July 19, 2017

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

Volume 4, Issue 36 Editor-in-Chief Hafsa Razi Managing Editors Julia Aizuss, Andrew Koski Director of Staff Support Baci Weiler Deputy Editor Olivia Stovicek Senior Editor Emeline Posner

Politics Editor Adia Robinson Music Editor Austin Brown Stage & Screen Editor Nicole Bond Visual Arts Editor Rod Sawyer Editors-at-Large Christian Belanger, Mira Chauhan, Mari Cohen, Jonathan Hogeback, Ellie Mejía, Yunhan Wen Contributing Editors Maddie Anderson, Maria Babich, Bridget Newsham, Adam Przybyl, Sam Stecklow, Margaret Tazioli Video Editor Lucia Ahrensdorf Radio Producers Erisa Apantaku, Andrew Koski, Lewis Page Social Media Editors Bridget Newsham, Sam Stecklow Visuals Editor Ellen Hao Deputy Visuals Editor Jasmin Liang Photography Editor Jason Schumer Layout Editor Baci Weiler Staff Writers: Sara Cohen, Christopher Good, Rachel Kim, Ashvini Kartik-Narayan, Michal Kranz, Anne Li, Michael Wasney Fact Checkers: Eleanore Catolico, Sam Joyce, Rachel Kim, Adam Przybyl, Hafsa Razi, Carrie Smith, Tiffany Wang, Baci Weiler Staff Photographers: Denise Naim, Jason Schumer, Luke Sironski-White Staff Illustrators: Zelda Galewsky, Natalie Gonzalez, Courtney Kendrick, Turtel Onli, Raziel Puma, Lizzie Smith Data Visualization: Jasmine Mithani Webmaster

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

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Cover photo by Jason Schumer

IN CHICAGO

A week’s worth of developing stories, odd events, and signs of the times, culled from the desks, inboxes, and wandering eyes of the editors

IN THIS ISSUE

Farmers Markets Have Beef As tenants of the Experimental Station, which runs the 61st Street Farmers Market (of which we are enthusiastic customers), this Obama Presidential Center drama hits even closer to home than usual: what will happen to our local farmers markets if the OPC opens up a farmers market as well, as it is currently considering? According to Sam Cholke at DNAinfo, both the Hyde Park and 61st Street farmers markets say there’s neither a large enough customer base nor enough farmers to support another weekly market in the area. The problem isn’t Obama-specific, either; Cholke co-wrote another DNAinfo article this week titled “There Are Way Too Many Farmers Markets In Chicago.” That surplus of farmers markets, according to DNAinfo, is at least due to misdirected attempts at neighborhood pride and identity; this one ignores the neighborhood identity that has already flourished. The 61st Street Farmers Market, for example, has been around for ten years and was the first to allow purchases with a LINK card. As Experimental Station executive director Connie Spreen said, “Instead of starting something that already exists, support what’s here.” The Weekly would just like the OPC to do something that won’t be cause for yet another of these concerned notes.

who gets to keep the gates?

Remembering Johnny O To the great sorrow of Bridgeporters, John Veliotis, best known as the namesake and proprietor of twenty-four-hour hot dog stand Johnny O’s, passed away last week at eighty-five years old.

Having made his living selling hot dogs, Italian beefs, and his signature “Mother-in-Law” (a tamale served on a hot dog bun with onions, tomatoes, peppers, and chili) since he was twelve years old, Veliotis was a beloved neighborhood institution in Bridgeport. He sponsored youth sports teams and acted as a mediator between local gangs after a 2012 shooting. “It’s the only way I know how to make a living,” he told the Weekly of his profession in a 2015 interview.

His expertise and camaraderie will be missed.

parkworks may not work for pilsen

Go East, Green Line, Go East In the mid-nineties, as the CTA gradually began shuttering the Green Line stations that stood east of Cottage Grove, Arthur Brazier, the influential bishop at the Apostolic Church of God, argued that demolishing the “L” in Woodlawn was the only way to bring commercial development. “How are you going to rebuild the 63rd Street business district with that monstrosity? If it comes down, we can have shopping knolls and new housing,” he wrote.

(Brazier was not, perhaps, a financially disinterested party—rumor had it that he bought lowpriced housing from the city hoping it would appreciate.) His pitch to the city was a success; the CTA never reopened the eastern stretch of the Green Line after a series of supposed renovations, citing diminished ridership in addition to Brazier’s point. This past week, though, a popular online petition calling for the restoration of the Green Line to Jackson Park has made nearly the same argument as Brazier did two decades ago, in reverse: the arrival of the Obama Presidential Center, together with the influx of money it is sure to carry in its wake, requires the restoration of the “L” through Woodlawn, along 63rd Street. It also argues that the construction of a new Green Line is a matter of transit justice, enabling “our South Side neighbors to move more freely to, from, and within Woodlawn.” While the petition has gained some online traction, the CTA said that, apart from the southward extension of the Red Line, it has no plans for new construction.

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY SUMMER SCHEDULE The Weekly publishes twice-monthly in the summer, with monthly special issues.

Want to get involved with a special issue?

Email editor@southsideweekly.com • short fiction, poetry, or personal essays • your favorite neighborhoood spots for BoSS • ideas for a story you think we should cover

AUG

2

The Lit Issue

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The Interview Issue

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The Best of the South Side

30 20

“It’s a certain demographic in the community that [Hairston’s] trying to cater to.” emeline posner.................................4 connecting city colleges

A hard worker, a risk taker, and a family man—as well as an impressive dancer. mira chauhan....................................8 predictive policing and the long road to transparency

The true test of the CPD’s transparency regarding the List may still come. josh kaplan......................................10 “The social fabric is at stake.” david struett ................................12 like nothing you’ve ever heard before

What comes next for The Flashbulb? ashvini kartik-narayan.................15 opinion: the metra’s not-so-electric plan

“In crisis...comes opportunity.” sandy johnston...............................16

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6pm Workshop: What the City Wants Covered Led by founder of Detroit’s Outlier Media Sarah Alvarez Presented in partnership with Illinois Humanities JULY 19, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

Who Gets to Keep the Gates?

Two aldermen claim to seek to transform parts of South Shore and Bridgeport through zoning, with mixed results

BY EMELINE POSNER

M

urmurs and greetings circulated through the wood-paneled meeting room of Bryn Mawr Community Church as one hundred South Shore residents settled in for the monthly 5th Ward meeting on May 23.

On the evening’s agenda was the first public discussion of a set of ordinances that Alderman Leslie Hairston of the 5th Ward had quietly introduced into City Council two months prior. These ordinances would rezone a mile-long stretch of 71st Street in South Shore, between Stony Island and Yates Avenues, from a mixed-use commercial district to an entirely residential district.

Most buildings along that stretch of 71st house street-level storefronts—many of them vacant—with apartments on top. Should the proposal to change the street’s zoning to residential be approved, prospective business owners would no longer be able to open up in those storefronts by right. Instead, they would need either to seek the approval of the alderman, who could submit a rezoning ordinance on their behalf, which would then be subject to approval by first the zoning committee and then the full City Council, or to file for a zoning variance—a process that entails paying a $1,025 nonrefundable fee, oftentimes hiring a lawyer, and waiting for up to three months to hear the outcome of the request.

Hairston presented the zoning change 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JULY 19, 2017

as a means of reinvigorating the corridor by stopping “undesirable” businesses from opening up in the area. Previously, she had identified these as convenience stores, dollar stores, and beauty shops. At the meeting, she expanded that category to include salons and barbershops.

“Ever since I got in office, you have consistently voiced your frustration about the lack of diversity in the businesses on 71st Street,” Hairston said from the front of the room. “No more hair salons, nail salons, barbershops, dollar stores, and convenience stores that sell single cigarettes, white T-shirts, and harbor criminal activity. We need to turn our business corridor around.”

Although Hairston’s promise to “turn around” the corridor was met with cheers and applause, the details of her plan to do so were met with concern from attendees, who questioned whether she should have the power to determine what businesses populate the street.

“As a constituent, it’s a bad idea,” South Shore resident and activist William Calloway stood up midway through the meeting to interject, “’cause what if she doesn’t like the business trying to come in, and then she got the right to say no?”

H

airston is not the only South Side alderman recently to point a finger at salons clustered in a struggling

commercial corridor.

The day after the 5th Ward meeting, Alderman Patrick Daley Thompson of the 11th Ward introduced a set of ordinances to downzone commercial and industrial parcels along Halsted Street between 35th and 37th Streets (as well as a stray property on 38th and Parnell) to residential. When DNAinfo followed up with him about the downzoning ordinance two weeks after the fact, Thompson justified the zoning change as a means of preventing certain businesses—nail salons, hair salons, and massage parlors—from opening in the future.

The use of downzoning to target “undesirable” businesses is nothing new within the Chicago political arena, though in previous decades, bars and “adult” businesses had been the object of aldermanic objections, not beauty salons.

Hairston and Thompson’s insistence that targeting salons (alongside other “undesirable” businesses) is key to solving the deep-seated problems of vacancy that both corridors have faced—and criminal activity, in the case of 71st Street—have left many skeptical that the aldermen are acting in the interests of the larger community. This is especially true in South Shore, where new development, including the Obama Presidential Center and Tiger Woods-designed golf course, is expected to change the face of the neighborhood.

The rezoning ordinances have come to different ends. Thompson’s ordinances, though likely to pass, have yet to go to a vote in the City Council’s Committee on Zoning, Landmarks, and Building Standards.

Hairston, however, has withdrawn her rezoning ordinances, announcing at the most recent 5th Ward meeting on June 27 that she will be soliciting advice from the architecture and urban planning giant Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and has since denied targeting any specific type of business.

Nonetheless, the resulting conversations in Bridgeport and South Shore have pulled at the fabric of rhetoric that suggests salons are incompatible with successful corridors or not desired by the larger neighborhoods.

And in South Shore, these conversations have illuminated an alternative, community-driven way forward.

W

hen Alberto Murillo, the owner of Antonia’s Beauty Salon (3525 S. Halsted) thinks of the Halsted Avenue of his childhood, he remembers “a completely different Halsted on that side than there is now.”

Across the street from Antonia’s stands

the old Ramova Theater. Weeds sprout from the theater’s terra-cotta edifice, and below, vacant storefronts fan out in either direction.

A relic of a bygone era in Bridgeport and in some regard the greater South Side, the Ramova shut down in 1986—about a decade after the Murillo family began cutting and styling the hair of Bridgeport residents.

According to Murillo, the dynamic on Halsted is much the same today as it was twenty years ago, when he was growing up and the theater was already long closed—little foot traffic and little pull to the area south of 35th Street. Nonetheless, it was a little less empty: there was a bakery across the street and, until very recently, the Ramova Grill (which closed in 2012 and stood next door to the theater) and Carlos’ Alterations Shop (which recently relocated to 31st and Shields).

“We’re kind of just at the fringe that’s always been there,” Murillo told me. “So people find their way to it.”

Now what remains in the vicinity— among industrial shops, a tucked-away bar, a yacht sales store, and ward committeeman John Daley’s insurance brokerage—are salons.

Immediately to the north of Antonia’s light blue awning are Nail Station, Salon Olori, and Hao Spa, a massage parlor. Along 35th, there are three more salons—Chicago Curl, Collective Anna’s Beauty Salon, and a Paul Mitchell studio—and further north up Halsted, Bliss Nails.

This cluster contains a mix of longstanding community institutions and more recent entries. Antonia’s, Anna’s, and the Nail Station have been open upwards of ten years, while Salon Olori, Hao Spa, and Bliss Nails opened less than two years ago.

