Chicago’s neighborhoods have lately become one of the nation’s liveliest laboratories of grass-roots economic development. Over the past decade, dozens of nonprofit community groups have worked against great odds to keep factories in Chicago and to stimulate new commercial and industrial activity here.
But many of these community economic-development experts were stunned by their late January meeting with mayoral aspirant Richard M. Daley. It was “a disaster,” “depressing,” “a truly horrible meeting,” in the words of a few participants. They were shocked that Daley seemed so insensitive, even hostile, to the new wave in economic development.
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Joel Bookman, president of CANDO and executive director of the Lawrence Avenue Development Corporation, and Ted Wysocki, executive director of CANDO, were among several participants who confirmed Daley’s indifference at the meeting to manufacturing and the PMD. When the neighborhood developers argued with him that manufacturing was important for the city, “Daley’s response was ‘Nobody wants to live next to the stockyards,’” Wysocki said. “Daley wasn’t concerned about the effect of real-estate speculation on manufacturing.”
The issue goes beyond whether the city can or should save its remaining quarter-million factory jobs, after losing nearly a third of its manufacturing employment between 1979 and 1986. The emerging “balanced growth” strategists see the primary objective of economic development as the creation of more good-paying, long-term jobs; the old Daley strategy focused on real estate and big construction projects.
In the meeting, according to Wim Wiewel, director of the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois/Chicago, Daley argued “that the key aspect of economic development is real-estate development and property taxes. That’s clearly a departure from the Washington administration, where the key to economic development was jobs. It was very explicit: economic development was real-estate development, which brings in property taxes, and that’s what makes the city roll. When somebody brought up the case of Finkl Steel [a firm that was encouraged by the new PMD to make new investments and hire 100 more people], he said, ‘Don’t you think if we had condos and shopping malls there, wouldn’t that generate more property taxes than Finkl Steel?’”
Beyond their fundamental policy differences with Daley, many neighborhood development groups fear that he will greatly cut back reliance on them as “delegate agencies” to implement city projects. Former mayor Jane Byrne first started channeling money to neighborhood economic-development groups, and Washington greatly accelerated it. While Sawyer, Bloom, and Evans all expressed strong commitment to what has been a very effective strategy, Daley was less clear. Several participants in the meeting with Daley were reluctant to talk on the record because they feared reprisals from him if he is elected.
Sawyer’s commissioner of economic development, Tim Wright, argues that Daley’s dismissal of manufacturing is irresponsible. “We push manufacturing not because it’s the end-all or panacea,” Wright says, “but it’s the area that needs the most help.” Although Daley calls for “one-stop shopping” for businesses needing city help or permits, Wright argues that the city already started it under Washington and has improved it since. Like many neighborhood developers, he is skeptical about Daley’s plan to combine planning, economic development, and other agencies, which in any case began meeting together as a development subcabinet under Washington. Critics see the Daley plan as a reversion to the old days when Lew Hill ran all development for the late Mayor Daley: big developers were taken care of quickly, but neighborhoods had a hard time being heard. A superagency, says Wiewel of the University of Illinois, “doesn’t solve problems of bureaucratic slowdowns. It just centralizes them.”
