February 7, 2018

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SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent nonprofit newsprint magazine written for and about neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. We publish in-depth coverage of the arts and issues of public interest alongside oral histories, poetry, fiction, interviews, and artwork from local photographers and illustrators. The South Side Weekly is dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists.

Volume 5, Issue 16 Editor-in-Chief Hafsa Razi Managing Editors Julia Aizuss, Andrew Koski Directors of Staff Support Baci Weiler Community Outreach Jasmin Liang Senior Editors Christian Belanger, Mari Cohen, Olivia Stovicek

Politics Editor Adia Robinson Education Editor Rachel Kim Stage & Screen Editor Nicole Bond Visual Arts Editor Rod Sawyer Food & Land Editor Emeline Posner Music Editor Christopher Good Contributing Editors Maddie Anderson, Elaine Chen, Mira Chauhan, Bridget Newsham, Adam Przybyl, Rachel Schastok, Sam Stecklow, Michael Wasney, Yunhan Wen Data Editor Jasmine Mithani Radio Editor Erisa Apantaku Radio Hosts Andrew Koski Olivia Obineme Sam Larsen Social Media Editors Bridget Newsham, Sam Stecklow Visuals Editor Ellen Hao Deputy Visuals Editor Lizzie Smith Photography Editor Jason Schumer Layout Editor Baci Weiler Staff Writers: Ashvini Kartik-Narayan Fact Checkers: Abigail Bazin, Sam Joyce, Bridget Newsham, Adam Przybyl, Hafsa Razi, Sam Stecklow, Tiffany Wang Staff Photographers: Denise Naim, Jason Schumer, Luke Sironski-White Staff Illustrators: Zelda Galewsky, Natalie Gonzalez, Courtney Kendrick, Turtel Onli, Raziel Puma Webmaster

Pat Sier

Publisher

Harry Backlund

Operations Manager

Jason Schumer

The paper is produced by an all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring. Over the summer we publish every other week.

Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773) 234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly.com

Cover illustration by Wendi Zhang behance.net/phudicin

THE HOUSING ISSUE E veryone deserves a place to call home. The sentiment—drawn from this issue’s opening essay—is simple, and we all know it’s easier said than done. But given the roadblocks, it’s worth restating—this powerful right forms the backbone for this year’s Housing Issue. In a year in which rent control has been hotly debated in the city, in which more and more Chicagoans are coming to believe that housing is a basic human right, we at the Weekly are thinking about the fact that this issue has always been about homes as much as housing. Home is not just the built landscape and physical places in which people dwell, but the ways in which they find comfort, permanence, and community in those places. In the struggle to ensure decent, affordable housing for everyone in our city, how do we make sure that they can also become homes—and that the homes people make in them can be sustained? This year, these questions have led us from Cabrini-Green on the Near North Side to the future Imani Village in Roseland and everywhere in between: the itinerant, years-long journeys that result in steadfast birthplaces of poetry; the ongoing battles fought over gentrification and self-determination; the homes we lost of which only histories, memories, and excavations remain. Although, as rents keep getting raised and the threat of eviction must be prepared for, these intractable questions are sure to endure, the stories in this issue testify to a promising range of answers, and to the answers yet to come.

A New Lease on Life Whether it’s fashion or food, the refurbishment of lower-class necessities as trendy items for the rich is well-documented. The recent boom in “tiny homes” for the homeless, however, has flipped the script, as Deanna Isaacs details in an article for the Reader.

Developers will be wrestling with zoning laws and funding issues for months (if not years) before any ground is broken, but Pride Action Tank and La Casa Norte’s proposal to house homeless students about a mile from Kennedy-King College in Englewood is a glimmer of hope in a public health crisis more pressing than ever as the city enters another week of bone-chilling cold.

Shop and Save Hairston’s Job We at the Weekly are very afraid because we find ourselves agreeing with Mary Mitchell, which we try never to do, but she points out so well in a recent Sun-Times article that it takes an election season to get anything done in this city. And now you can bet your eggs and bacon that South Shore’s Jeffery Plaza, which is home to the only remaining vacant grocery store after the Dominick’s chain left the city four years ago, will finally house a Shop & Save market. Nice work, Hairston. Even though Mitchell could not reach you for comment, word is a deal has been struck. Just in time for the March primary. We see what you did there.

Rent Is Out of Control Last week the Tribune posed the question: Could, and should, Illinois embrace rent control? Uh...yeah. Let’s look at the data and pose some other questions. One little known fact is that Chicago had rent control regulation in place prior to the 1997 Rent Control Preemption Act. With Chicago renters who earn the median income spending more than half of their workdays trying to earn enough to cover rent, as the Tribune reports, it seems like the answer should be a clear resounding yes. The question will be further asked on the March primary ballot in nine wards and in roughly one-hundred precincts around Chicago, according to Jawanza Malone, executive director of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization as well as leader of the Lift the Ban Coalition—a bloc of community groups who have been leading a two-year campaign against the Illinois ban on rent control. In a recent survey, seventy-four percent of Chicagoans answered yes when asked: do you agree there should be a limit on how much rents can increase in a given year? So, who are the remaining twenty-six percent? Greedy landlords and exclusionary enthusiasts?

through the cracks

I have lost my roof three times. nicole bond.......................................4 the rent control debate

“Hey, rich people are getting screwed too in this market.” yunhan wen......................................6 know your rights: eviction

Eviction is bad enough by itself—what’s worse is losing your bearings in the complicated legal process. yunhan wen......................................9 a shelter, fallen out of favor

A way to move to the much more palatable “Neither Dead Nor Red” giorgi tsintsadze...........................11 home history: airport homes

When locals found out that the CHA intended to move in Black veterans, they reacted angrily. christian belanger & sheika lugtu ..........................................................13 who pulls the strings on the pluc?

“Those of us who advocated for this body and for this advisory board, we were literally kicked out.” bridget newsham...........................16 home history: gwendolyn brooks home

Brooks’s fraught housing history is inseparable from her work. abigail bazin...................................19 the personal histories of public housing

“‘I’m in the projects, but that’s my home. I love my home just like you love your home.’” adam przybyl..................................20 healthy housing takes a village

To assuage what Patricia Eggleston calls the “social determinacy” of health michael wasney..............................23

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Through the Cracks

BY NICOLE BOND

“T

here but for the Grace of God go I” is a phrase I often hear said by those witness to someone else’s misfortune. When the misfortune is homelessness, people often say how they are only one paycheck away from homelessness themselves. Yet for the majority, that one paycheck continues to come and the roof remains over their head, no matter how precariously.

I have lost my roof three times. I don’t believe I ever fell from any type of grace, but I did fall through the cracks each time.

The homeless population has forever been composed of people navigating a variety of circumstances. Still, the rules always seemed clear: if you don’t pay the rent, you lose the apartment. Simple, right? But things are not always as they seem, and rarely are they simple.

The first time I lost my roof was in the summer of 1990. I was in my mid-twenties, newly divorced, and determined to not ask anyone for anything. I worked three jobs seven days a week to keep a studio apartment in Lakeview that I had crammed full—though quite stylishly—with what had previously been comfortably spread out over a 2000-square-foot loft. Was I exhausted most of the time? You bet. But having my very own place on my own terms was the reward. I never missed a rent payment, and I was considering upgrading to a onebedroom apartment at my lease’s end.

Then one of my part-time jobs as a note-taker for disabled students at the City Colleges of Chicago was eliminated, delaying my payment of one month’s rent.

Typical rental leases stipulate that rent is due on the first of each month, with a five-day grace period. If rents are not paid within the grace period a landlord’s fiveday notice is issued, advising the tenant that court proceedings for the landlord to retain possession to their apartment will begin. Once the process begins, the tenant is at the mercy of the landlord and the court, and eviction is likely unless an arrangement can be made. If the tenant knows this information, they know how to proceed. But if they don’t know, it becomes a very different story. The summer of 1990, I learned the hard way.

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After missing only one month of rent, I was summoned to appear in court. I had no desire to vacate my apartment and had the one month of rent I thought I was being sued for in hand at the hearing, so I appeared in court with only my mom and no attorney. I would pay the money and the matter would be resolved—right? Wrong.

My case was called. I approached the bench a cheerful defendant, my happy little money order in hand. The plaintiff ’s attorneys representing Wirtz Realty began spouting off lawyer jargon, all foreign to me. When my time to speak came, I told the court I wanted to pay the one month of rent in question. The judge asked the Wirtz attorneys if they were prepared to accept my payment. They said they were not, and a judgment for possession was ordered and stayed thirty days. I still have no idea what’s going on. All I know is I have the money. I want to pay it and go home, or at least go back to one of my jobs. I had no idea I was being sued not for the rent but for possession of the apartment.

Since the attorneys were not prepared to accept my payment and I was still unaware I had been sued not for late rent but for possession of my apartment, I left the courtroom and went immediately to the Wirtz Realty/Chicago Blackhawks (yes, same company) offices to make my payment in person. It was a classic case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing: my payment was accepted. I was given a receipt that showed I was current with no outstanding balance, and I went on with my day.

Shortly after, I received my next month’s rent statement by mail, as usual, which I paid promptly. Weeks later, but before the next statement was mailed, my mom and I met up to go see a movie, but I needed to make a quick stop at home first. As we took a shortcut a block away from the street where I lived, my mom noticed a boldly printed pillowcase on the ground.

“Hey, don’t you have some sheets like that?” she asked me. Glancing quickly, thinking someone must have dropped theirs on the way to doing laundry, I answered that I did. A little further on, my mom spied a curious one-of-a-kind lamp propped against

a chain-link fence. She stopped dead in front of it and asked urgently, “Don’t you have a lamp like that too?” An uneasy feeling crept up my chest. I answered yes and walked faster.

When I reached my apartment, the curbside was scattered with the remains of the entire contents of my apartment, now reduced to some file folders, papers that used to be inside file cabinets, and a few books.

My lifetime of possessions had been evicted and hauled off by people driving up in trucks to help themselves. I had accumulated some very nice things of both monetary and sentimental value that could never be replaced––but it was hard to convince the fine folks from Wirtz Realty when I became the plaintiff suing them. In their thinking, since I was a young Black woman late on a month’s rent in a studio apartment, my belongings—my oil paintings, my jewelry, my vintage record collection—couldn’t have amounted to much more than a bean bag and a lava lamp. After years of dragging on the proceedings, with condescending, dismissive remarks carried back to me by way of my attorney, we settled out of court for an amount I agreed to only in frustration.

Thirty years later, whenever I see that Native American head logo, I still throw up a little.

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fter that day, I was able to return to my family home for six months while I rebuilt my life and moved to Hyde Park-Kenwood, where I would spend the next twenty-one years––thirteen of them in the same apartment—until the neighborhood gentrified and I was priced out. But along the road to being priced out, there were some bumps: changes in pay structures at a longtime high-income job, my mother’s catastrophic illness, and having to leave a company in order to cash out my 401K so I could care for her.

During my thirteen years in the same apartment, there were three instances when my rent was late and the whole court process started. I moved the final time; but the other two times I was able to make arrangements to pay the money owed before appearing in court, and did not have to vacate my apartment. Nevertheless, because the simple act of filing a suit against a tenant is considered an eviction––no matter the

ESSAY

outcome of any subsequent arrangements–– it now appears on my tenant history as if I had been evicted from the same apartment in the same building three different times between 1999 and 2012, which is both impossible and difficult to explain once you try to lease another apartment. Since all prospective landlords see on paper is eviction, they have no interest in the circumstances, which often are not evictions at all. In 2013, having cleared all the other requirements, I was moments away from acquiring an affordable housing unit at a Holsten property in Edgewater—until my rental history of pseudo-evictions surfaced.

When my Hyde Park high-rise rent skyrocketed to nearly double the original value, I lost my roof a second time. By then, I no longer had a family home to retreat to, nor a family. I did have a friend also in a housing crisis, who had walked away from a home she was so far underwater in she was drowning, and was able to squat with her for nearly a year. I was technically not homeless either time, since I was indoors with a place to sleep—but neither my family home nor my friend’s foreclosed townhouse was my own address.

This last (and what I intend to be final) bout with homelessness is a little trickier.

A short unemployment coupled with a lengthier underemployment caused me to be sued for eviction from my last apartment.

Although the circumstances were not of my choosing, I had wanted to move from my last apartment the day I moved in, during September of 2014, making the loss of that particular roof practically a step up.

Nestled on one of the sketchiest blocks in South Shore is one of those awful apartments you are forced to rent after your rental history becomes tainted with the appearance of several false evictions. It was a slum-lorded building infested with mice and tenants who couldn’t care less about how they cared for the place they called home—so property management couldn’t care less either. At one point my unit had no working toilet for nineteen days. Regardless of how clearly I explained the problem, management told me my particular brand of toilet paper was causing the problem. This, of course, was ridiculous, and they eventually replaced the substandard malfunctioning toilet, after a colorful letter hand-delivered with a box of candy.

