Truly Hard Wind

Posted on August 30, 2020 by admin

What in the U.S. Midwest would spur comparisons to a hurricane? What could spread damage over an equally wide area? It is a good bet that most people are unfamiliar with the word “derecho,” which comes from Spanish, meaning “straight,” but such a storm made itself felt just three weeks ago in Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, as well as parts of Nebraska and Wisconsin. The Spanish word with an adopted meaning in English refers to such a storm’s powerful straight-line winds, as opposed to another adapted Spanish word, “tornado,” literally meaning “turned,” which, of course, refers to a cyclonic, or spinning, meteorological phenomenon.

The Event

On August 10, a derecho took shape in eastern Nebraska and the southeastern corner of South Dakota early in the morning. The city of Omaha suffered some of the initial damage, with an estimated 57,000 people losing power. But as it roared across the center of Iowa, the storm, as derechos often do, rapidly gained wind speed until estimated winds of 140 miles per hour struck Cedar Rapids and surrounding Linn County in eastern Iowa. Nearby Iowa City, home of the University of Iowa, also suffered extensive damage. Derechos can and typically do strike with little warning, unlike hurricanes, but even at speeds of 90 to 100 mph, in this case, it still takes hours to cross Iowa from west to east, and even longer to reach Illinois and Indiana.

Thus, my first warning of what was to come, sitting here in Chicago, was a telephone alert from the University of Iowa around noon that day. I get such alerts because I am on the faculty, although I now teach remotely as an adjunct. But our landline and my cell phone are on the system, so the alerts come automatically. Fortunately, that gave me most of the afternoon to prepare for what was coming, which arrived in our area around 3:45 p.m. Winds and rain pounded on our skylights for nearly 45 minutes, leaving numerous branches and twigs on the ground from our stately American elm, which towers above our house and garage and has probably withstood other storms for at least a century. It was already huge when we built our house in 1994, and we chose to make it sure it remained. Even this storm caused it only minor damage.

The same could not be said of many street trees in parts of Chicago. Trees often collapsed on top of parked cars, leaving many owners to bemoan what became of their vehicles—or, in some cases, the roofs of their homes.

Even the repose of the dead was not left undisturbed. Graceland Cemetery, one of the more famous in Chicago, faces months of repairs and replanting and is closed for six weeks. The storm uprooted about 40 trees and damaged numerous gravestones and monuments. It had become a popular place for peaceful strolls and contemplation during the months of coronavirus-induced shutdown. After the storm, it was a visual mess that will cost about $250,000 to repair.

Removing damaged trees in Chicago’s Rogers Park.

One lesser-known by-product of derechos is tornadoes, which can be spun off from the shelf cloud as it moves through an area. In Chicago, two tornadoes, one EF-1 in the Rogers Park neighborhood along Lake Michigan near the city line with Evanston, literally buzzsawed trees in an area of densely built multifamily housing and small

Insurance claims agents inspect building damage in Rogers Park.

businesses. A few days later, I visited the area to shoot photos that appear here. At first, driving up Greenwood Avenue, I wondered where the damage was. But as I drove further north and approached W. Jarvis Ave., the answer became starkly obvious. I could not drive beyond that corner because the street was blocked; Jarvis was one way going east, but Jarvis east of Greenwood was also blocked. City trucks were removing damaged trees. After finding a way to park without impeding traffic, I encountered insurance agents on the ground shooting outside photos of nearby buildings, presumably for damaged masonry. Any damaged cars had already been removed.

That tornado, and another that reportedly skipped across the Eisenhower Expressway (I-290) on the West Side, dramatically demolished for some an old urban myth that tornadoes don’t strike urban areas. People believe this for various reasons, including how they think tall buildings disrupt wind circulation, but trust me: I’ve been involved in disaster recovery long enough to know that tornadoes do not discriminate against smaller towns. Rogers Park is very urban. Tornadoes go where they please. This specific tornado eventually skipped out over the lake, becoming a waterspout. But it left its mark.

The storm, by the way, ultimately spun off at least 17 documented tornadoes, mostly in northern Illinois, but a few in Wisconsin and Indiana. All were either EF-1 or EF-0 on the Enhanced Fujita scale. But by far, most of the damage resulted from the straight-line winds themselves, which were often in the range of 90 to 100 mph, with a top measured speed of 126 mph in Atkins, Iowa, making them basically of tornado or hurricane strength. And they sped, over the course of a single afternoon, across all or parts of several states.

By 4:30, the storm had continued its march into northwest Indiana, where it finally petered out. But what happened along the way?

Iowans can attest that it functioned across much of their state like a Category 2, maybe even Category 3, hurricane. Lyz Lenz, a columnist for the Cedar Rapids Gazette, noted in a guest column for the Washington Post four days later that the winds had damaged “more than 10 million acres, or 43 percent, of the state’s corn and soybean crop.” The reduction in harvest in Iowa is likely to be between one-fourth and one-half. The heading on her column referred to the storm as an “inland hurricane” that most people had not heard about. The damage was massive enough to be visible in satellite images.

The damage was not just to crops on the ground, but to hundreds of millions of bushels in storage bins on farms and in commercial storage facilities, according to the Iowa Department of Agriculture. Toppled grain bins were a common site.

Damage to Chinese House roof in Grinnell. Photo by Rachel Bly.

Despite those staggering figures, that was only the beginning. Between Indiana and Iowa, four people died from either falling trees or electrocution, and, in one case, a mobile home tipped over by high winds. Losses of electric power affected approximately 585,000 Iowans, or roughly 20 percent, while 1.9 million lost power in neighboring Illinois. Tree damage in Linn County totaled in the hundreds of thousands, and most buildings suffered anywhere from mild to catastrophic damage. In small towns, like Grinnell, building damage and tree damage to cars was also extensive. Here, I wish to thank Rachel Bly, director of Conference Operations and Events for Grinnell College, for sending me dozens of photographs she shot after the event. Bly, I might note, has a certificate in emergency management from Park University in addition to her MPA from Drake University. The images she shared help convey some reality to the trauma that occurred. Hundreds of other small communities suffered similar impacts. Not surprisingly, Gov. Kim Reynolds issued a state disaster declaration by August 14 for 25 counties, and has sought a federal declaration from President Trump, citing an estimated $4 billion in damages. By August 19, Trump had signed a declaration for Public Assistance (PA) but not Individual Assistance (IA) for Iowa. PA provides aid for restoring public infrastructure, such as roads and bridges and community facilities, while IA provides direct aid to individuals for reasons such as loss of housing.

Power line damage in Grinnell. Photo by Rachel Bly.

Photo by Rachel Bly

Roof seen through the window. Photo by Rachel Bly.

Inside a damaged salon in Grinnell. Photo by Rachel Bly.

Derechos as a Natural Hazard

All this raises the question of what we know about derechos as a wind-related hazard. I will confess that I spent most of my life never having heard the word, let alone understanding what it meant. It is not the most common occurrence, but it certainly ranks among the most destructive. To my surprise, I learned from Wikipedia that the term was coined in 1888 by a German-American scientist, Gustavus Detlef Hinrichs, who had emigrated to St. Louis just before the Civil War. He wrote in the American Meteorological Journal about a storm that struck Iowa in 1877 and described its unique characteristics. Nonetheless, even in the Midwest today, many people are unfamiliar with the term—until they hear it on the news, as they did on August 10 amid storm warnings.

The gust front “arcus” cloud on the leading edge of a derecho-producing storm system. The photo was taken on the evening of July 10, 2008 in Hampshire, Illinois. Credit: Brittney Misialek. From National Weather Service website.

There are several types of derechos, but the National Weather Service describes a derecho as a “widespread, long-lived windstorm that is associated with a band of rapidly moving showers as thunderstorms.” More specifically, it defines the phenomenon as a swath of damage that “extends more than 240 miles (about 400 kilometers) and includes wind gusts of at least 58 mph (93 km/h) or greater along most of its length.” In plain English, this is a huge, regional storm, not some localized thunderstorm. It exhibits straight-line winds that can be at least double the minimum in the definition, and the August 10 event involved winds far above 58 mph in most locations. Like all such storms, it is a product of unstable atmospheric systems, in this case typically involving a bow-shaped front in a large squall line.

The storms are typically a mid-latitude phenomenon, making North America and the Midwestern U.S. particularly susceptible, but they occur elsewhere in the world as well, including southern latitudes (southeastern Brazil and Argentina), South Africa, China, and even eastern Europe, where a derecho struck parts of Estonia in August 2010, and near Berlin in Germany in 2002. The August 10 event was not the first one I have witnessed in Chicago—another struck in July 2011 and disabled electric power for nearly a million people—but it was certainly the largest in a long time.

70% of all derechos occur between the months of May-August (the warm season). The other 30% occur during the cool season. From National Weather Service website.

