Friday, July 07, 2006

Nailing Denny Hastert's to the Wall on Urban Sprawl

The Chicago Tribune keeps the drum beating—or at least one of its columnists, John McCarron, does—on U.S. House Speaker Denny Hastert’s head. The paper even had an editorial after the story and column about which this McHenry County Blog post was written.

Last Wednesday, the Tribune ran an editorial entitled,

Secrets of Little Rock Road
It added one fact I had missed previously. Not all of the $207 million Hastert earmarked for his Prairie Pathway was for the road in general. One was
...for a $55 million interchange. The parkway interchange is about 5 miles from the property he held in secret (that is, in a secret land trust).
Friday, on its op-ed page was a John McCarron column which attempts to pin urban sprawl on Hastert. (Well, his allies are included, too.)

At least, that is my quick reading of its thrust.

Urging people to live near employment centers or train stations, McCarron makes this very good point about housing development because of the cost of driving and commuting time:
It's a business in which the main economic benefits are realized upfront by a savvy few, while the bulk of the costs are distributed over time to the unaware many. Sure, you can technically become one of the few by buying the stock of a corporate home-builder. But that's the hard way. Better you should buy raw farmland and wait for the home-builders to come calling.
McHenry County Blog ran numerous articles about Carpentersville School District 300’s and Woodstock School District 200’s major tax hike committee contributors being home builders. Check posts in February and March of this year.

McCarron then goes after Hastert, trying to make him a poster child of the people who benefit from urban sprawl. He says it demonstrates the “the depth and power” of what he calls the “farm flipping industry.”
This is the technique apparently mastered by U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and a group of his fellow investor-politicos out in Kendall County. Records show the speaker and his family made nearly $2 million last year selling farmland in and around Plano, a hot market for subdivisions. One of his investment partners is Dallas Ingemunson, the longtime Kendall County GOP chairman. They held the property in secret land trusts. Wouldn't want to give people the wrong idea about why Hastert has been pushing for a new expressway out that way, or why he's secured more than $200 million in federal funds to get the concrete flowing.
All of this “background” is to introduce a new “Housing and Transportation Affordability Index” that is being developed by what can be reasonably described as a group of not-for-profit organizations run by lefty-liberals. The Chicago group is Chicago by the Center for Neighborhood Technology. The index can be found at www.reconnectingamerica.org, but it’s not ready for Chicago yet.

Have to hand it to McCarron. He has made a very interesting connection between his two topics.

Ironically, while attacking Hastert’s $200 million earmarking for the 4-lane Prairie Pathway, his favored organization, Reconnecting America, which hosts the Center for Transit-Oriented Development—the one that developed the index—Reconnecting America just received $1 million in earmarked money from the same congressional process.

June 30th I left messages with each of the individuals listed as contact people on the June 1st press release, asking which congressman was responsible for inserting the $1 million of earmarked money in the Federal budget. No reply yet.

6 comments:

Bill Baar 7:07 AM  

There have been significant drops in homelessness in the past few years.

The survey [on Denver] results mirror a national trend, said Philip Mangano, executive director of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, also known as President Bush's "Homeless Czar."

Mangano said New York City announced a 13 percent drop in its homeless population two weeks ago, and Miami recently reported a 30 percent decline.

"Denver is right in the forefront of cities that are getting the best results in the country," he said.


There was a time when buidling houses, especially affordable houses, was considered a liberal a progressive thing.

I tell that to people who complain about all those new town homes along Randall Road.

Recall The Economist's comparison of Hastert's Kane County and Pelosi's San Francisco.

There is also a class difference. Mr Hastert's district is as resolutely middle-class as it is cheerfully mid-American. A few businessmen live in multi-million-dollar houses, and send their children to private schools. But most people send their children to public schools, shop in giant shopping malls and eat in chain restaurants. The region's varied economy means that you do not need a higher degree to get ahead: people do well in farms and factories as well as in office suites. And the almost universal commitment to the public schools reinforces the sense of equality. Sue Klinkhamer, the mayor of St Charles, points out that her local school district is so big that people living on fairly modest incomes can send their children to the same schools as do millionaires.

