Your property is about to be condemned for Chicago`s third airport at Lake Calumet and you are mad as hell.
Maybe you own a bungalow in Hegewisch or a two-flat in suburban Burnham. Or perhaps you have a convenience store on South Torrence or a six-flat on South Exchange.
Whatever your stake, you are among the 40,000 people whose house or place of business is about to be obliterated now that Gov. Jim Edgar has agreed to support Mayor Rich Daley`s airport plan. You feel betrayed and angry. You want to fight City Hall to the bitter end. You`re thinking about protest phone-a-thons and candlelight vigils. It`s the normal reaction.
But maybe you should calm down. There may be a better way, a variation on the old South Side motto: Don`t get angry, get even.
Consider some advice that may get you better than even: Get organized and get a good lawyer.
And one other thing, don`t waste your time fighting the new airport. If the thing doesn`t get built, it won`t be because folks around Lake Calumet don`t want it.
Only two things can stop it now-if the airlines don`t agree to shoulder the debt service on the construction bonds through rents and landing fees, or if the federal courts side with environmentalists who will surely sue over the wetlands issue.
While those battles are being fought, you and your soon-to-be-condemned neighbors should get busy putting together a Deal.
You know, a Deal, like the one they gave the folks whose property was condemned for the new Comiskey Park. Remember what happened to them?
I do because I covered their story for the city desk from 1986 to 1990. The Sox condemnees taught me a few things about the politics of eminent domain here in the Land of Lincoln.
Most of the people who lived in South Armour Square, the residential area immediately south of old Comiskey, were middle-class retired couples who had every hope of living out their golden years on the 3500-3600 blocks of South Shields, Princeton and Wentworth.
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They learned otherwise one cold December morning in 1986, when newspapers and radio newscasts informed them that a backroom legislative deal had been struck in Springfield. The Sox would stay in Chicago and play in a new stadium to be built where their houses stood.
Their initial reaction, like yours, was confusion, followed by rage. Two weeks later about 25 of them fashioned protest signs out of empty cardboard boxes and picketed outside Comiskey while then-Mayor Harold Washington watched then-Governor James Thompson sign the bill into law at home plate.
It was the most ragtag picket line I ever saw, but it was a start. It was the beginning of the South Armour Square Neighborhood Coalition. They held more meetings, elected officers and wrote bylaws.
Later they listened to relocation experts from City Hall explain their rights under the federal Uniform Relocation Act; then they listened to leftist organizers from outside the neighborhood urge them to fight the new stadium to their last breath. (The residents` last breath, not the organizers`.)
At that point, the coalition told the outsiders to leave them alone so they could make up their minds. And they did. They decided to hire a good lawyer.
Her name was Mary Milano and, at the time, she worked in the Chicago offices of the world`s largest law firm, Baker & McKenzie. Milano spent many hours talking with coalition members about what they wanted in compensation for their homes.
Together they drew up a list of desired options, which Milano pressed upon the city-state agency created to build the new ballpark. She didn`t have to remind the mayor or governor that retired couples with homemade protest signs make awfully good TV news clips.
The Deal went like this: Renters in the condemnation zone got a $5,000 relocation fee plus moving expenses up to $10,000; homeowners got a choice-the appraised value of their homes plus $25,000 for their inconvenience, or a new home built at government expense in an up-and-coming neighborhood a mile east of Armour Square.
Milano counseled her home-owning clients to take the new house. Those that did-there were 18 in all-are living in handsome brick duplexes built to their specifications just east of the Illinois Institute of Technology. The frame bugalows they left in Armour Square were appraised for $50,000 or less. Their new houses are worth five times that, or more.
Milano, who teaches ethics at a women`s college in Indiana, sees no reason the same Deal, or a better one, could not be cut for the families in the path of the Lake Calumet airport.
Besides generous buyouts, she said, their Deal should contain options for new housing in model communities with new schools, parks and libraries. And there should be guaranteed jobs and/or commercial opportunities at the airport, she said.
”You`ve got to decide, as a group, what you want,” said Milano. ”You don`t settle one-by-one for appraised value. You come up with a plan. You go for the maximum. If you don`t ask, you don`t get.”
So that`s my advice. Get beyond the anger, get organized and get a good lawyer . . . someone like Mary Milano.