“Honestly, you can get a haircut with us, at Salon Olori, at Anna’s, and we all pretty much offer the same service,” Murillo said, “but I think what really threw us apart was my mom’s personality; she was really welcoming.”

Murillo’s managers and clientele are mostly local, and most have been coming in since they were children. Dee Desalu of Salon Olori, one of the newer Halsted salons, however, pulls in customers from other neighborhoods through social media. Her shop has dark glossy windows and an inset door with a buzzer. On a Saturday afternoon, there is no one visible in the cavernous room behind the two sets of doors.

Desalu says that because she is not tied to the neighborhood by her customer base, she may leave for the West Loop once her lease expires in two years.

While perplexed by the clustering of salons, Desalu doesn’t think it’s a problem for

DEVELOPMENT

DENISE NAIM

business. The salons have different specialties and cater to different demographics, besides: of the two hair salons on 35th, Chicago Curl Collective serves a primarily Black customer base, according to Desalu, while the Paul Mitchell salon serves more Hispanic and white customers. “Anna’s and Antonia’s have been around for quite some time and they’re right around the corner from each other,” Desalu said. “And I’ve been here two years and I don’t think any of the business has stopped my business from being successful. To each his own.”

Thompson claimed that the community is opposed to the salons that have recently opened up.

“More and more, a lot of these storefronts were being leased to nail salons and massage parlors, all permitted uses under B [mixeduse commercial] zoning districts,” he said.

“And then we would immediately hear from the community that that was not the type of entertainment they were looking for—they were looking for restaurants.”

Only one massage parlor has opened up recently, however: Hao Spa opened earlier this year. The windows are partially concealed with curtains and posters, and customers must

be buzzed in. I was allowed entrance, but the proprietor did not wish to speak on the record.

And the only recently opened nail salon on Halsted is Bliss Nails (3214 S. Halsted).

But Bliss opened two years ago, and on the site of a former nail salon. When I came in on a Saturday morning, every chair was full. An employee who did not wish to speak on the record said that Bliss had been well received by the community upon opening.

It may be that there is greater legitimate discontent with massage parlors, long viewed unfavorably in Chicago. The owner of a store on Halsted, who asked not to be named, said he supported the ordinance because he believed it would block new massage parlors from coming in—and relayed rumors he’d heard recently that parlors were looking to lease empty storefronts on Halsted, though they had been stopped. (Hao Spa received a business license in April of this year, and, according to the alderman, more massage parlors have tried to open recently in storefronts for lease.) Unlike hair and nail salons, which under a provision in the Chicago zoning code must apply for a special use application if opening within 1,000 feet of another similar business, massage parlors may

open by right in a commercial district.

What lies beyond this thousand-foot range are the 3600–3700 blocks of South Halsted, zoned mostly industrial and commercial. The proposed zoning changes here look like patchwork: included in the new residential district on the east side of the street is a restaurant equipment manufacturer, but not the two auto shops owned by Dominic Bertucci, a meat wholesaler, or the 11th Ward Regular Democratic Organization. On the west side of the street, the old Schaller’s Pump and adjoining properties, owned by the Schaller family, have been downzoned to RS-3, as have four parcels to the south owned by the Kaminski family. It seems unlikely that salons would even consider opening here, given the more industrial nature of the buildings and the even sparser foot traffic these blocks receive.

Some longstanding salon owners do not see the issues the corridor is facing as related to the question of salon and parlor density.

When I asked Anna Pervin, who runs Anna’s Beauty Salon at 755 W. 35th, right around the corner from the area affected by the ordinances, why Thompson was doubling down on nail salons and parlors in the area,

Pervin passed on diplomatic language—“I’m not scared of anybody,” she said, deadpan.

While she was unsure why the alderman was focusing on salons, it didn’t surprise her. “[Thompson] doesn’t associate with the little people,” she said, “like we are.”

Pervin, who has run her hair-nailsand-makeup salon for thirty-one years, said that she recently began to consider leaving the neighborhood. After a spike in business robberies—at the Family Dollar, the Bridgeport Bakery, a family-run convenience shop, and a MetroPCS—within the last six months, Pervin says neither she nor her customers feel at ease.

Not all agree that this should spur alarm.

Murillo said that while he is aware of the recent robberies, he is not concerned about it affecting business and has in fact recently extended business hours from 6pm to 8pm for the benefit of customers with longer working hours.

Others simply point out that this stretch of Halsted has been headed in this direction since the Ramova closed.

Amy Lee has run the Nail Station at 3519 S. Halsted for twelve years. Like the Murillos, Lee owns the building that houses her business. She said she was not worried about the ordinance because of her loyal customer base, and because she wasn’t planning on moving or leasing out her storefront.

“You see, the area is dead,” Lee told me, gesturing through the salon’s busy window toward the empty sidewalk. The empty Ramova loomed across the street.

Her customers, many of them long-time Bridgeporters, will occasionally reminisce in the salon chair about date nights, Lee said, when film tickets cost just a quarter and the corridor was more alive.

T

hirty-five blocks south and across the Dan Ryan, salon owners had a more mixed reaction to the alderman’s language about salons. There are many salons on the 71st St. commercial corridor—by the Weekly’s count, five nail salons, eight hair salons, and four barbershops—but they are spread out along the street.

The corridor stretches alongside the JULY 19, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

Metra tracks from Stony Island to the South Shore Cultural Center. Most of the businesses are convenience shops, community centers and offices, salons, and restaurants, but traces of an older 71st Street, constructed around and for entertainment, remain.

Although the Hamilton Theater was demolished in 2002 after having been shuttered many years, the Jeffrey Theater, built in 1923, was remodeled in the nineties for use as the headquarters of ShoreBank. It lacks many of its original features today, but may be redeveloped as a theater by resident and business owner Alisa Starks.

Brianna Jefferson runs Oh Behave Nail Salon at 1863 E. 71st, between Euclid and Bennett. She opened at that location two years ago, and says that business has been “pretty good” since then. But she doesn’t understand why the alderman is targeting salons like hers, among other businesses, in discussions about downzoning.

“I mean the thing is that 71st Street does have a lot of salons,” Jefferson said, “but nail salons and hair salons are not the same— they’re two totally different things.”

One of the concerns that has been aired in the discussion about zoning on 71st Street is about loitering—an activity that many associate with criminal activity. “Do Not Loiter” signs can be found on most building corners. A recent petition circulated on Change.org demands that the businesses in the development on 71st and Jeffrey enforce a no-loitering rule.

On the petition, the offending businesses include Walgreens, MetroPCS, Liberty Tax, Jeffrey Nails, Check Cashers, and a nameless convenience phone store—just one of them a salon. As of press time, the petition had garnered 796 signatures, out of a goal of 1,000.

A public records request filed by the Weekly returned eighty complaints to 311 about businesses on 71st Street between 2014 and 2017. Two of them made earlier in the year were against Oh Behave, alleging that they had no business license. This allegation proved to be false, according to the city’s data portal. Many of the complaints, however, were made about restaurants, convenience stores, and grocery markets.

Oh Behave Nail Salon has never had a problem with loitering, Jefferson said, pointing out that, in her experience, the problem is more or less limited to convenience stores.

And, in her opinion, the alderman has done nothing to address the matters of public safety in the business corridor.

“To be honest, I don’t even know who our alderman is,” Jefferson said. “She ain’t 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JULY 19, 2017

doing nothing.”

Although most other hair and nail salons did not wish to discuss the downzoning on the record, those who were willing to talk were less critical of the ordinance. Guyse Dawson, who has run Guyse’s Salon of Beauty at 2309 E. 71st Street for eighteen years, said that while she was initially concerned about the ordinance, when she learned about the alderman’s intention of increasing business diversity along the corridor, she decided it was a good move. It’ll be good not to have “salon after salon after salon,” she said.

A

t the 5th Ward meeting a block north of 71st Street in May, however, few spoke about salons. The conversation revolved around the interconnected questions of public safety and absentee landlordism: if the landlord packs up and goes home to another community at the end of the day—or never even enters the neighborhood—what incentive is there to work with residents and businesses to ensure the safety and satisfaction of passersby and shoppers?

Those who voiced skepticism about the alderman’s proposal suggested that there might be other ways of achieving the shared end goal of “turning 71st Street around,” which might incentivize communication and cooperation between residents, business owners, and property owners, rather than giving the alderman more of a say in what businesses can open and which cannot.

Chief among the skeptics is Val Free.

Executive Director of the Planning Coalition, a group that works to strengthen the links and channels of communication between existing community organizations, she has spearheaded the movement to reestablish the community area councils and block clubs that laid the foundation for South Shore activism in the eighties. Her organizing efforts, which the Weekly covered in an article last year about the Southeast Side Block Club Alliance, have become increasingly visible as members of the community rally in opposition to the zoning.

Soft-spoken and measured, Free maintained in a conversation prior to the ward meeting that while she was sympathetic to the alderman’s efforts, she was unconvinced by the nature of the proposal. “I believe what [Hairston] says about [71st Street] is accurate,” she said, “but I believe there are other ways to do that that are more democratic.”

Free continued to push toward that alternative at the ward meeting. She introduced the Austin Good Business Initiative, an initiative designed by the Austin Chamber of Commerce to tackle vacancy and

store-side criminal activity, as well as to reward the businesses that offer quality services and serve as community spaces—an initiative that another attendee, who had previously lived in Austin, endorsed enthusiastically.

The initiative was designed to be replicated in neighborhoods that face similar issues.

The alderman said she had not heard of it. When Free offered to send her office the information, Hairston responded, “You can send me, but then again I’ve lived here for forty-five years. I know what the issues are...and with the exception of you, business owners, and landlords, most of you choose not to engage and choose not to participate. That’s their choice.”

The alderman hammered this point home, but it seemed clear that community engagement was not missing. Free’s Planning Coalition, alongside independent activists and other community groups such as Reclaiming South Shore for All, have worked to inform and engage residents on online platforms and in physical venues over the last several months, in order to come up with a more democratic framework for a plan for 71st Street’s revitalization.

But at the meeting this contingent came up hard against Hairston, who equated opposition to downzoning with complacency.

Midway through the meeting, a resident asked for confirmation that she would not move forward with zoning should the community’s consensus ultimately be negative. (Hairston notably elected to use “consensus” over “vote,” though she did not elaborate on how the process would work.) But in response, Hairston retorted, “And so you’re saying—I just want to be clear—that you like 71st Street the way it is?”

As the meeting heated up, Alisa Starks, who announced plans to open up a theater location at the old Jeffrey Theater building at 71st and Jeffrey in 2015, stood up in support of the downzoning. “I am for downzoning for one simple reason,” she said. “A $12 million investment means that I want other businesses to come ... [but] I don’t want another nail salon opening up next to me.”

No one challenged this reasoning at the meeting. Hairston later said in an interview with the Weekly that it was “not exactly correct” that she was targeting salons or any other specific business type, and that she was responding to what the “community has said they need and don’t need.”

But William Calloway offered a different explanation for the anti-salon rhetoric given voice to at the May 5th Ward meeting: “I think it’s a certain demographic in the community

that [Hairston’s] trying to cater to, what they want the landscape to look like...It’s very legitimate to have [salons] in the community.”

Calloway, whose organization, Christianaire, advocates for police reform and is working to develop initiatives to fight neighborhood gang violence, thinks the problems lay deeper than in the presence of salons and dollar stores. “How can you attract businesses until you fix the social issues? I think that’s kind of oxymoronic,” he said.

