April 1, 2021

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent non-profit newspaper by and for the South Side of Chicago. We provide high-quality, critical arts and public interest coverage, and equip and develop journalists, photographers, artists, and mediamakers of all backgrounds.

Volume 8, Issue 9 Editor-in-Chief Jacqueline Serrato Managing Editor Martha Bayne Senior Editors Christian Belanger Christopher Good Rachel Kim Emeline Posner Adam Przybyl Olivia Stovicek Sam Stecklow Politics Editor Jim Daley Education Editors Ashvini Kartik-Narayan Michelle Anderson Literature Editor Davon Clark Contributing Editors Mira Chauhan Joshua Falk Lucia Geng Matt Moore

Francisco Ramírez Pinedo Robin Vaughan Jocelyn Vega Tammy Xu

Staff Writers AV Benford Kiran Misra Jade Yan

Data Editor

Jasmine Mithani

Director of Fact Checking: Charmaine Runes Fact Checkers: Abigail Bazin, Susan Chun, Maria Maynez, Elizabeth Winkler, Lucy Ritzmann, Kate Gallagher, Matt Moore, Malvika Jolly, Ebony Ellis, Katie Bart Visuals Editor Haley Tweedell Deputy Visuals Editors Shane Tolentino Mell Montezuma Anna Mason Staff Photographers: milo bosh, Jason Schumer Staff Illustrators: Mell Montezuma, Shane Tolentino Layout Editors Haley Tweedell Davon Clark Web Editor Webmaster Managing Director

AV Benford Pat Sier Jason Schumer

The Weekly is produced by a mostly all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring. Over the summer we publish every other week.

Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773) 234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly.com

Cover Photo by Isiah ThoughtPoet Veney

IN CHICAGO

IN THIS ISSUE

Stop Asian Hate Hundreds of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans rallied in Logan Square on March 20 after the Atlanta mass shooting that claimed the lives of eight people, six of them women of Asian descent. Some speakers blamed the Trump administration for sowing distrust of China and by extension, Asian people, during the peak of the pandemic. On March 27, Chicago joined other cities across the country in solidarity with Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities, alongside public officials and supporters from out of state. Local activists called for better public safety in Chinatown and for Asians to be treated with dignity.

public meetings report

Not a good look for Loretto Last week, Mayor Lightfoot announced the City would no longer be distributing COVID-19 vaccines to Loretto Hospital after the West Side hospital gave vaccines to ineligible but well-connected people such as, according to Block Club Chicago, Cook County judges, residents at Trump Tower, and employees of a Gold Coast luxury watch store. The hospital’s COO/CFO, Anosh Ahmed, resigned after being named in connection with the unauthorized inoculations. Just three months ago, in December 2020, Lightfoot touted Loretto as the flagship of the City’s commitment to equitable vaccine distribution and it was the site of the first public COVID-19 vaccination. At that event, the mayor joined CDPH Commissioner Alison Arwady, Loretto CEO George Miller, who is currently on leave because of the scandal, and State Rep. Lashawn Ford, who has since resigned his seat on the hospital board. On March 29, following tense exchanges with reporters at previous press conferences as the story unfolded, Lightfoot expressed support for an audit of Loretto’s vaccination program. The 60644 ZIP Code, which includes Austin, had 7.6 percent of residents fully vaccinated as of press time; the citywide total is 13.4 percent. South Side Weekly’s neighborhood tracker shows 218 COVID-19 deaths in Austin to date. The City announced it will open two new mass vaccination sites on Monday at Chicago State University and at a Wrigley Field site.

As Chicago waits for its first ‘COP’ house in Roseland, some residents say community policing needs work. jade yan..........................................5

An immigrant city?

It’s no secret that new immigration from Latin America to Chicago is practically at zero, due in part to a shortage of jobs and a rising cost of living. A recent report by the Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC) demonstrates that the Mexican immigrant population in the greater Chicago metropolitan area has dropped dramatically in the last decade, by 45,000 people in the city alone, noting that “our standing as an immigrant friendly state is slipping.” MPC added: “By losing immigrants Illinois loses cultural vibrancy, talent, and even tax revenue, which has major implications for the state and the Chicago region.”

The Weekly’s FOIA lawsuits Last month, the Weekly filed two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits after FOIA requests related to police overtime controls and to last summer’s protests were denied by law enforcement. The first lawsuit was filed against the Chicago Police Department after it denied multiple requests for departmental emails, meeting notes, and overtime related data. The second was filed against the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) after it refused to release body camera recordings from Chicago police officers involved in an altercation at a protest on July 17, 2020, in which the Weekly identified CPD Officer Nicholas Jovanovich as the officer who struck GoodKids MadCity organizer Miracle Boyd in the mouth. Both lawsuits have July court dates.

A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level. olivia stovicek and jacqueline serrato, city bureau’s documenters & south side weekly............................................4 who is the

“community”

in community

policing?

gambling on the

78

“Some Chinatown community leaders are worried that safety concerns a casino could bring would prompt a greater police presence in the area surrounding the 78.” lynnea domienik...........................8 testimonies from the land

A photo essay thoughtpoet..............................11 the arkestra and the city

Sun Ra’s career took off in mid-century Chicago, and it provides a portal into the living reality and utopian horizons of our city in that time. benjamin ginzky..........................14 vaccine outreach in chicago’s latinx communities

“The United Center is not a friendly place for non-English speakers.” alma campos................................16 the reinvestment movement after redlining

“Contemporary urban America has still not entered, in any meaningful way, a post-redlining period.” dave reidy....................................19

ILLUSTRATION BY HOLLEY APPOLD

Public Meetings Report

A recap of select open meetings at the local, county, and state level for the April 1 issue

OLIVIA STOVICEK AND JACQUELINE SERRATO FOR CITY BUREAU’S DOCUMENTERS & SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY Mar. 15 A permanent remote work program will be an option for most Illinois State Board of Elections staff once telework related to COVID-19 ends. The board approved a detailed telework policy at its meeting, which enables eligible staff to opt in to schedule three days in the office and two at home. ISBE members also expressed opposition to an Illinois Senate bill prohibiting them from donating to political committees.

Mar. 16 A proposal to keep Chicago Community Land Trust homes affordable for longer was approved at the City Council Committee on Housing and Real Estate meeting, with only one no vote after public commenters spoke overwhelmingly in favor, and later passed at City Council. Prior to the change, the agreements that ensure CCLT homes are sold at affordable prices ended 30 years after the original purchase, regardless of how often a home changed hands. Now, that 30-year clock will start anew each time a home is sold before the mortgage term ends. The agreements also ensure that homeowners benefit and profit from ownership.

The annual Chicago Housing Authority “Moving to Work” report was approved at the CHA’s board meeting. The report tracks CHA compliance with its agreement with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), including details of its initiatives. Last year more than 200 units were added through development and vouchers, an official emphasized. The board also approved a contract to include a Near West Side building in a voucher program after its rehabilitation, which could result in eviction of tenants ineligible for CHA programs.

The selection of COVID-19 vaccination sites for suburban Cook County is evolving, officials reported at the Health and Hospitals Committee of the Cook County Board of Commissioners meeting. The County is moving away from large arenas and convention centers, which tend to be expensive and present scheduling conflicts. Instead, planners are considering commercial venues like big box stores, while prioritizing sites accessible by public transit and near COVID-19-vulnerable communities.

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Mar. 22 The City Council Finance Committee approved a proposed ordinance for a pilot program that would impose a surcharge on demolition permits in the 606 residential area and Pilsen, at $15,000 for a detached house, townhouse, or two-flat, and $5,000 per unit for multi-unit buildings. Council members Sposato, Lopez, and Cardenas raised concerns that this would effectively diminish the property equity residents have built if they chose to demolish or renovate. Ald. Sigcho-Lopez responded that this ordinance would regulate the "free for all" instigated by big developers, which contributes to gentrification and exacerbates displacement of working-class communities. After the committee voted 20 to 11 in favor of the proposed amendment, it passed the full City Council (also in a divided vote, 37 to 12) in its meeting two days later.

Mar. 23 At a City Council Committee on Zoning, Landmarks and Building Standards meeting, Chicago artists spoke against an ordinance proposed (and withdrawn) by Ald. Sophia King that would have shut down grassroots exhibition spaces like house museums and apartment galleries. The president and CEO of Landmarks Chicago, Bonnie McDonald, said the organization’s research showed that more than 30 organizations would be negatively impacted by the ordinance.

Mar. 24 A symbolic resolution against ethnic discrimination in India was rejected at this month’s City Council meeting by a 28-18 vote after the proposal received both significant support and significant pushback from South Asian residents.

To read more or to see a list of upcoming meetings visit documenters.org.

POLICE

Who Is the “Community” in Community Policing?

As Chicago waits for its first ‘COP’ house in Roseland, some residents say community policing needs work.

BY JADE YAN

W

hen Elaine Sharp, a Roseland community organizer who has lived there for forty-eight years, found out that a COP house—a community policing strategy that exists in a few other states—was coming to her neighborhood, she was angry and upset.

And she had a lot of questions.

“What is the COP house?” she asked. “What is the purpose? What is the objective? We don’t know nothing!”

Even though the plans for the house have been two years in the making, Sharp only found out about the COP house plans in February, through her alderman Anthony Beale’s newsletter. She feels that the community was not appropriately consulted on the decision by Beale, who is spearheading the plan.

“The alderman really should have consulted everybody,” Sharp said.

Cleopatra Draper, a Roseland activist who ran against Beale (as Cleopatra Watson) for 9th Ward alderman in 2019, feels similarly. She said she learned about the COP house plans through the Tribune, not through her alderman, and said that as a community organizer she knows that this was how many others in the Roseland community learned about the COP house too.

