To help visualize the physical changes taking place in Chicago, an apartment search company decided several years ago to compile a series of photographs from Google Street View. These photos, taken from the same vantage points just seven years apart—2007 and 2014—documented a remarkable transformation of the city’s skyline. Another set of pictures, shot from the top of the John Hancock Center, show an even more striking makeover of the built environment occurring over the past four decades. Three new books explore the politics that has helped guide, and in many cases underwrite, this transformation and examine its consequences for the city and the well-being of its citizens.
On the first point, all three manuscripts credit (or, depending on their point of view, blame) Chicago’s iconic former mayor, Richard M. Daley, for being both the visionary and key architect of the several-decades-long effort to redevelop the city’s lakefront. When Time magazine named Daley one of the country’s top five mayors in 2005, it congratulated him for overseeing the “city’s transition from a graying hub to a vibrant boomtown.” Building the City of Spectacle, written by two leading urbanists, Costas Spirou and Dennis Judd, examines how Daley translated his vision of making Chicago a tourist destination into a political reality.
Comparing Daley to New York’s legendary planner and builder Robert Moses, the authors attribute much of the recent developments on the lakefront and around the Loop, Chicago’s business district, to the mayor’s skill in building political coalitions and corralling the fragmented machinery of government. In order to turn his vision into reality, they argue, Daley cemented a pliant “rubberstamp” city council, first by continuing the city’s tradition of granting individual alderman autonomy over the provision of city services in their district and veto power over local zoning. When vacancies occurred, Daley appointed loyalists to fill them, further increasing his influence over the council. Similarly, the mayor appointed top staff and allies to key independent boards and commissions responsible for overseeing the city’s park system, convention center, and housing authority. Control over these organs was essential for remaking the waterfront, including the construction of the new iconic Millennium Park and redevelopment of Navy Pier.
During the latter years of his nearly two-decade tenure in office, Daley increasingly acted in ways that flew in the face of established political norms and what many might consider principles of good government. To thwart efforts to keep open Meigs Field, a small waterfront airport, Daley ordered city crews in 2003 to carve giant “Xs” into the runway under the cover of night, in clear violation of federal regulations. In exchange for private donations to underwrite the Millennium Park development, wealthy donors—a “who’s who” of the city’s social and economic elites—were able to select the architects and artists involved in the project and give direct input into major design decisions, a process that resulted in considerable delays and cost overruns.
Spirou and Judd are evenhanded in evaluating Daley’s legacy, noting that some might disagree about whether the mayor left the city in better shape than he found it. Critics complained that Daley put the interests of out-of-town visitors ahead of his own constituents, and concentrated too many resources downtown at the expense of neighborhoods. Many residents might echo a letter to the editor of a local newspaper quoted by the authors: “Let me get this straight: Millennium Park cost $475 million for 24.5 acres of a park with a giant, shiny bean”—referring to Cloud Gate, a stainless steel sculpture by Anish Kapoor—“in the middle. Do you think the city could have spent the money a little better—maybe for the crumbling schools or the crumbling streets? What a waste of money” (p. 118).
Nevertheless, the authors leave little doubt where they fall in the debate, writing: “If the City of Spectacle that visitors inhabit did not exist, Chicago’s economy would be in shambles and not only because a lot of out-of-town tourists would be missing” (p. 119). In the opening chapter of the book, the authors offer this reflection: “We came to understand that the City of Spectacle is so central to Chicago’s history, image, and economy that it would be impossible to know what the city would be like without it. It would certainly be less prosperous, less attractive, and less diverse” (p. 13).
Certainly the book’s strength is in documenting the pivotal role played by local politics in remaking Chicago, a role frequently overlooked and underappreciated in some urban scholarship. However, the authors arguably inflate the economic consequences of Daley’s investments in the city’s tourism sector, likely overestimating their impact. For example, Spirou and Judd take at face value—and quote extensively from—city-commissioned economic impact analyses, ignoring the well-known tendency of such reports to massively overstate the actual economic impact of projects and claim credit for spending that would have been realized anyway (see, e.g., Andrew Zimbalist, Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup, 2016). The authors fail to acknowledge that most of the jobs associated with tourism tend to pay near-poverty wages with few benefits, or to discuss the long-term fiscal consequences of locking up so much of the city’s real estate in tax increment financing districts. This approach will likely mean that any new revenues generated in these districts will go toward repaying the debt incurred by the projects, rather than contributing to the city’s general budget or the provision of other public amenities, such as local schools, that are critical to Chicago’s long-term success.
