Chicago on the Make

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Chicago on the Make Page 35

by Andrew J. Diamond


  A young Barack Obama had gone to City Hall that frigid December night to join thousands of other dazed African Americans who felt that their presence might somehow help to avert the ending to the story that was beginning to seem destined. He had watched the crowd wave dollars bills at Sawyer and shout “Sellout” and “Uncle Tom,” and he had left after midnight, several hours before the final vote, with a sinking feeling that “the fleshy men in double-breasted suits,” as he referred to them, would seize the day. Walking across the Daley plaza to his car, he gazed with a sense of bitter irony upon a handmade sign that read “HIS SPIRIT LIVES ON.”79

  Obama had been working on the far South Side of Chicago since 1985 as a community organizer for the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC), a grassroots Alinskyite organization that was attempting to bring together churches, labor unions, and other community organizations to give working-class blacks, whites, and Latinos greater leverage in solving the problems of high unemployment, poor housing conditions, inadequate schools, and violent crime. In the Alinskyite way, Obama’s job was to interview folks, listen to their complaints, and figure out ways to use the data he collected to formulate strategies of mobilization. He conducted much of this work in the Altgeld Gardens housing project, a horribly maintained set of two-story brick buildings located next to the chemical waters of the Calumet River and just across the street from a sewage treatment plant that blanketed the area with putrid odors when the wind was blowing in the wrong direction. The residents of Altgeld were casualties of the sharp contraction of the city’s steel and manufacturing sectors in the 1970s and 1980s, a situation that had largely unfolded outside the purview of city politics. No mayoral candidate had ever promised to save production jobs; the forces that had led to the collapse of steel and manufacturing in Chicago were located in Washington and in the corporate command centers of global cities. But Chicago could play a role in lessening the blow of plant closings by providing better services and better schools and promoting development and investment that would lead to the creation of the kinds of jobs that former production workers could fill. In his work for the CRCC, Obama was trying to make this happen, and by the end of his nearly three years as a community organizer he could claim some modest victories.

  And yet by the time that Harold Washington died, Obama had submitted his application to Harvard Law School and was eagerly awaiting the admissions decision. Indeed, his experience as a community organizer told him what he probably already suspected, which was that he would be more useful to the people of Altgeld Gardens from a high position within the system. Much has been made about the political education Obama took from his first stay in Chicago in the mid-1980s and of the influence of the Harold Washington era on his ambitions. To be sure, Obama was inspired by Washington’s ability to unite blacks, Latinos, and whites in a city where this had seemed impossible just years before, and he admired the fact that the mayor had accomplished this while gaining the support of big business, stabilizing the city’s financial situation, and restoring its Moody’s bond rating. However, what might have been most important to Obama, even if he was not entirely conscious of it at the time, was his perspective on all that did not happen with a dedicated reformer like Washington in power. He saw at the grassroots level that Washington’s ascendency had little impact on mending the fractures between blacks, Latinos, and whites in low-income neighborhoods, and that even with a mayor committed to spreading resources throughout the city, very little seemed to be changing in the material conditions of life for the people he had gotten to know in the working-class neighborhoods of the Pullman and Roseland areas.80

  A cruel twist of fate has left us with only speculation about what might have been had Washington’s heart not given out in 1987. Washington was one among a new generation of black politicians elected mayor in the 1970s and 1980s, but as scholars like Adolph Reed Jr. have argued, most of them arrived to find that the prize they had struggled so hard to possess had been emptied of value.81 Their hands were tied by budget shortfalls, the drying up of federal funds, and a neoliberal order that required them to cater ceaselessly to the demands of developers and business elites to maintain the flow of tax revenue. Even if he would continue to hold on to the dream of one day sitting in the mayor’s office as he moved to Cambridge to begin his studies at Harvard in the fall of 1988, Obama’s years in Harold Washington’s Chicago had certainly dampened his idealism about what could be accomplished on the municipal level. He left Chicago with a new understanding of the extent to which the “the fleshy men in double-breasted suits” ran things—a revelation that probably made him start thinking seriously about ways of taking his mission to another level. And yet, upon reading Obama’s rather terse account of Harold Washington’s impact on Chicago politics in Dreams from my Father, it is hard not to feel that young Obama had missed something essential.82 Somewhat curiously he made little mention of one of the key principles at the core of Washington’s reform “revolution”: a commitment to community participation in formulating and implementing public policy. So devoted was Washington to this goal that he had even opened up the city budget-making process to public scrutiny and input—a move that reveals just how radically Washington’s approach to governance had departed from the machine tradition.