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or the time being I have landed in a clean, safe, warm dwelling, but it is not my own. I have no address.

ELLEN HAO

I now have a job I love, a modest hourly wage, and the potential for it to grow into a career. There are systems and agencies in place that claim they work to prevent or end homelessness, but they are difficult to navigate. So far I have learned that if I were disabled, a senior citizen, or a veteran, I would move to the top of some imaginary list I have yet to be privy to, and my own roof would become a reality in a matter of days. I have connected with a social worker and have been issued a Homeless Management Information System number intended to assist me in accessing services to assist homeless persons, but so far all it has amounted to is my answering a detailed list of highly personal questions for data collection purposes.

When I reached out to the office of one of my elected officials, someone from his office put me in touch with an affordable housing online portal I had already researched and determined to be useless; much of the information was outdated or listed in error.

In one instance, dialing what was supposed to be a Kenwood affordable apartment, I reached a South Loop pizzeria. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, meanwhile, has a number of “affordable” and subsidized units available for people who qualify. I have been told I now fit the criteria, but the units are always filled, and instructions as to how to be placed on waiting lists are vague. I also received the Chicago Low-Income Housing Subsidy Trust Fund

list of properties with available units, but the units are all filled or in places like my last apartment. Many of the properties are not even aware they are on the Trust Fund list and are perplexed when an inquiry is made about their subsidized units. But even though these properties told me upfront that their subsidized units were all full, they each asked how much was I allotted for securing a unit—as if the right figure would somehow open up a unit for me.

So what happens now? Your guess is as good as mine. I work every day. I have a rental history tainted with false evictions, and I have no living family. I’m luckier than most: I sleep indoors each night with food in my stomach. But the systems in place designed to help people like me who fall not from grace, but through the cracks, are failing me. Meanwhile, so much new construction is springing up all over the city, particularly in the Hyde Park neighborhood I called home for nearly a quarter of a century, but I have no access to it. My income is a fraction of what it once was, and rents continue to skyrocket, pricing out people like me, who after a history of restrictive covenant laws have endured this too many times. I have worked every year of my life since I was fifteen years old and paid plenty of taxes.

Surely some of that money can be put to work for people like me. Everyone needs a clean, safe, quality place to call home. But for now, I have no address. FEBRUARY 7, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

The Rent Control Debate

Where rents rise and wages stagnate, affordable housing is a package deal

BY YUNHAN WEN

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JASON SCHUMER

n January 31, around twenty housing activists blocked traffic on the first floor of the James R. Thompson Center.

They brandished banners and placards and demanded support for rent control from Governor Bruce Rauner, whose office is housed at the Thompson Center.

The action was organized by the Lift the Ban Coalition (LTB), a federation of community organizations that work together to make rent control possible in Chicago, where it is currently prohibited under the Rent Control Preemption Act. The Act, passed by the state legislature in 1997, forbids Illinois municipalities from instituting any form of rent control.

“We need economic well-being in our state,” Jawanza Malone, executive director of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization and one of the most visible leaders of LTB, called out to the audience. He then referred to a study showing that more than half the renters in Cook County pay more than they can afford.

“And that’s wrong!” he passionately concluded.

His verdict was echoed by other protestors: “What do we want?

Rent control! When do we want it? Now!”

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The protest is part of a grassroots movement that has sprung up since early 2017, when State Representative Will Guzzardi introduced HB2430, a bill that would repeal the 1997 rent control ban.

Since its introduction, HB2430 has made rent control the subject of city- and statewide debates. As those debates reveal, deep rifts exist between real estate interests and communities whose residents are suffering from rising rents and stagnant wages.

Economic aggregates don’t paint a rosy picture for renters in Chicago. A report by Nested, a London-based real estate brokerage firm, ranks Chicago as the eighth most expensive city in the US in terms of rent. Although several reports have suggested the rate of rent growth in Chicago has been moderate compared with the national rate, such moderation is not evenly distributed across the city. According to an analysis by RENTCafé, an apartment listing website, North Side communities in general have a much faster growth rate in rent than South Side communities, but the community with the highest rent growth in 2016 was Bronzeville.

Moreover, as Malone suggested, affordability of housing is not only tied to rent, but also income; the growth of household income has failed to match even relatively moderate increases in rent.

A 2016 analysis by the Pew Research Center showed that Chicago’s low-income households have started to make up a larger share of the city’s population. According to a report by the Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul University, high numbers of lowincome households are extremely rentburdened (paying more than thirty percent of household incomes in rent is considered rent-burdened, and if the number exceeds fifty percent—extremely rent-burdened), and areas with large affordability gap— where substantial numbers of rent-burdened families live—cluster on the South Side: Hyde Park, South Shore, Woodlawn, and Washington Park have the largest affordability gap in the Cook County.

So, even though rent increases faster in the north, it is more unaffordable and burdensome in the south.

And as rent becomes more unaffordable, a rising number of residents have been displaced or evicted across Chicago, especially on the South Side. According to the Reader, the South Side saw the highest numbers of evictions in 2016, with more than 200 evictions taking place in most South Side communities. Among them,

South Shore is the city’s “eviction capital,” with 382 cases in one year. (And that’s not counting the cases that never make it to court.) Research done by Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Princeton, shows that eviction leads to job loss and income insecurity. As a result, it tends to be a cause of long-term poverty.

Despite the wide range of problems that result from rising rents, any legislative implementation of rent control in Chicago is forbidden by the Preemption Act. As the Reader has showed, the original Preemption Act passed after an intense lobbying campaign from small-government conservatives and a real estate industry worried about any regulation that might threaten their profit margins. And the tradition seems to persist—once the Illinois real estate industry found out about the existence of Guzzardi’s repeal bill, realtors and property owners across the state immediately rallied against it. According to Illinois REALTORS, the state association of realtors, more than 5,200 Illinois realtors had expressed their opposition to HB2430 a month after Guzzardi introduced it.

“It’s mind-boggling that after what we’ve been through in the housing market since 2008, Illinois would consider a bill that sends the message, ‘We don’t want to develop, rehabilitate, or improve our housing stock,’ ” Illinois REALTORS wrote in the summary of reasons why they object to HB2430.

In their defense, realtors draw first and foremost on orthodox economic consensus—the Econ 101 cliché that rent control is destructive to the economy because it distorts the market. In this view, rent control takes away incentives from developers and landlords to build new rental units or maintain and upgrade existing ones, leading to a dwindling supply of rental units.

The law of supply and demand then dictates that prices will go up for housing units that are not covered by rent control. (At least in New York and San Francisco, rent control isn’t applied to every building in the city.)

This means that rents, though cheaper for some, are more expensive for others. The disparity is worsened by landlord behavior.

Landlords of rent-stabilized or rentcontrolled units will often try to convert their buildings so that they’re ineligible for rent control regulation; they can then charge market rates, according to a working paper presented by three Stanford scholars on the effects of rent control in San Francisco.

But realtors and developers have not

talked about another finding from the same paper: that rent control does prevent displacement, and is beneficial for those who live in rent-controlled housing. The same Stanford paper found that “rent control increased the probability a renter stayed at their address by close to twenty percent.” For the period studied, tenants in rent-controlled apartments received benefits averaging $2,300 to $6,600 each year; aggregate benefits came out to more than $390 million annually.

The debate, then, seems to hinge on the question of who bears the cost of rent control, and economic consensus suggests that it will be renters who fail to secure rent-controlled housing. This conclusion is acknowledged

by Janet Smith, an associate professor of Urban Planning and Policy at UIC, codirector of the Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement, and one of LTB’s most vocal supporters. This acknowledgement leads her to support a more universal form of rent control.

“Hey, rich people are getting screwed too in this market,” Smith joked in an interview. “I mean, we’re seeing that housing affordability is creeping up the income scale in Chicago. There might be a bigger coalition in support of rent control if you start looking at a citywide program instead.”

But universal rent control is unimaginable for the real estate industry.

First, Illinois REALTORS point to the “morass of bureaucracy” it would take to implement rent control. Secondly, and more importantly, the industry argues that, if every rental unit is rent-controlled, there won’t be the rent increase observed in non-controlled units in New York and San Francisco. In other words, profit margins would only seem poised to go down.

“If the movement wants to go towards locking rents, and there aren’t locks on rising property tax, rising utility taxes, and utility costs, what happens to the owner?” Brian Bernardoni, Senior Director of Government Affairs and Public Policy for the Chicago Association of Realtors (CAR), told the Weekly. “The owner can’t just make up that money. The owner has no other choice but to sell, or stop investing in the building.”

Yet, for Frank Avellone, senior attorney of the Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing (LCBH), the fear that owners will lose money because of rent control misunderstands the kind of rent control envisioned by housing activists. That misunderstanding conflates current rent control proposals with the earliest model

of rent control in the United States. Under those early attempts, a hard cap was set on how much rent the landlord could charge, regardless of any changes in costs—such as those related to upkeep—that the landlord might experience.

“Modern rent stabilization is being done in a number of places around the United States,” Avellone said. “It’s done in a lot of different ways, but the basic framework is that there are many reasons and mechanisms for allowing rent to increase.”

In other words, modern rent control (usually labeled “rent stabilization” to distinguish it from its hard-cap prototype) usually doesn’t prevent landlords and property owners from earning money— it just makes them earn less. But industry advocates argue that lessened profits will still hurt landlords and developers, in part due to the unpredictable near-term future of property values and property taxes in Cook County.

“Cook County property taxes continue to rise. Chicago is going to be going through a real estate triennial assessment, this year,” Bernardoni said. “We have no idea what this is going to do at this point. No one does.”

Bernardoni is referring to the reassessment of property values that takes place every three years, during which the Office of the Cook County Assessor will levy new property taxes on reevaluated properties. During current officeholder Joseph Berrios’s tenure, his office has come under fire for overvaluing properties in lowincome neighborhoods—meaning poor people pay a much higher tax than they should—while undervaluing properties in rich neighborhoods. Depending on the regions, property values can vary significantly with each reassessment. It thus seems to make sense that, against the backdrop of the 2018 reassessment, the industry is scared of the added uncertainties brought forth by a rent control ordinance.

William Smiljanich, a mom-and-pop landlord interviewed by the Weekly, has a second opinion. According to Smiljanich, the unpredictable reassessment is more of a concern for small landlords, since corporate landlords have resources to absorb the shock, should there be any.

Nevertheless, Bernardoni’s narrative depicts the real estate industry as a candle in the wind, and rent control the last puff to blow it out. But it’s hard to know exactly how profitable rental units are for property management companies and corporate landlords. (The Weekly sent several requests FEBRUARY 7, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

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for comment to Pangea and Mac Properties, two big corporate landlords on the South Side, but received no response.) Even so, rent stabilization could take the problem of profit into consideration—for pro–rent control activists, making sure that the landlords will not have negative net rental incomes is crucial for long-term growth.

But the call for rent control also touches on the fundamentals of municipal finances. According to Janet Smith, the City of Chicago has relied on property taxes to pay off interest on loans the city borrowed a long time ago. Consequently, a potential rent control not only impacts the real estate industry, but also a municipal government that wants to steady the flow of city revenues. “[The vote for rent control] is actually going to be a vote for a property tax increase at the end of the day,” Bernardoni told Chicago Tonight. “Rent control, if it goes into effect, will actually reduce the property tax base, thus increasing the property tax.”

For Janet Smith, this doesn’t have to be the case.

“If taxes are a concern for the city of Chicago, we will talk to Mr. Emanuel about other solutions, like being a better investor,” she said. “Don’t always rely on property taxes as a good solution, because then we have to build higher-income housing—that’s just the way it’s going to be.”

If that is the case, the reliance on higherincome housing to finance the city might be the root cause of inadequate affordable housing as well as skyrocketing rents in Chicago. To that end, realtors and housing activists both argue that there should be more affordable housing. “[Rent control] is just one piece of what needs to be a comprehensive strategy of how to make housing affordable—how to guarantee housing as a basic human right,” said State Rep. Guzzardi in an interview with the Weekly. “Building more public housing units and more affordable housing units are also part of the picture.”

But where proponents see affordable housing as part of the entire package, developers and realtors see building more affordable housing as a sensible alternative to rent control. This relies, yet again, on an orthodox economic argument—because there are a lot of vacant lots in Chicago, building more buildings will drive up the supply of housing and consequently lower the prices. In contrast, measures such as rent control deter developers from staying in Chicago at all, obviating any possibility that affordable housing will be built.

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However, building more does not necessarily lead to more affordable housing.

