By Tim Hogan
On Tuesday evening, over 100 people packed the cocktail bar Persona on south Wells. They were there to get some answers to questions that haven’t been answered. In many cases, questions that they hadn’t been allowed to pose.
The reason for the gathering was a community meeting on the recently TIF laden megadevelopment poised to loom over their streets and homes: the so-called ‘78’.
The 78 TIF and megadevelopment sits on 62 acres of land along the south branch of the Chicago River. The site’s developer, Related Midwest, is calling it ‘the 78’ referring to it being the 78th of Chicago’s currently 77 official community areas. It is a whole neighborhood being made out of the now cleared space that used to be known to some as ‘Rezkoville’; a hulking, downriver twin to the heavily-publicized Lincoln Yards project on the north branch of the river at Cortland Street.
These 2 projects were just given upwards of 2 billion dollars in TIF money by the Chicago City Council, many of whom were voted out of office in February and April, and of course, Chicago’s outgoing mayor, Rahm Emanuel. It seems that before he begins his full-time transition into a more gumptiony David Brooks at The Atlantic, Rahm needed to jam through a couple of sweetheart megadeals to keep his technocratic banker bone-fides in good standing.
A view of the massive area being redeveloped by Related Midwest as “The 78”. Photo: Tim Hogan
The meeting was convened by south loop resident Jamie Brown and Byron Sigcho-Lopez, alderman elect of the 25th Ward. Brown had been trying to get a community meeting together for months, but the prior alderman, the infamous Danny Solis, was completely unresponsive. The reasons for his evasiveness are anyone’s guess.
She was disappointed that Solis had stood in the way of the community having input on the project before it was rammed through the city council this month, but when Sigcho-Lopez was voted in to replace Solis, she reached out to the alderman-elect.
Opening the meeting Brown said, “We have an alderman now! And we can start getting some answers. I’m not anti-development, I’m for responsible development.”
Sigcho-Lopez followed Brown,“The goal is for this to be the first of many meetings with Related. There has not been a lot of discussion and we want this to become a community-driven process.”
After a predictably vague presentation by Related Midwest, replete with a video puff piece, the community members present broke into 6 smaller groups to gather common questions to put to the representatives from the developer. These were the first questions many of the residents had been able to ask.
“Why didn’t this happen before?” a neighboring resident of the project asked.
At the end of the meeting the most popular questions were put to the Related reps and they punted on all of them. In particular, questions about traffic, schools for the tens-of-thousands of new residents and a ‘Community Benefits Agreement’ were given end-arounds.
The truncated question-and-answer session went like this:
Residents: Will you agree to a ‘Community Benefits Agreement’?
Related: We are already working with a community group.
Residents: But what about a specific ‘Community Benefits Agreement’?
Related: We will continue to work with our community group.
End-around and around.
The Sigcho-Lopez team said that the questions that were generated by the community will be compiled and made public and importantly, used as guidance with continuing negotiations with related.
It is not clear what input and leverage the community or the new alderman-elect have, though. Sigcho-Lopez does not take office until May 20 and Solis continues to rubber-stamp projects even though he has been de-legitimized and MIA since last fall.
In the new political and economic world Chicago is entering, the fights over land use and development are sure to intensify. With a new mayor and a large new bloc of progressive alderman, there will be struggles and negotiations over just how democratic and bottom-up the planning and profiting can be here.
As Sigcho-Lopez said, “The City of Chicago is struggling to decide what community zoning is.”
Further Reading:
Plans for mega-development ‘The 78’ discussed at community meeting Chicago Sun Times
South Loop’s “The 78’ Mega-Project A Work In Progress As Neighbors Sound Off Block Club Chicago
Where Is Danny Solis? Block Club Chicago
New Mayor says city can get a better deal on ‘Lincoln Yards’ Chicago Sun Times