Community Oriented Policing houses, colloquially known as COP houses, are neighborhood homes renovated into bases for police. They were first piloted in Racine, WI more

than twenty years ago; there are now six houses there.

COP houses have the two-fold aim of reducing crime and gaining a community’s trust, largely by providing the police with more opportunities to interact with residents. The houses are often advertised to neighbors as resource centers offering after-school activities and educational programs. 9th Ward Alderman Anthony Beale, has framed his successful bid to bring a COP house to Roseland as a chance to “start building confidence and relationships back between the police and the citizens.”

The COP house will be located on 102nd Place. Beale has said that Chicago can “craft” its COP house to meet the city’s specific needs. But according to Draper, a COP house would not address Roseland’s most pressing needs. “I just look at it through the lens of prioritization,” said Draper, who works in a food pantry as one part of her organizing. Greater needs, she said, include addressing Roseland’s food desert, lack of affordable housing, and the need for mental health facilities.

“When you look in the eyes of people that don’t know where their meal is going to come from tomorrow, a COP house can’t be the priority. It just can’t,” said Draper.

Beale has described the COP house as a type of community wraparound center, with reading and tutoring rooms as well as arcades and computers that allow

communities to potentially interact with police in more positive ways. “This might sound strange, but I have been trying to do exactly what [Ald. Beale is] trying to do, but not from a police perspective,” said Antione Dobine, a resident of West Pullman who works as a community activist in Roseland.

A

ccording to outgoing Racine Police Chief Art Howell, COP houses allow officers to become “intimately familiar” with the neighborhood and more effectively prevent crime. Howell, who retired at the end of March after thirty-six years with the department (eight as chief ), pointed to a drop in Racine’s crime rates as an indicator of the house’s effectiveness, and added that offering resources helps to “bridge the gap.”

Local organizations in Racine, including the Racine Literacy Council, Cops n’ Kids, and several churches have partnered with COP houses for food pantry collection, to provide services for the communities where the houses are located, according to Racine police officer Chad Andersen, who works at a COP house in Racine’s Anthony Lane neighborhood. Andersen said the house also means that officers are “not tied to the radio,” and can be “proactive” with the community.

However, some residents of Anthony Lane, who declined to be identified

for this article due to concerns about retaliation, feel that the COP house falls short in terms of community engagement and outreach as well as the activities on offer. One resident who has lived in the neighborhood for three years sees the COP house as a “PR stunt.”

Another Racine resident said she has no inclination to go into a COP house, even though the houses have been advertised as spaces for the community.

“I am a law-abiding citizen, I have no criminal history,” she said. Despite her lack of a criminal record, she “still can’t figure out any reason why I would go into the COP house.”

Andersen responded to this by saying it is “rare” for people to come into the COP house he oversees, and that this is a “misconceptuali[zation]”—it is more about going out and talking to residents, he said. But the same resident, who can see the COP house from her own house, said that she has never interacted with a police officer in her neighborhood.

“There are some officers that I see on a regular basis that have never ever once said ‘hello’ or ‘hi’, never waved a hand, never gave a head nod,” she said. “I don’t think it’s a bad program, but I don’t think that it is all it’s cracked up to be or publicized to be.”

“A.B.,” another Racine resident, is a mother with children, and said that while she has seen other COP houses run activities, she hasn’t seen much with her APRIL 1, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

[COP] house needs to be customized to the needs of the neighborhood,” says the guide.

But Corey Prince, an organizer and Racine resident, says the COP house program as a whole does not revolve around the community. While the theory of COP houses is good, said Prince, “the application is not.” He listed officers and supervisors who have made themselves accessible to the community. But in his eyes, these individual officers do not represent the COP house program, which he believes ignores certain groups of people.

“You have to first listen to people, not talk,” said Prince. “Until the COP— the Community Oriented Policing— house can really be oriented with the community, it can never be effective.”

ILLUSTRATION BY EMMA PUNCH

neighborhood’s COP house and hopes for more activities, especially for children and teenagers. “I’m a parent, I look for those things. I would have seen or known about it by now.”

“It’s not a community-based house,” she said, calling it more of a small headquarters for police and saying that she barely knows any of the officers who work there.

Akosua Aning, who lives a block down from another Racine COP house on 6th Street, says she feels similarly. She has lived there for five years and says she has personally never seen anything going on in her area’s COP house.

Aning, who chairs the Demilitarization Committee for the social justice organization Voces de la Frontera, also questioned the need to “force a relationship between these communities and police,” adding that COP houses are placed in majority communities of color. “Why don’t we try a different approach? Let’s try a less lawenforcement based approach,” she said.

Instead of police, it could be community organizations reaching out to residents, she added.

Other activists such as Markasa Tucker, executive director of the African American Roundtable in Milwaukee, support this view.

“Why not just put the money or the opportunity into a community6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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based organization?” Tucker asked. She added that although the fact that there are multiple houses in Racine seems to highlight community support, there also aren’t many funding opportunities for community organizing in Racine that might allow the development of cohesive community opposition to the houses.

Officer Andersen acknowledged that “maybe we need to take a survey of how we can better communicate,” or host a roundtable. “I would honestly love that time to sit down with them and [ask] what can I do and what can we do moving forward,” he said. When told that residents may fear retaliation from the police if they expressed complaints, he expressed surprise and questioned what sort of retaliation they would feel.

In response, one of the sources said that he feared being targeted by the police.

The COP house officers “might harass me and pull me over,” he said. Like Andersen, he said “the best way for them to know what the community wants” is to have a meeting such as a town hall, but that the meeting needs to include “everyone.”

Collaboration with community partners and face-to-face engagement with neighbors are emphasized as key to the program’s success in the “COP House Playbook,” a comprehensive guide to establishing and running a COP house, published by Racine’s police department under the direction of Chief Howell. “A

I

n Chicago, Roseland’s Alderman Beale has similarly been accused of not hearing everyone out.

“I think his leadership is awful,” said Draper, the Roseland activist who ran against Beale, and who also founded the organization Roses in Roseland, which provides resources to community members. She outlined Beale’s lack of communication with his residents, adding that he has had “plenty of opportunity” to speak with constituents about the COP house plans. (Beale told the Weekly he had “never heard” of Roses in Roseland.)

Another Roseland activist and life-long resident Eric Wilkins, fifty, also said he thinks that Beale lacks a sufficient relationship with his constituents, particularly younger people.

In response, Beale said that he has had “numerous community meetings” about the COP house plans and that “the community is embracing it 100 percent.”

He added that the project has been in the works for two years and “is nothing new.”

“All my community leaders embraced it before I even started pursuing getting it done,” he said, and when asked which the community leaders he was referring to, named the president of Rosemoor Community Association, the board chairman of the Chesterfield Community Council, and the president of the Roseland Heights Community Association. He said that he sees his job

as being to work with “registered” and “legitimate” organizations, “not somebody who just formed something last week.”

“I’m sure you can always find somebody who says I don’t know something about anything,” he said, when told that community members don’t feel as though they have been consulted about the COP house. He listed email blasts, robocalls, and his newsletter as the main ways he communicates with his community during COVID, noting that he hasn’t had any town hall meetings for over a year due to the pandemic.

According to Draper, Beale’s methods of communication are not enough, in part because they assume that all constituents have internet access. “That’s not true engagement,” she said. “There’s a lot of people. They’re not brought into the fold.”

Beale’s COP house idea is on its way to being realized: the City Council approved a proposal for the house in January, marking a victory for the 9th ward alderman, who spent two years advocating for it.

Racine’s “COP House Playbook” warns against bringing political discord into the plan, and states that “the police chief must be fully on board and willing to champion the strategy.” But Chicago’s COP house proposal has been the subject of political conflict between Ald. Beale and Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Before the proposal was passed in City Council, Lightfoot had said she “cannot support” the proposal.

“Neither I nor Supt. [David] Brown believe that this COP House approach makes sense for the moment that we are in here in Chicago,” Lightfoot said. She expressed concerns that the COP house wouldn’t fit with the city’s existing community policing plans, and raised questions about the security of police officers and who or what would fund the houses. After the proposal was passed (under conditions that included identifying a sustainable corporate sponsor), however, Lightfoot’s office said she had given it her approval. According to Ald. Beale as of March 4, Chicago’s police Supt. Brown had not yet expressed his approval for the house.

Lightfoot’s question about who would fund Chicago’s Roseland COP

POLICE house was answered in January, when Beale revealed that a Racine corporation, the Fortune 500 company SC Johnson, would donate $250,000 to the Chicago Neighborhoods Initiative (CNI) to renovate the house. The company also supports Racine’s COP houses and allegedly approached Beale first with the idea for putting one in Chicago.

SC Johnson has manufacturing facilities near Roseland, in neighboring Pullman. Beale has also cited Roseland’s violent crime levels—which are roughly twice as high as the citywide average— as another reason to put the COP house in that neighborhood, saying that violent crime has gone down by seventy percent in Racine. The Racine COP house website also makes this claim, but according to FBI data violent crime actually increased in Racine, from 639 per 100,000 residents in 2007 to 672 per 100,000 in 2017.

Dobine, forty-two, started a Roseland youth basketball program and has long wanted to create a place to host block club meetings, job training programs,

mental health services, and education and housing opportunities. Ideally, he said, there would also be a playlot on the side for children and a community garden for seniors to walk in. Dobine isn’t against the COP house—in fact, he would like to see more than one house, spread out along an eight- or sixteen-block radius, as he believes that it could help young people learn how to interact with the police.

But Roseland resident and activist Wilkins is “totally against the COP house.” Wilkins, fifty, has lived in Roseland all his life and was shot and paralyzed in the neighborhood; he has since started a foundation called Broken Winggz to support people who are quadriplegic. According to Wilkins, no one in the neighborhood “will trust nobody who go there.” He sees the proposed house as “more like a surveillance.”

Wilkins also believes that true community policing “takes years, and it takes the right people and chemistries.”