As a mitigation planning response, almost no hazard mitigation plan (produced for FEMA approval as a condition of eligibility for federal hazard mitigation grants) for any state or community east of the Rockies (with the possible exception of Florida) should fail to identify derechos as a potential hazard. Moreover, especially in the Midwest, it may be time for states and communities to reexamine their building codes for wind resistance as a means of limiting future damages from derechos. Finally, it may also be time for many communities to examine more closely their urban forestry programs for adequate attention to hazardous tree management. That does not mean refusing to plant trees or removing them unnecessarily as a mindless precaution. It does mean engaging professional urban foresters in an assessment of the urban tree canopy with an eye to ensuring forest health and removing those trees that are most likely to fail under severe wind pressure. Already, the call has arisen for such reforms in Chicago. It is time for planners, environmentalists, disaster professionals, open space advocates, and concerned citizens to seize the moment while they have the public’s attention.

Jim Schwab

Plotting Post-Pandemic Recovery

Posted on July 20, 2020 by admin

Photo by Carolyn Torma

In recent years, the development of local or regional recovery plans following major natural disasters has become increasingly common. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has long encouraged such planning, and I led the production of two major FEMA-funded reports from the American Planning Association on the topic—Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction (PAS 483/484, 1998) and Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery: Next Generation (PAS 576, 2014). I’ve spoken repeatedly on the topic, trained planners, and valued the collective knowledge of the two teams we assembled to make those projects happen. The underlying idea is to help a community assess its losses, reassess its goals, and find the silver lining in the dark cloud of the disaster that will allow it to rebuild better and stronger than before. This is the central concept of community resilience: the capacity to learn from such events, adapt to the changes they require, and move forward.

The idea of natural disasters has generally encompassed those caused primarily by meteorological and geological disturbances, such as storms and earthquakes, though it includes impacts exacerbated by human mistakes in building and planning. Disasters necessarily involve the collision of natural forces with the human and built environment, which has caused some people to question the very use of the word “natural” in connection with disasters. Personally, I am comfortable with the term “natural disaster” so long as we understand that no disaster exists without this interaction.

But there are those disasters where damage to the built environment is a secondary consideration, and the loss of lives is primary. Drought is somewhere in the middle. Damage to structures can occur, but only as the result of the slow, nagging loss of moisture in the air and soil. Heat waves can take hundreds of lives without affecting a single structure, though they can put enormous stress on energy and transportation infrastructure.

Pandemics, however, fall into another category entirely as biological disasters. They occur when bacteria or viruses emerge in the environment and attack humans before we have developed any effective immunity or vaccines. The current COVID-19 crisis fits this mold precisely. It can be far more devastating than a natural disaster simply because it can roam far more freely across the planet, as did the 1918 influenza pandemic, striking down hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. Before the era of modern medicine, pandemics like the bubonic plague in the Middle Ages could kill half of the affected population. Even without vaccines, we at least have the huge advantage of understanding how such microbial threats spread. Our disadvantage in the U.S. has been national leadership, starting with the President, that has been psychologically allergic to scientific advice. The result has been needless loss of life on a colossal scale.

It was a matter of time before some community, even without such federal leadership, applied many of the principles of recovery planning to the coronavirus pandemic. One critical question related to recovery is identifying the point at which the crisis is over, or at least waning. In natural disasters, drought being again the exception, this point becomes clear within a matter of days, or even hours in the case of tornadoes, as the storm passes. However, weather systems such as that which produced the 1993 Midwest floods, can last for weeks or even an entire summer. But at some point, it becomes clear that the emergency is over, and planning for long-term recovery can begin. In the absence of a vaccine, however, it is less clear when we can use the “all clear” signal for a pandemic. Right now, in the U.S., it is painfully clear that the rush to reopen is producing unconscionable and shocking consequences across the South and Southwest, and in a few other locations as well. It is incredibly hard, perhaps even impossible, to plan meaningfully for recovery when you are still stoking the fire by facilitating the spread of the virus.

Nonetheless, some states, notably including New York, much of New England, and Illinois, have fought hard against the odds to bring down infection rates, which are now a fraction of what they were in April or May. Their victory remains tenuous, considering the larger national crisis that remains a growing threat to public health, but Chicago under Mayor Lori Lightfoot has announced a list of states whose residents must quarantine for 14 days upon arrival, notably including Florida, Arizona, and Texas. Later, Iowa was added. By July 17, the Cook County Department of Public Health expanded that quarantine area to include all of suburban Cook County except a handful of suburbs that maintain their own health departments, and 17 states are on the list with new case rates exceeding 15 per 100,000 people per day. While it is nearly impossible to monitor all arrivals, the message is clear: We don’t want to re-create the problems we so recently overcame.

That is the context in which a large Recovery Task Force the city assembled released a recent report, Forward Together: Building a Stronger Chicago, which examines how Chicago could build a vibrant recovery from the coronavirus experience. Because such reports, especially those involving dozens of contributors and participants, are never crafted overnight, it is worth noting that the effort was launched on April 23, at a time when the outcome was far from clear. Neither the city nor the state could be certain then how long the problem would last or whether the stay-at-home orders and other measures would succeed at all in the near term. As of July 18, Illinois had dramatically increased its testing rate and brought its positivity rate for coronavirus tests down to 2.9 percent, well below most rates elsewhere, although it remains higher in Chicago at 5.4 percent.

So far, the strict measures announced in March have produced measured success, and the task force used that time to look farther down the road to the kind of city that might emerge from this ordeal. Forward Together is, to be clear, not a true recovery plan; it is billed as an “advisory report.” But it is the closest thing to a recovery plan that I have seen so far, and merits scrutiny and consideration for what it offers. (New York Mayor Bill de Blasio promised his own “road map to recovery” on April 26.)

The task force itself was broadly based. Lightfoot co-chaired it with Samuel Skinner, a businessman, lawyer, and political operative who served as both Secretary of Transportation and White House Chief of Staff under President George H.W. Bush. He has a long track record in public affairs. Committee chairs and members included elected officials, among them Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who was Lightfoot’s run-off opponent in the 2019 mayor election, labor and community representatives, business leaders, academicians, and civic leaders, including some prominent activists. The task force was broadly inclusive, which bodes well for public buy-in on the resulting recommendations. Moreover, the report shows significant evidence of wide community outreach, including a youth forum that tapped the ideas of teens and young adults.

Like all big cities, Chicago has witnessed significant disparities in impacts of the pandemic on specific disadvantaged groups, including the elderly, but also Blacks and Latinx residents. While these two groups each comprise 28 percent of Chicago’s population, they respectively comprise 30 and 48 percent of the cases of coronavirus and 44 and 32 percent of the resulting deaths. This is an important backdrop to the discussion of goals in the report.

The report discusses four specific initiatives to move the city forward and address many of the inequities and vulnerabilities exposed by the coronavirus. Invest South/West aims to bring public and private investment to those neighborhoods in the city that have suffered historic disinvestment, and where COVID-19 rates have generally been highest. Racial and ethnic inequities in coronavirus impact have been notably more severe among both Blacks and Latinx residents, in large part because of lower levels of insurance coverage but also because of differences in job exposures, poverty levels, and living conditions. Solutions Toward Ending Poverty (STEP) is a new program, announced in February by Lightfoot, that is attempting to identify evidence-based metrics that can plot a road map toward reducing urban poverty in Chicago. We Will Chicago—Citywide Plan aims over three years to develop what amounts to a comprehensive plan, something lacking in Chicago until now. The report says We Will Chicago “will encompass all elements of citywide planning.” Finally, Chicago Connected will aim to shrink the digital gap between more affluent and poorer neighborhoods by making broadband more readily available, a need whose urgency has clearly been exposed by the closing of schools and the challenges of assisting children from poorer households with remote learning.

A significant part of the report focuses on the economic development opportunities that Chicago can pursue to restore prosperity as the pandemic recedes. It is clear that certain categories of jobs—food service, retail, administrative, and manufacturing, but also arts and entertainment and personal services—have suffered the brunt of economic displacement from the pandemic. The report notes the opportunity for Chicago, as a result of some economic changes wrought by the pandemic, including shifts to online retail, to focus on transportation, distribution, and logistics (TDL) segments of the economy. These would take advantage of a longstanding Chicago advantage as a transportation hub.

TDL, however, faces its own challenges of inequitable opportunity. Food insecurity represents a serious challenge in “food desert” neighborhoods. Resolving those inequities is the intended purpose of the four initiatives, but it is hardly a challenge that will be resolved overnight. It has taken years of unequal opportunity, to say nothing of deliberate discrimination, to create the current dilemma. Failure to address these problems will slow down or even stagnate Chicago’s recovery from the current crisis.

The report makes what strikes me as an honest effort to address social services gaps that, if anything, grew under the previous administration of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who closed some mental health centers in a bid to reduce budget deficits. The problem is that such reduced access to services only exacerbates problems among those needing such help and may increase other costs as a result. For example, a significant proportion of the inmates at the Cook County Jail (and many others around the nation) suffers from mental illness.

