Loading summary
Transcript35 lines
- [00:00]
Alex Montero
Foreign.
- [00:10]
Bernice Radel
First class streetcar downtown with a fine ladies in the peeps.
- [00:19]
Norm
Hi there and welcome to a Member Week themed episode of Upzoned. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to be joined today with by Bernice Radel and Alex Montero who are Strong Towns members and doing the work in their communities to build stronger, more vibrant, more inclusive places. And as we celebrate members this week, we just want to acknowledge that there are so many people that are part of the Strong Towns movement. I always say many of you are already member adjacent. You are putting in the time. You are taking note of things in your community that are a real challenge and you're addressing them in ways that are so conducive to a Strong town's mindset and addressing the things that we need in our places. And so with that, I hope as we, as we take this time during Member week to really think about what we can be continuing to do, one of the questions that we have is, well, what can we do right now about our places and the struggles that we face? And one of the struggles that we're going to talk about today as, as a part of a bigger pattern that we certainly see probably in your neighborhood as well, or your community has stories like this is that 10 years ago. So we're going to wind the clock back a decade. Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago used eminent domain to assemble an entire block of neighborhood storefronts on Bryn Mawr Avenue between Kimball Avenue and Bernard street in Chicago's north park neighborhood. So they closed the businesses that were in there. Then the property owner stepped in and said, wait a minute, why are you using eminent domain for this? So they fought it in court, which meant that it then dragged on. The university did win those court cases because they had these powers and their plan to build additional student housing on these sites, as well as some retail, basically was still vibrant or still potentially going to go forward. But the student housing never arrived. And still today, a decade later, much of that block remains vacant. And even this earlier this year, Neighbors marked the 10th anniversary with a birthday party, posting signs that read 10 years of decay, filling storefront windows with sticky notes, imagining what they would like to see there instead. Coffee shops, better housing, bookstores, grocery stores, ice cream, other neighborhood serving businesses. And the story comes from a May 28 article by Molly Devore in Block Club Chicago. And I'll put a link in the show notes if you'd like to read the reporting for yourself. But we know that this isn't just a story about Northeastern Illinois University or one Block on Bryn Mawr Avenue in North Park. It's a story about what happens when communities and especially community leaders try to put all of their chips into one big plan and take some pretty big swings to make it happen. And then what do you do when that plan no longer makes sense? Or maybe from a strong towns perspective, never made sense in the first place? To help us unpack that question, we're joined by two people who bring very different but complementary perspectives. First is Bernice Radel, an incremental developer in Buffalo, New York, founder of Neighborhood Evolution and co leader of the Strongtown's Buffalo Local Conversation Group. Bernice has spent years helping bring older buildings and overlooked commercial corridors back to life through really interesting small scale incremental investment and development. Her work brings her face to face with some of the real challenges that happen when buildings are left vacant, when communities sit in a state of idleness, and what alternative paths might be available in order to be able to take the next step. Also joining us is Alex Montero, co leader of Strongtown Chicago. Alex is an urbanist. He's also a stand up comedian and fittingly enough, someone who was just a few blocks away from the site. We're going to talk about when I reached out to him to say, hey, can you come on this podcast to talk about Northpark? Alex has a deep understanding of Chicago as well as understanding of how neighborhoods evolve and adapt and also as we see sometimes get stuck. So let's talk about land assemblies and what's going on on this site and maybe Alex, can you share, as you were nearby right in that area, what are some of the ways in which this is unfolding in your community?
- [04:22]
Alex Montero
Yeah, of course. So happy to be on NORM and talk about this as an interesting case study of some of the other things happening in Chicago and with land use in general. So I don't live in North Park. I live on the southwest side of Chicago. North park is on the northwest side of the city. But I was in north park recently because north park is the home of not just Northeastern University, but a major hospital here in Chicago, Swedish hospital, enormous hospital complex, a lot of smaller clinics and related healthcare businesses nearby. And it's a, it's a destination for a lot of folks in the city. A lot of nurses and a lot of doctors work there. Obviously there's a lot of patients who go from across the city for different procedures and different things. And so it's an area where because it has those two major employers, the university and the hospital network, there's a lot of demand for housing in that neighborhood, but not necessarily easy ways to build it, which I'm sure will come into the conversation itself.
- [05:21]
Norm
Bernice. I mean Buffalo has examples like this as well, so I would imagine there would be some parallels. What were some of the things that struck you as you initially covered this article?
- [05:31]
Bernice Radel
Well, Buffalo is not similar to Chicago in the sense that we've lost a ton of population. So we, but we actually deal with a lot of these really great kind of small to medium sized buildings that either get gobbled up by developers who do nothing with them, or they get, they sit there because it's really hard that they're in neighborhoods that have been redlined, they're, you know, vacant because we can't find the financing for them. So there's similarities there with this article. And you know, it made me think so much. There's so much pressure on the country in areas just like Alex just said, there's whether it's in Buffalo or any, the communities that we live in, usually medical campuses like put pressure on housing. Right. Or, or specific districts put pressure on housing. And so I, when I, when I read this article, I was really kind of surprised that like 10 years and this has just gone by, nothing's been really being done. And but then when you read go through it, what you really realize the model that they, that big development likes to do, that universities likes to do, it's just they cannot think granular. They want to. And it's not an, I'm not trying to offend anybody, but it's just like their business model is not granular and we need more granular, local focused business models if we want to see buildings like these get renovated.
