City Hall Invest South/West Plan Sounds Good, Seeing Is Believing

PULLMAN — On Friday night, I headed over to the Pullman Community Center to catch City Hall’s roll-out party for the Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s plan to revive parts of Roseland and Pullman, and nine other downtrodden South and West Side neighborhoods.

After last week’s friction between Lightfoot and Ald. Anthony Beale (9th) over a proposal to build an Amazon distribution center in Pullman, I wondered if the feuding politicians might realize that when it comes to redeveloping my neighborhood they’re on the same side.

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State Rep. Nick Smith (34th) did, too. He stopped me on my way in to ask if this might be the night Lightfoot and Beale share “kumbaya moment” on stage to the tune of Bob Marley’s “One Love.”

We had a good laugh. A Lightfoot-Beal peace circle would have been a shocker, but it didn’t happen. They did say nice things about each other. Publicly.

Something did happen that was quite a surprise. Lightfoot’s new planning commissioner Maurice Cox said something that everybody knows but City Hall bureaucrats don’t typically talk about in public.

Cox stood in front of a projection two economic heat maps — one from 1970 and the other 2017 — that illustrated that wealth, almost exclusively, has expanded on the mostly white North Side, and that the middle class has been replaced by extreme poverty in mostly minority neighborhoods to the South and West.

“I contend that that map was intentional,” Cox said. “That is a product of public policy.”

My neighbors cheered. For far too long, people living in poor neighborhoods have suffered the effects of City Hall neglect, broken promises and, worst of all, racism.

“We just have to own that,” Cox said. “If public policy created that map I can assure you that we can make a better map. And that’s what we’re here to do today.”

Mayor Lightfoot’s Invest South/ West initiative aims to flood 10 neighborhoods that already have a community redevelopment plan with $250 million to improve infrastructure and nurture new business development. City Hall has pledged another $500 million in public infrastructure investments over the next three years.

Lightfoot says she’s going to end City Hall’s long-standing practice of investing “here and not there,” which is a nice way of saying putting up public money in rich, white parts of town and not in poor minority neighborhoods.

Friday’s gathering in Pullman gave neighbors a chance to let City Hall know how they’d like to see that money spent. Folks scribbled their ideas for infrastructure improvements on Post-it notes — a pedestrian bridge over the Bishop Ford, sit down restaurants, coffee shops and co-working spaces and, simply, more jobs.

Part of the planning department’s listening tour included urging neighbors to toss golden coins in plastic cups signifying their preference for how City Hall should make blighted blocks more inviting with public amenities you only see on the North Side — street furniture, public art and fancy landscaping, among other things.

Folks stood in line to give Cox and Lightfoot’s Deputy Mayor Samir Mayekar an earful about what their forgotten neighborhoods need. My neighbors had a lot to say. And, they actually listened.

I watched as Roseland native Kelli Davis filled a half-dozen neon Post-it notes with her thoughts about what neighborhood transformation should look like and stuck them to a poster board earmarked for neighbors’ “Big Ideas.”

Ideas, though, are cheap. What neighborhoods like Pullman and Roseland need is a consistent effort to boost private investment and employment, improve public safety that give people who live in abandoned neighborhoods reasons to stay. Chicago’s losing population in African American parts of town that City Hall has systematically ignored. Everybody who lives down here knows it’ll take more than a friendly night of confessed sins, campaign-style promises and a free tote bag (and some tasty barbecue) to do that.

I asked Davis the question that I keep wondering, “As much as we want to believe Lightfoot, haven’t we heard all this before?”

“Well, I like what I’m hearing. I just hope that it pans out and we see some of this actually comes to fruition while [Lightfoot] is office. We’ve had enough empty promises,” she said.

“The community needs to hold her office and the planning office accountable. This could appear like smoke and mirrors until you actually see some of what they’re promising come to life. … I like that they’re coming to the community looking for ideas and aspiring to do much. But they need to be realistic about what we can expect. I think that’s the one thing that was missing tonight.”

Nobody from City Hall was in earshot. So, Mr. Cox, if you’re reading.

When it comes to City Hall promises, folks down here ... well, we'll believe it when we see it.

Until then, we'll be watching and waiting, impatiently.

And, thanks for the tote bag.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting and Emmy-nominated producer, was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN. He was a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots."

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