There is an urgent need to restore those services, but more importantly, the report shows that mental health services are far more prevalent on a per-person basis in more affluent, whiter neighborhoods than in poorer areas. For instance, 48 percent of whites with mental illness were receiving services in 2015, but just 31 percent of both Blacks and Latinx with mental illness were doing so. A map toward the end of the report shows differences shows a variation in presence of mental health providers ranging from zero or well below 0.25 per thousand residents in certain poorer areas of the city to well over 2 in predominantly white, middle-class areas and hundreds per thousand in downtown Chicago, a district well-nigh inaccessible to many South Side residents.

This may reflect, among other things, a disproportionate presence of white professionals in mental health and a need to bring more minority psychiatrists and psychologists to those neighborhoods. Reopening clinics in the neediest areas of the city would be a major step forward. As for the connection to coronavirus, the stress induced by greatly increased unemployment, to say nothing of job pressures within health care, can contribute to mental health challenges. Perhaps the most noteworthy proposal in this section of the plan is the recommendation to create a dedicated 211 line whereby residents can access a wide range of social services. It strikes me as essential, also, to reduce pressure on police to respond to personal mental health crises by instead responding to such incidents, to the extent possible, with mental health professionals and social workers.

As I noted, this is framed as an “advisory report.” I strongly suspect, however, given the tenor of the moment, that its recommendations will find widespread support among Chicagoans. What remains to be seen is how well voters and aldermen hold the administration’s feet to the fire to make it all happen. It is not enough to have confidence in a mayor who seems determined to make it happen. Implementation will require broad-based commitment to achieving the goals the report lays out. That includes embedding those goals in the comprehensive planning process that We Will Chicago envisions, and enacting measures to move them forward.

What is important about this effort for the rest of the country is the very idea of mounting such a broad-based effort to produce a forward-looking analysis of how our cities can recover from the coronavirus pandemic. Many may first have to learn how mayors and governors can exert the leadership, and evince the humility to consider the science, necessary to get the virus under control, as many other countries in Europe and Asia have done. These leaders must also be open to hearing from a widely representative cross-section of their citizens in preparing similar reports. Pandemic recovery planning is for all of us an experiment that can build on the foundations of other kinds of recovery plans while recognizing and thoroughly exploring the unique features of this monumental public health challenge. It is no small matter, and should not be treated as such, politics notwithstanding.

Jim Schwab

A Taste of Reopening

Posted on June 14, 2020 by admin

People in the Chicago area, and many beyond, some well beyond, are familiar with the city’s decades-old Taste of Chicago, featuring booths in Grant Park from dozens of the city’s iconic restaurants. Wandering the closed streets within the park, you can get pizza, jerk chicken, Indian foods, and a wide variety of other edibles while listening to entertainment and enjoying the sun, as long as the weather holds. The event has spawned numerous imitators throughout the suburbs, such as Taste of Aurora and Taste of Evanston.

Humans? Who cares? But thanks for the post.

But not this year. Big festivals are out, social distancing is in, masks are de rigueur, and the restaurants offer take-out or delivery, if anything. Some are now adapting to offering outside dining when weather permits, but indoor dining must await the next phase of reopening, not only in Chicago but throughout Illinois. Blame coronavirus, but please don’t try to tell us it’s a hoax, or that you can cure it with hydroxychloroquine, or that distancing doesn’t matter. Here in Chicago, we can read the numbers and follow the logic, and we know better. Someone else can drink the Clorox, or the Kool-Aid, or whatever. The vast majority of us prefer to stay safe. And yes, we are aware that the demonstrations for racial justice may produce an uptick in cases. On the other hand, we know that the issue of police reform has been brewing for a long time, and people are impatient. It is not hypocritical to insist that reform is overdue after the death of George Floyd.

Within the past week in Chicago, a few things reopened, cautiously. Navy Pier, which competes with Millennium Park as the city’s leading tourist attraction, now offers outdoor dining but does not yet allow tourists to wander the stores inside the complex. That is okay; caution is in order. We do not need to follow the practice of some states that either never instituted a stay-at-home order (like neighboring Iowa) or reversed one with a highly partisan state Supreme Court decision (Wisconsin, you’re not helping!). Unlike, say, Alabama and Georgia, Illinois’s numbers of COVID cases and deaths have been declining. It would be nice to keep it that way.

My wife and I reached our 35^th anniversary on June 8. Occasionally, we’ve celebrated elsewhere (Honolulu, or Charleston, SC), but usually we’ve eaten out in Chicago, attended the Blues Fest, or done something else that was fun. This year, we had a few too many distractions just before the actual date (like getting the air conditioning fixed), so we chose to wait until Saturday, June 13, for a delayed event. We chose to investigate Navy Pier and enjoy a leisurely outdoor lunch instead, accompanied by two grandsons, Angel, 16, and Alex, 11. The outdoor tables at Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville seat four anyway. We decided to get a Taste of Reopening.

Alex alongside the Navy Pier Ferris wheel, closed for now.

Did I mention gusty? Shortly after we were seated and the waiter had brought four large plastic cups of water, the wind caught my wife by surprise and knocked over her water. It spread across the entire table, soaking the paper menus and dripping onto both my lap and Alex’s. We hurriedly sought the waiter’s help and used paper towels to wipe up the mess as fast as possible. Fortunately, we had all chosen our orders, so we could dispose of the menus and laugh at the absurdity of it all. You can’t get angry with the wind. Besides, what is summer for? Roll with the punches.

Restaurants have all struggled with the restrictions, but I must commend the generosity of our hosts. Once the waiter shot photos of us after learning of our anniversary. (He mentioned his own mother celebrated a birthday on June 9). He also ensured that the manager complimented us with a $15 reduction of our bill. When we all ordered key lime pie for dessert, he brought a fifth slice as an anniversary bonus. They were doing all they could to help us celebrate within the limitations of the tentative reopening, and they clearly appreciated our patronage. My order of teriyaki shrimp and chicken, accompanied by broccoli and rice with a slice of teriyaki pineapple, was delicious. My wife and our grandsons made other choices, but no one complained. (Yes, we left a generous tip.)

A sailboat glides past a Lake Michigan lighthouse near Navy Pier.

The Chicago Shakespeare Theater at Navy Pier remains closed, but its time will come.

Jean and the boys pose in front of a statute commemorating captains on the Great Lakes.

We walked the length of the pier afterwards and can testify that the lakefront scenery remains as compelling as ever. However cautious the reopening, we appreciate the emphasis on public safety over the more pell-mell rush to reopen occurring elsewhere in the nation. We do not need a resurgence of COVID-19, which has already claimed more than 6,000 lives in Illinois. Let the disease wind down instead of giving it a second wind. We will take our time, just as we did in strolling the sights at Navy Pier. Life is beautiful if you act smart and protect it.

Jim Schwab

Weep for America, but Build Leadership

Posted on June 4, 2020 by admin

I weep for my neighborhood. I weep for Chicago.

I weep for the state of criminal justice in America when a police officer, hand in his pocket, a look of utter indifference on his face, feels the sense of impunity that empowers him to kneel on a black man’s neck in broad daylight for more than eight minutes until he dies.

I cheer for America’s resilient sense of justice when bystanders train their cell phone cameras on this officer and refuse to back down in documenting injustice while they plead for the man’s life.

These mixed feelings have haunted me for more than a week now, as events have evolved across the nation. I am glad that the state of Minnesota has arrested and charged officer Derek Chauvin for murder, not out of a desire for revenge but because justice demands it. The sense of impunity that allowed him to ignore bystanders’ pleas to remove his knee from George Floyd’s neck must be the first casualty in this crisis. Serious police department reform is a necessity. As I write this, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has announced that the other three officers at the scene have been charged with aiding and abetting the crime.

But America also faces some serious lessons in civic leadership, from top to bottom. At the White House, for at least a few more months, we are stuck with a president who, facing the second major crisis of his final year in office after failing to prepare for or respond effectively to a pandemic, now is fanning the flames of hatred while throwing matches on the fire. Emerging from his protective bunker in the White House, he used National Park Service police to clear his path of peaceful protesters for the mere purpose of standing in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, without invitation or permission to use it as a camera prop, to hold a Bible high while threatening violence against protesters and insulting the governors and mayors who have done the real hard work to bring calm to their communities. It is thankless work, lie-awake-at-night work, very unlike the simple-minded task of tweeting empty threats to violate the Constitution. Most presidents, while asserting their proper authority, have sought to unite the country. Trump prefers to drive a wedge with the help of a Bible he does not understand and seldom if ever reads.

Amidst this dearth of national leadership, there is a shortage of leadership on the streets that reflects both deep anger and a failure of our society to create a sense that everyone has a stake in the success and prosperity of our communities. And, to be sure, there are criminal elements that are only too happy to take advantage of these gaps in equity and leadership. That is where we find ourselves now, today, this week, this summer, this year, while still seeking to recover economically, medically, and emotionally from the toll of a coronavirus pandemic whose toll in America now exceeds 100,000 lives, and counting.