He added that officers need to get out of their cars and get to know people.

An example of “the right people,” according to Wilkins, are Roseland’s two abandoned-building police officers, Rodolfo Gomez and Marc Poblador.

The two officers have been stationed in Roseland for five years, and in that time have worked to clear Roseland’s abandoned lots. The officers also shovel snow in the winter, according to West Pullman resident Brenda Scott, who works alongside them as a volunteer. In Scott’s eyes, the officers are building trust by getting out of their cars and working out on the streets. Scott says that residents are usually surprised to see police officers doing this type of work, and often come out to help.

But Scott is also concerned: Gomez and Poblador are potentially being moved to another area by their sergeant. She emphasized the need to have the right people doing the community policing.

“I’m not interested in the COP house,” Scott said. “That money can go

into buying [Gomez and Poblador] a van” to help clear out the lots, she said.

Tucker, the Milkwaukee activist, believes that COP houses unnecessarily expand the reach of police. She is “not interested” in community policing as a whole, largely because she feels it is not effective. She said that she has witnessed repeated attempts at reform, but none have worked. This was what caused her to stop advocating for reform and instead start fighting for abolition and systemic change.

“People have been working to try to make sure police won’t kill us. That hasn’t worked,” Tucker said. She added that COP houses do not allow for what she sees as necessary healing. “Cops aren’t proactive,” she said. “Their job is to be reactionary.” Jade Yan is a staff writer for the Weekly. She last reported on Illinois’ redistricting process.

APRIL 1, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

DEVELOPMENT

Gambling on the 78

What would a Chicago casino as part of the Related Midwest development mean for Chinatown?

BY LYNNEA DOMIENIK

ILLUSTRATION BY SHANE TOLENTINO

W

alk along Roosevelt Road just east of the Chicago River, and you’ll see construction commencing on a road. It’s part of “The 78”–a megadevelopment so named because Related Midwest, the developer for the project, is positioning it as the future seventy-eighth neighborhood of Chicago.

Bordered by Ping Tom Park to the south and Clark Street to the east, the site is slated to be a mixed-use development, with a river park, residences, a water taxi stop, and the Discovery Partners Institute campus for tech education and R&D. It’s also now possible that it will be considered as the site of a future Chicago casino, which was approved as part of the 2019 Illinois Gambling Expansion Act. In August 2020, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot put out a non-binding Request for Information for the casino, asking existing casino operators to weigh in on what recommended amenities and how much acreage and infrastructure it would need. Related Midwest and Rush Street Gaming, which runs casinos in 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Schenectady, and—closer to home—Des Plaines, were among the nearly dozen respondents to the request. This puts the 78 site in the mix. There’s no certainty that Related Midwest and Rush Street Gaming will respond in the next phase to the mayor’s Request for Proposals, which Crain’s Chicago Business reports may begin in April, but sources say it’s likely that they will.

The casino will affect the whole city, and should the 78 site be proposed and chosen, there will be long-term impacts on surrounding neighborhoods, including Pilsen, the South Loop, and Bronzeville. Most immediately, it would affect Chinatown, which will border the 78 to the south, and a road that is currently being constructed will connect the development to the heart of the neighborhood, where it is common to see billboards for casinos, often in Chinese.

Before the pandemic, several different casinos outside the city chartered shuttles to pick up passengers in Chinatown throughout the day, seven days a week.

What could a casino mean for the community if it were at the 78? Eunice Liao runs the Problem Gambling Program at Pui Tak Center, a churchbased community center in Chinatown.

She says her program doesn’t focus on social gamblers, but on educating people who have had their lives impaired by gambling. A casino at the 78 “may draw in people who are currently going to Indiana, and/or struggle with gambling issues,” she said. But as for whether it will “turn” people from social gambling to disordered gambling, she can’t say for sure. She recommends that the state and the Illinois Gaming Board fund studies to accurately assess what the impact would be, including on the next generation.

She says it may take time to observe and evaluate.

A 2019 University of Massachusetts Boston report by Carolyn Wong and Giles Li, titled “Talking About Casino Gambling: Community Voices from Boston Chinatown,” notes that it’s necessary to “challenge erroneous notions that reify culture by depicting Chinese

as ‘gamblers.’” The report highlights the importance of distinguishing between the popularity among Chinese immigrants of playing Mahjong in community spaces and homes and the commercialized casino setting. “Playing Chinese themed table or electronic machine games in casinos can easily heighten the risk of addiction,” the report continues, “especially when fast repeat play is a feature of electronic games, sophisticated marketing messages encourage players’ dreams of huge winnings, and free drinks are served.”

The Midwest Asian Health Association (MAHA) conducted a survey of gambling trends in the Asian Community in the summer and fall of 2020. Lina Xie, the substance abuse prevention program coordinator at MAHA said that of roughly 285 respondents, over fifty percent believe that there is an issue with problem gambling in Chinatown.

The Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS) is currently undertaking the first-ever statewide needs assessment to gather data about the impact of at-

DEVELOPMENT risk and problem gambling in Illinois.

Patrick Laughlin, deputy director of communications for IDHS, said that the needs assessment “will help IDHS to make data-driven and evidence-based decisions about how to direct resources.”

The results from the needs assessment are expected to become public in the fall of 2021. However, this study does not look at the potential effects a casino within Chicago’s city limits may have on increasing problem gambling.

Some community leaders, like Grace Chan McKibben–the executive director of Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community (CBCAC), which came out of a coalition of Chinatown organizations who fought over twenty years ago to regulate how many casino buses could come to Chinatown and

where they could pick up passengers, are clear. “We don't want a casino to be located closer and be easier for residents to get to.”

Neo Li, a shopkeeper on Wentworth says he’s supportive of the 78 in general, but concerned by the proximity of a possible casino to Chinatown. In his opinion, it would harm the community more if you can walk to the casino than if it was farther away. He knows people who ask him for money to pay off their gambling debts. “You can’t stop when you go to a casino.” He’s seen it damage people’s relationships. “People don’t take care of their family, kids, all the money goes to the casino,” he said.

He’s also concerned that having a casino nearby would increase crime, especially robberies. Chan McKibben

CONTRUCTION ON THE SITE OF THE 78. PHOTO BY LYNNEA DOMIENIK

said safety is a number one concern for residents, especially in light of a fatal carjacking in December 2020. There is also a history of residents being robbed after having won at the casinos.

In addition to these instances, there are national trends that show increases in 911 calls in the first few months of a new casino opening in an area. Rush Street Gaming’s Rivers Casino in Des Plaines is the most recent casino to open in the Chicagoland area and fits the trend. A community post on Patch.com quotes Mike Kozak, acting police chief at the time: “Officers responded to 7,560 calls in the sixth ward in 2011 [the year it opened], with 681 of those calls to Rivers Casino.” This is compared to an annual average of 6,822 calls in the city's sixth ward from 2009 to 2011.

Some Chinatown community leaders are worried that safety concerns a casino could bring would prompt a greater police presence in the area surrounding the 78. “We don’t need more police to be patrolling,” said Consuela Hendricks, co-founder of People Matter, a Chinatown-based political education organization.“More numbers of police does not solve the root issues.” She added that a way to mitigate this kind of crime is to ensure that all people have affordable rent and higher paying jobs.

Rudy Pamintuan, founding director and COO of Diversity Gaming Solutions, said he’s hopeful that a Chicago casino would provide new jobs. But Angela X. Lin, another co-founder of People Matter, said, “In surveying our members, we’ve found that more low-wage jobs in food and beverage are not the kind of jobs people want.” Lin said that people have expressed interest in training to become interpreters or bilingual teachers in the community. Hendricks worries that these jobs would only change the quality of life slightly: a job in a casino “might offer you a way to survive, but we want you to thrive.”

Pamintuan disagrees. “When it comes to workforce development, it’s not a one-size-fits-all, some people want to do retail, some want to do IT, it’s a matter of creating exposure and access to opportunities.”

Pamintuan adds: “Dealers make a lot of money, and I know dealers who have been able to travel the world with their profession.” According to the employment website Indeed.com, the average casino dealer’s hourly wage in Illinois is $16.96, and average daily tips are $200.

Another shopkeeper on Wentworth who didn’t want to give his name said there are pros and cons to the casino. He sees that the city needs revenue and says if there was a casino at the 78, he said, “maybe it would attract more tourists.”

Neo Li, the shopkeeper who worries about the casino’s proximity, said he’s familiar with the argument that it will be better for Chicago if there’s a casino in the city, rather than people taking their money to Indiana and playing there. But he asked, “where will the money from the casino really go?”

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DEVELOPMENT

A GAMBLING ADVERTISEMENT. PHOTO BY LYNNEA DOMIENIK

“Some Chinatown community leaders are worried that safety concerns a casino could bring would prompt a greater police presence in the area surrounding the 78.”

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Two major factors affecting this casino, tax structure and how the revenue will be spent, have been decided without direct community input. The Sun-Times reported that as of June 30, 2020, the Illinois General Assembly lowered the effective tax rate from the Chicago casino from approximately seventy-two percent to forty percent, because a gaming consulting firm claimed this was too “onerous.”

Jim Landers, an associate professor of clinical public affairs at the Ohio State University, co-authored a 2016 paper called “The Responsiveness of Casino Revenue to the Casino Tax Rate,” which looked at how both the number of people who entered Illinois casinos and how much they wagered between 1997-2008 fluctuated in response to an increase on the tax the casino paid on AGR (wagering) and admissions.

The paper indicates that an increase in taxes on wagering and admissions led to fewer people going to the casinos, and betting less once they were there.

A decrease in wagering and admissions taxes led to an increase in the numbers of entrants and the amounts wagered.

Landers said whether or not the casino will be profitable depends on many factors, including location and how well it can compete with video gambling and casinos in Northwest Indiana.

