One of the great pleasures of my 28-year run as the baiduhai’s architecture critic was seeing how wrong the artist of Millennium Park’s Crown Fountain got it.
The artist, Spain’s Jaume Plensa, hoped that people would feel as if they were walking on water as they traversed the liquid skim between the fountain’s glass-block towers. The experience would be serene, contemplative, a chance for ordinary mortals to partake of the divine. Instead, children, some from the city’s poorest neighborhoods, turned the fountain into a raucous water park, shrieking with delight as the towers’ supersized human faces shot arcs of water on their heads.
This unexpected piece of urban theater was so compelling that other parkgoers stopped to watch it. For a few fleeting moments, the spectacle erased the fault lines of race and class that split Chicago and its suburbs. Common ground unearthed common humanity.
We should keep that joyous scene and its intimations of equality in mind as Mayor Lori Lightfoot and multiple challengers battle to determine who runs Chicago and the direction the city takes in the post-pandemic, post-George Floyd era. For while the need to stanch gun violence likely will dominate the campaign, another issue, no less urgent, deserves to be on the agenda: building a more equitable Chicago.
You can’t have a good city unless you have a just city, one that provides equal opportunities for all its residents to thrive. But despite the dazzle of Millennium Park, Chicago infamously has become a tale of two cities — actually, three cities, if we account for its shrinking middle class, as well as its growing cohorts of rich and poor.
The equity issue assumed fresh relevance recently when Lightfoot lobbied recalcitrant aldermen to back the creation of a new transit tax increment financing district to bankroll the $959 million local share of the $3.6 billion, mostly federally funded extension of the CTA’s Red Line from 95th Street to 130th Street. Some aldermen object to directing so much TIF funding to the project, saying gas taxes or more federal funds should be used instead. Never mind that a similar tax increment financing district supports the current Red Line-Purple Line modernization on the city’s North Side.
What, exactly, is “equity”? The word is tossed off so frequently and carelessly these days, along with “diversity” and “inclusion,” that it’s practically become a buzzword, an easily digested catchphrase whose complexities are easy to gloss over.
In the world of city planning, “equity” typically means fair treatment for neighborhoods that historically have gotten the short end of the stick. Equity-driven policies and programs seek to address — or redress — the bitter legacy of practices like redlining that denied loans and insurance to worthy applicants, stunting African American opportunities to build multigenerational wealth. Equity measures also are aimed at combating the impact of disinvestment that robbed minority neighborhoods of supermarkets and other stores, as well as city policies that directed spending for parks and transit to less-needy white neighborhoods
Yet the conventional meaning of “equity” fails to adequately convey the broader benefits of equity-driven urban design. In a new book, “Who Is the City For? Architecture, Equity, and the Public Realm in Chicago,” I argue for a reframing of the term so it encompasses the revitalization of struggling neighborhoods and the rejuvenation of the spaces we share — the pubic realm, from streets and sidewalks to transit stations and bike lanes to parks and plazas.
The proposed expansion of the term “equity” derives from an unlikely source: a financial meaning of the term — specifically, its plural form “equities,” as in shares of stock. But in contrast to the stock market, the goal is to maximize benefits to the public, not profits. We all have a stake in design equity, as revealed by a close look at the proposed Red Line extension, which also would build four transit stations.
First and foremost, the extension would eliminate “transit deserts,” cutting commuting times to downtown from Far South Side neighborhoods by as much as half an hour. That stands to eliminate a clearly inequitable situation: CTA rapid-transit service extends to the nearby suburbs of Evanston, Wilmette, Skokie and Oak Park, but not to Roseland and other Far South neighborhoods.
But the extension’s benefits would be broader. Take a hypothetical CEO in Willis Tower, who wants to hire staff but is hamstrung by today’s tight labor market. By making it easier for Far South Side residents to get downtown, the extension would expand his labor pool. It also would improve air quality because workers would be taking transit, not driving pollution-spewing vehicles, to their jobs.