As most readers of this blog know, I live in Chicago. Over the weekend and into Monday evening, at bedtime, I could hear the sirens and fire trucks and helicopters in the distance and know that not all was well. I could see on local television channels the coverage of looting that damaged familiar areas of the city, as well as protests against police brutality. But I had not left the house, for a variety of reasons. However, it became clear that Wicker Park, an area less than a mile from us, was struck by looters Sunday evening, leaving windows smashed and property damaged. Small business owners have been waiting patiently, amid considerable financial angst, for the promised partial reopening from the pandemic on June 3, a few days after many state restrictions were lifted on May 29. And then this.

On Tuesday, after both a telemedicine meeting at 2 p.m., following up on my recent hospitalization, and a team meeting for a planning consulting proposal at 3 p.m., I decided it was time to find out what had happened. I walked down North Avenue to the six-way corner of North, Damen, and Milwaukee, the nerve center of Wicker Park, an area that gentrified in the 1980s and 1990s but retains an artsy demeanor, with independent bookshops, cafes, and art stores. I chose not to drive or even bicycle because being on foot seemed to me the best way to absorb a full sense of our tragedy and dilemma, even though I knew Wicker Park was far from being the most hard-hit area in the city. Those questionable labels belong to the downtown, temporarily cordoned off to all but essential workers, with many Chicago River bridges raised to prevent access, and to the South and West Sides, predominantly black areas where the torching of stores often exacerbated the food desert that had only recently been ameliorated with the opening of new grocery stores. One owner of Subway shops saw all six of his stores on the South Side destroyed.

The urologist with whom I spoke during the 2 p.m. appointment had recently moved to a high-rise near his downtown office in the Northwestern Memorial Hospital complex. I asked him about the situation. “It’s terrible,” he said flatly, then noted that he had walked down Michigan Avenue, and “it felt like Detroit.” Anyone who has spent time on the usually vibrant Magnificent Mile until recently knows what a stunning statement that is. Buildings are boarded up, many were looted, some were torched. At a recent mayoral press conference, the city buildings commissioner noted that her department was reaching out to the owners of at least 180 damaged buildings citywide to provide support for rebuilding. It may go without saying, but the damage harms not only the business owners, but employees who had fervently been hoping to return to work, many of them black, Latino, or Asian.

The walk down North Avenue was more routine than jarring, interrupted only by pedestrians passing in the opposite direction, some with dogs on leashes, some wearing masks, some not. It was at the six-way intersection that I began to see the impact of the past weekend. As I made the wide-right turn onto Milwaukee Avenue, it became clear that perhaps 80 percent of the businesses in the next half-mile southward toward Division St. were boarded up. Many businesses may have done so proactively, seeing the damage to others and wanting to avoid a similar fate on a subsequent night. Others, like Ragstock, had been attacked over the weekend, with windows smashed, merchandise stolen or destroyed, and equipment ransacked. It was hard to tell which was which, but the overall effect was that of significant lost opportunity and delayed reopening of a vital commercial district on Chicago’s North Side. For those that had been attacked and looted, the work of restoration could easily delay reopening by weeks.

Nonetheless, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who toured the affected areas on Tuesday (June 2), reported that the overwhelming reaction of business owners when she asked about possible delays in reopening was to encourage her to move forward, which she is now doing. Not everyone is pleased because of the induced inequality of opportunity, with consequent job losses and lost incomes, due to the damages that were inflicted. The only way forward is to assist with cleanup and rebuilding, not to put everything on hold.

Nor would everyone be pleased with my focus on this question. There are many who would argue that the rioting is an expression of frustration and powerlessness, and for some, I am sure, that is true. As Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page notes, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, explained riots in the 1960s by saying, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” He was not condoning such activity but trying to impress upon white Americans that racial justice cannot forever be denied or delayed without serious social consequences.

A small crowd gathers in front of Walgreen’s in late afternoon for a peaceful protest.

But it is important to raise the issue of how the protests against police violence can and did, in some cases, go awry. One factor is the pent-up frustration of which King wrote. Another is the deliberate attempts by those of ill will to take advantage of unrest to advance their own purposes, which may be criminal or manipulative. The latter category would include all manner of provocative agents either seeking to undermine the protests by discrediting them or by bending and twisting them to the will of extremists who would not easily carry the day in an open, democratic discussion of protest goals.

It has never been hard to find examples of either motive. At 70, I am a veteran of the 1960s and 1970s who has joined his own fair share of marches for the environment, to oppose war, or for civil rights. I can easily remember learning, in my college years, how to identify agents provocateurs of any political stripe who would seek opportunities to redirect a discussion or a protest toward unfortunate ends. And I also know that it was the spiritual strength of leaders like King, or Nelson Mandela, or Mohandas Gandhi that helped to maintain a discipline of purpose in countless demonstrations and protests around the world. Gandhi used the Hindi word “satyagraha,” meaning “spirit power,” which he said gave otherwise beaten-down people a sense of self-respect, purpose, and moral strength. Christians may find such solace in the Holy Spirit, but the concept has its own universality.

Why do I raise this issue? Because, clearly, we need a way to move beyond the stigma of riots and looting to maintain the dignity of the cause for which George Floyd’s needless death has become a catalyst. We need a way to channel the power of the protests to make the provocateurs and the criminals unwelcome, and to harness the anger of those wayward souls easily led astray. That requires the sense of purpose that spirit power unleashes in making leaders of those who have felt left behind. It requires instilling vision.

Make no mistake. I am proud of the political leadership provided at this time in Illinois by both Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Lightfoot, as well as many others in lesser posts, as well as some mayors and governors elsewhere. But the leadership needed to save and redirect the protests will not come from politicians. It will come from neighborhood leaders like Jahmal Cole, with the sense of humility that comes of building movements from the ground up, and thus understanding how to reach and relate to people where it matters. Cole spoke at Mayor Lightfoot’s press conference last Sunday (May 31), along with clergy and other civic leaders, but his impassioned speech reappeared on the op-ed page of the Chicago Tribune two days later, under the headline, “Looting isn’t the answer, but organizing is.” He distinguishes between mobilizing people and organizing them, making the powerful case that organizing is the true hard work, with fundamentals, or basic rules. Leadership does not just happen. It is trained, but it also grows organically from heart-felt commitment.

Cole closes with a “message to the cops,” stating that a badge “gives you a platform that will elevate your true character.” It will either amplify your wickedness or amplify your platform to do good. Perhaps it can be said that, in a much less formal way, joining a movement can do the same. Every protester faces a moral choice. We need leaders who redirect wayward energy and identify and exclude evil intent. They will not succeed in every instance. Many instances of crime and looting will be out of their control and depend far more on police response and readiness. But their efforts will nonetheless help our nation reframe the debate over racial injustice.

Jim Schwab

Isolated Adjustments

Posted on March 30, 2020 by admin

I miss my gym already, closed just two weeks ago. There was a profusion of equipment to keep anyone in shape, whether you were working on legs, biceps, core, cardio, some combination, whatever. Here at home, I have small barbells, some ankle weights, and perhaps most importantly, a newly tuned 26-inch bicycle. There are other bicycles in our garage, mostly to accommodate grandchildren but also one my wife uses. We were out briefly yesterday for a ride in the neighborhood before the blustery spring winds brought more rain.

Closed entrance to the 606 Trail at California Ave.

A friend joked a few days ago that, after closing the Lakefront trail, adjacent parks, and beaches, and the 606 Trail plus park district field houses and playgrounds, Mayor Lori Lightfoot may have been praying for rain to enforce the stay-at-home, social distancing restrictions in effect throughout Illinois. If so, she got her wish over the weekend, but the weather is changing already, and Chicagoans are likely to take advantage of it. That’s okay, as long as we use those big park spaces that are still open to maintain social distance and help slow the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

Alex at a closed entrance to the 606 Trail.

Quite frankly, just one week ago, after picking up my bike from a nearby shop that performed the tuning, I used it to ride a portion of the 606 Trail, feeling the liberation that comes with such a small adventure. That was Monday afternoon, and the closures came on Thursday. I was not surprised. The 606, which is a great community-building amenity in normal times, seemed far too narrow and crowded for public safety in these times. I have not returned. Future rides will be on winding paths in the 700-acre Humboldt Park, where one can move past other human beings without encroaching on personal space. And I can still invigorate my body and spirit with some healthy exercise.

Humboldt Park is open, but the playgrounds are closed.

So, what is this blog post about, exactly? It is about adjustments in the time of COVID-19. But let me be clear. I am sharing the adjustments being made in our three-member household, and everyone else is making their own. Each set of adjustments is unique, yet many of us can learn from one another. I am also painfully aware that we are safer and in a better position financially than many people who have lost jobs or are suffering lost income, or have a sick family member. I can empathize, while knowing their experience will unquestionably be very different. And I wish such people the very best. Our nation is in for one tough slog against a ghastly microbial enemy.

