This was how a federal urban renewal program whose most idealistic framers viewed as capable of lifting up the urban poor, became, in Daley’s Chicago, a powerful means for reinforcing inequalities of race and class. To be fair, Daley inherited rather than invented the city’s growth machine; in fact, Chicago was a pioneer in early urban renewal efforts, lobbying the state legislature to pass the Blighted Areas Redevelopment Act and the Restoration Act of 1947, which granted it broad powers of eminent domain for acquiring large slum areas and selling them to developers, as well as state subsidies to sweeten the deal for investors. The legislation was largely the brainchild of a civic planning group called the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council (MHPC), and in particular of two of its leading members—Chicago Title and Trust president Holman Pettibone and Marshall Field’s executive Milton C. Mumford—both of whom favored a downtown approach to the city’s redevelopment plan in order to stave off blight and reverse the trend of falling real estate values in the Loop. While downstate Republican legislators—many of them rural-based and hostile to anything that smacked of New Deal aid to urban blacks—were adamant that state funds would not be used to subsidize public housing for displaced residents of redevelopment projects, Pettibone and Mumford worked out a compromise that would create the Chicago Land Clearance Commission (CLCC) to deal with the housing of displaced residents. The idea was to bypass the Chicago Housing Authority and its nondiscriminatory tenant-selection policy. Pettibone hailed the legislation as “a pioneering combination of public authority and public funds with private initiative and private capital,” but the public side of the partnership had clearly been given a subsidiary role.24 By legislative sleight of hand, the capacity of public authorities to acquire and clear land and then sell it to private interests at below-market costs had come to be defined as a “public purpose.”
By the end of the 1940s the city was using such powers to begin redeveloping the Near South Side neighborhoods around the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and the Michael Reese Hospital. Working closely with real estate magnate and MHPC president Ferd Kramer, the city cleared hundreds of acres of slums to make room for two new middle-class housing complexes, Lake Meadows and Prairie Shores, which would end up raising rents around IIT and Michael Reese between 300 and 600 percent—an increase that priced out the vast majority of the mostly black residents who had been displaced.
This first foray into the new postwar frontier of urban renewal did not go so smoothly. Opposition to the Lake Meadows project crystallized soon after the announcement, with property owners filing suit in federal court to prevent the CLCC from taking their homes, and a group called the Property Conservation and Human Rights Committee of Chicago petitioning the federal government to withhold funds. Moreover, the uncertainties surrounding the situation of the thousands of black residents who would be displaced by the project caused considerable political fallout, prompting Third Ward alderman Archibald Carey Jr. to propose a city ordinance, backed by the Chicago Urban League and CORE, outlawing discrimination “where public aid is provided for housing units . . . even though such housing units are built with private funds.” While the ordinance was, in the end, soundly defeated in the city council, it stirred up a rancorous debate, with Carey and other proponents of the measure evoking “negro removal” and comparing the treatment of blacks to that of Jews in Nazi Germany. Sensing the seriousness of the threat to Chicago’s urban renewal plans, Mayor Kennelly, who normally observed a policy of nonintervention in legislative matters, appeared in person before the city council to speak against the ordinance.
Moreover, African Americans residing in the area around Lake Meadows were not the only ones to feel threatened. Late in 1950, with the bulldozers rumbling away, a range of community associations from a number of white South Side neighborhoods, some located several miles away from the Lake Meadows site, began agitating against the project for very different sorts of reasons. Leading the charge was a realtor from the Roseland community who argued that the rehousing of those displaced by the Lake Meadows project posed a “disastrous financial burden” to taxpayers while stoking fears about the “dispersal of the colored inhabitants . . . into outlying areas.”25 Adding to all this trouble and delay was more controversy surrounding the proposal to close a stretch of Cottage Grove Avenue, an idea that the Chicago Plan Commission pondered for several months before finally signing off. By 1950, the New York Life Insurance Company, the project’s principal investor, was threatening to pull out, but Kennelly proved a capable fixer. Nearly two years later ground was finally broken.26
In the end, Lake Meadows was built, and the ultimate success of the project opened the way for a lot more of the same. Emerging out of the wrangling and controversy over Lake Meadows was a new modus operandi for the city’s planning and development process. During this time the MHPC’s downtown agenda prevailed over a range of Loop area interests who favored a very different approach to the future—one that sought to revitalize the neighborhoods surrounding the Loop rather than merely orienting their redevelopment around the priorities of Pettibone, Kramer, Mumford and the rest of the downtown business crowd. Standing opposed to the MHPC, for example, was the South Side Planning Board, an organization that represented a range of manufacturing, printing, and warehousing interests from 12th Street all the way down to 47th Street. Rather than the middle-class residential development favored by the downtown interests to house white-collar workers, provide downtown shoppers, and buffer the Loop against blight, the South Side Planning Board supported infrastructural improvements that would aid the expansion of Near South Side manufacturers, which would, in turn, provide a healthy job base for working-class South Side residents.