- [06:48]
Norm
And so can you have mixed use retail with some student housing on top and have it at a finer scale than what was probably proposed where this would be a full block development. There's often maybe Bernice, you run into the challenge that people are like, well that, that doesn't pencil and you have proof like, no, I can find ways to like make even the smallest site viable and even to add height to sites. We can see that in most major cities have, you know, small parcels that have been built upwards. And yet in my community, I, I shared like just an example in my community that's just unfolding right now is my city did something virtually the same. They bought a bunch of land that was near the little waterfront sort of riverfront area and there were seven different sites on it and they knocked down four of them and so that only three remained and there were, there was a great little antique store, great, you know, a bunch of other spaces that were using these old dilapidated buildings, but they were, they were still functional. And then the city said, wouldn't it be great if we had a hotel? So they went and got rid of the other three tenants, knocked down those buildings. Now we have a large asphalt pad. And they went. And it just really reflected what this story of the university is doing. The university has put out a request, can somebody please do something with this land and be a partner with us? And that call has gone unheeded. And in my city, my city is already millions of dollars in on the laying out of a platform for somebody to do something with this site. The trouble is they consolidated all seven lots into one lot, which I was like, oh come on, you could have just left it at 7 and on the day that you need the change to occur, switch it back to one. But no, ahead of time. They wanted to make it easy, streamlined, simplified. So one parcel, and now they're waiting for hotels to show up. And I was like, why a hotel? And they said, well, because we need one. And I said, if we needed one, we would have one is a little bit of my perverse response to it. And so I'm grappling in my community that we've done essentially the same thing. We just don't have 10 years yet on the clock and we don't have the little post it notes saying, hey, we've missed a huge opportunity here. And Alex, in your observation, I mean, north park needs small businesses. North park needs something to be happening there rather than nothing. And so why, what are some of the longer term sort of impacts and costs that you see in what's happened there?
- [09:12]
Alex Montero
Yeah, I think this is an example of what happens when the cost of holding onto land indefinitely are very low. Right. Universities have access to the power at the state. Universities have access to the power of eminent domain. And that means that if they want a parcel, not necessarily because there's something urgent, but something that could be convenient in the future, it's pretty easy for them to acquire that land because their state level entities as well and function on a, on a quasi government, nonprofit basis, they also often don't need to pay property taxes on that land. And so there is essentially no holding cost once they acquire a parcel like this and they can just hold on to it together and say at some point we might want to do something useful with it. There's really no rush, there's no urgency behind it. I think that's part of the problem because if there's not an opportunity cost that people feel for, for holding land and not putting it to any productive use, then it's really easy for these zones to just remain underutilized indefinitely. I also think that it's easy to demonize entities like the city or the universities or them and say they can only think big, they can't think smaller, they can't think more granular. I think in a lot of cases, the reason why larger institutions and larger private developers as well seem to be the only ones building anything anymore, anymore is because a lot of that more granular urban fabric, the middle housing and the small scale businesses and those neighborhood level uses have essentially been legislated out of existence. I think the parcel that the university acquired through eminent domain is an interesting case study in this. It is a business designation. It's B1.2 zone, which essentially means you have ground floor commercial and you're allowed to have some apartments above it. But the apartment cap is very small. And if you see the building there today on Bryn Mawr Avenue and in this parcel, it's pretty much maxed out. They built the maximum number of apartments that they were allowed to, and they probably would have been built more if they were allowed to. But by then the Chicago zoning code was in place and put in pretty significant density restrictions and parking requirements that precluded building more apartments or larger apartments. So in a lot of cases, when people ask, well, why hasn't more of this incremental development happened in the neighborhood for housing, for businesses, for all of those things? The answer is because it can't. Because the zoning rules and the land use rules are such that none of those projects are allowed or would pencil in practice. And so the only people who can really play are the people with very low holding costs like the university or other entities, or people who have lawyers and PR firms and other folks to do pressure to do a big project that will be worth all of the effort and brain damage at the end of the five years or 10 years to actually get forward? I think that's part of the story as well. How do we make the alternative that we want to see legal and viable in the first place? Because in many cases it's not the alternative to the university building dorms. There would be essentially nothing.
- [12:27]
Norm
So, Bernice, if you were in the, in the responsibility as a university administrator to do something with a block, even, even say the decision had already been made to acquire it, what would you do in the interim? Because they've Just sat on it because they could and left things dormant, which is wild. That that's been just the standard that they've been doing. But so not only have they missed the last 10 years, but they've also sort of like been all in on a strategy that has proven to not work. What would your approach be and how would that be able to create the conditions where down the road there would be more housing, there would also be the retail that was needed, that revitalization would be happening?
