Invoking her personal experience growing up poor in Ohio, Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Friday challenged a crowd of well-heeled businessmen and civic leaders downtown to join her administration in addressing Chicago’s deeply entrenched poverty.
She also announced plans to introduce several reform proposals around housing. They include a law to ensure renters get more than 30 days to find a new place to live during no-fault evictions, a measure mirroring Cook County’s “Just Housing” ordinance aimed at ending housing discrimination against people with arrest records, and a pilot program in Woodlawn giving qualified community buyers the right of first refusal to purchase certain multifamily buildings when an owner puts a building up for sale.
But first, Lightfoot opened her speech before a white tablecloth lunch audience at the City Club of Chicago with a stark declaration: “Poverty is killing us. All of us. Literally and figuratively.”
Lightfoot ran through a number of everyday scenes in the city that she said illustrate the problem: children relying on school for food, a life expectancy rate that’s 17 years lower for black and brown residents in one neighborhood compared with the life span of other mostly white neighborhoods, and the high costs of Chicago’s gun violence.
“Am I making you uncomfortable?” Lightfoot asked. “I mean to.”
One of the things that kept her up at night during the Chicago teachers strike was the large number of students who rely on school meals for their food, she told the audience.
At one point, Lightfoot said government and leaders helped create the problem by using government to create and enforce race-based discrimination.
“We did this by voting for politicians who embraced this ethos and used every tool at their disposal to perpetuate the deprivation and disenfranchisement of people who looked like me solely on the basis of race, ethnicity or national origin,” Lightfoot said, adding that government needs to address the problem.
“We the people created this monstrous problem, and we the people must solve it,” Lightfoot said.
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During a news conference with reporters after her speech, Lightfoot declined to blame any specific politicians — saying the problems date back to slavery, America’s “original sin.”
Asked about the housing measures mentioned in the speech and whether they go far enough or can effectively curb the problems she’s described, Lightfoot said they’re part of a broader wave of changes she wants to introduce beyond the items she mentioned during the speech.
“One thing is not going to get it done. Two things may not get it done,” Lightfoot said. “But thinking intentionally about the entire ecosystem and putting together a package of solutions I think will make a specific difference, particularly when we talk about housing.”
In recent weeks, Lightfoot’s made combating poverty and raising awareness a key goal. During the Martin Luther King Jr. interfaith breakfast, Lightfoot hailed the work her administration has done to address poverty and equity in Chicago while acknowledging there’s much more work to do. She plans to host a “poverty summit” next week further addressing the issue.
But she’s also faced scrutiny from anti-homelessness advocates, who want her to keep a campaign pledge promising an increase on the real estate transfer tax that would go toward fighting homelessness. She’s opposed increasing the tax to make a mandated revenue stream to tackle homelessness.
During Friday’s speech, Lightfoot also preemptively took a shot at skeptics who would argue that tackling poverty is too big a task to take on, saying she relishes a challenge to prove people wrong and is personally drawn to the cause.
“If not me, who? Look at me, think about my life’s story,” Lightfoot said. “I am called to this challenge because if I look away, I am denying a part of myself, a part of my story, my history. So, when I look at this challenge, I think, ‘There but for the Grace of God, go I.'”
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