Crain's Chicago Business, June 26, 2023

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FROM PLUNDER TO PROSPERITY

The AI farm of the future is already being built

If you think your smartphone has some fancy features, you ought to drive a Deere X9 combine I

BY NEIL STEINBERG

Don’t be fooled by the miles of grain blurring into one endless golden eld as you blast past on I-88. ose stalks only look interchangeable.

Farm equipment today can see each individual plant and know which is a crop, which is a weed.

A John Deere combine rattling across the Gaesser Farms in Ankeny, Iowa, can recognize what type of grain is being harvested,

consider the direction of the wind and the slope of the ground before adjusting itself accordingly, orienting among the corn and soybeans with far more precision than the smartphone in your pocket can tell you where you’re standing.

While the Global Positioning System satellites locate your phone within a foot or two, combines further triangulate the GPS signal with incredible accuracy,

using a pair of stationary correction towers.

“We apply everything within one inch of where it’s supposed to be,” said Chris Gaesser, who farms 5,400 acres with his father, Ray.

Such precision is necessary if you want to, say, spray herbicide on weeds but not on the dirt between them. Or remember that

See DEERE on Page 20

Mayor Johnson’s move to leave business off his pension panel sends a signal. PAGE 2

Deere’s

Black Chicagoans are determined not to see a repeat of the tactics that sustained the racial wealth

◗ F. Christopher Lee, co-founder and president of Johnson & Lee Architects, got an up-close view of the redlining, blockbusting days of white flight that quickly remade Chicago’s neighborhoods between the 1930s and the 1970s.

A sign the mayor’s biz honeymoon may be over

One of the more amusing political shows running in Chicago lately is the courtship dance between the city’s business community, which mostly sat on the sidelines or waltzed with someone else during the mayoral runo , and runo winner Brandon Johnson, who isn’t at all shy about reminding everyone who outhoofed all of his rivals.

In public, everyone has been nice as can be. Business groups such the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago and the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce have opened their wallets, promising to back at least some of the targeted investments and anti-violence programs Johnson campaigned on. Both sides have had plenty of nice things to say about each other, about how everyone is listening to everyone and everything is o a nice start.

Now comes the rst reality test. It didn’t go well.

I’m not talking about the budget

and looming tax hikes, which are almost certainly on the way, though not yet. Nor is the subject of public safety; it won’t be at least until after Labor Day that we can even begin to judge the e ectiveness of Johnson’s new approach. Rather, the news came on that old bugaboo — public-sector pensions — a sore spot that has haunted every mayor of this city for at least a generation now.

What Johnson did is appoint an expert “working group” to begin to draft a plan on how to handle the shortfall between what the city must pay current and future retirees and what it actually has saved. ough the plan nominally will apply only to city government, and especially to retirement systems for police and re ghters, it could become a template for other city funds and even larger state of Illinois retirement systems, which collectively are at least $140 billion short of what they’ve promised in bene ts.

On the panel are key City Council committee chairs, the city bud-

get director and a few others with obvious credentials. Also on the 17-member panel are no fewer than seven top union o cials or former o cials, including folks from the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees; the Union of Operating Engineers; the Laborer’s Union; the Chicago Federation of Labor; the re ghters’ union, and even the oft-cantankerous Fraternal Order of Police. Not on the panel: anyone from any business group, even though their members will end up paying a huge portion of the eventual pension bill. Not one. Nor is there anyone from the Civic Federation or other watchdog groups.

It didn’t have to be that way. In fact, I’m told there was a pretty good debate within the Johnson administration about whether to broaden the group, if only for appearance’s sake. After all, this mayor’s mantra is that his will be a collaborative administration, one that gives all stakeholders a seat at the table.

GREG HINZ ON POLITICS

So, why the biz shutout? Publicly, all Johnson’s team has said is that the panel will consult with lots of people in coming months before making a nal recommendation. One source close to the matter who asked not to be named says it’s appropriate that labor and management (Johnson, et al.) negotiate among themselves before taking the question of how to pay for it to others.

Others have a much di erent take. “It’s a big nger to those who weren’t with him in the election,” says one knowledgeable source who is in neither labor nor business’ camp. “Labor is in charge, and they want everyone to know it.” at is exactly what many in

With new faces, now’s the time

These are unprecedented times for fresh faces in Chicago and Illinois government, making it an ideal time for a new-day approach to transparency, accountability and ethics.

We have a new mayor in Brandon Johnson, of course. For the rst time in 54 years, there is no Ald. Ed Burke in City Hall. We have a younger, much more diverse City Council.

ere are 16 council members who either are brand-new or who have less than ve years’ experience, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

In Spring eld, there’s no more Mike Madigan after nearly four decades of ironclad rule. e Democratic majority leaders, Senate President Don Harmon and House Speaker Chris Welch, have served for many years but have been in their leadership positions three years or less. ey’ve shown signs of involving their members more in key operations, as evidenced by the extra time it took to get a budget approved this year. e Republican leaders are even newer to their roles. And there are plenty of fresh faces among the rank and le.

Fully half of the state Senate Democrats have ve years of experience or less, according to research compiled by John Amdor, a partner in lobbying rm Nekritz Amdor

Andersson Group. More than 40% of state Senate Republicans have less than ve years’ experience. In the Illinois House, more than 55% of the Democrats and more than twothirds of the Republicans have fewer than three two-year terms under their belts.

In both of our biggest government venues, this seems like a wonderful opportunity for the newer members to join up with their experienced counterparts to enact some mean-

ingful change for the better.

In Chicago, Ald. Andre Vasquez recently refreshed his proposal to restrict the other kinds of jobs council members can hold. at’s worth considering and debating. Vasquez’s proposal would make the aldermanic position full time, allowing only for volunteer legal work or for council members to serve as landlords for fewer than ve properties.

Now also would be a great time to x the loophole recently uncovered that allowed several council members to hire as a consultant a former park district manager who landed on the city’s Do-Not-Rehire list after he was cited repeatedly for mishandling a major sexual harassment scandal.

Ald. Matt Martin would like to launch a hearing on a plan to institute ranked-choice voting in city elections, which would eliminate runo s and give voters the ability to show support for more than one candidate in a race. Let’s have that discussion and get moving on considering it for state and presidential elections as well.

If new and experienced o cials who are committed to improving our institutions’ operations get organized and band together, there’s no limit to the good that might come from it.

ey could change the rules so that legislative proposals with a decent amount of support would be required to get debates and votes in the House and Senate and on the council oor. If a bill in Spring eld can win the support and sponsorship of a couple of dozen Democrats and a couple of dozen Republicans, it deserves a debate and a vote.

Let’s lead the nation. Rather

than a weak law that lets lawmakers lobby their former colleagues almost immediately upon quitting, organized majorities in Spring eld could push a law to require a more than two-year break before former elected o cials can lobby their colleagues.

Kudos to our elected o cials who did just enact a law to allow the state O ce of Inspector General a stronger range of penalties when wrongdoing and abuse is uncovered at state agencies. Empowered inspectors general can and should work across all levels of government, including the Legislature. And thank you to lawmakers who

unveiled a plan late in the just-ended session to ban red-light camera companies and their o cers from donating to state and local candidates. If it works in this instance to curb contributions, how about trying it elsewhere?

With more fresh o cials on the job in Chicago and Spring eld joining some veteran o cials in

business circles fear: that Johnson will smilingly take any nancial o erings they choose to make in summer jobs, etc., and then ram through anything more he wants. It’s too early to say that for sure. But denying a key interest group a seat at the table, even at this stage, is not a good sign.

In Spring eld, one of the things the departed but not vanished Mike Madigan was known for was putting everyone in a small room and telling them to keep negotiating until they agreed on a bill. It didn’t always work. But given that whatever Johnson’s group comes up with quite probably will have to be approved in Spring eld, the mayor might want to keep that in mind.

enacting reforms, let’s keep the momentum going. Let’s get even more done to bolster our governments, campaigns and elections. ere’s no better time than right now.

Madeleine Doubek is executive director of Change Illinois, a nonpartisan nonpro t that advocates for ethical and e cient government.

Newly built homes in Bronzeville going for over $1.1 million

DENNIS RODKIN

In Bronzeville, where the price of new-construction homes has been steadily stair-stepping upward over the past several years, two builders are now o ering houses at over $1.1 million. Two are sold but have not yet closed, according to their listing agents.

As recently as 2019, the highest-priced new homes in Bronzeville sold in the upper $700,000s.

At East 49th Street and South Martin Luther King Drive, two of four newly built greystones are under contract to buyers at prices in the $1.1 million range, according to Sybil Martin, the Coldwell Banker Realty agent representing them for the builders. Martin said both sales will close in the next few months.

e rst of the four sold in March for a little over $998,000, a new record-high for new-construction single-family homes in Bronzeville.

e fourth in the group is on the market at $1.2 million.

About three blocks away at East 44th Street and South St. Lawrence Avenue, a pair of townhouses each priced at $1.15 million is under construction.

Buyers “are demanding bigger and better, and this is where we’ve landed, at over $1.1 million,” said Michelle Browne, the @properties agent representing the St. Lawrence pair.

Martin concurs. Buyers, she said, “want ve or six bedrooms, four bathrooms, upgraded nish-

Exelon to revamp board in litigation tied to ‘ComEd 4’

BY STEVE DANIELS

Exelon is revamping its board under terms of a proposed settlement of litigation that asserts major duciary failures by multiple directors and executives in relation to the ComEd bribery scheme in Spring eld.

es. ese are mini-mansions.” e two King Drive houses that are under contract had asking prices below $1 million before their buyers ordered a slew of upgrades that pushed the price over $1.1 million, she said.

e prices are also driven by the cost of buildable, privately owned vacant lots, which Browne says has risen from the $50,000-to-$70,000 range to $250,000 in about ve years. City-owned lots, when they’re available, go for less.

Bronzeville has been a booming market for new-construction homes since the mid-2010s. Factors include a lot of buildable vacant land from decades of disinvestment and decline, the presence of Black-owned restaurants and businesses, easy access to the Loop on public transit or by car, and — despite fast-rising prices — a ordability relative to North Side neighborhoods.

In the past 12 months, 16 houses and townhouses in Bronzeville have sold for $700,000 or more,

Exelon Chairman John Young will relinquish his role as board chair by 2025, although he will be allowed to remain on the board under the settlement, disclosed June 16. Most other directors who served during the 2011 to 2019 period in which Exelon-owned Commonwealth Edison admitted bribing then-Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan in return for his support of lucrative legislation either are in the process of departing or already have.

Exelon is appointing three new independent directors under terms of the settlement, two of whom already have been named.

Among the few Chicago business gures still on the board of Chicago-based Exelon, Anthony Anderson, former Midwest managing partner for Ernst & Young, must exit the board by the 2024 annual meeting, according to the settlement. Anderson has been an Exelon director since 2013.

Linda Jojo, chief customer ofcer for United Airlines and an Exelon director since 2015, was required earlier this year to relinquish her chairmanship of

the board’s compensation committee, per the proposed settlement. She can remain a director and serve in other board leadership roles in the future.

e wide-ranging settlement, which is a proposal that some shareholder plainti s have endorsed but remains opposed by others who sued the directors and o cers on behalf of the corporation, now goes to U.S. District Judge John Blakey for approval.

e Chicago-based federal judge will hear arguments from the dissenters before deciding.

Exelon’s board signed o on the agreement this month. It was negotiated by a special litigation committee the company formed two years ago, made up of three

Argonne completes its most powerful supercomputer yet

a supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which was the rst U.S. exascale computer.

BY JOHN PLETZ

Argonne National Laboratory has nished building a $500 million supercomputer that’s shaping up to be the fastest in the world.

e new computer, called Aurora, is among the rst examples of a new class of blindingly fast machines to reach “exascale,” or the ability to do a quintillion — or 1 billion-billion — calculations per second.

To put that in perspective, Aurora can do in one second what it would take the Earth’s population 40 years to accomplish if everyone was doing one calculation per second. It’s the sort

of speed in handling staggering volumes of data that enables cellular-level simulations of parts of the human body or models of the universe, which weren’t possible before.

Last week, workers at the national lab near Lemont installed the last of more than 10,000 “blade” servers, or nodes, as the 70-pound individual boxes that contain eight high-performance processors are known. It’s part of a long process, made harder by the COVID-19 pandemic, that began four years ago.

e new computer is 200 times faster than its predecessor, eta, says Rick Stevens, Argonne’s associate lab director for comput-

ing, environment and life sciences. But it’s a very di erent type of machine that required new and larger infrastructure at the Argonne campus.

Workers will spend the next

year tweaking the hardware and software. Argonne o cials expect its peak performance to exceed 2 exa ops, or 2 quintillion calculations per second, which would top the speed achieved by

Argonne — along with Oak Ridge and other national labs such as Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley — is among a handful of places that house the largest, cutting-edge supercomputers funded by the federal government.

e capability brings prestige and expertise, drawing researchers from around the world both in person and remotely. Companies, such as Boeing and GE Research, have used Argonne’s supercomputers to help design or test new materials and products. Gov. J.B. Pritzker has showcased Argonne, as well as Fermilab

CALDWELL BANKER REALTY

STEVE DANIELS

A complex and detailed settlement proposal recommends some extraordinary remedies in response to alleged major duciary failures

The $500M Aurora, part of a new breed of ‘exascale’ machines, is expected to be the fastest of its kind

Exelon’s o ce building in Baltimore.

4931 S. Martin Luther King Drive

BRONZEVILLE HAS BEEN A BOOMING MARKET FOR NEWCONSTRUCTION HOMES SINCE THE MID-2010S.

See BRONZEVILLE on Page 23

See EXELON on Page 23

ARGONNE

As recently as 2019, the priciest new homes in the neighborhood sold in the upper $700,000s I

BY

State regulators clamp down on Nicor Gas

The Illinois Commerce Commission ruled this month that the gas utility spent $31 million unwisely in 2019. Regulators ordered a refund and rate adjustments.