“She’s not taking a proactive approach to a lot of these social ills,” he said. “If you’ve got drug addicts then you should say, ‘My community has a substance problem.’ If you’ve got people in debt then you should say, ‘My community has an economic problem, and I need to work to try to fix that.’”

A

lderman Hairston has since withdrawn the rezoning ordinances and is soliciting advice from an urban planning team, and in a later interview with the Weekly emphasized that going forward there will be an advisory council that “will be meeting regularly” with the Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill planning group.

At the head of the advisory zoning committee will be Susan Campbell, Cook County’s director of planning and development and a resident of the Jackson Park Highlands Disrict in South Shore. An early supporter of the proposed rezoning, Campbell was unable to provide an example of successful residential rezoning in a commercial corridor comparable to 71st Street while speaking up for the ordinances at the May ward meeting—other than Garfield Boulevard, which, as one community group pointed out, remains largely vacant aside from the development resulting from the University of Chicago’s collaborations with Theaster Gates.

While residential zoning may no longer be in the immediate future for 71st Street, questions about the changes the two corridors will undergo and who gets to participate in their creation remain on the table for both communities.

As the South Shore neighborhood gears up for the incoming Obama Center and professional-level golf course, there is worry that any changes undertaken might result in a more aestheticized version of the corridor, one which appeals to those who have a lot invested in its prosperity, but does not address these more deep-seated problems that Calloway brings up.

And while residents have pushed for a more community-driven process for

DEVELOPMENT

implementing better business practices, Hairston has said that a rezoning of 71st is not entirely off the table and that the programs she implements will depend upon the findings of the planning committee.

In Bridgeport, there is a possibility that the residential downzoning might lead to unexpected results—like an increase in the single-family detached houses allowed by right under the new proposed zoning classification. Although Thompson has denied having any intention of transforming the commercial district into a residential one, anyone would be able to construct a singlefamily home on vacant land, which is not lacking on Halsted.

“New residential property could bring in more property taxes and more upscale customers for existing and new businesses,” University of Illinois at Chicago political science professor and former alderman Dick Simpson pointed out. He said that while zoning could be used to promote business, this usually occurs within manufacturing and commercial categories, not residential.

It is difficult to predict the longterm impact of zoning changes. But if anyone knows the ins, outs, and question marks of aldermanic zoning authority, it’s Bridgeporters.

Halsted has been an area of focus for zoning changes for decades. “There are areas in my ward that are overrun with taverns, where neighbors just don’t like them anymore,” 11th Ward Alderman Patrick Huels said to the Tribune in 1987 while defending his rampant rezoning practices. By the Tribune’s count, Huels sponsored twenty-nine zoning changes in a three-year period. “I don’t need package liquor stores and fifteen resale shops on Halsted Street,” he said, using language that rings familiar.

A decade later, Huels passed a controversial ordinance downzoning parts of 47th Street and Western Avenue in Brighton Park, industrial-commercial districts, to residential. He let it sit in City Council for three years before bringing it to a vote without the neighborhood’s notice.

Two decades later, aldermen are showing renewed interest in similar tactics.

Alderman Gregory Mitchell of the 7th Ward filed an ordinance recently that would grant aldermen city-wide the ability to unilaterally reject business applications.

Hairston, one of the ordinance’s seventeen supporters, has said that if it passes, she would retract her own zoning ordinances. Mitchell’s ordinance is unlikely to pass, however, said Beth Kregor, director of the UofC Institute

Bridgeport (right) These highlighted properties would have their zoning changed from mixed-use commercial to residential, if Alderman Thompson’s ordinances are passed by the city’s zoning council. Three salons are located in the northernmost parcel, while the other parcels include vacant storefronts, a manufacturing business, vacant lots, and a stray multifamily residential unit to the west, at 3759 S. Parnell.

South Shore (below) Earlier this year, Alderman Hairston proposed to downzone a mile-long stretch of 71st Street, from Stony Island Avenue to Yates Avenue, to a residential district. Although Hairston withdrew the ordinances, a planning group brought in by the ward office is focusing on this same area.

for Justice’s Clinic on Entrepreneurship, but its implications are concerning: in her opinion, the ordinance would likely discourage entrepreneurs and open the door for corruption.

Even on its own, aldermanic zoning authority, although it has been regulated since the twentieth century, provides an abundant toolbox for those who aren’t shy about achieving their desired ends or fighting their personal battles through political intimidation.

As government accountability nonprofit Project Six reported earlier this year, Alderman Joe Moreno of the 1st Ward threatened to downzone the property that until recently housed music venue Double Door in order to punish the property owner, Brian Strauss, for evicting the long-running business. In a recorded conversation, Moreno promised that after the targeted downzoning (also known as “spot zoning”), Strauss would not see another tenant for three years and that he should expect “inspectors in here on a daily basis, you watch.” Alderman Daniel Solis of the 25th Ward and Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa of the 35th Ward have also recently used spot zoning to discourage development in rapidly gentrifying parts of eastern Pilsen and Logan Square.

Corruption in the zoning process might take a more insidious shape. In a commercial corridor rezoned to be residential— where businesses cannot open by right—a prospective business owner might be encouraged, explicitly or implicitly, to make a campaign contribution to the alderman before asking for a zoning change.

Even if aldermen proclaim democratic intent, as Thompson and Hairston, and develop a robust community-input process

DATA COURTESY OF CITYSCAPE VISUALIZATION BY JASMINE MITHANI

for rezoning matters, it will result in discrimination and should be ended, Kregor wrote in a Sun-Times opinion piece.

“No single alderman—or community group—should exercise control over entrepreneurship in a neighborhood. No alderman or community group can forecast which business will be a ‘problem business’ or a ‘desirable business.’ If the power to approve or reject a business is discretionary, it will be discriminatory,” Kregor wrote. “Even people with the best intentions will be operating on assumptions and biases. They may assume, for example, that all dollar stores or nail salons are the same and no more are needed. They may also assume that local residents or businesses that already are established are the only applicants that will (or should) succeed.”

The 3500–3600 blocks of Halsted, with the boarded-up, city-owned Ramova overshadowing an empty street with more than a few bare storefronts, might serve as a general warning sign against greater aldermanic control in zoning and business license matters—and against singling out the businesses that have weathered difficult economic circumstances.

Salons like Antonia’s and Anna’s, or Guyse’s in South Shore, could have packed up and headed for another neighborhood when times were tough—when the theaters closed, or when the recession hit—but they did not.

And newer salons, for now standing in the shadow of the more established institutions or attempting to build other customer bases, may one day step into that position. Or they may close, their spaces remaining empty, until a different business deemed “desirable” expresses interest. It is more likely to be the case in Bridgeport that they remain empty, if precedent is any example.

Although Alberto Murillo was not opposed to Thompson’s ordinance rezoning his building, he did express confidence in the community’s power to support or reject a business over time, without the aid of ad hoc regulation from the ward office.

“The community really decides what’s successful,” said Alberto Murillo, “and that’s really what I’ve seen, being there for so long.” Nicole Bond contributed reporting for this story.

JULY 19, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

Connecting City Colleges

Juan Salgado goes to work as chancellor

BY MIRA CHAUHAN

W

hen Juan Salgado received a call in March telling him that Mayor Rahm Emanuel was going to appoint him to become the new chancellor of City Colleges of Chicago (CCC), he said his first instinct was to get to work immediately. After the tumultuous year where Salgado’s predecessor, Cheryl Hyman, stepped down, one can imagine Salgado had his work ready for him.

Salgado has the task of rebuilding the relationship between students and faculty and the chancellor, as well as improving CCC overall, despite the budget crisis that has been affecting community colleges across Illinois. Already Salgado has made significant changes in response to these challenges by selling CCC’s downtown headquarters and planning faculty layoffs.

City Colleges of Chicago is the largest community college system in Illinois, according to its website. It serves more than one hundred thousand students, employs 5,500 faculty members, and consists of seven community colleges and six satellite sites. Salgado, as chancellor, acts as what he describes as the “connector” between these various entities.

The search for a new chancellor came after Hyman announced in June of last year that she intended to resign. Hyman, who had been chancellor for six years, faced significant criticism from faculty, students, and local politicians, mainly due to her decisions to make large changes to CCC without input from students and staff. This led the faculty council of CCC to support a Declaration of No Confidence in Hyman in February of 2016.

Hyman pledged to resign after a year, allowing time for a nationwide search to find her replacement. Following an extensive selection process, Emanuel informed Salgado of his new position in March with

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an official start date shortly thereafter on May 1. Salgado was a natural choice. He is a dedicated advocate for education, a fighter against income inequality in Chicago, and a recent recipient of the nationally recognized MacArthur Genius award—not to mention a community college graduate himself.

Salgado’s path to where he is today has been marked by an intense motivation to help others. He received an associate degree from Moraine Valley Community College and then a bachelor’s degree at Illinois Wesleyan University, majoring in economics with a “lens of income inequality,” as he describes it. Upon a recommendation from his professor, he went on to earn a master’s degree in urban planning from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While studying, Salgado spent time in East St. Louis.

“I got a real education being in East St. Louis,” Salgado said. “[It’s] a place with so much income inequality and almost no tax base for that city to do anything about it, and yet there were these people in these churches and these communities that had hope and had belief and saw possibilities where other people never saw them, and so that’s sort of been my frame throughout my life.”

After Salgado graduated, he pursued a career in education, which he believes to be the main vehicle for reducing income inequality. In 2001, he joined Instituto del Progreso Latino, working there as CEO until his appointment as chancellor. Salgado describes Instituto as doing “everything that city colleges do on a smaller scale.”

The nonprofit strives to provide education, vocational training, and employment opportunities for Latinx immigrants.

Alejandra Garza, the current interim CEO and president of Instituto, has

worked with Salgado for over twenty years. According to Garza, Salgado “has an understanding of what’s happening on a national and a local scene when it comes to education.” Garza described him as a hard worker, a risk taker, and a family man—as well as an impressive dancer.

During Salgado’s time at Instituto, Salgado said he learned smart budgeting.

“When you run a nonprofit, you have to be extremely efficient in the utilization of your resources in order to draw maximum value from every resource,” he said. “When I see a dollar that’s not well utilized, I see how that dollar can go back to a student.”

This skill will be particularly useful considering CCC’s financial struggles.

Without a state budget for two years, community colleges around Illinois have faced severe budget cuts. Since 2015, CCC decreased its operating revenues by ten percent. Hyman struggled with these constraints during her time as chancellor, and they influenced some of her more controversial decisions such as program consolidations and tuition hikes.

The passage of a 2018 budget two weeks ago will provide much-needed relief to the school system, but Salgado now has the responsibility of grappling with the aftermath of this financial crisis.

Salgado moved quickly to deal with the situation dealt to him. At the end of June, he announced a decision to lay off 120 employees, as well as to do away with one hundred percent pension contributions for district officers. CCC has not walked back these changes after the restoration of a state budget—for the CCC system, as with other public colleges and universities, it will take time to recover from years of running on nonexistent or stopgap state funds.

The Weekly asked Salgado about how he would deal with both the successes,

and, more strikingly, the shortcomings of Hyman’s administration. He was hesitant to criticize his predecessor. “There’s a lot of success to build upon,” he said.

Salgado agrees with many of the initiatives spearheaded under Hyman and recognizes the need for some program consolidations. “Much has been said about consolidating things,” he said, in reference to the debate during Hyman’s tenure.

However, he added, “In some places, it makes all the sense in the world. You just don’t have choices because your investments are very, very capital intensive, and they have to be that way because you’re trying to meet a standard.”

