October 28, 2020

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SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent non-profit newspaper by and for the South Side of Chicago. We provide high-quality, critical arts and public interest coverage, and equip and develop journalists, photographers, artists, and mediamakers of all backgrounds.

Volume 7, Issue 28 Editor-in-Chief Jacqueline Serrato Managing Editor Martha Bayne Senior Editors

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Cover Photo by Alma Campos

IN CHICAGO More taxes and fines in 2021 Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced on October 21 a property tax hike to balance the $1.2 billion budget deficit worsened by the pandemic—and will tie it to inflation, meaning that property tax bills would go up every year. A study by Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas released the same week found that in the past twenty years taxes on residential Chicago properties have skyrocketed 164 percent, although the cost of living has only risen 36 percent.

Lightfoot also proposed laying off 500 public sector workers and eliminating 1,900 vacant city positions, including more than 500 Chicago Police Department posts. The city is also counting on an 11 percent increase from fines, forfeitures, and penalties, compared to last year. Among those fines are traffic citations from ramped-up "speed enforcement" that will ticket drivers going more than 6 mph over the speed limit instead of the current 10 mph max. The City Council's Progressive Caucus called the mayor's budget "regressive."

Second wave of COVID Mandated closures of schools and businesses brought about a significant drop in COVID-19 cases over the summer, but infections and hospitalizations are rising again (see our online tracker of Chicago deaths due to the novel coronavirus). Last week, Governor Pritzker and Mayor Lightfoot publicly disagreed with one another about whether restaurant and bar openings helped cause the increase in COVID infections. On October 27, prompted by the upswell of infections in Chicago—where the seven-day rolling average of positive test rates is at 7.4 percent as of this writing—Pritzker announced a ban on indoor seating at bars and restaurants, as in phase three, scheduled to take effect Friday, October 30. (Similar restrictions to suburban Cook County went into effect.) On PBS NewsHour that evening, Lightfoot again broke with Pritzker, saying she would continue to “engage” the governor on closures, and that metrics other than the rolling average (such as hospitalizations) should be considered. Data from the Cook County Medical Examiner shows the largest surge has been on the Southwest Side, where majority-Latinx ZIP codes show that one in eighteen residents has tested positive.

Jail rejects judicial voting guides Earlier this month, South Side Weekly teamed up with Injustice Watch to help design and print their judicial election guide. The “Check Your Judges” guide, which was included in our October 14 issue, is a ten-page tip sheet for voters confused, as so many are, by the lengthy and obscure judicial retention section on the ballot. Judges are, in many cases, the only agents of the state a citizen might come in contact with, and have the power to make decisions that can radically affect a person’s life. With early voting privileges extended to Cook County Jail for the first time, Injustice Watch organized a campaign to get the guide to eligible voters inside the jail. One thousand copies were printed and mailed to the jail, after getting clearance from the Sheriff ’s Office—only to have them be rejected as “contraband” by a worker in the mailroom. Even if one accepts, as Injustice Watch has, the Sheriff ’s Office explanation that it was a simple mistake by an ill-informed staffer, the debacle lays bare once again the absurdity of expecting a dysfunctional bureaucracy in which even the most basic communications can fail to be capable of administering any form of “justice.” With less than a week to go before the election, IJ says it will re-send the guides, but for many voters it’s already too late.

IN THIS ISSUE opinion: abolish uofc’s crime lab

The research center operated by the University of Chicago uses the illusion of scientific objectivity to support the racist violence of the Chicago Police Department amber jean, aryssa, samhitha, troy bolton, brian bean.........................................................4 following the yellowlined road

The lives of Black and Latinx people on Chicago’s South Side are still harmed by forces set in motion by the housing disasters of the twentieth century.

Yellowlining—the lesser cousin of federalgovernment redlining—is another one of those disasters, a discriminatory force that historians and economists have only begun to explore. dave reidy..........................................................9 bringing open access fiber connectivity to chicago

The pandemic, the recession, and Chicago’s broadband ballot initiative provide a unique opportunity to embark on an ambitious public works project modeled after an unlikely source francisco ramírez pinedo.............................15 crossword

Happy Halloween! jim daley..........................................................16 mlk, virtually speaking

A night out last winter at the DuSable’s new virtual reality rendition of the 1963 March on Washington morley musick.................................................17 bicycling for environmental justice

Cyclists took a pedal-powered tour of community gardens and sites of environmental degradation and neglect charmaine runes............................................20 rise against general iron

“When I was a kid, there would be so much stuff landing on the house [that] Republic Steel would send people over to paint it free for you.” alma campos....................................................24 a simple twist of fate

“People often look at women who use drugs negatively, and the women don’t feel respected. So giving them basic human decency and respect goes a long way.” alex shur.........................................................26

POLICE

Opinion: Abolish UofC's Crime Lab The research center operated by the University of Chicago uses the illusion of scientific objectivity to support the racist violence of the Chicago Police Department

BY AMBER JEAN, ARYSSA, SAMHITHA, TROY BOLTON, BRIAN BEAN This piece is part of a series that explores the various perspectives around defunding the police.

I

n the wake of this summer’s rebellion against racist policing, academic institutions across the country have faced scrutiny and activist campaigns surrounding their relationships with police departments.

These protests recognize that universities in the neoliberal age are not mere sites of higher learning, but institutions that have profound economic and political influence on city politics. The University of Chicago is a prime example: with an international reputation, a multibillion-dollar endowment larger than the budgets of many cities, and a private police force reputed to be one of the largest in the world, UofC has a significant impact not just on the fiefdom of Hyde Park that it lords over, but on the entire city of Chicago. This makes the university’s collaborative relationship with the Chicago Police Department (CPD) especially egregious.

This relationship is perhaps best exemplified by UofChicago’s Crime Lab, a research center with over one hundred employees run by tenured faculty under the pretense of studying crime and working to provide data-driven policy solutions, particularly to gun violence. In reality, the Crime Lab uses UofC’s clout, money, and veneer of scientific scholarship to work directly with CPD, supporting police work and providing ideological cover for CPD’s racist practices. As we’ll show in more detail below, this reveals the deception at the core of the Crime Lab’s stated research mission.

It claims to objectively study the effect of policing in the broad interest of public safety, while in reality working alongside cops as colleagues, research partners, and strategic advisors—all while helping to bolster the public image of a police force widely reviled 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ OCTOBER 28, 2020

for its corruption and long record of abuse.

Simply put: as long as the Crime Lab continues to operate in its current capacity, UofC is complicit in the racist policing practices of the CPD.

T

he Crime Lab advertises itself as leveraging “science in service of cities” or “science to save lives,” claiming that the goal of their work is to use “rigorous research and data to pursue answers, insights, and scalable solutions.”

This innocuous sounding, seemingly objective endeavor is also flush with cash and backing from powerful figures in business and politics: it has been given millions of dollars in funding and support from the mayor and former president Obama, and billionaire hedge fund manager and noted Republican super-donor, Ken Griffin (the richest man in Illinois).

The reality of how the Crime Lab operates, however, is far less benevolent than its public relations branding would suggest.

To be precise: the Crime Lab’s research and policy recommendations are steeped in scientific racism, the way the lab operates suffers from lack of transparency and public accountability, and the lab’s stated mission is undermined by its unwavering support for the racist system of policing. From the data Crime Lab chooses to use, to the partnerships that allow them to access that data and the analytical methods they employ, the Crime Lab’s decisions are deeply political, deeply conservative, and deeply committed to the status-quo power dynamics of capitalism and white supremacy.

The UofC Crime Lab, a private research organization, works directly with CPD to carry out police work.

Since 2017, the Crime Lab has operated Strategic Decision Support Centers (SDSC), receiving a $10 million boost from Ken Griffin in 2018, in an

“It blames the individual for social problems, reeks of scientific racism, contributes to the criminalization of young people, and diverts attention from the structural causes of gun violence in Chicago.” ever-increasing number of police districts, starting with Chicago’s 7th and 11th districts (roughly the Englewood and Garfield Park neighborhoods). SDSCs are rooms full of TV and computer screens linked up to huge police data systems, where officers and Crime Lab-hired and -salaried embedded analysts work together to “integrate crime intelligence, data analysis, and technology” as a response to gun violence. The creation of the first two SDSCs was accompanied in these districts by the installation of ShotSpotter auditory sensors to detect gunshots and pod cameras to increase video surveillance.

While Crime Lab proudly claims that the SDSCs are “tailored to meet the unique needs of each community,” and that “community concerns [are] incorporated in the district’s daily planning process,” it is unclear how or if these community members consented to the type of increased surveillance that the SDSCs bring to their neighborhoods.

As of 2018, the 11th and 7th districts have more complaints made against cops than almost all other districts, ranking second and fourth, respectively, according to data published on the Invisible Institute’s Citizens Police Data Project, but this community perspective is not referenced in

any of Crime Lab’s work. Recent research demonstrates a high level of inherent bias in these types of surveillance methods, but Crime Lab has yet to show any engagement with these critiques, while continuing to ignore data regarding policing produced by non-police sources.

T

he Crime Lab depends on a positive relationship with CPD to carry out their data-focused research model.

This relationship shapes their research questions and assumptions across their research portfolio, making it impossible for them to be objective on the topic of policing.

A 2017 letter from its finance director describing the working relationship between lab and CPD personnel to be “close” secured the Crime Lab a $1.1 million noncompetitive contract with CPD, illustrating its tight relationship with the department.

When confronted with criticism for this close collaboration with CPD, Crime Lab leadership often pivot to discussing their evaluations of mentoring and educational programs for youth, implying that their close collaboration with cops is not necessary in this other area of their work. As Crime Lab faculty director Jens Ludwig claimed on a panel at UofC’s Reimagining/Reinventing

Police Conference in July, “About twothirds of our portfolio is not with criminal justice agencies... We wouldn’t want to be an organization that was just working with the criminal justice system.” This response misrepresents the depth of Crime Lab’s reliance on police data and collaboration.

In reality, even its research on youth programs or jobs programs like READI Chicago relies on their access to large police datasets to provide crime-related insights.

This reliance shapes the research questions they ask and the results they report when studying social service programs. Far from helping matters, the lab’s work studying mentoring and educational work simply underscores concerns about independence and objectivity.

Clearly, using police data in its programevaluation work provides significant benefits for the Crime Lab: it allows its analysts to report on more outcomes of social programs, increasing their chances of finding a significant result, and it allows them to rely on large and regularly updated datasets, which is important for the kind of rigorous evaluation Crime Lab has staked its reputation on. But reliance on police data requires reliance on the permission of the police to access it—and that permission could be withdrawn by CPD at any time. CPD is not known for taking criticism well. Working closely with the police in order to access their data leaves little room to critique the inherent biases of police data pushing Crime Lab to filter all of their research questions through the logical lens of policing. But Black people are disproportionately targeted by police and therefore overrepresented in police data, which Crime Lab relies on to make analyses and conclusions about crime and who commits it.

Take, for example, the randomized control trial of a mentoring program called Becoming a Man (BAM), for which the Crime Lab is widely known. In collaboration with Youth Guidance, the nonprofit that designed and runs BAM within Chicago Public Schools (CPS), Crime Lab conducted an evaluation of BAM’s impact on high school-aged participants’ graduation and arrest rates. In a paper reporting the results of the evaluation, the Crime Lab claimed that BAM had a causal impact on participants, increasing their graduation rates and reducing their arrest rates for violent crime, as compared to similar CPS students who were randomly assigned to not to participate in BAM. (Notably, as the

New York Times reported when a related paper on the BAM evaluation came out, these lower arrest rates lasted only as long as program participation did.)

The publication of this evaluation had two direct results: the expansion of BAM to more CPS schools and the classification of BAM as a violence prevention program.

The expansion was touted as “part of Mayor Emanuel’s new public safety plan to combat the surge in violence in Chicago,” ABC 7 reported. The description of a program consisting of mentoring and group therapy sessions for predominantly Black and brown high schoolers as a violence reduction strategy is a direct result of the use of police department data to evaluate the program’s impact, and define its success. The use of arrest records as a metric imports the logic of policing into the Crime Lab’s research— namely, the assumptions that arrest records are an objective data source, and that violence originates with individuals’ decisions, rather than structural factors.

This work extends the logic of policing into research on youth programming: it blames the individual for social problems, reeks of scientific racism, contributes to the criminalization of young people, and diverts attention from the structural causes of gun violence in Chicago.

The Crime Lab brings no historical or structural context to their study of “crime” and “violence reduction.” Instead, they rely exclusively on behavioral science methods based on economics and statistics, and the implicit assumption of their work is that the individual choices of Black and brown Chicagoans are the fundamental cause of intracommunal violence. This approach strips the concept of crime of any structural context, and blames the victims of oppressive structures for their plight instead of indicting the social system that harms them.

While the Crime Lab presents its work as apolitical and data-driven, it has a profoundly ideological approach to their research topic, in that it investigates crime as a purely behavioral phenomenon using purely quantitative methods. In reality, as numerous academic fields and social movements have demonstrated, crime is socially constructed and systematically weaponized against the oppressed. While any person can cause harm, only the oppressed are consistently and proactively criminalized for it. That is, harm caused by Black, poor, or otherwise marginalized people is often moralized against and criminalized whereas harm caused by capitalists and other privileged

BY SHANE TOLENTINO

groups is sidelined and ignored at best, and encouraged at worst, as is the case with the attention paid to petty robbery over wage theft, a systematized extraction of wealth that affects far more people than any other form of theft.

