Cunningham's response to the devastation of black communities? Bring in 'new people'.

Just when you think we've heard the last from the disastrous duo of Arne Duncan and Peter Cunningham, they become media go-to guys on (of all things) gun violence and community development.

Remember, this was the pair that ran the Chicago Public Schools and the U.S. Dept. of Education for years, promoting austerity, mass school closings, privatization and uncapped expansion of privately-run charter schools in black communities. Their policies helped lead to the devastation of urban school districts and contributed to school re-segregation and the push-out of thousands of black and poor families from cities like Chicago.

Why media would turn to them for meaningful solutions to the problems they helped create is beyond me. But here we are.

Cunningham's Sun-Times commentary yesterday (To revive declining South and West Side neighborhoods, import people) was the most egregious. The headline says it all. Now that 300,000 African-Americans have been pushed out of Chicago over the past few decades, Cunningham sees their replacement with thousands of "new, middle-class people" as the city's salvation.

How unoriginal. I have referred to it as the whitenization of the cities. But it's deeper than that.

CUNNINGHAM QUOTES VITO...

Cunningham asks, just how do you attract the gentrifiers into formerly segregated, disinvested and isolated neighborhoods like Englewood? He turns to Godfather mobster character Vito Corleone for an answer. "Make them an offer they can't refuse."

So, what would it take to get 4,000 young middle-class families to move into these neighborhoods? The answer, or at least part of it, is affordable, high-quality housing. Sell the houses at cost.

If that’s too high, help cover the down-payment. Still no takers? Help pay their college debt or give them a 10-year property tax exemption, something Philadelphia has done.

Welp, where has that been? Why wasn't that offer made to the families who lived there before, the ones who built those neighborhoods and went to the now-closed neighborhood schools? The ones whose homes were foreclosed upon during the subprime crisis?

As for Duncan, who now runs Chicago CRED—a counseling and job placement service (not exactly what he was primed for by the Emerson Collective), he's cited as an expert on neighborhood gun violence in a Crain's column by Joe Warren. 

There, he carefully avoids any mention of gun control. Instead, Duncan appeals directly to his corporate pals, asking them to hire some gun offenders.

"My selfish interest is that the business community own this and see this as an economic problem, not a crime problem," Duncan says. "We have to hire our way out of this, not arrest our way out of this."

Yes, hire more and arrest less. But this doesn't even begin to deal with the enormous scope of the problem, as Mayor Lightfoot has pointed out in her recent jousting with Ted Cruz. 

But how do we stop the flow of guns and drugs into the city? What do we do about mass youth unemployment, disinvestment, and under-resourcing of public schools? The notion that the answer to Chicago's gun violence epidemic rests simply with more counseling and job placement is absurd on its face.

To quote the mayor:

“There’s a great need across this country for federal leadership in particular to step up and come forward with a real plan to deal with the gun violence that we’re seeing not only in cities like Chicago but really across the country.”

Duncan hasn't a clue.

Whitenizing Chicago

UNEMPLOYMENT AND DISINVESTMENT by the city and its corporations are destroying neighborhoods and pushing thousands of African-American families out of Chicago and other big cities. Some call it "reverse migration" but the net effect is the whitenizing or gentrification of the cities. 

Another driving force behind this push-out of black and poor from the city, is Mayor Rahm Emanuel's capital investment plan and his closing of schools, mental health facilities, and other city services. While investment-starved neighborhoods suffer, Rahm has pumped millions into ill-conceived projects like the new DePaul basketball arena.  Rahm's policies have further isolated, destabilized and blighted south and west-side neighborhoods, creating conditions for more crime and violence. Whole neighborhoods are now marked by boarded-up homes, stores and schools as thousands of families lose homes to foreclosure.

DePaul's new $200M basketball arena.

An article in Monday's Reader calls Chicago's South Shore neighborhood, "the eviction capital" of the county. Real estate owners and management companies like Pangea and Kass are doing most of the evicting. Last year, Pangea filed more than 1,000 eviction cases, usually also seeking back rent, and won about 60 percent of them.

 "If you want to know Pangea's ambitions, they named themselves after the ancient supercontinent," says Mark Swartz, director of the Lawyers' Committee for Better Housing. "They are buying up the south side."

 "The issue is unemployment, and lack of investment by the city and by companies," says alderman Leslie Hairston, whose Fifth Ward includes parts of northern South Shore. Though she says she doesn't hear much about evictions from her constituents, she wasn't surprised to learn about the higher-than-average eviction rate in South Shore. "You look at the number of people working two, three jobs just to try to make ends meet—it's challenging," she says.

Impact on education...The next time you hear Rahm or schools chief Claypool boasting about rising standardized test scores or graduation rates, consider how these jumps (if they are to be believed) correspond to the loss of CPS enrollment, especially on the part of poor and black students.

Changing face of the city, schools and politics

Chicagoist

Here's what has replaced public housing in Rahmville.  2 Bedrooms In Cabrini-Green's New High Rise Start At $3,200 A Month. The units boast such amenities as Nest Thermostats, floor-to-ceiling glass windows and exposed concrete ceilings. The building's shared spaces include a rooftop with a chef's kitchen and two dog runs.