Any taxes the city would collect from a casino have already been spoken for.

Mayor Lightfoot is required to use the revenue to fund the firefighter and police pension fund, a decision that was made by her predecessor Rahn Emanuel, says Amanda Kass, associate director of the Government Finance Research Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

According to Kass, having the tax money from the Chicago casino go towards the police and firefighters pension would be a dedicated revenue stream that could free up money from the rest of the City budget.

“If it ultimately happened that a casino was housed in the 78, we want the revenue to go towards affordable housing and supporting public schools in Chinatown, Bridgeport, and surrounding areas,” said Chan McKibben of CBCAC, ”including the high school we have been pushing for for the past three decades.”

In addition to wanting to be consulted about how to reinvest in the community, Chinatown residents and community leaders have expressed concerns about the lack of communication around the planning of the 78. The website for the 78 states that since 2017, Related Midwest has introduced the 78 at nearly fifty community meetings and events. “An ongoing dialogue is paramount to creating Chicago’s next great neighborhood, which doesn’t happen without input and feedback from residents,” the website claims.

Eunice Liao of Pui Tak highlighted the difficulty in reaching this mostly immigrant community to get that feedback. She remembers at the end of a webinar she hosted, someone asked whether the community could say no to a casino being located there.“Obviously they were not the ones included in the conversation,” she says. “To be included in the conversation, it’s not easy.” She attributes it to language barriers and a lot of residents not having familiarity with the internet or Facebook.

The Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community put on several events in 2019 to raise awareness among the community about the gambling expansion bill. Chan McKibben said: “We want Related Midwest to work more closely with the community, to seek community input in every step of their planning. The 78 itself already poses great gentrification and displacement risk to the community. Their contemplation of adding a casino makes this even more concerning.” You can access and participate in the IDHS survey of frequent gamblers at bit.ly/ILGamblingSurvey.

Lynnea Domienik is a freelance audio producer and reporter. She lives in McKinley Park. This is her first article for the Weekly.

T

Testimonies from the Land A PHOTO ESSAY | BY ISIAH THOUGHTPOET VENEY

he world is just beginning to understand how police aren’t needed—but do we know that Black women made that possible? Any and all history leads back to how women truly care for others even when that care is not returned.

Being a Black woman from the hood is a superpower many can’t comprehend.

This story in photos is about women that are guiding this city to better days. This isn’t a women’s history month tribute. This is a story only Black women can tell.

A testimony. ¬

Isiah ThoughtPoet Veney is a photographer and writer from the Chatham and Burnside area, on a mission to capture and express powerful opinions and perceptions through imagery and writing of the Black experience. He currently lives in West Englewood, and previously contributed the photo essay "(IKnowFolksAss) The Interlude" to the Weekly.

The Goddess of Englewood “My light has made disparity more visible while illuminating a path towards healing our city and the four corners of the universe folks and ‘nem know as 63rd and Halsted. I take the knowledge my ancestors gave to me through my grandmothers and momma to manifest the beauty that comes from a community you can believe in and cherish. My art helps freshen the air in this city of wind. My home, Englewood is the foundation of that.”

Tonika Johnson is a photographer, a social justice artist, a lifelong resident of Englewood, and co-founder of two community-based organizations, Englewood Arts Collective and Resident Association of Greater Englewood, that seek to reframe the narrative of South Side communities and mobilize people and resources for positive change. Within her artistic practice, Tonika often explores urban segregation and documents the nuance and richness of the Black community, countering pervasive media depictions of Chicago’s violence and crime. Since 2018 she has used her ongoing Folded Map project to investigate disparities among Chicago residents who are “map twins” living on opposite ends of streets that span the city’s racial and economic divides, and has transformed Folded Map into an advocacy and policy-influencing tool that invites audiences to open a dialogue and question how we are all socially impacted by racial and institutional conditions that segregate the city. In 2019, she was named one of Field Foundation’s Leaders for a New Chicago and was appointed as a member of the Cultural Advisory Council of the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events by the Chicago City Council. Most recently, she was selected to be the National Public Housing Museum's 2021 Artist as Instigator to work on her next project "Inequity for Sale," highlighting the living history of Greater Englewood homes sold on land sale contracts in the 50's and 60's.

Model: Tonika Lewis Johnson Makeup artist: Jade Landon Stylist: Ariana Fuana Michaella The Essentials of (Her) “I was born in the arms of imaginary friends that reminded me the moment I saw the inferno that my light can persuade a generation and a world to change its heart towards those who have endured like me. I’m still fighting. I’m still here.”

Inez White is a doctoral student of nursing specializing in family nurse practice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received her bachelor’s degree from Illinois Wesleyan University in sociology and Hispanic studies. She received her second bachelor’s degree from Resurrection University in nursing. Inez has been a member of BYP100 for over four years, after experience as a student organizer at Illinois Wesleyan, where she worked to alter the oppressive systems there to bring awareness to the lack of inclusivity for students of color and the LGBTQIA+ community. She currently aids in the planning and execution of BYP100’s ongoing campaigns. She is passionate about expressing the importance of radical transformation of current systems to accomplish Black liberation, including joy, freedom, housing, abolition, healing, and solidarity. She is also passionate about transferring this information to generations to come, including her five-year-old son, Malachi. Her goals include acquiring an independent practice focusing on community education and healthcare in impoverished areas of Chicago.

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Styling: Andrea Montoya Model: Inez White Makeup: Tiara Dèshanè Hair: GoToTheMo ¬ APRIL 1, 2021

What’s Your Thot Juice “I have imperfections. I have the most doubts you'll ever see in anyone, and my darkness often times makes it hard to see my own clouds. But don't mistake my vulnerability through my art as weakness. I'm a soul from the land that's as strong as the angels God herself created. Respect my ability to inspire. Respect my ability to create. Respect my pain. Embrace my love. It's not deserving to everyone.”

E’mon Lauren is a Black, queer Scorpio from the West and South sides of Chicago, whose work unpacks her coined philosophy of “hood-womanism.” She was named Chicago’s first Youth Poet Laureate. She has been featured in Chicago Magazine, the Tribune, and Vogue, while her work has appeared in The B ​ reakBeat Poets anthology​ series, volumes 1 & 2, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the host of the hit podcast “The Real Hoodwives of Chicago.” Her first book of poems, C ​ ommando​, was published by Haymarket Books in 2017.

Model: E’mon Lauren Memories from Tuley Park “I’m awaiting golden skies while I also ponder on what God thinks is the best way for me to say I love myself and all of my faults. The answer hasn’t come just yet. So I’ll just hold your hand and keep guiding us through the darkness. Away from the hurt and towards the peace we both want.”

Ceaira Herbert holds a BA in sociology from Lane College and works by day as a customer service representative at AT&T. A Tuley Park native and a second-generation graduate of Burnside Scholastic Academy, Ceaira now has a son continuing the tradition, the third generation of her family attending this historic school. Ceaira is deeply rooted in her community, which has over the years suffered from disinvestment and neglect, making it vulnerable to violence and gang activity. By doing food drives, volunteering at the school, and helping to keep the grounds of the school and the church clean and safe, Ceaira and others like her are on the ground helping keep the old neighborhood alive. Living and working on the South Side of Chicago, Ceaira is an example of how tradition builds stronger generations.

Model: Ceiara Herbert

Shut Up When Black Women Are Speaking “A gift and curse I’ve been holding for most of my life. I don’t mind it though, I just want it to bring me the blessings I know I deserve. I pray about it. I dream about it with every fabric of strength I carry. I just want that light to show itself.”

Naira is a first-generation Nigerian from the South Side, a poet and a student at Columbia College with a major in film and a minor in environmental studies. Naira is also an activist, and co-founder of a four-person collective called Blck Rising, focused on organizing, abolition work, and mutual aid. Naira recently created a clothing brand and shop, KOBO, where she shares items designed around her passions and humor.

Creative direction, styling, and model: Naira Ikoro

APRIL 1, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

LIT

The Arkestra and the City Sun Ra’s Chicago traces the interstellar musician’s urban roots

BY BENJAMIN GINZKY

I

t’s a summer night in 1948, and you love jazz and there’s plenty of it. You and maybe some friends get together around 29th Street in Bronzeville. You can fill up the time between now and dawn at a jazz venue every one or two blocks heading south.

Maybe outside the big ballrooms like the Regal Theater, you and your friends just joke around, smoke, and fight while the big bands play. At the Savoy, you have to go in and dance.

At the Grand Terrace on 35th Street, you are closer to the stage, and the sound is a little different. Earl Hines Orchestra soloists like sometime visitors Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie often defy your expectations, but the bandleaders discourage such forays into what they pejoratively call “Chinese music,” labeling the new sound as strange and foreign, in favor of a focus on tunes, tunes, tunes.

You don’t know it now, but one of the sidemen at the Grand Terrace is Herman “Sonny” Blount—later known as Sun Ra, who will go on to have one of the most unique careers in experimental jazz. Sun Ra not only innovated in his musical style but elaborated a system of outer space myths and images in his music, liner notes, and performances. He instructed his tightly knit “Arkestra” in “Solaristic Precepts” and attracted a cult following, claiming to be from Saturn.

But, as William Sites, associate professor at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, wants us to appreciate in his new book, Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ APRIL 1, 2021

and the City, Sun Ra’s career took off in mid-century Chicago, and it provides a portal into the living reality and utopian horizons of our city in that time.

A time when, if you’ll remember, you are reaching Washington Park, the home stretch of your night out, but the richest leg—and the neighborhood where Sun Ra lived. Garfield Boulevard is dotted at this time with clubs you can go back and forth between until dawn.

Along with the Onyx Club, the Café de Society, the Rhumboogie Café, the Hurricane Theatre Lounge, and Last Chance, there is the most renowned, the Club DeLisa, where until recently Fletcher Henderson—one of the swing era’s masterful, accomplished, exemplary bandleaders—had ruled the roost.