Given this dynamic, choices of discipline, data sources, and analytical techniques in the study of crime are clearly political ones. Rather than researching the construction of crime and the ways in which the justice system and legal code are designed to target and penalize oppressed groups, the Crime Lab treats the law as fact and the police as unbiased experts, while describing the behavior of marginalized individuals and groups as deviations from an imagined norm of appropriate behavior. Rather than asking, “Why is the rational behavior of particular groups coded as crime?”, the

Crime Lab asks, “Why can’t these people stop committing crimes?” It studies crime as if it were a natural phenomenon with no critique of its social construction, which only legitimizes and amplifies the fundamental biases of policing.

The select social programs that the Crime Lab chooses to evaluate reflect the policing-derived politics of their research.

Two of their main program evaluation projects—assessing BAM and another program called Choose to Change—are centered on individual social and emotional development and therapy as the basis for providing solutions to social problems.

While the types of mentorship provided these programs are not inherently harmful, and therapy to deal with the trauma of institutional racism should be widely available, the metrics the Crime Lab has OCTOBER 28, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

EDUCATION

chosen to measure these programs’ success are deeply problematic. By claiming that young Black men can simply improve their responses to stressful situations with skills that target emotional development, the Crime Lab completely erases any contextual factors that contribute to high rates of gun violence. It implies that it is men and boys’ behavior alone that leads to arrests, rather than the choices of police officers notorious for racist profiling and abuse. It places the blame for interpersonal violence squarely on marginalized individuals, rather than discussing the impact of years of racist policymaking and policing in Chicago.

This narrative has long complemented the logics of policing and neoliberal austerity that have flowed from the mayor’s office, providing mayors Rahm Emanuel and Lori Lightfoot with supposedly evidence-based violence prevention talking points that ignore the violence the city enacts in Black and brown communities, from over-policing to closing schools and mental health centers.

Crime Lab’s peers in the academic community have provided them with ample opportunity to examine the political commitments of their work more deeply.

While the most recent example is sociology assistant professor Robert Vargas’s op-ed in the Chicago Maroon, which pinpoints Crime Lab’s need for a robust analysis of systems of racial inequity as opposed to reforming individual behaviors, he is far from the first person to critique the Crime Lab’s approach to social science. In a 2013 statement titled “Combating Gun Violence in Illinois: Evidence-Based Solutions,” thirty-two Chicago academics condemned Crime Lab faculty director Jens Ludwig’s choice to write a policy memo advocating for enhanced sentencing for gun crimes during a heated policy debate in the Illinois legislature, despite the lack of support for such enhanced sentencing policies in the relevant literature.

Crime Lab is not responsive to these kinds of critiques and reacts defensively when confronted, as evidenced by a lengthy and contentious comment exchange by Ludwig in response to a 2013op-ed that made similar accusations to the statement. Crime Lab leadership seem far more interested in defending their work, remaining relevant, and preserving their power to “show the government how to invest resources” than in having a robust conversation about the best way to reduce gun violence in communities of color. In reality, as so many people who experience both intracommunal and police 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ OCTOBER 28, 2020

violence already know, challenging the objectivity of police does not mean denying the reality of harm facing our communities.

On the contrary, it means rejecting the myth that systems of white supremacist violence like the police can keep Black and brown people safe from harm.Rather than engage in the ongoing, nuanced conversation about what true public safety could look like in Chicago, the Crime Lab consistently chooses to sweep the violence of policing under the rug.

The truth is, if the Crime Lab were to evaluate policing with a critical eye, they would probably lose access to valuable police datasets, and the funding opportunities that access has brought them.

While CPD has refused to release most documentation related to their work with the Crime Lab (prompting the Lucy Parsons Lab to sue them in a pending lawsuit), the department did release a 2016 nondisclosure agreement (NDA) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. This NDA sets out the conditions under which the Crime Lab can receive, use, and share the results of analyses derived from police data. One particular clause of the NDA illustrates the depth of Crime Lab’s dependence on a positive relationship with CPD. It reads: Nothing in this agreement creates any obligation on the part of the Chicago Police Department to provide information. With or without cause, CPD retains the right to require the immediate return or destruction of all copies of the information obtained under this Agreement . . . and refuse any future requests for criminal information from the Requestor [emphasis added].

According to this agreement, CPD has the power to terminate their datasharing relationship immediately, if Crime Lab ever publishes anything that reflects poorly on the department. If the Crime Lab researched critical questions like, “Do surveillance and over-policing have any negative effects on Black communities?” it’s hard to imagine that CPD would willingly sign over their data going forward. This clear conflict of interest exerts institutional pressure on the lab, neutering any ability for it to be independently critical of CPD. Losing their access to CPD’s data would affect not just the Crime Lab’s policing focused work, but also their ability to use policing derived metrics like arrest records to evaluate social programs. It would also likely lead to a loss of funding from conservative donors like Ken Griffin who

have clearly demonstrated their interest in funding police work, and from moderate and liberal foundations, which commonly look to evidence-based and data-driven programs to allocate their funding. Without access to large police datasets, the Crime Lab’s research might be considered less rigorous, and this could undercut grants received across the board, demonstrating how the Crime Lab operates essentially at the whim of the CPD. Given these contingencies, Crime Lab can’t treat the police department as it might treat other partner organizations.

There is always another youth program to evaluate, but there’s only one Chicago Police Department. Instead, Crime Lab treats the existence and massive power of the police department as a foregone conclusion, and continues to benefit from access to CPD’s large, biased datasets, rather than evaluating the racist impact of policing.

T

he problem isn’t simply that the Crime Lab’s research and programming is conducted in ways that are biased, and that fail to subject the CPD and its practices to scholarly scrutiny. That’s because the Crime Lab doesn’t simply collect information—it also wields significant influence over public policy. In particular, by recommending and participating in expensive reforms to CPD, the Crime Lab plays an outsized role in determining what policing looks like in Chicago. Moreover, when it comes to controversial political questions such as the amount of the city budget that goes to CPD, the Crime Lab’s veneer of objectivity allows it to exert political influence without appearing to do so.

Crime Lab is written into CPD’s 2019 Consent Decree, the result of a Department of Justice report that confirmed the department not only displays racist patterns of policing, but also exhibits “no regard for the sanctity of human life when it comes to people of color.” The consent decree, a toothless contract between the Justice Department and CPD, consists of a long list of unimaginative reforms, some of which Crime Lab is explicitly responsible for helping implement. One of these reforms involves developing implicit bias training, which, under Crime Lab’s influence, means CPD was allowed to purchase expensive force option simulators, or large machines that play videos of potential interactions with civilians and test officers’ use-of-force bias. The force option simulators serve as

a tool to recognize bias, which has already been confirmed by the DOJ, not to mention decades of citizen and activist accounts, and evaluate skills picked up in implicit bias workshops. However, there is no scientific consensus on whether these workshops are effective in reducing bias or changing police behavior. In fact, as of 2018, “no RCTs [had] yet been conducted to rigorously evaluate the impact of implicit bias training.”

The perverse brilliance of these types of reformist reforms is that any evidence of harm caused by police is immediately coded as a need or an inadequacy that can only be solved by increased funding and resourcing for police departments. The scam goes something like this: the more racist CPD behaves and the more incompetent they prove themselves, the more money they receive from the city and private funders.

The increased spending is justified by appeals to the never-ending need for more training for police officers, and supported by the supposedly neutral reports of the Crime Lab and other pro-police actors who always perceive CPD as lacking resources despite its already outsized scale and budget.

When politicians and foundations continue to throw money at CPD to implement the evidence-based practices Crime Lab promotes, Crime Lab receives yet more legitimacy as policing researchers in the world of city politics and philanthropy, despite never publishing rigorous or peer— reviewed evaluations of police work.

This scam also occurs in the midst of a political debate in our society over whether policing ought to exist in its current form, whether police budgets ought to be slashed, and whether it is even legitimate to prescribe policing as a solution to a slew of social problems from homelessness to interpersonal violence. The Crime Lab–flush with private cash–takes firm positions in favor of the status quo on all these questions.

Crime Lab’s political and monetary support depends on their ability to masquerade as an objective research institution, even as they reject any evidence that contradicts their assumptions, and continue to support police violence against Black, brown, and Indigenous communities.

But Crime Lab is far from a passive observer of city politics; to the contrary, it has a clear interest in gaining and maintaining political power. The Lab has close ties to Chicago’s past two mayors, and in Lightfoot’s most recent search for a new CPD superintendent, Crime Lab consultant Sean Malinowksi (former chief of detectives for the Los

Angeles Police Department) was considered a potential frontrunner for the position.

That a private research institution is so thoroughly enmeshed in the workings of CPD might be cause for concern on its own.

That the research institution in question is so dogmatically committed to upholding the legitimacy of policing, even as a worldwide uprising calls for moving toward new ways to address harm, is unacceptable.

The Crime Lab’s unexamined support of CPD during the largest-ever global movement to abolish municipal policing is not just political, it is dogmatic and regressive. The lab has never published a report or recommendation suggesting that CPD’s funding be reduced or diverted to other services. They’ve never even interrogated this question, despite a recent city budget survey whose more than thirtyeight thousand respondents consider CPD the least important social service by far.

The most recent uprisings against police brutality began in May, eliciting no response from the Crime Lab, despite the protests’ clear implications for the lab’s work and very existence. Among waves of public statements from public, private, and nonprofit institutions across the country pledging support (however performative) for the Black Lives Matter movement, promising critical self-analyses and antiracism work, the Crime Lab did not flinch. They released no external comment and marched forward in lockstep, unfazed by world-changing events. Their obstinate refusal to engage with the movement and the research supporting its demands is indicative of deep-seated political ideology and alliances, rather than the academic neutrality they purport.

The Crime Lab’s relationship to CPD is not honest, rigorous, or challenging.

Rather it is a mutually beneficial economic exchange, in that each entity benefits from the other’s continued existence.

Their close collaboration yields large philanthropic grants to bolster their joint efforts, supplementing the billions of dollars Chicagoans already pay to fund policing every year. The lab’s veneer of nonpartisan, scientific knowledge production is its strongest tool in furthering its pro-police agenda. It’s time to break down that façade and be honest about the nature and role of the Crime Lab and other propaganda disguised as social science research. The Crime Lab operates as a research arm of the police force, and its imagination for social change will only ever extend as far as the

interests of CPD. If we are to end the violence that CPD carries out with impunity in Chicago’s Black and brown communities, the Crime Lab has to go, too. In its place, we demand research and funding that respects the radical imagination of Chicago communities and activists by studying and advancing the development of alternatives to policing. A version of this piece was originally published in Rampant Magazine. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Editor's note: In an ongoing effort to balance the public's need for information against the potential for doing harm to those struggling for justice, the Weekly allowed some authors to use their first name only or an alias due to their current or previous employment at the university and the Crime Lab. Amber Jean is a queer Black organizer and member of the Black Abolitionist Network in Chicago. Aryssa is a born-and-raised Chicago southsider and member of the Black Abolitionist Network, working to defund CPD. Samhitha is a queer Nebraskan born of the South Indian diaspora, and a social science researcher interested in studying race, organizing, and education systems with a focus on abolition.

Troy Bolton is a former Urban Labs employee who has become increasingly distressed by the Crime Lab’s dogmatic commitment to propolicing research methods. brian bean is a member of the Rampant editorial collective and an editor and contributor to the book Palestine: A Socialist Introduction forthcoming from Haymarket Books.

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HISTORY

Following the Yellowlined Road

The lives of Black and Latinx people on Chicago’s South Side are still harmed by forces set in motion by the housing disasters of the twentieth century. Yellowlining—the lesser cousin of federal-government redlining—is another one of those disasters, a discriminatory force that historians and economists have only begun to explore.

BY DAVE REIDY

I

n December 1939, yellow ink flooded Chicago’s Southwest Side. Frank Reidy, my paternal grandfather, and his neighbors never saw it coming.

At the time, the twenty-four-year-old man was living with his Irish-immigrant parents at 64th Street and Maplewood Avenue in the Marquette Manor section of Chicago Lawn. Each weekday, Frank, short in stature with a wiry build, commuted five miles north and east of his parents’ brick bungalow to work at the Stockyards Station Post Office, where he earned sixty-five cents an hour as a substitute clerk.

While he worked his federal government job that December, another federal agency called the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) dispatched real-estate appraisers to survey Frank’s neighborhood: the value of its housing stock, the rents commanded by its landlords, the traffic volume on its numbered east-west streets and named north-south avenues, the earning power and ethnic make-up of its residents.

In Chicago, as in every city the HOLC surveyed, appraisers’ purported task was a neighborhood-by-neighborhood calculation of mortgage security: the likelihood that a home loan would be repaid without default.

The evil lay less in the HOLC’s purpose so much as its methods. HOLC appraisers, many of whom were local real-estate men freelancing for the feds, saw the presence of Black and Latinx people in a given Chicago neighborhood as an inherent, decisive risk to the security of any mortgage loan made within its confines.

Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps made the federal agency the original perpetrators of redlining. In metropolitan

Chicago, twenty-nine percent of neighborhoods—home to thousands, mostly Black but also Latinx people—had been given a grade of D and dyed red on HOLC maps. By choosing red, that universal color of warning, the HOLC made visible and visceral the enormous mortgage-security risk presented, in the eyes of the agency and its appraisers, by even a small number of Black residents. Of a section of Woodlawn surveyed in October 1939, an HOLC appraiser wrote, “This is a semi-blighted area and while it is restricted to Whites… there is a constantly increasing encroachment of Negroes from both the west and south…. It is expected ultimately that this entire area will revert to the Colored race.” The HOLC gave the area, only one percent Black when it was surveyed, a D grade.

For decades to follow, redlined neighborhoods and their mostly Black residents were starved of credit and investment and robbed of opportunities to build wealth. The shamelessly unethical speculators who filled the void left by many traditional mortgage lenders gouged residents of redlined neighborhoods with predatory practices such as contract selling: arrangements under which Black Americans made unusually large down payments on exploitative sale prices and paid exorbitant interest rates while building no equity in their homes (which they did not technically own), all under constant threat of unjust eviction for a missed monthly installment. From extreme heat to rates of hospitalization related to COVID-19, new dimensions of the persistent damage done in neighborhoods graded D on HOLC maps are still emerging. Contention about the role of the federal government in redlining

is at the heart of the ongoing debate about reparations for Black people in the United States.

With more deliberation, and with less venom than they expressed toward Black and Latinx people, HOLC appraisers looked askance at lower- and working-class European ethnics they identified as “foreign,” seeing their presence as a significant but more tolerable risk to mortgage loans. On the same HOLC maps that sentenced residents of redlined neighborhoods to decades of deprivations, Frank Reidy’s Marquette Manor neighborhood and ten areas surrounding it were deemed Grade C—the third-rate grade on the HOLC’s four-grade

scale of mortgage-loan security. Grade-C neighborhoods were stained yellow, a clear recommendation that mortgage lenders take caution and greater self-protective measures when considering and making loans in these areas.

Only recently have economists and scholars begun to recognize and debate the virulent effects of the HOLC’s Grade C designations. Today, for Black and Latinx residents of once yellowlined neighborhoods on the South and Southwest Sides of Chicago, a continuous, multi-decade trend of disinvestment that can be traced to HOLC yellowlining is made more perilous by a global pandemic that has exacerbated

Frank Reidy (center, in U.S. Army uniform) with his mother Margaret Reidy (left), his father Daniel Reidy (right), and an unidentified boy on the 6400 block of South Maplewood Avenue. The photo was taken just a few years after Marquette Manor was yellowlined by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC).

OCTOBER 28, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

HISTORY

“That redlining’s disastrous consequences were intensified by other sweeping, contemporaneous, discriminatory policies is just one of the many reasons that redlining and yellowlining should not be conflated.

Redlining was, and remains, the more vicious scourge.” a pre-existing housing crisis, and by the risk of displacement should long-awaited investment arrive before effective affordablehousing measures are in place.

T

he Great Depression upended the home lending industry in the United States. In the early 1930s, home foreclosures in the nation’s cities reached a rate of about 1,000 per day.

From 1933 to 1936, the HOLC refinanced at favorable terms the distressed mortgages of more than one million homeowners. By July 1936, ten percent of non-farm mortgages in America had been refinanced by the HOLC. By means of these loans, the federal government found itself a major investor—to the tune of many billions of dollars—in urban residential real estate.

Having propped up the U.S. housing market, the HOLC set about protecting its investments. Federal banking officials had concluded in 1934 that “faulty property appraisals” were among the systemic weaknesses that had contributed to the Great Depression, according to a 2012 article

by Louis Woods, an associate professor of African-American history at Middle Tennessee State University. The HOLC argued that the application of “scientific” rigor to residential appraisals would bring about a host of desirable outcomes: fewer foreclosures, greater housing-market stability, even a greater volume of mortgage lending. To foster the so-called science of appraisal, the HOLC evaluated mortgage security in 239 American cities, recording their findings on multicolor maps and in written descriptions of each polygonal tract. Surveyed neighborhoods were given a mortgage-security grade of A, B, C, or D. 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

Primarily in the context of their analyses of redlining, academics have long debated the most accurate way to assess the impact of HOLC maps. Researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago show that HOLC mortgage-security maps contributed directly to a range of negative ramifications, including lower homeownership rates and lower home values, in neighborhoods given grades of D (red) or C (yellow).

Woods asserts that the HOLC’s appraisal approach shaped the underwriting policies of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), making it significantly less likely that residences located in neighborhoods populated by poor, nonwhite or identifiably ethnic inhabitants would receive FHA mortgage insurance, a gateway to lower interest rates and other favorable lending terms.

Amy Hillier, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy & Practice, argues in a 2003 paper that HOLC maps reflected and endorsed the racist and anti-ethnic sentiments, as well as the discriminatory lending and real-estate practices, that had sown the seeds of urban decay before the maps themselves were created. Hillier called HOLC maps “probably the clearest, most accessible, and most dramatic evidence” of what she deemed “collusion” of private and federal real-estate bodies to ratify the exercise of “racial prejudice” in assessing mortgage security across American cities.

Scholars agree that the restriction or deprivation of credit experienced in neighborhoods given HOLC grades of C or D correlate strongly to a range of negative repercussions, from underinvestment and

¬ OCTOBER 28, 2020

depressed housing values to, in the words of Chicago Fed researchers, “an array of social problems related to poverty.”

O

n HOLC maps, Frank Reidy’s family home was located at the heart of one of the largest contiguous Grade C areas south of Roosevelt Road.

Four miles of 63rd Street, from Ashland west to Cicero, were yellowlined. Likewise, federal appraisers made an ironic yellow brick road of a one-and-a-half-mile stretch of Talman Avenue, from 51st Street south to 73rd Street. On the banks of this sea of C-grade housing were redlined neighborhoods, industrial areas, and land too sparsely developed to be graded.

In the official HOLC description of Frank Reidy’s Marquette Manor neighborhood, the appraiser gives the area a C+ rating, still third-rate despite the “good demand, conveniences, and pride of ownership” cited in the report. Appraisers took an even dimmer view of surrounding areas and their residents. An L-shaped, yellowlined plat covering parts of the New City and West Englewood community areas was described as “a rather poor third class.” Of the southern end of a yellowlined Englewood tract, an HOLC appraiser wrote, “In general, this is a low class neighborhood characterized by no pride of ownership, and is, at present, slipping.”

Residents of yellowlined neighborhoods would contend with forces much more potent than bureaucratic condescension.

Borrowing costs in Grade C areas were often higher than those in areas graded A or B. The HOLC description of the aforementioned section of New City and West Englewood characterized its mortgage funds as “somewhat limited” and noted interest rates of six percent. By comparison, lenders made mortgage loans at five percent interest for homes across three sections of the Beverly neighborhood, the only areas south of Roosevelt Road to receive a Grade A designation on HOLC maps of Chicago.

Mortgage-funding descriptions for two of the three sections of Beverly included the abbreviation “Ins.,” likely shorthand for mortgage insurance provided by the Federal Housing Authority. The availability of FHA insurance emboldened private lenders to offer mortgages at lower rates of interest and, according to Hillier, federally insured mortgages were easily resold on the secondary market.

In short, the more desirable a neighborhood was thought to be, the

easier and less expensive it was (for white people deemed creditworthy) to get a mortgage there. The unattractive prospect of paying higher mortgage costs to live in a neighborhood considered less desirable paved the road to disinvestment in yellowlined areas.

The Chicago Federal Reserve’s side-byside analysis of Grade C neighborhoods and Grade B neighborhoods reveal the magnitude and durability of the disinvestment that followed HOLC yellowlining. When the HOLC map of Chicago was published in 1940, homeownership rates on the borders between Grade C neighborhoods and Grade B neighborhoods across the United States were 4.7 percentage points lower on the yellowlined side. By 1960, the homeownership gap in Grade C-Grade B border areas had widened to seven percentage points. In 2010, homeownership rates along C-B borders on HOLC maps were still more than six percentage points lower on the yellowlined side.

Along these same Grade C-Grade B borders, home values on the yellowlined side still lagged in 2010.

Chicago Fed economists found that negative effects of HOLC maps were “larger and more persistent” along borders between Grade B neighborhoods and Grade C neighborhoods than they were along Grade C-Grade D borders.

Having identified the dual phenomenon of “restricted access to credit in yellow areas” and rising levels of racial segregation on the C side of borders between Grade C and Grade B neighborhoods, the Chicago Fed economists dubbed it “yellow-lining.”

From the mid-twentieth century into the twenty-first, many thousands of residents of neighborhoods yellowlined on HOLC maps have paid a price in dollars and opportunity.

P

art of what makes the gaps between yellowlined neighborhoods and Grade B neighborhoods so galling are the factors, geometric and demographic, that the HOLC applied in determining its grades.

The authors of the Chicago Fed study of HOLC maps and their impact suggested that some blocks in Chicago may have been yellowlined for the convenience of those drawing the maps. Choosing railroad tracks and major thoroughfares as area boundaries likely proved more alluring for HOLC appraisers than did a conscientious investigation of intra-neighborhood

variations in credit risk.

HOLC appraisers considered buildings’ attributes, including the age of the structures, recent sale prices, rents and occupancy rates, when assessing mortgage risk in a neighborhood. However, Woods argues that, in the HOLC’s determination of mortgage security, “the type of inhabitant was as important as the condition of the dwelling units under appraisal scrutiny.” He elaborated in an interview with the Weekly, saying that HOLC appraisers would have considered “Irish, Italian, Russian, and Jewish groups as infiltrators” into otherwise stable, desirable neighborhoods.

The presence of working-class ethnic European populations—who, in the words of scholar and author Elaine Lewinnek, were considered “not quite white” in 1930s America—led to the yellowlining of neighborhoods that might otherwise have received a B grade and benefited from easier access to credit.

HOLC area descriptions make the institution’s emphasis on race, ethnicity, and class abundantly clear. Field 1.b on the standard form was “Class and Occupation.”

Field 1.c. asked for a percentage of “Foreign Families”and for their“Nationalities.”“Negro” was a separate category on the same line. In Frank Reidy’s Marquette Manor section of Chicago Lawn, the HOLC appraiser listed common occupations as “minor executives,” “technicians” and “artisans” and recorded $2,400—about $44,000 today— as the average annual household income.

The appraiser declared twenty-five percent of Marquette Manor households “foreign,” making specific mention of Lithuanian and Czech nationalities.

Federal appraisers’ written descriptions of yellowlined neighborhoods across Chicago’s Southwest Side contained additional, potentially decisive notations— some veiled in their reference to ethnicity or class, some overt: “Heavy Italian concentration north and south of Marquette Road, from Ashland Ave. to Wood [Street].

Poor quality of improvements, adverse influences and low grade population indicate a ‘C-’ area.”

Sixty percent of residents of a yellowlined section of West Elsdon were deemed “foreign” by the HOLC. Many of them were Polish laborers, and average annual income in the neighborhood was estimated to be just $1,800 ($33,000 today).

The appraiser assigned to West Elsdon made sure to note the “poor grade of population.”

In the description of Frank Reidy’s

Chicago Lawn neighborhood, an HOLC appraiser wrote: “Heavy Jewish concentration in the vicinity of Mozart St. and Marquette Rd., where values are declining.” Along with declarations of a twenty-five percent “foreign” population of Czechs and Lithuanians and an average monthly income of only $200 ($3,670 today), anyone searching for the reasons why “good demand, conveniences, and pride of ownership” were not enough, in the eyes of the HOLC, for Marquette Manor to earn a B grade has found them.

By contrast, in each of the three Beverly neighborhoods given A grades, the HOLC described residents’ class and occupation as “Business and Professional” and pegged the “foreign” population at zero percent.

In the HOLC’s determination of mortgage security, neighborhood character was pivotal, and the institution’s concept of character boiled down to the race, ethnicity and class of residents. For the federal agency bent on protecting its investments in residential real estate, the primary problem in the Marquette Manor section of Chicago Lawn and in some other yellowlined neighborhoods was not the housing, but the

people living in the houses.

M

any ethnic European residents in America’s yellowlined neighborhoods saw their fortunes rise in the 1940s and 1950s. After World War II, white-ethnic people were granted many of the privileges of American whiteness, including low-cost home loans under the GI Bill. Many exercised their option to reside in suburbs fertilized with generous loans from legitimate lenders.

Despite their military service, Black veterans living in America’s redlined neighborhoods were not given access to the housing and education advantages that white-ethnic veterans and their families enjoyed after World War II. That redlining’s disastrous consequences were intensified by other sweeping, contemporaneous, discriminatory policies is just one of the many reasons that redlining and yellowlining should not be conflated. Redlining was, and remains, the more vicious scourge.

Some white-ethnic Americans who remained in their pre-war neighborhoods used violence, mob action, and terror to influence local policymakers and prevent

Black people from moving in. Black people who purchased homes in yellowlined neighborhoods often did so at inflated prices.

The arrival, actual or seemingly imminent, of Black residents in a tenuously middleclass, white-ethnic neighborhood triggered an outmigration of its white residents—the exodus known as white flight. Disinvestment rooted in the restriction of credit under yellowlining deepened as white ethnics left their city enclaves and, in the words of writer Daniel Kay Hertz, who has contributed to the Weekly, “pulled every dollar out of the commercial life of their neighborhoods.”

(Hertz is now the policy director for the city Department of Housing.)

