Urban renewal is not criminal activity.
The average citizen might be forgiven for thinking otherwise, what with so many news accounts of “clout-heavy” developers and their “well-connected” lawyers cutting “sweetheart deals” involving “lucrative” subsidies.
Fact is, the work of repairing broken cities, though essential to the nation’s future, is not particularly profitable. Not when compared to the slam-dunk economics of subdividing bean fields along the suburban fringe. Besides, fringe developers don’t have to put up with loudmouth community activists, a jaded downtown press corps, 24-hour security headaches or industry-tainted soil that needs to be purified to the federal “edible dirt” standard before anything new can be built.
For pioneering urban redevelopers, the grief comes first and the glory–if there is to be glory–much later. . . once the conventional market confirms they weren’t so crazy, after all, to convert an empty factory into residential lofts or retrofit a long-dark theater into an arcade of shops. For suburban subdividers, the payback is immediate and the problems are deferred. . . well after they’ve moved on to the next opportunity created by our ever-expanding tollway system.
Not many urban affairs writers have caught on to this hustle. Many instead remain preoccupied with the so-called “gentrification” issue, in which urban redevelopers play the heavy against low-income victims of displacement. Others attempt to scandalize readers with the fact that, say, the mayor’s brother’s law firm represents a developer on a big downtown project.
Every so often, though, a writer steps up who understands the difficulty of city-fixing and the uphill terrain on which these battles are waged. Lois Wille is such a writer, and her new book about the building of Dearborn Park is a must-read for anyone who has ever wondered how good things actually get done in big cities.
“At Home in the Loop: How Clout and Community Built Chicago’s Dearborn Park” ($29.95, Southern Illinois University Press) tells how Chicago’s version of “a small group of willful men” conceived of, then executed, a pioneering middle-class housing development on derelict railyards south of the Loop.
No conspiracies here, unless you find something sinister about three aging corporate chieftains deciding at a meeting in 1970 that “we” (meaning Chicago’s corporate leadership) had to do something not just about those dismal railyards, but about the worrisome flight of middle-class families from the city.
Starting with that first meeting, Wille takes readers on a wild, 25-year ride through five mayoral administrations, a couple of near-bankruptcies, innumerable tantrums by the city’s best-known architects and real estate moguls and, well, more plot turns than the Wild Mouse at old Riverview.
“At Home in the Loop” was commissioned by Dearborn Park Corp., the corporate investors who raised the original $14 million to launch the project, but Wille, a retired Chicago newspaper journalist and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, doesn’t know how to pull a punch. She paints warts and all. Figures such as Thomas Ayers, the retired Commonwealth Edison CEO who chaired the Dearborn Park effort from start to finish, come through as hard working and high minded. But even the good-natured Ayers nearly wrecked the venture, Wille suggests, by initially hiring project managers with more social credentials than real estate experience. They had to be replaced.
As for political venality and ulterior motives, it’s all here, but not trumpeted so a reader might conclude a nefarious conspiracy was afoot. Yes, City Hall became more cooperative after former Alderman Fred Roti’s cousin rolled in a hot-dog stand to serve the construction workers; and of course, the project’s insurance brokerage had to be the one owned by former Cook County Democratic kingpin George Dunne. This is Chicago, after all, not Minneapolis.
Nor does Wille try to obscure the fact that the builders of Dearborn Park chose not to accommodate low-income black families, whose presence might have scared away middle-class whites. Or that the advertising and sales efforts were manipulated to achieve a 58-30-12 percent mix of whites, blacks and Hispanics and/or Asians. Stable integration in such a project, Wille points out, must be actively managed, not left to the marketplace or the latest civil-rights dictum from distant bureaucrats in Washington.
Wille reserves special admiration for Ferd Kramer, Chicago’s emeritus dean of residential real estate whose pragmatism and financial connections pulled Dearborn Park through its darkest days. Then there was the time Philip Klutznick, Kramer’s alter-ego on the project, buttonholed the late Mayor Harold Washington at a society dinner and convinced him Dearborn Park was not a racist plot, and that City Hall needed to live up to the first Mayor (Richard J.) Daley’s promise to provide streets, sewers and water mains.
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As for the pivotal, if unintended, role played by the late George “Papa Bear” Halas, well, no sense giving away all the treasures stored in Wille’s book.
Suffice it to say that 51 acres of empty railyards got turned into a congenial, racially integrated neighborhood for more than 1,000 families; that a residential housing boom was triggered that still reverberates across the Near South Side; and that the original corporate investors, though delighted with the outcome, ended up recovering only 95 cents on the dollar.
So much for greedy downtown developers.