For the last few years I’ve been chronicling the clumsy efforts of city officials to spark development in low-income communities without igniting the kind of wholesale gentrification that forces everybody out. Some local teenagers recently provided a refreshing perspective on the problem. The kids, 15 students from Big Picture, a public high school at 4946 S. Paulina, hooked up for a week in June with academics from DePaul University’s Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development, a think tank on urban land use. The purpose was to offer the students a primer on planning in Chicago as they looked for ways to stimulate development in their own neighborhood.
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During the week of June 25 the students took classes at DePaul taught by urban planning professor Joseph Schwieterman, attended a lecture by zoning lawyer Jay Cherwin, and sat with city planners, who gave them a tutorial on existing programs–including tax increment financing. I got a kick out of hearing the kids discuss the nuances of that sticky wicket; their explanations were accurate if a little sanitized. Then again, their instructors were from the planning department.
For much of the week they walked the neighborhood with Kearney, principal Alfredo Nambo, and Mayra Almaraz, an English teacher, concentrating on the business district at 47th and Ashland, around the corner from their school.
The students’ task was to figure out how to rehabilitate the neighborhood without gentrifying it. “You want balanced development,” says Zulema Ortiz, a senior. “You don’t want to displace everybody.”
They ultimately concluded that the best bet would be to have the city buy it, fix it up, and convert it into a community center, whose offerings would include programs for teens. It’s not a bad idea. Not too long ago the city saved a vacant Goldblatt’s in West Town, near the intersection of Chicago and Ashland, by converting it for municipal use with space for public art.
On the phone Carter echoed what she’d been saying publicly about the proposal: opponents are exaggerating the environmental destruction it would cause, and it will provide a boon for the county when the Olympics are over.
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