BY STEVE DANIELS

State regulators have ruled that Nicor Gas improperly charged customers for $31 million in infrastructure spending from 2019, triggering a process that will lead to a refund and rate adjustments.

e Illinois Commerce Commission on June 15 ordered the disallowance of about 7% of the $415 million Nicor spent updating its natural gas system in that year.

e action marks the rst time regulators have determined Nicor didn’t spend money wisely and shouldn’t be allowed to bill ratepayers for those investments since the state gave gas utilities the authority to impose monthly infrastructure surcharges in 2013. e levies are meant to cover much of the cost of quali ed upgrades, plus a pro t for utility companies.

Under the 2013 legislation, utilities add infrastructure surcharges to customer bills without prior regulatory approval. e ICC reviews the surcharges after the fact and can disallow those it deems inappropriate.

e ICC just completed reviewing charges for 2019. Similar proceedings are yet to come for 2020, 2021, 2022 and this year.

In her nal meeting as ICC chair, Carrie Zalewski said Nicor had inappropriately failed to submit some construction projects to competitive bidding. Other projects had cost overruns, and the

company didn’t convince regulators those were unavoidable.

NICOR ‘DISAPPOINTED’

Zalewski stepped down June 16 per a schedule announced earlier this year, and her replacement is Doug Scott, a former ICC chairman and an energy policy adviser to Gov. J.B. Pritzker. All ve commissioners now are Pritzker appointees, four of them named just this year. All are considered more friendly to consumers than utilities.

In remarks from the bench, ICC Commissioner Stacey Paradis said Nicor needs to improve its project management and reporting.

“Avoiding similar disallowances in the future is entirely within the company’s control,” she said.

A Nicor spokeswoman said the utility would take the rst steps necessary to appeal the ruling to the courts.

“We are disappointed in the decision, which was received (June 16) and are still in the process of evaluating,” Nicor spokeswoman Jennifer Golz said in an email. “However, the company intends to le an application for rehearing so that the commission can reconsider its decision based upon the law and evidence.”

Utilities must ask the ICC to reconsider a decision they don’t like before appealing to the Illinois Appellate Court.

“Our contract grant and bidding process is very thorough — in fact,

Nicor Gas has spent $1.6 billion with quali ed diverse businesses since 2018,” Golz added.

In a Securities & Exchange Commission ling, a unit of Nicor parent Southern Co. said it would undertake a court appeal, “if necessary.” Atlanta-based Southern will record a $38 million charge against second-quarter earnings because of the ruling.

Still awaiting ICC review are Nicor capital costs of $389 million, $408 million and $437 million for 2020, 2021 and 2022, respectively, the ling said.

e surcharge authority for gas utilities will expire at the end of this year. After that, they will have to ask the commission for spending permission ahead of time, or spend

the money upfront and ask regula tors to allow recovery after the fact.

e ruling is only the latest indication that the commission is taking a tougher-than-usual stance on utility spending and rates. Regulators ordered Peoples Gas, which supplies gas in the city of Chicago, to refund more than $15 million based on a ruling that the utility’s bill collection had been too lax in 2018.

LITTLE RISK

Peoples recently led for an ICC rehearing on that decision, the necessary rst step before a court appeal.

Utilities in Illinois bear little risk from customers who can’t or won’t pay. ey typically pass that

bad-debt cost on to ratepayers. But if the commission determines a company hasn’t tried hard enough to collect what’s owed, it can reject those pass-throughs.

Nicor, which serves most of suburban Chicago and is the largest gas utility in Illinois, will have to return to the commission with a plan to repay customers for what it’s already collected from them. e decision also will take a bite out of its pending request for a $321 million delivery rate hike, which includes some of the costs the commission just disallowed. e regulators must rule by December on the new rates, which as proposed would hike Nicor’s average residential gas bill by more than $9 a month.

What a $3,000 ticket gets you at the NASCAR Street Race

Bloody Marys and mimosas, luxury ne dining, access to a rooftop terrace and VIP access to on-site concerts: That’s among what awaits big spenders for the event

BY JACK GRIEVE

Bloody Marys and mimosas upon entry, luxury ne dining catered by one of the city’s premier restaurant groups, a dedicated concierge service, and access to an open-air deck with panoramic views of the Chicago skyline and Lake Michigan. It might not be the traditional NASCAR experience, but for a small group of VIP guests and big-spender ticket holders, that’s exactly what the inaugural Chicago Street Race event over the Fourth of July weekend will entail.

e premium tickets, which start at $3,015 per person, grant guests access to the President’s Paddock Club, a two-story viewing structure overlooking the race’s start and nish line on South Columbus Drive. Ticket-holders will nd an enclosed, air-conditioned space on the lower level and an open-air rooftop terrace upstairs.

“What you’re getting there is spectacular views,” said Chicago Street Course President Julie Giese. “You’re going to see a good portion of the course. You’re going to see cars coming o of Turn 12, you’ll see them going into Turn 1 as well as Turn 6.”

’YOU OVERLOOK PIT ROAD’

Guests at the club will be in close proximity to some behindthe-scenes operations of the course. “You overlook Pit Road, so you have a bird’s-eye view of the pit stops,” Giese said.

e rooftop of the Paddock Club is also where race teams will position some of their spotters. Spotters play a crucial role in the race operation as they overlook the course and feed real-time information to drivers.

“ ey’ll be on the top level on the south corner, so guests will actually be able to see them working,” Giese said. “You’ll see your favorite driver’s spotter, you’ll see them communicating

back to the driver. It’s a really unique experience that hasn’t been done before.”

e club area also will house the trophies for the two races, which means guests will be able to see and photograph the awards before they’re given to the winners.

Beyond the race itself, NAS CAR has partnered with Chicago-based restaurant group Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises to provide premium ticket-holders all-inclusive food and drink service from its subsidiary brands RPM Restaurants and Oakville Grill & Cellar. Lettuce’s o erings at the Paddock Club will include a pasta station and seafood bar, as well as cocktails crafted by local RPM mixologists.

VIP CONCERT ACCESS

Premium tickets also include VIP access to on-site concerts by e Chainsmokers, Black Crowes, Miranda Lambert and

Charley Crockett.

As for folks hoping to attend the race without dishing out thousands of dollars, there are an array of other options avail-

able — though it’s still going to cost you. General admission tickets are available for $240, and you can snag a reserved seat for about $450.

ALAMY

Construction crews work on the President’s Paddock Club, which once it is completed will be a two-story luxury viewing area overlooking the nish line at the NASCAR Street Race.

JACK GRIEVE

AND SHIRLEY W. RYAN CATHERINE AND FREDERICK W ADDELL

Blackhawks hope to add residential units near United Center

The plan for future development, which includes hotel rooms, lines up with team owner Rocky Wirtz’s goal of turning the area around the arena into more of a campus

BY DANNY ECKER

e owner of the Chicago Blackhawks is seeking city approval to eventually develop as many as 1,200 residential units and 663 hotel rooms two blocks south of the United Center, one of two new real estate proposals near the arena introduced last week to the City Council.

Included in a zoning application for the NHL team’s planned $65 million, two-rink expansion of its Fifth ird Arena practice facility is a request to allow the mix of residential, hotel and retail uses in “future phases” of the development. e application, led by a venture controlled by the Blackhawks-owning Wirtz family, does not include detailed drawings of the mixed-use plan and notes that such future projects would require site plan approval from the city.

Separately, a church just steps from the River West site where Bally’s plans a massive casino and hotel complex led a zoning application to build a new location on land it owns two blocks east of the United Center. A future phase of that project is slated to include a 12-story building with 76 residential units, according to the application.

e plans are in line with a development path that has marched

west from the exploding West Loop and Fulton Market District neighborhoods over the past decade. A gap of new development that has long existed between downtown and the United Center has started to ll up in recent years, most recently with new apartment projects that have been completed or are under construction.

MOMENTUM

e Wirtz family, which co-owns the United Center, has been part of the development momentum with the 2017 debut of the Fifth ird Arena community ice rink (formerly the MB Ice Arena) at 1801 W. Jackson Blvd. e family recently struck a deal with Rush University Medical Center to pay $23.5 million for the hospital’s vacant seven-acre site west of the existing rink, where it plans a 135,000-square-foot development that would double the size of the hockey complex. e rink expansion doubles down on the Wirtz family’s move to build the new practice facility and provide a new venue for youth hockey in the region. e popularity of hockey in the area skyrocketed during a historic run of Blackhawks success on the ice that included three Stanley Cup victories.

A Blackhawks spokeswoman said the team has no de nitive plans to develop anything be-

yond the new two-rink hockey facility. But adding new uses such as apartments and hotel rooms would be in line with team Chairman Rocky Wirtz’s recently stated goal of making the area around the United Center “into more of a campus.”

e Wirtz venture’s zoning application seeks zoning that would allow buildings rising as tall as 295 feet on western portion of the property. e application contemplates up to 1,200 residential units and 663 hotel rooms, though either number could increase if the other decreases.

e construction timeline for the new hockey facility is subject to city approval, but the Blackhawks disclosed in a May 17 community meeting that the team aims to complete the new building by 2026.

Roughly two blocks away from the practice facility, City Church Chicago has proposed a two-story building at 116-138 S. Paulina St. that would include a 1,500seat auditorium worship space

for its congregation, according to its zoning application.

e $15 million rst phase of the project hinges not only on city zoning approval, but also the sale of the church’s existing pair of neighboring buildings totaling around 30,000 square feet at 777 N. Green St., said Kent Munsey, a pastor at the church. e church has hired a broker from CBRE to market its Green Street properties for sale, which the church bought for $4.2 million in 2015, according to Munsey.

A venture controlled by the church paid $5.8 million in 2021 for the land at the intersection of Paulina and Adams streets, Munsey said, an acquisition it made with proceeds from a $10 million capital campaign to build a new church that accommodated its growing congregation.

PLANS

e new building would be just more than 40,000 square feet, with a planned second phase to include a more than 28,000-square-

foot expansion, according to the zoning application. e longterm plan for the site would be to add 76 residential units on top of the expansion in partnership with an a ordable-housing developer, Munsey said, though timing for that project is unclear.

Munsey said his church was looking to move regardless of the casino project, which stands to dramatically change the character of the River West neighborhood. But he lamented what he saw as a lack of su cient engagement with longtime neighborhood stakeholders as city o cials approved the casino plan.

“It just felt like the city was not really interested in hearing from the community and there being a process,” Munsey said.

Munsey added that City Church prioritized staying in the 27th Ward for its congregants and noted that the Near West Side location will bring it closer to several community organization partners. “We really liked the location and the accessibility,” he said.

American, United pilots warn of risks with raising retirement age

Legislation now moving through the U.S. House to reauthorize funding for the Federal Aviation Administration would bump the retirement age to 67

BY JOHN PLETZ

Pilots at United and American airlines are warning that a proposal to raise the retirement age from 65 to 67 years old puts travelers at risk.

e airline industry, especially regional carriers, has been scrambling to replace a growing number of pilots who are leaving the cockpit as baby boomers hit retirement age. A proposal to boost the retirement age is included in a U.S. House version of the bill that reauthorizes funding for the Federal Aviation Administration for the next 10 years.

“To have pilots ying beyond age 65 has not been studied or tested for safety,” says Dennis Tajer, spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association, which represents pilots at American Airlines, the second-largest carrier at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. “Suggesting we get less experienced pilots at the beginning of their career is crazy. We will not stand by quiet-

ly as people put pro ts over safety.”

U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a Chicago Democrat, criticized the bill, which passed a House committee this month. “Our country has a pilot shortage, and this bill takes the wrong approach to addressing it,” Garcia said in a statement June 16. “While the bill improves workforce development and expands talent pipelines in underrepresented communities, it does not go nearly far enough in addressing the root causes of this shortage. Instead, this package seeks a quick x by raising the retirement age for pilots and replaces pilot training in planes with simulators.”

e Regional Airline Association, which has struggled the most with the pilot shortage, has promoted the legislation as a way to reverse cuts to air service to small communities.

Pilots are required to pass stringent medical checks to stay on active duty.  e retirement age was raised from age 60 to 65 in 2007.

Coupled with a recession, a lull in pilot hiring followed. Now airlines are having a hard time hiring enough pilots, especially at regional carriers that are used to feed tra c from smaller cities to hubs such as Chicago.

UNKNOWNS

e other big di erence, pilot unions say, is that raising the retirement age from 60 to 65 was less of an unknown because other countries already had done it.

Tajer, an American Airlines pilot based in Chicago, says the International Civil Aviation Organization had data on performance of pilots up to age 65. “We don’t have any data on pilots ying till 67,” he says.

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby told CNBC a year ago that 36% of United pilots who are age 64 are unable to y on any given day for medical reasons.

e Air Line Pilots Association, or ALPA, which represents pilots at United, notes that even if Con-

gress increases the retirement age, U.S. pilots over age 65 would not be allowed to y international trips under ICAO rules. Canada and Australia don’t have mandatory retirement ages and Japan’s is set at 68. But pilots over 65 are limited to domestic ying.

“ ese pilots, frequently captains of widebody aircraft that y internationally, will be forced to retrain on other aircraft and displace junior pilots from their aircraft,” ALPA says. “Given that the pilot profession is seniori-

ty-based, this will create a cascading training backlog that is expensive, as pilots must retrain and requalify on aircraft or into a di erent seat position. is costly endeavor will reduce the amount of ying airlines can do, restrict ights and pilot availability.”

Seniority provisions mean that airlines would have more pilots at the top of the pay scale, which could push up labor costs that already are on the rise because of new contracts with raises of nearly 10% a year over four years.

The Blackhawks plan a $65 million, two-rink expansion of their Fifth Third Arena practice facility.

CHICAGO BLACKHAWKS

Wrigley Field sportsbook to open this week

The Cubs and DraftKings’ facility stands to house one of the rst betting operations at a major pro sports venue in the U.S., but retail wagering will need to wait

BY DANNY ECKER

e Chicago Cubs will open a two-story sportsbook this week at Wrigley Field that stands to house one of the rst betting operations at a major U.S. professional sports venue. But placing wagers at a betting kiosk there will have to wait, and fans attending games won’t be able to come and go from the sportsbook as they please.

