December 25, 2000

Letter to the Chicago Journal newspaper by Steven Balkin, Professor of Economics, Roosevelt University

Evan McKenzie's article in the December 14 issue of Chicago Journal was way off the beam.  He attempted to put the imprimatur of the new urbanism movement on UIC's South Campus Expansion.  He is wrong.  UIC's expansion is not new urbanism. It is the old discredited policy of 1960's style Urban Renewal equals People Removal, i.e., poor and minority people removal. The South Campus Expansion is not gentrification through the free market forces of supply and demand, as McKenzie asserts. This area is being developed by central government planning, built by contractors with strong ties to Mayor Daley, heavily subsidized by government, and with the use of the power of eminent domain. It is ludicrous that real estate developers are getting government subsidies to build in the near West Side. Yet, $55 milliondollars of taxpayer money is subsidizing developers to build UIC townhouses for the rich.

According to the Congress on New Urbanism, two principles of New Urbanism are preservation of our built legacy and
reducing separation by race and income. UIC's South Campus project destroys almost all of the historic buildings in the old Maxwell Street area and prevents the poor who live and have businesses in the area from having an opportunity to remain.  There is no housing being built in the South Campus area that the people now living in the Maxwell Street area can afford.

There are several businesses who want to remain and who could prosper in the South Campus if allowed to keep the buildings they own, but they are being forced out. UIC's policy is not free enterprise and it does not respect property rights.

To the extent that the UIC South Campus project is similar to a contemporary planning paradigm, it the policies of Slobodan Milosvec in what is called Ethnic Cleansing. In Ethnic Cleansing, a powerful government not only forces inhabitants of a different group from their land but also erases their history. People moving into South Campus should feel guilty because they are gaining a place to live at the cost of our American Blues heritage and at the expense of the most poor and vulnerable
citizens of Chicago. This is not integration. This is segregation.This is part and parcel of what's being called the new American apartheid.

What makes a city great is not flower boxes, millenium parks, or sterility.  It is positive human relations that make a city good to live in. Kicking one group out to give their land to another group does not foster good human relations.

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Contact Us

TO REACH US VIA EMAIL:

Chuck Cowdery, President (cowdery@21stcentury.net)
Steve Balkin, Vice President (mar@openair.org)

Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition
P.O. Box 6435
Evanston, IL  60204