A blue-ribbon jury has reached a verdict on Mayor Richard M. Daley’s 21-year stewardship of Chicago, and the decision is (envelope, please): We’re No. 6.
OK, so our ranking in the 2010 Global Cities Index published recently by Foreign Policy magazine is not exactly a report card on the mayor. In fact, it’s a ranking of the world’s largest metropolitan areas, not just cities, using multiple criteria ranging from “business activity” to “political engagement.”
And in the interest of full disclosure, one of our city’s premier civic groups, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, teamed with business consultancy A.T. Kearney to crunch the numbers. So there’s a chance our thumb was on the scale.
Still, one can’t help but be impressed that a prestigious journal of international doings ranks our city just behind New York, London, Tokyo, Paris and Hong Kong. Or that we scored ahead of Los Angeles, Singapore, Sydney, Seoul and Brussels (the complete list can be found at foreignpolicy.com/).
Point is, for all the skepticism and dark speculation about why Rich Daley is hanging it up after six terms, Chicago is far better positioned for success than when he took over in 1989.
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Back then Chicago was losing population, especially its middle class, at an alarming rate. Jobs were disappearing faster, especially good-paying manufacturing jobs, more than 300,000 of which disappeared during the ’70s and ’80s. Entire neighborhoods were hollowing out, especially those near the vertical slums maintained by the Chicago Housing Authority. Our public schools were declared America’s “worst” by the U.S. secretary of education. Racial antagonisms defined city politics and “Council Wars” stymied redevelopment efforts from Navy Pier and the North Loop to neighborhoods that needed them the most.
Sure, some of these setbacks would have occurred no matter who held the mayor’s office. Deindustrialization happened all across America’s rust belt, only Chicago, its oversized buckle, had the most to lose. Same goes for the loss of social and familial cohesion among the underemployed and undereducated poor. It happened everywhere. Cities like Detroit and Newark, N.J., have yet to turn it around.
Not that Daley turned it around by himself. Far from it. America’s urban winds shifted about the time he took office, though not every city had the foresight to alter course, crowd sail and go with the blow. A new generation of college-educated professionals — many raised in bland, post-war suburbs — opted to start their working lives in more diverse surroundings. Digital communications technologies — which many predicted would let entrepreneurs set up shop on distant mountaintops — instead prompted many to locate where the action is. In effect, River North trumped Aspen. All the while, an epic migration from Mexico and points south transfused neighborhoods once left for dead by white ethnics.
Mayor Daley was early to spot these trends and turn them to the city’s advantage. Taking a lesson from the late Mayor Harold Washington, he reached out to black and brown Chicago. He spread proceeds from tax increment financing districts and federal grants to projects sponsored by inner-city churches and development groups. He defended minority contract set-asides from federal legal assaults. He chaired and spoke to innumerable fundraisers held by nonprofits, from the Urban League to the United Neighborhood Organization.
Most of all, Daley focused on remaking his father’s industrial city into a post-industrial center of arts and culture, of digital bits and bytes. Over two decades Chicago morphed into a place capable of intriguing and attracting the movers, shakers and soldiers of the new economy.
Mistakes were made. Too many displaced CHA tenants fell between the cracks. Too many public school graduates are not job-ready after years of Daley-style education reform. Too many vacant lots remain in neighborhoods laid low, again, this time by the foreclosure fiasco.
There are also serious questions — valid questions — about a “culture of corruption” at City Hall, a culture Daley did not invent, but one that has continued during his reign, infuriating his detractors and disappointing his defenders.
His flaws notwithstanding, Chicago is going to miss Mayor Daley. Those of us who followed the Council Wars, as we listen to the growing cacophony of mayoral candidates, fear what’s ahead may be a good deal less benign than democracy in action.
We’ll soon see what the moralizers and supposed reformers actually get done once Daley is gone. But four years from now, do remember this: Rich Daley’s Chicago, warts and all, was No. 6.
John McCarron teaches, writes and consults on urban affairs.