On June 20, sports gambling giant DraftKings unveiled the new 17,000-plus-square-foot addition to the southeast corner of the Friendly Con nes, dubbed the DraftKings Sportsbook at Wrigley Field. e restaurant, bar and sports-viewing venue with a 2,000-square-foot curved video wall will open to the public on June 27, while the entity that will operate the sportsbook is still awaiting nal approval and a license from the Illinois Gaming Board to begin accepting retail bets there.

e addition is part of a larger overhaul of Wrigley Field completed over the past decade by the Ricketts family, which owns the franchise and has spent well over half a billion dollars modernizing the historic stadium and redevel-

oping its surrounding property. Adding a gambling aspect would add another massive new revenue source for the club’s ownership, while the venue itself is poised to bring more foot tra c and spending to the neighborhood regardless of whether the Cubs are in town or in season.

SINGLE ENTRY POINT

e prospect of a sportsbook at the venue also created a challenge for the team to incorporate it in a way that didn’t cannibalize a family-friendly appeal of Wrigley Field that the Ricketts family has tried to maintain as a key piece of the Cubs brand. e physical structure of the new venue should help: e sportsbook is accessible only from a single point of entry along Addison Street, meaning fans inside the stadium during games would be able to go in the sportsbook only if they leave the ballpark. And like any other ticket holder, there is no re-entry into the stadium.

A Cubs spokesman said the separation between stadium and sportsbook is meant to comply with Major League Baseball rules, which prohibit sportsbooks from operating where a game ticket is

required for entry. It’s a di erent setup from the one at the United Center, where fans can come and go during games to an in-arena sportsbook that opened last fall but has also not yet begun accepting bets.

e Wrigley Field sportsbook is open to anyone age 21 and over, regardless of whether they have a game ticket.

“Today marks a signi cant milestone in this multi-year project and it represents the shared vision and longstanding relationship DraftKings has established with the Chicago Cubs,” DraftKings Retail Sportsbook Senior Director Michael Kibort said in a statement.

A DraftKings spokesman said the company was “not putting a timeline” on when it expects onsite retail betting to be allowed at the sportsbook, though patrons can place bets on their phones while there, just as they would anywhere else it is allowed in Illinois. A spokesman for the Illinois Gaming Board did not respond to a request for comment.

e new venue also adds a massive new bar and restaurant to a neighborhood famous for them. It remains to be seen whether the

addition will bring more visitors to the area or pull them away from other nearby establishments, a major concern for Wrigleyville bar owners as the team was proposing its Wrigley Field renovation plan 10 years ago.

Beginning June 27, the sportsbook venue will be open to visitors ages 21 and over Monday through ursday from 4 to 11 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 2 a.m., and Sundays from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., though hours can change based on events happening at the ballpark.

e sportsbook includes space for walk-in visitors as well as large spaces that can be reserved for groups. Two private areas on the venue’s second oor can be re-

served for 25 people with a $3,000 minimum spending commitment. A spokesman for concessionaire Levy, which will operate the food and beverage portion of the sportsbook, said guests will be allowed to make reservations for tables in the main portion of the venue several days in advance. While common in Europe and other places around the world, sportsbooks at or adjacent to major U.S. pro sports venues have started to pop up only in recent years as more states have allowed sports gambling. Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., last year became the rst Major League Baseball venue to open a sportsbook connected to the stadium.

Inside the DraftKings Sportsbook at Wrigley Field.

DANNY ECKER

More questions swirl around Lightfoot’s casino deal

Sometimes a news story raises as many questions as it answers — and a new investigation by the Chicago Sun-Times is only the latest case in point.

On June 23, the Sun-Times pulled back the covers on the relationship between the nancial services consultancy hired by then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot to evaluate pitches for the Chicago casino and the gambling company that eventually won the contract. at nancial services consultancy is Tokyo-based Nomura Securities. e gambling company, as any sentient Chicagoan knows by now, is Bally’s. What the Sun-Times reporting brings to light is that while it was courting the Lightfoot administration, Bally’s was also closing a $2.6 billion deal to buy Gamesys, a British online gaming company. Paying o Gamesys’ lenders was a provision of that deal, the Sun-Times reports, and among those lenders was Nomura — the same consultancy that brought Bally’s to the table to bid for the Chicago casino.

ere’s a lot more to the Sun-Times story than that, but there’s also quite a bit that goes unsaid. Between the lines of the report, we’re meant to intuit that winning the Chicago casino would put Bally’s in a better position to pay o the debt it incurred by buying Gamesys, and that, in turn, would bene t Nomura.

Readers are left not knowing much about the situation surrounding the Nomura debt, however. Was this a distressed deal? Did Nomura desperately need a buyer to bail out Gamesys so it could get it its money back? e SunTimes story doesn’t say. Nor does it reveal whether Lightfoot administration o cials

were aware of the relationship between Nomura and Bally’s — or any other Chicago casino bidder, for that matter — prior to hiring Nomura to evaluate each bidder’s nancial tness.

at evaluation, by the way, is the thing a spokesperson for the former mayor and her deputy overseeing the casino bidding, Samir Mayekar, emphasized when responding to an inquiry from Crain’s:

“Nomura’s role was speci c and limited in scope to evaluating whether bidders had the wherewithal to nance the proj-

ect. eir analysis found that all three bidders possessed that nancial wherewithal. . . . e evaluation process moved on to consider other determining factors in selecting the ultimate winning bidder. Nomura held no substantive role in that subsequent phase.”

What the Sun-Times found is reminiscent of an April 2022 story by Crain’s Greg Hinz, which reported that a consultancy hired by Team Lightfoot, Union Gaming Analytics, calculated the Bally’s bid would generate the most tax revenue for the city

treasury compared to the rival bidders. What went undisclosed until Crain’s report, however, was that Bally’s had been a client of Union Gaming, which helped raise $696 million for Bally’s as co-manager of its 2021 common stock o ering.

None of this is to take anything away from the Sun-Times story. It’s a nifty bit of investigative work that tells Chicagoans more than they knew before about the ties between people maneuvering behind the scenes on a project that was one of Lightfoot’s signature priorities.

e pity is that it takes investigative work of any kind to understand who was driving each phase of the casino decision-making and what their motivations were. e process of selecting the winning bid was murky all along, performative public hearings notwithstanding.

at process is actually not entirely over, as it happens. e Illinois Gaming Board just this month granted preliminary status for Bally’s to build out its temporary casino at Medinah Temple, it’s true. But the permanent casino at Tribune’s printing plant site at Chicago Avenue and Halsted Street still awaits its o cial license. at means there’s still time for the Gaming Board to ask some important questions — out in the open — about how the Bally’s deal came together and who bene ts.

Ideally, the biggest bene ciaries should be Chicago taxpayers, who for better or worse are relying on this casino to help nance city government. But given the way this deal has unfolded so far, Chicagoans deserve reassurance that the deal the Lightfoot administration negotiated on their behalf was truly the best and cleanest one possible.

Gender-inclusive restrooms are a win for Illinois

The “Curb-Cut E ect,” conceived by Angela Glover Blackwell, explains that an inclusionary measure meant to serve one group may unintentionally bene t others. For example, sidewalk ramps were meant to assist wheelchair users, but travelers with luggage, caregivers pushing strollers and runners also bene t. e curb-cut e ect applies to many features in our everyday life, and Illinois may soon add gender-inclusive restrooms to the list.

Last month, the Illinois General Assembly passed HB 1286, a common-sense bill that allows places of public accommodation to implement multi-stall, gender-inclusive restrooms. If an entity chooses to install a gender-inclusive restroom, it must have locks and privacy strips on each stall to ensure users’ safety and privacy, baby-changing stations, menstruation supply dispensers

and other features. e bill only needs the governor’s signature to become law.

HB 1286 began as my law school capstone project in 2019.

At the time, Illinois law barred our law school from installing gender-inclusive restrooms to serve its transgender and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) students. My professor and I thought the prohibition was discriminatory, so I drafted an amendment to Illinois law to allow for gender-inclusive restrooms.

While primarily meant to serve the LGBTQIA+ community, I also saw the bill as a broader opportunity to make Illinois restrooms safer, more private and more inclusive.

TGNC individuals face daily challenges when same-gender restrooms are the only option. TGNC individuals may have diculty deciding which restroom to use, as

they may not identify as female or male or may be transitioning genders.

Moreover, a National Center for Transgender Equality report found that 59% of transgender respondents avoided using same-gender restrooms out of fear of harassment or assault, simply for who they are and how they look.

Gender-inclusive restrooms will create a safer environment for TGNC individuals by fostering a welcoming space for users of any gender.

However, gender-inclusive restrooms do not exclusively serve the TGNC community; all Illinoisans will bene t.

For instance, same-gender restrooms force parents and guardians with children of a di erent gender to either leave their child alone in the restroom or enter a restroom that does not match their gender. Gender-inclusive restrooms will keep children and families together, creating a safer experience.

Gender-inclusive restrooms similarly

will bene t caregivers who assist people with disabilities or older adults of a different gender in restrooms, especially in medical care settings.

Gender-inclusive restrooms also will allow businesses to better serve their diverse customers and workforce. By choosing to install a gender-inclusive restroom, a business will become more accessible and will signal that its doors are open to everyone, including TGNC individuals, families and those with disabilities.

As with any inclusive initiative, some disagree with HB 1286. Unfortunately, a few have resorted to hateful anti-trans dog whistles. While their comments are inappropriate, their opposition is also misguided — they overlook the innumerable bene ts that gender-inclusive restrooms will provide to our society.

As neighboring states attack the LGBTQIA+ community, we should be proud that Illinois values its diversity and stands as a beacon of inclusivity in the Midwest.

Justin Ian Sia is an attorney at Miner Barnhill & Galland.

GENSLER

‘Granny flats’ debate highlights the a ordable housing gap

Arecent Crain’s article by Dennis Rodkin (“Granny ats could soon be OK citywide,” online June 9) highlights the opportunity for collaboration between advocates and industry to bring more a ordable housing to Chicago.

e Chicagoland Apartment Association (CAA) recognizes the signi cant challenge of housing a ordability in the city. e number of families renting their homes stands at an alltime high and is growing, but unfortunately, the supply of new apartments is falling short of demand. Research from the National Multifamily Housing Council shows that the Chicago metro market alone needs to add 48,000 new units by 2030; there is also a growing need for renovations and improvements on exist-

ing apartment buildings as roughly half of the apartment stock was built pre-1980.

CAA has been committed to working with policymakers at all levels of government to explore and implement policies and programs to address a ordable housing solutions. We developed SHAPE Illinois in 2018 as an alliance of property owners, managers, operators, a ordable housing advocates, union building trades, local elected o cials and others in the multifamily housing industry. Collectively, we seek to support a ordable housing solutions for Illinois, while avoiding the unintended consequences of government mandates, like rent control, that would decrease the quantity and quality of a ordable housing.

One approach to increase the housing sup-

ply is utilizing existing housing stock by allowing the addition of “granny ats” or accessory dwelling units (ADUs) such as garden units, attics and coach houses. Expanding transit-oriented development and revising regulations to allow for smaller homes are other areas of common ground. CAA, advocates, developers and a ordable housing providers agree on alternative policy options to address housing issues, such as direct rental assistance, tax incentives to maintain a ordable rents and streamlined development processes.

e mayor has expressed a willingness to collaborate in nding solutions, and CAA is responding to the invitation by seeking common ground with advocates and elected o cials to address a ordable housing. Our organization

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encourages prioritizing policy proposals that can facilitate immediate collaboration in tackling a ordable housing challenges. While we may not agree on all the proposals put forth, the goals outlined in Mayor Johnson’s Chicago for the People plan provide opportunities for business and industry to work with housing advocates in bringing more a ordable housing to Chicago.

We respectfully encourage the prioritization of policy proposals in which collaboration can be achieved immediately to begin addressing our a ordable housing challenges.

MICHAEL MINI  Executive vice president  Chicagoland Apartment Association

PEOPLE ON THE MOVE

ACCOUNTING / CONSULTING

Wip i, Chicago / Naperville

Wip i is proud to announce the promotions of Sean LaFortune to partner and George Persekian to principal.

CONSTRUCTION

J.C. Anderson, Chicago

ENGINEERING / CONSTRUCTION

World Business Chicago, Chicago

LAW

Gomolinski Mediation, Nationwide

STRATEGIC ADVISORY

NielsenIQ, Chicago

LaFortune

Persekian

Sean LaFortune provides outsourced CFO and controller services specializing in the manufacturing and distribution industry. Sean regularly helps business owners maximize tax bene ts, retain wealth and advises clients on business strategy, mergers and acquisitions, and many other operational needs. George Persekian is a leader in the nonpro t, government and education industry. George is always ready to help clients identify areas they can streamline for improvement to maximize their success. He has served as an auditor and consultant for over 10 years and now focuses on growth and development.

ARCHITECTURE / DESIGN

Lamar Johnson Collaborative, Chicago

Lamar Johnson

Collaborative elevates

Eli Lechter, RLA, ASLA, CLARB, and Jameson Skaife, PLA, SITES AP to Associate Principals.

Eli has over 15 years of experience working on large-scale urban design and planning and public realm and open spaces projects.

Lechter Skaife

An award-winning landscape architect, Eli holds a Bachelor of Science in Landscape Architecture and a Bachelor of Science in Horticulture from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Jameson has 14 years of experience managing community, corporate and commercial, higher education, and residential landscape architecture projects. Jameson holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Toronto and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture and Urban Planning Certi cate from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

BANKING / FINANCE

Wintrust Commercial Banking, Wheaton

Wintrust is proud to welcome Senior Vice President Marco V. Quintana to the Wintrust Commercial Banking team. In his new role, Marco will help grow the Wintrust Construction, Engineering & Architecture portfolio nationally as well as help in the expansion efforts for Wintrust Commercial Banking. Marco brings over 20 years of banking experience and has held a variety of business leadership roles working with middle market privately held companies.

