look at how well things work south of the border!).
Well, it was all probably well enough intended. But for some reason, it didn't quite go as expected.
To be sure, the whites who ran Cicero were wildly corrupt. They were the freakin' mafia, after all! But that doesn't explain the magical thinking of the media and polite white liberals. What evidence did they have that Latinos would be corruption-free? Is there something special about being Latino that makes one uncorruptible?
What's more, could the people who so decried white organized crime really have been naive enough to not realize that violent Latino street gangs have controlled large chunks of Cicero (and adjoining parts of Chicago) for years?
Well, long story short, it all worked out just great for everybody in Cicero. Purportedly reform-minded Latinos were, indeed, elected to fill previously-white-controlled positions of power. And of course, many of those Latino "reformers" turned out to be figureheads who represented the interests of -- wait for it -- Italian organized crime. Within a few years, Italians of questionable repute had retaken most offices in Cicero. And everything went back to normal.
So yeah, replacing corrupt whites with Latinos worked out really well ... for corrupt whites who had to lay low for a couple years. But they didn't go away. And Cicero just went right back to being Cicero.
BTW, the mob boss of Cicero (Mike "the Large Guy" Sarno) got sentenced to 25 years in prison yesterday.
"Dahinda makes a good point. Calling Cicero is a "suburb" is a stretch."
"I think that the media outside of Chicago uses places like Cicero to over dramatize how suburbs are changing when in fact, it really is just an inner city area that never happened to get annexed into the city."
There are suburbs that are really changing though. The one I live in was 99.9 % white in the 70's and now has a school district that has a majority minority student population.
Section 8 has made sure that we ALL get the benefits of a vibrant culture...
"Such buildings are often no man’s lands thanks to fears of industrial contamination, which have left older suburbs pockmarked by blight while jobs and homes sprawl outward. But new techniques like “phytoremediation” — using plants like poplar and willow trees to absorb toxins — open the door to safer, less-expensive rehabilitation. "
An excellent plan - so someday, some enterprising community organizer, like our current President, can sue the city in the name of his clients - the newest victims of "environmental racism". Then the native taxpayers of Chicago can be forced to pay out millions of dollars to liberal activist groups who purport to work on behalf of mexican peons that the Chicago taxpayers never wanted there in the first place.
". . .Thursdays $26 billion settlement with five leading banks."
Possible Romney commercial for September: An older white couple is balancing their checkbook and complaining about the increased monthly fees. Husband "Well, I guess they have to make up for that $26 billion settlement somehow.
Wife: "Maybe Obama cares more about deadbeats than people who pay their bills."
@anon 7:05 pm: "your name is the most pleasant surprise I've come across on the internet, if that's worth anything."
Thanks, my friend - my moods vary, but about half the time, I think that *À la recherche du temps perdu* is the single greatest achievement of the mind of man.
And poor old Vinteuil - an Amalgam of Franck, Saint-Saëns & Debussy (but you know all that) - is a favorite character from the book.
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