After the war, the heart of jazz in Black Chicago had migrated down from its Roaring Twenties home in Bronzeville’s core, between 25th and 47th Streets, to here on Garfield Boulevard.

Henderson’s departure similarly meant moving on from the Jazz Age—now, various sidemen were leading their own ensembles.

As Henderson winds down his reign at the DeLisa, Sonny Blount picks up piano duties. A few times, you heard Sonny’s arrangements instead of Henderson’s. They were still ballads and dance tunes, but the piano parts were aggressive and expressive. The other members didn’t always know what to do with the phrasings, you could tell.

Within a couple years, while still in Chicago, Sonny Blount would become

COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Sun Ra. He went on to make experimental jazz that Sites wants us to understand as rooted in jazz standards and the swing era—and also to articulate alternative religious and philosophical views, which Sites argues are rooted in a broader Black heterodoxy and atmosphere of exploration and messianism. To Sites, Sun Ra’s out-there worldview (and band) were driven by more widely shared utopian views: hopes evident every time Black families came to northern cities, built religious and mutual aid groups, met in parks to proselytize, invested in musical education and discipline, read about newly conceivable exotic vacations in Ebony, or wheeled out the TV to the dinner table to watch space launches.

Blount/Sun Ra himself, like thousands of other Black folks in the first

half of the twentieth century, migrated to Chicago from Birmingham, an industrial city of the “New South.” Sites points out (as other recent scholarship highlights) that like many other participants in the Great Migration, the musician was already urban before he was a northerner.

Sites gives a vivid picture of the urban culture in Birmingham in the 1910s and 1920s, drawing on both historical sources and Black Renaissance literature.

Birmingham was a city with music in the streets at night, and one where during the day, Blount studied at the public library housed inside the Masonic Hall in the Black downtown business district—possibly picking up the Masons’ connection between horizon-expanding knowledge and brotherhoods with secret codes and costumes.

LIT Sun Ra got his early musical education at Birmingham’s Industrial High School, which Sites points out consistently produced highly competent Black musicians under the leadership of Fess Whatley. Like many of them, Sun Ra went out “to the territory,” touring with one of many bands that traveled the South and Midwest bringing swing music to saloons and ballrooms.

For Sites, swing bands were vessels for charged ideals. The large group of musicians working together to play a precisely arranged melody with artful showcasing of virtuosic soloists demonstrated Black “sophistication” and artistry. But the style was also taken up by white bands (or, at least for recording, integrated ones)—most definitively

by Benny Goodman, whose accessible “populist” sound Sites associates with the optimism and multi-racialism of the New Deal.

Sun Ra’s cities themselves also embody ideals. For Sites, the Birmingham where Sun Ra grew up exemplified the “uplift” ethos of Booker T. Washington, where the quintessential Black leader was both a minister preaching moral reform and an entrepreneur building business institutions that would serve Black community members. Chicago was home to the old Black Renaissance idea of a Black “city within the city,” and to a Second Great Migration-era optimism about post-war society, both of which Sites identifies as forms of utopianism, imagining alternate spaces where things could be better. Arguing that Sun Ra’s later cosmic visions and utopian message grow out of his time in Chicago, Sites encourages us to recast our view of the city in that period from the relatively bleak and industrial one known from Carl Sandburg poems and Nelson Algren novels.

In fact, in his years in Chicago, Sun Ra benefited from the factors that always make catalysts for the future: new types of work, social connections, and forums for ideas. In Washington Park, the neighborhood where he lived and played at the DeLisa, the namesake park was home to a “Forum” descended from bohemian radical spaces of the World War I era—but in the evolving Chicago

landscape, now less socialistic, more (and more diversely) religious, and all-Black in its attendance.

At the Forum, Sun Ra and collaborator Alton Abraham circulated broadsheets produced under the auspices of their “Thmei Research” collaboration.

These did not advertise a clear confession to join like the also-in-attendance Moorish Science Temple, Nation of Islam, Ahmadiyya Muslims, and Black Israelites. Instead, they offered wideranging exegeses and speculation about the origins and fate of Black people, drawing from wide reading in Theosophy, occult tracts, and a broad tradition of religious Ethiopianism that identified Black people in America with peoples or places known from ancient sources like the Bible. In content, the Thmei tracts themselves were often perplexing, hard to follow, and pessimistic in a way that might be disconcerting to a reader expecting a militant or empowering message. (Not purely a changeling fantasy of exalted origins, this myth actually figures Black Americans as deserving of their own oppression because, according to Thmei lore, they killed Christ in their guise as the ancient Jews.) But their method is interesting: Sites highlights how many of the broadsheets run on the conceit of some truth (itself often of the characteristic Thmei worldview, which Sites describes as “caustic and strangely redemptive”) concealed in American popular song by pun or allusion.

But Blackness and freethinking were far from the norm in all urban spaces of the era. Money and segregation were often definitive, from Chicago’s segregated musicians’ unions that geographically divided the city, to the gigs Sun Ra and others played in Calumet City, a “sin suburb” where they worked all night providing the soundtrack to stripteases for audiences of white ethnic steel workers. It was exacting: Sites describes a Jim Crow arrangement where Black musicians were separated from white strippers by curtains, and the proprietors aimed for “continuous action,” where sets were lined up with the steady rhythm of workers coming off the shift.

But the intense demands of the strip club gigs honed musicians’ skills:

they had to adapt on the spot to the performance’s key flourishes and reveals, and some of the performers requested music like “Rhapsody in Blue” that was highly complex to learn and perform.

Sites claims that Sun Ra not only refined his playing, but nurtured his “passion for standards,” developing a familiarity and intimate repartee with the “tunes” of the “Great American Songbook” that borders on the mystical, especially taken together with these same songs’ role in Thmei lore.

Sites makes sure we see the force of Sun Ra’s nonconformity: his conscientious objection to service in World War II, his struggle to have his arrangements played, his draw as a sort of guru or Socratic interlocutor for his bandmates (telling them variously that the piano will become obsolete, that if they displease him he will leave them behind when his spaceship comes, and that the forms of segregation practiced on Jupiter make Alabama look enlightened).

Despite this, Sun Ra at first usually cut a receding figure on the bandstand, probably taking after Fletcher Henderson.

Sites attributes the bandleader’s eventual shift to a more assertive stage presence to his Thmei collaborator and business partner, Alton Abraham. Sites works with material from the Alton Abraham archive at the University of Chicago’s Special Collections Research Center to show Abraham’s integral role in managing the recording and publishing side of the Arkestra project, which Sites describes as a band that also served as a fellowship of nonconformist seekers and a “community organization.”

Sites emphasizes the role of physical space, too. Sun Ra goes from practicing in bandmembers’ mothers’ living rooms to building a relationship with a venue, the Wonder Inn, where the band could play a regular gig and practice all day. He was committed to fanatical group practice, in large part a legacy of Industrial High School’s industrial model for music education. But there was more to the political economy of jazz than hard work yielding returns. The jazz age heyday of “Black Metropolis” nightlife was enabled by overpacked densities. With the fall of racial covenants and Black people’s subsequent moves to more of the South

Side, new venues emerged, but each one anchored a solid entertainment interest much more tenuously.

So while Sites, a sociologist, helpfully lays out these kinds of material constraints to cultural life, he is really interested in how art can transcend them, or feel like it. It’s inside the Wonder Inn—playing a set late into the night, robed in fanciful get-ups, reading poetry, engaging in call and response with an audience, and détourning George Gershwin songs— that we feel how the Arkestra could take you into another space in the way that Sites characterizes as utopian.

Sites’s book brings Sun Ra back to Earth and helps us understand not only Sun Ra but also jazz and American cities in this crucial period. One occasionally loses sight of the sheer oddity of Sun Ra, and familiarity with his later, more experimental Arkestra work after leaving Chicago largely goes assumed.

Most valuably, though, Sites writes ably about jazz, both the music itself and the experience of making and consuming it, from riding with the instruments in the back of a territory band bus, to how sound develops under the demands of striptease gigs, to the struggle for practice space. In an effective counterpoint to his jazz writing, Sites brings us into the “parks, storefront churches, music clubs, and neighborhood bookstores” where alternative ideas like Sun Ra’s and a thousand others were nurtured and developed. Like jazz music, Black imaginative life in the 20th century was a project of improvisation on themes, drawn from America and a wider cosmos, for which Sun Ra’s career, for all its singularity, is amply illustrative. William Sites, Sun Ra’s Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City. $30. The University of Chicago Press. 328 pages Benjamin Ginzky is a law student at Chicago-Kent and lives in Hyde Park, where he is a docent at the Oriental Institute and involved with the 57th Street Meeting of Friends. He also edits nonfiction at Mouse Magazine. He last wrote for the Weekly about the Black Arts Movement and art rooted in Chicago’s urban space.

APRIL 1, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

IMMIGRATION

Vaccine Outreach in Chicago’s Latinx Communities Many people are finding vaccine information through word of mouth and community-based organizations doing bilingual outreach.

BY ALMA CAMPOS

I

n late March, Jonathan López, an undocumented immigrant from Little Village, went to the United Center to get his first vaccine. He said he had spent almost every day of the month calling the operation’s call center to make an appointment. When he finally got through, he found out he was eligible as a resident in the 60623 ZIP Code, one of many ZIP Codes currently being prioritized by the City for vaccination.

Protect Chicago Plus is the campaign guiding the city’s vaccine distribution.

Officials rely on data from what they call the Chicago COVID-19 Community Vulnerability Index (CCVI) to rank neighborhoods based on their level of exposure and vulnerability to COVID. Rankings range from four (lowest vulnerability) to sixty-four (highest vulnerability). Through Protect Chicago Plus, the city has been announcing vaccine eligibility by way of ZIP Codes over the last two months.