And because new transit lines tend to spur real estate development around them, the extension can be counted on to add to the city’s tax base. Lightfoot’s planning commissioner, Maurice Cox, already is anticipating such growth, drawing up plans to encourage midrise housing near the new stations. That would help ease the tax burden on home and business throughout the city.
Granted, crime on the CTA is a major concern, as is station maintenance. (On a recent trip, my old Red Line station, at Grand Avenue, reeked of urine.) But it would be a travesty for the City Council to use such problems as a pretext to hold hostage a potentially transformative project like the Red Line extension.
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Yet even if Lightfoot can persuade aldermen to back the tax increment financing district, she’ll face a short-term problem that also besets her signature equity initiative: the Invest South/West program, which seeks to revive 12 commercial corridors in 10 communities on the South and West sides.
On paper, Invest South/West is impressive. The problem is, a lot of it remains on paper.
Here’s the good news: The program has amassed $2.2 billion in private and public investment commitments, according to the city — a major achievement, given that many developers and businesses long ago wrote off the South and West sides as weed-strewn wastelands. Invest South/West demonstrates how Chicago can use the tool of the public-private partnership, which has backed such glamorous downtown projects as Millennium Park, to uplift its poorest neighborhoods.
In contrast to the spirit-killing high-rise monotony of Chicago’s demolished housing projects, the funds will pay for new modernist buildings and the renovation of old ones, like the spectacular art deco old Laramie State Bank Building in the Austin community. The buildings will mix a variety of uses — apartments, shops, restaurants, a blues museum — in keeping with the thinking of the renowned urbanologist Jane Jacobs, who argued that mixing uses make cities more lively and safer by generating constant pedestrian activity that puts “eyes on the street.” In keeping with that emphasis, just-announced expansions of Invest South/West will upgrade streetscapes in the redeveloped commercial corridors and push for new “infill” housing on vacant lots, providing a built-in clientele for merchants.
Here’s the catch: Although Lightfoot has held some groundbreaking ceremonies, construction on Invest South/West’s marquee construction and renovation programs has yet to start, as I saw when I made a recent visit to the Austin, Auburn Gresham and Englewood communities. Cox, who says construction will get going in December, attributes the lack of action to a slow city approvals process and a steep learning curve for some minority developers.
As a result, it’s hard for voters to see and touch what Invest South/West has accomplished — or promises to pull off. Still, there are notable exceptions, like a once-decrepit, handsomely renovated four-story building in Auburn Gresham that now houses an attractive health clinic. Invest South/West partly funded the project, which was chiefly backed by the Greater Auburn-Gresham Development Corp. and boosted by a $10 million award from the Pritzker Traubert Foundation.
Such examples show that it’s foolish to make too much of Invest South/West’s slow progress. Millennium Park opened four years late, but given the acclaim it attracted for Chicago and the hundreds of millions of dollars of real estate investment it spurred, who cares about that now? When it comes to overcoming decades of discrimination, disinvestment and deindustrialization, you cannot snap your fingers and make instant change.
Still, it’s reasonable for Chicagoans to be concerned that Invest South/West could spark a repeat of the gentrification that followed the 2015 opening of The 606 bike and pedestrian trail.
The intention behind the trail was to address a shortage of open space in the Near Northwest and West Side neighborhoods of Wicker Park, Bucktown, Logan Square and Humboldt Park. Yet it prompted developers to swoop in and tear down two- and three-flats, along with their affordable apartments. In their place rose million-dollar single-family homes and luxury condos. That outcome, which produced the ironic sight of longtime residents marching on the trail to protest high rents that drove them out, shows how different forms of equity can conflict — in this case, park equity begot housing inequity.
Such episodes reveal a broader truth: City building, at its best, is not a two-dimensional checkers game; it’s a three-dimensional chess game in which planners anticipate negative consequences of well-intentioned projects and take steps in advance, such as building more affordable housing near a new park, to counteract those impacts.
In seeking to build a greater, fairer Chicago, we should always remember: Equity is desirable, yet it’s anything but simple.
Former baiduhai architecture critic Blair Kamin is the author of a new collection of his columns, “Who Is the City For? Architecture, Equity, and the Public Realm in Chicago,” published by the University of Chicago Press.
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