“Their argument about Chicago is that we have room to build more,” Smith said. “But you have to turn the question back to them, and say, ‘Okay, so we’ve been building a lot more, and housing hasn’t gotten any more affordable.’ We’ve been building at the highest. It’s not filtering down and, in fact, it’s causing rent to go up in some areas that used to be affordable.”

Part of the problem is that there are no binding laws that require developers to build affordable housing when they build on vacant lots, unless those residential developments receive city financial assistance

fields—the land was worth $1.3 million in 2016.

To address housing issues for lowincome families, there is also the House Choice Voucher (HCV) Program, commonly referred to as Section 8 housing, but the current program doesn’t meet the needs of low-income families in Chicago.

“Statistically speaking, only one-third [the number is closer to one-fourth] of the people who are eligible for Section 8 participation actually participate, because Congress does not appropriate enough money for it,” said Frank Avellone. “The Section 8 funding dynamic in Congress every year makes it kind of unpredictable

“[Rent control] is just one piece of what needs to be a comprehensive strategy of how to make housing affordable—how to guarantee housing as a basic human right.”

– State Representative Will Guzzardi

or involve city-owned land, according to the City of Chicago’s Affordable Requirements Ordinance (ARO). (The ARO is also triggered when a development involves zoning changes.)

Under other circumstances it is up to aldermen to enforce the construction of affordable housing in their wards. Alderman Danny Solis, for example, made a Pilsen– specific mandate that requires at least twenty-one percent of the units in eligible new developments to be designated as affordable housing. It’s a mandate that hasn’t always been enforced. In 2016, in Solis’s ward, there was a ninety-nine-unit development near Benito Juarez Community Academy by Fox Chicago LLC; ten percent of the units have been designated as affordable housing, less than half the amount of what Solis promised in the mandate. To compensate for the lost eleven percent of affordable units, Fox Chicago LLC donated an acre of land to nearby Benito Juarez Community Academy that will be used to expand sports

what forces would affect the local level.”

In addition to the lack of overall funding on the local level, sometimes, due to skyrocketing market rates, Section 8 voucher holders sometimes can’t even find proper places to use the voucher since rents are too high. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, public housing agencies will decide on a payment standard, “the amount generally needed to rent a moderately-priced dwelling unit in the local housing market.” The voucher holder must pay thirty percent of the family’s monthly income for rent and utilities, and if the unit rent is greater than the payment standard the family is required to pay the additional amount. For 2018, the Chicago Housing Authority set the payment standard for a two-bedroom apartment as $1,253, which exceeds average rent in a lot of South Side communities—but too few families get in.

Rent control, its supporters argue, is one way to combat the inadequacies of

these other programs. “I would think that we should refer to rent control as one tool.

Not the only tool in our toolkit, but a big tool that can have a pretty quick effect,” said Janet Smith.

Ultimately, progressives are simply asking the state to lift the rent control ban, restoring Illinois municipalities’ right to home rule. “We need to let cities make decisions on how to handle their housing markets,” said Guzzardi. “If Chicago considers this, and decides rent control is a bad idea, they don’t have to pass an ordinance. They don’t have to do anything.”

Realistically, Guzzardi doesn’t expect HB2430 to make much progress in the legislature this year, but says that a hearing on it will hopefully take place in the spring. ( JB Pritzker and Daniel Biss, two Democratic candidates for governor, have publicly announced their support for HB2430.)

Locally, LTB has found more success.

In the March 20 election, precincts in ten different wards, seven of them on the South Side, will have a referendum item on rent control.

On January 31, during the Thompson Center protest, activists from LTB took out blankets and sleeping bags, a gesture aimed at demonstrating the upcoming danger to working-class Chicagoans if rents continue to rise. Their speeches and chants echoed around the Thompson Center for a long, long time, attracting a sizable crowd.

But this sentiment wasn’t shared by the state officials working in the building, who never came down to meet the protestors, nor was it shared by Governor Rauner, who, with his entire office, was away in Springfield giving his State of the State speech. The action ended when protestors gave their letter of demands to the receptionist at the governor’s office.

There are a thousand alternatives to rent control, claim the real estate industry. There are a thousand ways to do rent control, claim the activists. Yet there’s one fact about Chicago—low-income families’ need affordable housing, especially on the South Side.

“What we’re seeing is rapid changes in the last ten years in terms of growing inequality,” said Smith. “We’ve lost the middle class. We have so few families with children under the age of eighteen. And given all the other things that are happening, the fundamental question is: who will be able to live in Chicago now and in the future?” ¬

EVICTION

Know Your Rights: Eviction Answers to common questions from renters facing eviction

BY YUNHAN WEN

E

viction is bad enough by itself—what’s worse is losing your bearings in the complicated legal process. For this year’s Housing Issue, the Weekly has put together a list of questions designed to help renters understand the eviction process and inform renters of their legally protected rights. Our aim is to help renters make informed decisions and avoid harms that could be prevented. But remember: this guide isn’t a substitute for legal advice. It’s important that tenants facing eviction seek legal help. Some useful contacts can be found in the cut-out sheet at the end of this article.

Have I received proper service of termination notices?

According to Illinois law, landlords have to give renters a written termination notice before filing an eviction case against tenants. This gives renters a notice period between five and ninety days—depending on the type of infraction—before a case is actually filed. In some cases (nonpayment of rent and lease violations) this notice period is the last chance for renters to fix problems with their landlords so that eviction can be avoided.

This is the very first step of the entire legal process. If you are not given a written termination notice before the case is filed, or the case is filed before the end of the notice period, this can be part of your defense in court.

Have I received proper service of court summons and court complaints?

When the case is filed in the court, a summons and a complaint will be served to the renter by a sheriff or a third party (such as a process server). They cannot be served by the landlord and need to be either hand-delivered to the renter (the defendant) or given to someone living at the renter’s place who is at least thirteen years old. If both methods fail, the court can send the papers by publishing them in a court-designated newspaper. Not only should the renter make sure the papers are delivered, but that they were delivered

properly. If you were not properly served your papers, you can use it to your advantage by challenging “service” in the court to reverse any orders that have been entered by the court.

operates on a first-come-first-serve basis with no phone numbers and appointments available.

What can I do when the case is called and the trial begins?

What can I do before the trial date?

If the landlord has violated your renters’ rights (for more, see the Weekly’s previous know-your-rights article on renters’ rights), you should gather materials to prove such a violation. Violations of renters’ rights include, but are not limited to, failing to provide essential services such as heat and hot water or failing to exterminate pests and rodents.

If due process is violated in any of the ways listed in previous questions, you should provide evidence of that, too.

To gather evidence, both parties have the right to pre-trial discovery, a process that allows them to submit written questions and request documents.

Before the first trial date, you can also request a trial by jury by filing an “Appearance and Jury Demand.” A waivable fee is asked for requesting a trial by jury. If you don’t have enough time before the first trial date to file the request, you can ask for a “continuance” from the judge when the case is called (when the clerk calls your name in the courtroom on the trial date). A continuance postpones the trial date.

What if I can’t make it to the trial or I’m not in the courtroom when the case is called?

It is highly inadvisable for the renter to be absent. In this case, the judge will usually announce a default “Order for Possession,” which is an eviction order.

Speak with the clerk as soon as possible to find out what happened. It is possible to have the order reversed by filing a “Motion to Vacate.” There will be a help desk (Municipal Court Advice Desk) in the Daley Center that the renter should visit as soon as possible—the help desk

When the case is called, you can: (1) ask for a continuance or (2) ask for mediation services. For the latter case, both the landlord and the tenant must agree that mediation should take place.

A continuance will give you more time to find an attorney, gather more evidence, or request a trial by jury.

However, it is completely up to the judge whether this continuance will be given.

You can also ask for mediation services, in which case the court will provide you with a mediator—a neutral party that will facilitate a negotiation between you and the landlord for a potential agreement or settlement.

When the actual trial begins, you should present your defense with accompanying evidence. Keep it short, succinct, and strictly factual.

A trial for eviction cases ends within a few minutes. If you do not have an attorney, state the most powerful facts that are to your advantage.

What kind of decisions will I get out of the trial?

Judgments Judgments occur when the judge decides that one side loses while the other wins.

Judgments are written into a court order and become part of the public record.

It is paramount for renters, especially renters who don’t have attorneys, to review the court order, since it is very common that the court order is written by the landlord’s attorney or filled out by them using blank court forms issued by the court.

Order for Possession (Eviction Order) An Order for Possession is a judgment against the renter that will leave a public

record. Judges will often grant a “stay,” which is a short period of time during which renters must move themselves.

After the stay period, the sheriff can remove the renter from the property. If you have special needs that need to be accommodated, you can contact the Sheriff’s social workers.

Agreed Order for Possession An agreed Order for Possession has the same legal ramifications: the renter will be moved, and there will be a public record indicating that the renter lost the case.

Settlements (Agreed Order) If the renter and the landlord can agree on a solution to settle the conflict, they can ask the judge to make their agreement a court order. That’s why settlements are also called agreed orders. It’s usually better for renters to settle with their landlords, since it’s often difficult to win an eviction case against them. Settlements can prevent eviction cases from making it to the renter’s public record, though renters should also ask landlords to seal the eviction file as part of the settlement.

Agreed Move‑Out and Compliance Status This is a type of agreed order that sets up a move-out date and a follow-up court date. Should the renter fail to move out before the set move-out date, the court will be reactivated and an Order for Possession will be issued. Agreed MoveOut and Compliance Status will not leave a mark on public records. (Again, tenants should ask landlords to seal the eviction file as part of the settlement.) If the renter has to move, this is usually the best option.

Dismissal with Leave to Reinstate This is another agreed order that dismisses the case but reserves option for both parties to reinstate the case, should either party violate the agreement between them.

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EVICTION

Pay-and-Stay Agreement This is an agreed order that allows the renter to stay in the rental unit as long as the rent owed is paid, which will be done so according to a payment plan negotiated between the landlord and the renter. It’s important to devise a realistic payment plan when renters consider this option.

How will I get evicted?

If an Order for Possession or a similar decision has been made by the court, eviction can occur as soon as twenty-four hours after the order reaches the Sheriff’s Office.

Tenants are not provided with the specific date and time due to officer safety concerns. Consequently, if you have an Order for Possession, it’s best to contact an organization that can help you relocate as soon as possible. Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign, the Social Services Department at the Sheriff’s Office, and the Metropolitan Tenants Organization all provide such services.

On the day of eviction, officers from the Sheriff’s office will knock and announce their purpose. They are authorized to forcibly enforce the order if no one answers.

Sheriffs will ask you to confirm which possessions in the apartment you wish to take with you, but are ultimately not responsible for securing your personal property from damage—it is important that you don’t leave anything important behind.

When the temperature is below fifteen degrees, eviction will be rescheduled. Eviction usually does not take place between Christmas and New Year’s Day, but most upto-date information should be sought on the Sheriff’s website. ¬

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RESOURCES FOR CHICAGO RENTERS

JUNCTURES

A Shelter, Fallen Out of Favor KIRAN MISRA

A Cold War legacy in the basement of a 55th Street firehouse

BY GIORGI TSINTSADZE

N

othing in the facade of the fire station at the intersection of 55th and University Avenue betrays the location, underneath the firehouse, of a Cold War–era bomb shelter. All functioning bomb shelters are alike, but each decommissioned shelter was decommissioned in its own way.

This one turned into a gym.

You can access it via two sets of stairs, one on each side of the firetruck garage. The staircase is lined with white square tiles that make it feel like a tunnel to an underground swimming pool. Halfway down the stairs, a door opens to a mini basketball court with just one hoop. The temperature drops noticeably as you descend. At the bottom, through the frame where a heavy metal door once stood, is a spacious rectangular compartment filled with sepulchral silver light.

The basement has the shape and proportions of a capital U and is equipped

with a special telephone line. Unused office furniture, cardboard boxes, and extra pieces of firefighting gear are stored in smaller rooms on one side of the hallway. Parts of a complicated air ventilation system, which would have filtered contaminated, post– nuclear event air, pop up here and there: a low shaft along the wall, multiple grates, and lots of tubing. The inner part of the U contains a courtyard of sorts—a small open chamber used for draining the water from the fire engine above it.

Fallout shelters were designed to house as many occupants as possible. Before this one was decommissioned, its two compartments would have resembled army barracks.

Much of the space not taken up by beds would have been used for storing supplies.

Government nutritionists determined that that crackers would be the best way to stock large amounts of durable calories, so they came packed in boxes weighing a standard

forty pounds bearing the unappetizing logo of the Office of Civil Defense. First aid kits and essential medicine came in special boxes that were stored in the darkest, driest corners of the shelter. It would have also been equipped with particle detectors to measure background radiation.