Kantro

Smith

J.C. Anderson, a leading Chicagoland General Contractor specializing in interiors, is pleased to announce that the company has promoted both Matt Kantro and Josh Smith to Project Executive. Kantro brings 12 years and Smith brings 30 years of experience to the company, both consistently demonstrating their expertise and commitment to delivering outstanding results for JCA clients. In their new strategic roles, they will be leading their own teams and continuing their focus on strengthening JCA project management through mentorship. They will also be focusing on securing future work and managing larger, more complex projects.

World Business Chicago, the region’s leading public-private economic development agency, has named Smita N. Shah, P.E., LEED AP BD+C, President & Chief Executive Of cer, SPAAN Tech, Inc., to its board of directors. World Business Chicago’s mission is to drive inclusive, equitable economic development to drive business growth, talent and workforce development, and community impact, while supporting the business community and promoting the Chicagoland region as a top global hub for business.

World Business Chicago, the region’s leading public-private economic development agency, has named Liz Buchanan Global Head of Customer Success and Platform Transformation, NielsenIQ, to its board of directors. World Business Chicago’s mission is to drive equitable, inclusive economic development, business growth, talent and workforce development, and community impact while supporting the business community and promoting the Chicagoland region as a top global hub for business.

CONSULTING

The Brattle Group, Chicago

The Brattle Group has welcomed Alison Forman to its Chicago of ce as a Principal.

Ms. Forman is an expert in accounting, auditing, and nancial reporting issues that arise in complex litigations, regulatory enforcement matters, and corporate investigations. She has over two decades of consulting experience spanning numerous industries, including nancial institutions, healthcare, real estate, oil and gas, high-tech, and retail.

INFORMATION

World Business Chicago, Chicago

World Business Chicago, the region’s leading public-private economic development agency, has named David R. Andalcio, CEO, Wynndalco Enterprises, LLC., to its board of directors. World Business Chicago’s mission is to drive inclusive, equitable economic development to drive business growth, talent and workforce development, community impact, while supporting the business community and promoting the Chicagoland region as a top global hub for business.

REAL ESTATE

Newcastle Limited, Chicago Newcastle Limited is pleased to announce that Mike Tsakalakis has joined the organization as Vice President, Retail Property Management. In his new role, Tsakalakis will oversee the strategic operations and nancial performance of the rm’s retail portfolio, which comprises more than 600,000 SF of retail space across 60+ assets, accommodating over 150 retail tenants. He will lead the retail management team in managing the portfolio, ensuring that it delivers optimal results for the rm.

COMPANIES

ENGINEERING

KDM Engineering, Chicago

Juan Campos, PE, joins KDM Engineering as Vice President of Engineering. With more than 20 years of electrical engineering and utilities experience, he will lead KDM’s diverse engineering portfolio of Power, Telecom, and Infrastructure across multiple regions. Juan will bring his extensive knowledge of substation engineering to grow KDM’s presence in the eld and help solve the challenges of connecting all communities to the evolving power grid.

INTERIOR DESIGN

Antunovich Associates, Chicago

To order frames or plaques of profiles contact Lauren Melesio at lmelesio@crain.com or 212-210-0707

Antunovich Associates welcomes Katherine Putnam, NCIDQ, as a Principal and the Director of Interior Design. Katherine is an interior designer with a diverse background, including computational, graphic, and editorial design expertise. She has comprehensive design experience with Multi-Family Residential Buildings, Workplace, and Hospitality projects. In addition to working at other leading design rms in Chicago, Katherine has also taught Interior Design at Harrington College of Design.

TECH / TELECOM

Comcast, Chicago

Javier Jugo was named Director of Community Account Sales for X nity Communities for Comcast’s Greater Chicago Region, which spans Illinois, Northern Indiana and Southwest Michigan. X nity Communities provides stateof-the-art connectivity and other telecommunications services to multifamily communities, ranging from Chicago’s iconic residential towers and suburban apartment complexes, to college campuses, assisted living facilities and hospitals.

ON THE

COMPANY LAUNCHES SHARE

OFFICE MOVES

Roetzel & Andress is pleased to announce that it has moved its Chicago of ce to 70 West Madison, a 57-story of ce building located in the nancial center and downtown commercial district of Chicago’s Loop. The location will provide our clients with enhanced service, convivence, and presence, and is home to over 25 attorneys practicing across more than a dozen key practice areas, including Health Care, Business Litigation, Trust & Estates, Tax, and Technology & Cyber Law.

For more information, contact Debora Stein at dstein@crain.com or submit directly to CHICAGOBUSINESS.COM/ COMPANYMOVES

RACIAL WEALTH GAP

POLICY APPROACHES: Six solutions that could make a real dent. PAGE 12

HARRIS POLL: Segregated Chicago reveals disparate nancial realities. PAGE 16

FAMILY HISTORY: A gap much too large for homeownership to close. PAGE 18

Charting a path from plunder to PROSPERITY

Chicagoans of a certain age can tell you about a di erent, carefree Windy City back in the 1950s. Nights sleeping in the park to escape the sweltering summer heat. Leaving the front door unlocked and going downtown to catch a double feature and taking the el, bus or trolley back home.

F. Christopher Lee, co-founder and president of Johnson & Lee Architects, is one of those old-timers.

“I grew up in a working-class neighborhood on the South Side,” Lee says. “Nice neighborhoods. I never thought of

our family as being challenged.” He pauses. “What amazes me,” Lee continues, “is how quickly the South Side ipped from being white to African American.”

Like many of the city’s longtime Black residents, Lee got an up-close view of the redlining, blockbusting days of white ight that quickly remade Chicago’s neighborhoods between the 1930s and the 1970s. Real estate speculators pro ted from racial fears by buying houses for sale in white areas then marking up selling prices to sell to Black families.

Speculators knew they could get

away with the higher prices because Black families’ lower incomes meant most banks would deny them loans. With no regulations to control them, the sellers created predatory, high-interest contract loans, keeping the deed until the loan was paid o . e contracts created no equity for the buyers. And the sellers knew that once a Black family moved into a white neighborhood, property values would decline so more homes would quickly go on the market. at meant more homes that could be bought cheaply and sold at a premium.

SPONSORS

e e ects of that still reverberate today and are a major contributor to Chicago’s wide and persistent racial wealth gap. e predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods on the South and West sides have yet to recover from a transfer of wealth from homeowners to real estate speculators.

“It was obvious,” recalls Lee, who grew up at South Woodlawn Avenue and 61st Street. “West of Ashland Avenue was white when I was high school. Four years

See PROSPERITY on Page 12

Black Chicagoans are determined not to see a repeat of the tactics that sustained the racial wealth gap | BY ERIC GWINN

F. Christopher Lee is co-founder and president of Johnson & Lee Architects.

RACIAL WEALTH GAP

Policy solutions aimed at narrowing the chasm

BY CASSANDRA WEST

e gap between the wealth of Black and white Americans, one of the starkest benchmarks of inequality in the U.S., is on track to widen substantially after the COVID pandemic exacerbated wealth concentration, according to data that details 160 years of racial wealth disparities, Bloomberg reported in June 2022.

In 2019, Black Americans had one-sixth the wealth of white Americans on an average, per capita basis, according to the analysis from several economists with the National Bureau of Economic Research. ough that has closed substantially from the pre-Civil War 60-to-1 ratio in 1860, it’s still less than what Black Americans had in the 1980s.

“ e recent role of capital gains in the widening of the racial wealth gap paints a sobering picture for the future of racial wealth conver-

PROSPERITY

Continued from Page 11

after high school, it had ipped Black, all the way to Damen (Avenue). It changed overnight.”

A 2019 Duke University study, “ e Plunder of Black Wealth in Chicago: New Findings on the Lasting Toll of Predatory Housing Contracts,” sought to calculate the amount of money extracted from Chicago’s Black communities through the practice of what was commonly referred to as home contract sales. From 1950 to 1970, speculators extracted $3.2 billion to $4 billion of wealth from Chicago’s Black homeowners, according to Duke’s analysis of Chicago real estate records. And researchers suggested those gures likely are on the low side.

Losing that amount of wealth — in signi cantly higher monthly contract home-loan payments over long terms — meant less money was available to support the Black-owned businesses in these communities. at made Black business owners less attractive customers to banks, so businesses couldn’t get the capital they needed to thrive and grow. is lack of investment, or disinvestment, brought down property values, which further eroded the investment that residents had made in buying their homes.

e barriers were real, even for upwardly mobile Black people. Lee, a Harvard-educated architect who worked in the o ces of the famed Helmut Jahn, remembers when he and his wife, a physician, went looking for their rst home — “a xer-upper in Dearborn Park, 18th Street and Michigan Avenue.”

gence,” the authors wrote.

“In the absence of policy interventions or other forces leading to improvements in the relative wealth-accumulating conditions of Black Americans, wealth convergence is not only a distant scenario, but an impossible one,” they said.

Individual e orts to address the racial wealth gap are no match for comprehensive solutions for addressing the intractable divide. “Public policy has created the Black–White gulf in wealth, and it will require public policy to eliminate it,” wrote the authors of a 2020 Brookings Institution blog post, “Black reparations and the racial wealth gap.”

Here are six solutions proposed by experts on policy and inequality.

Baby bonds

Baby bonds are federally managed accounts set up at birth for children and endowed by the federal

“We didn’t think of ourselves as being victims,” he says. “We were con dent because of our professions: ‘We’ll be able to get a mortgage like everybody else and didn’t think of it as being a racial thing.’ ”

Lee and his wife eventually got a loan from a di erent bank.

COMPONENTS OF THE WEALTH GAP

From the 1930s until the years just after the 1968 Fair Housing Act, Americans of color faced overpriced homes and higher-than-average mortgages. ese remain signi cant drivers of the racial wealth gap today.

Most personal wealth is made up of assets — an individual’s home value, equity, business, and liquid assets like cash and retirement accounts — minus liabilities, such as credit card debts and student loans.

e di erence between assets and liabilities is net worth, and white Americans have much more of it than Black and Brown Americans. In 2019, the average white household had a mean net wealth of $980,550, compared to $165,540 for the average Hispanic household and $142,330 for the average Black household, accord-

FROM 1950 TO 1970, SPECULATORS EXTRACTED $3.2 BILLION TO $4 BILLION OF WEALTH FROM CHICAGO’S BLACK HOMEOWNERS, RESEARCHERS SAY.

ing to the Federal Reserve Board’s 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances. Put another way, for every $1 of wealth held by a Black household in the U.S., the average white household had $7.

Several factors contribute to

government at a level inversely commensurate with the nancial position into which the child is born. Lawmakers earlier this year renewed a proposal to give every American child $1,000 at birth. Called American Opportunity Accounts, they would be federally insured and managed by the U.S. Treasury Department and could be used when the child reaches adulthood for education, to purchase a home or to start a business.

Guaranteed employment and a higher minimum wage

Simply increasing workforce participation is wholly inadequate in lifting people out of poverty, experts argue. What is needed is not just more jobs, but more jobs that pay a living wage for everyone who wants work. is would have an outsize impact on reducing the racial wealth divide given the disproportionate number of low-income, non-white households.

Investments in a ordable housing

A comprehensive approach is needed to ameliorate historical injustices in housing and to address the current crisis. Nationally, three out of four neighborhoods that were redlined are still low income, showing the long-term e ect of this policy.

Strengthening government mortgage programs

e Federal Housing Administration and the U.S. Department of Veterans

A airs play an outsize role in supporting black homeownership. e FHA nances 33% of purchases for rst-time homebuyers and 34% of all minority purchase activity. FHA loans require a small down payment and mortgage insurance premiums for the life of the loan. As a result, FHA loans are generally more expensive for the borrower than a conventional mortgage. Passing the Neighborhood Homes Investment Act would create a federal tax credit

to incentivize the development and renovation of housing in areas most in need of investment.

Raising taxes on the ultrawealthy

e tiny group that controls the vast majority of the nation’s private wealth is overwhelmingly white and has been the principal beneciary of the past four decades of economic growth and historically low tax rates.

Grow Black-owned businesses

Businesses create jobs, and when entrepreneurs create businesses, they become job creators who can build wealth. Access to capital is the biggest hurdle for Black entrepreneurs. Assisting them through low-interest loans, venture-capital commitments and other infusions of capital can increase employment and incomes, stabilize communities, and nance educations and home purchases.

e local bank wasn’t interested in lending to them.

RACIAL WEALTH GAP

Richard Townsell is executive director of the Lawndale Christian Development Corp.

PROSPERITY

Continued from Page 12

that wealth gap, according to economists.

“Black people in America have on average lower earnings, lower rates of homeownership, less access to banking services, pay more for credit, have lower levels of retirement savings and have higher loan denial rates than their white counterparts, all factors that contribute to vast disparities in wealth between their households and white households,” says Kristen Broady, a senior economist at the Federal Bank of Chicago and director of the Chicago Fed’s Economic Mobility Project.

Broady’s remarks came at the Economic Mobility Project’s summer 2022 virtual event, “Exploring the Racial Wealth Gap.”

Estimating Chicago’s racial wealth gap is hampered by the lack of local data on personal wealth. But a lot can be learned by looking at markers such as homeownership, home values and household credit score as a proxy for debt. ose factors reveal that the net worth of Chicagoans in predominantly Black and Brown communities is on average much less than that of residents in mostly white neighborhoods.

Typically, an individual’s home is their biggest asset. In Chicago, more than half of white residents — 52.1% — own their homes, while only 30.1% of Black Chicagoans own homes and 28.7% of

INEQUITIES IN HOME EQUITY

As of the second quarter of 2022, prices in predominantly Black neighborhoods surpassed pre-Great Recession peak levels and were 4.3% higher than at any other point since 2000. As prices continue to appreciate, these owners will have increased home equity and are less likely to be underwater on their mortgages.

