March 4, 2021

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.

Editor-in-Chief Managing Editor

Volume 8, Issue 7 Jacqueline Serrato Martha Bayne

Senior Editors Christian Belanger Christopher Good Rachel Kim Emeline Posner Adam Przybyl Olivia Stovicek Sam Stecklow Politics Editor Jim Daley Education Editors Ashvini Kartik-Narayan Michelle Anderson Literature Editor Davon Clark Contributing Editors Mira Chauhan Joshua Falk Lucia Geng Matt Moore

Francisco Ramírez Pinedo Robin Vaughan Jocelyn Vega Tammy Xu

Staff Writers AV Benford Kiran Misra Jade Yan

Data Editor

Jasmine Mithani

Director of Fact Checking: Charmaine Runes Fact Checkers: Abigail Bazin, Susan Chun, Maria Maynez, Elizabeth Winkler, Lucy Ritzmann, Kate Gallagher, Matt Moore, Malvika Jolly, Ebony Ellis, Katie Bart Visuals Editor Haley Tweedell Deputy Visuals Editors Shane Tolentino Mell Montezuma Anna Mason Staff Photographers: milo bosh, Jason Schumer Staff Illustrators: Mell Montezuma, Shane Tolentino Layout Editors Haley Tweedell Davon Clark Web Editor Webmaster Managing Director

AV Benford Pat Sier Jason Schumer

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

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

Cover Illustration by Haley Tweedell

IN CHICAGO What’s up with the mail?

That’s the question on every Chicagoan’s lips this winter. Since September, postal delivery delays have been commonplace across the city, and they picked after the recent snowstorms, but they’re particularly bad on the South Side, nothing new. A scathing U.S. Postal Service inspector general’s report released February 1 found that at four South Side sites audited from September through January (Auburn Park, Henry McGee, Ashburn and James E. Worsham) had in total 62,866 delayed letters, flats, and packages on just two dates in September alone. Block Club Chicago noted that at the Worsham station packages due to be delivered in August were found sitting at the post office in October. Rep. Bobby Rush, who represents the 1st District, has called for Postmaster Wanda Prater to resign (or be fired) and last week 19th Ward Alderman Matt O’Shea sponsored a resolution echoing that sentiment; twenty-nine other aldermen signed on as cosponsors, but the resolution has not yet been introduced to City Council. Meanwhile, postal officials blame understaffing due to both COVID and the summer’s civil unrest for the delay, and point the finger at the feds, where Trump-appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is under similar scrutiny.

1,100 vaccinated in Little Village In response to data showing the neighborhood is at the top of the list of COVID-19 deaths in the city, and considering its large number of essential workers, community organizations Mi Villita, Padres Angeles, and the Greater Lawndale Healthy Work Project at UIC partnered with Walgreens to organize a walk-up inoculation event at St. Agnes Catholic Church in Little Village. Given the absence of mass public vaccination sites to date, clinics like Esperanza Health Centers and Howard Brown Health have also held events and pop-up sites to vaccinate people in their network and the general public. The city's Protect Chicago Plus program has been supportive of community clinics in Black and brown communities; the city announced it will designate the United Center a mass vaccination site on March 10. Check southsideweekly.com for a list and map of South Side vaccination sites.

OIG report frowns upon CPD’s handling of the summer protests In February, the Chicago Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released a report on the city’s response to the protests and uprisings that took place in May and June 2020 in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The report’s findings were harsh. “CPD’s senior leadership failed the public they are charged with serving and protecting and they failed the department’s rank-and-file members and front-line supervisors,” it read in part. The OIG conducted dozens of interviews, analyzed CPD arrest data, and reviewed body-camera footage and radio transmissions.

They also cited the Weekly’s protest coverage when establishing when each downtown bridge went up on May 30. The report noted that CPD took months to respond to many of the OIG’s records requests, some of which were still pending at the time of publication. The OIG concluded that CPD’s use of mass arrests and excessive force during the protests and uprisings “set CPD and the city back significantly” in their efforts to foster trust with community members. Superintendent David Brown disputed some of the report’s findings.

IN THIS ISSUE public meetings report

A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level olivia stovicek.............................................3 op-ed: how undocumented chicagoans are ensuring a true sanctuary city

Strategy & determination helped Chicago immigrants and their allies win six major immigration policy changes in five years. carlos ramirez-rosa and xanat sobrevilla....................................................4 opinión: chicago es ahora una ciudad santuario gracias a la lucha de los inmigrantes

Estrategia y su determinación ayudó a los inmigrantes de Chicago y sus aliados a ganar seis cambios importantes en la política de inmigración dentro de cinco años carlos ramírez-rosa y xanat sobrevilla, traducido por gisela orozco....................5 what went wrong at cook county jail

The Weekly takes a look back at the thousands of infections and ten lives lost in the jail kiran misra...................................................7 cops got overtime for anjanette young raid

Five of the officers named in Young’s lawsuit got overtime pay for the night of the botched raid jim daley.....................................................10 it’s not about obama

Obama Center CBA organizers remain focused on Black South Siders’ needs as rents climb michael murney.........................................12 planning for who?

A planned Amazon warehouse in Bridgeport is the latest site in the fight against an inequitable distribution of warehouses amy qin..........................................................15 all homeless shelters receive vaccines

The goal is to address the inequitable distribution of vaccines for the most vulnerable across the city madeleine parrish....................................19 the neighborhood is an image of the city

The fourth installment in a five-part history of Bridgeport and Douglas Kristin Ostberg........................................21

Public Meetings Report

ILLUSTRATION BY HOLLEY APPOLD

A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level

BY OLIVIA STOVICEK FOR CITY BUREAU’S DOCUMENTERS & SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY A West Englewood elementary school shuttered in 2013’s mass closings is expected to be transferred to city ownership after approval at the City Council Committee on Housing and Real Estate on 2/16. The goal of taking over the Granville T. Woods Math and Science Academy Elementary property is to facilitate redevelopment as part of the INVEST South/West initiative.

The Illinois constitution requires a redistricting plan to be filed by October 5 at the latest, but the Census Bureau announced that states shouldn’t expect 2020 data until September 30, officials noted at the Illinois State Board of Elections meeting on 2/17. There is a potential for the state primaries to be moved, but the board concluded they should do more research.

CPS is launching a yearlong effort to create a new school accountability policy to replace the School Quality Rating Policy, which relies heavily on standardized testing, according to a presentation at the Englewood Community Action Council meeting on 2/18.

Council members sparred with Chicago Budget Director Susie Park over how federal COVID-19 funding was spent during the 2/19 meeting of the City Council Committee on Budget and Government Operations. Though they eventually approved the carryover of $68 million in unspent relief dollars from 2020, as well as more than $200 million in new funding, council members pushed back on Park’s attempts to justify $280 million spent on police.

Far larger percentages of white and Asian employees at the Cook County Health and Hospitals System (CCHHS) have been vaccinated for COVID-19 than Black and Hispanic or Latino employees, officials reported during a 2/19 meeting of the Human Resources Committee of the CCHHS Board of Directors.

Two police misconduct settlements for $175,000 and $400,000, respectively, were approved despite significant opposition at the City Council Committee on Finance on 2/22. Officers rammed down the door of the wrong home and are alleged to have held the Franklin family at gunpoint. In the Anderson family case, which squeaked through the committee

with a 14-13 vote, CPD killed James Anderson after his mother called for help to take him to the hospital during a mental health episode.

More transparency for tax increment financing (TIF) funds is likely coming to Cook County. An ordinance requiring line item reports on TIF expenditures was approved 15-2 on 2/22 by the Legislation and Intergovernmental Relations Committee of the Cook County Board of Commissioners.

A policy that would allow Chicago Public Schools to track employee COVID-19 vaccination—and eventually authorize CPS to require it as a condition of employment—passed the Chicago Board of Education on 2/24.

A City Council resolution honored the late, great Karen Lewis. The 2/24 meeting was abruptly adjourned, as council members argued that Lightfoot’s spending more than $280 million of COVID-19 funds on police personnel doesn’t add up. Alds. Burke (14th) and Lopez (15th) used a rules maneuver to reconvene on 2/26.

POLITICS

At the Cook County Board of Commissioners Health & Hospitals Committee meeting on 2/24, officials discussed a vaccination outreach project and media campaign. Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller criticized an overemphasis on vaccine hesitancy as an explanation for racial inequity in COVID-19 vaccination, and said outreach wasn't enough when not everyone can get vaccine appointments.

The Cook County Board of Commissioners passed a resolution on 2/25 to honor former Chicago Teachers’ Union president Karen Lewis. $73 million of federal relief funds to landlords and utility companies were approved.

A $5.5 million increase in a contract to feed Cook County prisoners was the subject of significant questioning at the Cook County Board of Commissioners meeting on 2/25. The Sheriff ’s Office attributed the increase to the cost of employees preparing food instead of prisoners during COVID-19, but multiple commissioners pointed out that the contract has lasted nine years without being renegotiated.

On 2/26 the City Council voted for Mayor Lightfoot’s plan to spend the remaining COVID-19 funds from the 2020 March and December relief packages; it includes $80 million in rental assistance. Council members blocked Ald. Sigcho-Lopez’s (25th) move to consider a resolution to support the hunger strikers on the Southeast Side protesting the relocation of General Iron/Southside Recycling. To read more or to see a list of upcoming meetings visit documenters.org.

MARCH 4, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

OPINION

Op-Ed: How Undocumented Chicagoans Are Ensuring a True Sanctuary City

PHOTO COURTESY OF ORGANIZED COMMUNITIES AGAINST DEPORTATION

An “inside/outside” organizing strategy and determination helped Chicago immigrants and their allies win six major immigration policy changes in five years.

BY CARLOS RAMIREZ-ROSA AND XANAT SOBREVILLA

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n late January, by a vote of fortyone to eight, the City Council strengthened Chicago's sanctuary city policy by removing exceptions that allowed the Chicago Police Department (CPD) to work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport immigrants. Removing the loopholes puts Chicago closer to becoming a true sanctuary for our Black and brown communities—one where our communities are not criminalized, but supported and protected. This victory towards making Chicago a true sanctuary was made possible by “inside/outside” organizing led by undocumented Chicagoans over the past five years.

The inclusion of exceptions in our city’s sanctuary ordinance short-circuited our Constitution’s due process protections.

The exceptions left unprotected individuals with outstanding criminal warrants, 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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individuals with prior felony convictions, individuals with pending felony prosecutions, and individuals identified in the city’s gang database. They allowed people to be deported before they had their day in court to contest their criminal charges and denied those listed in the gang database the opportunity to challenge their classification as a gang member.

These exceptions promoted the criminalization of our community and hinged our city’s sanctuary protections on whether or not members of our community were deemed criminal, and therefore, disposable.

Chicago’s movement to create a clear line of separation between local law enforcement and federal immigration enforcement began in 2015, following the formation of the Chicago Immigration Working Group (CIWG). The CIWG was formed by the undocumented

immigrant-led Organized Communities Against Deportation (OCAD), the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), nearly a dozen immigrant advocacy and community organizations, and with support from the 35th Ward aldermanic office and other progressive aldermen.

