WHAT RAHM LEAVES BEHIND
The downtown skyline
grew taller and burned
brighter in Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago. The only
problem: He didn’t make room for everyone.
BY
EDWARD MCCLELLAND
PUBLISHED
TUESDAY AT 8:55 A.M.
in
his obituary of Chicago’s greatest mayor, Mike Royko wrote that “if a man ever
reflected a city, it was Richard J. Daley and Chicago.” That was true, but
Daley, who died in 1976, was mayor of a Chicago very different from the one we
live in today: Daley’s Chicago was an unsophisticated blue-collar town, with a
broad middle class, powerful industries, and neighborhood loyalties stretching
back generations.
If
any man reflects the city Chicago has become since Daley’s death, it is Rahm
Emanuel. A suburban striver who grew up in Wilmette, he moved to the city in
adulthood with a fancy master’s degree from Northwestern, built a lucrative
career in politics and business, competed in triathlons, and settled at a tony
North Side address. Emanuel’s Chicago is a global business and cultural capital
whose bifurcated economic structure is a microcosm of 21st-century America — only
fitting for this most American of cities.
Since
Emanuel became mayor, in 2011, Chicago has become more prosperous and more
educated — achievements
of which any civic leader would be proud — but
those characteristics have become increasingly concentrated in the urban core.
Imagine the city’s skyline as a bar graph of its demographics, the tallest
buildings representing the most wealth, scaling downward to two-flats,
bungalows, and vacant lots as it flatlines from its peak.
Emanuel
did not create this Chicago, which has been developing since at least the
1990s, when the city began reversing a postindustrial trajectory that
threatened to consign us to the same Rust Belt ash heap as Cleveland and Detroit.
His mayoralty is, however, a product of it. In his first election, he ran up
his biggest vote totals in the wealthy lakefront wards, which are populated by
transplanted Midwestern professionals who share his conviction that the
business of Chicago is business. The most significant decisions of his
mayoralty have accelerated the city’s rise to global status. Emanuel is,
arguably, one of the architects of the 21st century’s global economy. As an
aide to President Bill Clinton, he helped sell the North American Free Trade
Agreement to skeptical prolabor Democrats. Once he got his hands on the levers
of power in an alpha world city, it only made sense that he would move to
aggregate money and talent in its core. There are very few winners in globalization,
and he wanted to make sure Chicago was one.
Like
so many American cities, Chicago has been experiencing what urbanist Alan
Ehrenhalt calls a “demographic inversion,” in which a once-derelict inner city
attracts wealthy residents, while the poor are forced into outlying
neighborhoods or suburbs. In the mid-2000s, Tom Tunney, the alderman of one of
those wealthy lakefront wards, which Emanuel would carry with 74 percent of the
vote in 2011, told me, “In 25 years, the entire city is going to look like this.
It’s going to be Manhattanized. There’s nothing anyone can do about it. There’s
too much demand for land in the city.”
“Then
where will the poor people live?” I asked him.
“In
the suburbs.”
Parts
of Chicago have been Manhattanized. But other parts — the
Second City’s second city — have
turned into Cleveland and Detroit, losing their industries, their business
districts, their middle class. According to demographer Alden Loury, who works
as the race, class, and communities editor for WBEZ, “The city is losing more of its lower-income
folks and gaining more higher-income workers.” While the African American
population is expected to drop to 665,000 by 2030 — half
what it was in 1980 — whites
are the fastest-growing ethnic group. The Loop and its adjacent neighborhoods
are gaining population, while the South and West Sides are declining. For the
first time, Lake View has surpassed Austin as the city’s most populous
community area.
The
African American population declined under Mayor Richard M. Daley, but he “tried
to manage the fallout,” says Jawanza Malone, executive director of the
Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization. “He saw himself as another Chicago guy
who knew what was happening in the neighborhoods. Emanuel is not a Chicagoan.
He doesn’t see himself as a Chicagoan. He brought in all these people from
outside Chicago who didn’t understand the Chicago Way.”
