Tag Archives: Rahm Emanuel

Plotting Post-Pandemic Recovery

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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

 

Ghosts in the Schoolyard

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In 2013, the board of education of the Chicago Public Schools succeeded in closing 50 neighborhood schools, an action fully supported by Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Of these, 90 percent had a majority of African American students, who comprised 80 percent of students in the closed schools. These, in turn, comprised fully one-fourth of the city’s schools with a majority of both African American students and African American faculty.

Chicago is not a city where people take abuse and discrimination lightly. Predictably, many parents in the affected neighborhoods rose up in civic rebellion. At Dyett High School, they launched a hunger strike to make their feelings known. Protesters succeeded in keeping Dyett open, but overall, little of this had any effect because Chicago has the only unelected school board in the state of Illinois. Instead, courtesy of special state legislation, the mayor appoints the members, who respond to the mayor, not the voters. Recent mayors have liked it that way.

If you imagine that this might be a political issue, you are exactly right. In the mayoral election that just last month culminated with the election of Lori Lightfoot, both she and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle vowed support for creating an elected school board. These two had emerged as the leading vote-getters from a mayoral field of 17 in the nonpartisan primary after Emanuel declined to seek reelection. As with many such things, the details will matter greatly in negotiations with legislators in Springfield, but Lightfoot’s 73 percent mandate unquestionably gives her considerable elbow room in the discussion. But such an outcome of the often harsh and certainly vigorous debate was hardly on the horizon when the closings occurred. So, too, was the explosive controversy over the police murder of Laquan MacDonald in 2014 until court-ordered release of the video exposed the official police explanation of the 17-year-old’s death as highly inaccurate. That set the stage for Emanuel’s exit from City Hall.

But back to the story of the school closings. This set of events helped to poison relations between Emanuel and much of the black community in Chicago even before the MacDonald shooting became the linchpin for relations with the Chicago Police Department. Lightfoot’s claim to fame—and she rose to challenge Emanuel even before he decided not to run—was her role in police administrative reform.

With permission from University of Chicago Press

In her new book released last year, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side (University of Chicago Press), Eve L. Ewing, assistant professor in the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, tackles the 2013 events to share with us why this was not just a one-off mistake by some misguided board members and school administrators, but part of a long history of institutional racism in the Chicago system. The closings did not happen in a vacuum; there was no blank slate. There was, instead, a powerful legacy of devaluing black students and their neighborhoods that played a significant role in the clash of world views between the powerful and the disempowered.

History matters. Ewing takes time to elucidate the migrations of southern blacks between the world wars to northern cities including Chicago. This was the origin of what has become known as the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side. Ewing notes that the black population in Chicago grew 360 percent in just two decades. However, while many other ethnic groups immigrating to Chicago developed enclaves by choice, blacks were forced to do so through a segregation enforced not by law, but by bombings and violence. Blacks attempting to move into white neighborhoods faced serious retribution. From 1917 to 1921, she notes, 58 bombs “struck the homes of black residents, of bankers who gave the mortgages, or of real estate agents who sold them property.” This was an average of one bombing every 20 days. It is not hard to imagine how this produced an intimidating effect for all concerned. The result was a ghetto in which blacks were confined in increasingly dense concentrations, eventually culminating in the infamous housing projects that lined the major corridors of the South Side. But we get ahead of ourselves here. In order to squeeze growing numbers of the southern arrivals into the same housing stock in a geographically confined area, landlords began to carve up existing units into ever smaller ones that came to be known as “kitchenettes,” often violating building codes and safety standards. Gwendolyn Brooks, the famous African-American poet laureate of Illinois, memorialized these housing atrocities in her poem, “Kitchenette Building.”

Ewing discusses her book in an April lecture at DePaul University.

That, in turn, led to overcrowded schools in the affected neighborhoods, accompanied by the morally constipated unwillingness of powerful school officials to consider integrating schools or allocating substantial resources to those neighborhoods to allow their schools to work. Instead, Superintendent Benjamin Willis took over in 1953, in an era when schools did not systematically collect racial data and he could somewhat disingenuously proclaim himself color-blind. As Ewing observes, “Local black leaders were not convinced.” This was, after all, also the time of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which the United States Supreme Court ordered desegregation of public schools and overturned the philosophy of “separate but equal.” In time, Willis implemented a policy that placed black students in overcrowded schools in temporary aluminum auxiliary trailers that were soon derided as “Willis wagons,” while students attended for half-days while the affected schools ran double shifts.