Already at the end of June, Salgado has acted on this sentiment, deciding to sell the downtown headquarters of City Colleges in an effort to use CCC’s resources more effectively. If CCC makes the sale, the plan is to move its staff to the Kennedy-King College campus and Dawson Technical Institute, both located on the South Side.

Among the programs Salgado applauded Hyman for was the College to Careers Program (C2C). C2C is an initiative spearheaded by Hyman and celebrated by Emanuel, aimed at maximizing students’ success when they graduate by locating different career programs at different colleges. This includes facilitating internship opportunities, bringing in business leaders, and overall gearing students’ education in a way that will prepare them for their careers.

The program has received both criticism and praise, even leading to the notable visit of a group of World Bank officials in 2013.

The officials came to learn how Chicago was building effective partnerships between students and businesses.

“This is a thing that I think is somewhat misunderstood about our College To Careers effort is that there is

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nothing limiting about any of this. Any company has opportunities all along a vast number of career ladders,” Salgado said.

“So when somebody gets into one of those occupations, it doesn’t mean they stay there.

Instead, they’re now in the workforce and can grow.”

Some students have reasons to criticize the program, however. Alexa Cruz, the Student Trustee for the Board of Trustees of CCC, explained that although C2C has a net positive impact, it requires improvement.

According to Cruz, certain colleges have a more successful C2C program because of increased resources or closer relationships with business communities. Cruz said she and other students agree that the program needs to be more effective across the board.

Other critics of the program have also argued that it deprioritizes helping students transfer to four-year institutions, and that the curriculum needs to be less focused on providing students skills and

more focused on producing students who are creative thinkers and problem-solvers.

Despite Salgado’s stated support of Hyman’s tenure, he expresses a will to diverge from some of her priorities. The previous chancellor pushed the system to increase graduation rates, leading to both a ten percent raise in graduation rates and accusations of inflation. But Salgado said he believes that CCC leadership needs to look at the whole picture, or as he describes it, the “full-value proposition,” when making decisions and formulating a vision for City Colleges.

Instead of just focusing on graduation rates to measure the success of City Colleges and the value it poses to the community, Salgado wants to examine other factors such as graduates’ income earnings and student performance academically and subsequently in the work force. Using that data, Salgado said he wants to more effectively communicate City Colleges’

success to Chicagoans.

“The value that they represent to their families, to their colleges, to their communities, to their employer community here in Chicago and beyond is phenomenal,” Salgado said. “And we’re going to make sure that that whole ecosystem, the whole world understands that and has an opportunity to engage with them.”

Salgado’s decisions to lay off 120 employees and move the downtown headquarters have received mixed reactions. Jennifer Alexander, a professor at Richard J. Daley College and President of the faculty council of CCC, declined to comment, but Kevin Woo, last year’s chairman for the District Student Government Association, told the Weekly that moving the headquarters finally saves individual colleges from bearing the brunt of the budget cuts. He said the entire CCC community believes that “the cost minimization effort should come from the District first as all the affiliated colleges are already suffering due to the significant budget cut.”

“As the prospect of getting any state aid is not conceivable, somewhat drastic action must have been taken to save the institution from insolvency,” he added.

The issue of saving CCC from insolvency applies to Salgado’s move to layoff employees. Although Woo is reluctant to support Salgado’s decision, he also said that he understands why Salgado had to find more funding.

“I believe Mr. Salgado is doing his best to sustain the livelihood of the CCC. As a newly minted chancellor, he seems to be capable of doing things that the previous administrators were reluctant to do,” Woo said. “As desperate times call for desperate measures, his decision to sell the District building and lay off faculty members may seem controversial but are necessary steps to keep the CCC from spiraling down even more.”

Perhaps where Salgado stands out most is in attitude and not in policy.

Salgado has made a concerted effort to regularly communicate with students and faculty, a responsibility that many criticized Hyman for neglecting.

In his first few weeks on the job, Salgado met with each of the faculty

councils for all seven colleges. Each college has its own faculty council. The districtlevel faculty council, also referred to as FC4, consists of four representatives from each of the college’s own councils.

Alexander, the president of the faculty council for the district, described the role of the council as a group of mainly volunteers who “represent all full-time faculty in all academic matters.” The FC4 traditionally meets with the chancellor every month, but according to Alexander, Salgado has already met with this council several times in the weeks since taking on his role as chancellor.

For Alexander, this constant communication and assurance that the chancellor is addressing the faculty’s concerns is especially crucial to ensuring success,” she said. “It’s collaboration and communication. It’s so elementary but also it’s kind of revolutionary.”

Cruz, the student trustee, reaffirmed Alexander’s sentiment about Salgado in her conversation with the Weekly.

Salgado has already met with students several times and has attended the District tudent Government Association meetings.

Already, Salgado has addressed a longstanding concern of student government by providing them their promised budget, which had fallen short this past year.

According to Alexander, Salgado’s insistence on communication is essential as the chancellor and the faculty work together to achieve shared goals. It seems that so much of what Salgado is striving toward and is beginning to achieve falls in line with the way he describes the role of chancellor: “the connector.” Representing the various interests of the various parties involved in City Colleges—the students, the faculty, potential employers—Salgado has to serve as an administrator, a lobbyist, and perhaps most importantly, the students’ and faculty’s biggest fan.

Drawing on his experience at Instituto and now his time at CCC, Salgado said, “You have to inspire and invest in and work with people... You have to be a servant leader to all of them for your outcomes to be phenomenal.” ¬

JULY 19, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

Predictive Policing and the Long Road to Transparency Why did the CPD release data from its Strategic Subject List after seven years of stonewalling?

BY JOSH KAPLAN

J

ohn Doe is a Black, male teenager from North Lawndale. He is in the Chicago Police Department (CPD)’s controversial gang affiliation database. He has a petty rap sheet, with four drug-related arrests in four years. He was recently beaten up, though he has never been arrested for a violent crime or gun violence, and has never been shot. There are 240 other “gang affiliated” people in the city of Chicago with similar profiles, who have been the victims of at least one assault recently and have as many or more narcotics arrests as John. But among these people, John Doe stands out— he has been given a perfect score by the CPD’s Strategic Subject List.

The Strategic Subject List is based on an algorithm the CPD uses to predict how likely it is that an individual will be involved in a shooting in the near future, as either shooter or victim. After large raids, the CPD regularly announces how many of the people they arrested were on the List, and last August, CPD Superintendent Eddie Johnson said that the department knows that those on the List “drive violence in the city.” However, there are only 153 people with a perfect score of 500, which marks them at the most extreme possible level of risk for gun violence. So why is John Doe among those people?

We know about John Doe (and the four other individuals with perfect scores who have never been shot or arrested for violent crimes or gun offenses) because the CPD recently released a year-old, anonymized version of the List— its largest step toward transparency in the seven years since the CPD began work on the project. But there 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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are still giant gaps in the information released about the algorithm behind the List, and civil rights organizations like the ACLU of Illinois have expressed concern about what they claim is a disturbing lack of transparency regarding both the algorithm and the potentially harmful ways the scores are actually used by the police department.

There are almost 400,000 people on the List. Being arrested is the only way to get on the List. Every person who has been arrested in the past four years is on the List and has been assigned a score. Given the demographics of those arrested by the CPD, the majority of people on the List are Black. According to Miles Wernick, the Illinois Institute of Technology engineering professor who designed the algorithm and continues to test and update it for the CPD, the purpose of the algorithm is not to predict the risk levels of everyone on the List precisely. Rather, it is meant to draw attention to a “very small group of people who are at extreme levels of risk because their recent involvement in crime is so, so high.” He analogizes it to a search engine, one that can comb through massive amounts of information and determine what might be important. “For instance, in a city, you may not realize that a certain person has been shot on several different occasions in the past six months. If you wanted to do something to prevent them from dying, it would be helpful to know who they are,” he said, adding that the scores are meant as “just a way to suggest to [officers and others using the List] what’s the situation out there.”

The score is calculated by a two-step process. First, every individual has a risk

ELLEN HAO

score derived based on the following seven factors: 1. Age at most recent arrest (the younger the age, the higher the score) 2. Incidents where victim of a shooting 3. Incidents where victim of an assault or battery 4. Violent crime arrests 5. Unlawful use of weapons arrests 6. Narcotics arrests (Wernick claimed that this is the least impactful variable, and does not seem to matter that much to the model) 7. Trend in criminal activity (essentially whether or not an individual’s rate of criminal activity is increasing or decreasing)

These categories have changed over time. For instance, gang affiliation had long been one of the factors, but was removed in the most recent iteration as Wernick said he found it had little impact on the score. These are all then weighted so that the more recent an incident is, the more impact it has on the score. Wernick said that individual arrest and victimization patterns from the past few months are what matter most to the score. The algorithm has never explicitly used attributes like race, gender, or location. Wernick also says that he has statistically tested the algorithm for racial bias, and found that it gives people with the same risk the same score, regardless of race—in other words, according to Wernick,

POLICING

it does not have a pattern of overestimating or underestimating the risk level of a given race.

The second step is then to adjust the scores based on people’s associations. More specifically, if two people have been arrested together and one of them has a high score, it can affect the other person’s score. The reasoning behind this, according to Wernick, is that people who regularly commit crimes together are likely to have situations which are more similar than their arrest and victimization records might suggest. For instance, in a case where Person A and Person B have been arrested together a lot, they very likely know each other well and run in similar circles. If Person A has been shot twice and Person B has only been shot once, the first step of the algorithm might think Person A is at substantially higher risk. But Wernick says that the fact that Person A has been shot more than Person B is likely just a matter of chance.

This feature of the algorithm explains why John Doe has a perfect score. When asked to explain that particular case, Wernick looked him up in the full version of the List (as opposed to the spreadsheet version released to the public, which is substantially different), and said that his score was high because a relatively high number of people he had been arrested with had been involved in shootings. So, as it turns out, any attempt to discern why John Doe has a perfect score from the data released is a fool’s errand. His extremely high score was not based on any of the information recently released to the public about him or even primarily on his own actions. Rather, it was based on the second step of creating the scores—adjusting risk according to social networks—which, in fact, is completely absent from the version of the List recently released to the public.

Consequently, it has also been absent from recent coverage of the List in major local and national outlets, which has largely attempted to understand the List based only on information published by the CPD without interviewing Wernick, the current algorithm’s creator. Likewise, the released data does not show how each individual’s victimization and arrest histories are distributed over the past four years, which is crucial to how the actual algorithm turns these histories into scores. Wernick said that the algorithm is too complicated to present in something like a spreadsheet, and that it is not clear that all the detailed components that form the List could be explained “to the public in a way that would mean anything.”

CHICAGO POLICE DEPARTMENT

Police officers see individual entries in the Strategic Subject List on their “dashboard.” The main tab shows the score, while graphs explaining the calculation of the score appear on a separate tab. Screenshots obtained by the Weekly in June 2017.

Karen Sheley, director of the Police Practices Project at the ACLU of Illinois, finds this knowledge gap disturbing. Sheley is deeply concerned by what she calls a “lack of transparency” both regarding how the List is created, and regarding if and how the List affects police interactions and is used in criminal sentencing. She said that people are possibly under increased surveillance and receiving heavier sentencing “based on a number, and the math behind that number is hidden. That’s not the way we operate as a democracy.”

