”American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash.”
-John Steinbeck
The author of ”Travels with Charley” had not seen the worst of it when he wrote those words in 1962.
Thirty years ago, the nation still was perfecting the process by which it abandons its older neighborhoods in favor of new development on the urban fringe.
The engine of suburban real estate development had only begun to roll, fueled by cheap gasoline and steered outward by an expressway system that put all points within an easy drive of all other points.
The economics of the process are simple enough. It is much cheaper to sub-divide a cornfield than redevelop an older neighborhood. Cities are messy to fix. Farmland is blank canvas. The sociology of it is more subtle but no less important: By moving out, the middle class hopes to escape ”urban problems,” the acceptable code for the presence of low-income minorities.
The product of this process is out there for all to see.
City neighborhoods with names such as Englewood and Lawndale have been reduced to wastelands of vacant lots and semi-abandoned buildings, their jobless residents physically and psychologically cut off from the economic action downtown and on the fringe. Lately some inner-ring suburbs have been showing signs of neglect as the ”badger hole” expands.
Out on the fringe, the development engine, slowed by recession, has produced vast tracts of split-level homes, strip malls and industrial parks. The village model was replaced by the logic of the automobile, which separates by long distances the places people sleep, work, shop and play.
It is testimony to the power of the process that in the last two decades, as Chicago`s suburbs fanned out to embrace Kane and McHenry Counties, the population of the metro area grew by only 4 percent. No wonder there is so much emptiness left behind.
All this may sound like an anti-development sermon, but it is not.
It`s a plea to slow the sprawl. America cannot afford to go on discarding its older neighborhoods-with their existing streets, sewers, schools, transit lines and housing stock-in favor of building those things all over again on the fringe. The financial waste is too great; the human waste unconscionable. Yesterday`s sprawl can`t be undone. But the Chicago region is about to make a crucial public policy decision that will strongly influence whether we pick up the pace of sprawl in the 21st Century or begin cleaning up the mess we left behind in the 20th.
That decision is the choice of a third airport site.
More Top Picks Best Treadmill Desks For Focus
By now you`re probably tired of this debate. The competition is among two close-in sites and three locations beyond the southern suburbs. The government-sponsored selection process has turned into a three-ring circus. There have been competing consultants` reports, raucous demonstrations by farmers and/or homeowners in the path of one site or another and the usual partisan political spoilsmanship.
But to my mind, it comes down to this:
By choosing Chicago`s Lake Calumet site, or Indiana`s Gary site, or some combination of the two, the selection committee would begin the work of cleaning up and restoring a portion of the metropolitan area that our development engine long ago gave up for dead.
By choosing one of the so-called ”green grass” sites-Kankakee, Peotone or Beecher-the committee would trigger another land rush down a new ”golden corridor” leading to the satellite city that inevitably will spring up outside the airport gate, some 50 miles south of downtown.
There are many other pros and cons, of course.
The city`s studies on behalf of Lake Calumet don`t deal adequately with the hardship faced by the 40,000 residents who would have to be moved. This calls for some imagination. Why not build them a model community on the lakefront where the U.S. Steel South Works mill is about to close?
The selection committee`s study, by an outfit called TAMS, draws the absurd conclusion that passengers will be almost as likely to travel to an airport 50 miles distant (an $80 cab ride) as one 10 miles away. TAMS also discovered that farmland is cheaper to redevelop than a cityscape of aging houses, slag heaps, polluted swamps and garbage landfills. Thanks for telling us.
Closer to the mark, I think, is a small study recently issued by City Innovations, a national nonprofit planning group based in Minneapolis.
They favor an airport at Lake Calumet because it could anchor a
”Crescent Corridor” of redevelopment from Gary on the south to Chicago`s Loop on the north.
”The idea,” said Otto A. Silha, chairman of City Innovation, ”is to use the airport to recycle 9,400 acres of a great city, rather than contribute to urban sprawl.”
Makes sense to me. The ”badger hole” approach may be cheaper for now, but in the long run we`ll find there are dreadful costs attached to our throw- away approach to cities, costs that TAMS never bothered to compute.