Who Is The City For?

WHO IS THE CITY FOR?

by Suzanne Hanney

Blai r KamIN on his book & the city's projects

Chicago is like an oil tanker, not a little boat that can turn on a dime, so improving life for all its residents can take generations. But it must be done, if Chicago is to be a good city, a fair city, and an effective one, says Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Blair Kamin.

“That’s the way that you drive the population up,” Kamin said in an interview about his new book, “Who is the City For?,” (University of Chicago, 2022) a collection of columns he wrote in the Chicago Tribune.

“You know, if the city is for the top 1% only, and the upper middle class only, Chicago’s never going to get back to three million people,” Kamin said. “It’s going to keep declining in population. But if we rebuild the city with equity as a guiding principle, then we have a chance to attract people rather than lose them, a chance to rebuild the tax base. But it takes time, and it’s not going to happen overnight.”

“Equity” is a term he took from the financial services industry, where it implies a share of ownership.

“I see the city as a shared enterprise. It isn’t devoted to maximizing profit, it is devoted to maximizing economic opportunity for all the residents of a city. The philosophy of my book is that cities are for everyone: not just the bourgeoisie. They should be for the poor, the homeless, the working class.”

The role of government – the public sector – is to stimulate investment by the private sector so that Chicago grows, he says. The philosophy is neither Franklin Roosevelt/New Deal liberal nor Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher conservative. It lets each sector do what it does best.

“The most important thing is not just to let the market run wild. We’ve seen that the market itself, left to its own devices, isn’t going to provide an equitable city. So, we need a public sector that is based on the fundamental idea that cities are for everyone.”

INVEST South/West, begun by Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration, is an example that works, he said. The initiative concentrates $750 million in public infrastructure spending (on transit, streets and more) in 10 disinvested business corridors on the South and West Sides. Architects are saving landmarks like the Art Deco Laramie Bank at Chicago and Laramie avenues, and designing new buildings around them.

“The program has attracted more than $2 billion to neighborhoods that many had written off as wastelands not worthy of investment,” Kamin said. “I’m concerned that Mayor [Brandon] Johnson wants to stop INVEST South/West. That would be a serious mistake.”

Mayor Johnson has called INVEST South/West a top-down program, led by City Hall. Kamin disagrees. “Numerous public hearings were held by the Department of Planning and Development, and they incorporated the public’s take on these projects.

“Before making a rash decision to end the program, I think Mayor Johnson should continue it. Watch what the outcomes are in the neighborhoods where this new investment has occurred and then evaluate whether to continue it, cancel it, or expand it.”

Yes, INVEST South/West has been slow to get started, Kamin conceded. But it has used public-private partnerships formerly limited to downtown projects like Millennium Park to bring retail stores, restaurants, and offices to impoverished neighborhoods. Chicago has lost 200,000 African Americans in the last two decades. Gun violence, lack of economic opportunity, a poor educational system are major reasons, but so is quality of life. They want neighborhoods where they find a grocery store and all their other needs in a 15-minute walk.

“That’s why I think INVEST South/West is so important, because it does a lot of different things simultaneously in terms of economic opportunity, safety. When you have vital streets, they’re more likely to be saved, because you have people watching the streets.”

“Eyes on the street,” whether it’s people watching from storefronts or their front porches, is a concept from the Jane Jacobs book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (1961 Random House). Practical and selftrained, Jacobs loved her Manhattan of the 1930s-60s. Unlike the antiurban rhetoric of recent years, she appreciated the population density that enables diverse businesses to start from scratch and flourish.

A homogeneous town might attract basic supermarkets, Jacobs wrote, but big cities naturally generate a variety of small enterprises: delicatessens, Viennese bakeries, art house cinemas. Her most-quoted words of wisdom from the book are, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

LaSalle Street Reimagined, another Lightfoot administration initiative, fulfills yet another Jane Jacobs mantra of relieving deadness by bringing more density, more diversity of uses, more connectedness, more eyes on the street – “something for everybody.” Three developments will bring over $560 million and 1,000 units of housing to three historic LaSalle and Monroe Street buildings that had largely been vacated for new construction on Wacker Drive. The City offered tax increment financing (TIF) to entice more than 30% (318) affordable units, up from the 20 percent normally required of projects seeking public assistance or zoning changes.