- [13:09]
Bernice Radel
Well, I think. Wow, that's such an interesting question. I don't work for universities. I like work in little baby buildings. But I would say one thing that I've learned working more in the nonprofit side is where nonprofits are can be big also and need buildings. It's just like universities aren't developers. Nonprofits are developers. Like, you know, we expect them to do the right thing. They don't know. They don't know everything. They don't. People waste all kinds of money on. On lots, on land, like with plans that don't make any financial sense. I mean, it's really literally why neighborhood evolution exists. And I'm not trying to like drop that in, but like, I can't tell you how many times we get pulled in because people buy land and they don't even know how to make it work, right? And like I'm working right now here in Buffalo on a. Originally built as a brothel. And I, I absorbed it, had a bad kind of team and the. They had gone through all these plans that didn't make sense. And it just. As soon as I walked in it, I was like, oh, I know how to make this work. Because my brain is like more developer real estate. Y brain, right? And so I, So I mean, if I was working in the university, I probably wouldn't know what to do, right? Because they, I hate to. I'm not trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm not trying to. It's not my. I'm not. I'm not in this fight. But I would imagine that they didn't. They maybe thought that this is gonna be really great, it's gonna pan out. It's gonna be. We're gonna have housing, we're gonna have storefronts. They probably had the best intentions, right? And so now what they should have done is probably done temporary pop ups, allowed those spaces to stay open, you know, at the very least get some small businesses in there on the ground floor. Like, they could easily done that. I mean, they could easily done pop ups Right. Like people don't like pop ups because, well, I love them, but some people don't like them because they take a lot of work, you know, and they require utilities or the utilities on. I mean, I have torpedo heater in the middle of winter and vacant properties to do pop ups. So I'm not the person to ask because I would solve that problem. But it's like to me, they could have done more, you know, think more like that. So, you know, again, you know, Alex is right. It's like, it's really not set up for them, the code. You know, they're sitting on this land, they're sitting on the buildings because they can, like Alex, what you said is, you know, very makes, makes a lot of sense to me. So. But, but what I think one of the things that I like about the UpZone podcast is solution based, you know, and so if you're working out there in the realm of university or nonprofit or like not realm, and you have properties like this, that's why you have to bring in experts. You have to think more granular. You have to, you know, like, you know, like a market study is not going to tell you exactly what. Like market study is going to tell you one thing. But the, but will the banks finance it? You know, that's, that's why you have to have a really good, solid team to try to accomplish what you want to accomplish. And so they just don't think, you know, I just, I bet they had the best intentions also. I just want to give a super shout out to the community for doing that tenure. Because as an activist, community activist, I was like, when I read that, I was like, these people know what's going on. This is cool. So. And that's really what we need to do. And actually one of the things I want to make sure I point to, we don't. You can direct the conversation, Norm. But I also want to point to ways that the city could take on things like receivership. Right. So there are tools. I don't know if there exists in Chicago, but there are tools nationally or that states are doing or that communities are doing that could try to avoid, you know, properties sitting there for 10 years. There's receivership. Like in Buffalo, we have receivership. There's foreclosure, there's, you know, obviously code review. So I don't want to direct the conversation. That's where you don't want it to go. But I think about solutions like maybe if they're not doing their thing, you know, the city could Step in and say we're going to appoint a receiver that could, if they have those receivership laws on the books, you know, and I think about that a lot because we sit there's all throughout Buffalo and all throughout, you know, the, the world, the country, there are always people that sit on properties. And I'm not a therapist, so I can't diagnose them, but they're like, there's some, sometimes there's a sense of delusion. I'm not saying the university at all. I'm just saying just sort of in general where you'll meet people who own a building and they think, oh, this is going to be a 14 story tower. And I'm like, are you out of what bank is financing 14 stories in Buffalo, New York in 2026? That's zero banks. Zero. Right. And so, you know, there's a sense of, I say the word delusion, you know, and. Because that's the word that kind of comes to my mind. But it's like there are so many buildings that are locked up with people that own, that own properties that think like that. And you know, and so the abandonment, receivership, these are, these are solutions I've talked on Strong Town's podcast in the past that like could be used. And so are they going to go after a university? Probably not. Okay. But you know, if the city could threaten and say, we're going to take you to take your building, you know, do building code enforcement, we're going to, if you don't occupy these, we're going to get receivership or declare them abandoned. You could do things like that. You communities can do that, especially the planners listening, you know, what are your abandonment rules? What are your receivership rules? Can somebody else take them on temporarily and get them occupied and then give them back to the owner? That's what that's like. What that's meant to do is like churn out these turn out solutions for vacant properties. So I digress. I'm so sorry, Norm.