In August 2015, our coalition announced six municipal immigration policies that the City of Chicago could implement in order to become one of the country’s most immigrant-friendly cities. In addition to calling for removing the exceptions from our sanctuary city ordinance, we also called for the city to provide pro bono or low-cost representation to low-income residents facing deportation; expansion of the city’s language access services; creation of a municipal identification card for all Chicago residents; additional support

for DACA applicants and recipients; and improved city support services for immigrants who are survivors of crime.

Following the announcement of our municipal immigration policy platform, we began meeting with then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office. While we received positive feedback and action on some of our policy recommendations—namely support for DACA applicants, expanding language access, and creation of a municipal ID—we faced major opposition from the Emanuel administration on removing the exceptions from Chicago’s sanctuary city ordinance.

So we did what organizers do: we upped the grassroots pressure. Through press conferences, letters to the editor, outreach to aldermen, outreach to the mayor’s office, and direct action, we uplifted the need to remove the loopholes from the sanctuary city ordinance. And

OPINIÓN

despite fear-mongering that insisted law enforcement, in this case CPD and ICE, must be allowed to criminalize and dispose of some of us, our community mobilized a united front. We could not allow Chicago to promote an image of sanctuary all while criminalizing and disposing immigrants.

Every time we escalated and publicly pressured Mayor Emanuel for not doing enough to protect Chicago’s immigrant community, he would respond by enacting one of our policy recommendations. For example, in late 2016, he funded pro bono and low-cost representation to lowincome Chicagoans facing deportation.

While inclusion of $1 million in Chicago’s 2017 budget to fund immigrant legal defense was a major victory, we didn’t rest on our laurels. It quickly became evident that our fight to create a city that truly welcomed and protected all regardless of immigration status was to be a long, persistent one.

As part of this ongoing pressure, in February 2017, after more than a year of meeting and negotiating with a recalcitrant Emanuel administration, we escalated in the legislative arena by introducing an ordinance to remove the exceptions. We did so with the support of twenty-seven Council sponsors.

Mayor Emanuel would leave office with the exceptions still in place, but because of our continued coordinated organizing efforts, both inside City Hall via progressive council members and outside via campaigns led by our communities building collective power— what we call inside/outside organizing— we won measures that we had called for in our CIWG policy platform: municipal IDs, expanded language access, support for the DACAmented, and funding for immigrant legal defense.

And while passage of our ordinance to remove the exceptions continued to elude us, we managed to make strengthening Chicago’s sanctuary city ordinance a municipal election issue. In the 2019 mayoral runoff election, candidates Toni Preckwinkle and Lori Lightfoot committed to side with our movement and remove the exceptions from Chicago’s sanctuary city ordinance once and for all.

We can not dismiss that removing the carve-outs occurred during a time of important uprisings against racist policing and the ongoing criminalization of Black and brown communities. Our forty-one to eight legislative win occurred in the midst of important pushes to decriminalize and reclaim resources for our communities—including the push to direct some of the nearly forty percent of the Chicago budget that today goes to CPD towards our communities and the push to erase the gang database that is ninety-five percent Black and Latinx.

Amidst these critical reckonings, Mayor Lori Lightfoot had no other option but to engage, and she signed the ordinance on February 23. But the fact that we had to push back against our ordinance being leveraged this past November to sweeten her austerity budget with increased funding to CPD is a reminder that our fight for our city to truly do right by our Black and brown communities has been a tedious one.

While removing the exceptions from our sanctuary city ordinance means the city has implemented all six policies called for by the CIWG back in 2015, there is still much more to be done to ensure Chicago becomes a true sanctuary. In a city grappling with demands to do more to address racist policing, to decriminalize and to fund Black and brown communities, removing the exceptions from our sanctuary city ordinance is the bare minimum of what must be done.

As we look towards winning additional reforms and changes we can look to the lessons learned from undocumented Chicagoans fighting for and winning six pro-immigrant policies in five years: we can win the justice people deserve through organizing with allied elected officials, and through sustained grassroots pressure rooted in our community’s self-love, resilience, and determination. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa is alderman of Chicago’s 35th Ward, now in his second term. Xanat Sobrevilla is an organizer with Organized Communities Against Deportations, and is herself an undocumented immigrant from Mexico with DACA.

Opinión: Chicago es ahora una ciudad santuario gracias a la lucha de los inmigrantes

Una estrategia de organización “dentro/ fuera”, y su determinación, ayudó a los inmigrantes de Chicago y sus aliados a ganar seis cambios importantes en la política de inmigración dentro de cinco años POR CARLOS RAMÍREZ-ROSA Y XANAT SOBREVILLA TRADUCIDO POR GISELA OROZCO

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finales de enero, en una votación de 41 votos a favor y 8 en contra, el Concejo Municipal fortaleció la política de ciudad santuario de Chicago al eliminar las excepciones que le permitían al Departamento de Policía de Chicago (CPD por sus siglas en inglés) trabajar con el Servicio de Control de Inmigración y Aduanas (ICE por sus siglas en inglés) para deportar a los inmigrantes.

Eliminar estas excepciones hace que Chicago esté más cerca de convertirse en un verdadero santuario para nuestras comunidades negra y latina, uno en el que nuestras comunidades no son criminalizadas, sino apoyadas y protegidas.

Esta victoria para hacer de Chicago un verdadero santuario fue posible en los últimos cinco años gracias a la organización “dentro/fuera” del sistema liderada por los indocumentados que radican en Chicago.

MARCH 4, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

OPINIÓN

La inclusión de excepciones en la ordenanza de ciudad santuario hacía cortocircuito con las protecciones constitucionales del debido proceso.

Las excepciones dejaban desprotegidos a individuos con órdenes de un juez pendientes; a personas con condenas previas o juicios pendientes por delitos graves; y a personas identificadas en la base de datos de pandillas de la municipalidad. Permitían la deportación de personas antes de que tuvieran su día en corte para defenderse de sus cargos y le negaron la oportunidad de apelar su inclusión a la base de datos de pandillas.

Estas excepciones incentivaron la criminalización de nuestra comunidad y derribaron las protecciones de ciudad santuario sin importar si personas de nuestra comunidad eran consideradas criminales y, por lo tanto, desechables.

En 2015 comenzó el movimiento de Chicago para crear una línea clara de separación entre la policía local y la policía federal de inmigración tras la formación del Grupo de Trabajo de Inmigración de Chicago (CIWG, por sus siglas en inglés).

El CIWG fue formado por las Comunidades Organizadas Contra la Deportación (OCAD, por sus siglas en inglés) lideradas por inmigrantes indocumentados; la Coalición de Illinois por los Derechos de Inmigrantes y Refugiados (ICIRR, por sus siglas en inglés), por cerca de una docena de organizaciones y con el apoyo de la oficina del concejal del distrito 35 y otros concejales progresistas.

En agosto de 2015 nuestra coalición anunció seis políticas municipales de inmigración que la Municipalidad de Chicago podría implementar para convertirse en una de las ciudades del país más amables con los inmigrantes.

Además de pedir que se eliminen las excepciones de nuestra ordenanza de ciudad santuario, también pedimos que la Municipalidad proporcione representación legal gratuita o de bajo costo a los residentes de bajos ingresos que se enfrentan a la deportación; la ampliación de los servicios de la municipalidad accesibles en su idioma 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MARCH 4, 2021

nativo; la creación de una tarjeta de identificación municipal para todos los residentes de Chicago; apoyo adicional para los solicitantes y beneficiarios de DACA, y mejora de los servicios de apoyo de la Municipalidad para los inmigrantes que son sobrevivientes de delitos.

Tras el anuncio de nuestra plataforma municipal de política de inmigración, comenzamos a reunirnos con la oficina del entonces alcalde Rahm Emanuel.

Aunque hemos recibido comentarios y acciones positivas sobre algunas de nuestras recomendaciones políticas — específicamente el apoyo a los solicitantes de DACA, la ampliación del acceso al idioma y la creación de una identificación municipal— nos enfrentamos a una gran oposición de la administración de Emanuel en la eliminación de las excepciones de la ordenanza de ciudad santuario de Chicago.

Así que hicimos lo que hacen los organizadores: aumentamos la presión de parte de los grupos comunitarios. Por medio de conferencias de prensa, cartas al editor, contactos con los concejales, contactos con la oficina del alcalde y acciones de protesta directas, elevamos la necesidad de eliminar las brechas de la ordenanza de ciudad santuario.

Y a pesar de los temores que provocaba la aplicación de la ley, en este caso por parte del CPD y el ICE que pueden criminalizar y deshacerse de algunos de nosotros, nuestra comunidad movilizó un frente unido. No podíamos permitir que Chicago promoviera una imagen de santuario mientras criminalizaba y desaparecía a los inmigrantes.

Cada vez que escalábamos y presionábamos públicamente al alcalde Emanuel por no hacer lo suficiente para proteger a la comunidad inmigrante de Chicago, él respondía promulgando una de nuestras recomendaciones. Por ejemplo, a finales de 2016, financió la representación pro bono y de bajo costo de los residentes de Chicago de bajos ingresos que se enfrentaban a la deportación.

Aunque la inclusión de $1 millón en el presupuesto de 2017 de Chicago para financiar la defensa legal de inmigrantes fue una gran victoria, no nos dormimos

en nuestros laureles. Rápidamente se hizo evidente que nuestra lucha por crear una ciudad que realmente diera la bienvenida y protegiera a todos independientemente de su estatus migratorio, iba a ser larga y persistente.

Como parte de esta continua presión, en febrero de 2017 después de más de un año de reunión y negociación con la administración reacia de Emanuel, escalamos en la arena legislativa mediante la presentación de una ordenanza para eliminar las excepciones. Lo hicimos con el apoyo de 27 concejales patrocinadores del Ayuntamiento.

El alcalde Emanuel dejaría el cargo con las excepciones todavía en su lugar, pero debido a nuestros esfuerzos de organización continuos y coordinados, tanto dentro del Ayuntamiento a través de los miembros del consejo progresista, como fuera a través de campañas dirigidas por nuestras comunidades construyendo poder colectivo —lo que llamamos la organización dentro/fuera— ganamos medidas que habíamos pedido en nuestra plataforma de políticas del CIWG: IDs municipales, acceso ampliado al idioma, apoyo a los DACAmentados y la financiación para la defensa legal de inmigrantes.

Y aunque la aprobación de nuestra ordenanza para eliminar las excepciones continuó eludiéndonos, logramos que el fortalecimiento de la ordenanza de ciudad santuario en Chicago fuera un asunto electoral. En la segunda vuelta de las elecciones a la alcaldía del 2019, las candidatas Toni Preckwinkle y la ahora alcaldesa Lori Lightfoot se comprometieron a ponerse del lado de nuestro movimiento y eliminar de una vez por todas, las excepciones a la ordenanza.

No podemos descartar que la eliminación de las excepciones ocurrió durante un tiempo de importantes levantamientos contra la policía racista y la criminalización de las comunidades negras y latinas. Nuestra victoria legislativa ocurrió en medio de presiones importantes para despenalizar y reclamar recursos para nuestras comunidades, incluyendo el empujón para dirigir parte del casi cuarenta por ciento del presupuesto de Chicago que

va al CPD hacia nuestras comunidades y el empujón para borrar la base de datos de pandillas que es noventa cinco por ciento negro y latinx.

