What do you call a town where most new jobs pay around $25,000 and most homes are for people making $100,000? Naperville. According to “The Metropolis Housing Index: Housing as Opportunity,” published in July by Chicago Metropolis 2020, Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics figures reveal that in 2000 Naperville had 11,728 new jobs paying between $20,000 and $30,000 a year–and just 91 single-family homes that someone with that income could afford. The town had zero jobs paying $80,000-120,000 a year, but 13,903 homes that people with that income could afford. The report documents a similar pattern for Oak Brook and Schaumburg.
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Prairie prescription: burn more, but not too much more. Writing in the July issue of Chicago Wilderness Journal, Marlin Bowles and Michael Jones reexamine 62 prairie stands that were sampled in 1976 by the Illinois Natural Areas Inventory. They find that high-quality prairies may need to be burned every other year “to maintain composition and structure.” But that isn’t easy, because prairie managers also have to consider “fire-sensitive invertebrates that appear to require two consecutive years without fire to recover to pre-burn population levels.”
Chicago would have had even more area codes years ago if it weren’t for the Citizens Utility Board, the summer issue of its newsletter “CUB Voice” reminds us. In 1999 the 312 and 773 area codes were projected to run out of numbers by early 2002. But CUB’s Seamus Glynn found that the problem was phone-company marketing, not the proliferation of pagers, cell phones, and faxes. His research showed that the companies “wastefully stockpiled unused numbers because they believed a long-term supply of the old, familiar area code would give them an advantage with customers.” CUB came up with a plan that now “gives phone companies numbers in blocks of 1,000 instead of 10,000. Companies must give out at least 75 percent of their numbers before requesting more, and unused numbers must be returned.” But this kind of sensible rationing won’t put off the day of reckoning forever. The city’s next number crisis is expected to hit in the second quarter of 2008.