- [18:54]
Norm
No, you're totally where I'm at. Where I think the one, the things we say about the suburban pattern of development is that you intend to build everything all at once to a finished state. And the trouble with that mindset is that we've smuggled that into our cities as well. And so then in the interim period where you're getting all the ducks in row to be able to do something to build that 14 story tower, perhaps you basically say, well, why would we put anything into that site until we're ready to Go for the full thing and actually think when we think about those interim measures, that makes a much bigger. That that's a much more important thing. It's sort of like if I think my 10 year old is going to play in the NBA one day, I may have some high hopes, but I've also got to do the core things that just set them up for other types of success along the way. And if they reach that pinnacle, that, that may happen. But we, we get into this situation where, you know, this is a landlord problem, this is, cities do this too, where it's like, we know that we're going to eventually rebuild that, so we're not going to do anything with it right now. And I love what you're seeing, like pop ups are one of those tools that we have to have like at hand that benefit the community. Probably do a lot of good things for crime stats and things like that. Certainly improve local health, provide pathways for small entrepreneurs to get their start. Like the idea of having this just sit there as, as a, as you know, a vacant, soulless space is so brutal. And I often wonder if there's ways that we can shield people from some of the liabilities, some of the challenges that they face. Where it's like, well, I don't want to go in and do something for only eight years. You're like, well, if there's a way to get eight good years out of that and then to celebrate as the next stage of that building emerges, that can go a long ways. And maybe, Alex, as you're looking at this, one of the challenges that the community identified was the need for more affordable housing options. And as Strongtown Chicago continues to sort of advocate on the housing front, this feels like one of those sites where it's aspiration meets like the critical reality, which is it's harder for the community to get those things if there's not a lot of funding available or if the primary partner of the university says, hey, our market case just evaporated for this. In the meantime, it would have been student housing. Now they're saying, well, if it's not going to be student housing, it should be affordable housing. What are some of the ways that you're saying that we can navigate that conversation? Because the prospect of saying, can we make it cheap or cheaply available? Which is a really bad way of characterizing what the quest for affordable housing is? I know, but that can sometimes also look like, hey, we don't want it to be 14 stories, we want it to be three stories and affordable And I'm like, you can't have that in a built up area. But I'm sure that in the Chicago sort of landscape you're grappling with that a lot with sites like this, that the first response of many people really graciously is to say I want some of the units to be affordable. What are some of the ways that you grapple with that?
- [21:49]
Alex Montero
Sure. So one thing I will point out is that Chicago has what we call the aro, the Affordable Requirements Ordinance. It basically for larger multi family buildings that have 10 units and above 20% of the units in those buildings have to be set aside at a certain affordability threshold rentable to families making 60% of AMI is the usual number. Sometimes they're negotiated for planned projects that are larger and have some more zoning exceptions, but it tends to be 20% affordability set aside for it. And so in a lot of larger housing projects that get built in neighborhoods, some of those units are baked in from the beginning. They're set aside in that way. And so when you get more market rate development in larger buildings built in Chicago, you also get some mandated set aside affordable units. There's some discussions about how effective that ordinance has been and whether 20% is the right threshold for that. The city is currently getting fewer affordable units built per year at 20% than it was at 10% before 2021. And ultimately this is a form of a subsidy. Right. And so when fewer projects pencil you get fewer of them, you might get a fewer total number of buildings, even of units, even if there's a larger proportion of them in different buildings. So there's discussion about the ARO and ways that it could change and be more effective in the future. But there's that same attitude in a lot of cases of we don't need to decide whether something is a fully market rate project or something is a fully li tech affordable project. There are ways to build not just mixed use but mixed income buildings in the neighborhoods where there's demand for it in parts of Chicago. One thing I will say as well is I think often part of the reason why a lot of the the big projects tend to get the most press. Your 11 story towers and opportunities to build more units and everything is because doing things at more modest thresholds is so hard. I think if you look at the residential areas that surround this specific business on 3418 Bryn Mawr Avenue, it's almost all a C of Rs3, which in Chicago lingo is one of the single family only zoning designations. The Neighborhood has a lot of examples of, we call them here in Chicago two flats and three flats and four flats, like stacked apartments, where each floor on a small narrow lot, the standard Chicago lot is 25 by 125ft. So very narrow, but very deep. And front faces the street, back faces the alley. That's usually where people have their garages or sometimes a coach house for ones that were grandfathered in. That the most effective way to build middle housing was to stack apartments on top of each other and have each floor be its own want. That's a very common type here in Chicago. And you will find those in every neighborhood in the city, including North Park. But the zoning changed under those buildings to make it so that if those buildings burned down tomorrow or had some major mechanicals problem or a foundation problem or something that couldn't just be remediated and the building is not no longer viable, if it had to get torn down, it legally could not be replaced by anything other than a single family home. And that's really frustrating because it's gotten rid of many opportunities to build incremental housing and to address those needs that aren't these massive projects that take up to a decade to come to fruition in a lot of cases. So the reason why everyone is betting on the big stuff is because again, the small stuff in a lot of cases has been legislated out of existence. I think it's also worth noting that I understand and appreciate that people, when they see vacant storefronts, and especially when they see vacant storefronts that are owned by an institutional entity like a university, that's frustrating. And they say, well, we could put better use to this. Let's do more of that. But I think if you look at the context of that stretch of Bryn Mawr and North park, there are many other storefronts that are vacant right now, and in some cases have been vacant for a few years that aren't owned by the university. And the reason for vacancy isn't that some institution bought it and vacated in hopes of building something else. It's that there's a not enough footfall in that corridor to be able to support more businesses than the ones that are already there. So I think a lot of times we tend to have the conversations about what commercial elements do we want in neighborhoods and what housing do we want as two separate things. I don't think they are. I think there's a lot of neighborhoods in Chicago that have trouble with commercial storefront vacancies where a big part of what's driving that is that those neighborhoods have had net population loss over the past few decades in many cases because of down zoning and demolitions and loss of some of that middle housing over time or disinvestment. So I think that's an important part of the conversation. Yes, we want more small businesses, but small businesses need customers. And if the customers don't live nearby, they're probably not going to drive across the city to your specific neighborhood to have your specific tamale or use your specific locksmith. A lot of these small businesses, they live and die by who is nearby them within walking distance. And so that, that needs to be an important part of the conversation.