En medio de estos cálculos críticos, la alcaldesa Lori Lightfoot no tenía otra opción que comprometerse y el 23 de febrero firmó la ordenanza. Pero el hecho de que en noviembre tuviéramos que responder para que la alcaldesa no utilizara la ordenanza para obtener apoyo para su presupuesto de austeridad con un aumento de fondos para la policía, es un recordatorio que nuestra lucha para que la Municipalidad haga lo correcto por nuestras comunidades negra y latina, ha sido larga y tediosa.

Aunque eliminar las excepciones de nuestra ordenanza de ciudad santuario significa que la municipalidad ha implementado las seis políticas solicitadas por el CIWG en 2015, todavía queda mucho por hacer para asegurar que Chicago se convierta en un verdadero santuario.

En una ciudad que lucha con demandas para hacer más para abordar a la policía racista y por descriminalizar y financiar a las comunidades negras y latinas, eliminar las excepciones de nuestra ordenanza de ciudad santuario es lo mínimo que se debe hacer.

A medida que intentamos ganar reformas y cambios adicionales podemos darle un vistazo a las lecciones aprendidas de los indocumentados de Chicago que luchando, ganaron en cinco años seis políticas pro-inmigrantes: podemos ganar la justicia que la gente merece a través de la organización con funcionarios electos aliados y a través de la presión popular sostenida arraigada en el amor propio, la resistencia y la autodeterminación de nuestra comunidad. Carlos Ramírez-Rosa es el concejal del Distrito 35 de Chicago, actualmente cumple el cargo en su segundo mandato.

Xanat Sobrevilla es una organizadora de Comunidades Organizadas Contra las Deportaciones y ella misma es una inmigrante indocumentada originaria de México y beneficiada por DACA. Esta es su primera contribución al Weekly.

JUSTICE

What Went Wrong at Cook County Jail

More than a year after the first known case of COVID-19 in Illinois, the Weekly takes a look back at the thousands of infections and ten lives lost in the jail

BY KIRAN MISRA

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few days before Easter, Karl Battiste called his daughter Karla with a headache. He wasn’t feeling well and was worried about the spread of COVID-19 in Chicago’s Cook County Jail, where he was incarcerated at the time.

Battiste told his daughter that he was being held right across from two people who had tested positive for the virus, and to make matters worse, his bunk was located under a vent. He had heard about how the coronavirus could spread with this type of circulating air.

“I didn’t think anything about it because I thought my dad was going to live on,” Karla said. “That was the last time I got a phone call from Cook County Jail and from my dad.”

Battiste is one of the thousands of incarcerated people in the United States who have died from COVID-19, and one of ten people who have died while incarcerated in Cook County Jail. At the time of Battiste’s death, the jail was the site of the largest outbreak of the novel coronavirus in the country, according to data collected by the New York Times.

“People were complaining and no one was listening,” said Anthony Johnson, who contracted COVID-19 in the jail in April. “It was going through the jail like wildfire [and the Sheriff ’s Office’s strategy] was just trial and error… the fact is they didn’t know what to do.”

Nearly one year later, as the virus continues to spread in the jail, advocates

know that more cases like Battiste’s aren’t just likely, they’re inevitable. Since May, the jail population has climbed by more than 1,300 despite activist pressure to free people to avoid another deadly outbreak. In December, there was another mass outbreak that rivaled the first one in April.

“I’m going to tear up when I start talking about Mr. Battiste,” says Margaret Domin, the public defender who had been representing him since January 2019. “We have made our position known very clearly as to the absolute failings of the Sheriff to protect the inmates and the employees.”

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or years, Karl Battiste waited at the end of the school day for his granddaughter Briana to come home from elementary school. He had decorated his apartment in South Chicago with pictures of her, toys strewn around the rooms in anticipation of their daily afternoon play time.

For Battiste, who was sixty-four years old, spending time with Briana while her mom was at work was a responsibility he took very seriously.

“When I visited him in the jail, there were times he cried because he missed his granddaughter so much… He loved her so much,” Domin said. “His day revolved around when his granddaughter came home for school.”

Battiste was the youngest child of a big family, with one daughter

KARL BATTISTE WITH HIS DAUGHTER KARLA. PHOTO COURTESY OF KARLA BATTISTE

and two grandchildren as well as five additional stepchildren and seven stepgrandchildren. A Chicagoan born and raised, he attended St. Ambrose Catholic School, then graduated from DuSable High School before working in Chicago’s shipping industry. While working, he married Valencia Smith, who passed away several years before Battiste.

“He was really big on politics; he was just a smart man and strong about what he believed in. He was really into sports, especially baseball. Whenever he could see a game, he would. But for the most part, he loved enjoying time with his family and his grandkids,” said Battiste’s niece Tiffany.

“In the summertime, he loved to barbeque and have the family come over and eat and play cards. On the holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving, I would always cook, and he would always get

really dressed up really sharp and come over and buy all the grandkids, nieces, and nephews gifts,” Tiffany continued.

“He made sure that every Christmas, he would buy the young men in the family a suit. They knew that Uncle Karl was going to bring them a suit.”

“My father was the smartest man that I knew. And he was very generous— he always gave his last dime,” said Karla. “He had a hard life, but he had a good soul.”

Awaiting trial after his arrest in January 2019, Battiste was ordered to be held without bail. Domin thought this decision made no sense. “He was on disability. I mean, he walked with a cane.

Come on, he’s not going to be running anywhere,” she said. “He’s an older man who never caused any problems in jail.”

So when the pandemic hit and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office MARCH 4, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

JUSTICE

announced they would be reviewing cases for release, Domin filed a bond reduction motion, hopeful that bail could be set for Battiste so he could return home.

Advocates knew that decarceration was the one and only way to prevent mass deaths in the jail. No combination of hand sanitizer, masks, and visitation restrictions would be sufficient to prevent spread of the virus in a setting where social distancing was impossible and many travelled in and out every day.

At the beginning of March, more than one hundred organizations coordinated by the Chicago Community Bond Fund signed an open letter to the county outlining what needed to be done to curb the spread of COVID-19 in the jail.

The letter recommended releasing people who were in jail solely for their inability to pay money bond, not admitting anyone a judge had deemed eligible for pretrial release, and releasing everyone eligible for electronic monitoring.

These positions were consistent with the Sheriff ’s public statements on the injustice of wealth-based pretrial detention. Others recommendations in the letter had been actively opposed by the Sheriff ’s Office and State’s Attorney’s Office in the past, such as increasing mobility for people on electronic monitoring, expanding access to phone and video visitation, pausing nonessential court activities, and releasing anyone over the age of fifty or who had a compromised immune system.

The last of these recommendations could have saved Battiste’s life. He had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), increasing his risk of death from the coronavirus.

Instead, the State’s Attorney’s Office insisted on reviewing cases individually for release, basing decisions on factors like whether the charge was classified as “violent” or “nonviolent” rather than risk factors for contracting complications from the coronavirus. The only substantial policy change the State’s Attorney’s Office made was a decision to not prosecute what it called “non-violent, low-level narcotics offenses” during the pandemic.

8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MARCH 4, 2021

The Sheriff ’s Office issued no response to the prayer vigils or car caravans taking place outside of the jail as hundreds inside became infected.

I

t’s impossible to overstate how bleak the outlook was inside the jail during these months.

Throughout the pandemic, people inside the jail testified to the conditions they observed and experienced. Dominik Baster witnessed a man with liver cirrhosis be denied sufficient food, medication, and medical attention, even when he started experiencing blood in his urine. He testified to the neglect of another man, even as he was vomiting and falling out of his bed crying for help.

This man, William Sobczyk, eventually died of the virus.

Meanwhile, medical workers and jail staff told those in Baster’s dorm not to worry about masks and gloves after Sobczyk died, because they had probably already contracted the virus.

“We talked practically every day, and he was talking about how things weren’t clean in there,” said Battiste’s sister Elaine.

In a statement to South Side Weekly and Shadowproof, the Sheriff ’s Office denied this, saying, “All detainees have always had access to as much soap, hand sanitizer, and cleaning and disinfecting supplies they need. Extra supplies are kept in every single division, and detainees who require more can simply ask and it will be provided to them.”

But reports from inside the jail detail guards keeping hand sanitizer for themselves, cells and surrounding areas not being sanitized after those who had died from the virus were removed from them, a chronic mask shortage, ceilings collapsing from mold and rot, infestations of pests, ignored requests for cleaning materials, and beds within one foot of each other making social distancing impossible. Men were often unable to change their clothes and sheets for over a week. Advocates remember masks and cleaning supplies being confiscated.

According to Sarah Staudt, a senior policy analyst and staff attorney at the Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair

KARL BATTISTE DIED AFTER CONTRACTING COVID-19 IN THE COOK COUNTY JAIL IN APRIL 2020.

PHOTO COURTESY OF KARLA BATTISTE

Courts, while responsibility for improving the conditions in the jail rested on the Sheriff ’s Office’s shoulders, the State’s Attorney’s and Chief Judge’s Offices have the sole power to decarcerate.

So, a few days after the Chicago Community Bond Fund released its open letter, the Cook County Public Defender’s office, where Domin works, filed an emergency petition for mass release from the jail. Then, the bond fund filed a federal class action lawsuit against the Sheriff ’s Office with Chicago civil rights law firm Loevy & Loevy, Civil Rights Corps, and the MacArthur Justice Center to improve protections for people inside the jail.

Meanwhile, advocates raced against the clock, conducting a mass bailout and freeing more than twenty people who were unable to pay for pretrial release from jail. They courtwatched, called and wrote to county and city officials, and more.

“There were actions calling for mass release that were connected to abolition and the call to ‘Free Them All.’ One of the larger caravans outside Cook County

Jail was explicitly organized by a coalition of abolitionist groups,” said Sharlyn Grace, the former executive director of the Chicago Community Bond Fund.

“But there were also calls for mass release from the Cook County Public Defender’s Office and from faith leaders, some of whom were abolitionists and some of them weren’t.”

A combination of these efforts and a slowdown in jail admissions due to reductions in cases pursued by the State’s Attorney’s Office decreased the jail population by more than 1,500.

“It absolutely showed that there were people in the jail, when they actually reviewed their cases, that could have and should have been released. And they should have been released without the presence of COVID-19,” Grace said.

But this reduction in the jail population wasn’t enough to protect everyone inside.

The jail recorded its first death on April 6. Jeffrey Pendleton was a fiftynine-year-old man in jail because he couldn’t afford the $5,000 it cost to go home pretrial.

JUSTICE

In response to the class-action lawsuit, the District Court of the Northern District of Illinois ordered the Sheriff to implement additional social distancing and sanitary measures at Cook County Jail. The Sheriff ’s Office appealed the decision, claiming it had already put in place reasonable measures to prevent the spread of the virus.