Many people in Latinx and immigrant communities say they are finding information about vaccine availability not only through official sources, but through word of mouth and community-based organizations that are doing bilingual outreach independently.

While this may be more effective than showing up to a mass vaccination site and testing their luck, there are still challenges with this approach—namely, that outreach to Spanish-speaking communities is not uniform, and it relies on under-resourced groups to do the heavy lifting

ILLUSTRATION BY SEAN MAC

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¬ APRIL 1, 2021

HEALTH

COMMUNITY HEALTH PROMOTERS KNOWN AS “PROMOTORAS” SIGNED UP SPANISH SPEAKERS FOR APPOINTMENTS IN LITTLE VILLAGE AS PART OF THE PROTECT CHICAGO PLUS INITIATIVE. PHOTO BY ALMA CAMPOS

López has lived the majority of his life in the U.S. and has been educated here. And while he can speak and write English, he didn’t see signs in Spanish or other languages at the United Center.

“Because this is a mass vaccination site, I think better directional signage is needed in multiple languages,” he said. “I only saw one person with an interpreter sign on their ID, but even that was also in English.”

As of March 29, there have been 225,127 known COVID-19 cases in Illinois for people identified as “Hispanic.” At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, Latinos statewide surpassed all other ethnic groups in the total number of reported COVID-19 infections, according to data from the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH).

After he got his vaccine, López took out his phone and snapped a selfie to post to social media “to show friends and family how easy and painless it is to take the vaccine.” But a security officer approached him, demanding he unlock his phone and delete the photo without offering an explanation. “I'm an undocumented immigrant so I just did not argue,” López said.

Although he felt the process inside was “smooth” and the U.S. Army

soldiers administering the vaccines were “efficient,” he didn’t think it was a place where immigrants could find help. “It's not a friendly place for non-English speakers.”

Luvia Quiñones, health policy director for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), said that her organization has had to create materials in various languages to educate immigrant communities about the vaccine and keep people up to date.

But she is also concerned about the lack of computer and internet access in immigrant communities. "They may not know how to use [a computer] either or how to navigate government-related websites.”

It took almost two months for Elena’s (whose name was changed to keep her identity anonymous) ninetytwo-year-old father to get vaccinated.

Elena helps care for her father, who lives in Little Village, and has been the point person in helping the rest of her family understand the pandemic. While her dad is able to get around, Elena said he requires assistance.

Since older adults became eligible for the vaccine, she had been calling various numbers but said it’s been difficult to get through. One of those numbers was for McCormick Place, which she heard about through one of the local Spanish-

language TV stations, but she could not get through. Elena also heard about a vaccination site at Arturo Velasquez Institute on the news, but when she showed up she was referred to a website to make an appointment.

A lot of her frustration came from busy phone lines and being unable to speak to a human being. “There was a machine talking in English on the other side, and you couldn’t talk to anyone.”

Navigating the internet for vaccine information hasn’t been easy either.

Elena cannot recall which website, but she said one of them asked for her father’s insurance information. She didn’t have that information at hand. “I really don’t know why they are even asking for that if they say it’s free,” she said.

Elena finally got a number that led her to Esperanza Health Center in Little Village. She was helped by a “promotora,” or community health promoter, through the community-based organization Enlace Chicago. Her father was able to get his first dose there and will get his second shot in April.

She asked for a vaccine for herself because in addition to her father, she also cares for her elderly mother-inlaw. But because she lives in Cicero, a majority-Latinx and immigrant Cook County suburb where people have also

been struggling to make appointments, they told her she was not eligible to be vaccinated in Chicago.

Across the street from St. Agnes of Bohemia Catholic Church, in their Cuarto Manz Hall, promotoras were helping Latinx and immigrant residents sign up for the COVID vaccine on Thursday, March 25. Promotoras like Jackeline Ortiz took down people’s personal information to help them schedule an appointment with Saint Anthony Hospital. Ortiz said the information is given to bilingual representatives from Saint Anthony, who from 8:00am to 7:00pm daily call people to confirm their appointments.

Ortiz volunteers at Telpochcalli Community Education Project (TCEP) in Little Village, where she got connected to a volunteer opportunity promoting health services to the community for Saint Anthony in 2019. When the pandemic hit, she had to pivot. Now she works to educate people about the vaccine by going to laundromats, corner stores, and small businesses in Little Village. She promotoras are able to earn a small stipend doing this.

“Some people have asked if the hospital will share their information with ICE if they are looking to deport someone. So we tell them the hospital can’t, because medical information is confidential,” she said. On December 10, 2020, Illinois Department of Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike said in a press conference that residents' personal information, including immigration status, will be protected.

According to David Louridas from the Pilsen-based non-profit The Resurrection Project, which partnered with St. Agnes and the hospital, said 331 people were helped that day, and they have done about ten similar events guided

by Protect Chicago Plus. “People were lining up at 2:00pm but the event began at 5:00pm. This tells you a lot about the need and the interest in the immigrant community to get vaccinated.”

At 7:00pm, as the promotoras were wrapping up, a man in his fifties was on his way out. He smiled and waved his baseball cap at the promotoras: “Gracias, gracias.”

APRIL 1, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

HEALTH “It’s very important to have events in places that the community knows and where they feel comfortable going,” Louridas said.

However, the assistance of city and public health officials has been a long time coming, and aldermen and community groups have had to organize vaccination events themselves.

Dr. Howard Ehrman, a public health advocate and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago, organized the first vaccination event in Little Village, in partnership with Walgreens and the community nonprofit Padres Angeles, after he saw that as of February nothing was being done in the area, which has a high percentage of essential workers and is at the top of the list of COVID deaths.

“The idea that we're going to systematically vaccinate people by having these pop-up sites that are hard for people to find out about and then harder to register for doesn't work,” said Ehrman.

25th Ward Alderman Byron SigchoLópez introduced a resolution on March 24 calling on the City to establish community and workplace vaccinations.

Community vaccinations would take place in public places familiar to residents such as libraries, park districts, fire stations, and schools.

The proposed ordinance is based on a public, rather than private, model. “The public health model is you go out to the people. You hire people as public health employees. And you take the vaccine to the people in their schools, their churches, in their homes and apartments and in the workplace,” Erhman said.

“Only when we have a driven process through CDPH, and not by private entities, we are going to have changes,” Sigcho-López said to CDPH Health Commissioner Dr. Allison Awardy, during a Health and Human Relations Committee on March 25.

López was referring to the city’s vaccine dashboard, which shows that people in white neighborhoods are getting vaccinated at a significantly higher rate than people in Black and Latinx neighborhoods. For instance, while West Englewood appears as the most vulnerable neighborhood in the 18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ APRIL 1, 2021

City’s COVID Vulnerability Index, and is eligible for a vaccine, it only shows 17.7 percent vaccinations as of March 30. But the Gold Coast, which is not eligible for a vaccine under Protect Chicago Plus, shows 32.1 percent vaccinations.

The resolution is backed by Ald. Rossana Rodríguez Sanchez (33rd), Ald. Daniel LaSpata (1st) Ald. Jeanette B. Taylor (20th), Ald. David H. Moore (17th), Ald. Ariel Reboyras (30th), Ald. Howard Brookins, Jr. (21st), Ald. Carlos Ramírez-Rosa (35th), and Ald. Maria E. Hadden (49th).

Ehrman, who used to be assistant commissioner at CPDH and served as chief medical officer in Will County during the Ebola outbreak, thinks Mayor Lori Lightfoot could have taken the federal funds the city received in the last year to rebuild the public health department. “They've done exactly the opposite. They have spent almost every cent on privatizing things that have completely failed,” he said.

The proposed ordinance is a combination of a jobs bill and a public health bill, said Ehramn, who, along with other public health advocates, has been working on the resolution. The proposed ordinance advocates for the creation of 2,500 CPDH jobs and would give $12 million to community-based organizations to hire 200 culturally competent health workers who would educate, organize, and help people get their shots. Unlike promotoras, who mostly volunteer for free or a small stipend, these health workers, also from Black and Latinx communities, would earn minimum salaries of $20 an hour for full-time work and be eligible for full benefits and union membership.

Meanwhile, insufficient outreach has left predominantly Latinx neighborhoods on the far Southeast Side feeling left behind.

In April 2020, South Side Weekly reported that people in these neighborhoods are far more likely to have asthma because of their industrial surroundings. And since COVID-19 is a respiratory disease that causes pneumonia, pollution can make things worse. “If you live in an area where the air quality is poor, your lungs are already going to be stressed, so you may be at higher risk of COVID-19,” said Dr. Susan

Buchanan, clinical associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the UIC School of Public Health.

Eduardo, thirty-three, is an undocumented immigrant working at a metal scrap yard in East Chicago, Indiana; his name has been changed to protect his identity. Customers approach him to sell non-ferrous metals like aluminum, nickel, lead, tin, brass, silver, and zinc. He said he sees about fifty people per day who come in to recycle their metal.

Eduardo lives in Hegewisch and has a wife and four children. Between March and June of 2020 he was unemployed when his workplace had to close due to COVID. Because he is undocumented, he was not able to apply for unemployment and did not receive any stimulus payments. He picked up food from his children’s school through the Chicago Public Schools’s Grab & Go meal program almost daily.

He also used up his savings to pay bills and buy groceries.

He said he doesn’t know where to start when it comes to finding a vaccine.

Only 2, 011 people have gotten a vaccine in Hegewisch as of March 29, out of the almost 9,000 residents in this ZIP Code. He knows 60633 isn’t part of Protect Chicago Plus yet, but even if it was, he would not know where to find information, where to go, or who to ask.

He said he searched on ZocDoc, the city's main platform for eligible Chicago residents to find vaccine appointments, under the belief that because he works in manufacturing, he would be eligible for the vaccine. But he wasn't able to find any available appointments.

