Chicago, Now!
Do you work hard?
You don’t
Chicago, now
There's a mayoral election in Chicago today. Four decades ago, voter turnout for a mayoral election used to be significantly above presidential elections. That's changed. Today, about a third of registered voters will participate, pretty much the same as every large city off-year election (non-presidential). The 2009 Los Angeles mayoral election had a turnout of only 18%, and remember, not everyone's registered. A turnout that low is hard to call democracy, not considering all the other problematical elements of the present election system such as money and advertising.
The one good thing about Chicago's recent elections, they've demonstrated an improvement in the city's too often toxic racism of the past. Don't misunderstand, Chicago can still be an overtly stupid racist place, but it's better, call it progress. Last election, the choice was between two African American women, while this year sees a neck in neck race between a Black guy and a White guy.
A poll released last week by Northwestern University's Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy had Brandon Johnson, the African American candidate getting 42% of the White vote, while Paul Vallas was getting almost a third of the African American vote. From the commercials being run, it appears the older African American and cultural proponents of various stripes will be the determinative vote.
While there's been a few, not prominent, racial undertones to the campaign, it's literally a black and white difference between this race and 1983's when Harold Washington was elected the first Black Mayor of Chicago. Washington struggled to gain 20% of the white vote against a token Republican primary winner, White stiff Bernie Epton. That election was detestably about race, Washington squeaked out a victory.
A couple years ago, New York Magazine had an interesting, well worth reading interview with a few members of Washington's 1983 campaign. One ad, run the weekend before the election helped win the race, an ad about race. Amusingly, Washington's White television and polling consultants snuck the ad on in the final weekend, against the wishes of Washington's all Black finance committee.
Washington's finance committee believed and had experience in talking about race as way for a Black candidate to lose an election in Chicago. Yet, the powerful ad shamed and reached the better natures of enough white voters for Washington's victory.
Looking at the changes undergone in the last half-century, Chicago exemplifies how a mayor of whatever race, whatever gender, will have at best a difficult if not close to impossible task of meeting many present challenges. The best example of the inadequacy of any cultural focus is Chicago's present Mayor, Lori Lightfoot. She checks every box of currently popular cultural political concern. African American, woman, lesbian, and only five-foot one, yet a month ago, the overwhelming majority of Chicagoans showed her the door. She received only 17% of the vote in the primary, an electoral stomping for any incumbent.
None of Lightfoot's cultural identities proved relevant in her capabilities as mayor. However, it was Lightfoot's identity as a corporate lawyer, the one promoted least in public perception, that proved much more relevant, from the personal of having an unhelpful, imperious, grudge-holding personality to more importantly the eminently political identity of her profession perfectly representing the city's harsh economic realities.
Lightfoot worked a decade and a half for Mayer Brown, a law firm founded in Chicago, now with offices across the globe and almost $2 billion in annual revenue. Mayer Brown represents the fundamental change of Chicago's economy, a foundational change that also helped disenfranchise city government from addressing the problems this change created.
As global cities go Chicago is relatively new, not quite two centuries old. It’s situated at the bottom of the Great Lakes, which hold 20% of the planet's fresh surface water. Sitting on the southwest shore of the lakes and the northeast edge of America's great grain belt, Chicago instantly became a major transportation hub. A decade before Chicago was founded, the Erie and Welland canals opened allowing the new city to grow as a port directly connected to the Atlantic Ocean. Following the proliferation of the railroads, Chicago became a continental rail center for both passenger and freight traffic.
Chicago was a major hub of agriculture commodities from corn to cattle and developed as a major processing center for Midwest and Plains animals butchered in Chicago, then sent in under twelve hours to the growing populations of the East Coast. With the advent of refrigerated rail cars, butchering gradually moved west. In 1971, after one-hundred and six years, the great stockyards, once a center of the city's economy closed. However, the Board of Trade and Chicago Mercantile Exchange (MERC) remained. Chicago stayed a global financial center, in the last decades a major world market for financial derivatives.
From its inception, Chicago also quickly became a major industrial player, one of the greatest industrial cities in the world's largest industrial country. However, just as the city lost its dominance in American meat processing, by the second half of the 20th century the city began losing its industrial base. In 1970, Chicago had one million manufacturing jobs, by 1990 it had lost half of them, by 2020 less than a quarter million remained.
As Chicago lost industry and jobs, it also lost population. Chicago's population peaked in 1950 at 3.6 million people. Today, the population is 2.6 million. That's a 28% loss, while at the same time, US’ population as a whole increased from 152 to 331 million, an increase of almost 120%.
Always a massive immigrant town, Chicago filled with people from the nation's coast and then from across Europe. The city long claimed to have the largest Polish population outside of Warsaw. Irish, Italian, Germans were all healthily represented. Hispanics, that most meaningless of cultural labels, are the city's most recent immigrants. Puerto Ricans and other Caribbeans, Mexicans, Central and South Americans, all together now compromise 30% of the population. Unfortunately, the only thing real “Hispanic” characteristic besides speaking Spanish is doesn't vote much.
Chicago's Black population has long been significant and one of the wealthiest in the country. Mass migration from the South occurred after both WWI and WWII, caused largely by the mechanization of cotton and other previously labor intensive Southern crops.
Since the 1983 Mayoral election, Chicago’s not only lost population, but its ethnic make-up radically changed. Chicago's African American population went in 1983 from 40% of the population to under 29% today, a loss of over 300 thousand people, due both to the changing workforce and basically a forced exodus. In recent years, two of the big post-WWII public housing projects, Cabrini Green and Robert Taylor Homes were emptied and mostly torn down, now housing a fraction of the over 50,000 people at their height. The greater population exodus resulted from a decades long housing demolition policy across the South and West Sides.