A similar campaign against the downtown agenda emerged on the Near West Side in 1949, when the Near West Side Planning Board, with the support of Twentieth Ward alderman Anthony Pistilli, successfully challenged the classification of a part of the neighborhood as blighted and put forward a redevelopment plan that sought to promote local manufacturing activities and to rehabilitate rather than clear existing structures. The back-and-forth between such neighborhood groups and downtown interests continued into 1954 with the announcement of the Fort Dearborn project, which was to involve the clearance of a 151-acre swath of land on the north bank of the Chicago River for the construction of five thousand private middle-income housing units and a $165 million civic center. Almost immediately Near North Side planning groups sprang into action, protesting the classification of the area as blighted and the effects the project would have on the local real estate market. However, just as things were getting unruly, with ordinary residents actually demanding a say in the planning process, Pettibone and Hughston McBain, chairman of the board of Marshall Field’s, moved to build a new and more powerful coalition of downtown business interests, the Chicago Central Area Committee (CAC), that would ultimately save their day.27
And yet the CAC remained restrained in Mayor Kennelly’s Chicago, where the city council actually possessed a legislative function and aldermen allied themselves with local planning groups looking to throw wrenches into the growth machine’s plans. This would change under Daley’s watch. Like Kennelly, Daley, despite all his blathering about defending the neighborhoods against State Street, believed that what was best for Ferd Kramer, Holman Pettibone, and Marshall Field was best for the machine. And he reconfigured city government accordingly. After taming the city council, Daley moved to sever it from the planning process with his creation in 1956 of the Department of City Planning, an agency that would be answerable to him rather than the city council. As a sign of how Daley conceived of the role of the Department of City Planning, he appointed Ira Bach, the former executive director of the CLCC who had worked closely with Pettibone on the Lake Meadows project, as its commissioner. During his years directing the CLCC, Bach had favored relying on the private housing market to rehouse working-class blacks displaced by clearance projects—a dubious notion in Chicago’s segregated housing
market—and expressed annoyance about the attempts of federal housing officials to obligate the city to formulate adequate and precisely detailed relocation plans. Taking over the tasks of planning and zoning, the Department of City Planning reduced the meddlesome Chicago Plan Commission into a purely advisory body. One of Daley’s first directives to the department was to instruct it to work with the CAC on a new plan for downtown. The fruit of this collaboration was the 1958 Development Plan for the Central Area of Chicago.
With a board that included the heads of Illinois Central Railroad, United Airlines, Marshall Field & Company, and some of Chicago’s largest banks, it was to nobody’s surprise that the CAC would promote a plan for the downtown area that emphasized increased office development, more expressways and garages, a beautified riverfront, a downtown subway system, a transportation center, near-downtown housing for fifty thousand families, and a University of Illinois campus—all that was necessary for a downtown business district oriented around management, financial services, and retailing. The development plan represented a blueprint for deindustrialization that clearly prioritized real estate values and Loop retail activities over jobs and proper housing for the city’s working class. The plan, the South Side Planning Board predicted, “will tend to drive business from the area to a section of the city where it can feel more secure.”28 Those who invested in such an eventuality made spectacular profits. During the first ten months of 1959, developers bankrolled eight major office and residential building projects with an overall price tag of $130 million, and between 1958 and 1963, construction activities around the Loop amounted to an impressive $662 million.29 One notable victim was the vibrant printing sector housed within the industrial loft buildings around Printing House Row, an area the development plan had designated for “resident reuse.” Between 1960 and 1970, land values here increased by $10 per square foot, after having remained virtually unchanged during the previous decade. Such speculation paved the way for the rapid loft conversion of the 1970s, and by the mid-1980s Printing House Row no longer contained a single firm to justify its name. The impact of such processes on the city’s labor market was nothing less than spectacular. Between 1972 and 1983, Chicago lost some 131,000 manufacturing jobs, roughly 34 percent of its total manufacturing employment.30
If Daley had never once uttered the term neoliberalism, his willingness to hand over the planning of the city’s future development to its business community suggests that he can be considered a kind of proto-neoliberal in a moment rarely characterized as belonging to the history of the neoliberal city. In fact, historians of the “neoliberal turn” have seldom traced its origins back into the 1950s and 1960s. For David Harvey, for example, the history of neoliberalization in the United States begins in New York in the mid-1970s, when, in the midst of a severe budget crisis, a cabal of investment bankers bailed out the city and thereby seized control of its resources and municipal institutions in order to restructure the city according to their entrepreneurial agenda. The result, according to Harvey, was that “city business was increasingly conducted behind closed doors, and the democratic and representational content of local governance diminished.”31 But who could deny that a similar result had not already been achieved in Chicago some two decades earlier?