Emanuel
simultaneously nurtured the rise of a global metropolis and managed the decline
of a Rust Belt city, both coexisting within Chicago’s borders. The exigencies
of this dual task ultimately undermined his mayoralty. Emanuel left Chicago a
more prosperous place, but at the cost of his own popularity. A police shooting — the
murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald — created
the biggest crisis of his administration and may have done more than anything
else to bring about his downfall, because many Chicagoans believed, rightly or
wrongly, that he had covered up the video of the crime to preserve his 2015
reelection. As an urban planner, he succeeded; as a politician, he failed,
because some Chicagoans came to believe he was indifferent to their struggles.
Rahm Emanuel has his super-fans. To tech
entrepreneur Howard Tullman, he is the best mayor of a big city in the United
States — an
irreplaceable civic ambassador who connected with international businesspeople
and White House staffers as no mere ward politician could have done. If Richard
M. Daley was a transitional figure between the industrial Chicago in which his
family’s political dynasty was born and the cultural and financial capital it
was destined to become, Emanuel put the final stamp on Chicago as a global
city.
“I
think that in these days it has a more direct impact on more people’s lives to
be the mayor of one of these megacities than to be a governor or senator or
member of Congress,” Tullman says. “I don’t think it ever used to be a global
job. Now it’s important to attract talent. It’s important to get financing,
investment, and connections.”
In
2013, Emanuel was instrumental in hiring Tullman to run 1871, the city’s new
tech incubator, named for the year Chicago burned, only to rise again. It was
actually the brainchild of then future governor J.B. Pritzker, but Emanuel made
it his baby, seeing it as integral to transforming Chicago into a technological
rival of Silicon Valley — an
ambition of his that fueled even his lame-duck months, when he made a
last-ditch pitch to bring Amazon’s
second headquarters here after the company announced it was pulling out of New
York City.
Emanuel loved bringing distinguished
visitors to 1871’s offices on the 12th floor of the Merchandise Mart, where
young entrepreneurs sit behind gunmetal-gray MacBook Pros in the wide-open
bullpen, beavering away at Chicago’s next internet success story. On a wall of
the auditorium are tiles with the 1871 logo signed by visitors such as
Emanuel’s ex-boss Bill Clinton, YouTube cofounder Steve Chen, and Shark Tank investor Daymond John.
“Emanuel
was there a lot,” says Tullman, who spoke with the mayor about 1871’s progress
at least once a month before stepping down in 2017. (He now heads the Ed Kaplan
Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship at the Illinois
Institute of Technology.) “He put the arm on companies to be supportive by
giving, doing events, working with our startups. He was a great bully pulpit in
the sense that he talked it up all the time. It was a funny thing. As it got
bigger and bigger and more successful, it wasn’t clear whether he was doing us
a favor or we were doing him a favor.”
SpotHero,
a service that helps motorists find parking spaces, spent its early years
inside 1871 and now has 165 employees in its own Loop office. Thyng, an
augmented reality platform that has been used to create everything from ads for
Rice Krispies to 3D medical images for physicians, found both investors and
employees through 1871. Thyng’s founder, Ed LaHood, has been part of the
Chicago tech scene since the early 1990s. Never in his career has the city
nurtured new tech businesses the way it does now, he says: “Thirty years ago,
if you wanted to start a startup in Chicago, you were on your own. 1871 really
created a technology ecosystem in Chicago. Rahm has been a huge part of the
tech sector’s growth. Not only in 1871, but wanting to bring tech industries to
Chicago.”
During
Emanuel’s tenure as mayor, the share of the city’s economy attributed to tech
more than quadrupled, from 2 percent to 9 percent, according to 1871. The
footprint of tech companies inside the Merchandise Mart increased from 100,000
square feet to 1.5 million. As LaHood notes, it wasn’t just 1871, even though
companies founded there have now created more than 8,000 jobs. Salesforce,
Facebook, Yelp, and Google all opened Chicago offices while Emanuel was mayor.