In its recent statement, the Sheriff ’s Office argued, “It would be disingenuous and a disservice to your readers to fail to report that social distancing measures were implemented unilaterally by the Sheriff ’s office prior to and independent of any outside agency, including the federal Court. In fact, the Court found that virtually every single intervention was implemented by the Sheriff ’s Office or in conjunction with Cermak Health Services, prior to the filing of the lawsuit or any judicial order.”

The text of the federal judge’s decision highlights the opposite, noting that many protective measures implemented by the Sheriff ’s Office “were instituted only after the Court’s TRO [temporary restraining order] or preliminary injunction.” The judge found that “the Sheriff did not voluntarily take all of the coronavirusprotective measures that he cites” and denied the Sheriff ’s request, stating that staying the injunction could “again place the health of detained persons at serious risk.”

Incarcerated people described the jail’s efforts to undertake testing and provide sanitation equipment as “smoke and mirrors.” Johnson remembers correctional officers actively working against implementing social distancing.

Incarcerated people resisted their conditions and fought for their own safety. They refused to congregate in group settings when ordered by the guards. Some would sleep in the hallways to avoid crowded spaces or camp out in the bathroom instead when ordered to the day room. Others tried to save and share cleaning supplies and made homemade masks from shirts, often at personal risk, since these items could be considered contraband.

“We didn’t have the option of just staying in the cell,” Johnson said. “And

you know, forty guys would be shoulder to shoulder, we couldn’t practice social distancing… They weren’t giving us any sanitizer, we had no face masks, we had no rubber gloves.”

Johnson tried to follow the proper channels, filing a grievance with the Sheriff ’s Office over the lack of protective equipment, social distancing, and effective testing. He never heard back or saw the issues resolved.

But only the Sheriff ’s Office knows the true scope of grievances and concerns those incarcerated raised. “We have known for a while that jails are fundamentally hierarchical and they’re fundamentally unjust places in terms of the way discipline decisions are made, in the way that there’s no access to review or appeal to a higher authority,” Staudt said.

“All jail discipline happens internally.”

“People inside the jail were calling and speaking to journalists, and whenever someone has a pending case, that’s done at great personal risk, also with the risk of retaliation from guards,” said Grace.

“People were really, really mobilized inside in a way that I’ve certainly never encountered before.”

Johnson asked the correctional officers, who traveled regularly in and out of the jail, if they were getting tested.

They told him they were not.

“So my question to them was, ‘What was protecting me from you?’ ” Johnson recounted. “Since you’re leaving and going home every day and you’re coming back here with no face mask, no face shield, no space, none of that.”

Meanwhile, “people were being secretly taken off the deck unbeknownst to us,” Johnson said, heightening the feelings of fear and a lack of transparency.

By mid-April, two more men had died inside the jail.

When Johnson started experiencing symptoms of the coronavirus, he asked to get tested but was offered a thermometer instead. Soon after, he was released without a home to return to in the midst of Chicago’s stay-at-home order, but still wasn’t tested, making it impossible for Johnson to know whether he was carrying the virus from the jail into his community. He immediately

got tested after release and came back positive, recovering at McCormick Place for the next two weeks. He considers himself lucky.

“When they finally got out, you know, the guys were happy, because they heard that people were dying from this and they didn’t want to die,” he said of himself and the lucky few who were released.

“There are some cases such as mine, that they should not keep people in jail unnecessarily to sit there, month after month, when the jail could release them on their own recognizance or on a furlough or house arrest or global positioning arrest.”

He believes mass decarceration efforts should continue after the end of the pandemic. “[In jail], the clothes are not washed thoroughly. By the time it gets on the deck, the sanitizer is diluted four, five, six times. The disinfectant is watered down, and the washing of uniforms and washing of the surfaces is a breeding ground for MRSA, scabies, body lice, and any other pathogen or bacteria,” Johnson said.

Grace agrees. “COVID heightened public awareness of things that have always been true about conditions inside jails, prisons, and immigration detention—that there is inadequate access to health care, that there is crowding, lack of ability to prevent the spread of infectious disease,” she said.

T

he week Johnson got out of jail, Domin was preparing to present a motion for Battiste’s release in court when she looked him up in the records system. It showed that Battiste had been hospitalized.

“I call our contact at the jail, and I’m like, ‘Where is he?’ and they wouldn’t tell me,” she said. “And then I said, ‘I really need to know, because I am his lawyer.’ They finally said, ‘He’s in Stroger [Hospital], and we’ll arrange for an emergency call for you.’ ” “When I heard his voice, I literally burst out crying,” Domin remembered. “I was just so relieved to hear his voice. And that man, he started laughing at me, he was like, ‘Oh, Ms. Domin, don’t be silly.’ ”

Battiste explained that he was getting some tests done, and Domin, in turn, assured him that she was working overtime to get him home as soon as possible.

“That was Wednesday afternoon,” she said. “Friday morning, he was dead already.”

“When my daddy passed, nobody contacted me from Cook County Jail,” Karla said. “Every time I tried to give somebody my phone number, it’s like they didn’t want to talk to me... I’m still hurt.”

The loss stings even more because Battiste was so close to freedom. “We were going to trial, we had a valid defense, we had a chance of prevailing… he would have testified superbly,” said Domin.

The jury had even been chosen for Battiste’s trial.

A few weeks after Battiste’s death, COVID-19 numbers improved nationwide and in the jail. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention manuscript claimed that widespread testing and “aggressive intervention strategies” made Cook County Jail a model for how to handle the virus.

Glowing profiles of Dart abounded, and the Sheriff ’s Office again tried to get out from under federal oversight, arguing that the federal injunction mandating precautions be taken to avoid the spread of the virus in the jail was unnecessary because the jail was taking steps that exceeded the court’s requirements.

However, after an appeals court judge ruled that the Sheriff ’s Office no longer had to comply with measures regarding social distancing, the number of people housed in congregate housing immediately started rising. Space between beds and ability to social distance started falling.

In its statement, the Sheriff ’s Office denied responsibility for these changes, saying, “The population of the jail increased over the summer, and as it increased, the number of beds available to single cell detainees decreased. The Sheriff ’s Office continues to single-cell as many people as possible and continues to implement social distancing practices to the fullest extent that space allows.”

MARCH 4, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

But these changes had a devastating impact on those incarcerated. By late November, the jail had more active COVID-19 cases than it did at the virus’s previous peak in the jail around the time of Battiste’s death.

During this time, Marion Johnson, another person incarcerated in Cook County Jail, contracted COVID-19.

“There’s nothing you really can do there,” she explained. “They have us all take a shower together… The officers would come and cough on inmates, they just didn’t care.”

Once Johnson started experiencing coronavirus symptoms, she let the jail staff know. They wrote it down but refused to give Johnson a test.

“They put me in the isolation room, and I asked them, ‘Can I have a COVID test?’ because you know I don’t have no taste, I can’t smell, I have a headache, I have a fever. And they said, ‘no, no, no,’ ” Johnson said. “It got to a point where I was worried about my life.”

Eventually, she started having a hard time breathing and communicating.

Johnson was sent to Stroger Hospital, where she tested positive for COVID-19.

After Johnson was hospitalized for a week, chained to a bed and forced to go to the bathroom in a bucket, her case was dismissed and she went home.

But such a dismissal is far from the norm: case reviews and reductions in admissions have also halted, bringing the jail population back up to 5,411 as of February 26, at pre-pandemic levels, with no plans for another systematic review in sight.

To make matters worse, cases are moving more slowly through the courts than ever, forcing many to wait in jail without end. Hundreds of people have spent more time in jail than any sentence they would receive at trial would mandate.

“When the tenth person died in the jail [in January], I’m not even sure anyone recorded it. We really are in a place where we’re just not responding to this crisis at all. We’re just sort of giving up, and the jail population is rising,” says Staudt. “We are still allowing people to get it.”

10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

The impacts of the virus in jails and prisons extend far beyond just the number of deaths from respiratory failure.

“Because of the virus there are all kinds of problems that are happening in our jails and prisons, including understaffing and heightened violence and tension.

There’s been double the homicides and double the suicides in prison,” said Page Dukes, a volunteer with Mourning Our Losses, a crowdsourced memorial project commemorating those who have died of COVID-19 while incarcerated.

Because of the restrictions on funerals and family gatherings, the Battistes were unable to gather in mourning. Instead, they released balloons and lit candles in Karl’s honor.

Karla, Battiste’s daughter, was able to bring Battiste’s ashes back to Tennessee. But she still doesn’t have closure. She planned to file a wrongful death suit against the Sheriff ’s Office, asserting that her father’s death was completely preventable.

“They knew he was sick with COPD, and then he was right across the hall from people who had COVID-19,” she said. “Me and my dad were best friends.

He always taught me about everything…

He’s right here inside my house, he’s right here with me.” This article has been published in partnership with Shadowproof and was supported by Shadowproof ’s Marvel Cooke Reporting Fellowship.

Kiran Misra primarily covers criminal justice and policing in Chicago for the Weekly. She last wrote about vaccination efforts at Cook County Jail.

¬ MARCH 4, 2021

Cops Got Overtime for Anjanette Young Raid Five of the officers named in Young’s lawsuit got overtime pay for the night of the botched raid.

BY JIM DALEY ILLUSTRATION BY DECLAN GATENBY

POLICE

F

ive of the Chicago police officers who served a warrant on Anjanette Young’s home in 2019 earned time-and-a-half for the botched raid.

Only two of the officers noted in their overtime requests that the extra duty was for serving a warrant; the other three used a generic category code.

In mid-February, Young filed a lawsuit against the city and the twelve male officers who burst through her door at 7pm on February 21, 2019 and handcuffed her while she was naked. The police were searching for a man who lived next door, but a confidential informant’s tip, which they failed to verify, sent them to her home in error that evening.

Via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the Weekly obtained overtime records for 2019 from the Chicago Police Department and checked the officers named in Young’s lawsuit against the data. Five of those officers—Alain Aporongao, Gabriel Cruz, Bryan Mordan, Michael Orta, and Nikola Saric—submitted requests for overtime they worked during the hours of 6:30pm and 10:30pm on February 21, 2019. An 11th District lieutenant, Nari Haro, authorized the requests the following day.

“The more we learn about the raid, the worse it gets for CPD,” said Keenan Saulter, the attorney representing Young.

“It’s a further abuse of the trust the public places in CPD, and to know some of the officers were getting overtime adds insult to the injury Ms. Young continues to suffer.”

Mayor Lori Lightfoot initially claimed she only became aware of the raid after CBS-Channel 2 aired bodycam video of it in December 2020, but after emails from November 2019 surfaced, she admitted learning of it earlier. Young’s lawsuit accuses the Chicago Police Department, the Mayor’s Office, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA), and the city’s Law Department of conspiring “to cover-up these grotesque human rights violations” by delaying her FOIA request for the bodycam footage and attempting to prevent CBS-2 from airing it.

COPA, the Office of the Inspector General, and a former federal judge are conducting independent investigations

of the raid and the city’s response to it.

CPD eventually made bodycam footage from the raid public via an index of videos on a department website. On February 24, several aldermen in the Progressive Reform Caucus introduced an ordinance named for Young to the City Council.

If it passes, it could change how CPD executes search warrants.

