The Citywide Planning Initiative "We Will Chicago" Surveys Streetwise Vendors

“We Will Chicago” is the city’s first comprehensive plan since 1966, and the first drafted with public feedback from neighborhood residents and community leaders. Of the plan’s 8 Pillars to improve Chicagoans’ lives – particularly individuals impacted by inequities – “Housing & Neighborhoods” and “Economic Development” are most important to StreetWise vendors.

The Chicago Department of Planning and Development (DPD) is seeking public feedback on the We Will Chicago draft plan (available at wewillchicago.com) until November 1, so DPD staff visited StreetWise offices in the South Loop on September 6 and collected 21 responses, according to Gabriela C. Jirasek, assistant commissioner of community and digital engagement. The Housing & Neighborhoods pillar, along with the Economic Development pillar, were each rated highest priority by 7 StreetWise participants. (Representatives of DPD and the Department of Housing also met September 8 with the StreetWise Writers Group.)

The remainder of the StreetWise breakdown on the proposed plan’s 8 Pillars was:

• Transportation & Infrastructure: 3

• Lifelong Learning: 2

• Arts & Culture: 1

• Civic & Community Engagement: 1

• Environment, Climate & Energy: 0

• Public Health & Safety: 0

“They should house low-income people, cut the red tape,” said Vendor Donald Brown. “Everyone should have an opportunity for housing, regardless of race or religion.”

Housing without strings attached would solve many problems for Vendor Keith Hardiman and those close to him. He lives doubled up with a friend, to whom he pays rent, rather than in a Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotel. An SRO would probably forbid his lady friend from visiting more than twice a week, which is not feasible, since Hardiman takes care of her. He doesn’t want her out on the streets by herself.

Hardiman’s ideal would be a two- to three-bedroom apartment, so that he could also take care of his two grandsons, age 17 and 18. The young men’s father, Hardiman’s oldest son, is dead. One mother lives in Indiana, the other in Minnesota, but the grandsons don’t want to be with their mothers’ boyfriends, and are left to themselves.

“They called me a two weeks ago and said, ‘Grandpa, can I come?’ They can stay for a night or two, but I feel bad having them go back out there on the streets. If I had my own two-, three-bedroom apartment, I could help them help themselves. ‘You don’t have to do the things I did because I am going to take you by the hand and guide you.’ They know who I am. They know I don’t play. I talk to them straight-up, with respect. They give it to me in return, with love.”

Simultaneously, Hardiman says that having spent time in prison for nonviolent crimes, he can’t access subsidized housing and he faces a lot of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t situations” that relate to economic development. If he tells prospective employers about his background during the interview, he never gets the job; if he doesn’t tell them, he loses the job after 30 days for lying in the interview.

Meanwhile, as a StreetWise vendor, “I am my own boss. I don’t have nobody watching over my shoulder and I put 100 percent into it.”

Vendor Lee A. Holmes has a similar story regarding his background and his inability to get Section 8 housing.

“They went all the way back, and told me, ‘you stole a bottle of wine when you were 15.’ I am nearly 60 now. I worked at the airport, where you have to do a background check. If you went back that far, you are telling me you don’t intend to give me housing. They need to change some of these laws, stopping these stumbling blocks for individuals like me, just like boys I was talking to, who were all living on the street.”

Holmes talked extensively with Jirasek about vacant buildings in his West Englewood neighborhood as a lost housing resource. He had seen buildings marked with an X that he was interested in bidding on for perhaps $5,000 and doing his own repairs. Were these houses going to be torn down? No, he had learned. They were going to be remodeled by the Cook County Land Bank and sold.

“But when they remodel them for $250,000, who can afford them?” Holmes said.

Jirasek responded that there needs to be more coordination between Cook County, which maintains the property tax scavenger sales, and the City of Chicago. Many people apply for grants, but they are behind on their property taxes. The city has money for construction costs, but not for taxes. She pondered the idea of tax forgiveness.