I was hired onto the staff of the Illinois Senate President in 1985. This was right when campaigns were becoming a business, previously, people who worked campaigns were put on elected officials' staffs doing the affairs of government until election season, then left to work campaigns. I was assigned to work with an African American woman Senator from the South Side, her district would in part become Barack Obama's State Senate seat a decade later. It didn't then include Hyde Park, though it did include the Robert Taylor Homes. It was largely a rough and tumble, poverty stricken area. The Senator's district office was in an old currency exchange, six inch bullet resistant glass separated the staff from the senator's entering constituents.
I spent a day with the senator driving around her district. The one thing standing out was the astounding number of empty boarded-up houses. I remember distinctly at the end of the day saying, “Shouldn't we try doing something about all these abandoned houses?” She looked at me and said, “If we could do anything about that, it'd be great.”
My time working for the Illinois Senate wasn't long, I didn't make the next election. The old Democratic party was collapsing, it was a rotten place to be. Running roughshod over the old politics of people to people organizing was the new politics of money, polls, and television, a politics the young Barack Obama entered and quickly mastered. Moving to San Diego, I was struck by the intense difference of a landscape of abandoned housing across Chicago, all of Illinois for that matter, in contrast to Southern California's desert hillsides thickly sprouting new houses. Economic progress, so it was deemed.
Back in Chicago, it took them another four or five years to figure out what to do with all the abandoned housing, they ripped them down. Today, you can stand in neighborhoods of the South and West Sides, Englewood for example, once thick with houses and stores, and without a great deal of imagination think you're in a prairie town in the middle of the state with only two or three buildings left standing per block. The jobs gone, the houses knocked down, people left the city.
Both demographically and economically, Chicago is a much different place today from a century or even forty years ago when Harold Washington was elected. There's little industry and as my brother-in-law, who spent a life in industrial sales quipped the other evening over a beer, “If it weren't for the Mexicans, there'd be no industry.” Over the last fifty years this economic dislocation led to a massive decline of the city's middle class from 50% of the population to now less than 16%:
This massive growth in stark income disparity occurred nationwide, but it is distinctly acute in Chicago. High income households grew from 10% to 20%, but were dwarfed by the rise in low income households from 42% to 62%.
Chicago was able to avoid a complete economic cratering due in no small part to it being a global financial center with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. As the city deindustrialized, the financial sector grew, benefiting a small but not insignificant section of the population.
In the last half-century, Chicago was swept by global forces the city had little ability to control or influence. Unlike the forces that built Chicago, which with a little ingenuity the city could take advantage, these new forces, paraphrasing Omar Khayyam, writ and moved on, with little ability for the city to influence. Simultaneously, political power was increasingly removed from local government and concentrated in DC, which fostered, rather than hindered, the devastating economic forces sweeping the city. If you're running for mayor, such explanations aren't going to get you many votes, instead you simply contend with a declining tax base and an ever greater demand on city resources, miserably manifesting themselves in a never ending clamor on crime and policing.
Chicago has long had a reputation as a violent place, from the gangsters of the 1920s Prohibition Era to today's drug prohibitions. Crime and even greater misperceived threats of crime are once again the major election issue. Crain's Chicago Business had a recent article demonstrating the rise of criminal violence is largely contained to certain areas of the city. Certainly this is no great revelation or reassurance to those living in those neighborhoods, nor does such reality versus perceptions calm the anxieties of the rest of the city or the views of the rest world, especially when a tourist runs afoul of crime and violence. So, the never ending political scripts about crime spew forth, while the forces creating the felonious environment move further and further beyond the influence of any mayor.
The deindustrialization of Chicago was caused mostly by offshoring, but also not an insignificant amount of automation. The next generation of information technologies, what's presently being touted as Artificial Intelligence will be much more destructive to the jobs of the higher income brackets, the various information pushers of finance, banking, real estate, and law, who saw city's greatest increases in wealth across the last several decades. The politics for meeting this restructuring? Nonexistent. Just keep calling it progress, I suppose?
In the last two centuries, cities across America and the globe were shaped by industrialization – the processes of manufacturing and the products of manufacturing. Modern republicanism, founded with the United States, grew simultaneously, but it was and is an Agrarian Era political system that proved at best not a great fit for industrialism, fairly innocuous for recent post-industrialism, and completely inept at dealing with the new information and electronic technologies now shaping the world.
Industrialization, no matter the politics built atop it, facilitated centralization. Over two centuries, the initial overwhelmingly distributed organization of politics and local government at the US republic's founding became overwhelmingly concentrated in Washington DC. Contemporary city governments have little power in relation to the massive global corporations built across the same era, these corporations are the greatest political actors now shaping the economy. In fact, the last decades saw the cities conduct a losing game of competing for corporate favor, increasingly depriving themselves of the resources needed to conduct the basic operations of governance.
The immediate chronic challenges Homo sapiens face, especially America's restructuring its energy and transportation infrastructures will necessarily be accomplished at the local level, literally where the rubber hits the road. At the same time, the massive tsunami of information being produced by new technologies, if it is to in any way foster democracy and not continue its current path of establishing historically unprecedented centralized control, demands new structures of government, a reestablishment and evolution of democratic organization and processes, a political and government reconstitution from the ground up, starting with the distributed networking of much more participatory local governments.