“I love a challenge. I have been known to always run toward the fire. This is a pivotal moment for the city and I’m thrilled to be in a position to do something about it.”
The person uttering those surprisingly hopeful words is Maurice Cox, Chicago’s planning commissioner.
Cox, you might think, would have every reason to feel burdened and overwhelmed by events out of his control. Less than a year after Mayor Lori Lightfoot handed him the challenging job of reviving beaten-down business districts on the city’s South and West Sides, those districts have been further battered by the twin blows of the coronavirus recession and the looting that erupted after the killing of George Floyd.
But after talking to owners of boarded-up businesses, like Alicia Lee, who runs the Iconic Rush Boutique at 1955 East 71st St., Cox has a different view than the one people are seeing on their TV screens.
“The impression you get from outside is that everything is closed,” he told me in a telephone interview Thursday. “From inside, you get a very different vibe.” Lee’s clothing store, he said, “was completely looted. But she had bought a little bit of inventory and she had set it out and was trying to sell again, to let people know that she was there.”
“I’m getting back on my feet,” Lee said Friday from her store.
Stories like that matter now. While much of the national conversation in the wake of Floyd’s death has rightly focused on tearing down Confederate monuments and other symbols of racism, too little attention is being paid to the nitty-gritty task of building up African-American and Latino neighborhoods that have been hammered by decades of disinvestment and decay.
That’s Cox’s task. If anything, in his view, the crises of COVID-19 and racial unrest have made it easier.
“I think there’s a greater sense of awareness of the need,” he said. “After witnessing the past few months, most people understand [rebuilding] is absolutely imperative. Chicago can’t fully recover unless there’s really an equitable development of these neighborhoods. … The crisis aspect of this really helps to hold people’s attention to not accept status quo.”
“The larger conversation that the nation is having about disinvestment in black and brown communities has helped. There is more private sector interest in the South and West Sides than before. We are in part benefiting from the fact that everyone understands this investment trend must change,” Cox added, though he could not name any companies that had committed to locate stores in Chicago.
Lured to Chicago last year from Detroit, where he helped plant the seeds of that city’s still-incomplete revival, Cox was quickly put in charge of a signature Lightfoot initiative, the $750 million Invest South/West program.
He and his beefed-up planning staff held community meetings in the ten areas that Invest South/West seeks to revive: Auburn Gresham, North Lawndale, Austin, Englewood, Humboldt Park, New City, Roseland, South Chicago, South Shore and the Quad Communities, which includes North Kenwood, Oakland, and portions of Douglas and Grand Boulevard.
All were hit by violence after Floyd’s death.
On the South Side, looters ransacked grocery stores that officials had worked for years to bring to “food deserts.” In North Lawndale, where rioters burned stores after the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., some residents said the looting marked a severe setback from years of painstaking rebuilding.
When I asked Cox if the violence was daunting, he had a surprising reply: Previous Invest South/West planning efforts had laid the groundwork for revival. “When this hit, I was so thankful that we put the operating model in place so we could just hit the ground running.”
Yet mindful of the fact that planners ultimately are measured by the impact of their work on people’s lives, not just the plans and processes they put in place, Cox stressed that his department is moving ahead with several concrete initiatives.
In the short term, architects working pro bono are designing outdoor seating areas for restaurants on the South and West Sides. The first of them may debut in July, Cox said.
Responding to the disproportionate share of coronavirus deaths in black and brown communities the planning department has shifted its Invest South/West priorities to meet the need for better health care facilities on the South and West Sides.
It is contributing $4 million to the planned transformation of a long-vacant commercial building on 79th Street in Auburn Gresham into a healthy lifestyle technology hub. “It’s locally owned and will provide community health services that COVID-19 made us painfully aware of,” Cox said.
In August, the city will ask developers to make proposals for mixed-use projects that would rise on vacant city plots in Englewood and Austin. And this fall, Cox hopes, the city will join with the Obama Foundation to break ground on the long-delayed Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park. A federal review of the project’s impact on the historic park appears to be nearing completion.
“This has been an amazing nine months,” Cox said of his tenure with the city. “If you were looking for a mandate to do things differently, we just received it. I’m thrilled to push to creatively seize this opportunity. For a planner, this is what we look for — that kind of strategic alignment. The city has prepared itself well for this moment.”
In Chicago and other American cities, the great unknown is still this: Will the present push for revival be more successful than the failed urban renewal efforts of the past?
Blair Kamin is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @BlairKamin