Ana Guajardo, executive director of Centro de Trabajadores Unidos, a workers’ rights organization in the East Side that also reaches out to Indiana border cities near Hegewisch and the South suburbs, said she’s not surprised ZIP Codes in the area are not yet included under Protect Chicago Plus.

“I’m glad communities like Little Village, Gage Park, Back of the Yards, and others are eligible. But why not us?”

The East Side ranks forty-four in the vulnerability index.

Like many other community-based organizations, Centro de Trabajadores

Unidos has had to do the heavy lifting.

They have informed their neighbors about the importance of getting vaccinated.

Guajardo said she had to apply for a COVID-related grant to allow organizers at the center to work as “navigators” that disseminate information about testing, contact tracing, and vaccinations.

Alderman Susan Sadlowski Garza, whose ward encompasses the East Side, posted a flyer on her Facebook Page on March 23 with four locations open to people eligible in phases 1a and 1b in ZIP Code 60617: Chicago Family Health Center, Aunt Martha’s Health Center, JenCare, and Walgreens Pharmacy on Commercial Avenue.

Guajardo said that using WhatsApp has helped her keep the community informed not only about vaccination eligibility and appointments, but also for testing early on. “Initially, we started using WhatsApp to alert the community about ICE presence in the community, but we’ve expanded it to COVID too.”

From the mass vaccination site at the United Center, where information for Spanish speakers was not available by phone or on site, to St. Agnes of Bohemia in Little Village, where 192 have lost their lives to COVID, to the Southeast Side, with its long history of pollution, the vaccines remain difficult to access even with the city's Protect Chicago Plus program.

López, who had wanted to show his friends and family that he got the vaccine at the United Center and couldn’t, said his mother tested positive for COVID in July and they had to discuss end-of-life plans.

While his mother recovered, she still has trouble breathing and a chest cough. “Knowing I live in a neglected and underserved community really affected me the most mentally,” he said. “I felt secluded and I knew that relying on the City to take care of us was not support I could count on.” Alma Campos is a bilingual reporter based in McKinley Park. Her writing has appeared in Univision Chicago, WTTW, and Crain’s and focuses on immigrant and working-class communities of color in the South and West Sides. She last wrote for the Weekly about vaccinations at the City Colleges.

LIT

The Reinvestment Movement After Redlining

A new book corrects longstanding popular narratives of real-estate crises and white flight.

BY DAVE REIDY

O

nly a writer with great confidence in her scholarly and narrative abilities would reserve a book’s most dramatic line for the acknowledgments.

On the 237th page of After Redlining:

The Urban Reinvestment Movement in the Era of Financial Deregulation (University of Chicago Press), author and historian Rebecca K. Marchiel writes, “This book began when I heard a lie on the radio in 2008.”

A CHICAGO PROTEST AGAINST ABUSE OF THE FEDERAL HOUSING ADMINISTRATION SECTION 203 INSURANCE PROGRAM. PHOTO COURTESY OF PEOPLE'S ACTION

That lie was a financial industry lobbyist’s assertion that the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, a landmark legislative achievement of the reinvestment movement that started on Chicago’s West Side, had caused the financial sector’s 2008 meltdown.

“I knew that wasn’t true,” Marchiel continues, “but I had a lot to learn to construct an alternative narrative.”

On this topic and others, After Redlining offers illuminating correctives to falsehoods advanced by the powerful and to what Marchiel calls “popular memory.”

From the mid-1960s into the early 1970s, whenever Black people first took up residence in an urban neighborhood populated by so-called white ethnics of meager or middling means, longstanding local lending practices changed. Savings and loan institutions known as “thrifts” reduced their lending activity in the neighborhood, despite holding the deposits of many residents. Local banks jacked up the percentage of a home’s total value that they required as down payment on mortgage loans. Thirty-year mortgages, with their affordable monthly payments, were suddenly more difficult to secure. The effect was to put home (and home-equity) loans out of reach for many who lived, or wanted to live, in racially mixed sections of American cities.

Municipal and actuarial complicity amplified the negative effects of reduced access to credit in what Marchiel calls “transitional neighborhoods.” Trash pickup became irregular. Educational funds that might have addressed overcrowding in public schools did not

materialize. Underwriters doubled and even tripled the cost of home insurance.

Together, these conditions coalesced into a new kind of redlining in urban America.

Like the original redlining perpetrated by the federal government’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the late 1930s and 1940, in which mortgage loans were denied to buyers in Black neighborhoods deemed “hazardous” by the HOLC, the new redlining of the 1960s and 1970s propped up a “dual housing market.”

Real-estate agents known as “panic peddlers” used racial animus, the prospect of rising crime, and predictions of falling home values to frighten lower-class white families into selling their homes on the cheap. The agents then sold those

APRIL 1, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

LIT same homes, for multiples of the previous sale price, to Black families steered into a tightly limited housing supply by a conspiratorial network of lenders and real-estate operators. Black city dwellers faced further exploitation in the forms of fraudulent appraisals and predatory lending. “Contract selling”—essentially the selling of homes on an installment plan—prevented Black homeowners from building any equity in their homes until the purchase price was fully paid off, and allowed eviction and repossession by the seller, often as not a speculator, on the flimsiest of pretexts.

But in the West Side neighborhood of Austin, the new redlining and the dual-housing market it fed gave rise to a multiracial, multiethnic reinvestment movement that would register significant, lasting victories against a finance-realty complex content to hollow out American urban neighborhoods for profit. The movement’s origins were humble and hyperlocal. Organization for a Better Austin (OBA), led by Austin resident Gale Cincotta and organizer Shel Trapp, pursued three goals at its founding in June 1967: relieve overcrowding in Austin schools, develop programming for neighborhood youth, and “improve local housing conditions.”

By 1972, by means of tireless organizing and coalition building, OBA had transformed into National People’s Action for Housing (NPAH) and adopted a broad, urban-reinvestment agenda. With Cincotta and Trapp in leadership roles, NPAH pushed the federal government to reform the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) mortgage insurance program, which lenders used to earmark city blocks for redlining and profiteering. NPAH also agitated, Marchiel writes, for thrifts to lend “losable, uninsured capital to neighborhoods,” no matter “the age of their housing stock or the racial identities of residents.”

Even in the face of setbacks, reinvestment activists continually employed a go-bigger-or-go-home strategy, expanding their geographical reach and policy ambition. By the mid1970s, NPAH had dropped “Housing” from their moniker, re-identified 20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ APRIL 1, 2021

themselves as National People’s Action (NPA), and petitioned authors of the Democratic Party platform for a National Neighborhood Reinvestment Policy that called for disbursement of development funds in low- and middleincome communities, federal funding for anti-crime measures, affordable pharmaceuticals, and assistance for urban residents unable to meet the rising costs of utilities. In the late 1970s, activists added “dignified employment” and concerns about displacement to their issues list. By the 1980s, in the face of federal-government austerity programs and monetary policy that pushed homemortgage rates as high as fifteen percent (up from a mid-’70s average of about seven percent), Cincotta and NPA were thinking in terms of “redlining by class” and forging alliances with labor unions and groups of family farmers.

Throughout her book, Marchiel connects the broadening of reinvestment activists’ policy goals to their burgeoning understanding of the systemic nature of what they had first experienced as distinct, local problems. As they discerned more clearly the powerful, interlocking forces aligned against the interests of their low- and middle-income communities, activists saw little choice but to grow their numbers and fight on multiple fronts.

T

he national reinvestment movement was multiracial and multiethnic from its beginnings, a coalition founded on the principle, as Marchiel puts it, that “all urbanites suffered the effects of institutional racism when they chose to live in neighborhoods that weren’t…white.” Though it begat an all-in-this-together ethos that pushed racial and cultural divisions into the background behind reinvestment aims—a triumph of Alinsky organizing strategy— the founding principle’s conflation of the experiences and burdens of whiteethnic city dwellers with those of Black and Latinx Americans is problematic on its face. Indeed, the movement’s white leadership overlooked or misunderstood more than once the interests of their Black and Latinx members. In March 1972, at NPAH’s inaugural conference, Black and Latinx delegates headed off

a resolution, sponsored and supported by white activists, to abolish the Federal Housing Authority’s mortgage-insurance plan. NPAH had correctly identified FHA insurance as a virulent tool of redlining.

“Despite popular memory that attributes abandoned buildings and vacant lots to the fallout of the 1960s urban rebellions,” Marchiel writes, “1970s FHA insurance decimated the housing stock in the transitional neighborhoods where it was most concentrated.” Though bankers and speculators were misusing and abusing the program, FHA mortgage insurance also represented the only legitimate path to homeownership for many low-income Black and Latinx people. Enlightened by the lived experiences of its Black and Latinx delegates, NPAH resolved instead to call for reform of FHA mortgage insurance and for conventional, non-FHA home loans to be made to urban residents, without regard to race, thus expanding their opportunities for home ownership.

Marchiel’s account of the reinvestment movement’s racial and ethnic dynamics is at the heart of another corrective counter-narrative that animates her book. White flight was real—in Chicago, 399,000 whites moved to the suburbs in the 1950s alone. In white-ethnic neighborhoods, white flight deepened disinvestment

rooted in restricted access to credit under HOLC yellowlining, the less severe, contemporaneous cousin of 1930s-era federal redlining. White flight was not an immediate, total exodus, however. Many white urbanites resisted both flight to the suburbs and the integration of city neighborhoods, committing acts of racial intimidation and violence, individually and en masse, as mobs, against Black families. Other whites who remained “crossed racial lines,” Marchiel writes, “to form community organizations that fought real estate abuse instead of their new [non-white] neighbors.”