- [27:09]
Norm
And I appreciate the recognition, like vacancy is not just on this particular block. And then, you know, or the university stepped in and took something that was perfectly, you know, the most vibrant part of the city and basically said, what if? What if it's not? Instead they were probably identifying something on that street. And, and some of the language in the early days would have been, we can actually be a great community partner. We can be the ones that come in and enable sort of a revitalization of a neighborhood. And the challenge is when the neighborhood says we weren't consulted. That is a huge and very common problem. Another challenge is if they, if the scale doesn't fit with what is actually feasible. And then the other challenge I think of becoming very adversarial through the court process, the eminent domain like tools. And my, my recognition is that the problem is that we have a lot of public institutions that certainly can sort of run roughshod. I'm not sure even if that fully applies here, but certainly my city, the way that they've treated that, that site down near our waterfront, you have, I think, Bernice, you mentioned medical campuses that frequently will do this. The most prolific offender is highway projects and road widening projects, cutting off not just people's front lawns, but actually just saying, like, oh, we can't just take a portion of your front lawn, we'll just take your whole house because maybe someday we're going to want like eight lanes here. And so I see this all over the place where even salvageable properties that could have been reoriented, so the front house, you know, backs onto the backyard and you create a new laneway. It's not worth the hassle. And so with real power, they just lay waste to what's happening there. And what also stands out to me is that your Bernice, your specialty, I think. And the thing that we need to train way more people to Think this way is not just to say like, oh, I can do something with that, but actually, like looking at those places that have been marked as, as blighted, marked as unworthy of keeping, and saying, like, what would it take for us to give this a second leaf leash on life? And I want to ask you about the, the theater that you're at work on, because that feels like, you know, this block in particular in north park doesn't have a theater in it, but if it did, it would look a lot like this scenario in Buffalo that you've been working at and rallying people together, like. Or that the music venue. Yeah. Do you want to share a little bit about that? Because that feels like the thing that they. I'll. I'll get in trouble here. But the people with the MBAs would just look at this and say, oh, it doesn't pencil. But people with like hardscrabble actual business experience probably would say, like, no, I think I can find a way. And you found that way. Can you share a little bit about that?