San Francisco is both higher- and lower-class. The city is home to some of the richest people in the country, many of them, like the Hearsts, Haases and Crockers, the heirs to rather than the creators of huge fortunes. It also has a disproportionate number of single professionals with big disposable incomes. Yet it is also host to one of the country's biggest concentrations of homeless people. Over 8,000 of them, perhaps twice that number, many drug-addicted or mentally ill, live on the streets. “A mixture of Carmel and Calcutta”, is the verdict of Kevin Starr, California's state librarian, on his native city.


I'll take Hastert's Kane County over Carmel and Calcutta any day and flip my little square of it for a profit hopefully come retirment day too. I hope the parkway helps.

Anonymous,  7:53 AM  

Bill, building affordable housing may be a l-i-b-e-r-a-l cause, but not on large lots in sprawling residential developments that are not easily served by mass transportation and other services. One group that will benefit from the continued inefficient use of oil spawned by big road building projects and urban sprawl -- corrupt Middle Eastern governments that indirectly support terrorist organizations.

Anonymous,  1:58 PM  

the people who benefit from the roads should pay for them, not the whole country

Then that begs the question, who benefits? Should the tiny towns of Marseilles and Seneca have been made to pony up for their share of I-80 when it was built? Should Gold Coast condo owners be assessed a fee when Lake Shore Drive is repaired? This is utter pettiness when it is carried to its logical extreme.

I will say that Prairie Parkway would be way more regionally functional if it went from the WI border to I-65 in Indiana. Maybe someday it will. And as a pork project, it is probably not the most needed in the country (or the least needed either), but it pales in cost and scope to Boston's Big Dig, the $18 billion project that was sponsored by another Speaker several years ago.

Anon 7:53; It is true liberal urban planner types favor dense transit friendly development, and I think it is a good thing in general. However, in a society that tightly controls where the development goes, the unintended consequence is that land near the transit lines, and urban land in general, gets ridiculously expensive (supply & demand), squeezing the poor and middle class even more.

And Cal, it was a lack of foresight and stick-your-head-in-the-sand mentality that leaves McHenry County one of the largest counties in the US without a freeway exit. Don't build it and they won't come. Well, they came anyway and they're still coming, and McHenry County transportation still sucks.

I see no end in sight for the population boom, and its resultant sprawl, in this country. We will never have the nerve to do anything meaningful about stemming the tide of immigration, legal or otherwise. Personally, I'm not sure we can or should.

Anonymous,  2:19 PM  

If developers want to build out there, then they shouldn't expect the government to pay for the roads that will connect their residents to main highways.

The problem is, developers don't really care if the roads are improved or not. They will build whether the roads are there or not. There are a tiny handful of new or widened roads or transit expansions built in the growth counties over the last 20 years, while hundreds of thousands of new homes and a few million more people have showed up. The developers don't "expect" anything except to turn a profit and move on to the next project.

Anonymous,  10:43 AM  

Anyone done the math on Denny's deals? Seems like he inherits, buys sells aaaand the numbers don't seem to work.
Are there other investors?
Maybe the Trib asked those questions and "forgot" the answers.

Sure hope Duke's boys or Jack A's crew did not cosign a loan.

Anonymous,  12:00 PM  

It was pretty well documented that his partners were Dallas Ingemunson and Tom Klatt on his latest transactions, who both are probably semi-wealthy in their own right and could provide ample collateral. He supposedly has also financed some of the transactions with borrowed money. IMO, it wouldn't be too hard to get a loan with favorable terms if you are a state or US legislator - and it would be legitimate IF you were able to demonstrate the ability to pay. Where it would be questionable is if a lending institution far exceeded its normal credit ratios to give favorable treatment to someone, just so the borrower could use the proceeds for a short term land flip.

Ever see the TV infomercial for "Credit Card Millionaire"? The guy had a scheme to borrow to the hilt on all these credit cards, buy land and flip it, and always stay one payment ahead of the creditors with his "house of cards".

I doubt there is a smoking gun here, but we'll just have to wait and see. There are many eyes on the issue, and if something is goofy, it will come out in the wash sooner or later.

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