  SEVEN

  A City of Two Tales

  HEAT, HIGH SCHOOLS, AND INEQUALITY

  On Thursday, July 13, 1995, the temperature in Chicago rose to a stifling 106 degrees, but it was actually much hotter than that. Meteorologists reported that the more critical heat index, which measures the temperature a person actually feels, could reach as high as 120 degrees. Chicago’s numerous brick apartment buildings transformed into ovens, roads buckled and cracked, city workers sprayed bridges to keep them from locking up, power outages left some fifty thousand residents without electricity for days, and a number of neighborhoods lost water pressure as a result of the many fire hydrants being opened by folks desperate for relief from the heat. In the hottest hours of the day, Chicagoans crowded into air-conditioned movie theaters and department stores or headed to the lakefront to wade into the cool water. But after sundown those without air conditioners or without the power to run them faced sleepless nights in sweltering apartments. On Friday, July 14, the heat index surpassed 100 degrees for the third consecutive day, and, since the human body can withstand such temperatures for only about 48 hours, thousands of city residents began to require medical attention, and more than one hundred died of heat-related causes.

  With reports of rising death tolls and complaints of power and water problems multiplying, the mayor faced reporters about the situation for the first time that afternoon. Much like his father, Richard M. Daley was famous for bungling phrases or for seeming obtuse and insensitive. And since his election in 1989, he had almost always seemed annoyed when members of the media dared to question him.1 “It’s very hot, but let’s not blow it out of proportion,” he blurted. “Yes, we go to extremes in Chicago, and that’s why people like Chicago—we go to extremes.”2 But by the end of the weekend, as the heat wave continued and stories of strained emergency services and a city morgue overwhelmed by dead bodies circulated throughout the local media, the mayor began to regret having taken such a dismissive tone and went into political damage-control mode. It was a blizzard, after all, that had sunk Mayor Bilandic not so long ago. A press conference was set up on Monday, and this time the mayor appeared alongside his health commissioner, Sheila Lyne; his human services commissioner, David Alvarez; his fire commissioner, Raymond Orozco; and his police superintendent, Matt Rodriguez. Despite the fact that Chicago newspapers had been warning of the grave dangers posed by the heat wave as early as July 12, the mayor argued that the city had been initially unaware of the gravity of the situation, but had then acted assertively and effectively. Then, in an effort to deflect blame, he railed at power company Commonwealth Edison for its inept response and threatened an investigation. Perhaps the most telling moment of the press conference c
ame when Fire Commissioner Orozco stepped in front of the microphone and proceeded to redirect blame for heat-related fatalities onto the victims themselves. “We’re talking about people who die because they neglect themselves,” he claimed. “We did everything possible,” he added, “but some people didn’t even want to open their doors to us.”3 When temperatures finally dropped to more tolerable levels, an estimated 739 Chicagoans had died as a result of the heat wave—more than twice the number that perished in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.4