A motley assortment of workout gear now occupies most of the airy room. There’s a single narrow path between various bits of equipment, past bench presses inclined at various angles, racks, pulleys and pullup bars. A heavy bag is suspended over a training mat on the far side. There’s even an indoor pop-up golf unit set up around the corner. If music is playing, its echo is deep and dull as it reverberates against the thick concrete walls.

The fallout shelter is not the only Cold War remnant in Hyde Park.

Only a short walk from the fire station, on the UofC campus, Enrico Fermi carried

out the first ever sustained artificial nuclear chain reaction on December 2, 1942, ushering in the nuclear age. Today, Henry Moore’s sculpture Nuclear Energy stands to mark the location of Fermi’s discovery and to commemorate the event in all its multiple ambiguities.

At a distance, the sculpture’s shape is hard to make out. A closer look reveals a globe, suspended on thick, curvy columns.

Get even closer and the shapeshifting monument starts to look like a mushroom cloud frozen in time. At a certain angle, it takes the shape of a hollowed-out skull.

The brown of the bronze, seen against the overcast sky, takes on a crimson hue.

The parts of Jackson Park that protrude into Lake Michigan were once part of an air defense system. Parts of the park’s Promontory Point were fenced in, and inside, three radar towers stood side by side with globular radars on top. They monitored the sky above Chicago and were supposed to guide Nike missiles towards an incoming warhead. In the southern part of the park, near the triangular ledge, the remnants of the abandoned underground silos, where missiles were kept in peacetime, are still visible.

By the late 1960s, Nike missiles were considered too slow to counteract newer, more advanced warheads that were harder to detect and intercept. The Department of Defense began decommissioning them around the country, including the ones on the South Side. By 1971 the radar towers were torn down.

By then, public fallout shelters were being decommissioned too. Civil defense had always been a touchy subject, controversial in both its conception and its execution. The initial spending boom had come during the Kennedy administration, when the possibility of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union became much more real.

Throughout the Cold War era, the Office of Civil Defense was tasked with preparing the nation for the worst. It duly compiled reports, conducted assessments, and articulated scenarios that spelled out the myriad ways nuclear war might threaten the United States. For some time, in the planning race of the early sixties, shelters seemed like a way to move from the grim, dichotomous mantra of the time, “Better Dead Than Red,” to the much more palatable “Neither Dead Nor Red,” as political scientist Andrew Grossman put it.

But optimism faded once the public got FEBRUARY 7, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

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a taste of what shelters actually were. The disparity between the risk—an H-bomb falling in your district, firestorm and fallout as far as the eye can see—and the supposed protection against it, government issued crackers and a barn repurposed as a shelter with an extra layer of wood, was hard to ignore.

Large industrial cities like Chicago, expecting to be in the direct line of fire, had to worry about the blast before they planned for the fallout. On August 23, 1961, the Tribune ran a story explaining what would happen if an atom bomb were dropped on the Loop. “If a ten megaton bomb struck at State and Madison streets,” the first paragraph reads, “It would leave a crater 200 feet deep and a half mile wide. The crater would run as far north as Lake street, as far south as Jackson boulevard, as far east as the Illinois Central railroad tracks, and as far west as La Salle street.” Within the fourmile area only those in shelters a thousand feet underground would survive.

Civil defense officials turned to the only possible way to survive nuclear bombing in Chicago—not to be in there when it happened—and tried to spin it as a strategy.

The evacuation plan envisioned a quick and total exodus of Chicago’s population to the nearby suburbs. Not only did the plan necessitate ample warning time before the detonations, an obvious impossibility, it also required the availability and effective allocation of food and shelter to temporarily house and feed millions of fleeing residents in the suburbs.

With most questions left unanswered, and largely ignoring the question of protection from the nuclear explosion itself, Chicago began the weary work of repurposing basements and sheds and barns as fallout shelters. The city lifted the ban on the construction of personal shelters in late 1961, hoping that more prudent residents would willingly carry some of the burden.

The Office of Civil Defense surveyed public buildings like schools and churches to find facilities that could be reinforced as cheaply as possible.

It is likely that the basement of the fire station on 55th was discovered during one such survey of the South Side sometime in the early 1960s. Now that the basement has gone full circle, it’s a testament to how civil defense plans were designed that neither the date of its initial designation nor of its eventual decommissioning can be recovered.

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KIRAN MISRA

Fallout shelters are much less complex than blast shelters; the latter must withstand the detonation of megatons of nuclear power while the former needs only to keep nuclear fallout out. As a result, designations often changed overnight and shelters cropped up like mushrooms to meet capacity quotas.

Funding slowly trickled in for stocking essentials and infrastructural upgrades.

Shelter space was always limited and its allocation unequal. While most fallout shelters were little more than wellstocked basements with marginally thicker walls, taxpayer money also paid for ultrasecure, almost lavish shelters reserved for elites in the government and military. For example, O’Hare Inn had a shelter with a capacity of five hundred guests for itinerant businessmen. The distribution of shelters often seemed to be guided not by strategy and tactics but by privilege and triage.

Most fallout shelters, even if well maintained, have a short lifespan. Ever advancing weaponry, such as newer and more sophisticated nuclear warheads and hydrogen bombs with ever-increasing

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destructive power, created an evolutionary arms race between bombs and defense infrastructure. For the United States to have a viable civil defense infrastructure, it had to be building and upgrading shelters nearly constantly. The impossibility of such an undertaking, as well as mobilized opposition, both within the government and among the general public, led to the abandonment of ambitious civil defense plans. It left behind a graveyard of shelters and anti-aircraft infrastructure, both of which can be found on the South Side.

If the radars at Promontory Point and around the country had detected incoming warheads, they would have automatically triggered an emergency alert system that Chicagoans would have heard on the street, over the radio, and on TV. Those lucky enough to have access to blast shelters would have headed to in the nearest one. Those with family shelters would have gathered their families and braced for impact. The more informed would have turned to fallout shelters they knew and hoped that the blast would happen far enough away. The

vast majority of citizens would have been unprepared or unable to locate or reach a shelter.

The shelter on 55th would likely have been overcrowded within minutes. The two chambers would have resembled an overflowing emergency room in a field hospital. The storage rooms along the hallway would have been filled to the brim with supplies. Government-issued guidebooks would have informed the occupants on how to measure background radiation, allocate portions of food and water, and communicate with the world outside.

The exact capacity is hard to estimate, but shelters of this size were expected to house more than two hundred for up to a week. But despite the stream of pamphlets and communications offering tidy solutions to unthinkable breakdowns of order, the one question that was never satisfactorily answered, what was to be done if more people showed up than the shelter could have housed. ¬

HOME HISTORIES

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HOME HISTORIES

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Who Pulls the Strings on the PLUC? Pilsen’s Land Use Committee draws heat for cozy relationship with its alderman

BY BRIDGET NEWSHAM

“T

hey don’t want to give agendas to the community. They don’t want to give us anything,” reflected Anderson Chávez, a youth organizer with the Pilsen Alliance. The “they” Chávez was referring is the Pilsen Land Use Committee (PLUC), an advisory committee set up by Alderman Daniel Solis (25th) to advise him on large-scale developments seeking a home in Pilsen. PLUC is intended to represent the community voice in decision making and uphold an only-in-Pilsen mandate of twenty-one percent affordable housing in all new developments over eight units. The committee is comprised of executives from four local nonprofits: The Resurrection Project, Alivio Medical Center, Eighteenth Street Development Corporation, and the Pilsen Neighbors Community Council.

Opponents see PLUC as an extension of Alderman Solis and largely a justification for the choices he makes in the community.

Over the past year, tensions between the community, Solis, and PLUC have been on the rise as Pilsen has become increasingly unaffordable and gentrified. According to Lauren Nolan, economic development planner at University of Illinois at Chicago, since 2000, after adjusting for inflation, rents in Pilsen have increased by twenty percent.

The community at large has lost over three million dollars in affordable housing—a loss many attribute to PLUC allowing developers to bypass the twenty-one percent affordable housing mandate in Pilsen by paying fines or providing other non-housing related benefits to the community.

For the past year, the Pilsen Alliance, a grassroots anti-gentrification group, has been organizing community members to demand transparency from PLUC and answers to their questions regarding how and why they

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have allowed developers to skate by without providing affordability to the community.

They have largely been ignored or blocked by the members of PLUC. Last month, the Pilsen Alliance’s Youth Committee held a meeting at the Rudy Lozano Public Library to discuss PLUC, what should be done to gain access to what they are doing, and what bylaws they follow. All members of PLUC—and Solis—were invited. None of them showed.

“We invited every single person who is a part of PLUC, and none of them are here,” said Karla Velasco, a youth organizer with the Pilsen Alliance, said during the meeting.

“We also invited Alderman Solis...he’s not here also...We want to have a discussion with you, we want to talk about what you are doing. We want to know what goes on in these meetings that you don’t want everyone to know about. So why are you not here? Do you not care about the community?”

T

he feud between PLUC, the Pilsen Alliance, and the community at large is not a new one—rather, it is an extension of a decades-long debate around transparency and accountability when it comes to development and gentrification in Pilsen. PLUC is in fact the third iteration of a fight started nearly two decades ago by the Pilsen Alliance and its allies over open community meetings around zoning, development, and what a “successful” community looks like.

In the early 2000s, Pilsen was ripe for development at the height of the real estate boom. Single family homes were being demolished in favor of upscale condominiums, warehouses were becoming lofts, and long-term residents were being pushed out due to rent and tax increases.

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ELLEN HAO

POLITICS

Solis, a political insider who in 1996 was appointed alderman by then-Mayor Richard M. Daley even though he didn’t live in the ward, was at the forefront of this trend.

He pushed for construction of large-scale development projects such as a 130 one- and two-bedroom condominium building, and designating much of the neighborhood as a tax increment financing district (TIF) for large projects involving industrial buildings.

His intentions, according to many activists and housing organizers, were very clearly to transform Pilsen from the perceived “blighted” community some saw it as to a bustling neighborhood akin to Wicker Park.

In March 2004, after years of conflict with Solis over his decision-making, a coalition of over twenty neighborhood groups and hundreds of Pilsen residents passed a sweeping yet non-binding referendum, requiring public input before any large developments or changes could be approved for construction. The referendum, called “Pilsen Is Not For Sale,” passed with over ninety-five percent of the community voting in favor, demonstrating the escalating tensions between the community and Solis.

When asked about the substantial win for the community, and his take on the referendum, Solis told the Tribune, “The referendum is almost like, ‘should mothers take care of their children?’ The answer to that is yes.” A response like this assumes two things from Solis: that he had already been functioning in a transparent way with the community, and that going forward he would be in compliance with the new policy. Both of these assumptions, according to residents and activists, have proven false. Solis, for his part, did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Resulting from the successful referendum, community members and local nonprofits established a nineteenmember Pilsen Community Zoning Board (PCZB) to field development proposals.

The board was comprised of members from the Pilsen Alliance; Alivio Medical Center, a free neighborhood clinic; The Resurrection Project (TRP), a developer of affordable housing; the longstanding Pilsen Neighbors Community Council (PNCC); the Eighteenth Street Development Corporation (ESDC); social services

nonprofit Mujeres Latinas en Acción; community art studio Pros Arts (now known as EleVarte); environmental justice nonprofit the Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization (PERRO); and a handful of individual community members.

“We originally wanted this to be a board that would actually be somewhat binding, that we would review these proposals and that we would actually be able to veto them if we needed to,” said longtime PERRO organizer Jerry Mead-Mead-Lucero, who worked on the referendum campaign and served as a member of the original shortlived board. “That was of course a nonstarter [with Solis], and so what we ended up with was this advisory board, but at least it was a step forward—we thought at least, if we made it clear to the alderman that there was going to be a big community fight behind one of these proposals, that would be something worthwhile, and at least we’d have the information about what was happening so that we could organize around it.”

However, the Zoning Board started unraveling almost immediately. The first case the group was presented with was a conflict happening over what was to be known as the “Chantico Lofts,” one of the largest condominium proposals at the time in Pilsen. Those in opposition feared that, if approved, Chantico Lofts would “open the floodgates to more high-priced housing,” the Tribune reported at the time. According to a 2010 article written by DePaul University geography professors Euan Hague and Carrie Breitbach—who were involved in the “Pilsen is Not for Sale” campaign—the PCZB was divided, with real estate groups such as ESDC and TRP speaking in favor of the development, and more grassroots groups such as the Pilsen Alliance and PERRO condemning the projects as a force of gentrification and displacement in the community.

The disagreement between the activist groups and the developer came to a head at a public meeting held to discuss the proposal. At this meeting, PCZB members in opposition to the development publicly called out the developer for failing to consider affordability and greenspace in its plan, two issues that had been discussed at

length in prior meetings and demands.

