It was only a few months ago that housing activists dared to imagine the unimaginable: getting the City Council to make law in the face of Mayor Daley’s opposition.
Like most of her allies in the coalition, Watkins figured they had a good chance of winning. They’ve been at it for two years. They had the strong support of Fourth Ward alderman Toni Preckwinkle, who drafted the ordinance that year, as well as 15 community groups from various neighborhoods. Many religious leaders backed it. In March a City Hall press conference included rabbis, priests, ministers, imams, and Buddhist monks. Cardinal Francis George also signed on. “I can lend my moral support,” George said at a rally two years ago. “What we are seeing in parts of the city is economic segregation. And it’s not good.”
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“People have to go somewhere when they’re gentrified out of a neighborhood–a lot of them come here,” says Watkins. “Our schools are overcrowded. We’re finding a lot of families moving in on top of each other. I think we need a much more balanced approach to housing.”
For the almost two years since then, activists have barraged aldermen with calls and visits. “We told them it was good for their constituents and good for the city,” says Watkins. “You can’t get rid of all affordable housing in the city. You can’t just move everyone out.”
Wrong. Aldermen Isaac Carothers (29th), Emma Mitts (37th), Danny Solis (25th), and Latasha Thomas (17th) dropped their support once they learned the ordinance actually might pass. “They told us they weren’t supporting the ordinance anymore–they said take their names off the list,” says Walsh. “It doesn’t make sense. You agree to 25 percent, why would you not agree to 15 percent? It’s less controversial, for goodness sake.”
Over the past ten years the city and the university have made a lot of promises to justify what was really just an old-fashioned move-the-poor-people-out urban-renewal project. They said that they were going to build research labs to help find a cure for cancer (still haven’t built them), that they were going to build recreation fields for the community (haven’t gotten around to it), that they were ridding the city of decaying structures. “There were 30 to 35 perfectly good old buildings around there,” says Lavicka. “But they had their experts say the buildings were decrepit and falling apart. They got the professional guys to stand up and say–oh, what were their words? They called them ‘slum and blighted.’”