In the spreadsheet the Weekly obtained, authorized overtime is listed for each officer by date. The data includes information about what time of day the overtime duty was performed, how many hours the officer worked, the district or area they worked in, duty category codes, and occasional notes detailing what they did. “Extension of Tour” is a category code; other commonly used codes are for duties such as court appearances, voluntarily working on days off, and special events. There is also a section for “Special Event” notes.

In all of the data from 2019, any time a warrant is mentioned in the notes, the overtime category listed is either “Special Event” (sixty-five percent of the time), “Extension of Tour” (twenty-two percent), “Other” (six percent), “Voluntary Regular Day Off ” (six percent), or “Call Back” (one percent).

Officers Aporongao and Saric— whose overtime requests for the evening of the raid were for duty until 1am the following morning, unlike the other three officers—categorized the overtime as a “06 – Special Event.” In the notes section, they both used the code “011-001 11th District Warrants.”

The other officers who requested overtime for the raid on Young’s home all used the “Extension of Tour” category, and did not include any additional information in the notes that would have made it clear they were serving a warrant.

The discrepancy suggests that CPD has not been regularly tracking how much time-and-a-half has been for serving warrants. There are over 100,000 similarly ambiguous “Extension of Tour” entries in the 2019 data, accounting for a quarter of all the overtime requests approved that year. The Office of the Inspector General’s 2017 report on CPD overtime controls flagged the prevalence of overtime entries with blank or generic reason codes as problematic.

A department spokesperson confirmed that “Extension of Tour” is one of the category codes used to detail the reason for overtime, and added that the CPD tracks all overtime to ensure it is being used appropriately.

The data also includes the names of supervising officers who authorized and approved the overtime requests.

Lieutenant Haro is listed as both the authorizing and approving officer on all five requests stemming from the raid on Young’s home. Haro authorized and approved the overtime on February 22, 2019, the day after the raid.

The spokesperson said that at the time of the raid, the same supervisor both approved and authorized overtime requests. In an attempt to strengthen departmental oversight, Superintendent David Brown ordered all overtime to be approved by supervisors ranked deputy chief or above shortly after he took control of the department in April 2020.

Aporongao was one of the department’s highest overtime-earners in 2019. According to records the city publishes on Chicago Data Portal, he took home $41,330 in overtime that year, more than that earned by ninety-five percent of officers.

The other officers who collected overtime for the Young raid were among the department’s highest third of such earners in 2019: Cruz earned $33,302 in overtime; Mordan, $19,308; Orta, $17,964; and Saric, $14,559. Jim Daley is the Weekly’s politics editor. He last wrote a Q&A about COVID-19 vaccines.

MARCH 4, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

HOUSING

It’s Not About Obama

Obama Center CBA organizers remain focused on Black South Siders’ needs as rents climb

BY MICHAEL MURNEY

ILLUSTRATION COURTESY OF HALEY TWEEDELL

W

hen Mitzi Haynes’ daughter Taylor moved back to Chicago in 2017, escalating rents forced her to move in with Haynes and Haynes’ mother in a cramped twobedroom apartment in South Shore. “It’s going okay, for now,” Haynes said. “But the main problem’s lack of space.”

A year before her daughter’s return, Haynes listened with cautious optimism as the Obama Foundation announced its partnership with the city and the University of Chicago to build the Obama Presidential Center (OPC) in Jackson Park, a few minutes’ drive north from her apartment.

In the vision presented by the city and the foundation, the OPC would be a sprawling complex, replete with athletic facilities, open-air gathering spaces, Obama’s Presidential Library— and a museum, whose design, as the foundation’s website proclaims, “embodies the idea of ascension.”

President Obama and his surrogates pledged that the OPC would not displace longtime South Side residents, and tendered lofty promises of job creation and economic development for Woodlawn and South Shore—the historically disinvested neighborhoods surrounding the OPC. Haynes wanted to believe.

But by the time her daughter returned to Chicago a year after the announcement, Haynes’ hope that those promises would be kept had evaporated.

“As time went on,” she said, “with the rising rent, yeah. That, to me, did not ring true.”

12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MARCH 4, 2021

HOUSING

T

“A 2019 study from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s College of Urban Planning found that in the twomile radius surrounding the OPC’s planned site, nearly ninetyone percent of renters ‘cannot afford their monthly rent.’”

he Haynes family are multigenerational South Side residents. Both Haynes and her mother were born here, and Haynes raised her daughter in Hyde Park. “My family’s considered ‘lifers’,” she notes with pride.

Over the past four years, however, Haynes has watched in alarm as neighbors in her building are priced out of or evicted from their apartments. Haynes’ brother, a fellow lifer and longtime resident of Hyde Park, recently considered moving after the rent on his one-bedroom apartment tripled in the past five years.

After her own rent ballooned by thirty percent in just three years, Haynes, a pharmacy technician, decided to move her and her mother out of the city, before their rent spikes again.

Haynes explained that the magnitude of the Obama family’s celebrity status can cause some to look away from the OPC’s local impact. “He’s the golden boy. You have some people out here, who, doesn’t matter what he does, what he says, he’s still Obama…so he could do no wrong.”

But for her, the OPC’s impact is clear. “To me,” she said, “it’s not for the community.”

T

he threat of displacement the OPC poses to low-income and working Black families like the Hayneses sparked the formation of the Obama Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) Coalition in 2016.

The coalition, comprising more than twenty organizations from across the city, fought for four years to pass affordable housing legislation for the South Side neighborhoods surrounding the OPC. Alongside the coalition, 20th Ward Alderwoman Jeanette Taylor proposed a protective housing ordinance in July 2019 that would have mandated that at least thirty percent of units in new developments within two miles of the OPC be made affordable to “very lowincome households.” Despite its twentyeight co-sponsors—including 5th Ward Alderwoman Leslie Hairston, whose ward encompasses the OPC and a sliver of Woodlawn—the proposal never received a vote.

Nearly fourteen months of negotiation ensued, resulting in the momentous passage of the Woodlawn Housing Preservation Ordinance in September 2020.

Shannon Bennett, executive director of the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization, a founding member of the coalition, says the protections afforded by the ordinance—including reserving thirty percent of units in new developments on city-owned Woodlawn plots as affordable, and creation of a $1.5 million loan fund to rehabilitate vacant Woodlawn buildings—are robust.

Nonetheless, Bennett acknowledges that the ordinance does not go as far as the coalition believes is necessary to protect residents near the OPC. Specifically, its mandate reserving at least thirty percent of units in new developments as affordable does not extend beyond Woodlawn—an excision from Taylor’s 2019 ordinance wrought from the multiple rounds of acrimonious talks between the city, the Obama Foundation, Taylor, and the coalition.

Meanwhile, the prices of land, for-sale properties, and rent have skyrocketed in all the neighborhoods surrounding Jackson Park since the 2016 announcement.

A 2019 study from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s College of Urban Planning found that in the two-mile radius surrounding the OPC’s planned site, nearly ninety-one percent of renters “cannot afford their monthly rent,” and that “the majority cannot afford” rents in newly renovated and new construction units either.

Within the OPC’s two-mile radius, which primarily includes Black, lowincome households, eviction rates are some of the highest in the city, according to the study. In South Shore—not two miles away from where the museum designed to embody ascension will stand—1,800 households, or about nine percent of renters, are evicted annually.

Now, as the coalition fights to secure protections for South Shore and beyond, Bennett said their message remains focused on the needs of families like Haynes’—not on critiquing

President Obama, nor sparing him or his foundation accountability.

“We don’t have time to waste in the discussion of ‘well it’s Obama, trust him,’ or ‘he’s the first Black president and you’re trying to stop him,’” said Bennett. “It’s way beyond Obama. We have to focus on saving our lives, our homes.”

T

he presidential complex is the latest in a long line of sweeping development projects that promise economic growth and housing stability for Chicago’s historically disinvested communities, without grounding those promises in communityinformed policy.

In January 2000, then-mayor Richard M. Daley launched the Plan For Transformation (PFT), a $1.6 billion overhaul of Chicago’s public housing system. Under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) pledged to demolish and replace more than 18,000 public housing units, and to relocate those units’ residents into “mixed-income” communities.

The PFT promised to replace the 18,000 demolished or renovated units with 25,000 new or rehabilitated units by 2010. Bennett and his fellow organizers responded by lobbying the city and the CHA for legislation guaranteeing that demolished units would be replaced in real time.

“We fought for one-for-one replacement. Tear down one unit, you replace it with another one, at the same time,” Bennett explains.

The CHA rejected one-for-one replacement. Instead, lease-compliant public housing tenants were offered the right to return to a new or rehabilitated unit when the plan was completed.

Six years after launching the PFT, Daley pitched another colossal project as an economic boon to Chicago’s disinvested communities: he wanted Chicago to host the 2016 Olympics—and to build its centerpiece, a $400 million, 80,000 seat stadium— in Washington Park.

A few miles northeast of what’s now the OPC’s planned site, historically MARCH 4, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

HOUSING

Black, low-income Washington Park was already in the early stages of a housing crisis when the Chicago Olympic Committee set out to realize Daley’s vision in 2007. After years of predatory lending targeting majority-Black and low-income neighborhoods, the U.S. housing market’s collapse in 2007 prompted mass evictions and foreclosures across the South Side.

As Daley wooed private investment to fund Chicago’s Olympic bid, activists leapt to action to protect Washington Park residents from further displacement driven by the rising rent and property taxes sure to follow the stadium’s construction.

“One of the first things we said was we want was to have a representative to sit on the committee,” said Cecilia Butler, a longtime Washington Park resident and president of the Washington Park Advisory Council.

Butler was selected in 2007 as the community representative on the Chicago Olympic Committee. After months of community feedback, she brought a twenty-six-point CBA before the committee, outlining policy proposals to ensure that the stadium’s projected economic impact would benefit residents, not price them out of their homes.

Meanwhile, the Olympic Committee faced waning public support for its bid as the financial crisis deepened—and the CHA’s Plan For Transformation was already thousands of units behind on its pledge to construct 25,000 new units for displaced public housing residents.

As foreclosures and evictions mounted in Chicago’s predominantly Black neighborhoods, HUD granted the CHA a ten-year extension—and about $1.4 billion in additional federal funds— to finish “transforming” public housing by 2018 instead.

I

n 2009, Chicago’s Olympic bid was rejected—to Butler’s relief.

“That was something I was glad we didn’t get,” she said. “Chicago would have been worse off. Or Washington Park would’ve been, anyway.”

Meanwhile, the PFT lagged behind its extended schedule—while those displaced by the initial demolitions 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

were left waiting, their “right to return” only redeemable upon the project’s completion.

By 2017, less than eight percent of the nearly 17,000 households originally included in the PFT were living in mixed-income communities. The rest were left to weather the private rental market—some equipped with a housing voucher, many without.

In 2018, HUD granted the CHA yet another ten-year extension, pledging federal financial support for completion of the project by 2028 instead.

Many of those displaced by the PFT are now Haynes’s neighbors in South Shore.

Mary Pattillo, professor of sociology and African American studies at Northwestern University, said that “the biggest transformation of South Shore in the past twenty years is that it has been a big receiving neighborhood of public housing residents who were displaced from the demolition of Chicago public housing.”