Home price changes from pre-Great Recession peaks to Q2 2022 by city of Chicago neighborhood racial or ethnic typology

Majority white

Majority non-white

Majority Hispanic/Latino

City of Chicago

Predominantly Black

Median house prices in 2000 to Q2 2022 and estimated equity gain by city of Chicago neighborhood racial or ethnic typology

2000 price Estimated price appreciation since

Predominantly Black

Majority Hispanic/Latino

Majority non-white

Majority white

Source: Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul University

residents of Hispanic or Latin heritage do, the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2021 American Community Survey shows.

In 2017, the home of a white

household in Chicago typically was valued at $275,000. Meanwhile, the homes of typical Black and Latino households were worth $145,000 and $180,000, re-

spectively, a report by the Institute for Research on Race & Public Policy at the University of Illinois Chicago showed. e city’s predominantly white

neighborhoods have a higher average credit score (732) than neighborhoods that are predominantly home to people of color (586), as reported in “State and Local Approaches to the Chicago Region’s Racial and Ethnic Wealth Inequity,” a report by the nonpro t Urban Institute, based in Washington, D.C. By the standards of most lenders, a credit score between 670 to 739 is considered good.

e result: A third of Black and Hispanic/Latin households in Chicago has zero or negative net worth compared to only 15% of white households, the UIC paper states.

“Homeownership is a key component of wealth,” says Damon Jones, associate professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. “But its value depends on the race of the owner and race of the neighborhood.”

Nationally, America’s tax system over time concentrates more wealth in the hands of fewer people, experts say, and those few are overwhelmingly white.

“You can hold your wealth and not pay capital gains taxes until you sell. If you pass those on to heirs, there are generous tax bene ts,” Jones says. “Having high income can delay your having to pay taxes.” e current system plays favorites, he adds: ” e more wealth you have, the more you get.”

In the U.S. and Chicago, multiple approaches have been taken to bridge the wealth gap.

Wealth gap signals disparate realities among residents

Black Americans have long battled a signi cant wealth gap, struggling to amassnancial resources on par with white Americans. Sadly, Chicago exempli es that bitter heritage, in many ways more than most of the rest of the country.

Chicagoans feel it: Roughly one-third of Cook County residents think economic (36%) and racial (28%) inequality is worse in the Chicago area compared to other places in the U.S., according to a recent Harris Poll survey. Recent economic research bolsters residents’ beliefs: e Financial Health Network, in partnership with e Chicago Community Trust, found that Chicago’s racial wealth gap exceeds the national average. In Chicago, 39% of Black Cook County residents and 30% of Hispanic or Latino Cook

County residents are “ nancially vulnerable,” meaning that they rated poorly on nancial health factors such as their abilities to save, spend and borrow. is shrinks to 9% among white residents. at gap dwarfs the national averages, where 20% of Black, 21% of Hispanic or Latino, and 12% of white Americans are nancially vulnerable. Chicago remains a deeply segregated city, and where its residents live is often indicative of theirnancial health. So almost one-third of the more racially diverse South and West Side residents are nancially vulnerable, according to the Financial Health Network, while nearly half of the residents of North and Central Chicago are nancially healthy.

Indeed, our own survey repeatedly illustrates that racial wealth gap.

 Black residents of Cook County describe their neighborhood as lower class twice as often as white residents, 48% to 23%. e gure is lower for people of color, generally at 38%, but even that is a glaring gap.

 e story is the same regarding di erent Cook County communities’ available resources. Black Chicagoans (50%) and people of color (48%) twice as often as white residents (25%) say that their neighborhood has fewer resources than others.

 All of this translates to grimmer — if, arguably, more realistic — expectations among those less well o . Half (51%) of residents that self-identify as middle or upper class agree that Chicagoland residents from all walks of life (e.g., race, income, religion) have access to the resources they need to secure their future, but only 38% of Cook County residents that self-identify as lower class agree. What to do about this seemingly intractable problem? Many Cook County residents seem to see it as too unwieldy or di use to handle. While the vast majority of Cook County residents consider

economic (84%) and racial (82%) equality to be issues of personal importance, relatively few rank them as the Chicago problems that most concern them. A plurality of Cook County residents (45%) are most worried about public safety, for example, a gure that dwarfs the number who identi ed economic (7%) or racial inequality (4%) as their most pressing issue.

Nevertheless, e Chicago Community Trust argues that closing the wealth gap will provide the city with more than just nancial gains. Spreading prosperity to more Chicagoans could help solve many of the city’s entrenched problems: decreasing violence, reducing homelessness and lessening food insecurity. Perhaps viewing racial and economic inequality as a catalyst for other major issues will inspire residents and commu-

nity leaders to prioritize addressing these issues.

Here’s the good news: Mark Twain once said of Chicago that it outgrows prophecies faster than you can make them, and he’s right. We remain a dynamic citadel, full of innovative people. Whatever problems Chicagoans may face can be overcome if we work together as optimists.

Wealth inequality remains a major problem today, but it is surmountable. Over six in 10 Cook County residents (61%) believe it is likely that their household income will increase within the next ve years. Business leaders

are similarly optimistic about job creation. Looking ahead, Chicago is well positioned to reduce inequality and increase prosperity. As a native of the city, I’m condent that better times will come — for all Chicagoans.

Working to advance racial equity and economic mobility for the ne xt generation inthe Great Lakes region.

In this deeply segregated city, where Chicagoans live is often indicative of their nancial well-being

William

Johnson

is CEO of e Harris Poll, a global public opinion polling, market research and strategy rm.

ROUGHLY ONE-THIRD OF COOK COUNTY RESIDENTS THINK ECONOMIC AND RACIAL INEQUALITY IS WORSE IN THE CHICAGO AREA COMPARED TO OTHER PLACES IN THE U.S.

RACIAL WEALTH GAP

Statistics don’t tell the full story of Black unemployment

BY SAFIYAH RIDDLE

De’Angelo Mack worked odd jobs for most of his adult life. At a mattress warehouse, a candy factory, FedEx. e jobs lasted a couple of weeks or months. When the 32-year-old sought more permanent employment after the COVID-19 pandemic, he had a tough time.

“I started trying to change my life, but I thought it was too late,” Mack said. “Because the jobs I was looking for — I wanted — they were rejecting me.”

After two years, Mack found stable employment at a cafe through the North Lawndale Employment Network, a workforce development agency that connects Black Chicagoans with jobs.

Mack’s struggle to nd employment is emblematic of larger trends across the state. Black unemployment is 10.9% statewide, more than three times higher than white unemployment at 3.4%, according to the Illinois Department of Employment Security, or IDES.

Meanwhile, the national Black jobless rate in May slid to the lowest on record at 4.7%, reaching the narrowest gap with white workers ever.

“It’s good to see improvement overall,” says Kyle Moore, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “But the fact that disparities continue to exist in relative terms in some places means that there can still be work done.”

Economists and community organizers agree that the source of the persistently high Black unemployment rate in Chicago can be traced to widening youth unemployment, a sluggish pandemic recovery, and increasingly how the outmigration of middle-class Black residents from the city is changing the demographics of who continues to live in Chicago.

STARTING YOUNG

A recent study by the University of Illinois Chicago’s Great Cities Institute found that the COVID pandemic exacerbated unemployment for Black Chicagoans between the ages of 16 to 24, even as white and Hispanic rates returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Speci cally, the jobless rate rose from 43.7% to 57.4% between 2019 and 2021 for Black people ages 20 to 24 in Chicago. e unemployment rate increase for Black women aged 20-24 was staggering, rising from 32% in 2019 to 60% in 2021.

Recovery for Black youth is slower compared to older Black adults as well. As of April, unemployment for Black youth is still twice as high as Black unemployment overall.

Matthew Wilson, an author of the Great Cities study, explained that youth unemployment was an important aspect of both overall employment and general community well-being.

“In terms of people’s career trajectories, youth employment becomes important,” says Wilson, associate director of economic

While Black unemployment has fallen in the last two years, it remains more than three times as high as white unemployment.

vices to Black women. “ ey’re still recovering from the pandemic; they’re anticipating this recession and they don’t know how it’s going to a ect them.”

In recent years, the organization has pivoted to industries that are returning more robustly, like transit, IT and construction. But these industries are still disproportionately located outside of predominantly Black communities, Patton says. “It may take you two or three hours just to get to these opportunities.”

LEFT BEHIND

Some point to Chicago’s accelerating Black population decline, fueled by decades of racial and economic discrimination.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Communities Survey, 85,000 Black people left Chicago between 2010 and 2020 — the second-highest rate in the country — even as the metro area’s overall population grew.

and workforce development at UIC. “ ere’s a lot of research that shows that as young people are attached to employers earlier on, that their lifetime earnings increase and there are crime reductions.”

roughout a campaign season dominated by concerns about crime, newly elected Mayor Brandon Johnson made youth unemployment a cornerstone of his plan to improve public safety.

“We have to love our young people enough to actually invest in them,” Johnson said at the 119th annual meeting of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce earlier this

month. “And that’s what my administration will do, and we’re going to do it together with the business community.”

APPLYING FOR JOBS THAT AREN’T THERE

In spite of the new mayor’s commitments, people of all ages are struggling to nd the jobs that were there before the pandemic but haven’t returned.

According to federal Current Employment Statistics data, Illinois is still 26,000 jobs below seasonally adjusted pre-pandemic levels, even as the country as a whole is up 2.1% from its previous peak.

Jobs that require face-to-face contact have been particularly slow to recover, according to IDES. While education, health and business services have surpassed pre-pandemic levels, the leisure and hospitality sector is still nearly 6% lower. Manufacturing and other service industries are also trailing.

“We’ve noticed some of that — where people are downsizing or people are restructuring or are doing things di erently,” says Latecia Patton, vice president of Economic Inclusion at YWCA Metropolitan Chicago, an organization that offers job training and social ser-

It is not the lowest-income workers or the unemployed who are leaving, according to a recent study published by the Chicago Urban League, but rather middle-class families who don’t bene t from the social safety net and increasingly struggle to make ends meet.

“ ose are the people who are leaving,” says Karen FreemanWilson, president and CEO of the Chicago Urban League. “Because their median income is higher, it immediately impacts the median income of the city.”

Freeman-Wilson added that when lower income and unemployed people often don’t have the resources to leave, they have made up a higher percentage of Chicago’s Black population.

De’Angelo Mack found stable employment at a cafe through the North Lawndale Employment Network.

PROSPERITY

Continued from Page 14

From 1968 to 1980, the federal government experimented four times with a negative income tax. is policy is similar to a universal basic income program. But the experiments were too narrowly targeted to the people with the lowest incomes and failed because of that and other reasons, policy experts observed.

In Chicago, various public-private partnerships and an abundance of community-based, foundation-funded programs have yet to stem the growing gap.

In February 2023, the Chicago Plan Commission adopted the “We Will Chicago” framework. Reducing the city’s racial wealth gap is one of the pillars of this effort designed to guide city spending and planning over the next 10 years.

Corporate entities also have examined ways to improve equity. A 2021 report by the McKinsey Institute for Black Mobility saw corporate racial-equity commitments reach $200 billion in the year after the killing of George Floyd and the massive protests that followed.

TACKLING THE DIVIDE

Black Chicagoans are not waiting for those commitments and programs to bear more fruit. On the South and West sides — areas hit hardest by decades of declined loans from banks — business leaders and community groups are working to rebuild what has been lost since the Great Migration, the widespread movement of African Americans from the rural South to northern cities like Chicago.

Plans are in the works for trade schools to create job-ready graduates who might think college is not in their future. Co-ops are rising up to incubate Black-owned neighborhood businesses, with the hope that they will hire locally to boost the communities’ economies.

Meanwhile, community leaders are wary of developers coming in and raising property values so much that longtime residents have to move out. ey point to the transformation of the CabriniGreen region of Old Town as a reminder of what can happen to Black low-income residents confronted with gentri cation.

On the West Side, one such organization is the Lawndale Christian Development Corp.

Led by Executive Director Richard Townsell, LCDC has a multipoint plan to capture the millions of dollars that North Lawndale residents spend outside their neighborhood each year and invest it into new job-generating businesses in the community.

LCDC is addressing neighborhood a ordable housing with plans to build 1,000 homes on vacant lots for working people.

2021 CHICAGO HOME PURCHASE LOANS

This map shows mortgage loan originations per 100 housing units by census tract. The highest concentrations of mortgage loan investments relative to housing stock were on the Near South Side, Lincoln Park and West Town. The lowest concentrations of mortgage loan investments relative to housing stock were in Riverdale, Armour Square and Fuller Park.

Loans per 100 housing units:

Fewer than 3 3-5 5-7 7-10 More than 10

Quiz: Why does the racial wealth divide persist?

In 1870, the wealth gap between Black and white Americans was a staggering 23-to-1 ratio. That’s equivalent to just $4 of wealth for Black Americans for every $100 for white Americans. In recent years, historians, economists and the media have written on the unrelenting economic disparity. Take the following quiz to see how much you know about it.

1. One way Black families in Chicago were deprived of their ability to build wealth was through the practice of what was commonly referred to as “home contract sales,” which grew out of federally endorsed redlining policies that denied Black homebuyers access to conventional mortgages. Home sale contracts were created by real estate speculators. Contract buyers accumulated no equity in their homes.

Q: Between the 1950s and 1960s, what percentage of homes sold to Black families in Chicago were contract sales?

A. Between 20% and 30%

B. Between 45% and 55%

C. Between 75% and 95%

3. e median Black household in America has around $24,000 in savings, investments, home equity and other elements of wealth.

Q. What is the median amount of savings, investments, home and other elements of wealth for a white household?

A. $98,000

B. $189,000

C. $224,000

4. e overall U.S. unemployment rate fell to 3.7% in May.

Q: When did the Black unemployment rate fall below 5% for the rst time ever?

A. April

B. May

C. Never

ty director and counsel, is overseeing the establishment of four co-ops: construction, chocolate-making, printmaking and holistic health. LCDC believes a big part of closing Chicago’s racial wealth gap is to create more Black-owned businesses that generate wealth for owners and income and inspiration for neighborhood residents.