What then do we know about how the List is used by the police? Jonathan Lewin, who as deputy chief of the CPD’s Bureau of Support Services is in charge of the Strategic Subject List project, said it is never used to guide arrests, and that it is operationalized solely through a program known as Custom Notifications. According to Lewin, the algorithm’s score is just one of several factors that goes into deciding the List of approximately 440 people flagged for Custom Notifications—essentially, a visit from the police. The goal of visiting someone, according to Lewin, is “to try to get them out of the cycle to reduce the chance of victimization.”

A visit has two components. First, Lewin said, notification recipients are offered social services such as job training, G.E.D. training, or addiction assistance.

Wernick said that, as he sees it, the next

phase in the development of these predictive algorithms is to use them to guide a “fully social services oriented” program that would expand this component of the visit but exclude police involvement.

As it stands, however, there is a second component to the visit. According to Lewin, recipients of Custom Notifications are told that “if you don’t take advantage of these things and you continue to commit weapons offenses, for example, you could be subject to advanced penalties because of your own criminal background. Not because you are on a list—not because of your score—but because of your own criminal activity, which is what the score is based on.”

According to Sheley, there is “no way to tell” if it is true that scores are not having any effect on criminal sentencing, or how effectively or consistently the CPD uses the List to provide access to social services.

“We’ve tried to [file a public records request for] information about who gets offered social services and who accepts it, and we’ve really gotten nowhere with the CPD. So if they’re trying to sell this entirely as some kind of social service program, they need to make that information available to the public,” she said. The CPD’s official directive about the Custom Notifications program, available on their website, said that if any individual in the program is arrested, “the highest possible charges will be pursued” for them. Representatives for the Custom

Notifications program did not respond to requests for more information.

Lewin also said that the score is included on police officers’ dashboard, which officers use to learn information like whether an individual they have pulled over has a warrant out for their arrest. Sheley says that this raises concerns, as “that kind of labeling is going to impact how the officer interacts with the person. If we’re going to have that kind of consequence, we should have more information about the entire program.” The dashboard does provide some explanation for how the score works, though.

While dashboard screenshots obtained by the Weekly through a public records request show that the main tab of the dashboard gives simply the individual’s score alongside other information like height, weight, recent arrests, and—though Lewin and Wernick both told the Weekly it is no longer factored into the score—“gang affiliation,” there is another tab that officers can click on that gives an explanation of how the score is calculated. This explanation consists of what Wernick described as “graphs, essentially, that explain why the model produces the score that it did.” Wernick said that officers should not act just on the basis of the score itself, but rather should use it as a jumpingoff point to understand why the algorithm gave an individual a certain score.

Sheley is concerned, though, that there is no way to see what information officers JULY 19, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

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are presented with or how they actually use that information. She had similar concerns about Wernick’s claim to have tested the algorithm for racial bias, Lewin’s claim that the scores have no effects on criminal sentencing, and other such claims about how the CPD uses predictive policing: “There’s a lot of ‘trust me’ going on. And we’re talking about criminal consequences for people. It can’t just be that we’re going to blindly trust someone who’s doing that for the government.” She referred to a report that the RAND Corporation, a nonpartisan think tank, published after it was brought in to conduct an outside evaluation of the first version of the List, which was used by the CPD from late 2013 to 2014. The report said that the algorithm was not effective—that “individuals on the [List] are not more or less likely to become a victim of a homicide or shooting than the comparison group”— and, furthermore, that the way the CPD used the scores produced by the algorithm was not effective, giving little guidance regarding what authorities should do with the scores other than to “take action.”

RAND’s evaluation was completed prior to the inauguration of the Custom Notifications program, and the algorithm itself has changed substantially since that time. However, Sheley said that whenever the Department meets criticism from outside sources about the List, “they say, ‘No, no, that’s the old version. We’re not doing that anymore.’ Well, you were doing it then.

And if you’re not being fully transparent, the question is, what are you doing now that a year from now you’re going to be saying, ‘We’re not doing that anymore so it’s okay’?”

RAND is currently working on a second evaluation of the current algorithm.

Lewin says that the decisions to withhold information about the List, such as the full list of categories used by the first step of the algorithm (which was not released until this May), have not been without good reason: “We didn’t want people to use the model to assess risk in a way that would allow criminals to target anybody—to put people at risk. We thought that that might happen. We thought that if a criminal gang, for example, could find out the elements of the algorithm and how it worked, then they themselves—keep in mind, our adult arrest records have been public for a long time— might be able to use the model itself or

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some of the measures that the model uses to determine risk for rival gangs, for example, and to put those people at risk.”

Sheley laughed in response to this: “I’m kind of speechless. I think it was a wise judgment to decide to release the amount of information they have if that was the justification for not releasing it, and I would encourage them to release the rest of it as well.”

Given the perceived public safety risk of releasing information about the algorithm, I asked Lewin to explain the decision to release this information now, and whether this meant that the CPD had decided there was no substantial risk after all. Lewin responded that criminal use of the model remains a credible threat, but that they decided to release the List after “a costbenefit analysis to look at the value of being transparent, which I think is part of the department’s philosophy, in the context of what can happen with the model if it were used in a nefarious way. I think right now with what’s going on with [public records] laws the way they are and with the desire for transparency, it’s a better decision to say, here’s the model. Here’s how it works.

Here are the variables...I think [this release] is in keeping with our philosophy of being transparent.”

In fact, journalists and others who have requested the release of the full algorithm and other information about how the List is used have long been denied by the CPD, recently leading the Sun-Times and several independent journalists, including the Invisible Institute’s Jamie Kalven, to file a lawsuit against the CPD contesting this refusal. In February, Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office issued a ruling, which found that the CPD’s refusal to comply with a separate Sun-Times records request for the List violated the state Freedom of Information Act. The ruling, if not directly forcing the CPD to publish the List, put it on shakier legal standing, and likely influenced its decision to partially release data from the List three months later. Still, the true test of the CPD’s transparency regarding the List may still come—it has yet to file a response in court to the lawsuit demanding the release of the full algorithm. Pat Sier contributed reporting to this story.

ParkWorks May Not Work for Pilsen The battle over Pilsen’s most contentious vacant lot

BY DAVID STRUETT

A

n empty parcel of land in eastern Pilsen, sitting between Metra and freight tracks and 18th Street, draws little attention to itself—but for some residents, the site has become a battleground for the future of the neighborhood. The luxury developer that owns the land, Property Markets Group (PMG), recently announced big plans for a 465-unit apartment complex on the site called “ParkWorks.”

The project, which would be built on Pilsen’s largest remaining patch of vacant land, would have rooftop green spaces, solar panels, art installations, and retail outlets— and a futuristic sheen that contrasts sharply with the rest of 18th Street, which hosts some of Chicago’s oldest housing stock.

PMG has been attempting to build on the site for nearly five years, but 25th Ward Alderman Danny Solis has refused to accept the developer’s proposals on the grounds that they wouldn’t be good for the community. In the current proposal, PMG is offering one hundred units of affordable housing and sixty jobs for Pilsen residents to show its commitment to be “guided by social responsibility.”

But some residents are not buying it.

Since the developer bought the property in January, it has constantly found itself at odds with community groups opposed to the construction of luxury development on 18th St. At a June 7 forum, the first of three “open houses” hosted by PMG, Byron Sigcho, executive director of the neighborhood group Pilsen Alliance, voiced concerns and reasons for opposing the project. Speaking face-to-face with the principal developer and

head of the project, Noah Gottlieb, Sigcho repeated the stance of the Pilsen Alliance: that the majority of the community stands to lose from the development, and that the promise of “community benefits” would not compensate for the gentrification that would follow the luxury apartments. In his words, “the social fabric of the community is at stake.”

The Promise of Community Benefits The land in question is nearly eight acres between 16th and 18th Streets, along Newberry and Peoria Streets. The project would contain 465 one, two, and three-bedroom units, ranging from $1,000 to $3,000 monthly rentals. It would be completed over five years and be constructed in three phases, according to project head Gottlieb. There would also be 10,000 square feet of retail space.

PMG is a developer known for its luxury apartments in New York, Miami, and Chicago. It was founded in 1991 by Kevin Maloney, who got into real estate in college when he used his student housing loans to buy two duplexes and rent them out to fellow students, though he didn’t live in them himself. On its website, PMG states it “distinguish[es] itself by focusing on premier luxury residential properties” and that it is “consistently enhancing the luxury experience.” One of its current projects is 111 West 57th Street in New York, a sleek, silver spire that is “poised to be one of the tallest residential towers in Manhattan.”

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Top: A rendering of the proposed ParkWorks development—a large, futuristic looking building—sharply contrasts with the 18th Street of today, which hosts some of the city’s oldest housing stock.

Bottom: A screenshot from a PMG promotional video for ParkWorks shows a visualization of its plan to spread its affordable housing obligations throughout Pilsen, which critics say would expand its alreadysizable proposed footprint in the neighborhood.

Now it wants to move into Pilsen.

Solis and the Pilsen Land Use Committee (PLUC), a neighborhood group created by Solis to vet development proposals in the neighborhood, have prevented the developer from building on this property since PMG started the process of buying the vacant land in 2013 from the Midwest Jesuits, a Catholic order that also operates St. Ignatius High School and Loyola University. PLUC and Solis shot down PMG’s first 500-unit proposal in spring 2015 on the grounds that the project would be too densely populated and would not meet Pilsen’s twenty-one percent affordable housing mandate.

The mandate, formed in 2005, states that any new development of eight units or more that requires a zoning change must reserve a minimum twenty-one percent of its units for affordable housing.

The number is unique to Pilsen—every other neighborhood has a ten percent requirement. The idea is to encourage more affordable housing and stem the exodus of residents who can’t afford to live due to rising rents and property values.

The mandate is not legally binding and developers can gain the favor of the PLUC and other groups by offering comparable benefits to the community instead of affordable housing. For instance, the PLUC and Solis approved a ninety-nine–unit building with only ten percent affordable housing in February 2016 after the developer promised to donate an acre of land to the nearby Benito Juarez Community Academy for an extended sports field.

But PMG’s second proposal, which involved building fewer units, didn’t meet the requirement, nor did it provide something else in exchange. Solis, who also chairs City Council’s zoning committee,

COURTESY OF PARKWORKS

rezoned the land to industrial-use in 2016 to keep PMG from building on it. In an email, a spokesperson for Solis wrote that until PMG meets those demands, “There is nothing for us to talk about; we have two different positions.”

PMG’s latest proposal could be its ticket to start building. The developer is hoping that a new package of community benefits will win over residents who oppose the project. “ParkWorks’ new plan exceeds the community’s request for affordable housing, green space, job creation, and support for local businesses,” according to a PMG video

about the project. Gottlieb is promising that two-thirds of property employees will be Pilsen residents, along with one-third of retail employees, and “on-site hiring for local construction jobs,” according to the video. According to Gottlieb, the project will create sixty jobs for Pilsen residents, though ten of them will be for construction, and only some will be full-time.

Affordable Housing and Social Responsibility The community’s largest concern seems

to be with the promised affordable housing.

The developer is claiming that it meets the twenty-one percent mandate of affordable housing, but there’s a large caveat: while some affordable units will be on site, others will consist of existing apartments in Pilsen that PMG will buy from residents, with promises to implement rent control for thirty years. In order to meet the mandate, PMG will have to extend its footprint further into the neighborhood by buying up more property.

Rosa Esquivel, a member of the Alliance’s community board, has lived in JULY 19, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

DEVELOPMENT

Pilsen for thirteen years and is worried that her parents, who have resided in Pilsen for more than four decades, may have to sell their house. She said that “everything sounds good and pretty,” but expressed alarm that Gottlieb is “saying the one hundred units aren’t going to be on-site. And he has plans on buying more property in Pilsen. I want to make sure he keeps his word.”

