Inside View of ‘Turnaround’ at a Bronzeville High School

August 12, 2011   Curtis Black   No comments

The first episode of a video series on the turnaround at a Bronzeville high school airs three times this week on CAN-TV Channel 19, starting Saturday morning at 9:30 a.m.

The series, produced by Amandilo M. Cuzan and Bronzeville 360, looks at the experience of Wendell Phillips High School, the oldest predominantly black high school in Chicago, since the Academy of Urban School Leadership was awarded a management contract last year.

Cuzan notes that many long-time community residents view the “turnaround,” in which teachers, administrators and staff are replaced, as part of a push for gentrification following the demolition of CHA developments in the area, while other residents backed the moved in the face of steady decline in the school’s performance.  It’s the most recent of numerous interventions by the central administration, he points out.

“It’s a classic, often emotionally-charged struggle that has few easy answers,” he said

The first 30-minute episode looks at three extracurricular activities at Phillips and their impact on school-community relations: a revitalized music program; a Peace Walk down Martin Luther King Drive organized by a student and teacher; and a Parent Cafe organized by community partners to facilitate parent networking.

It airs on CAN-TV 19 on Saturday, August 13 at 9:30 a.m., Wednesday, August 17 at 4 p.m., and Saturday, August 20 at 9:30 a.m.

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El Cilantro: Little Village Youth Speak Out

August 11, 2011   Curtis Black   No comments

A young Little Village activist blogs about her experience at an environmental justice conference last month on an Indian reservation in North Dakota at El Cilantro, the blog of Young Activists Organizing as Today’s Leaders.

“As a Chicana I realized that our culture’s youth are less and less connected to their roots,” writes Brenda.  “Everything I learned that weekend inspired me to look into my family background and to feel more proud of my culture.  This weekend words like land, culture and nature had more meaning than ever before.”

Brenda was part of group of YAOTL members who attended the Protecting Mother Earth Conference sponsored by the Indigenous Environmental Network and hosted by the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nations at Four Bears Park in the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation.

Along with workshops and cultural events, including a pow-wow and a water ceremony, participants learned about the Three Nations’ struggles with the oil industry.

Other posts on El Cilantro include a report on a field trip to the City Farm near Cabrini-Green, the Lincoln Park Green City Market, and the Waters School’s community garden; an analyis of the treatment of women in fashion magazines and the patriarchal ideology it reveals; a report on the Power Shift conference in Washington, D.C., in April; and a poem criticizing “mainstream hip hop” (which “is not hip hop!”):

“Does he try to fool you by telling you he has all these honeys chasing after his money?…

“Hip hope was not made so you can brag about your fame!”

YAOTL is a project of the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization which seeks out creative ways to educate and organize young people on environmental justice issues in the community.  An example:  working with LVEJO’s open space campaign to get a park built in Little Village, YAOTL is organizing youth to push for a skateboard park within the park.

Toward this end, the group is holding a Skate Jam on August 27 at Albany Park and 31st Street.  They’ve gotten a block party permit and will be setting up ramps for a skateboard competition, along with a stage for local performers and a skate galley displaying skateboard art by young artists.

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Hearing on youth unemployment

August 04, 2011   Curtis Black   No comments

Jarrett Norwood, 18, is volunteering at Ashunti Community Resource Center since funding for his summer job dried up – and he’s afraid he won’t be able to pay the fees for community college this fall.  “I can’t really afford to work for free,” he said.

Norwood was among hundreds of West Side residents at a hearing on jobs held by State Representative LaShawn Ford, AustinTalks reports.

“We see that the system is failing,” said Ashunti CEO Regina Lewis. “A lot of our kids have given up. They don’t believe in the system, period.”  More here.

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TIF hearing in Bronzeville

August 03, 2011   Curtis Black   No comments

Bronzeville residents turned out in impressive numbers for last Thursday’s public hearing of the Mayor’s Task Force on TIF Reform, and they had lots of ideas — from Housing Bronzeville‘s proposal to develop affordable housing on city-owned vacant lots to Urban Juncture‘s suggestions for using TIF to create local jobs. Full report at Newstips.

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Competing visions for the southeast side

July 26, 2011   Curtis Black   No comments

Businesses and environmentalists square off on the Southeast Side over new industrial developments, including a coal gasification plant, a cement plant, and an asphalt storage facility, Kari Lydersen reports.

Environmentalists worry about emissions and other issues, while companies promise emissions controls — and jobs.

The area once had one of the nation’s largest concentrations of heavy industry, spewing toxic pollution; it also features Chicago’s greatest expanse of wetlands and open spaces. Environmentalists would like to focus on those natural assets to drive the community’s economic future — and they point out that about 250 jobs at the three new facilities is nothing near the tens of thousands formerly employed at steel mills.