“We had all these tough questions for him,” said Victoria Romero, a former board member of the Pilsen Alliance and a member of the Community Zoning Board. “When we started opposing the development, the alderman stated publicly at the meeting that he would no longer support us...he said we had made a mockery of the developer.”

Shortly after, Solis approved Chantico Lofts without community support and officially disbanded the PCZB. In place of the group, Solis created the Pilsen Planning Committee (PPC), which consisted of all members from PCZB who were in favor of Chantico Lofts—PNCC, ESDC, TRP, and the Alivio Medical Center. Ousted members “received letters stating the new group was to be more ‘objective’ and ‘professional’ than its predecessor,” according to Hague and Breitbach, leaving no opportunity for former members to join PPC and further contribute to the conversation around development. “The alderman went in and kind of just changed it over to people that were friendly to him,” Mead-Lucero said.

“As far as I’m concerned, that was basically the end of the effort. From that point on, it was just a rubber stamp for the alderman, and it wasn’t really going to make much of a difference.”

Maria Balderas, a longtime Pilsen resident and unaffiliated “concerned community member” who was part of the referendum campaign and a member of the PCZB, said that, after the PCZB advocated for what Solis thought was excessive oversight, “those of us who advocated for this body and for this advisory board, we were literally kicked out.”

F

ollowing the disbanding of PCZB, a series of high-profile public disagreements between community leaders, Solis, and the PPC regarding large developments in the community played out in Pilsen. The most significant battle was fought over a proposed 387-condominium building sitting at the corner of 18th and Peoria—a lot many will recognize still stands vacant today—then called Centro18. Much like the Chantico Lofts, Centro18 was thought to be a catalyst for gentrification in the community, as even the

units deemed ”affordable” were well outside the price range or size most Pilsen residents could afford or needed, and the “greenspace” was better suited to singles looking to jog rather than for families to play on. Worse still, Solis’s office and the city had extended the boundaries of the TIF district to include the lot so as to capture the property taxes from the development, the Reader reported in 2005.

After a series of protests led by the Pilsen Alliance and other community members calling for more consideration into how this development would affecting the existing community, “the Alderman’s office, and...the organizations that had founded the PPC following the PCZB split spoke out in favor of the proposals,” DePaul geographers Hague and Breitbach wrote, all but flat-out ignoring the pleas of the community to reconsider the consequences the development may have on the longevity of the existing community. The development was approved, but it was soon revealed that the developer of Centro18 had made about $19,000 in donations to Solis’s ward organization between 2006 and 2007.

After the approval of Centro18, and the demolition of a massive wholesale fruit distribution factory and several single-family homes on the site, the economy tanked. The project was never realized—leaving the twoblock vacant lot still visible today.

What is meaningful about the Centro18 as it pertains to PPC is that it was the first large-scale development project proposed after the disbanding of PCZB, and PPC’s first opportunity to weigh in as the “community voice” and prove their autonomy from Solis. Acknowledging that Solis likely approved this development largely because of the campaign contributions—or potential for them—and that PPC did seemingly nothing to persuade him otherwise, activists believe the decision was made entirely by Solis, with PPC serving as a mere show of approval rather than a legitimate advisor.

According to former PCZB members, PPC made no public statements during this time regarding why they decided in favor of Centro18—just that they were in agreement with Solis.

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I

n 2006, the PPC elevated their role in the decision making process by designating its members as the governing body for a new affordable housing policy in Pilsen. Two new guidelines were established for housing development in Pilsen in the 2006 Quality of Life Plan, a joint effort by the PPC and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation.

Going forward, all new developments of a certain size were required to have twentyone percent of units set aside for families earning sixty to eighty-five percent of the Chicago-area median income, and a new group known as the Pilsen Land Use Committee (PLUC) was to oversee it.

The document says that “some of the members of the Pilsen Planning Committee have formed the Pilsen Land Use Committee, which is working with Solis to incorporate affordable housing into new developments.” However, the PPC and PLUC have identical membership.

Much like its predecessor, PLUC has been consistently secretive about how closely it aligns with Solis, what projects it consults on, and how it determines its final decisions. Based on projects approved and completed since its creation, it would appear there is a great deal of discussion happening behind the scenes. After several requests for an interview, a spokesperson for PLUC and the Resurrection Project told the Weekly that PLUC members had “informed [him] they are working on compiling a report of their findings and what they have been working on for the last year set to be released the first week in January. Until then, they are unable to give any interviews to the public or the media.” PLUC has not published any reports in 2018—or ever.

In 2016, PLUC made what is likely its most controversial decision to date: the approval of the development of a new ninety-nine-unit condominium building at 1414 W. 21st St. While the size of this building certainly falls within the mandate for twenty-one percent affordable housing, PLUC agreed to the standard citywide ten percent requirement for this project.

Their rationale for agreeing to halve the neighborhood’s affordable housing requirement was that the developer provided a “substantial and comparable community benefit...[to] the neighborhood,” in the form of a one-acre addition to the field at

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Benito Juarez High School.

However, according to emails requested by the Pilsen Alliance from the city and later obtained by the Weekly, at the time their approval of PLUC members seemed to be unaware of what the pricing would be for the units in the building. They asked the developer to let them know what rents it would set—a full five months after the zoning change for the property had been approved by City Council. It is unlikely PLUC would have been able to conduct a substantial analysis to determine what could be an “equivalent” community benefit, if the pricing and how that would impact the community had yet to be released. This small insight into PLUC’s decision-making process highlights their lack of commitment to the decree put in place by members themselves and the uncertainty behind their motivations.

The secrecy behind PLUC approving this project leaves many in the community feeling uneasy as to what new development will come to their community and how this will impact their lives. Following the critiques of their decision, PLUC released a statement in January 2017 saying they would “soon be opening up the process to more residents and organizations in order to have a completely transparent and inclusive process that will allow us to have a successful project after years of proposals that did not satisfy the community’s needs.” No “opening” of “the process” has occurred since, even though PLUC chairman Raul Raymundo asserted the necessity of transparency in a 2016 blog post defending the PLUC. “The misinformation by groups pretending to represent community interest when it’s politically expedient and incomplete reporting by news outlets can leave the public with a distorted view and misunderstanding about the true nature of PLUC’s work to preserve balanced development in the community,” he wrote.

“What’s more dangerous than gentrification is the dissemination of incomplete or even inaccurate information that benefits particular agendas but not the community as a whole. It’s the responsibility of everyone in the community to engage in the conversation with nothing less than all the facts and leave the formation of opinions and conclusions to its informed citizenry.”

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The 18th and Peoria vacant lot has remained a flashpoint for gentrification in the neighborhood since Centro18 fell through, and it exemplifies PLUC’s lack of transparency. After Centro18 fell through, the land was bought in 2013 by the Midwest Jesuits, an order that runs Loyola University Chicago. The order originally planned to build housing for clergy on the site; by 2015, however, it had agreed to lease the land to a luxury developer, Property Markets Group (PMG), which intended to build a 500-unit development that was swiftly shot down by Solis and PLUC members.

After PMG came back with a second, slightly smaller proposal, called “ParkWorks,” which did not have all of its required affordable housing on-site, Solis—the head of City Council’s Zoning Committee with wide power over approving zoning changes—shifted the zoning of the site back to manufacturing to prevent anything residential from being built.

PLUC members were vocal about their opposition to the project, giving PMG’s lead developer on the site, Noah Gottlieb, a timely nickname: “Trump Jr.” Undeterred, PMG bought the land from the Midwest Jesuits in 2016 and began holding community meetings to build support, which were protested by the Pilsen Alliance. Last October, members of the Pilsen Alliance crashed a meeting of PLUC at the Alivio Medical Center and found Gottlieb discussing the development with PLUC before being kicked out by security.

The Pilsen Alliance viewed this as a betrayal, writing on its website a week later that it was “one of the most shameful and authoritarian acts this appointed committee has made in its thirteen years of existence.”

Based on the available evidence, many activists and Pilsen residents believe— based on how the group was formed and its members’ close alliances with Solis—that much of its decision-making is a direct result of the wishes of Solis himself. “They are beholden to the alderman that has proved time and time again he is uninterested in working with the community,” Victoria Romero said. “All members of that group need aldermanic approval for their most important programs. The Resurrection Project needs Solis to approve any zoning changes for upcoming developments, Pilsen

Neighbors needs permits for their largest festival of the year, Fiesta Del Sol. Without Solis’s grace, they are paralyzed.”

Mead-Lucero, the former PERRO organizer who now lives in Southern California, made similar points. “I don’t mean to coldly badmouth them, they do some really great work—TRP does tremendous work on providing affordable housing in the community, and so on—but they’re organizations that are tied to the alderman, ultimately, for funding streams and those kind of things, and they will only go so far to challenge the alderman,” he said.

Pilsen residents have proven their commitment time and time again to forcing the hand of Solis and whatever group he uses at the time as a facade for community opinion, though they have consistently come up against a wall. What will it take for Solis to back down and open the process for community involvement? In an interview with the Weekly, Dick Simpson, a political science professor at UIC and former progressive alderman of the 44th Ward—where he pioneered communityled zoning processes—summarized the struggle: “If decisions get made without community input or major disapproval, you are going to have continual conflict in the community. If the decision process is open and transparent and they feel they have been heard, they are normally satisfied. An open and participatory process in any major decisions affecting the community is critical to trust in a community.”

Mead-Lucero lamented the way that the original zoning group had allowed itself to be split. “I do like [PLUC chairman and TRP executive director] Raul Raymundo, I was very close with and love [Alivio Medical Center founder] Carmen Velásquez,” he said. “I respect all those organizations in many ways, but I’m always very honest about my appraisal, and I do feel that they let the alderman basically co-opt that zoning board, [and] it became pretty much useless after that. It’s a shame. If we had remained united around it, we could have made more of a difference.” Sam Stecklow contributed reporting.

HOME HISTORIES

HOME HISTORIES

The Gwendolyn Brooks House

BY ABIGAIL BAZIN

T

ucked away on a quiet residential street in Greater Grand Crossing, an unassuming house boasts a rich legacy. From 1953 to 1994, the house located at 7428 South Evans Avenue was home to none other than Gwendolyn Brooks, the Topeka-born, South Side-raised poet, author, and teacher. Built in 1890, today the house remains modest but well-kept by its current owner. Its one-and-a-half story gray and white exterior is a welcome change among the predominantly brick two-story houses surrounding it. Though the house is far from flashy, a closer look reveals endearing details, such as the delicate white latticework tucked below its welcoming veranda. Its simple structure is transformed into something truly remarkable when one imagines the world of creative expression it held for the four decades that Brooks lived there—and what it took to get there.

Born on June 7, 1917 in Topeka, Kansas, Brooks moved to Chicago with her family shortly after her birth. Chicago remained her home for the rest of her life and she took great pride in the city: in a 1994 interview, she said, “I am an organic Chicagoan. Living there has given me a multiplicity of characters to aspire for. I hope to live there for the rest of my days.

That’s my headquarters.” However, life in Chicago did not always come easy for Brooks and her family. They arrived in the city as part of the Great Migration, when segregation and racist housing policies constricted Black homeowners, excluding them from white neighborhoods and exploiting their basic need for a place to live.

As adults, Brooks and her husband

ELLIE MEJÍA

faced many of the same obstacles tackled by their parents. Gwendolyn’s housing troubles, however, coincided with her rise to literary prominence. Upon publishing her first book of poetry in 1945, Brooks became widely recognized as one of America’s foremost poets for her simple but powerful depictions of the lives of the urban poor on Chicago’s South Side. In 1950, she became the first Black Pulitzer Prize winner for her second collection Annie Allen. Later, she would become the Poet Laureate of Illinois and the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. But not even consistent recognition from a predominantly white literary world would protect Brooks from the same housing discrimination faced by all Black people in Chicago at the time.

Early in their marriage, Brooks and her husband bounced around the South Side, financial woes and hard times making it difficult to stay in any one place for long. They moved six times, including brief stays in a one-room apartment, a converted garage, and several kitchenette buildings, before landing on South Wentworth Avenue. There, Brooks and her family lived in a large housing project called Princeton Park Homes. Since renamed Ivy Park Homes, the development occupies eighty acres of land between 91st and 95th Street, just west of the Dan Ryan. It was here, in a project built in the 1940s to house poor Black workers and their families, that Brooks made history by becoming the first Black winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

In a 1986 interview with the Library of Congress, Brooks described the night she found out about the good news. She

received a phone call from a reporter and she and her nine-year-old son celebrated in the dark—they hadn’t paid their electricity bill.

She recalls being “absolutely petrified” when photographers and reporters came the next day, knowing they would discover her secret when they tried to plug in their equipment.

However, someone—she never found out who—paid her bill just in time and she was saved from embarrassment.