- [29:46]
Bernice Radel
Yeah, well, one of the secrets to any type of whether you want to. If you want a music venue in your community or are the nonprofit that I run, you know, we're opening a preservation resource center. We opened, we did Eugene V. Debs hall, which is a community center, which we've talked, I think Strong Towns has talked about in the past. That's another community based center. The key to doing cool, weird things that the community loves is having apartments above to pay the bills. Right. So. Or whether it could be apartments, could be art studios. So in the case of like Mohonk Place, which is the music venue that you're talking about, so Mohawk Place is in downtown Buffalo and it's been a music venue for. Since 1990. It's like very legendary. And it had vacated the space was closing, but the entire upper three floors were never touched. And so they were like band spaces for a bit and somebody was squatting in there. But it was a rooming house like a hundred years for a long time. And then, you know, so now we're looking at this model where instead of actually housing, we can put art spaces upstairs and just rent them spaces. Whether. Whether they are apartments or they are art spaces or they are small business spaces, what goes on above you is what starts to allow the, the creativity to flow for the ground floor apartments to be legendary. Right. And so that's what you want. You want the pie shop, you want the cake maker, you want. And this is what, where I feel like I do all, I do so much of this work right like this. Right now I'm working on this. This was built as a brothel. The building does not pencil. Everybody would throw. We got donated to our nonprofit because it doesn't pencil. But partnering with a nonprofit, right? So we're taking the first two floors. All of a sudden we were able to tap into all kinds of nonprofit funding. So now it does pencil because of the nonprofit funding and the historic tax credits. So with the, like with Mohawk Place, that doesn't make a lot of sense. It really doesn't. But what makes sense as a building owner is like everything above it, right? And so universities are going to look at, okay, we're going to rent this, this, you know, storefront to a music theater or community center or nonprofit. The renting of that is hard because then you just need three or four or $5,000 a month and your baby nonprofit can't really afford that. But if you can allow local people to own the building, like you allow the, the music venue owner to own the building or the pbn, our nonprofits own the building, all of a sudden the ownership makes so much sense. It doesn't work for university, but it sure as hell works for our nonprofit, right? We're going to make a little money, we're going to rent upstairs to other small businesses. And by the way, I will say this will not get me love here, but I'll say it. I mean, it might get a little bit. We need a ton of housing. What I have found is sometimes we are like, these spaces that are empty make good art spaces. They make good small business spaces, like office spaces. So sometimes we're doing housing above, sometimes we're doing art, sometimes we're doing offices. And so sometimes what actually stops a small scale developer is the fact that we have to put an elevator or we have two means of egress, which I know that Chicago's working on. And so there's actually codes that will stop if it's four stories. Like we have three, four stories. And so, but so if you mix abuses, that becomes a problem, expensive problem. So kind of the working around that has been art offices, etc. Because the residential is not in it. The residential is what kicks it into higher code. So I'm not saying not put residential, and I'm not saying that at all. Don't get me. Nobody come at me. We need tons of housing. But in Buffalo, where our market is different, we haven't had all that growth, right? We have a ton of artists, we have A ton of bands that need space. We, we grew 17,000 people in the city. You know, we lost half our population and then grew about 17,000 in the last decade. So we're like, I mean we're, we have a different level of pressure and so anyway, so create the moral of this story, at least my story is you think that you needed to be creative before COVID post Covid. The creativity has to be off the charts to make these projects work. And no joke, you may say this doesn't pencil. Have you partnered with your nonprofits? Have you partnered with your artists? Have you partnered with the local developers? Get them in the hands of the Bernices and Alexes of the world and we can make the magic happen. That's really the truth. We make it pencil or. And then if it really doesn't, you know, then the city is like South Bend has. They've showed up with so many incentives for small developers. Tiff money, vacant funding, low interest loans. Right. That's where you hit it. And, and you know, each community is different. Chicago obviously is much different pressure than South Bend or Buffalo. But if you're out there thinking, well, how do we combat this? You know, there's so many ways that you can tackle stuff like this and there's so many opportunities. But to me at the core is you got to get it in the hands of a smaller scaled person that can be creative but that still has the wherewithal to make the project work. Go to the bank and do all those things. And so that's why we have to train all these small developers. That's why Ink Dev is needed. Neighborhood evolution, all these, all of this is so important because we need to find the norms, the Alexes of the world to make it make sense.
- [35:28]
Norm
I 100% agree and I feel like that is that next evolution from like the people that are posting the post it notes of. I would like to see this in my community. Many of them are never going to be in a position to actually take on that, that mantle of saying, all right, I'm going to now do the next level, which is I'm going to start to find that way, sort of squirrel my way through this process in order to create the conditions for this to happen. But that's not to say that that can't happen. I actually believe that more and more if we can get the conditions on the ground right for that, that next increment of development, you know, going back to Strongtown, sort of core stuff like it actually matters and it will make a huge difference. And maybe, Alex, as I want to get your thoughts just in terms of outcomes as a resident and perhaps if you can put yourself into the shoes of somebody living in the north park neighborhood, what is an outcome sort of along the way that you would say, like, can really begin to help heal this, this wound that's been created and the challenges that is faced there?