According to Pattillo, displaced residents were drawn to South Shore by its abundance of multi-unit apartment buildings and affordable rents.

But now, just as it has prompted Haynes to leave the city, escalating rent— this time engendered by the OPC— threatens to displace them once again.

The Obama Foundation dismissed community concerns about displacement in 2016, and pledged that the OPC would not push residents out. Bennett said, “We were told, ‘just trust that this will be done in your best interest because it's Obama.’

“That's an insult.”

After witnessing the longterm patterns catalyzed by immense development projects like the Olympic bid and the PFT, Bennett does not see the OPC—nor the fight to ameliorate its impacts—as somehow different from the projects that came before it.

“At the core of all of this is that the Obama Center is just like—I’m sorry to minimize it like that—it’s like a planned development for million-dollar condos,” he said.

When asked what specific programs or policies the Obama Foundation had

¬ MARCH 4, 2021

“It’s way beyond Obama.

We have to focus on saving our lives, our homes.” in place to ensure South Side residents would benefit from the OPC’s presence, a spokesperson for the Obama Foundation declined to comment.

Instead, they highlighted in an email the youth mentorship program spearheaded by President Obama years before the OPC landed in Chicago, and wrote that, “we remain committed to supporting the South Side through economic development and leadership programs. When construction begins on the Obama Presidential Center, we will support job growth on the South Side, ensuring opportunities are specifically given to diverse communities.” s Haynes and her mother prepare to leave South Shore, Haynes’ daughter Taylor, twenty-five, is determined to stay. “Now that I’m back,” she said, “I have no intentions on leaving.”

As Taylor searches for a place she can afford, she is simultaneously running her own catering company, studying psychology at DePaul University, and attending classes at McCormick Theological Seminary in Hyde Park. She plans to pursue her master’s degree in divinity after graduating from DePaul.

Haynes said she’s encouraging Taylor to work and study as hard as she can while she’s young. “I told her, ‘do that now, so when you’re in your thirties, you can ease up a bit.’”

Yet she worries that the toll of relentless work won’t allow her daughter to reap what she’s sown. “She might be too sickly, too broken down, or too old to truly enjoy the fruits of that labor,” Haynes said.

A

Savannah Brown, twenty-five, an organizer with Black Youth Project 100’s Chicago chapter, says that while she doesn’t believe that South Side communities asked for—or even wanted—the OPC, she is confident they will flourish regardless. “We will make sure that this vision of doing something for the Black community happens,” she said.

Brown lamented that the city touts the economic force of the OPC as a solution to South Side residents’ problems, while chronically underfunding the services Black communities need: “What about mental health? What about education? The fundamentals that are without a doubt needed, especially in Black communities?

“That’s what we’ve been asking for.”

Nonetheless, Brown says the way forward is clear. “Alas, we’ve been given the Obama Center. we’re still going to make sure that we have a thriving Black community that is sustained in the areas that are impacted by this.”

“Because if we don’t,” she added, “who will?” Michael Murney is a journalist reporting on housing, policing, immigration, and beyond. He is currently pursuing his M.S. in Journalism at Northwestern University.

DEVELOPMENT ILLUSTRATION BY HALEY TWEEDELL

Planning for Who?

As some Chicagoans disproportionately reap the benefits of the city’s growing logistics sector, others bear a disproportionate burden.

BY AMY QIN

C

ity officials were excited to approve plans for a new Amazon warehouse in Bridgeport in November 2020. Maurice Cox, Commissioner of the Department of Planning and Development, applauded Amazon’s development team for “watching out for the public interest” and “setting a new standard” for future logistics facilities.

Not everyone was celebrating, though. Ten community organizations, the Metropolitan Planning Council, and multiple residents spoke or signed on to letters opposing the development.

“Chicago is not for sale, it is not just a square to exist on Amazon’s Monopoly board,” wrote Phan Le, who identified as a “future Bridgeport resident” in her comment to the Plan Commission.

The development will combine two sites—2420 S. Halsted Street and 2500 S. Corbett Street—along the South Branch of the Chicago River. Prologis, the country’s largest developer of industrial real estate, will lease the building to Amazon.

The proposed 112,000-square-foot warehouse is part of Amazon’s latest push into the city with its “last-mile” facilities.

These facilities are warehouses built closer to customers’ doorsteps that allow the e-commerce giant to compete with retailers for same- or next-day deliveries.

Amazon has been tight-lipped about their expansion in Chicago, but according to people familiar with the transactions, there will be seven last-mile facilities in total. Warehouses are already open in Pullman, the Near North Side, McKinley Park, Little Village, Gage Park, Cicero, and now slated to open in Bridgeport.

This means six of the seven facilities will be on the Chicago’s Southwest and Southeast sides, which comes as no

surprise to activists who have long called out the city’s inequitable distribution of heavy industry and environmental harm.

In Bridgeport, the proposed Amazon warehouse will come at the expense of the residents who live there in the form of increased traffic risk, more pollution, and the loss of valuable riverfront land.

Even amid strong opposition and growing scrutiny of Amazon’s taxpayer-funded expansion, the warehouse was approved because of the decisions the city, developers, and elected officials made behind closed doors with little input from the residents they’re supposed to represent.

MARCH 4, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

DEVELOPMENT

Hundreds of trucks and delivery vehicles 24/7 In 2007, Raymond* and his family moved to a small residential neighborhood west of the proposed Amazon facility, referred to informally by residents as Bridgeport Landing. Drawn to its riverfront location, views of the city, and proximity to public transit, he initially didn’t think much of the large industrial lots a few steps away.

“In the beginning we saw those lots being vacated and cleaned, we were thinking it’s gotta be something residential,” he recalled.

He was wrong. First there was Chicago Helicopter Experience, a controversial heliport which flew helicopters day in and day out over his neighborhood for more than five years.

It finally left last summer, according to residents. But before he could breathe a sigh of relief from the noise, Raymond received a letter about a new warehouse near his home.

“It’s just unbelievable that they would put a huge commercial site like Amazon there,” he said.

The warehouse will be in operation twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, so hundreds of vehicles will pass through at all hours, with the highest truck volume during the night and early mornings. On a peak day, more than 600 commercial vehicles, including forty-two semi-trucks and 421 delivery vans, will drive in and out of the facility, according to a traffic study prepared for Prologis.

For Raymond, the vehicles’ endless beeping will keep him and his family up on summer nights when they have their windows open for air. “There are other warehouses along the river, but they’re very quiet. Amazon is a different operation,” he said.

The residents of Bridgeport Landing also have safety concerns about the number of vehicles that will weave through their community to access and entrance on Senour St., a narrow residential street between the neighborhood and warehouse site where children often play.

Traffic estimates indicate that during peak afternoon hours alone—from 4-5pm— 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

there could be eighty vehicles entering and exiting through Senour. “I don’t want to see any of my neighbors get injured,” said James*, another longtime resident.

More than twenty residents have signed a petition to remove the Senour Street entrance completely, but developers have yet to respond. Instead, they moved the entrance 200 feet south.

One of the main access points for semi-trucks into the facility is an entrance on Halsted Street, to the east of the warehouse. Halsted isn’t just a busy street for existing vehicles, but a popular bike lane: it’s just one of two bike lanes that cross the river between Bridgeport into Pilsen and UIC, and steps away from a busy Halsted Orange Line station.

“All of that traffic will funnel on Halsted southbound turning right” said Kate Lowe, an organizer with the Bridgeport Alliance and a professor in UIC’s College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs. She commutes to work on her bike from Bridgeport to UIC most days and won’t feel safe commuting on the bike lane knowing there will be hundreds of large vehicles turning across it. “It adds a lot of risk,” she said.

Even if there is a traffic light at the access point on Halsted, which Prologis said they will build, drivers of large trucks could miss a bicyclist on a right turn, according to Lowe. Crashes are not uncommon in an already congested area.

A little further south, at the intersection of Halsted and Archer, there were ten car-pedestrian crashes and eighteen carbike crashes from September 1, 2017 to November 17, 2020.

Residents and advocates are also worried about the pollution generated by the hundreds of delivery vans and trucks.

Richard Klawiter, an attorney with DLA Piper representing Prologis, noted that the “air quality impact is quite de minimis,” or negligible, and likened the impact to that of a “big box retailer.”

Advocates, however, say an increase in vehicle exhaust will increase the amount of particulate matter in the air, hazardous dust particles in the air that can contribute to chronic respiratory problems. Diesel exhaust from trucks also contain toxic compounds that increase

¬ MARCH 4, 2021

“That’s how it is: we can have input into how the lights are placed, but we have no say as to whether this comes in at all.” the likelihood of cancer, according to a Chicago Reporter investigation.

In addition to pollution from emissions, dust generated from truck wheels, contaminated water runoff, light pollution, and ground vibrations can all have harmful environmental impacts, said Meleah Geertsma, Senior Attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

Bridgeport and other neighborhoods on the Southwest Side are already incredibly environmentally burdened; residents are not only more exposed to sources of industrial pollution, but they are also more vulnerable to its harmful effects. They often have a lack of access to healthcare, higher rates of asthma, and experience the compounded effects of existing pollution. Research also suggests that air pollution can worsen the effects of COVID-19, which already has disproportionately impacted Black and Latinx communities in the city.

Chloe Gurin-Sands, Manager of Health Equity and Planning at the Metropolitan Planning Council, said Chicago needs a planning process that looks at the cumulative impact of where logistics development is happening, and not just what’s going on at an individual site.

Shut out of the planning process There are several aspects of the Amazon development that are frustrating to residents, but for many, the most galling is the city and developer’s apparent lack of meaningful engagement with the community.

According to a project timeline, Prologis began meeting with the Department of Planning and

Development and 11th Ward Alderman Patrick Daley Thompson in June of 2019, a full year before the project was announced to community members in June of 2020.

The project they announced was also a near-complete one, according to residents who attended the Zoom meeting. The meeting was “geared more towards presentation and public comment, rather than true engagement,” the Metropolitan Planning Council said in their statement to the Plan Commission. The short timeframe between the meeting and when key documents were filed indicates it’s unlikely they made many changes based on resident feedback at the time. Prologis filed an eighteen-page application to the Plan Commission on July 22, 2020 and published a traffic study, dated July 6, 2020. “There’s only so much that people can comment on when you come with a plan that looks complete,” said Gurin-Sands.

At press time, Prologis and DLA Piper had only reached out to employees at the Metropolitan Planning Council, who suggested Prologis connect directly with community-based organizations.

None of the other organizations or residents the Weekly spoke with had been contacted, nor did they know of others who had been. Both Prologis and Alderman Thompson declined to comment for this article.

“There’s zero interest in hearing from the community what we might want,” said Anna Schibrowsky, community development leader at Bridgeport Alliance. “That’s how it is: we can have input into how the lights are placed, but we have no say as to whether this comes in at all.”

Such lack of transparency around

DEVELOPMENT

developments like Amazon’s is not new. In 2014, Chicago Helicopter Experience was approved, despite feedback against it from residents. In 2019, plans for the relocation of a food processing plant to Pilsen was presented as “a done” deal, again, despite opposition from community groups.