Many whites who fled yellowlined neighborhoods were motivated by racism, surely. But author and reporter Ta-Nehisi Coates has argued for an understanding of white flight that looks beyond “a natural expression of preference.” Pointing to restrictive housing covenants, public investment in suburbs and interstate highways, and Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps, Coates asserted in his essay “The Case for Reparations,” that “White flight was the policy of our federal,

A scan of a section of the the HOLC Map of the South Side of Chicago. Frank Reidy's Marquette Manor neighborhood (C209) is near the center of a contiguous yellowlined area several miles wide.

OCTOBER 28, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

HISTORY

state, and local government,” too.

Chicago Fed economists claimed that HOLC maps “account for roughly half of the homeownership and house value gaps” from 1950 to 1980 between Grade C neighborhoods and neighborhoods given the preferred grade of B. These findings suggest that, even before and during periods of white flight, the HOLC maps themselves were a cause of depressed home values and home-ownership rates in yellowlined neighborhoods.

T

he neighborhoods of Chicago’s South and Southwest Sides are still being mapped, segmented, and rendered in meaningful colors.

Beginning in 2016, three civic organizations—the Chicago Metropolitan Area for Planning (CMAP), the Metropolitan Mayors’ Caucus, and the Metropolitan Planning Council—partnered with the Institute for Housing Studies (IHS) at DePaul University to divide the Chicago metropolitan area into eight housing submarkets. The stated purposes of the effort,

known as Regional Housing Solutions (RHS), are to enable policymakers, elected officials and community organizations to “understand the variation in local housing submarkets, identify where common housing challenges exist across the region, and determine the best strategies to address those challenges.”

The results of the enormous quantitative and qualitative analysis are readily accessible at regionalhousingsolutions.org. On the site’s home page, I entered the address at which Frank Reidy had resided in the Marquette Manor section of Chicago Lawn.

Today, on the variegated RHS map, my grandfather’s childhood home is identified as part of Submarket 1.

RHS characterizes Submarket 1 neighborhoods in stark terms: “a high distress area with higher levels of foreclosure and vacancy,” “low levels of mortgage investment and high levels of cash sales,” and “an older housing stock.” Descriptions of the people who live in Submarket 1 neighborhoods are similarly blunt: “Educational attainment levels are low, and households in this

submarket are lower income with the largest income declines of any of the submarkets.”

The color given to Submarket 1 housing on RHS maps is yellow.

Just twenty-one percent of Chicago and two percent of the metro area are included in Submarket 1, but some neighborhoods on the South Side are almost entirely yellow on RHS maps: all of the Englewood, Oakland, Washington Park, and Woodlawn community areas, ninetynine percent of West Englewood and Fuller Park, and ninety-three percent of Greater Grand Crossing.

Benign stated intentions.

The stratification of urban neighborhoods.

Descriptions of residents in socioeconomic terms.

Is the Regional Housing Solutions effort a reincarnation of redlining and yellowlining on Chicago’s South and Southwest Sides? Not exactly. First, when describing neighborhoods and their residents, RHS avoids the racial and ethnic characterizations essential to the HOLC

grading scheme. Second, while HOLC maps were largely hidden from the non-lending public, RHS has pursued transparency, publishing not only its map but a spreadsheet of its data sources and a detailed description of the submarket-clustering process. Third, whereas the HOLC consulted few outside the lending industry when grading urban areas, the organizations behind RHS engaged neighborhood residents. Geoff Smith, executive director of the IHS, told the Weekly, “We did a lot of data validation of sorts, talking to folks on the ground from these different types of communities to get their take on, ‘Does this represent what you see as your neighborhood?’”

Community housing organizations, too, see the RHS effort’s potential for good.

Deborah Moore is director of neighborhood strategy and planning for Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS) of Chicago, a “nonprofit neighborhood revitalization organization” that operates in communities across Chicago’s South and Southwest Sides, including Frank Reidy’s former neighborhood of Chicago Lawn. In an

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HISTORY

Lower-Cost Neighborhoods with Rising Prices Neighborhoods in this category include much of West Garfield Park, North Lawndale, Englewood, Greater Grand Crossing, and Washington Park, well as parts of East Garfield Park, umboldt Park, West Englewood, Chicago Lawn, Woodlawn, South Shore, South Chicago, New City, Austin, and Auburn Gresham.

These areas have the lowest values in the City of Chicago. Values are too low to signal immediate displacement pressure from rising costs, and rising prices are a posi�ve trend. Long-term disinvestment is likely a more cri�cal concern impac�ng pa�erns of neighborhood change, such as popula�on decline.

Assessing vulnerability • These areas have a high share of lower-income renters, families, and seniors who are vulnerable to displacement when costs increase.

• Households are already cost-burdened, meaning they spend a substan�al amount of their income on housing, even though costs are low.

• High levels of vacant land indicate low demand for housing and investment is needed to build demand.

• Neighborhoods within these areas tend to have higher levels of violent crime which can be an impediment for investment.

Challenges with maintaining affordable housing • These markets may be challenged, but an area near a higher value neighborhood, amenity, or new development/investment could a�ract specula�ve investment which may not be advantageous to the community as condi�ons improve.

Opportunities for preserving affordability The abundance of lower-value properties and land may provide the best opportunity for developing comprehensive, long-term housing strategies for inclusive growth.

• Utilize vacant land for future equitable development. High levels of vacant land often city-owned and low values in these areas create an opportunity to develop community ownership and preserve affordability in tandem with strategies that build demand and encourage private investment.

Vulnerable and significantly rising prices Vulnerable and rising prices

• Provide resources that help renters become homeowners. In many From a PDF with images of the high-, medium- and low-risk displacement maps published by DePaul's IHS. cases, homeowners rather than renters benefit most from rising values because of increased home equity. If coordinated with a large public or private development effort, a homeownership strategy could help moderate-income households build wealth.

email to the Weekly, Moore characterized the RHS effort as “an interesting highlevel resource for better understanding the conditions impacting the communities we serve” and “a nice clearinghouse for sharing planning and community development tools” across municipal boundaries. Moore noted that NHS of Chicago works closely with the civic organizations behind the RHS effort.

For her part, Moore sees crucial differences between the RHS mapping effort and that of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, whose maps, she wrote, “were predicated on the notion of mitigating risk, but most of that ‘risk’ was based on racial and ethnic fears. [HOLC maps] were deliberate tools of exclusion.”

The history and legacy of both redlining and yellowlining suggest that reasonable intentions may not be enough, however, to

protect already disadvantaged communities from the inherent dangers of mapping urban neighborhoods through a real-estate lens and describing their residents in terms of class. Even supporters of the Regional Housing Solutions effort recognize the potential for its misuse.

“With so much data now available at our fingertips,” Moore wrote, “there [is] always a risk that it could be abused or misunderstood.”

“It’s possible,” Smith said, “that someone might look at the map and be like, ‘Hey, I don’t want to make a loan there now because it’s [Submarket] 1.’ I don't think that’s going to be how [the RHS submarket maps] are used, hopefully, or how they have been used.” Community engagement, Smith said, helps to ensure “we’re telling the right story with the maps and that there’s a positive application at the end of the day.”

In the 2020s, the perils facing formerly yellowlined and redlined neighborhoods on Chicago’s South and Southwest Sides are not limited to continued underinvestment.

The RHS highlights that, because of their proximity to the Loop, access to public transportation, and lower land values, some communities in Submarket 1 face the prospect of “rapid neighborhood change,” also known as gentrification.

In 2017, the IHS published “Mapping Displacement Pressure in Chicago,” a map and accompanying analysis that identify areas where current residents may not be able to afford the rising housing costs that accompany development. After an update using 2019 data, a handful of neighborhoods south of Roosevelt Road— three separate sections of Bridgeport, a sliver of Hyde Park, part of Pilsen, and the Near South Side between Chinatown and the

Lakefront—are considered at high risk of seeing their residents displaced. In these neighborhoods, rising housing prices have besieged vulnerable populations: lowerincome renters, families and seniors who already dedicate a considerable percentage of their income to housing costs. Displacement is already underway in high-risk areas, and opportunities to stop or slow it are limited.

The updated IHS analysis found that residents of sections of the Oakland, New City, Gage Park, Chicago Lawn, Douglas, Grand Boulevard, South Shore, and Woodlawn community areas are at moderate risk of displacement due to rapid development. Driving displacement risk in many of these areas is easy access to public transportation that an influx of higherincome residents could use to reach the central business district. Smith said that housing advocates and city officials “still

OCTOBER 28, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

HISTORY

have some opportunity to get ahead of lost affordability or displacement pressure” in moderate-risk neighborhoods. “But,” Smith continued, “if you have a big project like… the Obama Presidential Center or something that's going to drive rapid increases in demand, then you have to be proactive in those areas to preserve that affordability.”

Frank Reidy’s former residence on Maplewood Avenue is part of an area now more than ninety-five percent non-white.

The IHS deems this tract of Chicago Lawn at low risk of displacement. As is the case in other areas in the low-displacementrisk category—among them sections of West Englewood, Englewood, South Chicago, Greater Grand Crossing, and Auburn Gresham—housing prices are rising significantly in parts of Frank Reidy’s old stomping grounds, but not to a degree that displacement seems imminent, even for residents who spend a large portion of their income on housing. The extended development timeline in communities at low risk of displacement presents opportunities, Geoff Smith said, “to be more creative in the way you try to preserve that affordability.”

According to the IHS, strategies for maintaining affordable housing in such areas include helping renters become homeowners, as well as purchasing vacant or low-cost land and earmarking it for “community ownership.”

A “more critical concern” in neighborhoods at low risk of displacement, according to the IHS analysis, is “long-term disinvestment.” That disinvestment endures as a threat in Frank Reidy’s erstwhile neighborhood and in many Chicago neighborhoods south of 47th Street is a legacy of white flight and redlining, certainly, but also of yellowlining that made mortgage loans more costly in already less desirable areas.

Might findings about the federal role in yellowlining further fortify arguments that the federal government should be held accountable for the extraction of housing wealth from redlined Black communities in American cities?

O

n an overcast Sunday afternoon in January 2020, I started out by car from 41st and Halsted, site of the Stockyards Station post office where Frank Reidy had worked as a clerk. The roads were wet, as if they had been sprayed down. The hiss of tires rolling over water announced every moving vehicle. A dusting 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

of snow partially concealed sidewalks and dormant grass.

I drove down Racine Avenue along the eastern edge of Sherman Park. Two basketball courts sat empty in a thick grove of trees. At Garfield Boulevard, I turned west.

In December 1939, an HOLC appraiser had described this strip of Garfield Boulevard as “the ‘gold coast’ of this area, with many brick apartment buildings and a fine planting of trees and park area in the middle of the street” before giving the surrounding neighborhood, populated in part by Czech members of the “laboring class” and with an average annual income of only $1,800 ($33,000 today), a C-minus grade. Even in winter, eighty years after that description was written, the landscape architecture of the boulevard was still appealing.

Upon reaching Ashland Avenue, I turned south and drove a mile of borderland between two sections of West Englewood— one that had been yellowlined and another that had been redlined—the type of boundary Chicago Fed researchers had studied to discern the effects of HOLC grades. The HOLC’s description of the Grade D section between Garfield Boulevard and 63rd Street offered examples of their appraisers’ contempt for working-class European immigrants—“many foreigners, Irish and Italians predominant…. The better class (or ‘lace-curtain’) Irish have moved south”— and of the militaristic vitriol they reserved for Black people: “A Property Owners' Organization is endeavoring to hold that portion between 59th and 64th, Green to Carpenter, against colored infiltration.”

At 63rd Street, I headed west toward the Marquette Manor section of Chicago Lawn, into the four-mile-wide swath of Chicago’s Southwest Side that the HOLC had yellowlined. Some of Marquette Manor’s one-way streets were under surveillance. At 66th and Maplewood, a camera, encased in a hemisphere of plastic, was mounted on a gray steel pole beneath sensors and transmitters—an installation of the city’s ShotSpotter technology, perhaps.

A similar apparatus kept watch at 64th and Rockwell.

On a steel placard atop a curbside pole tilted at eighty degrees, in red and blue type, the 65th and Rockwell block club welcomed visitors and alliteratively laid out the ground rules: no loitering, littering, soliciting, or speeding. With its sign, the block club requested careful driving and awareness of playing children before thanking visitors for their cooperation.

¬ OCTOBER 28, 2020

Just south of 64th Street on Maplewood Avenue, I found the brick bungalow that Frank Reidy had shared with his parents.

To my knowledge, I had never laid eyes on the structure before. Decades had passed since any Reidy owned it. Having returned from serving in the Army during World War II, Frank Reidy was still living in the Maplewood house when his father Daniel, a native of Ireland’s County Clare and a retired Chicago firefighter, died in November 1946.

In 1949, Frank moved about three miles south and west to a modest home on West 83rd Place in the Ashburn community area, where he would live for more than twenty years. Frank’s mother Margaret, also from Clare, stayed in the Maplewood house until she died in May 1963 at the age of 91. One of Frank’s brothers and his family remained in residence on Maplewood for some time after Margaret’s death.

On this January day, the trim around the Maplewood house’s three front windows

shone as brightly white as the snow coating the roof. Behind the glass panes, white shades were drawn. A gray-shingled dormer with three small windows of its own looked a miniature of the façade beneath it.

A densely needled pine tree nearly twice the bungalow’s height loomed over its northwest corner. That the conifer had grown so tall only a couple of feet from the house’s exterior wall seemed a miracle.