- [36:27]
Alex Montero
I think some of the things we brought up in this conversation of finding ways to put places to productive use without committing to commercial leases, which at least last five years, is the standard. If you're an institution like the university that might want to do a project that makes sense and build dorms or something like there someday, you're never going to sign those kinds of tenants because you're afraid it will block you from getting started when you're ready to. But to Bernice's point, there is a space for pop ups. There is a space for community activation. There is space for even when you know a particular partial or particular building is going to be redeveloped, not just have it sit empty the entire time. And there are examples of people doing good work like that. Across the city of Chicago, Overton elementary on the south side in the Washington park neighborhood, which we in Strongtown Chicago did a neighborhood walk to and spoke to the primary local incremental developer there. On it is an old Chicago public elementary school that got closed down about a decade ago after the city was was facing population loss and no longer had enough students to justify keeping a lot of buildings open. That space has been undergoing redevelopment for a long time, many years at this point. But they've been really good about letting community organizations use the parking lot to paint a map of the city on it, use the green space for weekend markets and fairs and those kinds of community events and small vendors and nonprofits and all those things. Use the space inside for when neighborhood organizations needed a place to meet, to discuss some things and to meet with each other and commune. So I think there's space to do that in a way where a lot of times we just assume nope, has to be empty until whatever the big project is that's going to happen. And I think we should examine that a little bit. And we need people who are willing to be creative with that kind of thing. And we need a city that encourages that kind of thing instead of throwing up a lot of obstacles or barriers and if anything, making it so that the easiest path of least resistance is to just do nothing with it. But the second part of it, I think it's important that we make it easier for the kinds of things that residents say they want to see in their neighborhood. More thriving commercial corridors, more housing that feeds customers into those local businesses and everything. We need to make that legal by default because if that is only allowed by exception and all of the caps that we have are so low that nothing, there's no opportunity for people to be creative because most of the ways that they would be creative, they're precluded from then there's not many good alternatives to point to, to some of these larger, more disruptive projects. And I think if this same strip and this same parcel had a zoning designation that allowed more apartments above it, we're talking about a relatively small lot. This is 12,000 square feet, like in some suburbs, that's two single family home lots next to each other. So this is a relatively modest parcel but there is more than enough space to have ground floor commercial and then two, three, four stories of apartments above. It's currently a two story building and it's a two story building not because of height limits but because of the density restrictions of saying on this 12,000 foot parcel you can build up to a maximum of 12 apartments and that's it. It's not worth it going up to more floors because you're not allowed to build anything on those higher floors floors. So I think in a lot of cases revisiting what the defaults are and making it so that we have more, fewer, fewer caps that are constraints so that you can have your incremental developers like Bernice and local folks who want to activate spaces and add additional housing on top of it can do it without going through a decades long negotiation process with the city. Yeah, major institutions can afford to do that. Small developers cannot, which I'm sure Bernice didn't say a lot more about.
- [40:34]
Bernice Radel
It takes so long to put these projects together. You know, I think people don't really realize they think they're going to get a building done in six months. I mean took me four months to get my plans reviewed from the city because it was a complicated project and you know you're paying taxes, insurance, like all the things on top of it over and over again. And it's. People really don't, I mean even this, this building, I, you know actually your guys that y' all are making me think because this building, I sort of, I sort of this, this building I was just at like on my way here, I was like sweating trying to get here to record this. I'll have my bike, riding my bike really quickly from this Building we're renovating and like, you know, it's sat vacant for a long time. Even our nonprofit is sat at vacant and went through so many different renditions. There's so much more even I can be doing, you know, and, but, but then it's, it's like, it's just so, it's so expensive and it's really hard and things take so long, especially even if it's zoned appropriately, you know, which is wild. So I, I always think this is me just saying Allah. But everyone goes, well, why does things take so long? It just takes a long time. You know, if you've got a grant tends like we have grant processes that take 30 days back and forth. They need to review things. Then I need to get approved at the state and then to come back that's another 30 days. Thirty days. Thirty days. Thirty days, thirty days. It's like, you know, it's just so wild to, you know, when you take a step back, how deep and long these projects can take. And so, and people, like I said, I actually said earlier, they probably have still the, some of the best intentions. They want that to happen. I guarantee you they want that to happen. They just run in all these roadblocks or maybe the staff turned over or they had a new, I don't even know like all this thing, all these things just take time. So I think, Alex, you're totally on the money. Like make it easier. Any way to make it easier.
- [42:32]
Alex Montero
Make it exactly. And there's enough other real barriers and problems to make any kind of an incremental development process viable. We don't need fighting the underlying zoning to be an extra one on top of that.
- [42:49]
Norm
I often think that we would be well served if we had like four of our city staff. Just follow like some of our best small scale developers with a, with a eraser and a pencil to be able to write in like, hey, oh, you need that? Okay, probably everybody's going to need that. Oh, that's not working for you. Let me just get rid of that. Because we would actually be able to deal with a lot of the things that we have projects coming to our city where they require eight variances. And I look at the variances and they're so mind numbingly like obvious and yet in the, in the hands of an opponent, it's like they can't even follow the rules. And you're like, no folks, we need to be able to help each other on, on this because we've gotten in way too deep on, on what's going on in our building codes, the overlapping requirements or the things that are at odds with each other, deeply frustrating. A deep level of sympathy I hope also is felt for, you know, people that live in the neighborhood, have posted sticky notes, did the awesome stuff of hosting a little block party. Like that matters. I would also say if you are a student at Northeastern Illinois University, join the Strongtown Chicago group. They're awesome. I can attest for that. Firsthand participate in the processes, you know, push the administration if need be or offer ideas. Say, hey, we would go live there if you are a student and looking for housing. And then if you're a university administrator, feel free to reach out.
- [44:08]
Bernice Radel
Right?
- [44:08]
Norm
We are folks that are trying to say how do we do this from the bottom up? And if our top down approaches, which eminent domain and other tools like that definitely resemble a very top down strategy. If you found that 10 years later things have not worked. Let's, let's talk. Let's have those conversations. Come on the podcast. I would love to do a follow up discussion about it. I would love that opportunity as well. And so as we head into our down zone, this is the time of the podcast where we just talk about something we're taking in, consuming something that inspired you. We can even broaden it maybe. Alex, do you want to go first? What is for you something that's in your down zone?