A vacant property serves no one, Jirasek said. It doesn’t provide tax dollars and it doesn’t build individual wealth. The Department of Housing (DOH) will release its vacant lot plan this fall, she said.

The City of Chicago owned an estimated 10,000 vacant lots as of early 2022, with another 20,000 lots controlled by absentee property owners, financial institutions and other entities who lacked a comprehensive redevelopment strategy, according to the draft We Will plan. Many West Side vacant lots date to the 1968 riots, sparked in part by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Englewood artist Tonika Lewis Johnson says 80 percent of the vacant lots there stem from contract sales (StreetWise Oct. 26-Nov. 1, 2020, Vol. 28, No. 41). Contract sales conferred no equity on the buyer until the house was fully paid. Until then, the buyer could be evicted with minimal repercussions. If the same 80 percent of Englewood homes had been purchased with conventional mortgages, “instead of 25 percent ownership, we’d probably have 80 percent ownership,” Lewis Johnson said during a Chicago Bungalow Association webinar.

However, 9 out of 10 Black families who bought homes during the 1950s and ‘60s resorted to contract sales, according to the We Will draft plan. They had to use this predatory lending practice because financial institutions “redlined” their neighborhoods: they deemed them too risky for conventional loans.

Vacant lots, redlining and contract sales, dilapidated and demolished public housing, housing covenants, federal highway construction that contributed to the postwar exodus of white families and businesses to the suburbs, and even the 2013 closures of nearly 50 schools — We Will Chicago acknowledges all of them as “historic harms.” It is the first planning process to do so. The intention is “to contribute to a larger process of healing and reconciliation among Chicagoans and serve as an outline of some areas the City of Chicago commits to improving.”

Harms to Chicagoans were both deliberate, and unintentional, due to market forces, according to the plan. Holmes recalled how Roseland used to have a Jewel, a Sears, and two movie theaters. “You didn’t have to go to 63rd Street to shop.”

Roseland’s vacancies stemmed from the loss of jobs after nearby steel mills closed, Jirasek responded. Segregation was also a factor.

“The point of this document is culture change,” she said. “Things like INVEST South/West are happening under Mayor [Lori] Lightfoot, but no matter who wins in the next election, it’s built into the system’s DNA.” As the DPD involved people in We Will Chicago drafting, community engagement became more and more valued, to the point where it was elevated to the 8th pillar of the plan.

“Equity” is one of We Will’s two principles, along with “Resiliency:” the ability to bounce back from obstacles, such as the pandemic.

The push for transparency began during COVID, when people became accustomed to data availability. City employees saw they could create “an equity dashboard” on the progression of all 8 Pillars over the 10-year life of the plan.

In seeking transparency, the plan has set a standard for public decision-making, she said. Community inclusion in development planning will mean more equitability. The plan will inform land use and zoning decisions, and it will align all city departments – DPD, DOH, Chicago Department of Transportation, and more – across annual budgets, major projects, and policies.

Elements of the plan are interconnected and cannot be pulled apart, Jirasek said.

The Economic Development pillar, for example, seeks “a more prosperous and equitable economy for all Chicago residents and workers.” One goal is building generational wealth and supporting business growth throughout the city, especially in businesses owned by Blacks and Latinos. Eliminating racial income gaps could boost the regional economy by $136 billion annually.

As it stands, however, Chicago added 170,000 jobs between 2011 and 2019, but minorities have not shared the gains. Black unemployment is four times higher than whites’ and Latino joblessness is twice as high, according to 2020 Census data.

Hence, the Economic Development pillar calls for “equitable and inclusive workforce development to build resilient economic clusters.” Simultaneously, among the five goals in the Lifelong Learning pillar is the creation of new educational pathways into the workforce for Blacks, Latinos and people negatively impacted by the criminal-legal system.