The two other books, though narrower in their scope, generally take a more critical view of Chicago’s renaissance and carefully consider the distributional consequences of the city’s revival. In general, both books suggest that Daley’s investments and redevelopment efforts produced significant number of losers, not just winners.
In No Simple Solutions, Susan Popkin, a long-time public housing researcher, examines the implementation of Chicago’s Plan for Transformation—a blueprint for the city’s housing authority that envisioned the demolition of many blighted high-rise public housing units and their replacement with mixed-income housing. The plan was enacted under Daley’s leadership and was implemented by the mayor’s close allies installed in key positions of power in the housing authority, and on staff at the private MacArthur Foundation, whose endowment helped support the effort. As the foreword notes, Popkin has written “an honest book about complex policy that had winners and losers and involved tough trade-offs” (p. ix).
Popkin gives Daley substantial credit for turning around the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), a dysfunctional and near-bankrupt agency placed into federal receivership in the early 1990s. However, she notes that the agency, even after its revival during the Daley years, was ill-prepared to deal with the various challenges facing the vulnerable families that continued to live in the city’s public housing when the plan was put into place. Those who had better options moved elsewhere far earlier, she notes, meaning that families who remained in the CHA housing when Daley took charge were some of the most difficult and disadvantaged tenants, who were unprepared to make the transition to the private housing market, even with generous subsidies.
Ultimately, few of the former tenants displaced by the demolition and rehabilitation efforts undertaken under the CHA’s Plan for Transformation remained in public housing a decade later. About a third moved to private housing using publicly subsidized vouchers. Most of these movers settled in better housing in modestly safer neighborhoods, but they continued to face overwhelming challenges. Many of their landlords fell into foreclosure during the recent Great Recession, forcing repeated moves with little CHA assistance. Teenagers faced considerable challenges adjusting to their new schools and social networks, some joining gangs, and Popkin notes that former public housing residents were more likely than other residents in their new communities both to be arrested and to report being victims of crime after moving. According to surveys, “families who moved to public housing developments that were rehabilitated as part of the Plan often reported better [housing] conditions than those renting from private-market landlords” (p. 52). Although the author gives considerable credit to both CHA and private foundations for helping create innovative programs designed to provide wraparound social services to former tenants, she acknowledges that many of these families saw only modest improvements in the quality of their lives as a result of the city’s considerable investment in remaking its public housing.
Many of these themes are echoed by John Betancur and Janet Smith in Claiming Neighborhood, which offers the most skeptical take on Daley’s redevelopment efforts. Taking a longer-term, historical view, the authors note considerable similarities between the mayor’s favored projects and the federally funded urban renewal projects attempted after World War II, which are blamed by many historians for reducing housing opportunities and resulting in mass displacement of the poor. For example, the authors note that the CHA’s focus on mixed-income housing developments—designed to avoid the negative social consequences associated with concentrated poverty—echo earlier twentieth-century efforts to limit the black population in neighborhoods to avoid the decline hypothesized by theories of “racial tipping.”
Although Betancur and Smith acknowledge that redevelopment efforts were largely successful in raising property values in formerly struggling minority-dominated neighborhoods such as Bronzeville and Pilsen, they remain unconvinced that the regular residents (rather than housing speculators) benefited considerably. Indeed, many former residents of these neighborhoods found themselves priced out by gentrification.
Collectively, these three works suggest that scholars should pay considerably more attention to the distributional consequences of urban redevelopment and critically reexamine the extent to which improvements in the built environment actually trickle down to benefit the people who reside there—particularly the most vulnerable among them.