Branches hung across the bungalow’s front stoop. Any adult climbing or descending the seven cement steps would have had to duck the pine’s lowest boughs. Even this magnificent, anomalous tree seemed to my eyes another challenge for residents of once yellowlined Chicago Lawn. Dave Reidy is the author of two books, including The Voiceover Artist: A Novel.

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Bringing Open Access Fiber Connectivity to Chicago

BY GABY FEBLAND

The pandemic, the recession, and Chicago’s broadband ballot initiative provide a unique opportunity to embark on an ambitious public works project modeled after an unlikely source: Utah’s UTOPIA Fiber open-access network.

BY FRANCISCO RAMÍREZ PINEDO

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n the Weekly’s October 14 issue, City Bureau’s Lynda Lopez reported that in addition to public officials and a graduated income tax amendment, Chicagoans will also vote on a non-binding referendum about whether Chicago should ensure citywide access to broadband internet.

The referendum provides a unique opportunity to envision a more innovative way to connect Illinoisans—through investment in an open access broadband network. An open access network is one that is built and financed, usually by municipalities, communities, or through private-public partnerships, and then leased to private internet service providers, like Comcast or AT&T. Similar projects exist throughout the country, including in Washington State, Colorado, Maine, and Kentucky. The largest such network in operation in the United States is the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency, or UTOPIA. It was created in 2002 when a consortium of eleven cities in Utah along Salt Lake convened to create one of the most ambitious public works projects in Utah history. It began as a way for cities to install fiber optic connectivity to cities and lease Fiber-to-the-Home wholesale to existing telecommunications corporations. UTOPIA executive director

Roger Timmerman likens open access networks to how roads, bridges, and airports are constructed by the city for residents, yet still allow for private companies like FedEx and UPS to conduct business.

UTOPIA has since evolved into a massive fifteen-city infrastructure body spanning Utah’s northeastern quadrant that offers services such as smart irrigation, traffic control, water meter reading, and air sensor controls to combat wildfires common in the area. However, the public company is mostly known for offering high-speed internet access that dwarfs the speeds offered by private Internet Services Providers, or ISPs. They range from 250 Mbps up to 10Gpbs, 10-100 times the speeds capped by companies like AT&T, WOW, and Comcast, which operate in Illinois.

One important caveat of these infrastructure projects is that they are not cheap, and it can be difficult to put a specific price tag on initial financing. Justin Marlowe, editor-in-chief of the academic journal Public Budgeting & Finance and a professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, whose area of research is infrastructure and municipal financing, pointed out that KentuckyWired, another open access network, had problems financing the service.

“It’s difficult to estimate what the demand is going to be once the service is up and running,” said Marlowe. “[KentuckyWired’s] bonds were way off.

They were able to refinance, but it was much more modest.”

Timmerman believes that KentuckyWired also vastly underestimated the barriers. “Fiber construction is hard... they ran into all sorts of problems when it came to construction and permitting and then they had to change their designs.”

Estimates on the initial cost of UTOPIA range from $185 million to $475 million, when including interest and grants. In a webinar by UTOPIA’s C-level executives, executive director Timmerman explained that it took four years before the project became self-sustaining and for loans to be paid back. It is currently funded by revenue bonds paid for by subscribers through fees and dues. Such a system in Chicago would require municipal bonds like those issued for the construction and maintenance of toll roads.

According to Marlowe, financing such a network in Chicago is “possible, but knowing how to price it correctly is a challenge.” There’s also the issue of getting elected officials on the same page.

With UTOPIA, KentuckyWired,

and similar frameworks across the country, the base cost for such a project rests in the hundreds of millions of dollars. UTOPIA also faced significant pushback from the telecommunications corporations based in Utah. In a 2003 New York Times interview, the former president of the Utah division of Qwest Communications, which has since been absorbed by CenturyLink, claimed that such a network was unnecessary, comparing the project to investing in a Rolls-Royce when a Chevrolet will do.

In a phone call, Kimberly McKinley, the chief marketing officer of UTOPIA Fiber, explained that in the beginning, the company battled CenturyLink for years in the courts, eventually settling with the company.

Timmerman said the bottomless funds that are at the disposal of lobbyists for companies like Comcast and Time-Warner have been a hindrance to developing the network. Organizations like the Institute for Local Self Reliance (ILSR) and Next Century Cities are only a handful of advocacy groups that can lobby for increased access to broadband, but in a limited capacity due to their lack of funds and their 501(c)(3) taxexempt status.

Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks

OCTOBER 28, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

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Initiative for ILSR, mentions that the telecommunications companies and banks like Macquarie Capital and Partners, which underwrote the project and thanks to a deal signed by the previous governor were paid $93 million in penalties by the state when the project was delayed, are the reason that KentuckyWired has struggled. Said Mitchell: “There was too much risk on the public side and they haven’t hit the key milestones.”

Eighteen years after the project was introduced, McKinley asserts that the open access model has been crucial in lifting smaller internet providers that otherwise would never have been able to compete with the giants in telecommunications that have a near-monopoly in some regions of the United States. This has thus increased the competition in the private sector, resulting in lower prices and expanded access for consumers.

However, despite the predictable challenges that would come from introducing such a project to Chicago, this year the United States finds itself in a global pandemic that has created a recession.

Interestingly, this provides the perfect opportunity to invest in such a project. There is a principle in Keynesian economics that states that when markets are in recession, the government must step in to create jobs and stimulate the economy. This is the same driving principle in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, commonly called the Recovery Act, which brought hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy for roads, bridges, and other infrastructure projects across the nation.

McKinley explained that UTOPIA was one of the projects that received approximately $16 million in federal funds from the Recovery Act. There is “no question broadband and access to broadband is a boon to communities,” said Marlowe. He went on to explain that the CARES Act passed earlier this year did provide some taxpayer dollars for IT infrastructure projects around the country. “Broadband is as good as any investment for economic recovery.”

As Lopez reported, Connect Illinois and Chicago Connected are plans that are already in place across Illinois and Chicago to provide internet access to underserved communities. However, these programs stick to the Federal Communications Commission’s current definition of broadband access as 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload. McKinley argues that this 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

is insufficient for today’s needs, especially considering stay-at-home orders that have drastically increased demand for at-home internet. According to a spring study by Kids First Chicago and the Metropolitan Planning Council, one in five Chicago Public Schools students lacks access to broadband at home, most of them Black or Latinx. In South Side neighborhoods where according to a 2018 WBEZ study approximately fifty percent of the residents lack reliable internet service, open access broadband would be a game changer—the difference between enough bandwidth to handle one spotty Zoom call or several in HD. McKinley maintains that UTOPIA’s model is scalable and durable enough to serve the needs of tomorrow; the same fiber-optic lines that were installed nearly two decades ago are the same that are in use today.

“In fact, it’s the most future-proof infrastructure out there”, Timmerman said.

“Technology has made leaps and bounds over time, but the fiber...doesn’t have any foreseeable end of life. It doesn’t degrade like copper. It’s in a conduit and it’s in a really strong outdoor cable that doesn’t degrade.”

As far as the origins of UTOPIA, executives there are adamant in saying that the company was created, not by one single person, but by the city leaders in participating cities. “City leaders made it happen,” McKinley said. When asked if such a project can be launched in other places, she said: “Absolutely, it can work anywhere if you have the right team and the right dynamics around it. But I think this is an appropriate way for the future of broadband across the United States.” Francisco Ramirez Pinedo is a freelance web developer and writer based in South Chicago covering labor, tech/cybersecurity, politics, immigration, arts, and design. This is his first piece for the Weekly.

¬ OCTOBER 28, 2020

croSSWord "HAPPY HALLOWEEN!" BY JIM DALEY

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ACROSS 1 "Resurrection ____" haunts Archer Ave. outside the cemetery that is her namesake 5 Spectre 10 With "man," a red-eyed winged creature that began appearing in Chicago around 2017 14 Margarine 15 Spooky 16 "____ Baby" (song from "Hair") 17 Soul singer Redding 18 "____ _ lift?"

19 Clutches of fish eggs?

20 You might find the ghosts of Leopold and Loeb, Civil War soldiers, or Richard Ogilvie haunting this Northside cemetery 22 They may utter "nevermore" 24 Bar in "The Simpsons" 25 Not less 26 Scary top floors?

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29 Ghosts haunt the site where this ship capsized in the Chicago River in 1915 33 Vampires' weapons 34 They're found in bowling alleys or highways 35 Pair 36 Henry's wife Boleyn, who haunts multiple sites in Britain 37 Social customs 38 South Asian quince 39 Movie critic Ebert, to his pals 40 Grievous injury 41 What you might do to a pumpkin 42 The site of this theatre (now the Oriental) is said to be haunted by the ghosts of 600 people who died in a fire there in 1903 44 Stylish coffin 45 They may contain ashes 46 Japanese rice wine

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47 Gomez and Morticia's spooky family 50 Full-moon shapeshifter 54 Happy cat sound 55 "Have _ ____ myself clear?"

57 Maury catchphrase: "The lie detector determined that was _ ___" 58 Malcom X: "We've been run ____! Led astray!"

59 They're periodically noble 60 Fancy ball, often for fundraising 61 Bugler's bedtime tune 62 Moody crime films 63 "You get an _ ___ effort" DOWN 1 In "Wuthering Heights," a ghostly child was lost on this foggy expanse 2 It's below mezzo-soprano

3 Kings, in Portugal 4 John Muir's favorite national park, perhaps?

5 They might be found in lamps 6 Head over _____ 7 Former LA Dodgers pitcher Hershiser 8 "Vicious" Sex Pistols bassist 9 Fragrant thorny hybrid flowers 10 Its cinematic universe includes Iron Man and The Black Panther 11 In "Peter and the Wolf," this instrument represents the duck 12 Yours, in Paris 13 War criminal Rudolf who died in Spandau prison 21 High, in Berlin 23 They accompany crafts, often 25 Like Mufasa's head 26 "Space Invaders" console 27 It's above a baritone 28 "I have," in Madrid 29 Gains wages 30 "It was _ ____ and stormy night" 31 Nine, in Monterrey 32 "Please __ ___ us know if there's anything you need" 34 Armstrong or Vuitton 37 Personality-influencing zodiac symbol 38 Salary before tips or overtime 40 German river 41 You can't have it and eat it too 43 They might be charm, strange, up, or down 44 Loving touch 46 "The Majority Report" host Sam, or a Passover feast 47 "Give yourself _ ___ on the back" 48 Parliament overthrown by the Bolsheviks 49 Beastie Boys song "Mmm ____" 50 "What ___ _ thinking?"

51 Elsa's snowman 52 Stitch's six-year-old pal 53 To be afraid of 56 "Little Red Book" author Zedong

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ART

MLK, Virtually Speaking

A night out last winter at the DuSable’s new virtual reality rendition of the 1963 March on Washington

BY MORLEY MUSICK

I

n February, while working for the Hyde Park Herald, I reported on the opening of a Martin Luther King virtual reality exhibit. It was called “The March” and sponsored by American Family Insurance and TIME Studios. The DuSable Museum of African American History in Washington Park hosted the premiere of the traveling exhibition, which was supposed to run at the DuSable through November, before the pandemic shut everything down. The exhibit’s centerpiece is an immersive recreation of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, complete with a 3D rendering of Dr. King.

The promotional materials suggested it would be a PR stunt that would have King’s children and insurance executives both in attendance. This excited me, because I like to go to PR events and drink champagne.

There is never any reason I should be there, and I get to laugh at how absurd the world is, and what a mockery advertisements make of life. On these occasions I will sometimes try to insinuate that I understand the plight of the PR person who is whisking me around, making sure I have a good time and learning only what I should learn. But they never take the bait, and I am left to impute reserves of pain hidden behind their energy and hospitality. I was in a good mood that night, even though it was cold and ugly out, the period of winter in Chicago that has nothing to commend it. I rode over on a Divvy bike.

The bike station by the DuSable was located across a field of snow. The snow’s edges had absorbed mud and gasoline from Garfield Boulevard, and the wet warmth of the days prior gave it a defeated look, so that it no longer recalled Christmas, but a dirty over-burdened life.

Two blacked-out Chevy Suburbans were parked outside the museum, and a white guard walked a German Shepherd in

circles around the trucks, calling its name over and over: “Gary. Gary. Gary.” His tactical pants and vigor suggested that he dreamed of wars—inflected his daily work with the feeling of Riyadh and Baghdad. The other guards, all of them Black, looked like they were just working. The excited guard waved the dog’s snout over my bag and allowed me inside. A red carpet had been laid out and staffers from TIME used their smart watches in the museum entranceway to communicate orders. Farther on, waiters walked the corridors carrying silver trays.

By the coatroom, three men in good suits discussed the cost of hologram rights for Black celebrities. “You’d be surprised at how cheap Travis Scott is,” said one.

A PR woman with blond hair and a gold sequined dress introduced herself. She wore a smart watch on which I could see three colored rings, one displaying how many steps she had walked in the day, another her heart rate, and another the calories she had burned. She explained that she had not yet seen the exhibit but that she thought she would cry when she saw animated King come to life. A journalist from a local parenting magazine agreed that she would also be moved upon seeing his speech in this new way. We all walked to the exhibit space and then entered the first room. A small space, it was entirely dark save for a strip of light on the floor. The strip of light changed colors as audio of Rosa Parks, Fred Gray, and other civil rights activists played through speakers in the space.