Townsell says, “$124 million leaves North Lawndale every year because of the lack of goods and services and trade amongst ourselves.” LCDC owns the land on which Quentin Love’s SoulFood Lounge sits. “We’re trying our best to get this co-op ecosystem going so we can create businesses they own.”

is kind of community investment could attract developers who might be eager to buy apartments and homes and ip them, making the neighborhood too expensive for the people who live there now.

owning (property) ourselves. Developers can’t buy something that’s not for sale.”

Additionally, LCDC and its partners — including the North Lawndale Community Coordinating Council and the North Lawndale Home Owners Association — are also working with residents so they stay engaged in decisions being made about the neighborhood.

Townsell, a longtime Chicago-

2. Among the nation’s 20 largest metro areas, the gap between appraised home values in majority-white and majority-non-white neighborhoods is bigger in Chicago than in almost every other major U.S. metro area, according to a University of Illinois Chicago analyst.

Q: Which city has a bigger gap than Chicago?

A. Houston

B. Dallas

C. Los Angeles

ANSWERS:

5. ose who study the racial wealth gap argue that current conditions make it impossible for Black American families to save or invest their way to more wealth parity.

Q. Multiple studies nd that after equalizing accumulation factors, it would take how many years to close the gap?

A. 50 years

B. 100 years

C. 150 years

1. C. Between 75% and 95% of homes sold to Black families during the 1950s and 1960s were sold on contract.

2. C. Of the nation’s 20 largest metro areas, only Los Angeles has a bigger di erence between the median appraised value in neighborhoods where the majority of homeowners are people of color and neighborhoods where the majority of homeowners are white, according to data from sociologist Junia Howell’s study, released in May.

3. B. $189,000

4. A. e Black unemployment rate peaked at 16.8% in May 2020, It has since fallen by 12.1 percentage points to 4.7% now (though the decline was driven, in part, by a drop in labor force participation among Black workers). e unemployment rate for Black Americans fell below 5% for the rst time ever in April.

5. B. It would likely take up to 100 years, if not more, to close the racial wealth gap.

Townsell is determined not to let that happen: “We’re big on

an who grew up in North Lawndale, has seen the boarded-up buildings, vacant lots and lost opportunities that can result from disinvestment in a neighborhood. He’s determined not to let gentri cation, which is a lot like blockbusting in reverse, destroy his community’s attempt to help close Chicago’s racial wealth gap.

Whittney Smith, LCDC’s depu- Sources:

“WE’RE BIG ON OWNING (PROPERTY) OURSELVES. DEVELOPERS CAN’T BUY SOMETHING THAT’S NOT FOR SALE.”

— Richard Townsell

Note: Each census tract has varying numbers of housing units and loan originations. The darkest blue tracts are areas where 10 or more housing units out of 100 had loan originations. The faintest-colored tracts show areas that were theoretically underinvested in by the mortgage industry because fewer than 3 out of 100 available housing units had loan originations.

Source: Chicago Area Community Lending Area Fact Book 2021; Woodstock Institute

NET WORTHS

Homeownership is just one avenue

Tracing one branch of my family tree back to 1825, you’ll meet my sixth-great grandmother, Harriett Riggs, born on a plantation in Georgia, and registered as property.

Two generations later, my family entered the era of Reconstruction. Harriett’s great-great-granddaughter, Zadie Mae, graduated from Savannah State College. She was an educator for 44 years. Her husband, Mack, was a World War II veteran, agriculture teacher and assistant principal. e home of my great-grandparents remains in our family today.

While pursuing my master’s in analytical political economy at Duke University, I began work on “40 Acres and a Mule: A Speculative Fiction,” an attempt to rewrite my family’s history given reparations in 1865 in full accordance with General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15. I sought a hopeful and optimistic counterfactual built on historical literature, family interviews, and intergenerational transfer models to compare my theoretical and actual net worths.

I never nished that work. e more I dug, the more discouraged I became assessing the negative impact of the various historical public and private policies and practices that directly harmed and disadvantaged my family one generation after another. ose policies negatively impacted neighborhood investment in Black localities. Our family home has provided stability for us but has done little to increase any of our net worths. For generations, we’ve gained little to no wealth through owning property. At times, maintaining our properties has been wealth without the equity to reinvest or borrow.

LESSONS

In March, I launched a solutions-focused series designed to reframe homeownership’s role in closing the Black-white wealth gap. Without radical intervention, homeownership won’t meaningfully contribute to closing the racial wealth gap.

Income inequality is an important factor. In all states, white median household income is greater than Black median household income. In Chicago, Black median household income was $78,000, compared to $131,000 for white mortgage applicants in 2021. Eighty percent of white households reported incomes that were higher than 50% of Black households.

Since Reconstruction, my family has been well educated but has only had access to certain professions. ose with degrees became teachers. ough a profession I deeply respect (until 6 years ago, I was a high school math teacher), teaching is not a high-paying job. If you were to identify industries with large Black representation in each generation since Reconstruction, you’ll nd trends left by racial discrimination in the labor market. ese professions have not o ered relative economic upward mobility.

Directly tied to income is debt. e average rate of households with a debt-toincome ratio (DTI) above 43% across all Black households was 32%, but only 15% for white households among Chicago’s 2021 mortgage applicants. Black households generally maintain higher debt loads as a result of carrying more medical debts, higher student loan balances, and credit lines with less favorable terms and higher minimum payments. is leaves less disposable

income for other investments in wealth accumulation, such as money market accounts, stocks and retirement funds.

Income and debt directly correlate with buying power. For 2021 mortgage applicants in Chicago, the median property value across all Black households was $255,000, compared to $445,000 for all white households. Home equity equals wealth. Ignoring di erent racial home-value appreciation rates, we see that once mortgages are paid o , the median white household will have more equity. Further contributing to the racially uneven bene t of homeownership wealth for white households are di erences in interest rates, loan level price adjustments, mortgage insurance, property tax assessments, homeowners’ insurance, mortgage interest deduction bene ts, home

value appreciation rates, and home improvement credit and costs.

After generations of property ownership and diligent stewardship of the version of American citizenship granted to Black people, my Black family is far from wealthy. Large public and private investments are necessary to repair harm done in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Until we have a truly competitive market made up of equal incomes and property values, the following adjustments can be made to address racial income, debt and home equity gaps:

 Subsidize 20% down payments for Black homeowners and homebuyers. Eliminate private mortgage insurance and other fees and higher interest rates associated with lower down payments. Provide home equi-

e government must address the divide it created

One of the more popular courses in the trainings I facilitate on Black history is called Racial Crossfit. I named it after the popular exercise program, because any discussion, study and work that addresses racism requires arduous work with a coach that keeps participants working to the point of pain to create progress.

My framework addresses the economic exploitation of Black Americans by the federal government and its role in creating white wealth.

On the rst day, participants are required to answer three questions:

1. When did their ancestors arrive in America, and from what country?

2. What government programs did you

and your family bene t from that Black families did not?

3. What government programs do you and your family bene t from that Black families are not?

We cannot have a discussion about the racial wealth gap without addressing the role that government taxpayer programs play in creating and sustaining white wealth, which those questions are meant to reveal.

Often white wealth gets created through inheritances from the homeownership passed from parents and grandparents. Unironically, many of these same white Americans are against reparations for Black Americans because they don’t think that Black people should get money when they were not enslaved, and “that they themselves were not slave

owners.”  e problem is ampli ed because the money White families got was often in the form of federal government programs that was denied to Black Americans. Black veterans returning from World War II were denied low-cost mortgages, high school or vocational education, payments for tuition and living expenses, and low-interest loans for starting a business.

Over the last 300 years, the government used several homeownership programs that bene ted speci cally white families.

Here is a quick overview of federal government housing initiatives:

If your family came to the U.S. between 1619 and 1865, the Headright program was a government program that provided white heads of households 50 acres and tools for working the land for free for simply coming to America.

If your family came to the U.S. between 1865 and 1915, the Homestead Act distributed over 240 million acres of free land

(taken mainly from Native Americans) and tools to heads of households. It is estimated that over 20 million white Americans living now are direct descendants of the Homestead Act grant land.

If your family lived in the United States between 1930 and 1960, the government provided FHA loans/VA home program grants to white middle-class Americans by encouraging banks to lend them money and by backing the housing loans with the full faith and capital of the U.S. government. While providing FHA loans for white Americans, the federal government denied Black Americans access and participated in predatory housing programming that put Black middle-class people in further debt. e most important fact to remember when discussing the racial wealth gap in America is that the racial wealth gap has two parts: e rst part is that the government provided taxpayer bene ts to white citizens; the second part is that the gov-

Amber S. Hendley is director of research for the Woodstock Institute.

ShaRhonda Knott-Dawson is founder and CEO of BRONDIHOUSE, which produces opportunities for students, educators and organizations to learn about Black history.

ty and make monthly mortgage payments more a ordable.

 Subsidize discount points for Black homeowners and homebuyers. Eliminate higher interest rates associated with higher DTIs. Make monthly mortgages more a ordable.

 Subsidize a monthly $50-100 principalonly mortgage payment for Black homeowners and homebuyers for the life of the loan. Increase home equity over the life of the mortgage and make the overall mortgage more a ordable. Beyond homeownership, we must also invest in other avenues for building wealth for Black households. I suggest we subsidize investments in stocks and bonds and retirement accounts, and implement similar lending subsidies as described above.

POSSIBILITIES

Chicago has a wealth of untapped economic power. Let’s nd it.

Any given night, Chicago’s ballrooms are filled with civic-minded business leaders supporting causes that fight citywide inequities. We ask ourselves: What can we do? How can we solve the lack of opportunity and income pay gaps among white, Black and Latino families in our cherished city? It’s clear the business community is strong, caring and generous.

Yet for all the civically engaged and nancially savvy professionals in Chicago, we are failing a basic math test. If talent, creativity and resilience are characteristics equally distributed across society, then there must be a disproportionately high, untapped talent and entrepreneurial pool in the communities least represented in corporate America.

Logically then, the most overlooked communities must be home to the highest proportion of yet-to-be-discovered superstars. It’s up to us to go nd them. at’s not an altruistic position. It’s a central pil-

PROPERTY TAX REFORM

lar of capitalism.

We need as many talented people as possible in our o ces and in our boardrooms, in our organizational charts and in our lunchrooms. We need them creating new businesses and adding to the economic powerhouse that could be the city’s future.

But let’s be honest. We may be doing better than others in diversifying our executive ranks, but we are punching way below our weight when it comes to representation in entrepreneurship and business ownership — the economic lifeblood of any town.

According to University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business faculty member and founder of e Decade Project Maura O’Neill, if our businesses re ected our population, Chicago would have more than 32,000 Black-owned employer rms instead of the 4,000 we have today.

To reach representative levels of Black and Latino business ownership, it would mean opening up the opportunity and cap-

Supreme Court opens door to a reform that preserves wealth

In a rare development, all nine justices of the sharply divided Supreme Court recently joined to condemn as unconstitutional a government practice that deprives people of their homes for failing to pay property taxes without compensating them for the difference between the value of their homes and the amount they owed for taxes.

In Tyler v. Hennepin County, a Minnesota homeowner owed $15,000 in property taxes, interest and penalties. e county sold her home for $40,000 and pocketed the $25,000 di erence.

e court held that the county must pay the homeowner the balance. As the Supreme Court said, “(t)he taxpayer must render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, but no more.”

the home and the right to charge signi cant interest to the homeowner. e homeowner generally has 30 months to “redeem” the property by paying the tax buyer the amount of all the taxes, interest and other related charges.

ital to add 60,000 more Black and Latino entrepreneurs to our city. And I guarantee you that of the nearly 4 million Black and Latino Chicagoans, there are more than enough untapped great ideas and leaders with grit and determination to hit those numbers and grow sustainable businesses.

How do we get there? By being the bridge to opportunity. By accepting uncertainty. By nding those superstars in overlooked communities.

As business leaders, we know gaps exist in our ecosystem — lack of educational opportunity, job training programs, mentorship, and challenges to overall health and well-being. We are working as a city to confront and resolve those challenges.

But we shouldn’t be waiting for perfect. We’re losing time. Our e orts to enact real change, starting with our workplaces and allocations to entrepreneurs and suppliers, can and should be our priority despite those obstacles. As entrepreneurs, we not only accept risk, we embrace it. So let’s go. ere is no magic moment to begin the work toward greater equity, diversity and opportunity. e moment is now.

ernment denied Black citizens access to those same programs.  is information isn’t new. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was advocating for government reparations to Black Americans before he was assassinated. If the U.S. government was able to create white wealth using tax money, it stands to reason that it has an obligation to provide government money and programs to create Black wealth. Only with robust federal government intervention, or government reparations, will we nally close the racial wealth gap.

e Tyler case could, and should, invalidate Cook County’s current property tax system that is much like Hennepin County’s. Cook County, however, does not pocket the excess market value, but gives it away to the private investors who “buy” the delinquent taxes.

John Bouman is the executive director of Legal Action Chicago, which is representing former homeowners, Southwest Organizing Project and Palenque LSNA in Bell v. Pappas, a pending federal court challenge to the Cook County tax sale system’s seizure of home equity.

is is the payo that the institutional tax buyers are in the game for — not the chance to own the house. Most homeowners manage to redeem the property, but some cannot. At that point, the tax buyer can petition the county court to foreclose on the lien, and the court awards the tax buyer not only the deed, but the entire market value of the home. Years ago the Illinois Legislature recognized the unfairness of this system by requiring counties to maintain indemnity funds that could be used to compensate homeowners who knew about the funds’ existence and could hire a lawyer to le a lawsuit for the di erence between the value of their homes and what they owed for taxes.

Cook County’s current system exacerbates the already huge racial wealth gap by depriving these families of the most valuable asset they could pass on to future generations.  is follows from and compounds our area’s history of discriminatory real estate and tax assessment practices.