“As much as jobs are needed, some residents worry the area will again become the place where Chicago’s dirty work is done,” Lydersen reports

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Black Chicago Divided

July 20, 2011   Curtis Black   No comments
  • A 17-year-old West Sider who goes to the Gold Coast to intimidate and steal (“We can get good stuff down there,” he says; “You can’t get no iPods or nothing like that on the West Side”).
  • A black nationalist activist who advocates concealed carry legislation to allow the black community to defend itself against crime.

Along with a range of activists from Chicago’s black community, these are some of the voices in Salim Muwakkil’s “Black Chicago Divided,” discussing long-smoldering class and generational conflicts that are intensifying as conditions worsen in communities like North Lawndale.

With devastating unemployment and crime rates, North Lawndale faces an “emergency situation,” says Mark Carter of Voice of the Ex-Offender.  Carter focuses on confronting established civil rights and black political leaders.  “The death and destruction in our community could not have happened without the black leadership elite’s cooperation,” he says.

Among the topics raised are Mayor Emanuel’s police redeployment efforts – many in the black community say “the mayor is taking aggressive action only  because most of the victims are white,” while the areas most in need continue to be neglected – and the shortfalls in a federal program to direct HUD spending to low-income workers and business.  (WBEZ’s Natalie Moore recently reported on complaints about HUD’s Section 3 program.)

“Black Chicago Divided” is the first in a series of in-depth features by Muwakkil, a senior editor at In These Times, investigating the lives of those African-American youth who have borne the brunt of the Great Recession; their plight is particularly acute in de-industrializing, segregated Chicago, Muwakkil says.

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Austin stiffed by TIF

July 13, 2011   Curtis Black   1 Comment

With Mayor Emanuel’s TIF panel looking into the program’s effectiveness, AustinTalks examines its impact in a community with the seventh-highest unemployment rate in the nation – and finds it falling far short.

Only four TIF projects have been authorized for Austin; only one – relocation of a Coca Cola warehouse – has met the terms of its TIF agreement; and that project has employed just 28 people who live in or near Austin, according to a report by Ellyn Fortino.

More than half of the 200 TIF projects authorized since 2000 are located downtown (as Fortino and ChicagoTalks staff previously reported in the New York Times).  “Few if any projects can be found in Chicago’s most blighted communities on the West and South Sides,” Fortino writes in today’s report.  “And many of those projects haven’t been completed at all – if started.”

Of $22 million in TIF subsidies allocated for Austin, “only $1.4 million has been paid out – most of it for the Coca Cola distribution center,” Fortino reports.  That’s out of $1.2 billion citywide.

That project is “a prime example of how low-income neighborhoods in TIF districts don’t get what they deserve,” with property taxes diverted from public services to benefit big corporations, one activist tells AustinTalks. It’s “legalized corruption,” says Dwayne Truss of the South Austin Coalition.

As for those other TIF projects in Austin, “no one in the Department of Housing and Economic Development, which oversees the TIF program, could shed light on why the three other projects are incomplete,” Fortino writes in a sidebar.

David Orr recently offered suggestions for Emanuel’s TIF panel, focusing on recapturing funding for schools and other public bodies.  Newstips recently reviewed a range of proposals for TIF reform.

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Local Reporting Initiative Round Table at 2011 MMC

July 12, 2011   admin   No comments

Pictures taken by Jill Stewart.

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Illegal evictions in the ‘foreclosure belt’

July 01, 2011   Curtis Black   No comments

Illegal evictions of tenants from rental buildings are most common in a “foreclosure belt” stretching across Chicago’s South and West Sides, according to a new report (pdf).

The Lawyers Committee for Better Housing reports that banks routinely violate state and federal laws protecting tenants in buildings in foreclosure.  The “most egregious cases” are concentrated in 20 low-income black and Latino communities where more than 10 perecent of the rental stock is impacted by foreclosure, the group reports.

Stretching from South Chicago to  Chicago Lawn, from Englewood to Brighton Park, up to North Lawndale, Austin, Garfield Park and Humboldt Park, and out to Belmont Cragin and Avondale, these communities constitute Chicago’s “foreclosure belt,” according to the report.

In these communities, the “mass destruction of rental units” has created a downward spiral of blight and disinvestment.

“Illegal constructive evictions that lead to building vacancies and boardups have a clear solution: enforce the already existing laws that protect tenants living in foreclosed buildings,” according to the report.  More at Newstips.

 

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Cement plant for Southeast Side?

July 01, 2011   Curtis Black   No comments

The Sun Times reports on a $250 million cement plant proposed for the Southeast Side, a prospect which Newstips noted in January.

Peggy Salazar of the Southeast Environmental Task Force tells us the group is opposed to the plant, citing concerns about plans to power it by burning tires.

She said the company has said it will employ new technology to capture those emissions but hasn’t provided details.  She adds that emissions from increased truck traffic – already quite heavy in the area – also need to be taken into account.

Along with a new bill providing ratepayer subsidies for a new coal-gasification plant in the area, it’s another setback for residents who would like to see protection of wetlands and more green industry, Salazar said

 

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