Dibs Snitches Clear Out Special Places For Themselves In Chicago

CHICAGO — Our city is divided on the topic of "dibs" — the unlawful, yet accepted, custom of using junk to stake a claim to a cleared street parking space after a snowfall.

After every fresh snow, even a light dusting, some people — you know who you are — mark parking spaces with a couple busted chairs to prevent visitors and neighbors alike from taking their spot.

During a dibs outbreak, certain people — let's call 'em dibs snitches — call 311 to rat out their law-breaking neighbors who pock snowplowed residential streets with tires, tables, crates, boxes, buckets, broken toys and scrap lumber, among other things.

Now, we know where they live, sort of.

City officials protect the identity and exact address of anti-dibs complainers, and for good reason. It is well known that in Chicago "snitches get stitches," or worse.

But a public records request for all dibs complaints from Jan. 1 to Feb. 1 does offer a glimpse of which wards are home to the most anti-dibs snitches, and where pro-dibs folks call home.

In all, 311 operators fielded more than 1,500 calls from dibs snitches during that period.

As things turn out, America's most racially segregated city also appears to be divided geographically when it comes to neighborhoods that tolerate, or even support, the illegal dibs culture.

Most people who live closest to the lake, at least in January this year, didn't get worked up enough to call 311 about parking-spot-saving two-by-fours and vacuum cleaners cluttering up their block.

Residents of lakefront wards, from the Evanston border to the Calumet River, aren't a bunch of dibs-hating whiners.

Not a single resident of the 42nd Ward (downtown) and 46th Ward — which includes Uptown, Buena Park and a corner of Wrigleyville — called 311 to inform the government of illegal dibs activity during the first month and a day of 2022, according to public records.

And city 311 operators only fielded three dibs complaints in the 4th, 5th and 7th Wards along the South Side lakefront from Kenwood to South Shore.

Reports of anti-dibs sentiments increased in the 10th Ward, our city's sprawling southeast corner along the lake that includes the Hegewisch and South Chicago neighborhoods.

During the first 32 days of the year, 311 call-takers reported 48 dibs-related complaints, including a plea from a parent who called the street junk blocking parking spots on Avenue C a "safety hazard."

Down in my neighborhood, Pullmanites claimed dibs on almost every block. Not one of my neighbors called 311 to complain. In January, the 9th Ward produced just three dibs complaints confined to two blocks.

In the 19th Ward, home to one of the highest concentrations of city workers and public school teachers, only two people called to complain about dibs. Both the complaints pointed to junk left in the street in the Beverly neighborhood, west of Western Avenue, according to public records.

It's difficult to ignore the irony that dibs snitches were most prevalent in the 14th Ward, home to Chicago's longest serving Ald. Edward Burke, who knows a thing or two about getting ratted out. Burke faces federal corruption charges due in part to a former ward boss turned wire-wearing federal mole, Danny Solis. In January, city 311 records show 146 people snitched on illegal dibs-claimers in of Burke's 14th Ward.

In the neighboring 12th Ward, a mostly Latino enclave centered in the McKinley Park and Little Village neighborhoods, there were 87 dibs complaints.

Ald. Ray Lopez made headlines last month when he directed Streets and Sanitation crews to collect everything from toilets to mattresses and vacuum cleaners being used for dibs purposes in the 15th Ward, which was home to 68 dibs-related 311 complaints, records show.

By Jan. 31, just ahead of another snowstorm, Lopez had had enough. He issued a Twitter warning: "Now is your chance to take back your lawn furniture, baby strollers & buckets before I consign them to their final resting place!"

The beating heart of the anti-dibs culture in Chicago can be found in a cluster of Northwest Side neighborhoods that stretch from gentrifying Logan Square west to Montclare and from Portage Park south to West Humboldt Park in the 30th, 31st, 35th, 36th and 37th Wards.

That part of town racked up 398 dibs complaints from the first of the year to Feb. 1.

Soon, the fate of street parking space claims will no longer depend on whether dibs snitches report lawbreakers to 311.

City Hall has declared Friday as the end of dibs season.

That's when city crews will start relocating the junk you left in the street to landfills.

After the next snow, the winter cycle of illicit street parking corruption will continue.

Some folks will find new junk to put in the street. Dibs snitches will call 311 to complain.

It's the Chicago Way.

If you're tired of being ratted out by the anti-dibs crowd in your 'hood, move closer to the lake.

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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