Asked why ParkWorks couldn’t be built with twenty-one percent of its on-site units as “affordable,” Gottlieb said he can’t afford it: “I can get to twenty-one percent, I just can’t do it all on-site.”

Some, however, see the promise of the affordable units as a bare minimum, and think that the introduction of luxury apartments into the neighborhood cannot possibly be compensated by providing only some scattered affordable housing. “Twentyone percent is the minimum mandate,” said Alliance director Sigcho. “The Pilsen Land Use Committee has not done a good job of communicating the point of the mandate.

It’s not legally binding, but it shows goodwill to the community—that’s the point of the mandate.”

“They have to do a lot more than twentyone percent,” Sigcho continued. “We’ve said in the past that we have a big affordability problem in the neighborhood. Is it going to benefit the families being displaced?

People are talking about fifty percent, one hundred percent. If PMG isn’t willing to do this, we can find another developer.” (Solis has also been talking about the site with the Resurrection Project, a Pilsen-based housing nonprofit, which was interested in developing it with more than twenty-one percent affordable housing.)

For PMG, promising affordable housing by buying up existing Pilsen property and imposing rent-control on it is a way to meet Solis and the PLUC halfway, but its language is vague and leaves wiggle room. For instance, it is still unclear what portion of ParkWorks units will be on-site versus off-site.

Gottlieb has said that the twentyone percent on-site rule is unfair to him as a developer and the neighborhood in general. One of Gottlieb’s posters at his May community forum claimed that private developers have built zero affordable units in Pilsen since the twenty-one percent mandate went into effect. This claim ignores projects born from private/public partnerships, such as Casa Querétaro and Casa Maravilla, which provide hundreds of affordable units housing to seniors and families in Pilsen.

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According to John Betancur, an urban planning professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, we should be wary of the language used in this development battle, such as “community benefits” and “social responsibility” and even the promise of jobs and affordable housing. “Developers are savvy and that’s all rhetorical,” he said of PMG’s promises. He has studied Pilsen’s gentrification for years, and approaches this project with skepticism. “Like politicians, they promise everything they can think of because they know once they get things, they can do otherwise. I don’t trust the developer and the community shouldn’t. Bringing shops to Pilsen is another gentrifying tool.

Pilsen doesn’t need shops. They don’t really need it.”

Gottlieb and PMG have framed their new proposal in terms of “social responsibility,” promising to bring more good than bad to Pilsen, but it’s unclear how that will play out in the long term. For one, PMG has a record of selling their buildings to third parties as soon as it’s profitable for them—PMG’s founder said as much in a 2013 interview with The New York Times.

Gottlieb contends that PMG is staying and investing in Pilsen. “To be clear, we’re not going to be doing condos,” he said. “This is an apartment building. That’s the goal.

All of these things we’re talking about will become documentation that’ll be inherited throughout the lifetime of the project. So it’s not something that goes away.”

His words, however, run contrary to the modus operandi of his company. In January, PMG put its Logan Square building up for sale. Known as the “L,” it was built in 2016 after years of planning and community debate. The building that was initially proposed to the community was altered to be smaller and meet the neighborhood’s affordable housing concerns, not unlike ParkWorks in Pilsen, after residents protested that it would be a gentrifying force in the neighborhood. Gottlieb was the project’s senior manager.

PMG has also expressed interest in the University Village and Pilsen area before. In March 2015, PMG played a role in buying and demolishing the Gethsemane Church, which stood for over 140 years at 13th and Union, to make room for an upscale apartment building in University Village.

They secured a building permit earlier this year.

So what should the community make of the developer’s promises? And how should the community work to make sure the

developer keeps those promises? Gottlieb has volunteered to sign a Community Benefits Agreement, and claimed that he could easily be held to his word since “the project is going to happen over a number of years, over five years, ... you can hold me to my promises incrementally.”

Gentrification and Pilsen’s Future For some longtime residents, however, the promise of retail jobs and rent-controlled housing does little to offset the concerns of the gentrification they feel ParkWorks would accelerate. Underneath the arguments over the details of the proposed development and the fight for zoning rights is a deep mistrust residents feel toward a developer who promises to make only positive changes in their community.

“It’s all outsiders coming here to make the neighborhood better. But better for who?” said Robertl Queztalcoatl, a Pilsen resident since 1947, outside the forum. He stood outside the open house holding a sign that said, “I am the face of eviction.”

For him, the issue about the development isn’t the amount of affordable housing offered by the developer, or the number of jobs that will be brought to the community.

“I don’t like white people taking over this neighborhood,” he said. “I grew up here and it’s a Mexican neighborhood and now it’s white people pushing us out. It’s already happening.”

“They’ve got a hundred affordable units and sixty jobs for locals, but, honestly, I think that’s just breadcrumbs,” said Javier Ruiz, a Pilsen Alliance member who held a clipboard and pamphlets outside the ParkWorks open house. “That project has a potential to displace a lot of people.”

Eastern Pilsen has already seen encroachment from higher-priced buildings of University Village to the north. ParkWorks is just the latest, and by far the largest, example of gentrifying development in this part of the neighborhood. At 917 West 18th Street, across the street from ParkWorks, a new office-loft space attracted media attention in January when its developers gave it the ill-suited name “The Gentry,” which smacked a little too truthfully of the gentrification of which the building was a part. The developer, Villa Capital Properties, changed the name after receiving negative feedback.

The planned “Paseo Trail,” a 606-style four-mile trail on old freight tracks that runs alongside the ParkWorks site, is likely the

greatest gentrifying force there today, with the potential to bump up property values in the surrounding area and attract more moneyed outsiders. Community groups resisted the 606 trail on the North Side, arguing that property values would increase and gentrify the areas around the trail, and those fears were well-founded. Property values of single-family homes within a half mile of the trail increased by fifty percent from 2013 to 2016, according to a study by the Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul University.

“People living here, it’s poor people,” said Bernadino Echeverria, a resident and Pilsen Alliance member. His main concern is that ParkWorks targets middle class prospective buyers from outside Pilsen, and that their entrance into the community would force out the Latinx community as rents inevitably rise. For him, keeping the developer out would help preserve the neighborhood. “We want to keep the community together,” he said.

But some residents unconnected to Pilsen’s tight-knit Mexican community welcome the plan and hope it will kick-start the neighborhood. “For me, it’s surprising that Pilsen’s already taken this long to turn over,” said Kimberly Galban, who lives across the street from the proposed site, and has lived in the neighborhood since 1999. “It’s close to the city, it’s close to a major expressway, it’s easily accessible… so it’s going to happen regardless. Prices are going up without this, so I just feel like now that there are more people coming to this neighborhood and there are more restaurants trying to make it on 18th Street.

It’s like we need the bodies to actually make that happen.”

Galban is not the only resident who thinks Pilsen could benefit from more apartments and shops. Over two hundred residents from University Village and Pilsen have signed a petition in support of the ParkWorks development. “Empty lots provide no benefit to our neighborhoods,” the petition reads, “and development would bring much-needed density to local businesses as well as additional tax revenue for the city.”

Ultimately,the future of the development and the surrounding neighborhood rests with Solis, who has the power to go through with PMG’s proposal or refuse it again.

Many members of the Alliance expressed the belief that Solis is too close to developers and puts his own agenda ahead of Pilsen’s.

Some members of the Alliance pointed out

MUSIC

that PMG donated $2,650 to Solis’s reelection campaign in 2014 and another $2,700 to his ward organization in 2015, and were worried this meant Solis could work out a backroom deal and allow the development to proceed.

At the June 7 forum, Sigcho was critical of what he saw as the developer trying to preemptively get the green light through Solis without the community’s input. “Being at the table after the fact is not the same as sitting down and saying, ‘This is the situation,’” Sigcho told Gottlieb, standing among a group of residents.

“Do you agree or disagree that the purpose of tonight is for everybody to sit at the table?” asked Gottlieb. “We hear your concerns.”

Betancur believes that Solis and PMG are in a stalemate, with both parties stuck in a difficult bind. “Basically the alderman does not have an easy way with residents. Every time there is a project, it’s difficult for him to approve a project,” Betancur said. “The community doesn’t want it there, and the developer is trying to get around, but none of the proposals have met the criteria and none will meet those criteria, but something might happen. There’s an impasse, and Solis might want more from [Gottlieb].”

The impasse is worrisome for residents who fear change in their neighborhood, and explains the energy being funneled into this dispute over eight acres of unused land in eastern Pilsen. But perhaps what this fight has proven is that this is not just about resisting change in a community but also about retaining the power and voice of residents.

“Communities change,” said Betancur. “It’s not a matter of keeping the community intact. It’s a matter of having a say—giving the time to the community.

I don’t think gentrification is inevitable.

It was kept off until Daley became mayor and Solis became alderman. If Solis holds off zoning changes, he can because the alderman has the ability to do that. If the alderman works with community to help the lower-income people, he can do that too.”

“There are many things that can be done,” Betancur continued. “It’s not a matter of keeping a community a particular race, it’s about giving people opportunity.” ¬

Like Nothing You’ve Ever Heard Before

Englewood native Benn Jordan, aka “The Flashbulb,” refuses to be tied down to one genre

BY ASHVINI KARTIK-NARAYAN

R

ight now, Benn Jordan, aka The Flashbulb, lives just outside of Atlanta. But that doesn’t stop him from repping Chicago: he continues to be influenced by his South Side upbringing in his performance style and experimental artistry. Using everything from acoustic guitar to ambient sound recordings, no track of Jordan’s is quite the same.

His most recent release, 2015’s Compositions for Piano, features slower, piano-based songs that differ completely from the house-music vibe of Soundtrack to a Vacant Life, which still contrast with the nearly hour-long ambient instrumental track from 2014, “Solar One.” Jordan is considered prolific for his ever-changing style, his unique recording methods, and his refusal to stick to one genre.

Growing up in West Englewood in the eighties, Jordan remembers a unique music scene heavily influenced by house and electronic dance music.

“I think we just had a bit of a different microcosm than the rest of America had at the time,” Jordan said. Instead of playing pop artists of the time like those heard today, popular Chicago radio station B96 once used Friday nights to play long acid house mixes. “It would go on for three hours, four hours without ad interruption,” Jordan said.

“At the time that was completely crazy, it was very bizarre.”

Jordan’s musical upbringing was also uniquely self-driven. “I think Guitar Center was the closest I would come [to being around trained musicians],” he said.

“I started playing guitar upside down, and I don’t think anybody even noticed enough to tell me that I was playing the wrong way until I had been playing for four or five years.”

COURTESY OF BENN JORDAN

Eventually, he began working on projects with professional musicians, the first of which sent him all the way to the North Side. But Jordan credits much of his work ethic, performance style, and creative instinct to growing up on the South Side.

“Musicians performing for me when I was growing up was usually people wearing a suit, playing an instrument, a lot of times they would look at charts and just play a song,” Jordan said.

Although his shows now often use synthesizers and modules to create

complex live tracks, sometimes he simply plugs a guitar into a PA system and plays for forty-five minutes, reminiscent of the performances he watched when he was young.

“I feel like those shows are probably the most inspirational because it’s so minimal and you’re actually entertained by just somebody playing an instrument into a PA system,” Jordan said. “That’s kind of incredible when you look at what everybody goes through to put on a show in a lot of cases...and people spend way more money JULY 19, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

MUSIC

on their visual systems than they spend on their music performances.”

Jordan tends to think about performance from an audience’s perspective.

