About Jeremy Gantz
Jeremy Gantz can't quite seem to sit still. A freelance writer and graduate student at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in Chicago, he has lived in Massachusetts, Minnesota, Sri Lanka, Cambodia and Washington D.C. He recently moved to Chicago's Bucktown neighborhood, from which he blogs about ugly new buildings at "There Goes the Neighborhood."
His work has appeared in the Chicago Defender, Shore magazine, The Daily Southtown, the Chicago Journal and The Cambodia Daily, at which he had a blast interning in 2007. He spent most of 2006 working as the only reporter of the Wareham Courier in Massachusetts, where he won a New England Press Association award for religion reporting and decided he loved journalism and the insanity of small-town politics.
While traveling through New Zealand, Australia, India and Cambodia, he wrote too many thoughts here. He is one of the Chicago Methods Reporter's faithful web producers.
He enjoys all sorts of writing, people and music, and is afraid that if he begins watching his new Twin Peaks DVD box set he will sever his few remaining ties to reality.
He can be reached at jeremy.gantz[at]methodsreporter.com
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Comments
Yeah, what a lot of people don't know is Chicago is rife w/ Contractors turned "developers" who are pissed that they can't design and engineering buildings (legally) for commercial purposes. So, what they do is find some down-on-his luck architect or some architect w/ 1 yr of licensed experience and pimp them so they can "develop" a bunch of plans stolen from ANOTHER architect (usually from a previous project where the Contractor wasn't allowed by the architect to substitute the GC's preferred crappy products).
Except now, the "developer" is free to substitute cheap products and makes all kinds of changes that make the structure crap --usually eliminating any semblance of safety, style and class from the original design.
There's a entire spate of these shiester Developer/Builders. (I find lawyers preferable to this latest group of shiester developer/contractors. ) In part, their rise in numbers is what triggered the City to clamp down on the "Developer" licensing requirements, because you were getting all kinds of mental retards building unsafe, crappy buildings. (My apologies to the mentally challenged, as being compared to a developer is generally a slur in my book.)
So what these current day crook developer/builders figured out is that they could put in granite counters and cheap stainless appliances, fake wood floors (they're not even real anymore) charge $150-300K more than what the house is actually worth, and most 20 and early 30 something, know-nothing yuppies wouldn't know what hit them til after the 1 year warranty expired.
And the only nice thing I can say about the Chicago houses that are built by these kinds of crooks is that they are still 25% BETTER than the REALLY crappy carcinogen clad vinyl monstrosities that are all over the suburbs.
Perhaps you'll consider posting some of these pics to the flickr.com Home Construction Nightmares group.
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