archGFX

current tune: whatever's on NPR (forgot my headphones again

the wife and i do this thing where whenever we go out to the suburbs, we assign points to the differences between the suburbs and the city. like: "everybody drives SUV's, -50 suburbs" "no scary kids hanging out with baseball bats +100 suburbs" it's mostly because we're deciding where to live after we finish with immigration.

so today, my bosss and i ran out to elgin to check out the site for the midrise condoo building i'm working on (right across from the fountain square ECC building).

elgin is a weird town. it's old. it's served by the river and the train, and it used to have a watch factory. so it got built in an industrial fashion, earlier than most of the suburbs around it. since it was built pre-70's-white-flight, it's dense. this means that it never sprawled the way most suburbs did after the white flight. this also means, it never got money ppoured into it the way most white flight suburbs did (think naperville or shaumburg, edge cities). now it's getting money in a different way. riverboat casino. which is weird. it's got a brand new public library, and all sorts of money to subsidize development, but it's still haunted by ugly light-industrial buildings. it'll be interesting to see whether it can successfully reinvent itself. as much as it would be nice to live in a suburb with a dense downtown that includes a river and a bike path, it's not quite clean enough yet to feel domestic.