Most city spending on public works is funneled into the O`Hare International Airport expansion and downtown improvements, leaving only
”maintenance level” funds for neighborhood streets, sewers and sidewalks, a new study contends.
”The City of Chicago is a partner and active participant in the uneven development of the city,” concluded James L. Greer, a researcher with the Center for Urban Research and Policy Studies at the University of Chicago.
Of the $3.2 billion the city plans to spend on public works between 1985-1989, Greer found, $2 billion will go to O`Hare, the Loop and the proposed Southwest Side rapid transit line to Midway Airport.
Greer`s analysis also contends that Chicago`s method of choosing and funding capital improvements ”is insulated, fragmented, technocratic and answerable to neither elected officials nor the public.”
”The situation could very well get worse for Chicago`s neighborhoods,”
Greer said.
”An underlying crisis looms,” he wrote, because of ongoing cutbacks in federal aid to cities and the imminent depletion of the $1.1 billion in federal funds the city was promised after cancellation of the Crosstown Expressway.
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Greer based his 45-page report, titled ”Capital Investments in Chicago,” on a unique neighborhood-by-neighborhood computer analysis of where the city spends its capital funds.
Although the final version of Greer`s study is being released this week, earlier versions have provoked debate and criticism in academic and urban planning circles.
Some think Greer erred by including airport expansion bonds in his analysis, since the airlines and their passengers, not city taxpayers, foot that bill.
Others say it was misleading to credit just one of the city`s 77 official community areas with all the spending that goes into a facility. Rogers Park, for instance, is credited with the entire $60 million rebuilding of the Howard Street rapid transit yard even though the benefits will be derived by CTA rapid transit riders across the city.
And as might be expected, supporters of Mayor Harold Washington say that Greer fails to credit the mayor with opening up the capital planning process and aiming more funds at neighborhoods.
Even so, Greer`s effort is one of the first to place hard numbers on the growing tension between Chicago`s booming downtown and not-so-booming neighborhoods.
”Even if you jump on some of his `apples and oranges` problems, this is the first and best information of its kind we`ve seen,” said Deborah Stone, a senior planner at the Metropolitan Planning Council. Stone last year produced an elaborate study of the ”infrastructure crisis” facing the Chicago area.
James Capraro, executive director of the Southwest Development Corp., a commercial development group at 63d Street and Western Avenue, said Greer`s study is more proof that ”there`s not a whole lot of rhyme or reason to city spending in neighborhoods.”
Capraro and Ted Wysocki, head of a citywide coalition of neighborhood business groups called CAN-DO, are pushing for more neighborhood involvement in city public works spending.
Greer aimed his sharpest criticism not, as one might expect, at the heavy spending on booming areas like O`Hare and the Loop.
A larger problem, Greer said, is the city`s unwavering tradition of using public works dollars in the neighborhoods only for maintenance and rarely for economic development.
”The most serious inequity,” Greer wrote, ”is not the uneven distribution of capital improvements, but the capacity to utilize capital improvements as developmental tools downtown but only for maintenance in the neighborhoods.”
Why not, Greer said, build sewers and streets in neighborhoods as a means to promote business and residential development.
”But we are,” said Robert Giloth, an officer with the city`s department of economic development. He said the administration has broken tradition by setting aside part of the capital budget for streets and bridges in older industrial zones such as Goose Island, northwest of downtown.
Giloth also pointed to the city`s sale last November of $171 million in general obligation bonds–the first issue since 1981 to raise a sizable amount of money for neighborhood public works.
But how that money was spent tends to support Greer`s findings, some say. To win aldermanic support for the bonds, all 50 wards were granted five miles of street repaving. No effort was made to determine if some of the wards needed the work more than others.