For most, the image of a Pulitzer Prize winner living in the projects, unable to pay her electricity bill, falls somewhere in the realm between surprising and downright unbelievable. However, in reality, Brooks’s fraught housing history is inseparable from her work. Brooks’s poetry is an honest depiction of the world she knew growing up and struggled to settle down in. In collections like A Street in Bronzeville, she devotes herself to understated yet evocative portraits of individuals struggling in impoverished neighborhoods. Rather than explicitly tackling large-scale issues like racism and poverty, she lets her stories tell themselves, subtly reflecting the oppression woven inextricably in her characters’ lives. Housing, of course, serves as the inevitable backdrop for these stories.

Brooks settled down at last in 1953 when she used the profits from the sale of a later Kalamazoo, Michigan home to purchase the house on South Evans Avenue for $8,000. Even there, however, life was not always smooth sailing, and Brooks and her husband were often in danger of losing the house to foreclosure. In America Magazine, Brooks’s daughter Nora Brooks Blakely

recalls growing up in the Greater Grand Crossing home: “I was eating far more beans and chicken wings than I would have liked.

When my mother wrote about people in tight circumstances, she was living it.”

Despite ongoing hardships, Brooks wrote and published much of her most famous work, including the collections In the Mecca and The Bean Eaters, within the house’s white doors. In 1994, after over forty years, she moved out. Brooks passed away six years later on December 3, 2000. Today, the house serves as a testament to Brooks’s ongoing legacy. It was designated a Chicago landmark ten years after her death, ensuring both symbolic recognition and concrete protection. Just last year, the nation celebrated the Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial for what would have been her one-hundredth year. To this day, students and poetry fans alike travel to the quiet street to gaze up at the little gray-and-white house, their humble respect a testament to the continuing impact of the work written there.

One of Brooks’s most powerful poems is called “kitchenette building,” named after the style of cramped housing frequently endured by poor Chicagoans, including Brooks herself, in the Black Belt. In the poem, Brooks laments the struggle of a dream to rise above the fumes of fried potatoes and yesterday’s garbage. In the end, the dream loses out, its lofty nature no match for the concrete realities that come with poverty.

Luckily, Brooks’s dreams, unlike those of many like her, made it out—and the world is better for it. ¬

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The Personal Histories of Public Housing Ben Austen’s detailed history shows the story of Cabrini-Green is as relevant as ever

BY ADAM PRZYBYL

I

n 2010, when the last families were moving out of Cabrini-Green and the last tower was being prepared for demolition, Ben Austen, a magazine writer and South Side native, began researching this end of an era for a Harper’s article. In a recent interview with the Weekly, Austen reflected that the more he dug in, he realized that this was “not just an important Chicago story but one of the most important Chicago stories...the whole history of the city exists within it.” Seven years and hundreds of interviews later, Austen would document that history in a deeper way with High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing.

The title calls for some clarification: High-Risers is more a biography of one prominent housing project than a study of American public housing more broadly.

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Cabrini-Green’s uniqueness in the public housing landscape—its enclosure within areas of white affluence, its notoriety in the American imagination—suggests that the fate of American public housing can’t be told through the story of Cabrini-Green alone. Yet while Austen mentions other public housing projects only in passing, he ties the history of Cabrini-Green to broad economic, political, and social trends that played a pivotal role in the creation and undoing not only of Cabrini-Green, but also of much of America’s public housing. By looking at how deindustrialization, acts of Congress, and popular perceptions of public housing affected Cabrini-Green, Austen hints at a history of all public housing.

Austen’s narrative starts with the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA)’s 1950 appraisal of ‘Little Hell,’ the mostly Italian

slum on the Near North Side. The housing situation there was borderline catastrophic, featuring cramped houses, often two to a lot, with many lacking showers and private toilets and almost all relying on coal stoves for heat. As “landlords overcharged for their firetraps,” the area suffered from higher incidences of infant mortality, sickness, and crime than the rest of the city.

The CHA considered it its duty to remedy the situation. Austen gives us some context for why the CHA built large highrises. “‘If it is not bold,’” said Elizabeth Wood, the then-head of the CHA, “‘the result will be a series of small projects, islands in a wilderness of slums beaten down by smoke, noise, and fumes.’” Lawrence Amstadter, one of the architects, would later reflect, “ ‘We thought we were playing God in those days…We thought we were

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doing a great thing, doing a lot of innovative design things.’ ” A half-century later, the rhetoric would sound eerily similar as the CHA proposed to replace the high-rises it had built in the fifties and sixties—now symbols of public housing’s decline—with mixed-income developments and Section 8 housing vouchers. Julia Stasch, who was in charge of seeing through the Plan for Transformation, as it was called, spoke of a “ ‘once-in-a-generation opportunity...to improve the lives of thousands of people.’ ” We are soon introduced to one of our main characters, Dolores Wilson. In the 1950s, she lived with her husband Hubert and her children in a divided basement unit on the South Side, one of the infamous ‘kitchenettes’ that later featured in the work of Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, and Gwendolyn Brooks. The place was unsafe—a man once tried breaking in through a window, and the threat of a deadly fire loomed over every moment. After a down payment on a South Side development fell through, Dolores started looking at public housing options.

An early moment illustrates how this history will be told. After considering and applying for apartments in older projects, like Ida B. Wells and Altgeld Gardens, “That’s when [Dolores] looked at Cabrini.

After its 1950 survey…the CHA razed the slum…demolishing the 2,325 units of substandard housing there; in their place, the agency erected fifteen separate towers that stood seven, ten, and nineteen stories tall, a total of 1,925 apartments.” Just like that, Austen sneaks in the sentences announcing the construction of the CabriniGreen high-rises into Dolores’s explorations of safe housing options for her family. By placing the stories of people at the forefront of the narrative, Austen invites us to bear witness history, not a lecture. He narrates how parents fought to improve conditions at overcrowded Jenner Elementary; how residents lobbied an unresponsive CHA to fix broken elevators and replace lights; and when Hubert started a drum and bugle corps called the Corsairs that practiced on the fields adjacent to the high-rises.

Austen carefully intersperses these stories with the conditions that shaped life at Cabrini-Green. At first, the criteria for being admitted to public housing were strict, initially prioritizing “working families with young dependents.”

“Very poor families, those who were unemployed, unstable, or unseemly—the

new public housing wasn’t intended for them,” Austen writes. “The subsidy wasn’t charity or humanitarian assistance; the developments were supposed to revitalize the slums, not replicate them.”

But as time went on, these requirements changed and demographic shifts—including Chicago’s declining population—influenced who was able and willing to live at Cabrini.

Congress passed laws that were, in theory, well-meaning, making it easier for people without reliable sources of income to get into public housing and making it harder for working families who could afford other options to remain. But the net effect, as Austen notes, is that people who paid rent left and were replaced by people on welfare who paid reduced amounts, cutting into the CHA’s finances. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development budget faced regular cuts.

Austen narrates the difficulties faced at Cabrini-Green—and by extension, other similar public housing projects— that contributed to its problems and played a role in its demise. Businesses and industries that had offered jobs to lowincome residents around Cabrini-Green moved elsewhere or closed down. Mothers on welfare had a financial incentive to avoid having partners live with them so as to continue receiving payments. CabriniGreen soon became a housing project isolated from the surrounding area by race and wealth, with fragmented families, badly in need of regular maintenance that the CHA couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for, and filled with children. On seventy acres of land, in the early sixties, there were 14,000 children for 6,000 adults.

We meet some of these children early on and they accompany us throughout the book. Kelvin Cannon was born and grew up in Cabrini, running around with the other kids and learning how to be and look tough.

Later he joined the Gangster Disciples and became the point man for his entire building.

J.R. Fleming, who grew up in the suburbs, had considered a football career. But after a summer spent in Cabrini, he discovered freedom—he drank, smoked, went out with girls, and forgot those aspirations. “It still felt to J.R. like everyone was either family or like family,” Austen writes.

Little moments from the lives of our characters bring them to life on the page.

When Hubert was arrested for a burglary he didn’t commit and spent several nights in jail, Dolores baked him cookies with tiny

“I love you” notes baked inside. On the first day of school, Kelvin couldn’t stop crying in front of the white teacher—“Although Kelvin had sprinted past countless white people on the streets of the Near North Side, he’d never before exchanged two consecutive sentences with one.” Annie Ricks, another main character who, along with her thirteen kids, was the last person to leave CabriniGreen in 2010, was made homeless in the late eighties when her house burned down.

She walked seven miles through the snow to Cabrini-Green and demanded to be given a vacant apartment. Eventually, the woman in the office, who had been unwilling to consider the unofficial request, acquiesced to Annie’s insistence.

But what comes across as exceptional in Austen’s storytelling is not so much the humanity of the residents—they were trying to make it, just like everyone else—but the inhumanity with which others treated Cabrini-Green. Already the projects were at a disadvantage simply for being what they were. An anecdote early on sums up the American attitude to public housing: “The architect Lawrence Amstadter had wanted to install metal numerals and letters, explaining that it would actually cost less to do so. But he was told the metal gave off the appearance of being pricier,” and so the addresses were painted above the front entrances.

The inhumanity and ignorance are most evident when Austen narrates how media outlets reported on the violence and deplorable conditions at Cabrini-Green.

In part due to its proximity to Chicago’s affluent downtown, the project gained outsized notoriety in the city and beyond for being poor, violent, and of course, Black. News outlets reported on the latest murders in grisly language—one CBS Evening News story called it “a public housing hell-hole of poverty and crime.”

Even crimes committed next to but outside of Cabrini-Green were reported as having occurred in the project. “‘If you stubbed your toe at Cabrini-Green, it was in the news,’ Dolores complained.”

City officials fared no better. When Mayor Daley announced his Plan for Transformation in 1999, the initiative meant to demolish the high-rises, he proclaimed he wanted to “rebuild their souls.” (‘What’s wrong with my soul?’ we might imagine a Cabrini resident asking.) Or when Mayor Jane Byrne took part in a political publicity stunt and stayed in a Cabrini apartment FEBRUARY 7, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

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for nearly three weeks, she called the project “ ‘a cancer that can spread to every neighborhood in the city.’”

While some residents played up the danger and grime—when Kelvin spent time in lockup, people reacted with respect when they learned he was from Cabrini—many spoke to the positives of living there. When Hubert passed away, Dolores was offered the option of taking a housing voucher and moving out to the suburbs. But she declined. “’I’m in the projects, but that’s my home. I love my home just like you love your home.’”

One of Annie Ricks’ kids, on that last day in 2010, tried to tell a reporter: “There was more good than bad.”

By juxtaposing residents’ stories with those of the media, Austen looks at the consistent failure of newspapers and television to accurately portray what was going on inside the projects. People outside of Cabrini-Green seemed more interested in creating and maintaining a certain image of the project than actually finding out what went on inside. “’What lifestyle is it that residents want to protect there anyway?’” reads one Tribune column, demonstrating both ignorance of and indifference to the answer.

Austen shies away from outright political analysis or commentary, but he often presents the history of CabriniGreen in such a way that invites subtle questions with no easy answers. When over a thousand homes on the West Side were burnt down in the wake of the 1968 riots in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the CHA sent more than a thousand people to vacant apartments at Cabrini-Green, unwittingly introducing gangs such as the Cobra Stones and the Gangster Disciples to a project that had had little to do with them. Drugs streamed in and the blacktop between high-rises became known as the “Killing Field” for the number of people shot from unseen snipers above.

What was the CHA to do besides give available homes to the people made homeless? “But it is one thing to operate a housing program and another to run an emergency shelter,” Austen notes. “At the very least, a sudden influx of homeless families required a boost in managers and services meant to assist them. Yet none of those things accompanied them to CabriniGreen.” Placing that responsibility on an organization that was already facing huge budget cuts and running inefficiently seems 22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ FEBRUARY 7, 2018

like its own kind of irresponsibility.

Austen paints a bleak picture of the CHA, the organization tasked with taking care of its public housing projects and people inside of them. Austen notes that the CHA was one of the most inefficient and poorly managed institutions in Chicago, but according to some HUD metrics, it was also considered one of the worst public housing agencies in the country even as its New York counterpart dealt with more than a hundred thousand more units units. Maintenance workers, sometimes appointed through the city’s mysterious patronage system, loafed on the job. The housing project went long stretches without adequate repairs until it landed in the media spotlight for whatever reason, at which point the city poured in to shore up security and evict squatters. Austen notes that during Byrne’s stay at Cabrini, “More work went on at the housing project in two weeks than had occurred in the previous two years.”

Sometimes the inefficiencies and indifference added up in personal ways, too.

Dolores was assured that on the day of her move from Cabrini-Green to a different housing project, she would be provided with boxes; but movers didn’t bring enough and ushered her out anyway. “Dolores cried as a lifetime of mementos went into the trash.