Selective -enrollment high schools are ubiquitous in Lincoln Park and Rahm keeps trying to build more despite a shrinking population in that area. Many of Chicago's wealthiest neighborhoods are dramatically below their peak populations. Selective enrollment magnets, originally created as a result of a court-ordered desegregation mandate, are now used like charter schools,  to promote racial and class resegregation.

And now, a lifetime ban and possible heavy fines imposed on families who try and "cheat" their way in. That doesn't apply of course, to the clout-heavy or to wealthy suburbanites, like Bruce Rauner, whose kid didn't meet entrance requirements at Payton, but got in through the back door after Rauner made a phone call to Arne Duncan.

According to Chicagoist,

...a goldmine for developers who have planned new, luxury high rises for the Near North Side area not far from where the dilapidated public housing towers once stood.

With Chicago in the midst of a housing crisis we can't help but see the promises of these luxury developments coinciding with the displacement of Chicago's working class and the hastening demise of its affordability for anyone making less than $72,000 a year (that's how much you'd have to make to reasonably afford a studio apartment at $1,825 a month, based on this popular rental formula).

Change in Chicago's population

Former Cabrini residents got a housing voucher, amounting to a one-way ticket out of their neighborhood and in many cases out of town. Waiting lists for subsidized housing vouchers in Illinois are closed. Nearly 82,000 households use housing vouchers, commonly known as Section 8, but  advocates say there’s a deficit of 321,394 affordable rental units in the state.

“This means that people who need affordable housing to avoid being homeless can’t even get in line and this signals that we need more resources,” said Bob Palmer, policy director for Housing Action Illinois.

Net loss to Chicago -- The 2010 census showed the city of Chicago lost 200,000 people over the last decade. The city now has about as many people as it did in 1910. There are nearly a quarter-million fewer African-Americans in the city than there were two decades ago, a drop of nearly 20% and tens of thousands fewer in the region as a whole. An estimated 1 million Blacks remain — about one-third of Chicago's population.

The political implications are great. A big power-shift marked by redrawn political maps and black pols losing their base of support. The loss of black cultural and educational institutions. Mass school closings in historically black neighborhoods, replaced by privately-run charter schools. Even Chicago State University is now on the chopping block.

I'm sure these numbers haven't eluded machine political strategists and they make plans to maintain their hold on the city and it's school system based on the new demographics.

Chuy's support growing in the black community

Civil Rights veteran Timuel Black leads parade of endorsers for Chuy Garcia

THIS MORNING... more than 100 African-American community leaders and activists endorsed Chuy Garcia for Mayor and helped celebrate the opening of the campaign's newest office. Perhaps there's hope after all.

NYPD: Arrest only when you "really have to"

“He [Mayor de Blasio] is not running the City of New York. He thinks he’s running a f- -king revolution,” said Lynch, head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, during the private gathering in Queens last Friday. -- NY Post

Ah, if only it were so. After years of scandal, corruption and police shootings, a revolution within the department is precisely what's needed.

The aptly-named head of New York's police union, Pat Lynch now says the city's cops are striking back with a counter-revolution of their own, aimed at the citizens of New York, especially those in the black community, hands-up, don't-shoot marchers and their elected mayor who got 73% of the vote. How are they going to strike back? Well, it's kind of a work stoppage.

The New York Post reports that NYPD officers are making arrests only "when they have to," leading to a massive drop in their response to low-level crimes.

It all makes you wonder -- Who and why were they arresting before this change of heart? And if they had only implemented the arrest-only-when-necessary approach, would Eric Garner and dozens of other young black men still be alive today?

Stovall

DAVID STOVALL TELLS IT ALL

Chicago is a hyper-segregated city. Despite rampant gentrification in certain areas, Chicago is not a city of neighborhoods but a city of universes. People can spend lifetimes here never experiencing certain parts of the city due to age-old demarcated lines that live in our minds and bodies.

 To uproot massive numbers of people without any accountability is criminal. But as we say around here, it’s the Chicago way. -- Cities in Revolt: Chicago

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Captain Clarion Tweet: "When does that dammed trickle down start, already?"

ANON

"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in
practice, there is. " -Anonymous

NEW CHARTER STUDY

 “The results showed that they were virtually identical,” Mazany said of the 2010 study. “I found that surprising because charters are based on a model that they have greater freedom, opportunity to be innovative and be more flexible. So I would have intuitively expected they would have been performing much better than the neighborhood schools they were pitted against.” -- Terry Mazany, president and CEO of the Chicago Community Trust

"Stark raving Rahm"

PROGRESSIVE MAG INTERVIEWS RAHM

IC: What do you think when you hear the word “gentrification”? 

RE: I know there are a lot of bad connotations. High rents and people being forced out who have been there for years. And there is a reason it has that connotation. But if we are smarter about it, we can do things that allow improvements. -- Stark Raving Rahm

LSC ELECTIONS

 “If these people in the charter school movement see the importance of that local empowerment of the community and the parents and the teachers, why don’t they duplicate it within their own schools?” -- CTU's Michael Brunson  

TORTURE

“If he [Dick Cheney] doesn’t think that was torture, I would invite him anywhere in the United States to sit in a waterboard and go through what those people went through, one of them 100-plus-odd times." -- Sen. Angus King (I-Maine)

SCHOOL FUNDING

“Illinois will never succeed by starving its schools.” -- Gov. Quinn spokeswoman Brooke Anderson.