“I naturally don’t like performing,” he said.

“When I go to shows, a lot of times I get bored. Especially electronic music shows... and I try and think, ‘How can I avoid that?’”

He uses improvisation, multiple live elements, and sometimes even unreleased tracks in his shows, because he is so familiar with what causes disengagement—and he never wants his performances to be a waste of time.

Beyond performance style, his desire to keep things interesting has driven his music as a whole. Jordan’s music, especially when it’s fast, upbeat, and entirely electronic, is unmistakably influenced by footwork, but this presence is not entirely consistent in all of his tracks, like those on Compositions for Piano.

“When it comes to genres, I never think about them,” Jordan said. “That happens with people who listen to my music, they usually place it somewhere, and just categorize it. I feel like it’s really, really difficult for me to think of my music in that way, and maybe I do it on purpose simply because I don’t ever want to have a restricted direction.”

Sometimes he begins composing by playing with an instrument and a melody, sometimes it involves exploring different audio software: ultimately, the process is completely unpredictable.

Jordan’s dedication to this exploratory recording process is part of what has kept him from releasing anything as The Flashbulb for two years. The weight of the release for Jordan isn’t quite the same as writing the music.

“Writing music to me is like taking a bath in warm chocolate pudding...and then when you release it, you have to clean the bathroom,” Jordan said. “It turns into non-artistic work really fast.” Cleaning the bathroom entails the more logistical parts of being an artist: the press, the manufacturing, the artwork.

Jordan has also had trouble grappling with the fact that his music can be interpreted in a range of ways other than

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what he intended pre-release.

“You realize that there’s just a huge disconnect between what’s going on in my head and what’s going on in other people’s heads when they listen to it,” he explained. “But that’s okay. I’ll get messages sometimes from people who say, ‘Your music helped me through a very dark time in my life, I was dealing with so much when I listened to this song.’ I’ll think to myself, ‘Wow, that song was not an inspirational song.’ ” But as time goes on, he has become more comfortable with the different meanings his music has for different people—and how this makes his music, varied and unpredictable on its own, even more interesting.

The unanswerable question, then, is what comes next for The Flashbulb?

Jordan doesn’t know, and he doesn’t want to know either. He recently announced that he will likely release something before the end of 2017, after a two-year pause (typical for most artists, but unusual for The Flashbulb).

“It’s funny because I kind of got bombarded on social media with people saying, ‘I hope it’s another album like Arboreal’ or ‘I hope it’s another album like Soundtrack to a Vacant Life,’” Jordan said. “It’s so weird to me when people say that, because why would you never ask an artist to make something that sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard before?”

So when confronted with the question of what direction his music will take in the future, Jordan is hesitant to posit a hypothesis.

“I always think, hopefully, it’s a completely new direction,” he said.

“Because otherwise I’ve kind of stopped being an artist.”

What he does know, though, is that he’ll keep trying to create challenges for himself in his music, so that he’s always learning something new.

“I’m always a little over my head, I always feel like I’m a dumbass for even trying to stay afloat in what I’m working on,” Jordan said. “And that’s really the best part because that’s when you continue to grow.” ¬

The Metra’s NotSo-Electric Plan

The Metra can and should increase service across the South Side, and not just to Hyde Park

BY SANDY JOHNSTON

M

etra’s plan to enhance Electric District service to Hyde Park has provoked chatter on the South Side and beyond since its announcement in May. Is the return of frequent, quality service on the Electric close at hand? Unfortunately, it seems that the current plan misses many opportunities and takes as many steps backward as it does forward.

The plan Metra is presenting would bring trains to Hyde Park roughly every twenty minutes at midday, while reducing service to the South Chicago and Blue Island branches.

While Metra has presented this plan within context of current service, understanding what the Metra Electric District is capable of providing to Chicago requires looking deeper into its history. Metra Electric is nearly unique among American “commuter rail” operations in that it did, historically, offer rapid-transit-quality service to the South Side—this changed most rapidly after the Regional Transportation Authority (RTA), with its chronic funding problems, took over. Service in the middle of the twentieth century ran at frequencies unimaginable today—and beyond what Metra is offering in its new plan. In recent years, advocates and coalitions have periodically proposed fixes for the Electric Division’s increasing woes, suggesting utilizing its existing infrastructure to provide quality service to the underserved neighborhoods of the South Side.

Metra’s plan does not accomplish that goal. As Steven Vance’s analysis in Streetsblog Chicago points out, the current plan would enhance service to Hyde Park—but at the expense of cutting it to neighborhoods with higher levels of poverty, disinvestment, and disadvantage, such as South Chicago, West

Pullman, and Morgan Park. (After a series of public meetings, in which South Siders raised concerns about this tradeoff, the Metra said it would make some adjustments to the schedule and release it in the fall for community input, DNAinfo reported).

This plan is sadly no accident, but rather a product of a fundamental mismatch between an infrastructure asset and the organization tasked with running it.

Metra’s paradigm for running a railroad simply is not suited to the Electric.

Comparing American and international models for operating suburban rail networks makes the differences clear: other countries treat every rail line as an opportunity to provide frequent service, all day long, on the model of full-scale urban transit such as the “L.” Meanwhile, as I argued in my master’s paper for the State University of New York at Albany’s Regional Planning Program, the “commuter” rail—a concept that exists in this form only in the U.S.—is a niche product that works well only for those making a simple suburb-to-downtown commute, emphasizing fast trains that make limited stops and have long distances between stations. The Electric District’s infrastructure is clearly more suited to the former style of service than the latter.

Stop spacing is extremely short, around half a mile in most places within Chicago proper.

The line sports high-level platforms and electrification, rapid-transit-quality features that few commuter rail lines in the U.S. boast.

The same suitability for frequent, all-day, transit-quality service exists in the Electric District’s ridership base. People living in lower-income South Side neighborhoods are less likely to hold white-collar nine-to-

OPINION

five jobs in the Loop, and more likely to need transit for non-commute daily tasks, given lower rates of car ownership and a greater percentage of children and seniors in the population. Historically—before Metra’s stewardship, which began with an RTA funding agreement in 1976—the Electric District (then known as the Illinois Central) served these needs fairly well. Today, within the misapplied commuter rail paradigm, it cannot. No wonder Metra Electric ridership has been in freefall for decades. Metra’s fundamentally mismatched vision of the Electric District is guaranteed to produce a “death spiral” (as Streetsblog’s Angie Schmitt called it), as indeed it has over the last thirtyfive to forty years.

Metra’s new plan represents not a genrebusting effort to restore bygone glory, but a modest attempt to fit the square peg of transit-quality service into the round hole of the “commuter” rail paradigm. It comes off as transit planning for the sake of business and college travelers—like Mayor Emanuel’s silly airport express, luxury transit for relatively well-to-do white folks, while transit- and resource-poor South Side neighborhoods continue to wait their turn. Is this how transit planning in Chicago should be done?

Still, Metra’s recognition that the Electric District needs a re-thinking presents an opportunity to bust the commuter rail paradigm entirely and return the entire railroad to its roots as a key part of transit on the South Side. Instead of a limited improvement targeted at the line’s most privileged users, transit planners should aim higher—toward a restoration of the kind of frequent service that the Electric once brought to much of the South Side.

While the concept of regional rail—that is, non-subway, -elevated or -light rail that provides frequent service with short distances between stops, effectively acting as rapid transit—is very common internationally, it is beginning to catch on in North America as well. Denver’s Regional Transportation District is in the process of opening a network of regional rail lines providing service at high frequency (in most places, fifteen-minute intervals all day long, every day). Caltrain, which connects San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and San Jose, is in the process of electrifying its railroad and providing service as frequently as every ten minutes, all day long. Toronto and the Province of Ontario have launched a major effort to turn the GO Transit commuter rail network into a Regional Express Rail system providing

frequent, electrified trains.

And Chicago has advantages that none of those systems can boast: existing assets such as a high-capacity four-track right of way, electrification, high platforms that allow for level boarding, and new (though not modernly-designed, and poorly suited to rapid transit service) trains. The infrastructure is essentially in place; all that is lacking is the political will to fund the level of service that once existed, and for which demand exists.

If Metra is willing to crack open the door to doing things differently, advocates, South Side stakeholders, and elected officials should insist on throwing it wide open.

Returning frequent Electric service to the South Side is, at a basic level, a trivial infrastructural task—but no small lift politically. To be fiscally sustainable while operating at frequencies akin to those of the “L,” regional rail trains must run with a crew that looks more like that of the “L.” Indeed, it was a dispute over crew sizes that contributed to ultimately pushing the Electric District’s former private-sector operations into the red back in the 1960s, leading to the line’s prolonged death spiral and transition to public-sector ownership.

The CTA has come to see any transit operation within the city of Chicago as its turf; whether or not it formally takes ownership of the Electric District, as some advocate plans have proposed, the turf wars between it and Metra will have to be worked out to the advantage of the public interest.

That turf war sent fares on the then-Illinois Central skyrocketing, leading to their wide divergence from CTA fares today; the systems would have to be rationalized and made to work together. On the South Chicago branch, more frequent trains means more frequent gate closures at the numerous street crossings. As numerous international (and the growing number of North American) implementations prove, these are perfectly surmountable barriers; but they require sustained, good-faith effort, and most likely sacrifice on behalf of some partners. Rather than building its way out of jurisdictional conflict, Chicago has the chance to lead the U.S. in focusing on organizing its transit policy first—an approach often known as “Organization Before Electronics Before Concrete” that guides transportation policy in some of the countries with the world’s best transit, such as Switzerland and Germany.

Still, expansion of Metra Electric service has political advantages as well. As Caltrain’s struggle to secure its electrification grant

THE CHICAGO DISPATCH ELLEN HAO

demonstrates, the presence of a federal funding partner for transit projects is far from guaranteed in the age of Trump. Since most transit infrastructure expansion projects rely in part on federal funding, this threatens Chicago’s ability to expand and improve the CTA network—and, in particular, places its ability to complete the showcase South Side project, the Red Line Extension to Roseland, in doubt. In crisis, though, comes opportunity; the withdrawal of a potential federal partner places a significant value premium on transit improvements that can be made without significant capital expenditure.

Luckily for Chicago, the Electric District already serves the neighborhoods to which the Red Line Extension would bring service; more frequent service, especially off-peak, could be initiated in the very short term. Expansion of Metra Electric service to Roseland, Pullman, and the neighboring areas would also provide an opportunity to correct the damage done to the area’s internal transit grid with the opening of the Dan Ryan Line in 1969. In other words, the Metra Electric holds the promise of bringing better access to jobs, resources, and education to one of the neediest parts of the South Side, and now— not some murky number of years down the line, and not dependent on the vagaries of the

federal government.

The existence of the Metra Electric’s high-quality infrastructure and legacy of frequent service is, in some ways, a silver bullet ideally designed to mitigate the impact of uncertain federal funding while meeting significant and growing local needs—but only if handled correctly. That means restoration of high levels of service everywhere, not just for those who demand it most loudly or have the most political chips to cash in. All of this can be done with local resources and at relatively little expense, if bureaucratic and political obstacles stop getting in the way.

Chicago can start to move forward on transit in real ways if—and only if—it is willing to confront the mismatch between the Metra’s infrastructure and its purpose, and emphasize quality service to the public over bureaucratic and political convenience. The door is being cracked; it’s time to pry it wide open.

Sandy Johnston is a former Chicagoan and a transportation planner with the Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Organization. He holds a Master’s of Regional Planning and a Certificate in Urban Policy from SUNY Albany.