Every year, Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas puts most of that year’s delinquent property taxes up “for sale.” e tax buyers, mostly Wall Street fund managers looking for a good pro t, “buy” the taxes by paying them to the county. e county gets its needed revenue, and the tax buyers get a lien on

Obscure and costly and deeply underfunded, the indemnity funds rarely provide a remedy, and even the handful of former homeowners who le and win lawsuits must wait as long as 10 years to receive compensation.

Black and Brown homeowners are a signi cant majority of those who lose their property and equity for failing to pay taxes.

Pappas herself has repeatedly decried the fact that the current system has a disparate impact on minority homeowners, many of whom own their homes outright (if there is a mortgage, the bank usually sees to the property taxes). Many of these homeowners are in rm seniors or people who worked hard to pay o mortgages but now have fallen on hard times, like those created by the pandemic. Others inherited or were given a family home. All of them lose not only their homes but the funds they could use to secure new homes.

e Supreme Court unanimously held that the excess market value is a species of property that no government can take away without just compensation. It is also clear that this whole system needs a reform that not only protects equity, but also keeps more people in their homes.

Marty Nesbitt is a founding partner and co-CEO of e Vistria Group. Vistria is a sponsor of Crain’s Forum.

To place your listing, contact Suzanne Janik at (313) 446-0455 or email sjanik@crain.com .www.chicagobusiness.com/classi eds

2250 Wahoo Dr, Morris, Illinois

Deere is already building AI farm of the future

DEERE from Page 1

one section of a eld is wetter than another. A farm generates data faster than it generates alfalfa after a rain. Both must be handled properly to keep everything running smoothly.

“I would say farm work is 50-50 managing data and actually working in the eld,” said Chris Gaesser. “All that data is important because it a ects a lot of the decisions you make.”

A ROLLING OFFICE

Sometimes the e ect of that data is immediate: A farmer driving a combine will pause, mid eld, check his computer screen and reset his optimization settings, changing the thresher’s rotor speed, clearance, fan speed and sieve openings, based on what he sees his machine collecting, trying, for instance, to minimize the dirt in his grain bin.

A farmer today is likely to be making phone calls and checking the number of likes on his latest #FarmTok post while the combine drives itself along a 20-minute row. He really doesn’t have much choice.

cus in Dallas, of all places — when Deere made a selling point of being forward looking, rst with styling, then with equipment. In 1999, it began plugging its combines into GPS. Today Deere employs more software engineers than mechanical engineers. Top management can even inch at the word “combines.”

“I would call them mobile sensor suites that have computational capability,” Deere’s chief technology o cer, Jahmy Hindman, told e Verge podcast. “ ey’re continually streaming data.”

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“You’re sitting in this thing 16 hours a day; many times in the fall, this is the farmer’s o ce,” said Jason Abbott, manager of value realization at the John Deere Harvester Works. “ ink about it that way. You have to not only run your machine eciently and productively, in many cases you have to run your business while you’re in the machine.”

And what a machine a new combine is.

City drivers are so dazzled by their shiny new hybrid automobiles’ tra c sign recognition and 360-degree bird’s-eye view they might never pause to realize that the same arti cial intelligence revolution changing the way we get downtown has also revolutionized both farming and the way farm equipment is manufactured.

“ e tech adoption in agriculture would absolutely shock people that aren’t in the loop,” said Miles Musick, factory engineering manager at the Harvester Works, located about 170 miles west of Chicago in East Moline, Ill.

INSIDE HARVESTER WORKS

Spend a morning at the 3 million-square-foot Harvester Works and you’ll begin to see how high tech it’s all become. When a Deere factory opened here in 1912, it was already toward the end of the company’s rst century in business. It was started in Grand Detour, Ill., in 1837 by John Deere, a Vermont blacksmith who turned an old saw blade into a self-scouring steel plow that did a better job of cutting through Illinois’ sticky black earth.

For the next century and a quarter, Deere was known more for tradition than innovation, its distinctive “Poppin’ Johnny” 2-cylinder tractor engines a familiar sound on farms that hadn’t made the jump to more powerful machinery. World War II began to change that, as farmers turned soldiers came home and wondered why their tractors couldn’t be as powerful as their Jeeps and trucks overseas had been.

e shift began in earnest in 1960 — announced at the Neiman Mar-

ere is nothing retro about any part of the manufacturing process except the color used to paint Deere farm equipment. Just like the old joke about Ford Model T coming in any color you like, so long as it’s black, you can have your new combine painted in a range of colors, all of them Pantone 364C, a hue commonly known as John Deere green. (Even here, though, innovation intrudes, as there are really two John Deere greens: the pre-1989 “classic” John Deere green, and the brighter color used since then, known as “Ag and Turf” John Deere green.)

THE GOLD KEY CLUB

Arrive promptly at 8 a.m. one morning this spring and you’ll already be behind a group of men in work boots, denim, plaid annel shirts and baseball caps, hailing from Texas, Georgia, North Carolina and Mississippi. ey’re here for their Gold Key tours, an almost daily ritual at Harvester Works. Each $1 million-plus combine is custom-made for a speci c customer — like Tesla, Deere realized they save a lot of money if, rather than build machines and then try to sell them, they instead sell their combines rst, and then build them to order. Customers decide whether they want to pop for the heated oor mat option or any other variables — except color — that add up to 3 million di erent theoretical combine combinations. Partially constructed units have a piece of paper stuck to them with a name, such as “Kevin R., North Platte, NE,” and a bar code.

“It’s kind of neat to come and watch it get built,” central Iowa farmer Brant Voss told Missouri Farmer Today after his 2015 Gold Key tour.

When it comes time to re up the engine of a new combine for the rst time, the owner is invited to turn the key, which is indeed gold-colored. Sometimes the timing isn’t quite right, so some Gold Key farmers have to settle for riding their new combine around the Harvester Works test track.

Before that can happen, however, Harvest Works must gather together, or fabricate, more than 18,000 parts — three times as many as needed to build a car — from tiny screws to thousand-pound threshing rotors, and assemble them into a vehicle that can weigh 50,000 pounds with a top speed of 25 miles an hour — more important than you might imagine, as getting from one eld to another has a way of burning up precious harvesting time. e whole assembly process takes about a week.

First, a bit of nomenclature. If everything you know about farming came from guiding plastic cows and chickens across a playroom carpet, you used tractors — pair of big wheels in back, two tiny ones in front, pulling various implements. Tractors are still important — pulling planters, tillers and the grain carts that catch harvested grain. But the harvesting itself is exclusively done by combines, which are called “combines” because they combine several functions: cutting the crop, threshing it to separate kernels of grain from seed covers and stalks, and windrowing the leftover straw. e business end of a combine is the “header,” a specialized, changeable frontend arrangement — say 12 or 14 or 16 plastic cones for dividing and cutting corn rows, or a rolling belt meant to pick up cut straw. e Harvester Works prides itself as the largest combine plant in the world — Deere also makes combines in Horizontina, Brazil, for the South American market, and in Zweibrucken, Germany, for Europe, where smaller combines tend to be used on smaller farms. And yes, their European business has been a ected by the Ukraine war. “Our German factory has taken a hit because Russia and Ukraine are in their market,” said Musick.

POST-COVID REBOUND

While Deere has expanded into construction equipment and even recreational all-terrain vehicles, its core business rises and falls in step with the ups and downs of agriculture.

At the height of the pandemic, the factory was jammed with half-constructed machines that couldn’t be completed because the necessary parts were waiting in tractor-trailers parked a thousand miles away. Some weeks the Harvester Works had 40% absenteeism. Workers were in such short supply, Deere took to training welders themselves by the hundreds in intensive round-the-clock classes. Not to forget the ve-week strike that closed the factory in autumn 2021.

“Supply chain was massively disrupted last year,” said Jim Leach, factory manager at East Moline. “We had hundreds of machines that were partially complete. We still haven’t seen a return to normal yet.”

But they’re getting there, with about 2,100 employees now working three shifts.

“We’ve basically doubled our workforce in the past 24 months,” said Leach. And on May 19, Deere’s latest quarterly earnings report topped Wall Street expectations on strong sales of its tractors and precision agriculture equipment. e company raised its net income forecast for the rest of the year, with booked orders remaining robust. e new target for scal year 2023: net income in the range of $9.25 billion to $9.50 billion, higher than the previous forecast of $8.75 billion to $9.25 billion.

THE SMART FACTORY

One way to minimize the wait for parts is to make them yourself. e Harvester Works has eight in-

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dustrial Trumpf ber optic laser stations turning sheet metal into combine parts, chassis components and grain tank sides, which are then molded on 10 press brakes — large industrial presses — in a process that is almost totally automated. e only need for human hands are to transfer the components from the lasers to the presses.

e plant turns 60,000 tons of sheet steel a year into combine parts.

“We make a lot of what we need,” said Musick.

As big a challenge as making the parts is then keeping track of where they go, spread across Harvest Works’ 71 acres of oor space. Two years ago employees were manually conducting daily inventory of what parts and aborning combines were where. Now a large white refrigerator-size autonomous mobile robot that factory workers affectionately dubbed Ruth purrs its way through the facility, scanning the RFID chips in various components to map the inventory, down to every bin of bolts and transaxle.

“We put trackers on every machine,” said Musick. “Before, we were paying people with a clipboard to write down what machine was there. As soon as you’d get done, you’d have to start over because everything was always moving.”

How to make sense of the sprawling process of combine manufacture involving thousands of parts, hundreds of workers making thousands of welds, attaching rivets and tightening bolts at dozens of stations over a solid 24-hour-a-day week? Perhaps the best way to envision what happens at Harvester Works is to divide combine creation into two tasks: attaching pieces together and then checking what had just been put together to make sure it’s been done correctly. e second task takes twice as long as the rst, transpiring on two di erent combine lines and six front-end header lines. (A combine without a header, as one Deere employee put it, “is just a slow ride.”)

Where possible, the assembling

and checking are done simultaneously. Michael Churchill uses an impact wrench gun containing an RFID chip that talks to Deere’s central production computer system — known internally as the SCF, or Smart Connected Factory — a program that knows when Churchill has tightened any given bolt enough and tells him to stop.

“We used to use guns that weren’t tied to the computer — you’d see a lot more loose hardware, missing bolts,” said Churchill, 34, who has worked at Deere for 16 years.

“ e computer nowadays tells you if you missed a torque, or if a bolt or a piece is missing. ere’s more error-proo ng the machines. You can’t go on to the next step — the computer will tell you, ‘Hey, stop, you missed something.’”

ough nearly 10 miles of overhead tracks convey smaller components hanging from chains around the plant to central lines, where they are assembled into nished combines atop yellow Strothmann conveyors — low German-made rolling platforms that won’t move forward to the next assembly point along a recessed track until all the functions at a particular station have been performed properly.

Some stations build and check; others just check. A subassembly pauses so that the SCF can examine hundreds of criteria, including counting the number of threads on exposed bolts to determine if a hidden washer is in place or missing.

Two years ago this check would

sometimes one part of a eld is a dead zone. at’s why Gaesser Farms keeps its visual eld markers in place, “just in case” they have to guide their combines the old-fashioned way.

As with smartphones, “right of repair” is a hotly debated issue among farmers, one that causes some Deere owners to sue the company, claiming it was hampering their ability to x the expensive combines they’d purchased.

“Deere also prohibits farmers from doing their own repairs on Deere equipment,” the American Economic Liberties Project wrote.

“Farm machinery is now so technologized that even a basic repair job requires interacting with software that Deere owns. It is zealous about its copyrights on that code — which forces farmers to pay a Deere dealer to x things rather than maintaining their equipment on their own.”

For its part, Deere maintains it does not stand in the way of farmers repairing their equipment.

“John Deere supports a customer’s decision to repair their own products, utilize an independent repair service or have repairs completed by an authorized dealer,” the company said in a statement. “John Deere additionally provides manuals, parts, and diagnostic tools to facilitate maintenance and repairs.”

at said, the lawsuit continues, and in February, the federal government issued a blistering statement siding with plainti s accusing the company of using its dominance to monopolize repairs.

lar hardness. Each combine takes about 20 gallons of paint.

Workers in spacesuits still need to go in afterward with handheld sprayers and touch up spots where the robots can’t reach.

Harvester Works produce two “families” of combines: four models of the older S series and the new X series. One of the factors considered in the X series design was ease of assembly: quicker manufacture means lower price. at includes trying to design away potential mistakes by, for instance, reducing the number of welds. ough welding is a task that can be done quickly by robots — the factory has 115 robotic welding arms, and half the welds are done by robots, half by humans — a weld involves heat, which can distort metal. e last thing Deere wants to do is throw a 33-foot augur out of alignment. So fewer welds, more rivets.

e new machines roll on special factory tires; both to reduce height clearance and so the tires won’t show wear from testing when the combine is delivered. e machines are red up — by the owner, if he’s there on his Gold Key tour — driven around a speed-bump test track to rattle it a bit and make sure nothing will fall o the rst time the new $1 million combine hits a rut. Farmers don’t like that.

AUTONOMOUS TRACTORS

be done by a Deere employee with a clipboard and take 20 minutes. Now it is done by a quartet of cameras mounted on tall poles and takes 1.5 seconds.

THE CONSUMER EXPERIENCE

Like many consumers, farmers have a fraught relationship with the technology transforming their lives. On one hand, they embrace tech because it generally works better. One Mississippi farmer beta testing the “See and Spray” technology Deere introduced in 2020 reports that it cuts herbicide usage by 85%. Steve Pitstick, who farms 5,000 acres of soybeans in Maple Park, Ill., estimates yields have gone up 50% since he started farming 45 years ago.

“A combination of everything: better genetics from seed companies, better job on our part as farmers, better equipment from companies like John Deere,” said Pitstick.

On the other hand, the more computerized systems on a combine, the less chance a farmer can x a problem with pliers and a can of WD-40. Prices of pre-GPS combines have been driven up sharply in recent years by those who don’t want to bother with all the technology.

If you’ve ever been frustrated by losing your phone signal, imagine driving a 25-ton combine across a eld when its systems go dead.