  Like the flood of 2005 that destroyed much of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, the 1995 Chicago heat wave has been remembered as a “natural disaster,” an idea that obscures the policies and social values that left certain residents—mostly the poor and the elderly—overexposed to the deadly possibilities of the elements. Just as thousands of lives in New Orleans would likely have been spared had the federal government invested more money in the city’s levee system and had the local government made serious efforts to evacuate its less mobile residents, hundreds of those who perished in the Chicago heat would have survived had the city responded more effectively to those in need, and, perhaps even more importantly, had years of social neglect not left residents of the black West and South Sides in such precarious circumstances. In his brilliant “social autopsy” of the Chicago heat wave, sociologist Eric Klinenberg found that the much higher incidence of heat-related deaths in black ghetto areas was caused by a “dangerous ecology of abandoned buildings, open spaces, commercial depletion, violent crime, degraded infrastructure, low population density, and family dispersion,” which tended to undermine community life and to isolate elderly black residents.5 In neighborhoods like North Lawndale, for example, where in 1995 there was about one violent crime for every ten residents, many old people remained in their overheated homes out of fear of being victimized on the streets. And such fears were far from groundless. Even though the heat wave produced a moderate drop in crime around the city, the Chicago Police Department nonetheless recorded 134 narcotics arrests, 50 assaults, and 2 homicides in the North Lawndale district for just that week.6

  As the preceding chapters have shown, such conditions were shaped by a series of policies implemented between the 1950s and 1980s that tenaciously directed investment capital towards the Loop, reinforced the segregated spatial order of the city, and turned away from the critical challenge of stemming the flight of people and jobs out of Chicago’s expanding ghetto. The consequences of such policies were clear in the North Lawndale neighborhood, where the population dropped from over 120,000 in 1960 to just over 40,000 in 2000, a decline that was hastened in the late 1960s and 1970s in particular, when International Harvester closed its factory there (in 1969) and Sears moved its headquarters out of the neighborhood and into the Sears Tower downtown. Back in those years, as Daley Sr. courted Sears CEO Gordon Metcalf, little thought was paid to the people of North Lawndale that Sears was leaving behind. The same had been true more than a decade earlier, when Boss Daley had rejected a proposal to build the city’s University of Illinois campus in neighboring East Garfield Park, a move that would have helped to stabilize the economy and real estate market of a large swath of the West Side.

  But, if a long history of neglect had made neighborhoods like North Lawndale and Woodlawn the kinds of places that were relatively easy to die in for young and old alike, more immediate circumstances also played a large part in the tragic story of the heat wave—circumstances that revealed a great deal about the direction Chicago was heading under Mayor Richard M. Daley’s stewardship in the 1990s. While it is easy to point to the extraordinary conditions brought about by the heat wave—”Let’s be realistic, no one realized the deaths of that high occurrence would take place,” Daley had told the press—Klinenberg’s “social autopsy” reveals that it was, above all, the city’s approach to urban service provision that had made it unable to respond to the situation at hand. Under Daley, Chicago city government had become what Klinenberg refers to as an “entrepreneurial state” characterized by deregulation, fiscal austerity, unprecedented outsourcing of services to private organizations in the name of cost-cutting, the promotion of market solutions to public problems, and the guiding assumption that residents should be treated as individual consumers of city services.7

  In the broiling Chicago heat, such practices became life-or-death issues for those without the means or capacity to fend for themselves. Directives from City Hall to reorganize, streamline, and outsource key emergency and social services hindered the city’s capacity to locate and respond rapidly to those in need, and Daley’s celebrated Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) program, which had been launched the year before with federal funding via the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, failed miserably to deliver the kinds of services it was designed for. CAPS was intended to restructure police work so that beat officers became intimately familiar with the communities they patrolled, thus enabling them to take on roles beyond simple law enforcement—as neighborhood organizers, community leaders, and liaisons to social service providers and city agencies. As idealistic as this might have sounded, it was also a strategy for maintaining low-cost social service provision in a period when federal and state funding for welfare programs was drying up; since the end of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, Republicans had been crusading for cost-cutting welfare reform, a project that President Clinton effectively completed when he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.