My wife and I are both in our early seventies, but our three-member household includes an 11-year-old grandson, for whom we assumed guardianship two years ago. His mother has long faced mental health challenges. Two weeks ago, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) closed, and as of now, they will remain so until April 20. After that? Who knows? At first, the closure was for two weeks, but that would have ended today. Officials at all levels of government have underestimated the scope and duration of this problem, but the important thing is that they are learning daily and adjusting strategies, as we all are. Universities have suspended semesters and moved classes online. A friend of mine who teaches at an area community college admits to being “dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21^st century” as he learns online teaching skills. I, on the other hand, have already been teaching online for the University of Iowa. My one class each year occurs in the fall, so the question is whether we enroll enough students to move forward by August. The odds seem good, but so much changes so quickly. Again, who knows? I will have to wait for the answer.

I practice what I call “alleged retirement,” which involves a part-time mix of teaching, consulting, public speaking, and writing. At worst, my wife, Jean, a retired teacher, and I can live off our pensions and Social Security. We would have to retrench if I had no outside income, some provided by the university, but we could survive. That makes us feel far more secure than I know is the case for gig workers, restaurant and hospitality workers, travel and tourism workers, and many others affected by shutdowns and restrictions aimed at containing contagion.

Jean in front of Moos School, now closed because of coronavirus.

Meanwhile, precisely because she is a teacher, my wife works with Alex on reading and math, so that lost school days do not translate entirely into lost learning. But that has involved its own learning curve. In the first week, we both noticed Alex’s ability to refocus his time on television and video games. We were busy figuring things out in that week of canceled St. Patrick’s Day events and the Illinois primary, in which Jean was an election judge. But we discussed the situation, and Jean quickly began to insist on specific hours for learning exercises. I am grateful, and hope Alex is, for her knowledge of teaching methods to keep him fresh on everything from multiplication to vocabulary expansion. I can only imagine what single mothers with four children no longer attending school must be doing to cope with the situation. Many in Chicago or rural Illinois or throughout America do not have Internet, or lack personal computers, and lack daily connection with the schools that kept their children busy until just recently. We have a 16-year-old grandson who is a high school sophomore. He is staying with his father, who works long hours in a warehouse to pay the bills. While we provided Angel with a small laptop at Christmas, I have noticed that CPS is not updating information on Aspen, its grade- and assignment-tracking online program, so we have no idea what, if anything, he should be doing in his classes. I used to help him with courses like Spanish, but now I have not a clue what he should be doing. It is as if CPS just vanished into thin air. The only solution from a learning perspective may be to extend the school year in June—but only if we have coronavirus under control by then. Otherwise, you could take his lost opportunities and multiply them by the tens of thousands across the city.

Then there is the drumbeat of coronavirus news to which people can subject themselves if they sit in front of the television all day long. I choose not to do that because I find that one hour of news tells me 90 percent of what I need to know, barring some breaking announcement, and the rest is repetition. I read the Chicago Tribune thoroughly each morning. My wife knows counselors and others who suggest limiting exposure to such news to reduce anxiety. She has taken to using some online meditation one of them has provided, and it works for her. I don’t share the anxiety because I am a different sort of person. My professional experience in the urban planning field is heavy on planning for disasters and disaster recovery. I read the news with an analytical eye, looking for clues to what we, as a society or region or city, can do better, and often turning that into commentary on this blog, but also applying it in various planning tasks. Since I retired from the American Planning Association (APA), many of those tasks have been pro bono activities, such as serving on policy guide task forces and chairing APA’s Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division. There is no shortage of opportunities, and I am grateful every day for the chance to contribute something through all those channels. It’s not all about earning money. Just helping makes our lives richer; how we do it depends on our skill set and interests.

But clearly, the precautions we are all observing can be frustrating and lead to adjustments. Travel, in most cases, is a non-starter for the near future. Little more than a month ago, I was in Rockport, Texas, assisting the APA Texas chapter with a Hurricane Harvey recovery event that allowed Texas planners to interact with planners from New York and New Jersey who could share perspectives from Sandy recovery. Two weeks later, after a quick recovery from a mild case of the flu, I was in Kearney, Nebraska, speaking at the annual conference of the Nebraska Planning & Zoning Association, sharing knowledge and ideas with colleagues there. The first hints of a truly serious public health catastrophe were becoming clear, and that became my last trip so far this year. By March 18, APA had canceled its annual National Planning Conference in Houston, an event that has typically drawn about 5,000 people. Not this year. As a division leader, I am involved in many of the leadership discussions about what comes next in taking many meetings and sessions and other events online, and moving forward. This is happening across the board to numerous organizations of widely varying sizes, with huge impacts on the hotel, airline, and convention industries not only nationwide but across the world. Caught in the maws of this economic and public health earthquake are millions of workers.

Yet, as obvious as this seems to me, with my laser focus on news that matters, I have learned that not everyone is fully aware of its consequences. Alex’s mother invited us to visit her apartment, and Jean declined because we have no way of judging how safe it is. Then, two other people visiting her apartment suggested coming to our house to visit Alex. Again, Jean said that would have to wait, but they seemed only marginally aware of developments like restaurant closures and social distancing. Meanwhile, my mother, whose resilience at an advanced age has been stunning, was released last week from a hospital in suburban Cleveland after a brief non-COVID illness to a rehab facility, where she is confined to her room for 14 days because she had been in a hospital. Visitors are not permitted, as they also will not be when she finally returns to her retirement home. In short, although I have two siblings who live near her, I could not visit even if I chose to drive there.

But that brings me to a closing note. I can stay home not only because I am “allegedly retired,” but because I am not a health care worker. Their adjustments have been the reverse of those of most of us, involving thorough engagement, exposure to life-threatening infection, and long hours of treating growing numbers of patients. And not just in urban areas. As of today, for example, Illinois has 4,596 reported cases, resulting in 65 deaths, spread across 40 of 102 counties. Small towns and rural areas will not be immune. I just heard New York Gov. Cuomo note that COVID-19 has spread to all but one county in his state.

Amidst all our concerns, the ducks in the lagoon at Humboldt Park are blissfully oblivious to human problems with the novel coronavirus.

We’re all making adjustments, most of us in our homes, but our public health workers, doctors, and nurses are making theirs at the front lines. We owe them a huge debt of gratitude and everything we can do to support them, especially those who have voluntarily returned to work from retirement, or serve in the National Guard, and didn’t have to take those risks. God bless them all, every last courageous one of them.

Jim Schwab

Weak Links in the Chain

Posted on March 25, 2020 by admin

Resilience has become almost a buzzword with regard to how communities handle adversity and disasters, albeit a very useful buzzword. It focuses our attention on how we can better prepare for and cope with such events. The question of the moment is how the concept of resilience applies to our response to coronavirus.

One of many hospitals in Chicago, all of which have visitor restrictions in place due to the coronavirus pandemic.

I am not and never have been a public health expert, though, as an urban planner and adjunct planning professor, I have often worked with such people. I say this because I want to be clear about the prism through which I am viewing the coronavirus pandemic as a public health disaster. What I bring to the task is decades of work, particularly as a research manager, in the subfield of hazards planning. I am known for deep expertise in hazard mitigation and planning for post-disaster recovery. In this article, I am reaching into that toolbox to help identify what we need to learn from the current crisis.

Specifically, part of what has become the standard approach to hazard mitigation planning is vulnerability analysis, the process of identifying what in plain English are weak links in the chain of community capabilities and capacities to manage and recover from a disaster. Every community, every nation has strengths and weaknesses built into its systems, which are really an ecosystem of economic, social, institutional, environmental, governmental, and other elements of the community that comprise the way the community functions in both sunny times and days of turmoil and dysfunction. How well can that community or nation restore itself, rebuild, adapt, and learn from its experiences? One of the most fundamental elements of success, for example, is trust in government and community leadership, something that is being tested right now in the U.S. That leadership can either greatly enable and empower or greatly hinder the capacity for effective response to, and planning for recovery from, a given disaster.

But my focus here is on what a vulnerability analysis of our response to COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, might include. I say “might” because I do not pretend that what follows is comprehensive. It is merely suggestive. A more comprehensive list would best emerge from a summit of leaders and experts when it is time to decide on the lessons learned from this disaster. For now, leaders are rightly focused on using existing authorities and capacities to control the spread of the disease.

The main point of a vulnerability assessment is to identify potential points of failure relative to the hazard under consideration. For instance, with hurricanes or floods, we would want to know what roads or bridges would collapse or become impassable. We would also want to know the locations of substandard housing that might suffer damage or destruction or endanger its occupants. There are dozens of other examples of potential points of failure that I could list here, but presumably, you get the idea.

