COMMENTARY Harold & Rob Lessons from

What Mayor Johnson should know as his first year in office continues

By BRIAN MIER

Robert Mier (1924-1995) was a professor of urban planning and public administration at University of Illinois Chicago and a leading expert on urban economic issues. Mier founded the University of Chicago’s Center for Urban Economic Development in 1978. During Mayor Harold Washington’s first term, Mier became the City of Chicago’s director of economic development and created “Chicago Works Together,” a city plan for development that became a national model for other large cities.

In the winter of 1982 I was a junior at Gordon Tech High School (now known as DePaul College Prep). One of my best friends’ mothers was dating a guy named Big Tony.

Big Tony was the owner of two pizza restaurants and a gas station and also our neighborhood’s precinct captain. He was a large man who drove a Buick and carried a .25 ACP Beretta in a holster discretely concealed under his silk suits. Tony, despite his macho posturing, was rumored to be “too soft” to become an actual member of the mafia.

One morning he pulled over as my mom was walking down Bell Avenue. He rolled down his window and said to her, “We’re watching you Mrs. Mier.”

At the time, my father, Robert Mier, was helping coordinate Harold Washington’s first mayoral campaign. Most of Chicago’s white population, including the working-class Bavarians in North Center (my old neighbor- hood), were hysterical over the possibility of having a Black mayor. My dad had warned me and my siblings that we were probably going to have rocks thrown through our windows.

After one of the most racist mayoral campaigns in Chicago history, which saw the best performance of a Republican (the previously unknown-to-many-voters Bernie Epton) in a Chicago election in over 100 years, Washington went on to win with only around 17 percent of the white vote.

Shortly after his historic victory, Washington asked my father to serve on his commission of economic development. Washington later moved him across the street into City Hall, where my father became the city’s director of development, a position that he held until he was fired on Mayor Richard M. Daley’s first day in o ce in 1989.

During his time at City Hall, my father would often talk to me about daily events at his job. He sometimes called me from his city-issued car, a 1982 Chevy Caprice Classic that had a phone in it (a sure sign that you had made the big time back in the early 80s).

After a while, the racist hysteria that swept over our neighborhood (“They’re going to replace the elevators in city hall with vines,” was a common refrain) gave way to begrudging respect for a mayor who prioritized neighborhood development over downtown development and manufacturing jobs over the service sector. I still remember my pride one evening when a neighborhood Teamsters Union truck driver told me what a good job his local thought Washington was doing.

Chicago is now a very di erent city. The brick two-flats in my old neighborhood that used to have two or three families living in them have been gutted and converted to $2 million single-family mansions. The streets around Bell School that were once patrolled by the Simon City Royals are now patrolled by people pushing expensive baby carriages. Many working-class north siders have been pushed to the northwest side or out to the suburbs.

One thing today’s Chicago does have in common with the 80s is that a progressive is back in the mayor’s o ce. A lot of the major players in the Washington administration, including my father, who died of cancer in 1995, are long gone. I imagine that most people living in Chicago—especially those under 50—probably don’t even remember the Washington administration.

I fear that Washington’s reputation conversion from progressive changemaker into a harmless icon after his death by mass media companies like the Chicago Tribune and WGN (both fought him tooth and nail on many policies while he was alive) has left younger generations with little substantive knowledge of what he actually did. I decided to write this article to share a few things my father told me about the times back then, with hope that the information might be useful to the movement that propelled Brandon Johnson to the mayor’s office. You can find further information from my father’s writings (like his 1993 book Social Justice and Local Development Policy).

Warnings

The Johnson administration should expect heightened scrutiny from the federal government. Nearly every new policy initiative implemented by the Washington administration was audited by the Feds. Granted, this happened during the Reagan years, but I can’t imagine the Biden administration will be any friendlier to a progressive democratic mayor, judging how the DNC has bent over backwards to prevent progressive mayors from getting elected (most recently in Bu alo). There are certainly those interested in working to turn the Johnson administration into such a disaster that no one elects a progressive in Chicago for another 40 years.

The Johnson administration should prepare to be attacked in the media for every attempt to provide affordable housing to the poor. During the Washington years, common attacks involved red-baiting (as happened to 46th Ward alderperson Helen Shiller), and constant accusations that the city was “putting development on hold” (one of the frequent proclamations of Machine alderperson Kathy Osterman).

T he new administration should prepare to be blackmailed into delivering on megacon struction projects. One of my father’s proudest achievements was helping block an edition of the World’s Fair from coming to Chicago. He was proud because mega-events like World Fairs, Olympics, and World Cups have an uncanny habit of bankrupting local governments, causing forced evictions, and scarring cities with abandoned white elephants. Nevertheless, progressive mayoral administrations are susceptible to being blackmailed into delivering on large construction projects that do little to benefit their primary constituencies from the working and middle classes.