By 1961, Ewing states, “tensions were flaring,” and a coalition of civil rights groups undertook efforts to enroll black students in white schools, where they were turned away despite vacancies. Operation Transfer served to expose the inherent discrimination in the system. Other forms of direct action followed, including black mothers visiting white schools to document open spaces (they were arrested for trespassing), and lying down in front of bulldozers preparing the ground for more trailers. Finally, the stage was set for a mass walkout on October 22, 1963, “Freedom Day,” in which more than 220,000 students boycotted school.

In short, the protests of 2013 had plenty of precedent, and the closings struck black parents not as an attempt to improve the education of their children—in areas losing population largely as a result of the demolition of the same public housing that once confined them—but as the destruction of families and networks that had grown in those neighborhoods over time. The full story is more complex and richly textured, but you begin to get the idea. Yet, the denial of this impact of history, and the insistence that new policies under Emanuel were somehow part of a clean slate to give disadvantaged students a fresh start, even as many had to cross gang lines and lost their lives to gun violence as they attended newly assigned schools, persisted.

That brings us to Barbara Byrd-Bennett, a black school superintendent chosen by Emanuel, who led the school closings. The fact that she was later convicted and imprisoned for taking kickbacks from a former employer and CPS contractor, escapes only those who suffer from a deprived sense of irony. Confronted at a public meeting with accusations of racism that touched a raw nerve, she reacted: “What I cannot understand, and will not accept, is that the proposals I am offering are racist. That is an affront to me as a woman of color.”

Ewing goes on, after quoting Byrd-Bennett at greater length, not only to examine the personal umbrage that Byrd-Bennett expressed, but the larger context of institutional racism, and the underlying question of why the schools in question were “underutilized” and “under-resourced” in the first place. After all, someone had made critical decisions to reallocate resources to charter schools and away from the very schools that were now being criticized for underperforming despite the clear history of policies that had helped make them so. The feeling of betrayal among parents and students in the schools facing closure was palpable, and the emotional commitment that led to a hunger strike was real. The fact that, yet again, the system found a way to turn a deaf ear to those who pleaded with the board to reconsider its approach spoke volumes about where power resided. There were numerous factors that led to this year’s election outcome, which also produced a growing progressive caucus in the City Council, but these battles over schools were surely among them.

The richness of Ewing’s book is much deeper than I can portray here, so I urge those interested in the topic to read it. Chicago is not alone in facing serious issues concerning the future of its public schools and fairness in the distribution of educational resources, so this book is not just for Chicago. It is for America.

Now, time for full disclosure: First, I was on a panel of three judges for the Society of Midland Authors that chose this book for honorable mention in adult nonfiction in our annual book awards context. That award will be bestowed at a banquet on May 14. Second, my wife is a retired Chicago Public Schools teacher and Chicago Teachers Union activist who wrote about the Dyett hunger strike and other actions against the school closings at the time they were happening. Her concern for students is not abstract and policy-driven but visceral and personal after decades in the classroom. There are many opinions about education policy in Chicago, but after three decades in the classroom, she has earned a right to hers.

Jim Schwab

Give It Up, Rahm

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As any urban planner, lawyer, or intelligent elected official knows, public safety is a powerful argument in support of measures undertaken by any level of government. This is particularly true of local government, which in the U.S. is responsible for most law enforcement, traffic management, and response to emergencies and disasters.

The city of Chicago in recent years has wielded this argument as the primary justification for a program using red light cameras to monitor traffic at various intersections in the absence of direct management by police officers, who cannot be everywhere. The tradeoff is simple: Violators who drive through red lights or make right turns where not allowed are cited and fined, but those violations do not appear on their driving record. That can only happen if they are cited by a police officer. Violators receive the photographic evidence of their actions in the mail with a notice to pay the fine. The assumption is that the deterrent effect of having to pay the hefty fines will reduce such behavior and make the streets safer, especially in areas near school zones. Most citizens logically assume that the premise is sound, even if the possibility of being ensnared by the law in this fashion can be annoying and deflate one’s wallet.