However, Daley’s embrace of the downtown agenda and his moves to create a governance framework that silenced the grassroots and shifted the planning process into corporate boardrooms were not the only dynamics that were neoliberalizing the city during the 1950s. No less important were the kinds of governance criteria that the downtown business crowd were managing to inscribe within Chicago’s governing institutions—a set of notions that aligned the public interest with their interest and that viewed the primary role of city government as a mechanism to unleash the forces of private enterprise. This phenomenon was hardly unique to Chicago. The protests emerging out of Chicago’s neighborhoods against the downtown agenda reflected a broader struggle taking place in municipalities across the nation over the very definition of blight. Emerging out of the New Deal context, blight during the 1930s was largely synonymous with slum and thus with unsafe and unhealthy conditions of residential living. But by the early 1940s, as state legislatures moved to give legal grounding to the activities of redevelopment agencies, the meaning of blight increasingly began to take on a much more pecuniary character, with key criteria related primarily to proper and productive economic use.32 Those pushing the downtown agenda in Chicago thus evaluated the public-private partnerships that would drive the city’s planning and growth in terms of revenues generated rather than in terms of social benefits created. They generally considered social costs, if they considered them at all, as nuisances to be managed.
Indeed, if, as political theorist Wendy Brown has argued, the advance of neoliberalization has increasingly placed the state “in forthright and direct service to the economy” and reduced it to “an enterprise organized by market rationality,” then the decade between the launch of the Lake Meadows project and the release of the 1958 Development Plan for the Central Area of Chicago was certainly a crucial one in Chicago’s move towards a neoliberal future.33 During this moment, for example, one of the city’s most critical social needs institutions, the Chicago Housing Authority, was transformed from an agency whose mission was providing decent affordable housing to low-income families to what Ferd Kramer described at the time as “the critical key to freeing land for redevelopment by private enterprise.”34 The gutting of such an important institution was accomplished so easily because public housing in Chicago had been thoroughly racialized in the decade following the end of the Second World War, when Elizabeth Wood had tried to use it as a lever of racial integration. Public housing, in the minds of most, was about black people, and, the Carey Ordinance aside, these same people watched helplessly as Boss Dawson and the rest of their political leadership failed to raise much of a stir about the use of their constituents’ tax revenues to finance the displacement of working-class African Americans living in the paths of the bulldozers.
But even though Daley possessed neoliberal sensibilities, the patronage game made him something of a quasi-Keynesian in spirit. Far from being ideologically driven by the notion of cutting budgets and reducing the state, the Daley machine was all about expanding municipal government and spending as much as possible—just as long as it was the federal government and private investors who were footing the bill. To be sure, the mayor’s Keynesian side was devoid of any sort of vision of trickled-down social justice (and here is where the quasi becomes necessary); only the machine’s faithful could share in the wealth, and the others could suffer for their stupidity for all he cared. Rather than social justice, Daley gave Chicagoans city services—cleaner streets, roads without potholes, more extensive police protection, better public transportation—even if such services varied widely according to which side of the color line you lived on. And he used signs, stickers, and highly publicized campaigns to make sure that nobody overlooked all that he was doing for the city.
However, if Daley was eager to entrust an alliance of business interests and technocrats with the task of planning Chicago’s future, preserving the city’s racial order was a job he would often take into his own hands. In reality, his business allies and their planners were mostly after the same thing he was, even if they often articulated their goals in coded, technical terms. In a 1958 urban renewal plan spearheaded by the University of Chicago, for example, the idea of demolishing hundreds of acres of mostly lower-income black housing between 47th Street and 59th Street in Hyde Park was justified in the name of developing a “compatible neighborhood” for the university. Similarly, the CAC’s vision of the Loop’s future lay in promoting middle-class residential communities around it, with the term middle-class serving as a euphemism for white. By the late 1950s there was a clear consensus among Chicago’s most influential developers, realtors, and planners that the creation of white middle-class communities provided the best defense against the rising
tide of ghetto blight. They were acting to protect valuable institutions and the value of the real estate around them, and in doing so they were doing the mayor’s bidding, for increasing real estate values meant increasing revenue for the city, and revenue, of course, translated into patronage and power for the machine. This was the beginning of a new period in the history of the American city when the capital generated from the redevelopment of urban space increasingly replaced that derived from manufacturing activities. In the case of Chicago, in particular, the presence of an administration so wedded to this progrowth ideology has caused historians to debate the extent of Mayor Daley’s part in this process, with some of the more persuasive studies arguing that the mayor’s role was more that of “caretaker” than “creator.”35
Chicago on the Make Page 20
