Lightfoot Must End 'Mayoral Prerogative' To Neglect Neighborhoods

Mayor Lori Lightfoot put Chicago aldermen on notice: Ready or not, reform is coming — and it starts with you.

It was fun to watch as Chicago’s first African-American woman mayor tell aldermen she intends to cripple the culture of backroom deals that breed corruption and have landed dozens of aldermen in jail.

“Stopping it isn’t just in the city’s interest, it’s in the City Council’s interest,” Lightfoot said, smirking before turning around to look all 50 aldermen in the face as the crowd offered a standing ovation.

City Hall whisperers say some aldermen consider those fighting words.

It wasn’t a secret that a collection of conspiring aldermen hoped to limit Lightfoot’s City Council influence before her speech.

So, rather than wait to be attacked, Lightfoot leveraged her landslide victory to dare aldermen to challenge her reform agenda — and doubled down by declaring the practice of “aldermanic privilege” dead.

Pundits praised Lightfoot’s speech and her first act as mayor — telling city hall bureaucrats that they will no longer take orders from aldermen who as a matter of tradition have held veto power over city licenses, permits and zoning changes in the wards they represent.

While symbolic and inspiring, calling out the corrupt culture that has helped land aldermen in jail it doesn’t attack City Hall’s greatest sin — neglecting neighborhoods.

Even the most corrupt ward boss can't be blamed for that.

Chicago mayors have hurt our city far more than any alderman who pocketed envelopes of cash for city favors by failing to prioritize rebuilding poor, minority neighborhoods while downtown boomed.

Remember that mayoral proclamation ordering up a comprehensive plan to rebuild neighborhoods that have suffered after the West Side riots, the death of Southeast Side steel mills, mortgage redlining that spawned white flight, that precursor to predatory lending and the collapse of the housing market that destroyed forsaken parts of Chicago.

Yeah, me neither.

A new Urban Institute Studyshows mostly white neighborhoods in Chicago get nearly three times as much as public and private investment per household as mostly black neighborhoods. Rich parts of town also receive 2.6 times the investment of poor neighborhoods.

If you're wondering if institutional racism has anything to do with that, the Urban Institute study provides these statistics: Majority minority neighborhoods account for 95 percent of census tracts home to concentrated poverty and unemployment. Only seven percent of mostly white census tracts in Chicago have poverty rates above 20 percent, compared to 52-percent and 84-percent of mostly Latino and mostly black census tracts respectively.

In her inauguration address, Lightfoot subtly acknowledged the short comings of her predecessors and promised to do better.

“We need fairness …which means paying as much attention to our neighborhood businesses as we do to the businesses downtown,” she said. “Our neighborhoods have been neglected for too long. They cannot be anymore.”

South Side small business owners like Jimmy Vilma of Pride Cleaners appreciate the sentiment, Ms. Mayor. But you'll have to forgive Vilma for being skeptical. He knew City Hall ignored his part of town long before the Urban Institute published it's study and, well, he's heard it all before.

"Politicians say they have vision, but it's spin words,” Vilma told me during the mayoral campaign.

In 2015, Emanuel made a campaign promised Chatham business leaders that good things were coming to their blighted corner of the South Side.

Hope swelled in Chatham until it became obvious that promise was broken. The neighborhood business district remains pocked with empty storefronts. Target closed-up shop at 87th and Cottage Grove, making bad times worse.

Now as far as we know, Emanuel never shook down a business owner for cash to clear in the exchange for a favor — the kind of thing that has landed aldermen in jail that Lightfoot’s aldermanic privilege ban aims to prevent.

But I think there’s something almost criminal about the vast inequity in how Emanuel worked to build his version of a “new Chicago.”

Emanuel's mayoral prerogative, so to speak, was to promote downtown tourism, court corporate headquarters, offer tax jumpstart real estate developments in rich parts of town and while ignoring dying neighborhood business districts.

You could argue Emanuel’s most touted South Side accomplishment was bullying Whole Foods into opening a store in Englewood. The former mayor idea of South Side investment was to pony up $5 million taxpayer cash to build the South Loop arena where Lightfoot was sworn in to replace him. And remember that Emanuel wanted to put taxpayers on the hook for a $1.2 billion loan to build George Lucas a vanity museum on the lakefront despite Chicago’s dire financial troubles.

Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives President David Doig, the developer responsible for bringing retail and manufacturing to Pullman will tell you that Emanuel administration incentives for investing in the South Side were "spread like peanut butter — too thin to make a difference."

The last time I talked to Lightfoot, she told me that her administration aims to change all that.

“Rahm was a transactional mayor. I will be transformative mayor,” Lightfoot said before she took office.

During our chat she promised that her administration would create a “Marshall Plan” for rebuilding forgotten parts of town. “It’s the only way,” she said.

“Big-shot land developers” will quickly get the message that doing business in Chicago will mean investing in the South Side and West Side, she said.

“We’re working on it, hoping to have a big announcement in the summer to tell people, “We’re coming for you,” Lightfoot said.

Chicagoans living in neighborhoods destroyed by mayoral prerogative will hold you to that Ms. Mayor.

Ironically enough, there's a dozen neighborhood landscapes by former architecture critic and South Side booster, Ley Bey, hanging in her new City Hall office to remind her, including a picture of Pride Cleaners. Hopefully those photos will remind Lightfoot — who lives in gentrifying Logan Square — that forgotten corners of Chicago are pocked with little gems might not last without intentional City Hall intervention.

Chicago’s new mayor would be better served by spending some quality time on “The Nine” — the stretch of 79th Street that City Hall left behind — to experience what life’s like beyond the edges of that photograph, maybe drop off a couple of fancy suits to be cleaned and pressed at Pride Cleaners, giving her an opportunity to soak in what it’s like live there, if only for a couple of unofficial visits.

If Lightfoot runs into Vilma, my bet is he’ll tell the mayor what said to me:

“Don't tell me what I want to hear. Words are cheap. Show me what I want to see. … a blue print for the South Side.”

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