With the novel coronavirus, we are dealing with an invisible hazard that inflicts suffering and death on people, not buildings or structures, and—most importantly—for which there is not yet an identified cure or vaccine. Most people do not die, and many suffer only mild symptoms, but the spread of the disease is of radical concern in part through the slow rollout of testing kits in the U.S., which exacerbates an existing inability to know precisely who is infected, especially since many people test positive who are asymptomatic, that is, not exhibiting clear symptoms of the disease. Vulnerability depends on various factors, most notably, but not exclusively, age. Respiratory and other existing conditions can elevate that vulnerability, while some older people may be tough enough physically to weather the assault. Thus, identifying and classifying real and potential victims is a business fraught with uncertainty.

Given all that, where are the weak links in our communities? Many can be readily identified from the more routine aspects of vulnerability assessments, starting with governmental capacity:

To what extent has the city, state, or the federal government prepared and established capacity for anticipating the problem and quickly enabling the appropriate responses? It is perfectly logical to expect that greater capacity should exist at higher levels of government that have greater resources at their disposal.
What is the level of political maturity among the electorate, and the political will for undertaking and enforcing difficult but necessary decisions in a crisis?

The biggest questions surrounding coronavirus seem to relate to institutional capacity, some of which can obviously be enhanced or supported through governmental capacity, for example, in procuring and distributing the personal protective equipment, ventilators, and temporary hospital beds needed by the regional “hot spots” for virus outbreaks, which at the moment include New York, but also a frightening spike in confirmed cases and deaths in the last few days in Louisiana, possibly tied to the huge crowds attending Mardi Gras in New Orleans. These have led to Gov. Jon Bel Edwards issuing a stay-in-place order similar to those in effect in California, Illinois, and New York. Among obvious questions in a vulnerability assessment going forward:

What hospital capacity exists for treating large increases in numbers of patients in a future pandemic? This includes emergency room capacity, intensive care units, and other essential elements of the treatment process, as well as the ability to expand access to protective gear. It also involves the adequacy of skilled professionals to work with this increased patient load.
What capacity exists to monitor, work with, and even thin the population of crowded jails and prisons, where social distancing is effectively an oxymoron, and the potential for rapid spread of disease can amount to a death sentence for those confined behind bars?
What are the sanitary and patient care conditions in local nursing homes, and how effectively are they regulated? Nursing homes and similar facilities for elderly medical care have in some cases become virtual incubators for the spread of coronavirus, leading to situations where relatives can no longer visit.

Many of these questions also lead us to questions of economic vulnerability, which also pertain to social equity. Restaurants in states that have instituted closures of public places where people normally congregate in large numbers have laid off thousands, possibly millions of workers—the numbers change by the day—who often work for hourly wages and need every hour to pay the rent. Workers in the gig economy, the tourist economy, and the travel industry are all similarly vulnerable in varying ways. One result, even under normal circumstances, is that many of these workers, some of whom are also undocumented immigrants, are reluctant to take sick days because they have no paid sick leave. Often, they also have no paid health insurance, or cannot afford it.

That, in itself, needs eventually to be recognized by the United States as a source of pandemic at worst, or a threat to public health, at best. Take, for example, the story of a McDonald’s worker who shared the news that he went to work ill, vomited when he ran to the restroom, but was afraid to call in sick because a missed paycheck was a threat to his economic security. How often does that happen, and how reassuring can it possibly be to customers who even think about the potential consequences? Is anyone attempting to gather data on this problem? A worker rights organization, Arise Chicago, has been fighting for better protection for workers on this front for several years, and won passage of a Cook County ordinance in 2016, but the battle continues. At the moment, these workers either are laid off because of restaurant closures, or are adapting to the temporary new world in which their employers can sell takeout, drive-out through, or delivery.

But whether it is hotel, restaurant, or transportation workers (such as taxi and Uber drivers), among others, the vulnerability lies in the harsh facts that drive them to show up for work despite illness because of their lack of paid sick leave or medical coverage. Nowhere in America can an honest vulnerability assessment of future pandemics ignore these socioeconomic imperatives. Economic facts drive health impacts, which in turn drive at least some of the questions surrounding health care capacity. In this sense, one can see how identifying all the weak links in the chain of vulnerability means recognizing the interrelationships between the various categories of vulnerability I listed initially.

This description of the process could go on for many more pages, but it may be more important to let the complexity and interdependence of it all inspire further thought. With that in mind, let me offer a few other items for consideration:

Given the inability of some parts of the population to accept the necessity of temporary restrictions, how well prepared are we to control the wayward behavior of the few, even as the majority of our citizens show adequate consideration for others around them? What are we prepared to do about them?
In the event of a lockdown, what are we prepared to do for victims of domestic abuse who are suddenly trapped inside their homes with abusive partners, parents, or relatives? Do we have institutional capacity to remove them to safer quarters and the ability to answer their calls for help? Sheltering in place is hardly likely to make an abuser more sympathetic.
How well are we positioned to assist those suffering from mental illness, for whom isolation may increase propensity for depression and suicide?
In what ways can we respond to the needs of homeless people, for whom the spread of a pandemic disease may increase due to proximity and unhealthy circumstances?

There are some very hopeful signs of creative thinking on these issues in local and state governments, if not in the White House. For example, the City of Chicago has reached agreement with several hotels to use hotel rooms as isolation rooms for victims of COVID-19, with the city paying for the capacity in advance. This relieves hospital capacity, to some degree, but it also provides some employment for hotel workers who would otherwise be idling at home because of the shutdown of the hospitality industry as both leisure travel and conventions grind to a halt. The workers will provide food in the kitchens and undertake other safe duties, while trained public health personnel deal directly with the quarantined patients. The hotels stay open, some workers stay employed, and some strain is removed from medical facilities. Some members of the Chicago City Council are now calling for the use of vacant public housing units for the same purposes.

Likewise, some otherwise closed YMCA facilities will begin accommodating the homeless while providing necessary social distancing. All of these are creative solutions that can emerge from identifying the weak links in the chain, and can provide cornerstones for sound planning for resilience in the face of future public health emergencies.

In short, let’s all keep our thinking caps on. We’re going to need them not just this time, but for the future as well.

Jim Schwab

Small Gestures Matter

Posted on October 29, 2019 by admin

Last week was for me an eventful time, including a four-hour trip to Dubuque, Iowa, on Thursday for the Growing Sustainable Communities conference, an event the city sponsors every year. I spoke in a session that afternoon, October 24, on community planning for drought, but mostly what I remember was the combination of keynote speeches that addressed the major issues of our time, notably including a luncheon talk on Friday by Dr. Katherine Hayhoe, of Texas Tech University, on communication about climate change. It was impressive and inspiring but underscored how much work lies ahead to reverse damaging trends affecting our planet.

But the week started out differently, with smaller actions that I think are extremely important in setting the tone for the way all of us relate to our fellow human beings.

My wife and I are members of Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park, in Chicago. Situated catacorner from the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago on E. 55 St., our church enjoys the benefit of the knowledge that abounds among the LSTC faculty. I serve as coordinator of the Adult Forum, an adult discussion group that meets during the Sunday School hour. That makes me responsible for finding speakers, programming discussions, and promoting the events. On Sunday, October 20, we discussed actions we could take following a five-week series covering the World War II Nazi death camps, visited by Dr. Esther Menn and her husband, Bruce Tammen, in August during a trip to Poland and Ukraine, which fed into considerations of how we treat immigrants and minorities in our own time.

Our pastor, Rev. Nancy Goede, told me about an incident that occurred the prior Tuesday in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, at Lincoln United Methodist Church. Lincoln has chosen to become a sanctuary church out of concern for the safety of undocumented immigrants, but a man shouting Nazi slogans came to the building in an angry confrontation with church staff. It was not the first time the church had been targeted for its actions. The man proceeded to smash the front window.

There is little we can do directly about an incident that is already past, but we decided that we could establish a supportive relationship with the congregation in the face of this hate crime, so we composed the following letter, eventually signed that day by at least 25 members of Augustana:

To the Members and Staff of Lincoln United Methodist Church:

We are very sorry to hear about the incident on October 15, in which a man shouting Nazi slogans smashed the glass window on the front door of Lincoln United Methodist Church. We have learned that you have been targeted by right-wing groups for your stance in establishing Lincoln UMC as a sanctuary church. We support your efforts and pray for your safety as you continue to follow your consciences in doing the Lord’s work.

Your Brothers and Sisters in Christ at Augustana Lutheran Church

Indeed, part of the purpose of this letter is to reassure Lincoln United Methodist Church that its members are not being left to handle this attack in isolation from the rest of the Christian community. We had learned a great deal about the high cost of silence during the Holocaust, as well as the need to forcefully address racial equality as we commemorated the 100^th anniversary of Chicago’s race riots in 1919, a story detailed well in Claire Hartfield’s recent book, A Few Red Drops.

