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News for 03/12/20
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Chicago’s vacant land problem

by Steven Vance

In 2018 when I was working in a City Open Workshop breakout group about land stewardship, Paola Aguirre helped us summarize and visualize the vacant land problem in Chicago as follows:

  1. The scale of the challenge is too large
  2. The pace of land stewardship [meaning someone other than the city acquires and maintains land] is too slow
  3. Available land acquisition processes are considerably opaque, unclear, or incomplete
This 4-part graphic illustrates the problem with vacant land in Chicago. Drawn by Paola Aguirre based on the research from our breakout group called Office of Land Management.

We called the group “Office of Land Management” — it suggests that a city as large as Chicago, or a county as large as Cook, needs a staff dedicated to inventorying land and selling it or giving it away as quickly and “safely” — to the right people, for the right reasons — as possible. Safely means there are financial, monitoring, and displacement safeguards to prevent corruption and mitigate land sales’ impact on gentrification.

In a 2016 analysis I found that there are over 30,000 vacant parcels in Chicago — almost half of them are probably owned by the city because the latest count of city-owned land (most are vacant but some are parking lots) is 14,548 parcels.

The Large Lots program, designed by Chicagoans and implemented by the Chicago Department of Planning & Development, has not been active in...

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Metra should add a new station in Humboldt Park

by Steven Vance

Author’s note: Many people have good ideas about where Metra should build new stations, but this post is about how station locations are selected and built, and what infill stations on existing train lines do to improve access to jobs.

A prominent real estate developer, Sterling Bay, has proposed a new Metra station in the West Loop, near the office buildings it’s erected. The rationale: make it more convenient for people to disembark near their jobs in the new office node a couple of blocks west of Halsted St rather than at either Ogilvie or Union stations a couple of blocks east of Halsted St. Many of those workers then take ride hail vehicles or shuttle buses operated by their employer or the property manager. A new station would put them two blocks away from work.

A new Metra station in the West Loop is a great idea. There should also be more infill stations on Metra’s citywide network to take advantage of their regional reach, and to fill in gaps in the CTA’s ‘L’ and slow bus networks.

Humboldt Park is another area in Chicago that could benefit from a new Metra station, over in Humboldt Park. I looked at two potential locations:

  1. Chicago/Kedzie, in the Humboldt Park community area, and near the East Garfield Park community area
  2. Division/Grand/Central Park, four blocks west of the park

Both potential locations are where three lines— Milwaukee District-North (MD-N), Milwaukee District-West (MD-W), and North Central...

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