More recently, the city has failed to be transparent with residents about multiple heavy-polluting industrial developments in South Side neighborhoods such as the MAT Asphalt in McKinley Park, General Iron in the East Side, and the botched implosion of the old Crawford coal plant in Little Village.

At the November meeting, Klawiter noted Prologis made changes to the site plan based on “extensive neighborhood feedback they received,” showing a before and after map of the site plan with more greenery, a riverwalk, and the addition of the former Heliport lot to the east of the original site to allow access to Halsted Street.

However, several changes were either required by law or decided upon prior to public notice. Multiple aspects of the project framed as “riverwalk amenities proposed”—a thirty-foot setback, public access to the riverfront, a riverwalk, benches every 250 feet—are basic requirements of any development along the river, according to the Chicago River Design Guidelines. Currently, the riverwalk only has one entrance on Halsted, where all the largest vehicles will be right-turning.

Schribrowsky and other neighbors call it the “riverwalk to nowhere.”

The idea to add the heliport site was also one Alderman Thompson had suggested to Prologis before he announced the project to the community.

“When I was first approached by Prologis for the former Grant Crowley boatyard site, I asked them to have a conversation with what was the heliport,” he said at the city meeting.

Ellen Grimes, Bridgeport resident and associate professor of architecture at the School of the Art Institute, is disappointed with what she calls the “greenwashing” of the project. Planting more trees around the perimeter of the site should not be a benchmark of sustainable development.

According to Grimes, there were many

more environmental measures beyond what’s required in city guidelines—solar panels, permeable paving to offset the heat generated by a large parking lot, or bioremediating infrastructure—that could have been implemented.

Aside from the requirements in city ordinances or zoning regulations, however, Grimes said any other promised improvements to the project are “just promises—they’re not bound to do those things.” That includes the promise to install EV charging stations or to use electric fleets, two points often cited by Prologis and the city when the topic of pollution is brought up. Amazon will not be required to follow restrictions on whether trucks only use the Halsted entrance, and not the residential entrance

by Senour, she added.

The 200 permanent jobs that will be created, according to Prologis, are not guaranteed—there is no requirement for Amazon to create a certain number of jobs and Prologis cannot make that claim on behalf of them. “We need to complicate this question of 200 jobs,” said Beth Gutelius, research director at UIC’s Center for Urban Economic Development. “What are those jobs? Are they jobs we want our children doing?”

The soon-to-be minimum wage jobs offer little upward mobility, unrealistic efficiency standards, and constant surveillance, according to Gutelius.

There are also numerous accounts of the negative physical and mental health impacts of Amazon jobs.

A Bloomberg analysis reveals that the arrival of Amazon warehouses actually brings down wages of other warehouse workers in the area. Research suggests many of these jobs may be lost due to automation in the future. Elected officials either promise lucrative property tax abatements and tax incentives, or Amazon applies for abatements and wins them – either way, Amazon facilities may bring a modest to minimal fiscal return for localities.

Even if Prologis had taken meaningful feedback from the community and improved the specifics of the site to their liking, advocates such as Gurin-Sands ask, “is that necessarily

the point?” There will still be a warehouse that the community did not want.

For Raymond and other residents of Bridgeport Landing, the improvements “don’t change much” – the reality of living within several feet of an Amazon warehouse is still the same.

Warehouse boom In many ways, Chicago’s geography, at the intersection of several major highways, waterways, and railways, makes the city a natural candidate for a burgeoning Transportation, Distribution, and Logistics (TDL) sector. In December of 2020, Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced that in the “coming months” Chicago will be “doubling-down” on efforts to invest in the TDL sector.

Commissioner Cox reflected this sentiment at the November city meeting: “We as Chicagoans have to accept that this sector is a part of Chicago’s future economy,” he said.

Yet, the boom of warehouse construction in primarily low-income and Black and Latinx neighborhoods is no accident. “Let’s be mindful that the landuse changes that have been occurring have created high priced properties on the North Side, removing those industrial locations, but where are they going?

They’re going to the South, Southeast, and Southwest locations,” said Chicago Plan Commission Chairwoman Teresa Cordova. “Let’s not be disingenuous about that.”

In 2016, the City of Chicago began a process of evaluating and updating landuse policies in all twenty-six of the city’s industrial corridors, areas of the city that were specifically zoned for manufacturing or industrial use.

Although the majority of Industrial Corridor land is located on the city’s Southwest and Far South Side, the city began with the North Branch corridor, located along the river between Lincoln Park and Bucktown. In 2017, the city adopted the North Branch Framework Plan, rezoning areas from manufacturing to mixed-use and commercial uses. The North Branch is now home to Sterling Bay’s planned Lincoln Yards development,

a fifty-five-acre “megadevelopment” that will include upscale offices and apartments.

But while the city has rezoned industrial land for mixed-use developments in affluent white neighborhoods, they incentivized manufacturers to move to designated “receiving corridors”, the majority of which are located in low-income or communities of color. Relocating manufacturers could tap into a fund created to help alleviate costs associated with the relocation, according to a city ordinance.

“It’s hard to view it as anything other than environmental racism,” said Geertsma. Instances of polluters moving into environmentally burdened communities are well-documented, the most recent example being metal scrapper General Iron, which is currently awaiting an operating permit from the city to relocate from Lincoln Park to the Southeast Side.

Prior to 2021, the Little Village Framework was the only Industrial Corridor Modernization Plan the city had adopted on the Southwest Side. José Acosta-Córdova, a research organizer at the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO), said the city only reluctantly agreed to Little Village after they put public pressure on them.

The process was very different from the North Branch, however. Acosta-Córdova said they were initially only given a threemonth process while the North Branch had over a year. There were also concerns with the community feedback timeline.

The lack of transparency only compounds the inequities. As with the Bridgeport facility, industrial and logistics developers alike have taken advantage of opaque local approvals to push projects through before residents can respond.

“There’s all this behind the scenes work that creates tremendous momentum and sidelines [our] voices in what happens,” said Lowe.

With regard to the Amazon’s Bridgeport warehouse, “if we were able to start those conversations beforehand, then maybe the outcomes could have been different,” said Gurin-Sands.

MARCH 4, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

DEVELOPMENT A long-term impact Advocates are hopeful for change, though.

The Chicago Plan Commision voted eight to six to approve the rezoning for Prologis in Bridgeport, a rare split vote in a committee that typically unanimously passes rezonings. At a January meeting, DPD announced they will initiate research for Far South and South West Industrial Corridor Framework Plans this year. The plans will look at land use and zoning, design guidelines for industrial developments, sustainability requirements, and freight impacts in those industrial corridors.

Unfortunately for residents of Bridgeport, Little Village, Gage Park, Pullman, and McKinley Park, all of this has come too late. Residents and organizers in Bridgeport were hopeful that the site, located near a Superfund site could be converted, envisioning a green, mixed-use, and transit-oriented development at 2420 South Halsted.

One group had already started planning for future community uses. The South Branch Park Advisory Council (SBPAC) has spent the last two years gathering feedback from nearly 500 residents to put together a vision that included several green spaces and gathering areas for the community. There were also ideas to put the first neighborhood high school there, among other hopes to eventually connect all of Bridgeport’s waterfronts together.

That is no longer possible now, and it will take years to get the riverfront site back from Prologis. For a project deemed as a “test case” by DPD for what sustainable warehouses in Chicago will look like, the impacts to the community will be much more permanent.

“It’s going to change the future of the river and the areas adjacent to it for who knows how long,” said James Burns, resident and president of SBPAC. * Names are changed for several residents who asked to be anonymous.

Amy Qin is a contributor to the Weekly. She last wrote about how to vote in Chicago during the pandemic.

18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MARCH 4, 2021

HEALTH

All Homeless Shelters Receive Vaccines

The goal is to address the inequitable distribution of vaccines for the most vulnerable across the city

BY MADELEINE PARRISH

M

ore than 2,000 people living or working in the shelter system at more than seventy-five shelter programs have received the first dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. The nonprofits Heartland Alliance Health, which serves the North/Northwest Side, downtown, and South Side regions of the city, and Lawndale Christian Health Center, which serves the West and Southwest sides, have been providing vaccines to shelters across the city.

Vaccination efforts in shelters began on January 25 when Chicago moved into Phase 1b of its vaccine plan, opening up the vaccine to Chicago residents in non-healthcare residential settings.

The Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) designated the two organizations to provide the vaccine to both guests and staff at shelters. Other care providers within certain shelters, including the PCC Community Wellness Center, are also vaccinating their patients.

CDPH sent 1,600 vaccine doses to Heartland Alliance Health specifically for people living in congregate settings who are experiencing homelessness and the staff. They began administering doses immediately, prioritizing the largest, most populous settings where people aren’t able to social distance and where people sleep in the same room.

As of February 22, Heartland Alliance Health has administered 1,150 vaccines at forty-five programs from thirty-seven organizations across the city.

The partnership centered on the issue of equity. “Where was there more COVID? Where was there more death?

What ZIP Codes had more COVID and had experienced more issues? We targeted those areas first,” said Mary Tornabene, the nurse practitioner leading the public health team in the vaccinations.

Alyse Kittner, the program manager at CDPH, reiterated these priorities. “We started with those sites where COVID-19 outbreaks are most likely to occur, where spread is most likely, and where people are most vulnerable,” she said.

“Our goal is really to eliminate racial disparities with regard to access to the COVID vaccine, testing, and ongoing care,” said Katy Kelleghan, Heartland Alliance Health’s senior director of growth. “This is informed by data that we’re seeing that communities that are most impacted are those that have traditionally not had access to care.”

Dr. Thomas Huggett, a family physician at Lawndale Christian Health Center, echoed Kelleghan’s concern regarding inequitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccine access across Chicago. “There are more Black people that have died of COVID-19 in Chicago than any other ethnic group” he said.

“There are more Latinx people that have been infected with COVID-19 than any other ethnic group. But who has received the majority of the vaccines so far? White folks on the lakefront in Chicago. So the people of color on the West and the South sides have certainly not been prioritized.”

In late January, the Weekly launched a daily Twitter bot mapping COVID-19 deaths next to fully vaccinated residents, revealing a negative relationship. Heavily Black and Latinx South and West side

neighborhoods have higher numbers of COVID-19 deaths while fully vaccinated Chicagoans tend to live on the predominantly white North Side.

“Seventy percent of people experiencing homelessness in Chicago are African American, so just almost by definition, we’re trying to meet that need,” Dr. Huggett said.

CDPH sent 1,200 vaccine doses to

Lawndale Christian Health Center and staffers there began administering them on January 26 at Pacific Garden Mission, a large congregate-style shelter on Canal St. As of February 22, Lawndale Christian Health Center has administered the first Moderna vaccine to 892 people experiencing homelessness and the staff who serve them across twenty-four different shelters. Of these people, fiftyILLUSTRATION BY MELL MONTEZUMA

MARCH 4, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

HEALTH

six percent are Black, twelve percent are Latinx, and thirteen percent are over the age of sixty-five. Another 500 people were vaccinated at Haymarket Center, a rehabilitation center in Fulton Market, in collaboration with Walgreens.

