Joseph Miscimarra 🇺🇸

you ever think about how many ships there are, quietly and thanklessly keeping the world running 24/7

If I had the time to flesh this all out, I'd do a book on how American cities manage virtually everything at the wrong scale, and this accounts for about 80% of our routine issues. Policy wonks want to policy wonk everything; designers like me see everything as a design problem. But what I've become convinced of is we have a basic management problem. I find this to be really difficult to communicate, so bear with me (which would be the point of writing something out, right?) Smaller cities and towns have their limitations, but their local governments are intimately familiar with issues in town, know their constituents closely and are generally very accessible. As cities grow larger, the population of districts also grows. Sometimes to very large numbers. My district in my city has over 80,000 people in it - represented essentially by 2 people. Bear in mind there are entire towns of half that size with a City Council of 5-12 people. So there's that aspect - the political side. Then there's the day to day management side. As cities grow, they grow like corporations used to grow - vertically and siloed. It becomes harder and harder for lay people to know who to call, who does what, etc etc. I've seen a number of workarounds tried, with good managers and not so good ones. But fundamentally I see a systems problem - people just get farther and farther away from constituents and needs. One result is many very localized issues just don't get dealt with well at all. Everyone in the process seems to default to solving problems at the scale of the whole city, when in fact most issues are hyper-local. That hyper-local scale gets problem-solvers in the form of BIDs, CIDs, Place-management organizations, like mine. And these groups often do a great job - because again they operate at a fine scale and are accessible. But parts of the community without those groups, just generally don't get their issues solved. This is but one part of a much longer thought train, but over and over again I've seen how we have countless issues because of lack of management at the right scale - a more localized one. And those issues then metastasize and become much bigger fights. Much of this is rooted in the very 20th century idea that consolidation of governments and annexations would lead to management efficiencies. Because that was the mentality of much of society at the time. Might've sounded good in a textbook or a seminar, but it just hasn't worked. My gut tells me so much of cities would work 1000% better if we had smaller-scale, localized governance and management. I feel like people instinctively know this or sense it, but we can't figure out how to communicate it well or solve for it.

There's 233,438.07 m² of empty or parking space in Uptown (ward 46). That could be homes for 10-15k new residents and $35-40M in yearly property tax revenue in a single ward alone

Chicago River appreciation post

my hot take on gentrification is the average person doesn’t understand that gentrification isn’t usually a function of individuals, but of big business restructuring neighborhoods, so gentrification takes often sounds indistinguishable from far right anti-immigrant sentiments

Effectively all growth in corn production over the last 20 years is for ethanol. ~20 million acres of conservation land, grassland, and soybean rotation was turned into corn monoculture that effectively strip mines the topsoil. Meanwhile it’s the most fertilizer dependent crop with only a 40% uptake rate. So ~1.7 million tons of nitrogen runoff flows into the Mississippi basin annually while also polluting their own water supplies. This runoff ends up expanding the Gulf deadzone, which is also where 40% of domestic seafood comes from. It’s hard to find a worse way to create fuel, with a wicked level of waste and downstream consequences.

First panes of glass going in at the new Bally’s casino on the river

The 133 municipalities in Cook County collectively have the same population as Chicago; meaning 133 separate police departments serve roughly the same number of residents as the Chicago Police Department alone.