When Rosa Parks discussed her experience with the Montgomery bus boycott, for example, the light strip turned red. I scrambled to quote her for my paper but didn’t get anything down. A cameraman from CBS was filming me and I kept looking at him. When this ended, a projection of the moon and the words MARCH ON appeared on the door to the

next room. The door on which the moon was projected opened automatically, like one of the entry ports in Star Wars, and the next room was covered in points of light that resembled stars. White stars decorated the black walls here, and young, Black museum staffers worked the room, taking cautious orders from an older white engineer who fiddled with his hands and looked on their work with quick and perceptive glances.

One museum staffer helped me into my VR headset, and I saw an all-black space filled with white stars.

He whispered instructions in my ear via a microphone, about how to stay inside the boundaries of the virtual scene, and how to view the world. It stirred a pleasant feeling on my neck. Every time he spoke I had the same feeling, which could be revived if I moved outside the bounds of the animated scene. The cameraman filmed me walking outside the bounds, so that the next day I saw myself on TV with my chin fat balled-up and the silver block covering my eyes. I looked like a caricature of my generation run in a conservative, Facebookbased “newspaper.” The Chicago Tribune ran wonderful photos of some of the insurance executives in their nice suits gazing on the virtual scene with a proprietary air.

In the simulation, I was ported all around—first to Constitution Avenue, where thousands upon thousands of animated bodies marched, then to the Washington Mall, then to King’s lectern. As virtual King was set to speak, I was ported into a gray wall that bisected my digital body. Perhaps because of where I stood at the edge of the room, I found, after a few moments of confusion, that I had actually been shoved into King’s lectern. Disoriented, I looked all around me for a way out, then saw a Black man’s forehead, peeking out over the little wall like a sun. I took a step back, and there he was, MLK.

The way my perspective was set up, I couldn’t have been more than three feet tall.

King appeared very tall, with the sunlight reflecting on his forehead and on his gold ring. The hairs on his fingers were visible, and so were the pores on his hands. His motions were more convincing than those of the marchers—because motivational speaker and Martin Luther King re-enactor Stephon Ferguson had been motion-tracked for the scene. The result was that the figure moved just like the real one. The animators took some license by turning the crowd behind me into a swarm of fireflies, which gathered by the stage as King spoke. The color was sapped from the scene, save for the glowing fireflies and animated King, so that it looked like one of those sentimental photographs inside of dollar-store picture frames of lone red roses set against gray worlds.

When King finished speaking, he turned to stare at me alone; the crowd of fireflies gathered under my feet, as if to join him in saying, “You are the chosen one…”

Of the civil rights movement? Then it ended, the staffer removed my headset, and I walked into the next room.

All this lurching around was so disorienting that I could not think about the history being depicted—I did not have an emotional experience of the moment.

Indeed, if there was anything moving about this experience, it was not seeing King speak—there were too many distracting details, and I was too interested in moving my head around to see what happened.

Rather, it was the feeling of being adjusted and gently corrected by the museum staffers; their quiet, benevolent voices (“just take a step back”), the hand on my shoulder guiding me back into place. It was the first time I have had such a physical experience of being told where to look in history. That it came from a Black staffer, taking orders

OCTOBER 28, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

ART

PHOTOS COURTESY OF MORLEY MUSICK

from a white engineer, who through him was telling me how to look at a simulation of a Black person, in a Black history museum guarded by Black guards overseen by a white military dreamer, on the edge of a neighborhood of overwhelming affluence, surrounded by Black poverty itself kept at bay by Black security guards overseen by a grotesquely rich and mostly white university—well this situation, this virtual and real racial situation, the connections, whatever they were, they were not lost on me.

I intimated my feelings to the CBS cameraman and the parenting magazine writer, but neither took the bait. So, feeling somewhat alone, I went out to solicit and then dutifully recorded my own hackneyed observations, and the casually dangerous and gaseous phrases of the exhibit’s creators: “You know, this way, the kids get to really experience history.” “This is more immersive than books.”

18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

Near the bar, several tall insurance executives were laughing and smiling strong, vigorous smiles. There were two MLKthemed drinks that night, one called the “Mighty Stream,” with lemon, and the “King,” with peach purée. I chose the Mighty Stream and introduced myself to Lance Van Vostrand, the tech specialist who had earlier been in the room with me. He explained that he had created the computer systems underlying the exhibit and was there to make it work properly. Loading so many thousands of people in real time, so many hairs on King’s hand, all available for inspection in any direction the viewer turns their head, required enormous computing power, he explained.

Later he said that VR was also being used to design immersive models for mining companies around the world. However, he did not say if there were any exhibits where you get to be a miner in Africa or Asia, and at the end fireflies gather around your body, dead at thirty-three.

¬ OCTOBER 28, 2020

A making-of video in the exhibit explained how they created King’s face. The video showed an MLK lookalike stepping into a sphere of cameras that captured his face from every angle, all of them flashing at different moments. Each image was then combined with some kind of software that represented the different sides of his face side by side in different panes, as if they were different rooms in a prison guard’s monitor.

These spherical facial-capture rigs, which move the face of one person onto another, actually look like futuristic jail cells, new forms of solitary confinement designed to erase memories. When I later Googled the facial model, I learned that he was actor Ty Brittingham, who played an FBI informant on People Magazine Investigates.

Virtual King was therefore a centaur, with a TV FBI man for the head (King, incidentally, once received an anonymous letter from the FBI encouraging him to kill himself ) and a motivational speaker for the

body.

Virtual King, in addition to being part of the exhibit, had also made it onto the cover of TIME, where he looked out with an expression of humble determination much like the expression worn by Bill Gates, Nancy Pelosi, Dwayne the Rock Johnson, Mohammed bin Salman, and Taylor Swift on their own respective TIME covers. A single style unites these portraits, a style of ecstatic, dizzying fidelity, with subjects’ eyes aglow with the future, a future as bright and dated as Times Square. Though it might entail, depending on the person, diversifying wrestling, bombing Yemen, or fighting for basic rights for Black people, each face seems to emanate the same compromising, questing, middle vision. Somehow it all seems of a piece with the space race; for TIME perhaps everything has the meaning of the space race, with its twin ethos of technological utopianism and military supremacy.

ART

In the painstaking labor of recreating King’s face one can see a new and characteristically American method of destroying history, distinct from Sovietstyle erasure in that it is more a series of brightening, smoothing, and stretching treatments than outright cuts from the record. More than 300 people and three years’ time had gone into the creation of this animated man—Viola Davis had worked on it as a producer, and King’s children had come to the show. And all this effort meant that we had to like it and bear its cost with a smile, so congratulations and catered crab cakes passed throughout the main hall all night long. White lights flashed over and over on important persons passing through the camera range; on Bernice King and Martin Luther King III, on Viola Davis, on Cynthia Nixon, on American Family Insurance executives.

Everyone smiled under mosaic frescoes depicting the museum’s founders, under Margaret Burroughs, a teacher, Communist sympathizer, and muralist who trained in Mexico under Diego Rivera, and helped found the Chicago Black Arts Movement; and beneath her husband Charles Burroughs, also a teacher and organizer, who grew up in the USSR, drove trucks for the Red Army, and then came to educate Black youth in Chicago. The big pixels of mosaic tiles rendered their life simply, refusing fidelity to pores in favor of fidelity to their persons. The PR staffer from TIME asked if I wished to talk to the Midwest CEO of American Family Insurance, and I obliged.

At this point, I was slightly drunk, having had two Mighty Streams.

Then a champagne bottle broke in another room and an older Black server swept it away, arranging a Japanese folding screen to hide her broom. There was something about the way she hid her work that, in suggesting it was a sight best hidden from the attendees, at last tipped my growing contempt into anger and sadness—

so I left, without talking to the executive.

Then I had another insurancesponsored experience, riding an identical Blue Cross Blue Shield Insurance rental bike down 55th Street, past the Ronald McDonald House for hospital patients who cannot afford to rent hotel rooms, and past the garish new University of Chicago dorms, which look like a hotel on the inside.

My face felt warm and everything around me was imbued with my anger, so that the world looked bright like the headset I wore, bright like the blue-light cop cameras on every corner. Strapped on top of street lights, shooting people from all angles, they are also a cage of cameras, which, in their aspiration, might one day enable not only the creation of individual 3D faces for a complete police database, but a 3D rendering of the entire criminal city.

I took some notes in a university building stairwell, the thrust of which was just this: that no amount of VR Kings can make history vivid, bring history to life as an experience, much less an animating source of activity for present afflictions—rather, what these things do is distract, impress, and dislocate, like the entertainment that prevents us from truly grappling with history.

This history is of course still around on the South Side. Where I was taking notes, east of the museum at the University of Chicago, a group of private security guards stood just outside. Working all night in the winter, almost all are Black. Many come from the surrounding neighborhoods— Woodlawn, South Shore, Grand Crossing— to which they return in the early morning.

These neighborhoods begin at the shuttered storefronts of 63rd Street, itself the product of more than fifty years of disinvestment, job loss, red lining, aggressive policing, exclusionary housing laws, and predatory real-estate schemes, driven in large part by the university, a school with an endowment of $8.5 billion. The guards are not allowed to unionize or wear their own coats. Their

neighborhoods have lost hundreds of thousands of people since the 1980s. King’s words at the march, so thoroughly exhausted by associations with spectacles like this, debased through repetition and empty invocation, still cut through as a description of many of their situations: “One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land….One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”

The DuSable is a fine museum and they know the neighborhoods and their dire situation—they invested in the exhibit, presumably to make money, which they needed, and then the pandemic happened, and they lost it. No point being too mad over another gimmick.

As I sobered up, I read a short article about Charles Bethea, a former curator at the DuSable. In it, he justified his 2002 decision to install a robot version of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black mayor, within the museum, saying: “You have to strike a balance between education and entertainment.” This is more honest than the claims I heard about virtual reality increasing history’s importance—and I have less of a problem with this kind of pragmatism, and no problem at all with the Harold Washington robot. In fact, I really like him.

He sat just behind the Martin Luther King-themed cocktail table at the exhibit, his neck slumped over, as if hit with an arrow, his always-open eyes cast to the ground. He was manufactured by a company that also made drum-playing gorillas. He cannot tell you much about history, much less reawaken it—he may produce a feeling of estrangement even more intense than the VR show. But perhaps for this reason, I have always liked Robot Washington. He is so far from convincing, that the exhibit has its own (admittedly unintended) historical feeling—like a quaint dream of the past,

when people in their innocence thought that some technical trick could awaken historical understanding, motion, freedom.

Trying to revive the show somewhat, the museum had partnered with Google to release an app that allowed visitors to take pictures with a hologram of Mayor Washington, whose size one could adjust by tugging at his head and feet. A curator told me that children had mostly shrunk him and placed Chicago’s first Black mayor on their shoulders, like a parrot.

One day shortly after the opening I went to see Robot Washington, riding a bike from the same dock and then through Washington Park. In the 1960s, Sun Ra, Kenneth Rexroth, and the Black Panther Party would gather here; more recently the Chicago Teachers Union and Black Lives Matter held protests. In response to a spate of recent homicides in the park, members of the community organization My Block My Hood My City put plastic cups into the holes in the fence of the baseball diamond and tennis courts; the cups spell out “Respect Life.” A flock of monk parakeets nest in the trees around here, having been imported as pets in the 1950s.

Inside the museum, I pressed the history button. Mayor Washington awoke, rose, spoke about his career, and at the end of his recorded speech said: “Those who remember me will still believe that I had a tremendous impact on Chicago. But, I will admit, I do miss my birds. Yeah, my birds. If it’s a spring or summer day, when you leave the museum, look up at the trees and say hello to my green feathered friends. Goodbye for now.” An earlier version of this essay appeared in Mouse Magazine.

Morley Musick is a writer and reporter from Chicago. He founded Mouse Magazine with friends in 2019 and posts short essays on his blog. He last wrote for the Weekly about fishing on the South Side.

“In the painstaking labor of recreating King’s face one can see a new and characteristically American method of destroying history, distinct from Soviet-style erasure in that it is more a series of brightening, smoothing, and stretching treatments than outright cuts from the record” OCTOBER 28, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

ENVIRONMENT

Bicycling for Environmental Justice Cyclists took a pedal-powered tour of community gardens and sites of environmental degradation and neglect

BY CHARMAINE RUNES

O

n the morning of October 17—an overcast Saturday with an autumn chill already in the air—more than a hundred cyclists gathered on the corner of Albany and Ogden avenues in Douglass Park. Some clutched cups of champurrado for warmth, balancing their bikes against their hips and lifting their masks only to sip their drinks. Others wandered over to a folding table stacked with drawstring bags containing a pamphlet about the 2020 Census, a pedometer, a pen, a bright red birding guidebook in Spanish and English, and a blue bandana that read “Black and Brown Solidarity.” They were there for a bike ride through North Lawndale and Little Village dubbed “Bikes, Birds, and Environmental Justice.”

Participants came from all over the city and beyond. Juan Manuel Bustos, who lives in Hermosa, happened upon the event while on a morning bike ride. “I saw there was some food and it looked interesting to me, because I loved seeing the diversity.

When the tsunami of bicycles came over here, I saw white people, Black people, Indigenous, brown; everybody all together, riding their bicycles.” Jamie Bush, a Little Village resident, said she heard about the ride through a friend of her husband’s at the Lawndale Christian Fitness Center. “We love birding and we love biking,” she said.

