Chicago has been siting its major public works for urban renewal purposes since the ’50s.
It’s a proven strategy, using public investments in schools, libraries and police stations to turn around sagging neighborhoods.
The most effective method has been to locate new facilities just beyond the frontier of existing private-sector redevelopment and let the marketplace close the gap. The city’s new police headquarters at 35th Street and Michigan Avenue is a prime example. It will anchor and extend a near-continuous swath of redevelopment headed south from the Loop between State Street and the lakefront. Same goes for West Side investments like the new police 911 center and Whitney Young Magnet High School.
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Less desirable public works, sad to say, have been located so as to minimize their impact on favored neighborhoods. The Cook County Jail complex on the Southwest Side comes to mind, as does much of the city’s public housing. Altgeld Gardens, surrounded by landfills and rail yards on the Far Southeast Side, is testament to how bad this practice can get.
All of which serves as preamble to the following proposition: The citizens of Chicago and of Cook County are not well-served by building the new Traffic Court at the corner of Jackson Boulevard and Homan Avenue on the West Side. That’s where the Cook County Board has voted to put it. And for several reasons it’s a mistake.
Traffic Court is not the kind of facility–like a school, park or branch library–that will lift up this blighted corner of East Garfield Park and make it a better place to live. Nor is that location–a block west of Kedzie Avenue and 15 blocks west of Western Avenue–close enough to the Near West Side boom to have a magnetic effect on private investment.
Most of all, and at the risk of offending those with fine senses of political and racial correctness (PC and RC), Jackson-Homan is not the kind of safe, central, race-neutral turf such a facility demands.
People from all parts of the city, county and region find themselves required to appear in Traffic Court, and they come five days a week and at the rate of 5,000 a day. It’s not a fun, discretionary thing like going to a Bulls game. Whether you’re from Orland Park or Schaumburg, whether you’re ticketed for speeding on the Dan Ryan or causing a fender bender on the Kennedy, Lake Shore Drive, you can be summoned to Traffic Court.
Same goes for Domestic Violence Court, which is the other suite of courtrooms that the County Board, in its wisdom, has decided to put under the new Traffic Court roof, along with Criminal Misdemeanor Court. That’s quite a mix: illegal left turners, battered women and vicious jerks.
Traffic Court should be located downtown, near the meeting of the region’s expressways and mass transit lines and on a street where even the most unsophisticated, in-from-the-suburbs rube will feel safe.
That’s not Homan and Jackson. As of the 1990 census, the neighborhood there was 98 percent African-American and the median income of its households was less than half that of the city median. The Harrison (11th) police district, which covers the site, reported 10 murders, 260 armed robberies and 526 aggravated assaults just in the first three months of this year. In downtown’s bustling 1st police district the corresponding totals were zero, 62 and 56.
True, Homan-Jackson is within easy walking distance of the Congress (Blue) rapid-transit line and a fair hike from the Lake Street (Green) Line. It’s also just a block north of the Eisenhower Expressway. Though last week the County Board damaged that advantage–spatially and psychologically–by reducing the size of the site to spare a block of ramshackle buildings overlooking the expressway. Now the three-story, 32-courtroom facility will be barely visible from the Eisen-hower.
Selection of Homan-Jackson is a fitting end to a project that has been botched repeatedly by President John Stroger and the County Board. Several years ago the city offered to sell, for the price of $1, its riverfront office building at 320 N. Clark St., where Traffic Court has shared with city offices. Stroger & Co., demurred, saying the old landmark was a “money pit” and would cost $38 million to rehab.
So the city sold it to private redevelopers for $10 million. Now those developers are charging the county $170,000 a month in rent and have given Traffic Court until February 2001 to vacate the premises. This is forcing construction of a $19 million interim facility at the Daley Center. The new Traffic Court, which will cost more than $212 million, won’t be ready until late 2003.
Some deal: wrong courts, wrong location, wrong price.
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