Once you start looking, you see them everywhere. There are empty storefronts on Irving Park Road in Portage Park, on Commercial Avenue in South Chicago, on Division Street in Austin, even on Clark Street in Lincoln Park. Still more striking are the empty lots dotting the landscape—the city alone owns more than 15,000, in each neighborhood on every side of town. That doesn’t include thousands more in private hands.
This is what it’s come down to in the 18th Ward: a choice between a pawnshop or a long-empty lot. Except that residents don’t believe it’s a choice they should have to make.
Almost everyone in the audience stood up.
Tyse is not an image of timidity. She’s tall, with pipes for arms and high sharp cheekbones, and as a former police officer—she ended her career as chief of the UIC campus force—she seems practiced at commanding authority.
“We’ve got a whole list,” she said afterward. “It just takes a business or two to come in and show that it can be done. We’ve got money to spend.”
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The corner of 79th and Western is roughly the center of the 18th Ward, as well as the meeting point of several neighborhoods—Wrightwood and Ashburn to the west, Auburn-Gresham and North Beverly to the east—that have evolved from all-white to predominantly African-American since the 1960s. But longtime residents, many of them the first to integrate their blocks, are quick to tell you what hasn’t changed: the ward remains a community of teachers, cops, and other middle-class workers who are invested in their homes. It’s common to encounter lawn-care workers, joggers, and jump-roping children on the quiet side streets, and nearly every block is organized into a block club. Citizen volunteers patrol the neighborhoods, watching out for unkempt yards and strangers who look like they could be up to something.
Brown and the members of his block club asked for more police patrols and city services; Alderman Lane said she was doing all she could “except getting a gun and going out there and shooting someone myself.” Last summer, almost exactly a year after the first incident, there was another fatal shooting on the block. Brown and his neighbors redoubled their efforts to communicate with police and maintain several vacant properties on their street, but they remain wary.