“Some of this stu , you lose your signal and it just won’t work,” said Chris Gaesser, allowing that it only happens rarely and not for long —

“During harvest season, time is of the essence,” the DOJ argued, pointing out that delays could come from independent repair shops being driven out of business and from Deere computer systems refusing to recognize the presence of a replacement part until an authorized technician “unlocks” them, or a range of other needless impediments.

Farmers wouldn’t pay $1 million plus for a machine if they didn’t want the features it o ers, and Deere’s defenders would argue that the company can’t be expected to honor the warranty of a machine that has been laden with o -market parts and manhandled by whatever mechanic is available in Eufaula, Ala.

BRAND LOYALTY

Despite the lawsuit, Deere’s brand is a synecdoche for farm life in general, the same way the Bible represents faith. “She’s a little up there, down here,” sings Jake Owen. “Puts a little King James in my John Deere.”

When Darren Bailey ran for governor of Illinois, his campaign put out a video of his Gold Key tour, set to Joe Di e’s anthem, “John Deere Green.” Painting the iconic green itself takes one wing of the Harvester Works — a 13-step electrocoating process of dip tanks, coating baths and robotic spray gun arms. e parts are cleaned in solvent by being dipped in 50,000-gallon tanks, primed, dried in a furnace, then painted electrostatically — the paint particles are given a positive charge, while the metal parts are charged negatively, allowing the paint to bond to the metal in a uniform thickness and particu-

How long that farmer will be behind the wheel of a combine at all is anyone’s guess. Last year Deere unveiled a completely autonomous tractor, the R8, which orients itself using a “geofence” and frees the farmer to check his email in the comfort of the farmhouse.

Deere is already sending autonomous tractors to spray herbicides, and farmers are expecting autonomous harvesters to be operating within the next decade. Or sooner.

“I think that’s the direction we’re going, for sure,” said Gaesser. “Right now everything’s bigger and quicker. I’d say within 10 years, and probably sooner than that, we’ll see smaller pieces that run all the time instead of man-operated larger pieces of equipment that run during the day.”

ough right now, he points out, you still need a skilled driver to, say, adjust to a row of crops that have been battered by a breeze, quicker than a machine can.

“If you’re going into good corn, you can get into down corn, and by the time it adjusts to the down corn, you’re back in the good corn,” said Gaesser. “You still need that person to know what’s coming.”

A reminder that, right now, in both eld and factory, technology only goes so far. Before each new John Deere combine leaves the East Moline Harvester Works for its — on average — 17-year life working the elds, divided among an average of four future owners, there is a step that does not get celebrated in the company tech stack, yet is vital nonetheless. “ e last line of defense,” as it was described: An employee lies down on a mechanic’s creeper, rolls under the new combine, and checks out its underside with a ashlight.

Neil Steinberg is a Chicago writer and a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times.

PHOTOS BY JOHN R. BOEHM

Harvester Works produces two “families” of combines: four models of the older S series and the new X series. One of the factors considered in the X series design was ease of assembly: quicker manufacture means lower price.

Argonne finishes $500 million Aurora, its most powerful supercomputer yet

in Batavia, as part of the state’s economic development plan to attract advanced-manufacturing work, such as electric vehicles and batteries.

Stevens says Aurora could vastly improve drug discovery, which already has been sped up by using computers to scour massive amounts of data before starting experiments in a lab. He envisions being “able to search 20 billion molecules in an hour to nd the best one to inhibit a particular protein target. No one’s ever done that.”

Similar techniques can be used in the search for battery materials that are cheaper, more widely available or less toxic.

WELL-SUITED TO AI

Stevens, who also is a University of Chicago computer science professor, says Aurora is particularly well suited to arti cial intelligence. Coupled with traditional computer simulations, the result will be vastly improved models of everything from weather patterns to robotic surgery.

“For lots of AI problems, we don’t have enough data to train the models,” he says. “We can use the supercomputer to generate enough data where you don’t have enough data naturally.

“Instead of running one simulation of potential climate outcomes — if you augment with AI, you could run 100 or 1,000 di erent models to better understand the amount of uncertainty. What you want to know with predictions, such as ooding in the Midwest, what’s the uncertainty?”

Researchers have been testing a mini version, or testbed, of Aurora called Sunspot since December in preparation for what will run on the new supercomputer. ey’ll begin using Aurora itself in the fall. It will be opened up to the scienti c community at large next year.

It’s not just the machine that draws researchers.

“People don’t appreciate that there are problems you run into at 1,000 processors that you don’t encounter on 100 processors,” says Amanda Randles, a Duke University researcher. “ ere are only a handful of people who have experience at working at those levels.

“ e national labs have some of the best coders in the world. ere are a lot of incredibly smart people working with cutting-edge toys.”

Aurora was built by chipmaker Intel and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and funded by the Department of Energy. e new computer not only required a new building, but also new power-distribution infrastructure at Argonne.

To keep the supercomputer cool, Argonne uses water, lots of it. About 44,000 gallons are continuously pushed through the machine, which weighs in at about 600 tons, or about as much as an Airbus A380 jumbo jet.

e supercomputer itself takes up 10,000 square feet of space, or roughly four tennis courts. e related infrastructure takes up three to four times more space.

Supercomputers are never easy to build, but the Aurora team also had to contend with a pandemic.

“Building new processors

takes many years,” Stevens says.

“ e critical shoulder-to-shoulder part of that, when you’re trying get chips to boot for the rst time and debugging them, is a hugely labor-intensive process.

at’s much harder to do if you can’t be in the same room. Imagine mission control during Apollo and no one can be in the same room. It’s been tough.”

Researchers say that all the hard work will pay o . Randles will use Aurora to run software to create 3D simulations of the way blood cells interact, which could

advance heart disease and cancer treatments.

“We want to look at once a cancer cell comes o a tumor, where is it going to go, what is it going to attach to?” she says. “To do that, you have to model all the red blood cells.”

At the moment, Randles can only model a tiny area of the body. Argonne’s computer will double the size of the area that can be modeled. “It will allow us to run longer simulations and do visualizations and probe data in way we can’t right now,” she says.

ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY

A worker at Argonne installs one of the more than 10,000 “blade” servers that make up the Aurora supercomputer.

Exelon commits to overhaul its board in ‘ComEd Four’-related litigation

current and former corporate general counsels, none of whom have personal ties to Exelon or the individuals involved.

Also party to the agreement are insurers for the defendant directors and o cers. ey’ve agreed to pay $40 million in damages. Exelon would get $30 million of that, and $10 million would go to the plainti s’ attorneys.

All the directors and o cers sued deny any wrongdoing and say they are entering into the settlement to close the issue and stave o future expense.

MARQUEZ, DOMINGUEZ PAY

As Crain’s previously reported, the committee believes that if they appeal unsuccessfully, Exelon would have reason to pursue repayment of legal costs the company has covered for former ComEd CEO Anne Pramaggiore and former ComEd executive and lobbyist John Hooker, both of whom a jury convicted of bribery and conspiracy in early May. e committee advises the company also to consider seeking to claw back past incentive compensation to Pramaggiore and Fidel Marquez, ComEd’s former head lobbyist who cooperated with the feds, wore a wire to collect evidence against the “ComEd Four” defendants and pleaded guilty to a single count of bribery.

But the panel has ruled out any e ort to do the same for Joe Dominguez, ComEd’s CEO from 2018 until 2021, and William Von Hoene, Exelon’s No. 2 executive for most of the bribery period and architect of the corporation’s lobbying strategy at the time. (Neither was charged in the federal probe.) e settlement would bar actions against any other former or current executives or board members as well.

“ is determination is deemed by the SLC and the IRC (a panel of two independent Exelon directors assigned to oversee handling of these lawsuits) to be in the best interests of Exelon and its shareholders,” according to the settlement.

COVERING LEGAL FEES

As Crain’s previously reported, Exelon reduced former CEO Chris Crane’s past incentive pay by $4.2 million due to his stand-

ing as the company’s top executive during most of the bribery period. at turns out to have been a recommendation of the special litigation committee, according to the documents.

Crane, who also was not charged in the federal investigation, retired as Exelon CEO at the end of last year for what he and the company said were health reasons. But the special committee’s report hints that he would have been unlikely to keep his job if he’d continued.

“During the pendency of the SLC investigation, Crane retired from his positions as CEO of Exelon, a member of the Exelon board, and chair of the ComEd board, obviating the need for the SLC to address further his employment status at Exelon or his membership on either board as a condition of the settlement terms,” the committee report states.

Another revelation from the settlement documents: In addition to covering legal fees for Pramaggiore and Hooker, Exelon has been paying legal costs for Marquez, the star witness against Pramaggiore, Hooker, and former ComEd lobbyists Michael McClain and Jay Doherty, the other two of the “ComEd Four” who were convicted. It was Marquez’s decision to cooperate with the FBI and U.S. attorney’s o ce that provided videos and recordings instrumental in the federal investigation of ComEd’s role in the alleged corruption of Madigan.

Madigan, who has pleaded not guilty, is set to stand trial on similar charges in April 2024.

“ComEd advanced the legal fees of Fidel Marquez, a former company o cer, as required by the indemni cation policy within the company’s bylaws,” Exelon spokeswoman Rhea Marshall con rmed in an email.

Exelon could seek to recover those legal fees for Marquez under the proposed settlement.

TALLYING THE COST

If the settlement goes through, Exelon’s many legal entanglements from the ComEd scandal will have resulted in no more than the $200 million ne that was part of ComEd’s deferred prosecution agreement combined with a separate $38 million in refunds to ratepayers, which

meant a little less than $5 o ComEd bills in April for the average residential customer.

Exelon recently agreed to settle a shareholder suit for $173 million, but the entire cost will be covered by insurance, according to a Securities & Exchange Commission ling.

e settlement of these lawsuits would provide Exelon with a net $30 million, nearly making up for the ComEd ratepayer refund.

As for company Chairman Young, Exelon’s Marshall said, “While the settlement contemplates certain changes in committee assignments and a refresh of the board’s overall membership, the company strongly supports Mr. Young as board chair through 2025 and looks forward to his continued service on our board, including in any other leadership role. Exelon will contemplate a new board chair in advance of our 2025 annual shareholder meeting.”

Young, a longtime utility industry executive, joined Exelon’s board in 2018, about a year before the federal probe of ComEd became public. He became Exelon chairman last year, succeeding longtime Chairman

Mayo Shattuck, after the company spun o its power-generation arm into publicly traded Constellation Energy Group.

Dominguez, who testi ed in the “ComEd Four” trial and was caught on Marquez’s recordings approving some of the lobbying agreements at the heart of the case, now is CEO of Baltimore-based Constellation.

NEW STANDARDS

e settlement also imposes strict new lobbying standards to prevent the kinds of favors done for Madigan, which constituted bribery, according to the jury. Among them: For at least a veyear period, the company can’t hire a vendor that a public ocial has asked the company to consider. If a hiring o cer deems a vendor in that situation to be critical to the company’s operations, a majority of independent board members must approve it. Lobbyists for the company must report all such requests from public o cials to Exelon.

ere also are new restrictions on what the company can ask of employees in terms of political contributions.

e board must task an existing committee with speci c

oversight of “lobbying and political activity.” Executive compensation practices must include new “negative modi er(s) for failure to achieve certain compliance-related key performance indicators.”

It wasn’t that many years ago that Crane’s success in “public policy” advocacy helped increase how much he was paid.

In advocating for settlement, the special litigation committee noted how Exelon has been negatively a ected by the intense media focus on the scandal.

“ e SLC also believes that settlement is superior to litigation as a way to avoid negative publicity, reputational harm, and disruption to Exelon’s business,” the committee report stated. “Here, Exelon received the rst subpoena related to this matter in May 2019, approximately four years ago, and has been investigating, remediating, and litigating ever since. Indeed, the nal submission required under the DPA is due by June 17, 2023. . . .As such, the SLC believes that it is in the company’s best interest to resolve the potential claims set forth in the demand letters and the consolidated action pursuant to the proposed settlement terms.”

Newly built homes in Bronzeville are selling for more than $1.1 million

BRONZEVILLE from Page 3

according to Midwest Real Estate Data. ey were all either new construction or resale of homes built since 2016.

To be clear: Neither of the $1.1 million projects is coming from an optimistic speculator new to the neighborhood. Both

are from builders that have worked in Bronzeville, and their listing agents are veterans in the neighborhood as well.

King Drive Development LLC

is a venture of Mark Boldun and Art Gurevich, who have built or rehabbed more than 100 condominiums in Bronzeville. is project is ve-bedroom, rough-

ly 5,100-square-foot greystones whose exteriors were designed to t into the historical context of King Drive.

On South St. Lawrence Avenue, builder Red Van is run by John and Kevin Keaney, who have been building new homes in Bronzeville since the early 2000s. This project is contem -

porary style. The units are four bedrooms, 3,800 square feet with rooftop decks overlooking Armstrong (Lillian Hardin) Park across the street.

Because they were both built on previously vacant land, neither of these projects directly displace existing Bronzeville residents. eir higher value may

contribute to raising the future property tax bills of homeowners in the neighborhood.

Browne of @properties has been an advocate for putting a freeze or slower growth on the assessments and tax bills of longtime Bronzeville homeowners, to help prevent displacement caused by fast-rising taxes.

EXELON from Page 3

Chris Crane, who was not charged in the federal investigation, retired as Exelon CEO at the end of last year for what he and the company said were health reasons. But the special committee’s report hints that he would have been unlikely to keep his job if he had continued.

BLOOMBERG

Thank You, ComEd!

ComEd Employees and IBEW Local 15 Are Powering Stronger, More Equitable Communities

ComEd employees and IBEW Local 15 members show up! For decades, they have committed to volunteering in their communities alongside United Way of Metro Chicago and other local organizations that help our neighbors meet their basic needs including food, shelter and safety.

United Way is grateful for the continued partnership and generosity of ComEd and IBEW Local 15. Together—united—we are building a stronger, more equitable region.

If your company would like to join us in thinking big and driving change, learn more at LIVEUNITEDchicago.org