T his happened with the lights deal in Wrigley Field, which only took place after the Cubs threatened to leave the city. My dad, a lifelong baseball fanatic, was proud that they were able to lock in a deal that guaranteed the team the lowest number of night games in the MLB for 20 years. Mayor Washington’s promise to convert the area into public housing if the Cubs left town certainly gave the city more bargaining power.

T hey were less fortunate with Comiskey, as Governor Jim Thompson and Washington caved to Jerry Reinsdorf’s threat to move the White Sox to Florida and subsequently subsidized construction of an expensive new stadium for the White Sox, with an astronomical tab that taxpayers are still footing today. The logic behind caving into the demands back then, as I remember it, was that letting a team move out of town would be political suicide and would be used by an already hostile press to hammer home the message that well-meaning progressives don’t know how to run governments. This is an example of the type of threat to progressives that remains in Chicago and other big American cities to this day.

Inspiration

B enefits to corporations are not a one-way street. All over what is now called “the rust belt,” manufacturers that had received low-interest loans and huge tax breaks to open up shop in big cities in the 80s shut down operations and moved out, leaving millions of people unemployed. While most big-city mayors simply wrung their hands and repeated Margaret Thatcher’s “there is no alternative” quote, the Washington administration decided to hold corporations accountable.

Four years after the Hasbro-Bradley toy company received a subsidized $1 million loan from the City of Chicago to expand its Playskool factory (with a promise to generate 400 new jobs), the company changed its mind and announced a plant closure. The City of Chicago then sued the company for breach of trust. During a time when the Reagan administration had no regulations for plant closures in place, Chicago was able to set a precedent. Although the lawsuit didn’t prevent the plant from closing, it managed to force Hasbro-Bradley to stay open for an extra year and pay for job placement services and emergency aid for their displaced workers.

I ndustrial jobs matter. In 1982, there were 277,000 manufacturing jobs in Chicago. Due to a variety of factors including robotics, that number has now diminished to around 63,000. These jobs are still important for Chicago, because they traditionally pay much higher wages than service-sector jobs. Manufacturing contributes around $53 billion per year to the local economy.

My father argued that despite the nationwide trend of manufacturing decline, Chicago still had a lot to o er to manufacturers who were thinking of relocating. Cheaper wages overseas, for example, could be o set by lower transportation costs, since Chicago was America’s rail, air, and trucking hub. Even if shutdowns were inevitable, the economic benefits would be substantial if this process of decline could be slowed down and workers were able to hold onto their high-paying factory jobs for a few more years before being forced into the normally lowerpay fi ng service sector.

T he 1983 Chicago Works Together development plan prioritized industrial jobs. One example of how the city’s department of economic development worked to help factories stay in operation was an order issued to allow a freight train to run through a new strip mall parking lot in the Clybourn corridor so that it could reach an 80-year-old candy factory that still existed in the neighborhood. Every day the train came through, cops would arrive with a tow truck and clear the tracks of any vehicle whose owner had ignored the signs warning them about it.

Popular participation is an important tool for deepening democracy. When the city announced construction of a new library in the loop, instead of awarding a no-bid contract to a politically connected construction company (as was the custom during the Daley Machine years), the Washington administration invited the public to vote on their favorite proposal.

Across the city, thousands of people went into their local libraries to vote on the five designs that fit the bidding requirements. This generated greater interest and a sense of ownership over the project among Chicagoans. Washington died before the project was finished, but the Harold Washington Library (the largest single library building in the U.S. at the time of its completion in 1991) is now one of the city’s most beloved public institutions.

Communications is key. It’s extremely hard managing a city with the size and the problems of Chicago, and, as in the case of Washington’s election, expectations for Johnson among large swaths of the city must be unrealistically high. This may sound obvious, but it’s fundamental that the new administration work to clearly communicate what it can do, what it can’t do, and what it is trying to do, to avoid a backlash among its support base.

Faced with an information monopoly from a hostile press in the pre-Internet age, the Washington administration did a lot of this through neighborhood meetings. Communications technology has changed a lot since the early 80s but the goal of e ective communications with the base remains the same.

I moved out of Chicago and the U.S. in the 90s, and whenever I return to my hometown,

I wonder how different this city would be today if Washington hadn’t died of a heart attack shortly after consolidating his power over the City Council. What would the city be like today if, instead of artificially accelerating gentrification and strip mall construction through subsidies for big real estate mafi as, a government had stayed in place for decades that fought to limit displacement of its residents?

W hat would it be like today if there had been a 20-year period in which a government invested as equally in the neighborhoods as in the downtown business district? What if, instead of dishing out taxpayers’ money to cronies to turn city parks into tourist attractions for people from the suburbs and out-of-town visitors who do not contribute to the city tax base, that money had been used to improve the public schools and the city’s transportation system? We’ll never know, but here’s hoping the Johnson administration can pick up where the Washington administration left o . v