But that is not all we chose to do. Esther Menn then noted the American Jewish community on this past weekend would be commemorating the first anniversary of a violent anti-Semitic attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, in which eleven members were killed, and seven others wounded, by a man apparently inspired by right-wing rhetoric. Robert Bowers, a truck driver from Baldwin, Pennsylvania, was arrested for the massacre, and authorities said he used social media beforehand to post criticism of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which has been supportive of the human rights of immigrants to the U.S.

In solidarity, Augustana announced that members of the congregation, as well as people from LSTC and McCormick Seminary, would gather last Friday evening to walk to nearby KAM Isaiah Israel congregation in Hyde Park to join its Friday evening shabbat service. Once again, Augustana would make a simple statement in opposition to hate crimes and violence against religious and ethnic minorities and immigrants. Because traffic on the way back from Dubuque that afternoon obviated the possibility of my own participation, Esther related to me that 27 people from Augustana and the two seminaries joined the effort, plus others who met them at the synagogue, and that their presence was greatly appreciated.

Supportive visitors at the doors of KAM Isaiah Israel synagogue. Photo provided by Esther Menn.

Sometimes, it is worth remembering that the simple act of reaching out to say we care and stand behind others is enough to establish lasting and meaningful bonds between otherwise disparate groups of human beings. It certainly is a place to start.

Jim Schwab

Discovering a Piece of Chicago

Posted on September 2, 2019 by admin

It is possible to live in a city as large as Chicago and be blissfully unaware of some wonderful things. Chicago, after all, includes 2.7 million people spread over 227 square miles. My wife and I have lived here since 1986, but we do not spend much of our time traversing unfamiliar neighborhoods. Like most people, we have well-worn paths, and at times we visit new areas where we know people and learn from them. Also, like most people with cars, we drive by certain areas without taking time to really see all that they contain, as one might on foot. Because I walk through my own neighborhood, I know a great deal about what is happening. But there are others where I have not a clue.

Chicago is nothing, however, if not full of pleasant surprises. Never mind unpleasant headlines or presidential tweets about crime rates. There are reasons why millions of people still live here. I discovered one this Labor Day weekend through sheer serendipity. I participated in a small workshop at a home on North Virginia Avenue, a street I had never visited before. I looked it up on Google maps and discovered that the homes on the west side of the street border a great park along the North Channel of the North Branch of the Chicago River, a drainage canal built more than a century ago. This channel extends straight north from where it joins the North Branch around Carmen St., just south of Foster Avenue, a major east-west artery that extends from Lake Michigan through Chicago’s North Side into the northwestern suburbs.

Entrance to Legion Park from Ardmore St.

What I saw on the map invited me to explore after I left the event, a little more than half a mile north of Foster, several miles from downtown. I soon realized what a gorgeous asset this neighborhood has just beyond its western edge, and what a gorgeous day I had chosen for my short walk. As at other corners along N. Virginia Avenue, Ardmore terminates on a short stub that opens onto a trail inside Legion Park.

A couple of asphalt paths provide walking, jogging, and bicycle trails with a very modest amount of traffic behind an area largely composed of single-family homes. Between the paths stand a variety of well-maintained deciduous trees whose shade both quiets and cools the park space. As I walked south toward Bryn Mawr Avenue, a major street with a bridge over the channel, the Legion Park Playground, a small haven for children needing adventure and exercise, loomed ahead. A mother and two daughters were using the merry-go-round. In the distance, on the far trail, came bicyclists who never noticed my small camera and did not need to. It was past 1 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon, and it was all so peaceful I could have sat and communed with nature for hours, undisturbed. Someday I may return for that purpose, but today I wanted to explore.

Exploration led me to a follow a cross-path to the North Shore Channel trail closer to the water, which, for the most part, lay hidden behind a screen of forest and uncut grasses, but the trail now led closer to the water by passing under the street above, leading me to a brick wall topped by wrought-iron fencing. Inside the tunnel I found the concrete support system for the road above, the sort of infrastructure that reminds you of what is necessary to allow a road to cross the waterway with minimal disturbance. If it was quiet in the park, it was even quieter down here. The water may not have been especially clean, but in its stillness, it provided a vivid reflection of both the steel girders and the verdant growth above it.

And then, just a few feet away, the waterway emerged in full daylight, with all the foliage that grew above its banks, all the way down to the riprap at the water’s edge. In a matter of seconds, I found myself south of Bryn Mawr, with a whole new section of the park emerging with its own paths, its own playground, and its own softball diamond. I quickly realized that the park was the backdrop to North Side Preparatory High School, which fronts on Kedzie Avenue, but enjoys a remarkable backyard view for those with the wisdom to take it all in.

All this took me perhaps 20 minutes of a slow stroll, with time to shoot photographs. I am aware from the map, and from the sight lines of the channel, that the park extends much farther both south and north from what I saw. But it reminded me, with my own knowledge of the urban landscape as a planner, that cities sometimes, accidentally or intentionally, remember that the best use of a floodplain often is open space, not development, and that the result can be a beautiful asset for the areas around it that are above the water. In Legion Park, even with what to my knowledge is a minimal history of flooding, there is ample room for the water to overflow its banks while harming nothing. The natural environment responds to the freedom we have allowed it and provides us with solitude, and beauty, and an abundance of ecological services. The city can co-exist with its riparian corridors, which afford habitat and recreation in the same space.

Chicago, in recent years, has been discovering that the sacred community space it has preserved so doggedly along its lakefront can and should include its riverfronts as well. The city has cleaned up and improved its Riverwalk along the main channel of the Chicago River downtown, a development I profiled on this blog about three years ago. In this morning’s Chicago Tribune, I read of new kiosk vendors doing business in a new covered space below Wacker Drive along the Riverwalk. But the Chicago River and its tributaries extend much farther into the heart of the city, and they can all serve a purpose in making the city more livable. In fact, in these less populated, less densely developed areas, the very openness and the greater stillness can inspire a spirituality that is harder to achieve in the downtown canyons that linger below skyscrapers and honking traffic. In Legion Park, I could not even hear the traffic. I could only see it in the distance—or witness it on two wheels as someone bicycled past me. What a magnificent gift. We should appreciate such treasures for all they are worth.

Jim Schwab

Great Lakes Merit Protection

Posted on April 9, 2019 by admin

I grew up near the shores of Lake Erie, in suburban Cleveland. After a seven-year stint in Iowa and Nebraska, I ended up in Chicago, where I have lived since 1985. The Great Lakes have been part of my ecological and geographic consciousness for essentially 90 percent of my lifetime. As an urban planner, that means I am deeply aware of their significance on many levels.

It will surprise no one, then, that as a planner who has focused heavily on environmental and natural hazards issues, I have been involved in projects aimed at protecting that natural heritage. As manager of the Hazards Planning Center at the American Planning Association (APA), I involved APA as a partner with the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM) as ASFPM developed its Great Lakes Coastal Resilience website with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) support. Later, I prepared a successful grant for support from NOAA’s Sectoral Applications Research Program for a project on integrating climate change data into local comprehensive and capital improvements planning. In that project, APA collaborated with the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning and the University of Illinois. That project, which involved work with five pilot communities in the Chicago metropolitan area, was (and still is) ongoing when I left APA at the end of May 2017. The aim was to develop applicable models for such planning for other communities throughout the Great Lakes region.

It is thus always encouraging to see others pick up the same mantle. It was hardly surprising that the Environmental Law & Policy Center (ELPC), a long-time Chicago-based staple of the public interest community, would see fit to do so. On March 20, in concert with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, ELPC released “An Assessment of the Impact of Climate Change on the Great Lakes,” with 18 scientists contributing to the 74-page report. I spoke two weeks later with Howard Learner, the long-time president and executive director of ELPC, about the rationale and hopes for the report.

The impact of adding one more report to the parade is cumulative but important. Learner explained that national studies, particularly the National Climate Assessment, mention regional impacts of climate change, but that drilling down to the impacts on a specific region and making local and state decision makers aware of the issues at those levels was the point. Thus, he asked Don Wuebbles, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois and a science adviser to ELPC, to assemble a team of experts for the purpose. Wuebbles recruited most of the team, with the goal not only of identifying problems but of developing or pinpointing solutions. Repeatedly, Learner emphasized the public policy role of ELPC as a “problem-solving” institution. The intended audience was governors, provincial ministers, congressional delegations from Great Lakes states, and other public officials, providing them with an assessment of the state of the science concerning the Great Lakes.

I won’t even attempt to review all the data in the report, but certain points are essential to an adequate public understanding. For one, the Great Lakes are simply huge and constitute a very complex ecosystem in a heavily populated region of more than 34 million people in the U.S. and Canada, the vast majority of whom repeatedly express support for protection of the Great Lakes in public opinion polls. It is the largest freshwater group of lakes on the planet, and second largest in volume. It is a binational ecosystem that demands cooperation across state, provincial, and national boundaries. It is home to 170 species of fish and a $7 billion fisheries industry. It has long been home to one of the most significant industrial regions of both nations. What happens here matters.