“Social justice, environmental action, Black and brown solidarity—those are all things that we wanted to support.” Tiara Bullock, a high school senior and student journalist, drove from Lansing with her father to attend. She said she was excited to see different races and ethnicities collaborating and coming together. “It’s different from things that you see on the news,” Bullock said. “More positivity, less negativity.”

20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

The event came together following an online panel co-presented by the One Earth Film Festival and Environmentalists of Color (EOC) earlier this summer.

Aasia Mohammad Castañeda, a member of the EOC Advisory Council, said the organization helped curate a slate of panelists that highlighted different aspects of environmental justice, from bikes and urban agriculture to birding. Olatunji Oboi Reed, the founder, president, and CEO of Equiticity, an organization that promotes racial equity, was one of the panelists. “There was an environmental justice advocate, an ultrarunner, a birder, an urban farmer, and a cyclist,” he said. Some of the same people that were on the panel came together to make the Saturday bike ride happen, he said.

Amaris Alanis Ribeiro, a board member of both EOC and Organic Oneness, first floated the idea of a birding and biking event. Castañeda suggested the focus on environmental justice. They also brought Syda Segovia Taylor, founder and executive director of Organic Oneness as well as a member of EOC, to the table after her organization helped coordinate a bike tour commemorating the 1919 Chicago riots in Bronzeville, Canaryville, and Bridgeport.

Organizers chose a route that went through both North Lawndale and Little Village because of the strong relationships they had with local community-based organizations, and also because of their demographics. North Lawndale is eightyseven percent non-Latinx Black, and South Lawndale—the community area encompassing Little Village—is eightythree percent Latinx. “We also wanted to focus on creating stronger bonds between Black and brown communities,” Reed said.

The event’s focus on Black and brown

¬ OCTOBER 28, 2020

healing and solidarity was especially critical after Black Chicagoans faced attacks in predominantly Latinx communities in June, during the citywide uprisings that followed the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade. “We’ve made a lot of progress—a lot of organizations on both sides, a lot of violence interrupters on both sides, a lot of caring and concerned citizens on both sides strengthening those bonds and healing those divides,” Oboi said.

“So, we wanted to bring another dimension of improving those relationships via a bike ride.”

Cyclists saw the event not only as an opportunity to demonstrate solidarity and allyship, but also as a space to build community. Chandra Christmas-Rouse, an urban planner and Equiticity board member, said she came to the event to meet

other environmental justice advocates and community members dedicated to building solidarity across neighborhoods. “I’m interested in working with folks that are thinking about the role of food, the role of industrial pollution and policy, and how we can build solutions toward a more equitable future,” she said.

O

ne of the event’s resounding themes was that any proposed path to a more equitable future must acknowledge and center Indigenous systems of knowledge. Before the group headed out, Castañeda spoke about Chicago’s ecosystems and waterways, and noted that Chicago is the traditional homeland of the Council of the Three Fires: Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi—as well as the Miami, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee Nations.

PHOTO BY CHARMAINE RUNES

ENVIRONMENT

C

hicago is home to over 22,000 Native Americans. The greater metropolitan area is home to over 65,000 Native Americans from 175 tribal nations. “We acknowledge that the treaties made with the people of the Three Fires have not been honored, and the destruction and dispossession of the land and lives of Indigenous peoples continues until this day,” Castañeda told the crowd. “We acknowledge that acts of genocide, deceit, forced removal, dispossession, appropriation of their knowledge systems, and implementation of a settler-colonial structure formed the foundation or our current city. We acknowledge that colonialism is an ongoing structure.”

Throughout the ride, the planning team and speakers returned to the idea that structural racism was at the heart of all environmental, food, and mobility injustices.

“Our oppression was—and is—by design,” Reed said. Christmas-Rouse reflected on the ways in which structural racism manifested in urban planning policies in her neighborhood, Bronzeville. “I think about the destruction of public housing that took place. And I think that the conditions that lead to that demolition, and the type of structures that kept people in those communities, are all a part of environmental racism, because it impacted the quality of health and the quality of environment in that community,” she said.

Reed said he believes that community bike rides get us a step closer to envisioning a society where Black, brown, and Indigenous people thrive. “Community rides at first glance could be perceived as frivolous—just people having fun. However, the impact is much more vast,” he said. “It speaks directly to improving people’s health because they’re being more physically active; reducing violence, because trust is at a higher level; and people have less concerns about violence and that allows people to walk and bike more in our neighborhoods. [If there are] more people walking and biking in neighborhoods, the more retail is attracted to a neighborhood. And retail brings with it jobs.”

Edith Tovar, an organizer with Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO) emphasized the need for this kind of mobility justice in Little Village specifically. Many Little Village residents ride bikes, she said, but there just isn’t much infrastructure in the neighborhood to support that activity. According to the Chicago Data Portal and Chicago Complete

Streets, there are only two marked bike lanes in Little Village: one going east to west on 26th Street, and another going north to south on Central Park Avenue.

And any new industrial development would only make it worse. “Initially in the planning conversation, I was nervous about folks taking their bikes on 31st Street,” she said. “31st Street is the street that divides industry and residential area, and there isn’t much space. If we continue to allow warehouse developments to pop up in my neighborhood, that’s only going to make it harder to have bike infrastructure.”

Reed said he hoped cyclists who participated in the ride would become more aware of and invested in the power of independent mobility. “Oftentimes, we bike for specific reasons: recreation, exercise, transportation—and that’s fine.

That is transformative in itself,” he said.

“However, I also wanted people to begin to understand the role of bikes in improving our neighborhoods. We engage each other more. We become socially cohesive. We create more collective efficacy. We trust each other more. There’s a social dynamic that is happening on these community rides.”

T

he day began with birding activities led by staff from Audubon Great Lakes. Participants, equipped with binoculars and field guides, wandered the park on the lookout for song, swamp, or white-throated sparrows—just a few of the dozens of species of birds that migrate through Douglass Park every fall. “[Birders] get to see a part of [Douglass Park] that is not seen easily,” Reed said. “You have to venture into the interior. Just driving by or walking down the edges does not allow you to appreciate what that park has to offer.”

At 10am, the ride rolled out—a joyful, motley crew moving west on tree-lined Douglas Blvd. Reed led the way, funk music booming from a speaker strapped to a dolly attached to his bike. Cyclists whooped and waved to residents putting up Halloween decorations on Central Park Avenue as we turned right for our first stop: the African Heritage Garden on West 12th Place, which highlights plants that originated on the continent. As the last of the cyclists had rolled to a stop, Blanche Killingsworth, the chair of the North Lawndale Historical and Cultural Society (NLHCS), greeted the group.

“North Lawndale is rich in history,” Killingsworth said. “I welcome you to our ground. You are home.” Today, some

35,000 Chicagoans, eighty-seven percent of whom are Black, live in the neighborhood.

“But originally, North Lawndale was a Czechoslovakian community,” Killingsworth said later. “Then, it became a Jewish community. At one time, North Lawndale had the most synagogues of any place in the city.” She shared examples of famous people and places in the community: the historic Stone Temple Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. spoke when he came to Chicago; the Contract Buyers League, a grassroots organization that fought redlining and housing discrimination; the longest stretch of Route 66 in a residential neighborhood; and Michael Scott, the past President of the Board of Education.

But North Lawndale’s story is also one of structural dispossession. “The City of Chicago—ever since the ‘68 riots—has left North Lawndale on the table, just like Englewood and Garfield,” Killingsworth said. “When the stores left—places where you could buy meat and fish—it left North Lawndale like a food desert.” As of June, there were only a handful of large grocery stores in North Lawndale. And between 2015 and 2016, researchers at the Sinai Urban Health Institute estimated that over a third of North Lawndale households potentially experienced food insecurity.

“When I speak about the conditions of North Lawndale, it’s a disinvestment.” She repeated the words to let them sink in. “It’s a disinvestment.”

A second wave of disinvestment hit North Lawndale during the Great Recession.

“When the foreclosure hit North Lawndale, it hit it hard,” Killingsworth said. “A lot of banks took over buildings, but they didn’t maintain them. But they maintained them in other neighborhoods: Bucktown, Uptown, the Gold Coast. There are abandoned buildings or foreclosed properties up there, but look at the condition of them,” she said.

“Who takes care of them? The banks do.

They aren’t even allowed to board them up on the North Side. You just see a ‘For Sale’ sign, or you see a lock on the door. But in

a neighborhood like North Lawndale, you see all these boarded up, beautiful graystone buildings—those are beautiful buildings.

The banks don’t do that.

“After the ‘68 riots and the city didn’t invest in North Lawndale, the mayor at the time said, ‘tear it up and tear it down.”

North Lawndale has 1,355 vacant lots—the third-most by community area in the city, behind Englewood (1,943) and New City (1,371). Killingsworth explained to the gathered cyclists that the now-lush Africa Heritage Garden used to be one of those lots. “A lot of the trees were torn down.

There were no trees—none of that out there.

It was just vacant land.” And all of those vacant lots impacted Lawndale residents’ mental health. “When one has to pass by a vacant lot with trash, no buildings, or with abandoned buildings, it gives a person stress,” Killingsworth said. “But when you go to places like Oak Park, there’s a canopy of trees on every block.”

According to the US Geological Survey, in 2011 North Lawndale’s green index— the percent of land covered by vegetation —was zero, but the neighborhood now boasts more than twenty community gardens. “There’s a big movement around gardening and green spaces, to provide public spaces and green spaces for people in the community to enjoy and be outside,” said John Wolf, a board member of the North Lawndale Historical and Cultural Society. The movement is thanks in part to the North Lawndale Greening Committee, an organization whose mission is to create a “greener, healthier, and safer community where people of all ages have places to meet and play as they build a stronger sense of community.” And getting residents into gardens plays a significant role. “I am from the South,” Killingsworth said. “And I tell people when you take a little, bitty seed and put it in the ground and you see it flourish and then ascend to something that you can eat, you get a certain amount of pride. It helps you respect nature.”

”The more we can course-correct policy, legislation, and processes for brown and Black food and farm businesses and cooperatives, the healthier our communities will be.”

OCTOBER 28, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

PHOTOS BY CHARMAINE RUNES

22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ OCTOBER 28, 2020

PHOTO BY CHARMAINE RUNES

W

hile the African Heritage Garden produces some fruit, it is primarily a “sitting garden,” unlike the Semillas de Justicia garden—our second stop. Paintings with captions such as “We Grieve Together” and “Nadie Es Ilegal En Tierras Robadas” (“Nobody is Illegal on Stolen Land”) line the garden fences.

Sergio Ruiz, an organizer with LVEJO who welcomed the group to the garden, told the Weekly that the art is a departure from the themes that had previously adorned the garden. “We transferred from regular decorative paintings to paintings that address things in the Latinx community that has to do with anti-Black racism and unlearning stuff—alerting people to what’s actually going on in the world,” he said.

LVEJO’s ongoing food justice campaign focuses on encouraging “a sense of independence and self-determination through the food that [people] grow, sell, and consume, so that [they] can be selfsustainable as a neighborhood,” Ruiz said. He later told the Weekly that part of the reason

LVEJO focuses on food justice is because “there’s not really a lot of healthy options” in the community. (According to a recent study, over forty-four percent of Chicagoans living in South Lawndale experienced food insecurity between 2015 and 2016.)

In addition to the garden, LVEJO’s Farm, Food, Familias (Granja, Comida, Familia) initiative provides local chef-cooked meals to families in Little Village.

Semillas de Justicia also helps residents heal by getting in touch with their roots.

“Part of gardening and farming is a practice that we have that has a long history,” Ruiz said. The gardeners always seem to say the same thing, he noted: “that we ourselves, in this community, created our own safe space.

The harvest we have here is grown with whole care, for our workers—all workers— and animals and lands.” Killingsworth described a similar connection between ancestral land practices and healing with the African Heritage Garden. “The elders walked the grounds with sage and blessed them,” she said. “I consider this a spiritual

and holistic ground.” Castañeda added that food justice must build off the work of the ancestral stewards of the land and the ways they cared for it. “Indigenous foodways are archived archives of ancestral knowledge,” she said, “and this is part of our healing.”

Food justice and healing also require equitable policies. “There are so many Black and brown farmers and growers that are trying to be successful,” Castañeda said. “There are so many barriers, and this system is not set up [for them]. The more we can course-correct policy, legislation, and processes for brown and Black food and farm businesses and cooperatives, the healthier our communities will be.”

The ride’s final stop was the demolition site of the former Crawford coal plant. Tovar explained that for years the plant’s presence played a role in many premature deaths and emergency room visits due to respiratory issues within the Little Village community, and that shutting it down took a twelveyear campaign. “The city engaged Little Village residents about what they wanted

to see,” she continued. “Unfortunately, HILCO developers did not.” In April, Hilco Redevelopment Partners demolished the Crawford smokestack in an operation that covered the neighborhood in a thick layer of dust. At least two area residents have died as a result of Hilco’s work; one was a worker who fell to his death at the site in 2019; the other was an elderly man with pulmonary disease who died shortly after the April implosion.

Tovar encouraged the group to draw connections between environmental injustice in Little Village and in North Lawndale. “Air is not stagnant,” she told the Weekly. “The fight is not only in Little Village, but in North Lawndale as well. We all need air to breathe.” Charmaine Runes is a developer, designer, and journalist studying Computational Analysis and Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

She last wrote about COVID-19 in an illustrated FAQ for the Weekly.

