Altgeld Gardens Residents Got Sold Out By Political Ward Remap Deal

CHICAGO — The city's newly confirmed ward map put Altgeld Gardens —the nearly all-Black, poverty-stricken, food and transportation desert on the far South Side — in a majority Latino ward represented by a white woman.

Such is the strange state of race politics in Chicago.

Much has been written about the bitter, race-based process of ward redistricting that culminated with a backroom deal that all but seven aldermen could live with.

Aftershocks of the feud rumbled on the City Council floor this week.

Ald. Jason Ervin, leader of the Black Caucus, called Altgeld Gardens' alderman Anthony Beale, who is Black, a sellout for not siding with Black aldermen on the remap.

Beale shot back with his own insults. When hard feelings spill into public meetings, it makes for hilarious City Council theater subplots that most people couldn't care less about.

Generally, you can count me among them.

But this war of words got interesting when Beale shouted about a detail in the city's new ward map that sounded much worse than the new gerrymandered 36th Ward, which looks like a cat doing yoga, a drain snake or a crooked cigar, depending on whom you ask.

Beale said people he's represented for more than 20 years in Altgeld Gardens will now have to take a 90-minute trip to get to their service office of their new alderwoman, Susan Sadlowski-Garza, in the mostly Latino and white 10th Ward.

Maybe news stories about the remap fight didn't mention Altgeld Gardens' new City Council representation for the same reason folks who live there have been forsaken by city government for generations.

Politicians don't care much about the opinion of the thousands of poor people who live in one of the most isolated corners of Chicago, where only 168 people cast ballots in the last city election.

So, I headed over to the coolest public library in Chicago to see how folks who live and work in Altgeld Gardens felt about having a white alderwoman with an East Side neighborhood service office.

Altgeld Gardens library security guard William Roberison grimaced in disbelief.

"Get away from here, man," he said, letting out a laugh.

I assured him that I was not kidding. The Black Caucus that championed a new ward map of 16 Black-majority wards stripped the public housing community — where former President Barack Obama got his start in political organizing — of its Black alderman.

"I'm just shocked," Roberison said. "You said about an hour-and-a-half on the bus? That's trouble."

Actually, the CTA ride is only about an hour at certain times of the day, if all your transfers align.

Still, Altgeld Gardens resident Phyllis Slaughter was flabbergasted.

"WHAT?! Why did they do us like that?" she said. "First off, people don't have cars out here. What if we really need something, how are we going to get there? Ald. Beale is right there. We can take a bus to him. We're not going to take no bus all the way to her. It's bad enough that we don't have no good public transportation out here. We don't have food stores, no restaurants. Nothing out here."

Slaughter said she's traveled to Beale's office in nearby Roseland to get the alderman's help to handle an issue with the Chicago Housing authority, and to borrow bean bag games for neighborhood kids to play on Memorial Day.

"There were a lot of things they offer [at the Roseland office]. You can't do that no more," she said. Politicians "don't care. Look how we got a library, and we don't have a store."

Lifelong Altgeld Gardens resident Lamar Brooks said he doesn't mind having a new alderman, but he'd rather keep trying to vote Beale out than have map-drawing politicians do it for him.

"I've always been against Beale anyway. He never did nothing," Brooks said. "But this [ward map] is bad. It's all bad for us. Politicians shouldn't be in charge of [ward redistricting] anymore. The residents need to have a say."

But they don't. That's the Chicago Way.

The one group fighting for resident input, Change Illinois, created a "People's Map" in an effort to reform the remap process with an eye toward neighborhood continuity rather than redistricting aimed at giving incumbents the benefits of having racial and ethnic demographic advantages on election day.

It got trumped by a City Council "compromise."

"I feel sorry for the people of Altgeld," Change Illinois' Action Board chairman Andy Shaw said. "They got hit with daily double in a remap that screwed Ald. Beale and the residents. ... They are one of 20 tragedies for neighborhoods and residents who have been disenfranchised and ignored, their neighborhoods marginalized and fragmented, so that 43 aldermen could have the wards most likely to re-elect them ... and the best chance of getting developers to fund their campaigns and the unions. That's the game."

As disheartening as that might be, folks who live and work in Altgeld Gardens have plenty of experience with political neglect.

Ebony Hillard shrugged when I asked her about Altgeld Gardens' new representation on the City Council as she waited for the No. 34 bus after a long day cleaning houses.

"Politicians, they all the same," she said. "They don't listen."

It's hard to argue with that when you think about how poor Black people living in Altgeld Gardens have been clamoring for city officials to deliver them a local grocery store, and they got a white alderwoman instead.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docuseries on CNN and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary "16 Shots.

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