Vendor A. Allen: What do I Bring to The City?

I personally bring StreetWise magazines to the city of Chicago.

StreetWise is an informative magazine that has been around for 30 years. Founded in August 1992 by Judd Lofchie, it is one of many members of the International Network of Street Papers. Not only do I bring StreetWise magazines to the city of Chicago, but I also bring a part of myself as well: my personality, my entrepreneurship and my dedication. The dedication I bring requires discipline, determination, and application. It takes discipline to wake up and be at your location every day at the same time for your customers’ convenience. It takes determination to do this day in and day out without outside influence. My motivation comes from within. I am determined to work for myself and to become successful at being an entrepreneur.

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If you don't have a personal vendor who sells StreetWise to you, you're welcome to come to Mariano's on Sheridan and Foster between 5 and 7 p.m. Monday-Friday. I'll personally sell you a StreetWise magazine.

Laramie State Bank of Chicago, 5200 W. Chicago Ave. (photo by Lee Bey).

Vendor Kianna Drummond: Who Is The City For?

The city is for the rich and the poor, because without the rich, the poor wouldn’t have anybody or anywhere to shop.

To me, it’s crazy, because it’s like the poor, or the not-sowealthy, shop and spend more than the wealthy, or the rich. The wealthy are the sellers and the not-so-wealthy shop.

With that being said, a good landmark for me is the lowend projects. For instance, when the projects were up and running, it was an African American gated community where everybody knew everybody. If I needed some sugar, I could go knock next door and get a cup. If I wanted to play, I could go downstairs and play in the playground. It wasn’t hard to make friends, because we all came from the same place. Everybody knew everybody, to where if somebody new moved in, or came around, you would know or hear about it.

But African Americans can’t all be in one place at the same time, ‘cause we don’t know how to act. Is that a stereotype or is it true? They tore all the projects down because there was too much killing. Drug dealers was taking over people’s apartments for their drug spots on CHA property versus if there were a different race living there. So as I say, the city is for the rich and the poor.

“So, again, this project is not just for tech workers, or lawyers, or others who are in the top 1%,” Kamin said. “It’s for a broad spectrum of people. So that’s the equity piece of that development. But it also has much greater ramifications.” The Loop is still slowly coming back from the pandemic, and hybrid work means less foot traffic for small businesses.

“If I’m living in one of these revitalized office buildings, or I’m working down there, I want to be able to go down to a nice restaurant, or maybe there’s a grocery store that’s going to be in the bottom of one of these buildings, as you find in revitalized Art Deco skyscrapers in New York. The idea of revitalizing the streetscape creates a shared public realm. And that’s good for all of us.

“So, I think that the Reimagining LaSalle Street program is very promising and should be continued by the new mayor. And it’s, again, an example where the public sector, by offering TIF subsidies to developers, can lure them to do the right thing for the city as a whole, including providing affordable housing.”

The Chicago Housing Authority’s (CHA) Lathrop Homes at West Diversey parkway/Clybourn and Damen avenues, on the Northwest Side, is another perfect example of redevelopment that answers the question, “Who is the City For?”

“Here you have a former housing project, a portion of which has been beautifully redeveloped. Historic buildings, low-rise, with beautiful architectural details. New public spaces have opened up Lathrop to the river, instead of isolating it from the river, as was the philosophy in the past, when the river was essentially an industrial sewer.

“There’s a mix of uses and income levels: all, again, following that kind of classic Jane Jacobs playbook. The problem is, that only the northern half of Lathrop has been fully redeveloped. The southern portion has just been sitting there for years. And if you don’t redevelop that southern half, and you don’t build the affordable apartments that are supposed to be part of it, you’ve, in effect, taken away a large supply of affordable housing for the former residents who were promised that they have a chance to return there to live.”