The Housing & Neighborhoods Pillar, meanwhile, is focused on every Chicago neighborhood being safe, with affordable housing and connections to what residents need to thrive. Gentrification is a concern, especially in historically marginalized areas. Besides maintaining affordable housing across all 77 Chicago community areas, this pillar would expand housing assistance for marginalized residents, especially those with very low income and/or disabilities.

This pillar also acknowledges that Chicago’s population has fallen by nearly one million people since 1950, and that 10,000 vacant lots in mostly Black communities undermine the necessary density to attract amenities. Its objectives are therefore to strengthen neighborhood developers (especially Black, Latino, Native American, Asian and immigrant), to prioritize the development of vacant buildings and to focus future growth around commercial corridors and transit hubs.

The Economic Development pillar could bring businesses to the Black community, but improvements to Transportation & Infrastructure would be necessary to carry Black and Latino shoppers there, Vendor A. Allen said. “In white neighborhoods, the buses come every 15 to 20 minutes, but you will be waiting all day for a bus on the South and West Sides. And Owl Service hours are ridiculous.”

Vendor John Hagan Jr., who lives with another vendor in Calumet City near the Indiana border, said he disagreed with policies that delayed extending the CTA Red Line to 130th Street until after construction of the Red-Purple bypass north of the CTA Red/Brown/Purple Line station at Belmont. Opened last year, the overhead bypass eliminated a bottleneck: a section of four flat tracks where Brown Line trains crossed over rails used by northbound and southbound Red and Purple Line trains.

However, Hagan said, “People in the south suburbs want to get to work faster and so do people working overnights.”

Hagan’s trip from the StreetWise offices at 2009 S. State St. to his Calumet City home can take two hours. He usually rides the CTA Red Line to 95th Street, then the Pace 353 bus to Sibley/Chicago. Coming into the city, he might take the CTA No. 30 South Chicago bus, get off at Ewing and 105th Street, and then connect to the CTA No. 26 South Shore Chicago. He might also spend an hour walking from home to pick up the South Shore Railroad in Hegewisch.

The Transportation & Infrastructure pillar seeks to create networks equally distributed throughout the city that support greater car-free connectivity: by public transit, walking, biking and other methods. It also seeks to balance the economic benefits of better logistics with the environmental harms from automotive exhaust.

Transportation & Infrastructure relate to Economic Development in two ways: households located near the city’s borders generally spend more of their incomes proportionally on transportation, and entry-level jobs with the shortest commutes are primarily located downtown.

Vendor V.W. could see other correlations among the 8 Pillars. V.W. sells StreetWise in Edgewater, near the site of a bank robbery two years ago. Although V.W. said she ranked Economic Development No. 1 in her talk with Jirasek, she discussed Public Safety afterward.

“You might want to enjoy arts late in the evening, but it would be more dangerous,” she said.

Mayor Lightfoot initiated We Will pre-planning in August 2020 with DPD, which convened other City departments and public agencies. The Metropolitan Planning Council, a non-profit civic group that provides planning assistance to communities and governments, then hosted a series of virtual workshops (because of COVID) focused on the work of other cities.

Public outreach began in April 2021.

To foster community participation, individuals and groups were encouraged to apply for pillar research teams. Roughly 500 applications were received for these stipend positions; 115 individuals and 25 organizations diverse in age, race, geography, education and more, were selected. In addition to these research teams, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) and more than two dozen artists conducted 80 virtual and in-person events with more than 1,400 people across the city.

In June, Civic Engagement was added as the 8th Pillar and DPD took We Will on the road. City workers clad in We Will T-shirts manned booths at festivals ranging from Taste of Polonia to the 79th Street Renaissance Festival, Pilsen Fest, Maxwell Street and Sundays on State. They connected with StreetWise at the latter, where we had a booth for GiveAShi*t.

DPD was eager to talk to StreetWise vendors, Jirasek said, because it was an opportunity to fill in the structure provided by the leaders. The plan is open for public response until November 1, after which DPD will refine it and introduce it to the Chicago Plan Commission early in 2023.