Thoughts, stories and ideas.
Last fall, I wrote a piece I had been rolling around in my head for quite some time, about the rise and fall and rise of moderate-density apartment buildings in Chicago. It essentially made the case that a middle-ground of density—between three-flats and high-rises&
The pantheon of Chicago architecture tends to cluster at either end of the density spectrum. In one corner you have the trophy commercial skyscrapers; in the other you have icons of domesticity, the bungalow and Chicago's answer to the East Coast rowhome, the stacked flat. A sampling of
There's a saying about bureaucracies that you should never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence. This is typically the axis along which explanations for dissatisfaction with local government live: Are they evil or stupid? As a recently ex-bureaucrat, one thing I tried to convey
Against Advice | The Point Magazine One of the paradoxes of advice seems to be that those most likely to be asked for it are least likely to have taken anyone else’s: their projects of “becoming” are the most particularized of all. I am at a point
A Housing Production Fund building In a previous post, I wrote about how it's worth separating the way we fund affordable housing into two buckets : Capital subsidy, which helps the government or a mission-oriented third party buy or build a building; and rental subsidy, which makes the
From "Affordable Housing Finance 101" by Hanneke Van Deursen Moderate versus deep affordability While we (advocates, elected officials, public agency staff, and media) often speak in a binary shorthand in which all housing is either "market rate" or "affordable," anyone who has actually paid
For at least a year, in certain very particular corners of LinkedIn, Substack, X, and Bluesky (along with the Crain's and Tribune editorial pages), affordable housing construction costs have been a hot topic in Chicago. It's easy enough to see why: The headline numbers are pretty