OCTOBER 28, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 23

ENVIRONMENT

Rise Against General Iron A march and rally were spearheaded by high school students: the younger voices now surfacing in the Southeast Side.

They do not want to inherit the polluted air, soil, and water.

BY ALMA CAMPOS

O

n Sunday afternoon, under gray skies and cold weather, East Side residents, and the group Bridges// Puentes: Justice Collective of the Southeast met at the East Side Memorial at the intersection of Indianapolis Ave. on 100th Street and Ewing Avenue. Organizers and participants painted each other's faces with zombie makeup to symbolize the diseases and death caused by polluters in the area.

The group greeted cyclists coming from

neighboring communities: Hegewisch, Slag Valley, Bush, South Deering, South Chicago, and even the Southwest Side.

Some came ready with zombie or Day of the Dead face paint; some mounted signs under their handlebars and bike frames to show their opposition to General Iron’s relocation to the Southeast Side.

Environmental racism had taken a seat at the table during the second and final presidential debate a few days earlier.

PHOTO BY ALMA CAMPOS

24 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ OCTOBER 28, 2020

President Donald Trump focused on heavy industries’ profits; former Vice President Joe Biden focused on the health and safety of vulnerable communities located beside mills, factories, and oil refineries. It was a very stark contrast in priorities. And yet, while Biden thinks these companies pose a threat to people’s health, Trump’s response was, “The families that we’re talking about are employed heavily and they are making a lot of money, more money than they’ve ever made.”

But that is not a reality for Samuel Corona, forty, a community activist, father, and long-time resident of the Southeast Side, one of the many fenceline communities along the Calumet River’s industrial corridor. He became involved in his community after returning from the Marine Corps. and noticing that some of his children had breathing problems in the summers. They would be out of breath and had the same symptoms as asthma. “I’m not a rich man so what am I giving my kids to inherit? Polluted air, polluted soil, polluted water?” Corona asked.

Corona is talking about the long history of pollution caused by companies operating in the area: U.S. Steel, KCBX, and now General Iron, the controversial metal scrapping facility slated to be relocated from Lincoln Park to East Side despite years of community pushback (and several explosions at its former location). He points to the city and local leaders. “We need to take a look at how the city allows for such loose regulations. It creates a condition where these communities are prisoners in their own homes.”

Crystal Vance Guerra, thirty-two, an organizer with Puentes//Bridges, says this type of creative, theatrical, or performancebased action was born out of the police

shooting of George Floyd in May, the Black Lives Matter protests that followed, and the COVID-19 crisis. “We’re at the brink,” Vance Guerra said.

Since May, the group has mobilized around social justice issues such as police brutality and immigration. “People are dying, there are no jobs, children at the border are put into cages, police brutality is happening… we have nothing to lose,” Vance Guerra said.

As the event began, protestors handed out signs and sold face covers and t-shirts with a clear message: General Iron Out, End Environmental Racism.

Then about a dozen cyclists made their way two miles south where they would join a rally at George Washington High School, before marching to the home of 10th Ward Alderwoman Susan Garza, who has failed to block General Iron’s relocation or fully engage residents on the matter. The march and rally were spearheaded by high school students: the younger voices now surfacing in the area. They do not want to inherit the polluted air, soil, and water that Corona spoke about.

“Washington is mere feet away from the relocation site of General Iron… a metal polluter, so we’re really just working towards making sure our students don’t breathe that air,” said Trinity Colón, seventeen, a student leader of the group Student Voices. “They are taking advantage because the school is low income, and predominantly Latinx, as well as the community in general.”

Washington High School is the only public high school in the East Side neighborhood. It has a student population of 1,440 with a minority enrollment of ninety-five percent (majority Latinx), and eighty-six percent low-income students, according to the Illinois State Board of

ENVIRONMENT

Education.

“The reason this march is happening is because time and time again, we have asked our elected leaders, like Garza, to do simple things like write a letter to the mayor and [Public Health Commissioner Allison] Arwady to state publicly that she doesn’t want this to happen in the neighborhood,” said Chuck Stark, a science teacher at George Washington High School, to the crowd of concerned students, families, and residents in front of Garza’s home.

According to Stark, the night before the rally, Garza informed the students that she was not going to send a letter to city officials. “She will do it in private but not in public, and that is why we have these students saying, ‘enough is enough,’” said Stark.

The Weekly reached out to the alderwoman’s office on Sunday for a comment, but did not receive a response.

In previous statements, Garza has said that she wanted to put a halt to environmental permits and licenses until meaningful public engagement on these facilities can take place. Garza also stated that due to COVID-19, community residents were not able to participate. But in October, the alderwoman said she didn’t know that one of the two required permits needed to relocate General Iron had passed and, according to Block Club Chicago, the city did not post any type of public notice of the approved permit for more than two weeks. One city permit is still pending.

On the way to Garza’s home, Jerry Crum, seventy-three, was sitting outside his home on 113th and Avenue O. He held up a sign emblazoned with the words, “Stop General Iron” and waved his hand, signaling his support to the protesters. Crum had an oxygen tank beside him with tubes connected to his nose to help him breathe.

He’s lived on the Southeast Side since he was twelve years old.

“When I was a kid, there would be so much stuff landing on the house. Republic Steel would send people over to paint it free for you. That was a good clue right there… back in the day.”

Crum said many friends and neighbors got sick and some died from pulmonary problems, just like his father did. “I didn’t know it was blowing through the air, but apparently it has been.”

The Chicago Police Department showed up at the school rally, followed the march to Garza's home, and circled protestors throughout the action. Upon

arrival at her front steps, residents rallied and demanded she come out. Colón attempted to knock on Garza’s home, but a police officer intervened and asked her not to trespass on private property. Garza did not open the door, and it was not clear if she was home.

“There’s been a lot of conflict with her, a lot of backlash,'' said Colón. “There hasn’t been a space for us to interact with her, especially around topics like this… she is not listening to young people.”

COVID-19 has also played a big role in the mobilization of students. “I think there’s been a lot of reflection in the community, in terms of where they live,” Colón said.

“It’s not as nice from the outside as other communities, but we deserve for it to be.”

At the East Side Memorial where the day started, an M60 tank sits in the same place it was installed nearly half a century ago. There are two metal signs attached to a stone monument beside it. One reads “East Side Memorial” and dangles at its side—the bolts that held it up broke. Another metal sign that used to be there simply read: “East Side”. The memorial was installed in 1979 to recognize the role of the steel mills and local workers in producing armaments during World War II. On the viaduct walls that connect 100th Street and Ewing Avenue is a mural that is chipping away. Freight trains run above, and all of it is under the Chicago Skyway. The viaduct's forgotten mural has a faded cargo ship. On the cargo ship is the phrase, “Pride of East Side.”

In August, local environmental groups on the Southeast Side filed a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

The complaint states the decision to allow General Iron in the East Side is “just one discrete instance of the City of Chicago’s longstanding and ongoing effort to facilitate the relocation of industries from white, affluent neighborhoods to Black and Latinx neighborhoods.”

The HUD is currently investigating if housing discrimination has taken place in the area during Lightfoot’s administration. Alma Campos is a bilingual reporter based in McKinley Park. Her writing has appeared on Univision Chicago and WTTW and focuses on immigrant and working-class communities of color in the South and West Sides. This is her first story for the Weekly.

PHOTO BY OSCAR SANCHEZ

Holy Cross Lutheran Church Welcomes all Christians seeking a place to worship God. We are a Christ centered church where we believe in bible-based principles and teach the word of God. We invite you and the people in and around the surrounding community to worship with us.

We are located at 3116 South Racine and worship on Sundays at 10:30 am. We look forward to seeing you.

www.holycrosschicago.net or call Pastor Ortiz at 773-523-3838

La Iglesia Holy Cross

da la bienvenida a todos los cristianos que buscan un lugar para adorar a Dios.

Te invitamos a ti y a las personas de la comunidad circundante adorar con nosotros.

Estamos ubicados en 3116 South Racine y adoramos los domingos a las 10:30 am.

PERO solamente tenemos misa en INGLES. Al fin de Octubre ofreceremos estudios bíblicos si esta interesados llamen 773-523-3838 y dejen mensaje con nombre y número telefónico.

Con la ayuda de Dios tendremos misa en español por primera vez en el futuro.

OCTOBER 28, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 25

HEALTH

A Simple Twist of Fate Addiction, prison, pregnancy, and a second chance

BY ALEX SHUR

V

eronica Daniels has been incarcerated more than once, but she couldn't have envisioned the challenges that this latest stint would bring. Daniels, who’s thirty-nine, was in prison with Elyiah, her newborn baby; the COVID-19 pandemic was spreading rapidly, and Daniels and Elyiah had a heightened vulnerability to the disease.

Then, on March 20, as COVID-19 cases began appearing in prisons, the Illinois Department of Corrections released Daniels and Elyiah from the Decatur Correctional Center’s Moms and Babies program. Daniels was put on electronic home detention, an arrangement similar to house arrest, in her mother-in-law’s house in Mount Prospect.

Had Daniels not been imprisoned with her child, she would probably still be incarcerated today; the Department of Corrections prioritized mothers and children for early release from prison amid the COVID-19 pandemic. But not every mom gets to keep her child in prison. For Daniels, it took the help of Aly Anderson, a doula and drug and alcohol counselor for Catholic Charities’ Jadonal E. Ford Center’s Pregnant and Parenting Women with Opioid Use Disorder (PPW-OUD) program in Roseland, to make it happen.

As a doula, Anderson provides medical and emotional support to pregnant people and their babies before and after childbirth.

Daniels met Anderson when Anderson was visiting program participants at the Cook County Jail, where Daniels was housed in January 2020. Initially, Daniels was reluctant to join the program. “I wasn’t easily persuaded,” Daniels said. “I thought possibly that I was going to be going to prison and not be able to keep my baby. I think I was in jail for three months before I reached out.”

Daniels finally joined the program in October 2019. And it worked in her favor: Anderson helped facilitate Daniels’ transfer to the Decatur Correctional Center’s Moms 26 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

and Babies program, where she gave birth to Elyiah in February and maintained her custody.

Anderson and her co-workers assist Daniels and other program participants, most of whom are dealing with opioid addictions. Unlike most participants, Daniels hasn’t used opiates in four years; Daniels said her latest addiction was to cocaine and benzodiazepines.

Daniels’ recovery from opiate abuse marks her as a survivor of a drug that caused 46,802 fatal overdoses nationwide in 2018, more deaths than any recorded year besides 2017, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Daniels’ recovery helped Elyiah, too.

In Illinois, 2.5 of every 1,000 babies born in 2018 were born with neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS), a drug withdrawal syndrome, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. NAS is associated with poor fetal growth and preterm birth, and can cause seizures, excessive irritability, poor feeding, and dehydration, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health.

Around eighty percent of the Ford Center’s PPW-OUD program participants’ babies are born with NAS, and many require methadone treatment to mitigate withdrawal symptoms, said Anderson.

Because Daniels stopped using opiates in 2016, Elyiah didn’t have NAS. No matter the mother, the PPW-OUD program’s structure follows a template.

“The moms come to me at some point in their pregnancy—anything from six weeks pregnant to term,” Anderson said. “We work in tandem with OB-GYNs to create a birth plan, then we work with each mom until their baby is one year old.” Each case’s details, though, are more complex. Anderson said many participants deal with personal trauma, substance use, a partner’s substance use, domestic violence, custody battles, housing issues, and ongoing court cases.

Accordingly, Anderson’s most critical

¬ OCTOBER 28, 2020

skill in her work is compassion. “People often look at women who use drugs negatively, and the women don’t feel respected,” Anderson said. “So giving them basic human decency and respect goes a long way.”

Given each case’s complexities, Anderson is careful not to overstep a participant’s boundaries. “For me, I don’t want to give them the end goal,” Anderson said. Instead, the participant creates goals, and Anderson makes sure they’re viable and safe. “We have a care plan for their recovery,” Anderson said, “and then a care plan for their overall health and their baby’s health.”

Initially, Daniels found it challenging to envision a goal. “Sometimes it’s hard when you haven’t set goals in a long time, to actually reach in and find those things, like what it is that you actually want,” Daniels said.

Then, she gave birth to Elyiah, and her goals became clear. “I want to be a healthy mom for her,” Daniels said.

But Daniels’ vision extends beyond Elyiah. “I have other children that I don’t have custody of due to my drug addiction, so she’s a chance at redemption for me,” she said. “And I get to try to do it differently this time and bring my other children in our lives when I get myself strong enough, so I know I won’t let them down.”

Central to Daniels’ vision is the bond between her and Elyiah. “I have a strong love for myself that I want to kind of nurture and help myself grow,” she said. “And I want Elyiah to love herself, so I have to show her those things.”

Elyiah is currently eight months old, and Daniels hasn’t used drugs in thirteen months. Until her release from electronic detention on March 26, 2021, she can only leave her mother-in-law’s house for approved shopping trips and socially distant visits with Anderson. She can’t work.

But Daniels is looking forward to freedom, work, and motherhood. “I can’t wait to get a job and go to work and come home and see the look on my baby’s face, so I know she’s excited to see me and happy I’m home.” For more information on the Jadonal E. Ford Center call (773) 474-7264.

Alex Shur is a journalist focused on social services, immigration, the opioid epidemic and social justice issues. Alex is currently pursuing an M.S. in Journalism from Northwestern University. This is his first piece for the Weekly.

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