The term “lake effect” is most often associated with the Great Lakes because their sheer mass has a measurable impact on local and regional weather patterns. Winds pick up considerable moisture that often lands downwind in the form of snowstorms and precipitation. For instance, any frequent visitor of farmers’ markets along the Great Lakes is likely to be aware of western Michigan’s “fruit belt” offerings of apples, cherries, pears, and other crops dependent on the lake effect.

Figure 3. Observed changes in annually-averaged temperature (°F) for the U.S. states bordering the Great Lakes for present-day (1986–2016) relative to 1901–1960. Derived from the NOAA nClimDiv dataset (Vose et al., 2014). Figure source: NOAA/NCEI (Both images reprinted from report courtesy ELPC.

Figure 4. Projected change in annually-averaged temperature (°F) for U.S. states bordering the Great Lakes from the (a) higher (RCP8.5) and (b) lower (RCP4.5) scenarios for the 2085 (2070-2099) time period relative to 1976-2005. Figure source: NOAA/NCEI

The lake effect, of course, is a part of the natural system in a region carved out of the landscape by melting glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age. Recent climate change is another matter. The region has already experienced a 1.6° F. increase in average daily temperatures in the 1985-2016 period as compared to the 1901-1960 average. Those increases are expected to accelerate over the remainder of this century. It is not just temperatures that change, however, because changing weather patterns as a result of long-term climate change result in altered precipitation patterns. Summer precipitation is predicted to decline by 5 to 15 percent, suggesting some increased propensity for drought, while winter and spring precipitation will increase, producing an increased regional propensity for spring flooding. Increased intensity of major thunderstorm events will exacerbate the vulnerability of urban areas to stormwater runoff, resulting in increased “urban flooding,” often a result of inadequate stormwater drainage systems in highly developed urban areas. That, in turn, has huge implications for municipal and regional investments in stormwater and sewage treatment infrastructure. In addition, heat waves can threaten lives and public health. Public decision makers ignore these implications at the fiscal and physical peril of their affected communities.

Among those impacts highlighted in the report is the increased danger of algal blooms in the Great Lakes as a result of changing biological conditions. The report notes that the largest algal bloom in Lake Erie history occurred in 2011, offshore from Toledo, Ohio, affecting drinking water for a metropolitan area of 500,000 people.

There is also danger to the stability of some shoreline bluffs, an issue highlighted on the Great Lakes Coastal Resilience website, as a result of reduced days of ice cover during the winter. While less ice cover may seem a minor problem to some, in fact it means changes in water density and seasonal mixing patterns in water columns, but it also means the loss of protection from winter waves from storm patterns because the ice cover prevents those waves from reaching the shore until the spring melt. The result is increased shoreline erosion.

All of that harks back to the central question of my interview with Learner: What do you hope to achieve? “The time for climate action is now,” he insisted, noting that the Trump presidency has been “a step back,” making it important for cities and states to “step up with their own climate solutions.” Learner hopes the report at least provides a “road map” for governors and Canadian premiers to focus their actions on the impact of climate change on the Great Lakes, such as “extreme weather events.”

Curiously, one arena in which new action may be possible is the city of Chicago itself, which on April 2 elected a new mayor, Lori Lightfoot. Media attention has focused on the fact that she is both the first gay mayor and the first African-American female mayor in the city’s history, but equally significant is her history as a former federal prosecutor who campaigned against corruption. Learner notes that outgoing Mayor Rahm Emanuel convened a Chicago Climate Summit in November 2017, and that ELPC is now “looking to Mayor Lightfoot to step up Chicago’s game” to benefit both the local economy and environment with a stronger approach to climate change.

The same can be said, of course, for numerous other municipalities choosing new leadership and for the new governors of the region, including J.B. Pritzker in Illinois. They all have much work to do, but an increasing amount of research and guidance with which to do it.

Jim Schwab

Batter Up!

Posted on July 4, 2018 by admin

Angel and Alex anticipate the start of a ball game.

We interrupt this series of serious messages for some old-fashioned American holiday fun.

Well, to be honest. I’m talking about yesterday, July 3. Following great American tradition, I took two grandsons, Angel, 14, and Alex, 9, to their first Chicago Cubs game at Wrigley Field. Observing Cubs tradition, it was a day game, beginning at 1:20 p.m. Observing Chicago tradition, we arrived via CTA, taking the Blue Line downtown and the Red Line from there to Addison, walking one block to one of the most iconic stadiums in America. One special aspect of Chicago, even with two teams, is that the Red Line will get you to either the White Sox or the Cubs, and as the train moves along, the ride becomes a communal experience as growing numbers of fans enter, easily identifiable by their team paraphernalia. It is quite different from many stadiums elsewhere with huge parking lots and fans pouring out of their individual cars and SUVs. It may be crowded, but you are part of a crowd on a mission. It is fun just getting there.

Apparently, we took too long or left too late because they were no longer passing out free Cubs t-shirts to the first 10,000 people through the turnstiles, even though we arrived almost an hour before game time. That misjudgment is on me. The least I could do inside was get the boys lunch and a drink. One had nachos, one had a chicken sandwich, and I opted for bratwurst because, well, this is Chicago. What I could not accept was the idea of paying $10 for a Budweiser, so I opted for lemonade. If the vendors at least had a respectable microbrew on tap, maybe, just perhaps, I could have splurged for that beer. But not for Bud. (Sorry to offend any Budweiser lovers, but please. I just bought a six-pack of Bohemia this morning for two dollars less.)

Anyway, we enjoyed our upper-deck seats to the right of home plate in part because they were shaded on a 90+-degree day, unlike those more enviable and expensive but sun-splashed seats below us. My new Arizona hat became largely unnecessary. We were comfortable, if a little more removed from the action. By the time the game started, I had used my new iPhone to text harassing messages to my long-time friend and colleague Rich Roths, who hails from Michigan and bears the burden of a Tigers fan, despite decades of life in the Chicago suburbs. The Cubs were playing Detroit, in case I need to put a finer point on the reason for my friendly needling.

Alex fell asleep in the second inning, a source of mild amusement to Angel and myself, but he missed little from a Cubs perspective as starter Kyle Hendricks gave up three runs in five innings before the Cubs finally revved their offensive engines for a nice, three-run rally in the bottom of the fifth. By then, Alex was awake, and while he does not yet understand all the nuances of the game, he began to catch on that the Cubs were coming back from a deficit. On the way home later, I suggested to him that some day he could sit and watch a game on television with me, and I would carefully explain many of the rules and intricacies of the game so that he had a better appreciation of what was happening. To my surprise, he smiled and gave me a thumbs-up signal. One thing about Alex: He likes to learn new things.

As for that fifth-inning rally—it was classic never-say-die Cubs-style baseball. Tommy La Stella pinch-hit for Hendricks, whose time was up, and smacked a double well into the left-field ivy. Albert Almora followed with a second double, driving him home. Jason Heyward must have decided that copycat was a fine form of baseball because he powered a third double and scored Almora. Now it was 3-2, with no outs until Ben Zobrist grounded out, but that allowed Heyward to move to third. That was all first-baseman Anthony Rizzo needed to score him with a single, tying the game.

Nothing more followed in that inning, but it was enough to reassure fans that the day was far from over. In fact, today the Cubs won their sixth in a row in a home stand after falling behind early in each game. Our Cubs are not to be easily written off. In the top of the seventh, Alex decided he needed a snow cone but, unwilling to take my eyes off the action, I indicated only that I would get him one if a vendor arrived, which never happened. But Alex soon found other ways to rivet his attention. Another run scored in the bottom of the seventh on a pair of singles and a fielder’s choice, and in the eighth slugger Kyle Schwarber nailed a home run in the right-field bleachers to provide some insurance for a 5-3 lead that held firmly in the top of the ninth.

The music started as the fans filed out:

Go Cubs go, go Cubs go!

Hey Chicago, what do you say?

Cubs are gonna win today!

When we once again emerged from the shadows into the sunlight of Clark and Addison, I had the boys pose in front of the statue of Ernie Banks. They obliged, as you can see, Alex engaging in some dancing shenanigans as he did so. God bless America. George Washington may not have invented baseball, but that’s only because he was too busy liberating his country from the British Empire, so left the job to Abner Doubleday. I’m glad I chose the Independence Day holiday week for our outing. Baseball and America are just a part of each other, the “Home of the Brave.”

Jim Schwab

Home of the Brave

Book Reviews and Discussion with Jim Schwab

Tag Archives: Chicago

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Weep for America, but Build Leadership

Isolated Adjustments

Weak Links in the Chain

Small Gestures Matter

Discovering a Piece of Chicago

Great Lakes Merit Protection

Batter Up!