She lost every letter she ever received. She lost her wedding photos and pictures from her trips to Jamaica with Hubert.”

Then there are the forces that seemed to actively work against Cabrini-Green residents. Some police officers terrorized and brutalized Cabrini-Green residents with illegal searches and frequent arrests. Since at least the 70s, when the idea of demolishing the high rises was first given a platform by politicians, the threat of losing their homes to real estate developers who were already investing in the surrounding neighborhoods loomed over residents’ heads. In the nineties, those plans become more defined and the threat loomed larger.

Cabrini-Green fought back. Residents banded together to pressure the CHA into undergoing maintenance and demanded more funds from the city. Activists created the Coalition to Protect Public Housing and organized protests, and the city reacted by creating committees that included them in the process. But at the last minute, residents were shut out of the decision-making process, and their requests—carefully negotiated over many months and years—

were summarily ignored and dismissed.

When a city official admonished residents at a meeting for getting rowdy and interrupting her statements, a resident yelled back, “You interrupted a way of life, lady.”

Despite residents’ efforts, CabriniGreen went the same way of the other high-rises. Families vied for mixed-income units, many of which the CHA had yet to build. Others took up housing vouchers and relocated to neighborhoods just as poor and dangerous as Cabrini-Green, only this time they were in unfamiliar territory without the support networks they had built up over the years and often seen as intruders and criminals by the neighborhoods that received them.

Some of them fought back in other ways. J.R. co-founded the Chicago AntiEviction Campaign and, with other volunteers, spent time breaking into vacant homes owned by banks and refurbishing them. Though they were technically trespassing, he successfully moved in families in need of a home, some of them former CHA residents who had fallen through the cracks. He traveled (and continues to travel) to United Nations and human rights conferences, arguing wherever he went that the country does not have a housing problem—there are at least five empty houses for every homeless person in America—but rather a moral and political one.

The Cabrini-Green homes are gone forever. The intense concentration of people and poverty, the killing fields, and the perpetually broken elevators are no more.

Also gone are the bonds of family and community between thousands of people, the days and nights spent on the walkways or on the blacktop grilling, dancing, and talking. These joyful institutions and connections will need to be painstakingly rebuilt in new environments, if at all.

Meanwhile, communities of color across Chicago—and the country—continue to be underfunded, scoured by police, and demonized in the media.

The high-rises are gone and, in time, the high-risers will go with them. But the lessons of Cabrini-Green still weigh on us all. Ben Austen, High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing. $27.99.

HarperCollins. 400 pages.

Listen to our full interview with Austen at southsideweekly.com/category/radio.

DEVELOPMENT

Healthy Housing Takes A Village Imani Village, a decade in the works, prepares to open its first center

BY MICHAEL WASNEY

A

fter over a decade of planning, the first component of Imani Village, a mixed-use community in Roseland, will be opening to the public later this year.

Twenty-three acres of land on the southeastern corner of 95th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, the future site of Imani Village, will soon host this first component—a 22,000-square-foot health facility run by Advocate Health Care.

The brainchild of the leadership of Trinity United Church of Christ, a church in Washington Heights, Imani Village will be a multifaceted community home providing amenities and services that Trinity has identified as necessary to lead a healthful and spiritually fulfilling lifestyle: a health clinic, a fresh produce vendor, housing for seniors and families, a job-training center, and athletic facilities.

Trinity has been developing a plan for a mixed business and residential community in Roseland for over a decade.

“It has always been a vision of Trinity United Church of Christ to build a community that reflects the tenants of the gospel and to impact the community… even during the time that Dr. [ Jeremiah A.] Wright was involved,” said Patricia Eggleston, executive director of the Trinity 95th and Cottage Grove Planned Community Development, LLC—Trinity United Church of Christ’s developmental offshoot. Eggleston served as an attorney for Trinity until 2012, when the church created the LLC to oversee the project.

Six years later, Trinity is preparing to see the first phase of its vision materialize.

Once construction of the health center is finished, which Eggleston anticipated would be sometime between May or June, the Advocate Medical Group (AMG) health center will move into an 11,000-squarefoot portion of the space. According to its website, AMG “provides primary care, specialty care, imaging, outpatient services and community-based medical practices” throughout Chicago. The facility should

officially open to patients by the end of the year, and depending on its success, could expand to the total 22,000 square feet as Advocate sees fit.

The new AMG center, along with other components of Imani, is being built with the aim of addressing many of the resources currently lacking in the area of Roseland where Imani Village will be located. As part of the plan, the AMG facility will be providing health services in a region where preexisting health providers are in jeopardy.

Three miles away, for example, the cash-strapped Roseland Community Hospital recently had to lay off thirtyfive employees. The future of Roseland Community Hospital, and many other safety-net hospitals that in large part serve Medicaid patients on the South Side, hinges on the Illinois state government’s decision to save or scrap its current Hospital Assessment program. The program, which allows hospitals to receive federal Medicaid funds in exchange for hefty payments to the state, expires at the end of June, and safetynet hospitals are expecting severe budgetary shortfalls if the law is altered from its current form. It’s unclear how Imani Village’s AMG facility would be affected by a rollback in the program.

Advocate Health Care (AHC), the company under which AMG operates, did not respond to the Weekly’s request for a formal interview. But partnership between Trinity United Church of Christ and AHC is not unprecedented. Advocate Trinity Hospital, about two and a half miles from the Imani site, is one such collaboration. Both are Lutheran-faith–based organizations and affiliates with the United Church of Christ.

Imani Village will be more than just a new AMG facility, though. Organizational partnerships outside of the AHC group will aim to assuage the multifactorial causes of ill health—what Eggleston calls the “social determinacy” of health. Lack of access to traditional health care is one such cause, but it also “has to do with employment,

COURTESY OF IMANI VILLAGE

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DEVELOPMENT

has to do with housing, has to do with physical health wellbeing,” Eggleston said. “The whole thing goes into how healthy you are.”

The idea of the social determinacy of health informs the other phases of the Imani Village project: it will be a senior lifestyle and family housing complex; a career training center that will work with previously incarcerated individuals; a food hub featuring a five-acre indoor garden and a yearround farmer’s market among other things; a sports facility; a center for the cultivation of entrepreneurship; and more. Trinity’s development arm is still trying to work out what functions will be housed in the Imani Village center and what organizations it’ll partner with to provide these various services when Imani Village opens to the public.

Eggleston hopes that the next component of Imani Village to open will be its housing. Brinshore Development is collaborating with Trinity’s LLC to create senior lifestyle and family housing complexes, which together will offer 120 units of housing. Brinshore has experience when it comes to green building, which was one reason why Trinity’s LLC and the development company originally found each other. Ecological justice is a key part of Imani Village’s mission, and one of Trinity’s ministries as well.

Since 2014, the church itself has spent $5.2 million on energy reduction measures to become more environmentally sustainable, which it’s done by switching to LED lights, installing a green roof, and building a garden. That mentality extends into the making of the Imani campus, which will be a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)certified “green” building, according to Eggleston. “Green is the new economy, and we want Imani Village to be a reflection of the green economy,” she said.

Much of Imani is geared towards advancing the green economy and preparing individuals to succeed within it. The Nature Conservancy, an environmentally conscious organization located in Arlington, Virginia, has agreed to come aboard to help create a green jobs training program at the center. This program will eventually be housed in a career workforce development center, which will have the dual aim of offering training programs for green careers and training for careers in Imani Village itself.

The food hub, too, will bolster Imani’s aim to generate jobs. A future commercial kitchen will serve as a space to support developing food entrepreneurs. The food hub will also include a year-round indoor farmers market; five acres of indoor cultivable land; and a fresh food restaurant and café. Trinity’s LLC is interested in fashioning Imani into something of a fresh food nexus for the Southeast Side. Eggleston said that the LLC has talked to potential co-developers interested in getting involved with these various projects but wasn’t ready to share who those co-developers are.

Other components of Imani Village, like the athletic and fitness center, are farther out. The fitness center is set to open in the space that is currently slated to hold their career workforce development center or possibly a charter school.

But none of this is “an overnight process,” Eggleston says. She and the other board members expect the entirety of Imani Village to remain unfinished for five years, and even that, she says, is “ambitious.” But considering that it’s taken six years for the project to reach this point, the imminent opening of Advocate’s new medical facility—the first of Imani Village’s resources to become serviceable to the community—is momentous. ¬

BULLETIN Black History Month African American Lit Fest Harold Washington Library, 400 S. State St. February 3–26. Opening program Saturday, February 3, 10am–4pm. soulfulchicagobookfair.com/events

South Side YMCA, 6330 S. Stony Island Ave. Friday, February 9, 6pm–9:30pm. bit.ly/ ReclaimingThrone

Free English classes

Hey Brown Girl: Sunday Social

Breakaway, 2424 S. Western Ave. Entrance on 24th Pl. Every Monday, 6:30pm–9pm.

Free. breakawaychicago.wordpress.com

The Bronzeville Incubator, 300 E. 51st St. Sunday, February 11, 12pm to 4pm. Free to enter, $5 and up for brunch. Tickets available at buytickets.at/aplomb

Breakaway Social Center is offering free English classes for Spanish speakers. A ninety-minute class will be followed by an informal hour-long language exchange between students and teachers. Student interests will shape topics and materials.

(Rachel Schastok)

Clases de inglés gratuitas Breakaway, 2424 S. Western Ave. La entrada está en la 24th Pl. Cada lunes, 6:30pm–9pm.

Gratis. breakawaychicago.wordpress.com Breakaway centro social ofrece clases de inglés gratuitas para hispanohablantes. Una clase de noventa minutos será seguida de un intercambio de idiomas informal de una hora entre lxs estudiantes y lxs maestrxs.

Los temas de la clase pueden cambiarse en función de los intereses de lxs estudiantes.

(Rachel Schastok)

Introduction to Transcendental Meditation

Have you always been interested in learning to meditate, but had trouble finding the opportunity to do so? Come to the Introduction to Transcendental Meditation, ¬ FEBRUARY 7, 2018

Reclaiming Our Throne

Kick off Black History Month by getting lit with the African American Lit Fest. The Soulful Chicago Book Fair, in partnership with the Chicago Public Library African American Services Committee, will host a series of events with local authors, poets, and storytellers throughout the month.

The opening program on Saturday features Haki Madhubuti, Maggie Brown, and Princess Pe’Tehn, a five-year-old poet prodigy. (Erisa Apantaku)

Blackstone Branch Library, 4904 S. Lake Park Ave. Wednesday, February 7, 5pm-6:30pm.

Free. (312) 747-0511. bit.ly/TMatCPL

24 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

a free lecture at the Blackstone Branch Library, and learn what Transcendental Meditation is, the health benefits that come from practicing it, and where else it is being used. Attend this workshop and take the first step towards becoming a meditation master yourself. (Michael Wasney)

Activist In You, an emerging nonprofit social justice organization dedicated to empowering minority groups, will host a Black History Month celebration in Woodlawn. The event will include plenty of vendors and activities, as well as a panel from 7pm–8pm. ( Jacob Swindell-Sakoor)

Join Hey Brown Girl and aplomb for a relaxing self-care Sunday! Enjoy soulful tunes, a Southern Creole inspired brunch, and vendors selling everything from soaps to teas to clothing. (Adia Robinson)

Expanding Your Horizons Chicago UofC Kent Chemical Laboratory, 1020 E. 58th St. Sunday, March 24, 8am-3pm. $5.

Registration opens February 12. eyhchicago.com Chicago-area girls in grades 6-8 come together each year for this career conference focused on STEM fields.

Students take part in a day of workshops and hands-on activities led by women in these fields. Online registration is mandatory; scholarships are available.

(Rachel Schastok)

CTA Public Hearing Gwendolyn Brooks College Preparatory, Academy Gymnasium, 250 E. 111th St. Tuesday, February 13, 6pm-8pm. Free. (888) 968-7282. transitchicago.com The Chicago Transit Authority recently announced plans to extend the Red Line to 130th Street. Attend this public hearing to

EVENTS

find out more about how this project might affect you. Comments can be submitted prior to the event at RedExtension@ transitchicago.com. (Michael Wasney)

VISUAL ARTS Public Newsroom: Felicia Holman on Problematic Art Reviews Build Coffee, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Thursday, February 8, 6pm–8pm. Free. citybureau.org Felicia Holman of the Art Leaders of Color Network will host a “Remix the Critique 2” workshop in the wake of recent controversies over arts coverage. Aimed at writers of color and writers looking to review artists of color, the session will consider the unlearning of racist frameworks and differentiate between the constructive and the problematic. ( Joseph S. Pete)

Eclipsing Workshop: Nourishing Noir with Nicole Melanie Arts and Public Life, 301 E. Garfield Blvd.