Even as her portrait of cities as “fruitful ground for interracial politics where ‘blacks and whites were fighting banks, not each other’ ” runs counter to popular memory of white flight, it joins Marchiel’s history of the reinvestment movement to a body of scholarship about powerful, interracial coalitions that threatened the mid-twentieth-century status quo in Chicago and beyond.

After Redlining makes a compelling companion to Jakobi Williams’s From the Bullet to the Ballot, a book that focuses on Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party, and Hampton’s formation, in class solidarity, of a multiracial “Rainbow Coalition” in 1969.

SHEL TRAPP (LEFT) AND GALE CINCOTTA (RIGHT) DISCUSS ORGANIZING STRATEGY. PHOTO COURTESY OF PEOPLE'S ACTION

“Though reinvestment activists may have stamped out the specific form of redlining that plagued American cities in the late 1960s and 1970s— no small achievement, this— contemporary urban America has still not entered, in any meaningful way, a post-redlining period.”

LIT

A

fter Redlining is, among other things, a tale told in two (legislative) acts. The first, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) of 1975, was a major victory for reinvestment activists sick and tired of banks’ denials of geographic discrimination in lending. Activists had long demanded “disclosure”—specifically, that financial institutions report their lending activity by geography. Soon after President Gerald Ford signed HMDA into law, lending disclosures by institutions in Salt Lake City, Baltimore, and Lincoln, Nebraska, unveiled what the NPA called “drastic patterns of redlining and disinvestment.” HMDA disclosures gave activists the data they needed to pressure local lenders to make affordable credit available to low-and middleincome city dwellers. Even so, HMDA fell short of outlawing geographic redlining, and the practice continued.

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977—After Redlining’s second act—gave HMDA disclosures teeth. Under the CRA, reinvestment activist organizations were empowered to challenge formally the merging or acquisition of any financial institution shown to have discriminated against—or merely failed to lend in—the low- and middle-income communities in its area.

Such a challenge opened negotiations between activists and the bank to lower barriers to credit in aging and transitioning urban neighborhoods. When activists were satisfied that their terms—ranging from low-interest loans for rehabilitating vacant buildings to the hiring of bilingual loan officers—had been met, and that accessible, affordable capital was set aside for their neighborhoods, the merger or acquisition was finalized.

The CRA abides as a remarkable devolution of regulatory power to activists—the law is still on the books today. However, as Marchiel demonstrates, any redlining that reinvestment activists did not spotlight remained undetected by federal regulators. In this sense, as much as it is a devolution of power, the CRA seems also an abdication of federal regulatory responsibility. Additionally, the CRA allocated no federal funds for aging and transitional urban neighborhoods.

Reinvestment capital was to come from banks alone, and activists, though newly empowered, would have to wrest it from them.

Armed with the powerful combination of HMDA transparency and CRA regulatory power, activists won substantial capital for their communities.

Between 1977 and 2004, Marchiel writes, “partnerships that grew from activists’ use of reinvestment regulations directed an estimated $1.7 trillion dollars to American cities...while increasing the flow of fair credit to minority communities.”

T

he storytelling in After Redlining is not limited to legislative maneuverings and dealings with ombudspersons.

Marchiel surfaces accounts of activist sting operations, confrontational direct action, and disturbing governmental counterintelligence efforts.

In 1970, with its multiracial coalition fraying and Black members demanding new leadership, the OBA elected a Black man named Mark Salone as the organization’s president.

Unbeknownst to the OBA electorate, Salone was an undercover Chicago policeman, part of the so-called Red Squad that, Marchiel writes, “targeted local political organizations like OBA that threatened to undermine the power of the local political machine.” Salone reported on organizers, missed meetings, and generally “botched” moments of opportunity for the movement. By 1971, the OBA was a “fractured organization,” albeit one still capable of coordinated activism.

Nor is After Redlining a history without heroes: the aforementioned Gale Cincotta, who remained an activist even after joining President Jimmy Carter’s National Commission on Neighborhoods; Shel Trapp, who schooled activists until his death in 2010; Tom Gaudette, trained

by Saul Alinsky himself, who set Austin’s anti-redlining movement on a multiracial path; Ed Bailey, among the first Black homeowners in his section of Austin and an OBA member; Robert Kuttner, a staffer for the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and founder of the magazine The American Prospect; Ron APRIL 1, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

LIT Grzywinski, a South Shore communitydevelopment banker who opened his bank’s books to educate activists and testified alongside them in favor of HMDA; Kristin Faust, a young banker who became an inside-industry advocate for profitable reinvestment that met the needs of low- and middle-income neighborhoods.

There is some dissonance, however, in Marchiel’s repeated mention of Black and Latinx activists’ valuable contributions to (and critiques of ) the reinvestment movement and the relatively few Black and Latinx activists named in After Redlining at the movement’s watershed moments. In the book’s introduction, Marchiel outlines the limitations of her “primary archive, the unprocessed papers of National People’s Action,” which “did not provide significant insight into tensions within the [reinvestment] movement.” Given that the birth and growth of the reinvestment movement is still in living memory for so many, After Redlining should serve as a foundation for further scholarly investigation that puts additional faces and names to the vital role that Black and Latinx activists played in the movement’s formation, struggle, and success.

F

or all of its concrete legislative and financial victories, Marchiel considers the reinvestment movement a failure by its own metrics.

Locally, “their attempt to create an integrated Austin ultimately failed,” she writes. Nationally, the federal government continued to rely on private lenders, not public funds, for reinvestment capital and stopped short of mandating the

allocation of credit to low- and middleincome city dwellers. Development money earmarked for cities did more for city-center residential districts, such as Chicago’s Printers Row, than it did for outlying neighborhoods. In the end, the systemic tide still swamped reinvestment activists and their stakeholders.

Marchiel herself, however, largely succeeds in advancing a corrective counter-narrative to the lobbyist’s lie that inspired her writing and research. In After Redlining’s conclusion, she ties up the threads of financial deregulation that run through her history of the reinvestment movement with an argument, convincing though brief, that deregulation itself set the stage for the 2008 housing-market crash. Storefront mortgage lenders, the core of what Marchiel calls “an unregulated financial service industry” not subject to activist-as-regulator interventions under the CRA, proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s, exploiting low- and middleincome borrowers, many of them Black and Latinx, with interest rates as many as three times the market rate. Deregulation also enabled further securitization of mortgages. The packaging and repackaging of mortgages as securities contributed to the crash while making it harder to identify the individuals and institutions responsible for it.

After Redlining joins the ranks of scholarly histories highlighting Chicago as the imperfect locus of grassroots, multiracial, multiethnic activist organizations that changed the status quo of their time in ways that still ameliorate aspects of our unjust present.

What is more, Marchiel’s account of the reinvestment movement’s go-bigger-

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or-go-home strategy offers a relevant historical perspective to contemporary activists who face, along with the communities for whom they advocate, a treacherously uncertain future.

T

he reinvestment movement abides today as People’s Action (PA), an organization with legacy ties to the NPA, Alliance for a Just Society, USAction, and other groups. Housing reform remains a focus of the modern PA, among a host of other campaign causes: health care, climate justice, and family economic security among them.

This wide array of policy objectives and PA’s rural organizing efforts reflect the reinvestment movement’s hard-earned knowledge of the interconnected, systemic nature of economic crises.

The existence of a vibrant, national, present-day incarnation of the reinvestment movement raises a stubbornly troublesome dimension of Marchiel’s book: its title. Though reinvestment activists may have stamped out the specific form of redlining that plagued American cities in the late 1960s and 1970s—no small achievement, this—contemporary urban America has still not entered, in any meaningful way, a post-redlining period. A recent WBEZ and City Bureau collaborative report showed that from 2012 through 2018, Chicago’s majority-white Lakeview neighborhood received twelve times more lending capital than was disbursed in the majority-Black Austin neighborhood.

Banks made more loans in majority-white Lincoln Park than in all of Chicago’s Black neighborhoods combined.

Moreover, according to a working paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago after Marchiel’s book had gone to print, the original federal redlining and yellowlining of the 1930s is still harming hundreds of thousands of Americans, many of them Black and Latinx, now in their thirties and forties.

The Chicago Fed’s analysis of urban cohorts “born in the 1970s and early 1980s” found that HOLC redlining and yellowlining had “a causal, and an economically meaningful, effect on outcomes like household income during adulthood, the probability of moving

upward toward the top of the income distribution, and modern credit scores.”

In other words, if you were born some three decades after HOLC maps were inked, on a block that the federal agency saw fit to code in red or yellow as being at higher risk of mortgage default, you likely make less money, enjoy less economic mobility, and suffer disproportionately limited access to credit compared to peers born just a few blocks away, across a line no less real for its near invisibility.

Redlining is not over. It evolves even as its negative outcomes compound.

On February 4, 2021, as reported in Crain’s Chicago Business, Chase Bank opened a branch in South Shore, part of a response to reports of the bank’s discriminatory lending practices in Chicago. Chase CEO Jamie Dimon announced the bank’s “targets” to provide “$600 million (over the next five years) in new mortgages for Blacks and new homeowners in Chicago neighborhoods.”

Should the funds make their way into the hands and homes for which they are intended—and histories such as Marchiel’s sow doubt as to financial institutions’ sincerity and commitment— another successful communitydevelopment partnership can be added to the running list. But it is difficult to conceive that any private effort, any more than the gaudy billions lent in deals struck under CRA-enabled activist regulation, can achieve scale significant enough to overcome the exponential negative impact of lending discrimination past and present. Either the federal government originally and recidivistically responsible for redlining will turn the systemic tide, or Black and Latinx residents of American cities will remain underwater. Rebecca K. Marchiel, After Redlining: The Urban Reinvestment Movement in the Era of Financial Deregulation, The University of Chicago Press, 296 pages.

Dave Reidy is the author of two books, including The Voiceover Artist: A Novel.

He last wrote for the Weekly about the history of yellowlining on the Southwest Side.

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