| On the very day the Congress for the New Urbanism’s annual conference opened in Chicago — June 24 — the Census Bureau reported that the city’s population had declined between 2000 and 2003 after rising in the 1990s for the first time in 50 years. No Chicagoans I spoke with took the news very seriously. “I doubt the Census Bureau estimates’ veracity, since the Census also severely underestimated the population growth at the end of the 1990s,” said Payton Chung, CNU membership coordinator. As it happened, Chung spent much of June 24 giving new urbanists a bus tour of Chicago’s boulevards and commercial streets — corridors that look better all the time.
What Chicago has accomplished in recent years is remarkable. Though the Census Bureau estimates that the city’s population declined by about 27,000 to 2,869,121, after expanding in the 1990s by 112,000, there’s been a continuing torrent of new housing. The 1990s brought construction of more than 52,000 housing units. From 2000 through 2003, the city issued permits for nearly 30,000 more, according to Chung. People want to live in the Windy City.
Richard M. Daley, mayor since 1989, is associated with an impressive number of civic improvements. Here are a few:
• The Chicago Housing Authority has passed the halfway point in a “Ten-Year Plan for Transformation,” which calls for building or rehabilitating 25,000 units of public housing. Most high-rise public housing is being replaced by mixed-income housing closer to the ground. At the notorious Stateway Gardens on the South Side, the original street grid has been restored, according to Daley, “so it looks and feels like other Chicago neighborhoods.”
• The city has built or fully renovated 44 neighborhood public libraries since 1989. Another eight will be completed before or during 2005. “This is one of the few [urban] library systems in the country that’s opening new libraries,” boasts Chicago Public Library spokeswoman Margaret Kallackey. The new or renovated libraries incorporate features that reduce energy use. Of importance to urbanists, the libraries are conceived as gathering places for their neighborhoods. Parking spaces are minimized to encourage people to visit on foot or via public transportation. |
• On May 27, Chicago adopted the first major rewrite of its zoning since 1957. In March 2003, New Urban News reported on some of the problems the real estate boom of the past decade or so has brought — buildings too bulky to fit with their neighbors; front yards replaced by sunken patios; rear yards covered over by parking and garages; and other manifestations of insensitive development. Many of those problems will be eliminated or alleviated by the new code, which takes effect November 1. Rear-yard setbacks will be increased in residential neighborhoods, to prevent developers from covering too much of the lot and causing the neighborhoods to feel cramped. Below-grade front-yard patios, called “patio pits,” will be prohibited. Buildings on the busiest retail streets will be required to have entrances and large display windows facing the front sidewalks. Parking requirements will be reduced for landmark buildings, elderly housing, and sites within 600 feet of rail stations.
The new code “follows a fairly conventional zoning ordinance structure,” says Kirk Bishop, project director for Duncan Associates, the Commission’s prime consultant on zoning reform. “It doesn’t look like some of the codes that are held up as new urbanist models.” But, Bishop says, “buried in it are many elements that meet new urbanist goals, such as pedestrian-oriented streetscapes.” Farr Associates, a Chicago-based firm with new urban principles, helped craft the code’s standards for pedestrian-oriented retail districts. The ordinance seeks to preserve classic six-corner intersections where radial thoroughfares cross the city’s grid. For details on the new Chicago zoning code, click here.
Whether the population has really slipped since 2000 is unclear. Given the smaller households today, the city could continue to become a better place even as its population diminishes. What is clear is that the center is getting stronger, that many of the neighborhoods are improving, and that Chicago is making good choices.
This article is available in the July/August 2004 issue of New Urban News, along with many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue. |