Please stand by

I realize it's been over a week since my last posting. I'm still here and will resume blogging shortly. Thank you for your patience.

New stuff in the neighborhood

On April 1, I wrote about Urban Epicure closing. I walked past there yesterday and found that the space is now occupied by Ranalli's, one of a small chain of pizza restaurants based in Chicago. This location is barely a mile north of Ranalli's "Up North" location, so I guess this would be Ranalli's Up Norther? Until a few years ago, there was one in the northern suburb of Riverwoods, which should have been named Ranalli's Way the Heck Up North.

I also noticed that just south of Foster, on Clark, there's a new day spa for men -- I think called Sir Spa? A day spa for men. Huh. Wonders never cease.

Last year I wrote about the fire in the building next door to the Tree House cat shelter in Uptown. I walked past there and found a brand spanking new building where the old one had burned down. If memory serves correctly, the old building was one of the traditional multi-unit types, perhaps a six-flat, so I was really disappointed to see what they replaced it with. The new building is made entirely of oversized red brick and is devoid of any ornamentation, which makes it jarringly plain looking. But that's the least of its problems. Inexplicably, the building was turned sideways to face the adjacent playlot instead of the street. The "front" features porches that look out onto said playlot, which to me seems to force public and private spaces to intrude on one another excessively. As for the side that faces the street, it is just plain ugly and is more characteristic of what would ordinarily face the alley. The statement this makes is one of extreme inconsiderateness, whether or not that reflects the attitudes of the building's residents.

An illustrated argument against the urban big box

So Mayor Daley vetoed the big box ordinance. And he got the three aldermen he needed to switch sides in order for the veto to stick. I disagree with his position, but that's the way it goes. Da Mayor gets what he wants. But what really sticks in my craw is what I read in the newspaper today. According to the Chicago Tribune, Mayor Daley commented on how there has not been such opposition in the suburbs, and he suggested that the ordinance "will unfairly keep stores out of black city neighborhoods."

Now there is some irony in trying to bring race into it, since African-Americans, given their history in this country, should be particularly sensitive to being under-compensated for the work they do. As for the Mayor's claim that the ordinance keeps big box stores out -- that simply is not true. At most, it might provide a slight disincentive to opening stores here. But there are other reasons aside from employment issues for opposing big box development in the city. In my previous entries on the subject, I've focused on the economics; at risk of turning this into a New Urbanist manifesto, allow me to demonstrate why Wal-Mart and its ilk make for poor urban design and should therefore be discouraged from building stores in urban areas. (There might also be legitimate reason to oppose big box stores in the suburbs, but opposition would not be effective without regional coordination among suburbs.)

Take a look at Figure 1. This is a aerial view of a Wal-Mart (upper left) and Sam's Club (lower right) in the Chicago suburbs near where I work. A McDonald's restaurant is at upper right. Each side of the image is roughly a quarter mile.


Figure 1: Typical Wal-Mart and Sam's Club in suburban setting

Now look at Figure 2. This is a aerial view of the Jewel grocery store in my neighborhood. (For readers in other parts of the country, a Jewel is similar to an Albertsons or a Publix.) The scale is precisely the same as in Figure 1: the photo is a quarter mile on each side.


Figure 2: Jewel (Albertsons) supermarket in urban setting

The Jewel represents relatively low density compared to its surroundings, yet its presence does not disrupt the urban street grid. It is located close to mass transit (note the buses lined up south of the parking lot, within 150 feet of an elevated train stop). Its parking lot is relatively full, indicating minimal waste, and those who live in the surrounding residential buildings need not even drive there. Just within the area shown, there exist approximately 1,000 residents. The Jewel coexists well, even if it is not a perfect design.

In Figure 1, the Wal-Mart, you can see some single-family housing on the far right. I would estimate that fewer than 40 people live in the area shown, not including the suburban homeless who might spend the night in their cars in the Wal-Mart parking lot. There is no street grid, and what might appear to be a rudimentary grid in the residential area (really modified cul-de-sacs that double as driveways) is totally disconnected from the shopping that is so tantalizingly close! The owner of the house with the brown roof might walk out his back door for a gallon of milk and have only an eighth of a mile walk to the front door of the Wal-Mart -- except a fence prevents him. Instead, he must get in his car and drive three quarters of a mile and park just a couple hundred feet from where he started.

That gallon of milk might be twenty cents cheaper at Wal-Mart than at the Jewel shown in Figure 2, but that doesn't include the hidden costs of: the necessity of owning a car; the wear and tear on the car of approximately $.10/mile; the cost of fuel of approximately $.10/mile; and so on.

You might suggest that he walk on the sidewalk, but there are a few problems with this. First, the nearest sidewalk, near the top of the image, is inaccessible from the adjacent residential area. It connects to a subdivision farther to the east, but that subdivision is not within easy walking distance. It is a sidewalk to nowhere. Not surprisingly, I hardly ever see anyone using it.