  The orientation of police officers towards the field of social work was symptomatic of such national trends and symbolized how degraded the very meaning of social support had become after decades of antiwelfare rhetoric. It was also emblematic of a wave of urban revanchism—a demonization, criminalization, and disciplining of the poor—that geographer Neil Smith has compared to the Parisian elite’s treatment of the laboring classes in late nineteenth-century France.8 The police officers themselves resented being cast as “soft services” providers, and their reluctance to fill these roles made them ineffective in doing the kind of legwork it would have taken to save the lives of the many elderly residents who died in the Chicago heat.9 And yet, when the time came to analyze how the system had failed the poor and elderly who had perished, the knee-jerk response by officials like Fire Commissioner Orozco was to blame the victims. This was no slip of the tongue. Orozco’s reaction reflected racially infused, neoliberal notions that had been circulating within circles of urban governing elites for years—racially infused in their manner of linking up with time-worn ideas of dysfunctional ghetto culture; neoliberal in their tendency to privatize and individualize issues that in the past had been viewed as public or social in nature.10

  Scholars have described the ideas and policy approaches that had such lethal consequences during the Chicago heat wave as characteristic of a broad shift to “neoliberal” modes of urban governance in cities all over the world beginning in the 1980s.11 That is to say, Richard M. Daley’s style of governing was part of a larger historical transformation that was hastened on the international level by the programs of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Helmut Kohl to restructure the state so as to promote unfettered free trade, reduce both taxes and public costs, and privatize property, services, and social support systems. However, even though Daley most likely never even uttered the word neoliberalism, it would be mistaken to overlook the role he played in encouraging the hegemony of this rationality in municipal governing circles. Chicago became the poster child for such policies during Daley’s twenty-two years as the city’s “CEO,” the title those in his entourage fittingly bestowed on him, when he guided the transformation of Chicago from a cash-strapped Beirut on the Lake into a bustling global city and world-class tourist destination. By the end of his first full term in office, Daley had turned a $105 million budget deficit into a surplus by reducing the city payroll, reorganizing City Hall, and raising water and sewer rates. During Daley’s more than two decades in office
, Chicago added more private sector jobs than Los Angeles and Boston combined; its crime rates generally dropped; its high school standardized test scores and graduation rates climbed; its population grew; its real estate market flourished; and the city became number one in the nation in green roofs, square footage of convention space, and annual domestic business-travel visitors.

  The list of such successes goes on and on, and, when taken alongside the remarkable feat of being reelected five times without ever breaking a sweat, it is hard not to conclude that Richard M. Daley was, in many respects, the “greatest” mayor of his generation. Edward Rendell, a two-term mayor of Philadelphia in the 1990s before becoming governor of Pennsylvania in 2003, went so far as to call Daley “the best mayor in the history of the country.”12 One can thus be sure that Daley’s policies were the buzz among municipal officials at both the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the National League of Cities. Although there is perhaps no better sign of the truly national scope of Daley’s influence than the number of officials and advisors he appointed who went on to walk the carpeted halls of President Barack Obama’s White House. Arne Duncan, who was Daley’s CEO of Chicago Public Schools between 2001 and 2009 served as the United States secretary of education; Valerie Jarrett, Daley’s chief of staff, became one of President Obama’s closest advisors; David Axelrod, Daley’s chief campaign strategist and advisor for nearly twenty years, served as the White House senior advisor for Obama’s critical first three years in office; Rahm Emanuel, who headed Daley’s fund-raising efforts for his first successful mayoral run, was Obama’s White House chief of staff before becoming the mayor of Chicago in 2011; even First Lady Michelle Obama, worked for two years in Daley’s City Hall as an assistant to the mayor and as a planning official. Moreover, while never formally a member of Daley’s administration, William Daley, the mayor’s youngest brother, took over the role of White House chief of staff when Emanuel left to run his mayoral campaign. In view of all the links between Daley’s City Hall and Obama’s White House, it would be hard to argue that the political sensibilities that suffused the Chicago success story of the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century did not shape the Obama administration in significant ways.

 

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