Lathrop had 925 public housing units, until they fell into disrepair and went vacant. The redevelopment brings only 414 public housing units – a deficit of over 500 – in the overall development of 1,116 units, he notes in the book. He quotes CHA that 290 more replacement units have been built elsewhere on the North Side, are under construction, or are approved for development. “Still well short of goal.”

To be fair, CHA cannot redevelop dense concentrations of public housing, because of the 1969 Gautreaux federal court decision, which said that CHA had deliberately segregated African Americans. The court’s remedy was scattered site housing: typically one-third each market rate, affordable and public housing units.

CHA officials have said that market rate units leverage the public housing units – and

that finding development partners was difficult during the 2008 recession. Housing activists say the opposite is true: that public housing units subsidize the market rate ones. They have also said that the surrounding neighborhood provides enough market rate units, so that the Lathrop site itself could be rebuilt with just public housing and affordable units.

“I think the activists may have a point, because I used to live in that area and there is a lot of very expensive private housing in that Lakeview neighborhood to the east,” Kamin said.

Simultaneously, he admitted, he wasn’t privy to the development’s finances. “But I am familiar with the lack of construction activity there. And it’s dragged on for too long. This is something the new mayor can address. Again, it goes back to the ques-

tion, ‘Who is the City For?’ because that area is now prime real estate, right along the river, next to a vital neighborhood.”

Ideally, Kamin notes in the book, living in a mixed-income community would integrate public housing residents into the city as a whole. Children would have new role models – except that there’s not much room for large families, because most new Lathrop units have only one or two bedrooms.

“The key for CHA is, we shouldn’t just be talking about building housing, we should be talking about building communities,” he said.

Three new combined CHA mixed income developments and Chicago Public Library branches are good examples of modest buildings that fit into the neighborhoods of Irving Park, West Ridge and Little Italy. The structures also integrate low-income people into the community, instead of warehousing them, like the Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green of the past, he wrote. Residents can find stimulation simply by walking downstairs.

“If I’m a public housing family, and I’m living in an isolated, high-rise complex where many people don’t go to work, there aren’t role models for children,” he said. “There aren’t connections, where one person can say to another, ‘Hey, I heard they’re hiring over at X place.’ That lack of integration can have profound consequences in terms of diminished economic opportunities, diminished educational opportunities.”

Breaking down barriers of social class, on the other hand, can lead to more people working, less crime, more tax dollars and more consumer spending, he said.

The Bloomingdale Trail, or “606,” a 2.7-mile-long former freight line-turnedhiking and biking trail in Wicker Park, Bucktown, Logan Square and Humboldt Park, is an example of how the city failed to effectively anticipate the outcome of the linear park, he said. The 606 attracted so much development that surrounding three-flats – naturally-occurring, affordable housing – were torn down. Many longtime residents were priced out.

StreetWise Participant Cornelius Washington: Who Is Chicago For?

By 1780, a man named Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable became the first permanent, nonindigenous settler of the unincorporated land called Chicago, which was ultimately incorporated by Yankee businessmen, and on March 4, 1837 granted a city charter by the State of Illinois.

So today’s storied question is, “Who does Chicago belong to and why?”

Well, Chicago is very diverse in terms of ethnicities, nationalities, religions, culture and backgrounds. I was born here in Chicago in 1963. And just as I am a law-abiding citizen of Chicago, there are millions of diverse people here.

Our Irish started coming in the 1830s, our German residents in the 1850s, our Polish in the 1860s, our Chinese in the 1870s. Our Mexican residents started arriving in 1910, and our Black and African American people started coming north in 1916. Puerto Ricans came to the mainland U.S. in the 1950s and 60s.

Our great city of Chicago has and holds an awesome title as one of the most multi-ethnic urban communities in the entire United States of America.