Though they began administering the vaccines in late January, both organizations began engagement efforts with staff and guests at the shelters well before they received the first doses of the vaccine from the city. Heartland Alliance Health held a webinar on the first week of January for all the shelter administrators to learn about the vaccine, ask questions, and express what they needed for their staff. Lawndale Christian Health Center held a Zoom meeting with eighty shelter staff from at least twelve agencies across the city, during which their psychiatrist spoke about racial inequity in healthcare.

“There’s always a suspicion [from patients] when we see people on-site in the shelters to do their primary care,” Dr. Huggett said. “Sometimes we’re perceived as being part of that system that has used them in the past. So it’s not unusual for us to have to kind of work through that to try to achieve a degree of trust and the therapeutic alliance and relationship as we go forward. We’ve kind of had to do that with the vaccine, too.”

Lawndale Christian Health Center’s engagement sessions—of which they have had more than a dozen—have primarily been hosted by Dr. Huggett and Dr. Angela Thomas, a physician’s assistant. Their in-person engagement sessions involve discussions with groups of eight to ten participants at the shelters.

“We didn’t call them education sessions, we intentionally called them

engagement sessions,” Dr. Huggett said.

That was so we could hear concerns, try to answer questions, try to lay out the facts as they have been presented to us for the vaccine, and really emphasize that each person makes their own vaccine plan and that we’re going to be there for them.”

Heartland Alliance Health approaches engagement sessions in the same way. “I’m not gonna stand up with a big powerpoint at a shelter,” Tornabene said. “I’m gonna sit down and have a one-on-one or a one-on-small-group conversation, and they’re gonna tell me what they need to know.”

While some people in shelters initially chose not to receive the vaccine, they decided to do so once they had seen the effects the vaccine had had on others around them. “At Franciscan Outreach [shelter] on Harrison Street,

we vaccinated probably sixty-five or seventy out of about the 140 people that were there. But what we found is that the very next week, people saw that people did okay, and then I did ten in a night because there were more people who were interested,” Dr. Huggett said.

By the end of February, both Lawndale Christian Health Center and Heartland Alliance Health are expected to have offered on-site vaccination to every shelter in Chicago, and they began administering the second doses of the vaccine on Tuesday, February 23. Madeleine Parrish grew up in New Jersey and is currently a University of Chicago political science undergraduate. She last wrote about reduced capacity and lack of turnover in shelters due to COVID-19

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¬ MARCH 4, 2021

HISTORY

The Neighborhood is an Image of the City Part Four: Social Problems

BY KRISTIN OSTBERG

I

n 1962, the authors of Black Metropolis were cautiously optimistic when they asked what postwar prosperity and the nation’s recent interest in civil liberties would bring. Would the Black ghetto finally disappear? Or maybe Black families would choose to maintain an urban subculture, and another, more prosperous, Bronzeville would take shape.

But in the decades to follow, the ghetto didn’t disappear.

Back in the 1910s and 1920s, a Chicago school of urban social scientists noted how the city’s white ethnic slums swarmed with vices.

They cataloged high rates of crime, drunkenness, broken families, sex work, and juvenile delinquency. They thought the slum dwellers’ inability to regulate themselves, to organize around shared principles and values, was an expression of their condition as migrants. Cut free from the social bonds that held their old world together, they struggled to control their children, there were fewer informal authorities to keep people in line, fewer shared institutions to extend a guiding hand.

Those early social scientists also tended to see slum life as a temporary condition. As migrants assimilated, they and their neighbors would develop new networks and new institutions, or more frequently, they would move out to some other neighborhood where the social order is established—they would leave the deviants behind.

By the 1950s, the old Chicago school of sociology that had made its name with

its practice of close observation of human behavior in the urban habitat was out of fashion. Social scientists favored statistics, they talked about how cities were built by coalitions of human agents mobilizing power, rather than coming together naturally like ecosystems.

In 1963, Gerald Suttles had just settled in Chicago's West Side slum to research the study that would make his name as an academic. The university that would soon employ him was revisiting the Chicago school heritage at the time. And he took up the tradition, he embedded himself in the neighborhood around Taylor Street and set out to study the moral order of the mixed-race neighborhood.

Later, he’d realize he’d happened to settle right near the boundaries of the separate territories of the neighborhood’s four ethnic groups—Italians, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and “Negroes.” He called his book The Social Order of the Slum and described how its diverse inhabitants ordered the territory, who could hang out where, how they behaved.

“Almost all societies create a public morality that exceeds the capacities of some of its members,” he wrote. He meant the moral standards shared by society at large, as distinct from the way people might conduct themselves at home, or in backwaters.

He thought the United States had a high moral standard, that many people fall short, and that in order to avoid compromising the ideals of public morality, much of the public had simply

“The storefront, or stoop, or street corner where people hang out are places where bonds are made, where status is settled, and leaders emerge.” moved away from such individuals, abandoning the inner city to the people they distrust.

“Obviously this practice has some limits,” he wrote. It tends to “aggregate” the poor and disreputable in the same slum neighborhoods where those mainstream ideals can’t really be maintained.

Watching his neighbors “compromise” on the markers of public morality, he came to believe they maintained an alternate one. He called it provincial, or personalistic, because it centered its ideals on personal trust.

Under the provincial code, to be a “fink” would discredit you more than being unemployed or a felon.

Provincial morality builds through networks that start face to face, and extend to encompass the whole neighborhood in some form another—so that everybody knows their place, where they belong and where they don’t, and how to behave to maintain their personal safety and the safety of their families.

Territory is essential to all these things—the storefront, or stoop, or street corner where people hang out are places

where bonds are made, where status is settled, and leaders emerge. Suttles thought the Black people living in public housing were at a disadvantage because they had less control over their space, they couldn’t open a storefront in it, or subdivide it into sublets to better their lot or enhance their position.

Bridgeport was no slum—in the 1960s it was the seat of considerable political power, but the provincial morality Suttles describes still resonates there.

Acquaintances will point out the corner where they and their friends gathered, and the ones where they couldn’t really go. Or how in their youth you never called the police, there were certain people in the neighborhood who were sort of in charge; if there was a problem your parents would go talk to them and they’d take care of it.

Suttles described how there was some violence in his neighborhood, but more often conflicts got diffused, or stopped before they went too far. There were street fights in Bridgeport too, but there were limits: “We’d fight with our fists. Now they fight with guns.”

Something changed in Chicago in MARCH 4, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

HISTORY

ILLUSTRATION BY EVA AZENARO ACERO

22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MARCH 4, 2021

the 1970s. It was most obvious in the surge in violent crime. The sociologist William Julius Wilson writes that there were 195 homicides in Chicago in 1965. In 1970 there were 810, and there were 970 in 1974, a recession year. The Wentworth police district was one of the worst.

The violence was accompanied by other problems: unemployment, outof-wedlock births, family dissolution, welfare dependency—ll the measures escalated at once.

Bridgeport was buffered from these developments. There were certainly factors other than personalistic morality that buffered it, and just as certainly, Bridgeport’s reputation for racial intolerance didn’t start in the 1970s.

But as the violence and social problems gained ground across the expressway, territory and trustworthiness could not have seemed less important than before.

Wilson, a Black scholar, caused a stir back in 1978 when he published a book called The Declining Significance of Race. He described the rise in social problems in the context of the real advances made by the Black middle class, suggesting that factors other than race must also be at play. He was surprised when readers sometimes took him to be a conservative—something he set out to correct with his 1987 book The Truly Disadvantaged.

In its opening pages, Wilson observes that liberals mostly avoided talking about the rising rates of social dislocation in the ghetto. By refusing to address it, he argued, they’d abandoned the field to conservatives who traced the rise in social problems back to a “culture of poverty,” by which they meant a sense of dependency fostered by a welfare system gone off the rails.

Their focus on the moral failures of the poor as individuals reads a lot like the old reformers who rallied around vice some eighty years before. Wilson came out on the side of systemic change.

Assembling all the statistics, he showed the push and pull of forces too big for individuals to counter with moral courage alone.

He started by showing how structural change in the economy

caused massive job losses that hit Black workers especially hard. He argued that contemporary racism was less a factor than historic discrimination that had positioned them at the bottom of the jobs ladder.

“When black men looked for work, employers were concerned about whether they had strong backs, because they would be working in a factory or in the back room of a shop doing heavy lifting and labor. The work was hard and they were hired. Now economic restructuring has broken the figurative back of the black working class.” (This is from his introduction to the 1993 edition of Black Metropolis.)

In 1950, Wilson wrote, an overwhelming majority of the men of the Black Metropolis were employed.

By 1980, only four in ten of the adults in Douglas had jobs, and the ratios were lower in Grand Boulevard and Washington Park, other neighborhoods of historic Bronzeville.

Massive joblessness had ripple effects. It caused poverty and welfare dependency. Young men who saw few prospects sometimes turned to crime, drugs, and violence. Unemployed men didn’t seem like marriageable partners. He draws on the scholar Herbert Gutman’s work showing that Black families weren’t particularly disorganized prior to these upheavals.

There were still a Black working and middle class—in fact, the Black middle class was thriving. But they moved out to better neighborhoods.

The neighborhoods they left behind suffered concentration effects. It was a vicious circle that changed individuals experiencing hard times into something like a separate social class.

“In short,” he wrote, “the communities of the underclass are plagued by massive joblessness, flagrant and open lawlessness, low achieving schools, and therefore tend to be avoided by outsiders.” The people who lived there found themselves socially isolated from the mainstream—isolated not just from job networks, but isolated in ways that affect their fashions and habits, even their cognitive and linguistic skills.

In the Black Metropolis, when the

poor, the working, and middle classes all lived in close proximity, the middle class was an important buffer against hard times.

They supported the social institutions— the churches, stores, schools, and parks— that gave Suttles’ neighborhood its moral contours. Their example made joblessness seem less terminal, and education more useful. They made family stability the norm.

What Wilson described gaining ground in their absence sounds like a culture of poverty, except that its root cause is not the moral inferiority of the people caught in it.

By 1980, Bridgeport was still the image of Chicago as a working city. Its population was employed, its median income just slightly lower than the city median. Its occupations mirrored the city’s new occupation structure, except with somewhat fewer executives and professionals, and somewhat more clerks and laborers, slightly more workers in skilled trades.

Bridgeport workers did not want for access to political patronage and union jobs—though some men whose careers started in the 1980s can recall how their fathers couldn’t get into the union because it was controlled by some other white ethnic group.

Now an acquaintance asks if a system run on reputation and connections is wrong. “Shouldn’t a father be able to help his son get a job?” he asks. “You know his son is going to work hard, because he’s not going to embarrass his father.”

Of course, all fathers should be able to open doors of opportunity for their sons. The fathers of Douglas couldn’t do that. ¬

|

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Originally published at The Hardscrabbler: A Bridgeport Blog; reprinted with permission.

This is part four in a five-part series.

Kristin Ostberg works in the affordable housing field, and writes about work, art, and social life in Bridgeport. This is her first piece for the Weekly; she can be reached at ostberg.k@gmail.com.

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