In the bargain, the city also increases its revenue by the amount of the fines collected, minus the cost of the contract to the vendor operating the system. In a city pinched for cash, as most are, the lure of that revenue can be pretty powerful. The city of Chicago has reportedly collected more than $500 million since the program began ten years ago. It can be hard to part with that money.

All that would probably be acceptable to most people if the premise held water. But the Chicago Tribune paid for a study by the Texas A&M University Transportation Institute to examine the safety benefits of the program and found that it essentially laid a goose egg. Mind you, this program was started under Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s predecessor, Richard M. Daley, more than a decade ago. Emanuel fired the initial contractor, Redflex Traffic Systems Inc., when it became clear that the company had bribed city officials. Now it appears that federal prosecutors have a “bagman” witness who can testify that the company offered city transportation officials incentives of $1,500 per camera to install additional cameras to enlarge the program, which now includes 350 intersections. In short, a program intended to benefit public safety and generate some municipal revenue through fines became mired in corruption. Knowledgeable voters in Chicago would like to be surprised by all this, but, well, you know. We’ve seen this kind of thing before.

What Texas A&M found out undermines the rationale for the program. The city could easily afford to pay for a similar study if it had wanted an honest evaluation of the efficacy of the program, but it has not done so. Basically, in a series that began on Sunday, December 21, the Tribune revealed that the Texas A&M study determined that, while the cameras produced an overall 15 percent reduction in right-angle “T-bone” crashes due to red light violations, it had also produced a 22 percent increase in rear-end crashes. There is a reason for this, one that many drivers in Chicago have instinctively sensed even without statistical data to verify their hunches. The city is using yellow lights that change to red in three seconds, sometimes even just a fraction less. Many of us in the city have had the unnerving experience of slamming on the brakes in the face of quickly changing yellow lights, so it is not hard intuitively to understand how the rear-end crashes would result. The city claims that this complies with a formula developed by the Institute of Traffic Engineers, but the Tribune reports that other cities, like Washington, D.C., and St. Louis, use an ITE deceleration rate that results in a yellow light time of 3.2 seconds in 30-mph zones. Maryland and Michigan use 3.5 seconds, and California and Florida 3.7 seconds where there are red light cameras. Of course, there is discretionary judgment involved, but the more conservative timing is intended to reduce the likelihood of accidents. Chicago uses timing based on posted speed limits and insists that using actual driving speeds, or providing a cushion, the basis for the longer yellow lights, effectively serves to encourage speeding.

But, of course, longer yellows might also result in fewer violations, resulting in fewer fines being imposed. That said, to the extent that shorter yellow lights are inducing, rather than reducing, accidents, the city’s rationale that the program improves public safety becomes a more questionable argument. The city finds itself in the position of possibly causing accidents in order to increase revenue.

The alternative, of course, is to argue to the contrary. The Tribune notes that Chicago Department of Transportation Commissioner Rebekah Scheinfeld defended the program before the city council with a simple before-and-after comparison, showing that accidents had been reduced by 47 percent between 2005 and 2013. But there were flaws in this argument. Even those with a moderately sophisticated knowledge of statistics are aware that picking two years for such a comparison can be very simplistic and subject to manipulation by failing to control for a number of confounding variables. Among those variables, the state of Illinois, during the interim, changed its minimum damage level for required accident reports from $500 to $1,500. That single change accounts for a substantial share of the difference, but is not the only factor complicating the analysis. Nonetheless, the city continues to maintain that the program benefits public safety.

One can excuse Mayor Emanuel with regard to the initial corruption scandal that tarnished the program. That happened on Daley’s watch. But after four years in office, as Emanuel prepares to run for reelection, his support of the Chicago Department of Transportation’s public safety logic makes the program his, even with a new contractor operating it.

The decision to either abandon or fix the program–to produce logical explanations for the locations of cameras, to remedy the positioning of numerous cameras at low-traffic intersections where they may well be causing more accidents than they are preventing–can also be his. Public safety is a powerful argument for municipal traffic management until it falls apart under close examination.

Fix it or give it up, Rahm. Public safety is an awesome responsibility and ought to be taken seriously, no matter how much the city cherishes all that revenue.

 

Jim Schwab