Chicago’s African American neighborhoods have become objects of the retail grocery sector’s affection. Generations have been subjected to “food apartheid”, the public-private practice of granting first-rate access and convenience for the white and wealthy, and paltry options for the black and impoverished.
“That’s wrong,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said. “You can call yourself a Chicagoland store and root yourself in Chicago, but if you are going to do that, then you have to be in every part of Chicago.”
The Fifth Floor is fulfilling a campaign promise to rid black communities of food deserts. In 2014, Walmart opened its neighborhood market version in Kenwood. This year Whole Foods and Mariano’s has a local presence in Englewood, Hyde Park, and Grand Boulevard. Last week Target’s new Hyde Park location opened for business.
But it doesn’t smell right. While the grand openings are believed to be political calculations to make amends with black voters for the Laquan McDonald cover up, it’s something else. Black communities have been outcasts of government and big box retailers; the neighborhood equivalents of the high school pariah nobody wants sitting at their lunch table. Now, all of a sudden, everyone wants to take us to prom?
Well, not all of us. Just the well-to-do.
The legacy of urban redevelopment in communities of color is the widening class divide left in its wake. To the darwinistic delight of the black middle class, big box retail is a gentrification metaphor. It’s an eviction indicator for the poor, targeting households unable to contend with increased costs of living; and small businesses unable to match the prices, scale, and marketing budgets of the new government-supported competition. Big box economic development doesn’t reduce poverty. It just removes it.
“We wanted to build something here that has the ability to sustain itself for a long period of time. Not in three or four years, it gets into disrepair, it's got to go away and the community is left empty again," said Mariano’s founder, Bob Mariano.
Undoubtedly, the racist absence of retail development has come a long way in respecting communities of color as a viable market. To be sure, new retail provides more spending options in closer proximity for area residents. It also provides employment and potential partnerships with local entrepreneurs. Big box retailers are doing away with traditional models of consumer engagement, in favor of a more localized view of people and place. Products from local vendors are sold on shelves. Neighborhood residents constitute many of the new hires. Commonly used items are priced lower than normal to accommodate area income constraints. But beneath the retail euphoria is an anxiety that the long-term savor may be more bitter than sweet.
“Economic growth is no longer any guarantee that we have a reduction in poverty,” said Robert Reich former U.S. Labor Secretary. “We now have a larger population of working poor. These days we have so many people who have not been able to make it, even though they have jobs.’
Talk is cheap for the poor. And in some cases, as Chicago has seen, deceptive and divisive.
In 2013, oppressive education policy resulted in the closing of 48 public schools in predominantly African American neighborhoods, the largest number of school closures of any city in the nation. A vast majority of students came from low income households. Government and the private education sector colluded to market “selective enrollment” as a strategy to provide premium education options for black middle class consumers, and “charter schools” as a mediocre option for the poor. The black middle class were sold on prioritizing premium consumer options to the detriment of the impoverished.
In the late 1990’s and early aughts, draconian housing policy in black communities led to the Chicago Housing Authority’s $1.6B Plan for Transformation, the largest public housing land grab in our nation’s history. With blatant disregard for the nuances of poverty and circumstance, thousands of poor families were evicted. Their communities demolished. Government and the private real estate sector colluded to market and sell new housing developments to black middle class consumers. The impoverished were displaced.
Including the poor as a full-fledged partner and equal beneficiary of urban development ought to be a public-private imperative. Camouflaging poverty with a community accoutrement, doesn’t remove its social and economic stench. Gentrification that pushes them out may stamp out indigence in one neighborhood, but it delays confronting the issue, as the “can gets kicked” to other communities. As the symptoms of economic hardship metastasize, poverty avoidance inevitably comes back to haunt us all.
The international spotlight on the city’s current gun violence surge is a case in point.
The running total of 2016 gun violence victims to date is 3,817. Over the last two weekends alone, 21 people were killed and 56 were shot. It should come as no surprise violence in Chicago is unlike no other American city: an international eyesore resulting from systematically acquiring large swaths of the nation’s third largest public housing authority, while casting 150,000 people aside. Today’s epidemic is what government disregard of poor people sixteen years ago looks like all grown up. If public housing was demolished in New York City or Puerto Rico with the same disregard and callousness toward the poor, gun violence would be just as rampant.
Mariano’s Bronzeville unveiling leaves a paradoxical aftertaste: development came about at the expense of chaos. The grocer at the intersection of 39th Street and Martin Luther King Drive occupies 8.2 acres of land on what formally housed 13,000 residents of the Ida B. Wells public housing complex. The well-being of those displaced has left much to be desired. As the relationship between today’s gun violence and harsh urban policy of yesteryear is hard to ignore, development in communities of color, to the detriment of the poor, begs the ever-present ethical question:
Is it worth it?
So far, not for all of us. Just the well-to-do.