- [44:44]
Alex Montero
There's a substack by Pete Saunders called the Corner side Yard. Very Midwestern urbanism attitude. He puts out some great articles that I think tackle a lot of the issues we have on land use and how our communities develop. He had a great article recently about alleys and how alleys are underrated as a tool for building good cities. And as someone from Chicago, which is probably the alley capital of the world, I'm biased, but I really, really enjoyed the level of granularity and detail that he went into that article on why these were built in the first place and all of the practical problems they solve. So I would highly suggest it to people who are if you're listening to this podcast, chances are these kinds of down the rabbit hole topics interesting. You check out the Corner side Yard substack by Pete Saunders. It's a delightful read.
- [45:40]
Bernice Radel
Yeah.
- [45:41]
Norm
What about for you, Bernice?
- [45:42]
Bernice Radel
I want to say I love alleys and I am so jealous because Buffalo has like four alleys. I don't know why, how we missed the alley situation. We were just built. We have the Ellicott, you know, radial street plan. So ours is like a radial and it Makes me sad. Literally, it makes me so sad all of our trash has to go out front. It's. Yeah. Anyway, down zone for me is totally not building related or urbanism related. I've been teaching myself how to DJ for like the last year. And in fact, I'm very. I'm just saying out loud, I would love to next year's Strong Towns, like, DJ an event. I think I mentioned this when we were partying at Strong Towns this year, but I just been really like working on finding, like doing things that I wish I'd done 10 or 15 or 20 years ago. And one of them is DJing. And so I've been really having a good time with vinyl and, and like disco and house music and just really finding joy in it. And as I. Actually some of my friends, they say they see my full smile when I do it, which is what we do because I always, I smile a lot, but it's like bit, you see all my teeth, you know. And so I would encourage people as somebody who's there, I'm 39, I'm gonna be 40, and I, I like to take that leap. Has been hard, weirdly hard. Although now that I've done it, I'm like, this is super fun. And like, no one, you know, I don't know, maybe I'm being judged by like some, you know, 20 something. It's like. But it's so much fun. I really don't care. I do it for the girls, you know, like, it's just a fun. So I've been really doing that. I've got a set coming like I'm planning in September. We're doing like an all day kind of barbecue Sunday thing with me and a couple other women that are DJing. And we're just like gonna have a good time. So I just encourage people to not work as hard all the time. This is coming from somebody who works all the time, you know, and, and music solves all. Huh? Norm, you know, that you like. And we both, you know, we all know.
- [47:43]
Norm
Yeah, all three of us were at karaoke at the national gathering, so nice.
- [47:47]
Bernice Radel
I know. We karaoke our little hearts out. I also want to say out loud, one, I gotta tell you, so if anybody's like, well, what should I listen to? I'm just gonna do a shout out for this, this person. This, this. I don't even know how to call them. Cerrone. C E R R O N E has been around since like the 70s is the craziest, wildest album that I found. You it's just disco y. So just look it up and you'll have a really great summer if you listen to some of Cerrone's music. So yeah, that's like what I've been hanging out in my Spotify.
- [48:24]
Norm
So that's fantastic.
- [48:25]
Bernice Radel
Not building related or books as you
- [48:28]
Norm
said that the 20 year olds are probably judging you. I was like, no, the 20 year olds are like, we listen to your music now and it's so cool. And we, you know, none of the new music meets the standards of the old stuff. So that's perfect.
- [48:39]
Bernice Radel
That's right.
- [48:39]
Norm
I know I got to do a school field trip with my son that I had flagged back in September and it was the Britannia Mine Museum, which is on the coast on the way up to Squamish and then Whistler, British Columbia. So it's a gorgeous drive. If you ever come out to Vancouver, folks come visit. And if you are interested at all in mining, they dug 240km of mine tunnels under the, under this mountain to pull out all kinds of copper ore and things like that. It was the biggest mine in the North American continent for quite a while before it closed. But it's fantastic. And I just, it was a reminder of like how hard life often was and can be and still is for so many people. And then many of the things that I take for granted, even the copper in my computer that lets this conversation occur. And so on that Friday it was, it's fascinating, it's kind of that reminder that I've driven by lots of these different items and you know, spaces and just to stop, take notice, as Roman Mars from 99% invisible would say, always read the plaque and I feel like life is better that way. So with that we hopefully have touched on some, I think some pretty powerful things that are not just for Northeastern Illinois University, but more broadly with these patterns persist in our communities. But I hope that you've appreciated the discussion. Thanks Alex and Bernice for jumping in today.
- [50:02]
Bernice Radel
Thank you.
- [50:03]
Norm
Great to be able to do this and we'll do it again. Take care everybody and have a good rest of the day. This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a non profit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong towns member@strongtowns.org membership.
- [50:33]
Bernice Radel
Sam.