Friday, February 9, 5pm-7pm. Free.(773) 702-9724. bit.ly/NourishingNoir “Nourishing Noir” is a workshop that will be led by Nicole Melanie on the nutrient dense qualities of plant-based foods in relation to their less nutrientdense versions. This workshop will also be centered on the origins and historical context behind these foods and their cultural significance. (Roderick Sawyer)

La Cultura Cura Market: Friendship, Self Love & Healing La Catrina Café, 1011 W. 18th Street.

Friday, February 9, 6pm–10pm. (312) 4730038. bit.ly/la-catrina-café La Catrina Café will host a cooperative market for barrio sustainability in Pilsen, featuring local and handmade items, jewelry, love readings, and a Fundraiser for Mariposas de la Diaspora. Come out to celebrate healing, growth, and love.

(Roderick Sawyer)

Rezident: Featuring Instituto Grafico de Chicago Lo Rez Brewing, 2101 S. Carpenter St. Friday, February 9, 7pm–11pm. Free. (312) 738-1503. lorezbrewing.com Celebrate the Instituto Gráfico de Chicago and Lo Rez Brewing’s Spring Rezident program with craft beer, live music, an auction, and “Dichos y Diretes,” a collection of the work of nine Latinx and Latin American printmaking artists from the IGC. Show up early to catch a happy hour fundraiser for the National Museum of Mexican Art. (Roderick Sawyer)

Theater of the Oppressed TwoDay Workshop Bridgeport Art Center, 1200 W 35th St. Saturday, February 10 and Sunday, February 11. 11am–5pm. $15 suggested donation.

RSVP at pochealingcircle@gmail.com. fullcirclecollective.space Je Nepomuceno will facilitate a workshop on the techniques and games that comprise the Theater of the Oppressed and will also explain what it can teach us about our biases and contradictions. Educators, artists, and activists are encouraged to take part in exercises like “Forum Theater,” where the consequences of different actions are explored in staged scenes. ( Joseph S. Pete)

New Moon Writing Circle: Valentine’s Day Edition AMFM Gallery, 2151 W. 21st St. Sunday, February 11, 2pm–6pm. Free. info@amfmmag.com. bit.ly/VDayWritingCircle Some say love is the greatest inspiration for poetry. Come find out if that’s true at the Valentine’s Day edition of New Moon Writing Circle. The workshop will be led by poet Melissa Castro Almandina and Maya Stainback. All they’ll need from you is a notebook, a writing utensil, and an open heart. (Michael Wasney)

Embodying Diaspora: A Monthly Dance Workshop Series Arts Incubator, 301 E. Garfield Blvd.

Tuesday, February 13, 6:30–8pm. Free. 16+.

(773) 702-9724. bit.ly/embody-diaspora The Embodying Diaspora series is a monthly dance workshop that focuses on Afro-diasporic movement traditions. This

month’s workshop, centered on Kizomba, will be led by Arif Smith. Come by to explore linkages between various traditions across the Black Atlantic. (Roderick Sawyer)

MUSIC Blanc at Blanc: Party for Awareness Blanc Gallery, 4445 S. King Dr. Thursday, February 8, 7pm–10pm. Free. (773) 3734320. RSVP at bit.ly/blanc-at-blanc Come to Bronzeville to “get taught, get tested, and get #treated:” commemorate National Black HIV Awareness Day with a fundraiser party for Austin PrEP Connect.

Web brand AMFM will present live DJs and musical performances, plus a raffle and cash bar. Last but not least: embroidered beanies if you get tested. (Christopher Good)

Duffle Bag Buru with Qari, Dally Auston, Adot Schubas Tavern, 3159 N. Southport Ave. Friday, February 9, 10pm. 18+. $10. (773) 525-2508. lh-st.com Rap game upstarts Lyrical Lemonade have curated an incredible lineup of breaking talent from the South and West Sides: monochrome MC Qari, screwball crooner Adot, Dally Auston (of “Bitch I’m Beautiful”), and Duffle Bag Buru.

(Christopher Good)

Mixed Signals with Jana Rush, DJ Deeon Exit Chicago, 1315 W. North Ave. Friday, February 9, 10pm–late. 21+. Free till 12am, $5 after. (773) 395-2700. bit.ly/boylan-bday Two decades ago, DJ Deeon and Jana Rush held down opposite sides of a split 12” for Dance Mania. This weekend, they’re joining forces once more to ring in Teklife mainstay Nate Boylan’s fortieth birthday.

Keep an eye out for Mucho Culo DJs and other special guests. (Christopher Good)

Pre-Valentine’s Day Extravaganza 7421 S. Chicago Ave. Saturday, February 10, 8pm–2am. $6 for one person, $10 for two people. Call for tickets. (773) 507-4314. bit. ly/ValentinesParkRangers Want to get your Valentine’s festivities started on the right foot? Don’t wait for the fourteenth to come around––the Park Rangers are hosting a Pre-Valentine’s Extravaganza on the tenth. If you think there’s a more fun group of people to kick off your V-day with, come by and be proven wrong! (Michael Wasney)

Do The Winter Block Party Thing Metro, 3730 N. Clark St. Saturday, February 10, 12pm–10pm. Free. (773) 549-4140. bit. ly/do-the-winter-thing Chicago Public Media is pulling out all the stops for its ninth annual celebration of hip hop arts and culture: expect breakdance battles, face paint, hopscotch competitions, a turntablism showcase, DJs from Young Chicago Authors, and a pop-up barbershop.

(Christopher Good)

STAGE & SCREEN Breach Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave. Friday, February 9–Sunday, March 11. 7:30pm Tuesday–Saturday, 7:30pm; Saturday–Sunday, 3pm. $15–$60.

(773) 871-3000. victorygardens.org Jeff Award-winning playwright Antoinette Nwandu’s Breach: a manifesto on race in america through the eyes of a black girl recovering from self-hate is a comedy about family, friendship, and motherhood billed as “a love letter to black women.” Caren Blackmore stars as Margaret in her debut on the Lincoln Park stage. ( Joseph S. Pete)

Chicagoland Shorts at Beverly Arts Center Beverly Arts Center, Baffes Theatre, 2407 W. 111th St. Wednesday, February 7, 7:30pm. $6, $5 members. (773) 445-3838. beverlyartcenter.org Chicagoland Shorts showcases a curated FEBRUARY 7, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 25

EVENTS

selection of experimental, Asian-American, African-American, and LGBTQ films that have been screened internationally at film festivals, galleries, and art museums. Check out what some of the artsiest, edgiest young filmmakers are coming out with. ( Joseph S. Pete)

1947 Drama Critics’ Award-winning play All My Sons. Featuring Timothy Edward Kane, John Judd, and Kate Collins, this dramatic tale, based on true events, weaves business, love, and tragedy, and established Miller as an American theater icon. (Nicole Bond)

Eye of the Storm: The Bayard Rustin Story

Lady Moses: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman

eta Creative Arts Foundation, 7558 S. South Chicago Ave. Friday, February 9–Sunday, March 11. Fridays and Saturdays 8pm, Sundays 3pm. $40, discounts available for seniors, students, and groups. (773) 7523955. etacreativearts.org

DuSable Museum, 740 E. 56th Pl. Saturday, February 10, 12:00pm. $10. (773) 9470600. dusablemuseum.org

Playwright McKinley Johnson tells the story of the behind-the-scenes Civil Rights Movement organizer Bayard Rustin, whose work garnered him the moniker The Architect of the March on Washington.

Despite Rustin’s efforts and achievements, he was persecuted for being gay. In conjunction with the play, a Contemporary Conversation on Race, Sexuality and Politics will be the topic of a joint panel scheduled with eta and the UofC Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture on Saturday, February 10 at 6:30pm with the playwright as well as social justice leaders and scholars from Chicago. (Nicole Bond)

Spotlight Reading Series: Dance on the Widow’s Row NEIU Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies, 700 E. Oakwood Blvd. Monday, February 26, 6:30pm. For free limited reserved seating visit courttheatre.org The Spotlight Reading Series features staged readings of plays by writers of color whose work is often missing from the traditional canon. Dance on the Widow’s Row is a comedy set in an eastern North Carolina coastal community, where four widows who have buried nine husbands between them set out to find love amidst small-town values and gossip. (Nicole Bond)

All My Sons Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Through Sunday, February 11. Tickets $20–$68. (773) 753-4472. courttheatre.org Charles Newell directs Arthur Miller’s 26 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

Chicago actress, playwright, and producer Cynthia Maddox uses monologue, music, and poetry to reinvent her original onewoman show, which tells the story of Underground Railroad abolitionist Harriet Tubman. (Nicole Bond)

FOOD & LAND Waging War on Food Deserts Chicago Public Library South Shore Branch, 2505 E. 73rd St. Saturday, February 10, 1:30pm–3:30pm. Contact OFAChicagoMetroSouth@gmail.com. bit.ly/WarOnFoodDeserts How can South Siders create hunger-free zones? This discussion, hosted by A Work of Faith Ministries and Organizing for Action, aims to build a plan to “wage war on food deserts” through delivery systems and community gardens. Although it was announced just days ago that South Shore will be getting a Shop & Save after nearly four years without a grocery store, equitable food access is still far from reality. (Emeline Posner)

Windy City Harvest Corps Info Session Arturo Velasquez Institute, 2800 S. Western Ave., Rm. 1102. Monday, February 12, 9am–11am. Free. bit.ly/WCHCinfosession Every year, Windy City Harvest runs a fourteen-week-long Harvest Corps training program designed to introduce urban agriculture to those with (nonviolent) criminal backgrounds. Come by on one of the listed mornings for more information on how the multifaceted training program could suit your interests, and where it might lead you. (Emeline Posner)

¬ FEBRUARY 7, 2018

51st Street Community Farmers Market Internship Applications Send applications, questions, to Stephanie Dunn, Sdunn1342@gmail.com. Applications accepted through February 15th. bit. ly/51stInternshipApps United Human Services, a food pantry that operates twelve community gardens and farms in Back of the Yards, is looking for three farmers’ market marketing interns and three farming interns for the coming season. The marketing internship will offer a $500 stipend for ten hours a week from May to October. The farming internship is unpaid with a free produce share and money-making opportunities at weekly farmers’ markets for sixteen hours a week. Candidates will be interviewed and selected by March 15. (Emeline Posner)

Chicago Food Policy Summit South Shore Cultural Center, 7059 S. South Shore Dr. Friday, February 23, summit 9am–5pm, reception 5:30pm–7:30pm.

Reception $10, summit and reception $20. chicagofoodpolicy.com Registration is now open for the thirteenth

annual Chicago Food Policy Summit, organized around this year’s theme “From Survive to Thrive.” The event is hosted by the Chicago Food Policy Action Council, a volunteer organization advocating for equal access to healthy food options in the city.

Details about summit workshops, speakers, and vendors to be announced. (Tammy Xu)

Healthy Food Hub Pop-Up Market Day Chicago State University Library, 9501 S. King Dr. Saturday, February 24, 9am–1pm.

(773) 410-3446. healthyfoodhub.org Come find produce, spices, and other goods at the Healthy Food Hub’s Chicago State University pop-up market day. The Englewood-based agricultural cooperative is taking a break from its normal weekly schedule for the winter, so don’t sleep on what may be the Hub’s only market day until the spring. Arrive at 9am to participate in an introductory class for the Hub’s Lifeboat Permaculture Design Certification and Commercial Farm Training. (Emeline Posner)

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Blackstone Bicycle Works

The UChicago Div School Ethics Club Presents:

THE EXAMINED PHILOSOPHY OF CORNEL WEST SATURDAY, FEB 24, 2018 SWIFT HALL - UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 1025 EAST 58TH STREET, CHICAGO, IL 5 PM RECEPTION - 1ST FLOOR COMMON ROOM 6 PM - 8:30 PM - PANEL, DR. WEST; Q&A PERSONS WITH A DISABILITY WHO REQUIRE AN ACCOMMODATION TO ATTEND, PLEASE CALL SANDRA PEPPERS IN ADVANCE AT 773-702-8230

Weekly Bike Sale Every Saturday at 12pm Wide selection of refurbished bikes! (most bikes are between $120 & $250)

follow us at @blackstonebikes blackstonebikes.org

Blackstone Bicycle Works is a bustling community bike shop that each year empowers over 200 boys and girls from Chicago’s south side—teaching them mechanical skills, job skills, business literacy and how to become responsible community members. In our year-round ‘earn and learn’ youth program, participants earn bicycles and accessories for their work in the shop. In addition, our youths receive after-school tutoring, mentoring, internships and externships, college and career advising, and scholarships.

Hours Tuesday - Friday 1pm - 6pm 12pm - 5pm Saturday

773 241 5458 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637

A PROGRAM OF

FEBRUARY 7, 2018 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 27