One of the easiest promises for a Chicago mayor to make is a commitment to share the prosperity of downtown and the North Side with the rest of the city. The hard part is getting it done.
Here was Mayor Lori Lightfoot during her Monday inaugural address:
“No matter who you are, no matter where you live, no matter your circumstance in life, Chicago is now on a mission to include you, to join hands with you, to share power with you and to give you a reason to believe that we can all pull in the same direction to make Chicago better, together.”
Lightfoot’s task is turning those words into reality — into blueprints, construction sites and ribbon cuttings. Because the most effective way to end inequalities is by spreading opportunity and prosperity via private-sector investments in jobs and economic activity.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel had a few signature wins during his tenure, including getting a Whole Foods in Englewood and wooing the Barack Obama Presidential Center to Jackson Park. But Chicago’s South and West sides remain neglected by investors and employers who tend to stick to economically successful neighborhoods and ignore the rest.
Lightfoot says she has the drive to erase the inequities. She can begin her mission by turning to two South Side sites that have the potential to catalyze economic rebirth in disinvested neighborhoods:
The Michael Reese Hospital site in Bronzeville has been dormant since the hospital’s closure in 2009. The land was considered as a site for the Olympic Village when Chicago was in the running for the 2016 Summer Olympics. It also was pitched as a possible site for Obama’s center and as a potential venue for Amazon’s HQ2.
Today, the site’s unused. Yet the land is ideally situated — just south of McCormick Place, along the lakefront. A group of investors envisions building at the site millions of square feet of space for medical labs, science and tech startups, data centers, apartments and retail. It’ll be up to Lightfoot to decide whether that’s the right plan for Michael Reese, and if so, to see that it gets built.
Also along the South Side’s lakefront is South Works, the site of a former U.S. Steel complex. Developers and bold visions for the site have come and gone. The latest, an Irish developer’s bid to build 20,000 homes, fell apart on Emanuel’s watch. Like Michael Reese, South Works is prime lakefront land with a tantalizing view of the Chicago skyline. The site has environmental remediation issues, but that’s what mayors are for —to solve those kinds of sticking points.
Developers build, but mayors make sure the right planning, policymaking and troubleshooting take place to make construction happen. On the North Side, the Lincoln Yards mega-development, a $6 billion mix of apartment towers and commercial space along the Chicago River, is on course largely because it was championed by Emanuel and his point man for stewarding transformative projects, former Planning Commissioner David Reifman.
Plans for The 78, a $7 billion mixed-use development between the South Loop and Chinatown, also moved forward under Emanuel. The Sun-Times recently reported that Reifman regretted the lack of progress on South Works and Michael Reese. Mr. Reifman, we feel your pain.
Lightfoot’s ambition to revitalize the South and West sides got an immediate private-sector boost from developer Sterling Bay, which plans to build affordable housing on 100 vacant lots in South and West Side neighborhoods. Sterling Bay, the firm behind Lincoln Yards, will use “modular construction,” a process that involves prebuilt sections of buildings that are assembled at the construction site, the Tribune’s Ryan Ori reports. One interesting effort afoot, many more to come, we hope.
Lightfoot has the chance to take the Michael Reese and South Works sites and make them South Side jewels — achievements that can vitalize neighborhoods and provide more job opportunities to more Chicagoans.
Success will require focus and ingenuity. But that’s how good mayors lead.