So, when anyone asks, or ponders, or analyzes the question, “Who does this city belong to?” the answer is simply, “Chicago belongs to everyone, to US, that’s YOU & I.”

The "606" Bloomington Trail (photo by Lee Bey).

“An attempt to address one form of inequality – a lack of open space –led to another form of inequality, which was, people couldn’t afford to live in the neighborhood that the park was supposed to improve.”

Gentrification is a similar concern with the Obama Presidential Center in the northwest corner of Jackson Park, a short walk from the Museum of Science and Industry. Kamin disagrees with opponents of the location, who say the center will destroy the park’s Frederick Law Olmstead design.

The Obama center would be an improvement over the current landscape, which is poorly maintained, intersected by a wide road and underutilized, he wrote. Olmstead himself realized that parks need to evolve with changing circumstances.

With rents already going up in Woodlawn, west of the Obama Center, Kamin encourages the City to be proactive about vacant land it owns there.

“Yes, there’s a lot of focus on the gentrification that the Obama Center might create,” he said. “But who’s going to say no to a $1 billion presidential center that is going to be a huge draw for tourists? That should, if it’s handled correctly, create benefits that extend far beyond the center itself.”

Meanwhile, a developer’s big costs are for the land, and for construction labor.

“If the City can write down the cost of the land, that’s a big carrot to attract developers to the Woodlawn area. I think that’s the approach the city is taking, and we’re going to see over time whether that has a positive impact.”

The area between North Avenue and Roosevelt Road, the lakefront and Ashland Avenue, now has 200,000 people. However, 60 years ago, construction of Marina City was intended to lure people back downtown, so that the janitors’ union would not lose office jobs.

“It’s an idea that was ahead of its time, and it turned that oil tanker to neutral,” Kamin said.

Similarly, the area just south of Roosevelt Road was decrepit 25 years ago. Then, the City rebuilt the Roosevelt Road bridge and the Museum Campus, which stimulated residential investment. Mayor Jane Byrne started the Museum Campus, which was finished by Mayor Richard M. Daley.

Mayor Daley, in turn, started the Riverwalk, completed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

“Running a city is often like running a relay race,” Kamin said. “A mayor will have an idea and will develop it and then the next mayor may finish it.

“Lori Lightfoot has started us on a systematic approach toward addressing equity and urban development. Brandon Johnson or another mayor, his successor, might complete that. Really important projects take a generation or generations to accomplish. Nothing happens overnight.”

Preserving African American Landmarks

A survey of African American landmarks will be a resource to prevent their accidental sale – which almost happened to the red brick house at 6427 S. St. Lawrence where 14-year-old Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, were living at the time of his murder in 1955.

The developer learned of the property’s significance from Preservation Chicago and admitted to the Commission on Chicago Landmarks that he needed to step back and consider his options, Blair Kamin writes in “Who is the City For?” Buildings in the Black and Latino communities are more often important for their associations with important figures – and not their architecture – so a survey of sites would keep this situation from happening again, said Maurice Cox, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Planning and Development and a member of the landmarks commission.

The Chicago City Council subsequently approved landmark status for the Till home in 2021. The nonprofit Blacks in Green (BIG) purchased the home from the developer and announced plans to turn it into a museum. Later that year, the City Council also landmarked the home of blues musician Muddy Waters at 4339 S. Lake Park Ave.

Funding for the Black Chicago landmarks survey was included in the 2022 Chicago budget. The new Black Chicago Heritage Initiative (BCHI) subsequently created a website with a landmarks map and multimedia tours. Among those on its steering committee are Black historians and artists: Christopher Reed, Ph.D. of Roosevelt University, a former landmarks commissioner; Tonika Lewis Johnson of the Folded Map Project, Julieanna Richardson, founder of The HistoryMakers; Peggy Montes, founder of the Bronzeville Children’s Museum; Perri Irmer, president and CEO of the DuSable Museum, and Bashir Salahuddin, creator of the TV show, “The South Side.”

The Till house, 6427 S. St. Lawrence Ave. (photo by Lee Bey).