But even if Mr. Brownhouseguy could get to the sidewalk, he would still feel an aversion to walking on it. It is a featureless white strip in the middle of a space that is poorly defined. To one side he looks out over a sea of parking (most of it empty), and to the other he is confronted with four lanes of traffic whizzing by at 55 miles an hour. The experience is more like being on the open savannah (complete with the cheetahs) than in a place conducive to human life.

While this is but one example, I'm sure millions of suburbanites can recognize the environment depicted in Figure 1 as being functionally similar to those they encounter every day, and containing the same dysfunctional qualities. Much of the dysfunction boils down to the fact that the suburbs are designed for cars and not for people.

Wal-Mart stores are built on the scale of suburban sprawl -- not on an urban scale. If big boxes like Wal-Mart are built in urban places, they must either be put in the few suitable areas that are far from the most vital parts of neighborhoods, or they must be built to a smaller, denser, more urban scale. Otherwise, their presence damages the built environment of the neighborhood.

Macaque see, macaque do

Normally, I shy away from name calling on this site, but after Sen. George Allen (R-VA) called a staffer of his Democratic opponent "macaca" -- a variant of "macaque", which in some circles is used as a racist slur referring to dark-skinned minorities -- I think Mr. Allen deserves it.

Yesterday, Sen. Allen committed another act of incredible stupidity. See, my senator, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), was about to introduce an amendment (No. 4884) to the DOD appropriations bill (H.R. 5631) that would earmark $19 million for treating veterans suffering from traumatic brain injuries. But Sen. Allen asked if he could speak before Durbin and then proceeded to introduce an amendment (No. 4883) that was identical, word for word, to Durbin's! I believe that's what we call plagiarism. But it's refreshing to see a Republican so enthusiastic about a Democratic idea that he wouldn't change a word.

Since the language was identical to Durbin's, it no longer made sense to introduce amendment 4884. Durbin graciously withdrew his amendment and, along with all the cosponsors of Durbin's amendment, attached his name as a cosponsor to No. 4883. Just like that, Durbin's idea goes on record as being Allen's.

An article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch has a different take on the incident, but if we are to believe Allen's campaign manager Dick Wadhams (yes, that really is his name) that the amendment was a "bipartisan effort," then why did Allen introduce his own amendment and not cosponsor Durbin's?

As for the merits of the proposal, I'll refer to an article that appeared last year in USA Today on the subject of soldiers suffering traumatic brain injuries (TBI's) in Iraq:

A growing number of U.S. troops whose body armor helped them survive bomb and rocket attacks are suffering brain damage as a result of the blasts. It's a type of injury some military doctors say has become the signature wound of the Iraq war. [Emphasis added]

Known as traumatic brain injury, or TBI, the wound is of the sort that many soldiers in previous wars never lived long enough to suffer. The explosions often cause brain damage similar to "shaken-baby syndrome," says Warren Lux, a neurologist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

...

The injury is often hard to recognize — for doctors, for families and for the troops themselves. Months after being hurt, many soldiers may look fully recovered, but their brain functions remain labored. "They struggle much more than you think just from talking to them, so there is that sort of hidden quality to it," Lux says.

Thinking about big boxes on Labor Day

This morning I awoke to an NPR interview with one of the editors of The Wall Street Journal. Appropriately enough for Labor Day, the topic was labor, although the WSJ editorial board is hardly a friend to the working man.

The interviewer asked about the minimum wage, and about how Wal-Mart in particular has been criticized for poor compensation and treatment of their workers. The WSJ editor made the typical supply-side argument that Wal-Mart needs to keep its costs down to compete, and if higher costs are passed on to the consumer, then it just hurts the people who shop there, and many of them are low wage earners themselves. Here's what I think of that: baloney.

You see, the WSJ editor was implying, and he was hoping we would assume, that big box retail is labor intensive. It is not. In my previous article on this subject, I examined Target's finances. (I assume that Wal-Mart's cost structure is similar to Target's.) The key figures are public knowledge, available on the Internet for anyone to see. And it looks to me like the wages of its lowest paid workers (making less than $10/hr) couldn't possibly account for more than 5% of its total costs. Target complains that being required to pay $10/hr plus benefits would cost them an additional 50% for some employees, and they would then need to pass the cost on to the consumer. But we're talking about a 50% increase in only 5% of its costs. To cover the increase in wages, all they would need to do is sell that $39 pair of shoes for $40 instead.

Three weeks ago, I went to a WakeUpWalMart event at St. Gregory's High School in my neighborhood. You can read about it at WakeUpWalMart's blog. I didn't know much about the organization before I went, but I was pleased to hear them make the same point that Wal-Mart really can afford to pay its workers more.

Finally, I was at a meeting at Alderman Smith's office (48th Ward) last week where she explained her position on the living wage ordinance. Among other things, she sees this as a taxpayer issue. When a large employer does not pay a living wage, the City must then provide services to help the workers make ends meet. The cost of these services is borne by the taxpayer, and the fact that the employer does not bear the cost amounts to corporate welfare. Alderman Smith says that letters to her office have been overwhelmingly in favor of the ordinance.