Sandy blogs at itineranturbanist.wordpress.com and tweets (voraciously) @sandypsj.

JULY 19, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

EVENTS

BULLETIN Re-Entry Education Summit

Black Carceral & Media Architecture + Affirmative Action & Art

Kennedy-King College, U-Building, 740 W. 63rd St. Thursday, July 20, 10am–2pm. bit.ly/ReEntrySummit

Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Island Ave. Friday, July 28, 5:30pm–8pm. Free.

Register online at bit.ly/BRMCarchitecture

Make acclimating to life after prison a little easier with guidance from the Kennedy-King College Re-Entry Education Summit. The summit will include workshops on record expunging and sealing as well as the CTA Second Chance Program, and its Resource Fair will connect you with a variety of community resources. (Adia Robinson)

Interested in an engaging “evening of research & refreshments?” If so, stop by the Arts Bank for a series of talks presented by the Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC).

BMRC summer fellows Ashlie Sandoval, Dr. E. James West, Sonja Williams, and Douglas Williams will discuss art and architecture in Chicago’s Black communities. (Lois Biggs)

Hustle Mommies Lead, Hustle Kids Read 63rd Street Beach, 6300 S. Lake Shore Dr. Saturday, July 22, 3:30pm–6pm. Free. Register at bit.ly/HustleMommies This isn’t your usual bookstore or library author reading—bring a blanket, towel, or chair to 63rd Street Beach for some sun, surf, and local author Veronica Appleton, who will read her children’s book Journey to Appleville.

There will be light refreshments and a raffle with great prizes. (Andrew Koski)

Inequalities in Education: Stories of Resilience La Casa, 1815 S. Paulina St. Thursday, July 27, 7pm–8:30pm. Free. bit.ly/IllinoisStateStories Illinois State doctoral students of all stripes will come together at La Casa in Pilsen for a story-sharing event intended to bring the university community together. Come listen as an audience member, or, if you’re a student, take the chance to have your voice heard. ( Julia Aizuss)

Increase the Peace: Reclaim the Streets Campout St. Ann’s Church, 1840 S. Leavitt St. Friday, July 28, 5pm–Saturday, July 29, 5am. (312) 666-1323. resurrectionproject.org This summer the Resurrection Project wants to cool down “Hot Spots,” or areas with a lot of violence, by camping out overnight and promoting civic engagement. There will be free food, music, dancing, an open mic, basketball, soccer, and more. (Adia Robinson) 18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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VISUAL ARTS Richard Medina: Scenes from the Middle High Hrothgar, 5120 S. University Ave., Apt. #3N. Friday, July 21, 6pm–8pm. bit.ly/RichardMedina On view for just one night at what is presumably someone’s Hyde Park apartment every other night, this pop-up exhibition of paintings by artist/curator/filmmaker/ SAIC student Richard Medina starts in its geographical location, the Midwest, and from there dives deep into “moments—scenes—of middle-ness and smallness.” ( Julia Aizuss)

Third Friday: Rodrigo de la Sierra: Timoteo and His World Zhou B Art Center, 1029 W. 35th St. Friday, July 21, 7pm–10pm. Free. (773) 523-0200. zhoubartcenter.com Zhou’s Third Friday evening reception this month hones in on its current exhibition on Rodrigo de la Sierra, a Mexico City–based sculptor. Formerly an architect, his modeling, wood-carving, and molds are now directed towards his childlike alter ego figure Timoteo, who “makes the very conceptual pill he administrates much easier to swallow.” ( Julia Aizuss)

Second Annual Chicago Poetry Block Party 19th St. and Wolcott Ave. Saturday, July 29, 2pm–9pm. Free. poetryfoundation.org

The Poetry Foundation and Crescendo Literary’s inaugural Poetry Block Party in Bronzeville in 2016 featured readings, breakdancing, verse scrawled in chalk on the pavement, and a catchy song about ham sandwiches. The National Museum of Mexican Art is helping stage the second annual shindig, which includes workshops, visual arts, a dance party, and free books and journals to bring home. ( Joseph S. Pete)

Fiesta del Sol 2017 1400 W. Cermak Rd. Thursday, July 27th, 5pm–10pm, Friday–Sunday, July 27–30, 11am–10pm. Free. fiestadelsol.org Join the Pilsen Neighbors Community Council (PNCC) for its annual fundraising event, Fiesta del Sol. Fiesta del Sol is one of the largest festivals in the Midwest, showcasing local art, carnival rides, educational resources, and so much more for kids and parents alike. (Roderick Sawyer)

MUSIC Jello Biafra Reggies, 2105 S. State St. Thursday, July 20, 8pm–12pm. 21+. Free. (312) 949-0120. reggieslive.com In this free set, Jello Biafra will be playing Garage, Soul, Surf, Trash, Dementia, and Punk as a part of Reggies Trainwreck Rooftop Deck. Biafra is the former lead singer of the Dead Kennedys, one of the first American hardcore bands to rock the UK. (Adia Robinson)

Jazz in the Courtyard Hyde Park Shopping Center, 55th St. and Lake Park Ave. Friday, July 21, 12pm–2pm, and every first Friday through September 1. Free. hpjazz.com Nothing says summer in Hyde Park like the annual free live jazz concerts every first Friday at the Hyde Park Shopping Center.

Grab lunch from any of the many restaurants nearby, then sit outside to enjoy the sounds of the Bosman Twins on July 7, the Chris Foreman Quintet August 4, and the Chicago State University Community Jazz Band conducted by Roxanne Stevenson on September 1. (Nicole Bond)

The Corner: ft. Wil Akogu and Boys v Girls The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. Monday, July 24. Doors 7pm, open mic 8pm. $5.

(312) 801-2100. promontorychicago.com At The Corner this week for its “intimate and eclectic musical experience” will be Wil Akogu and Boys v Girls. Akogu’s hip-hop flow promotes self-awareness and self-love, while Boys v Girls defies genres and brings spontaneous fun. The show begins with an open mic hosted by J Bambaii, with DJ Lisa Decibel. (Adia Robinson)

Cloud Nothings and Oozing Wound Reggies, 2105 S. State St. Thursday, August 3, 10pm. $20, $25 day of show. 18+. (312) 9490120. reggieslive.com Ditch the long lines and massive crowds of Lollapalooza for something a little more intimate: Reggies Rock Club. Cloud Nothings will be sure to bring their signature catchy hooks, as well as what Pitchfork calls “Screams, massive guitar tone, and a muscular performance.” But that’s just the half of it: catch Chicago’s own genre-bending metal darling Oozing Wound, an amalgam of thrash, sludge, and hardcore. Oozing Wound’s sardonic lyrics, whose themes range from anti-consumerism to post-apocalyptic sci-fi, feel ever more prescient in the current political era. (Andrew Koski)

Kool Moe Dee The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. Thursday, August 31. 7pm doors, 8pm show.

Tables $35 per seat, $20 general admission. 21+.

(312) 801-2100. promontorychicago.com Even the Promontory admits on their website that Kool Moe Dee “began to fade by the early ’90s,” but if you want to relive (or live for the first time) hip-hop’s original spats dating back to the eighties, Dee—who was one of the first rappers to win a Grammy, but is perhaps now more famous for his feud with LL Cool J—is at the Promontory next month. ( Julia Aizuss)

Parallax Views: Paranoia on Film Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S. Morgan St. Thursday, July 20, 8pm–11pm. Free, donations encouraged. (773) 837-0145. southsideprojections.org Alan J. Pakula’s classic thriller will not be screened at this event bearing its name, but five experimental short films “interfacing with an aesthetics of paranoia” will be, in addition to excerpts from filmmaker Ernest J. Ramon’s “Critical Paranoia” series. Ramon will be there in person for a Q&A to talk paranoia as today’s political affect of choice. ( Julia Aizuss)

Lion at Beverly Arts Cinema Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th St. Wednesday, July 26, 7:30pm. $9.50, $7.50 members. (773) 445-3838. beverlyartcenter.org Lion, which was nominated for six Oscars, concerns a young Indian boy who stumbled on a train and ends up stranded in a Calcutta orphanage before he’s adopted by an Australian couple. He seeks out his biological parents in an uplifting film, perhaps made more uplifting for the BAC viewer by the Bookie’s discount: you can get a dollar off your ticket if you bring a receipt from the local bookstore. ( Joseph S. Pete)

Walk a Mile in My Shoes Rebuild Foundation, 6760 S. Stony Island Ave. Friday, July 21, 7pm–9pm. Free. (312) 8575561. rebuild-foundation.org Coquie Hughes’ Walk a Mile in My Shoes, presented as a Black Cinema House screening, is a film about “Granny Ballers,” a team of older women who try to save a friend from eviction by winning prize money in a basketball tournament. Hughes, a Chicagobased independent filmmaker with 57,000 YouTube subscribers, will talk with the audience afterwards. ( Joseph S. Pete)

Water: A Dispatch from the Bottom of the Tub High Concept Labs at Mana Contemporary Chicago, 2233 S. Throop St. Friday, July 21, 7:30pm–9:30pm. $10. highconceptlaboratories.org

“Ebb, flow, torrential rain,” murmurs a speaker, her face half-covered in swirling blue paint. Paper figures soak in a paper bathtub. In the background, eerie melodies tell the story of a drowning. Experience these surreal scenes and more at Water: A Dispatch from the Bottom of the Tub, a collaborative performance featuring multimedia artist Rae Red, multi-instrumentalist Hedia, and plenty of shadow puppets. (Lois Biggs)

Melanin Voices Nichols Park, 1355 E. 53rd St. Saturday, July 22, 4pm–6pm Free. bit.ly/MelaninVoicesLit This poetry, performance, literature, and activism collective will be presented as part of the Chicago Park District’s Night Out in the Park Series. Scripted vignettes of short stories, poems, and nonfiction from various Chicago artists will focus around the experiences of Black women and girls, including the voices of youth from queer, cis, and transgender perspectives. (Nicole Bond)

The Miseducation of 55th Street: an Original Sketch Comedy Revue The Revival, 1160 E. 55th St. Saturdays July 22, July 29, August 5, 7:30pm. $15, $5 students. the-revival.com Since the truest things are often said in a joke, this original sketch comedy revue directed

by Cody J. Spellman, will delve into some of the city’s everyday situations to examine the complexities of race, using a mix of humor, music and poetry. (Nicole Bond)

One of the Largest 2017

STAGE & SCREEN

VEGETARIAN

Food & Lifestyle

Festivals in North America!

AUGUST 12 & 13, 2017 11AM–8PM FREE ADMISSION!

Bantu Fest Midway Plaisance, between 59th St. and 60th St. Saturday, July 29, 10am–10pm. Free. (773) 676-7239. bantuentertainment01.com This will be the third annual Bantu Festival, bringing together people from over twenty African and Caribbean nations to celebrate diversity, unity, and love. Enjoy live performances, dancing, crafts, a children’s village, and food, food, food! Chicago’s own Afrika and Maggie Brown will perform, as well as reggae band Indika from Jamaica, Alan Cave from Haiti, Lil June from Belize, and more. (Nicole Bond)

DON’T MISS OUT Talks by health experts Children’s activities Meditation classes Family fun Over 100 vendor booths Yoga classes Free parking

VEGGIE FEST CHICAGO Benedictine University 5700 College Road Lisle, IL 60532

Phone: 630-955-1200

12th Annual Veggie Fest

Host sponsor Science of Spirituality

International Food Court, Live Music, Vegetarian Food Demos

www.veggiefestchicago.org

JULY 19, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19