When Google was planning to open a Midwestern headquarters in the Fulton Market
district, Emanuel “was in almost constant communication with their executives,”
says Andrea Zopp, a former deputy mayor who is now president and CEO of World
Business Chicago. “I think if you talk to any CEO who’s moved here, they’ll
tell you he’s relentless.”
The
Rahm Butterfly Effect
For better or worse, Chicago (probably) wouldn’t have any of these
things without Emanuel’s influence
There’s
another aspect of globalization that Emanuel turned to Chicago’s advantage: In
the aftermath of late-20th-century deindustrialization, there could be only one
Midwestern metropolis. Chicago was the winner, and it’s been sucking the
economic vitality out of surrounding states — and
the rest of Illinois — ever
since. At first, this took the form of brain drain, as college graduates from
Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin flocked to the city. Now, under Emanuel,
Chicago has been the No. 1 American city for corporate relocations for five
years running. Headquarters that were once synonymous with their small
Midwestern hometowns are following the talent here. Archer Daniels Midland
moved its global HQ from Decatur to an office on West Wacker Drive. ConAgra moved
from Omaha to the Merchandise Mart. And corporations that built office campuses
in Chicago suburbs during the urban flight of the 1960s and 1970s are following
the white-collar class back into the city: McDonald’s from Oak Brook, Motorola
from Schaumburg. So powerful is the global city’s lure that Emanuel rarely
granted tax breaks.
“The
mayor’s philosophy about it is, ‘If I have to buy your way here, don’t come,’ ” says Zopp. “We
have so many great assets. They’re coming because
their people want to be here. It’s the trend toward urban growth.” Still,
Emanuel’s approach was hands-on: He lured Ferrara Candy from Oakbrook Terrace
to Chicago after striking up a conversation with a company employee on a
flight. She told him many of her coworkers wanted to work downtown, and
suggested he call the CEO. Emanuel did, and Ferrara’s 400-employee headquarters
are now in the Old Post Office.
The
thousands of employees working at relocated companies didn’t just want to live
in the city; they wanted to live right by their jobs. Though neighborhood life
is the essence of the Chicago experience, the Loop was designed as a place of
business. Emanuel set out to change that, with a special emphasis on the
desires of millennials, who are “uniquely city-dwelling compared to previous
generations,” according to demographer Ed Zotti. Emanuel hired a hotshot
transportation planner from D.C., Gabe Klein, who laid down bike lanes and
established the bike-sharing service Divvy. “Increasingly, young people were
looking for that — tech
companies in particular,” says Ron Burke, executive director of the Active
Transportation Alliance. “Rahm saw this eight years ago.”
Emanuel
cleaned up the Chicago River and built kayak liveries along its branches. The
$100 million Chicago Riverwalk expansion, with its restaurants and bars,
brought the public down to the level of a body of water that became known as
the city’s second shoreline. “[The Riverwalk] has helped define the Loop,” says
Michael Edwards, president and CEO of Chicago Loop Alliance, and it is among
the reasons Chicago has one of the fastest-growing downtowns of any big city in
the United States, adding 5,000 residents to the Loop between 2010 and 2016.
Those newcomers are moving into buildings such as Marquee at Block 37, which
opened in 2016 and rents one-bedroom apartments for $2,400 a month. (That’s
affordable housing in the Loop, where 82 percent of residents have college
degrees and the median household income is $98,000.) So intense is the demand
for downtown housing that Magellan Development is building on the river the
101-story, 396-unit Vista Tower, which will be the city’s second-tallest
residential structure.
Five miles south of the Loop, at the corner
of 49th Street and Indiana Avenue, Irene Robinson stands alone on the playground
of Anthony Overton Elementary School. The playground has been empty since 2013,
when Overton was one of 49 “underutilized” or “underperforming” schools closed
by Emanuel’s handpicked school board. A map of Chicago stenciled on the asphalt
pinpoints their locations: almost all in African American neighborhoods on the
South and West Sides.
“This was my second home,” Robinson says. “All
my kids went to this school. My grandkids. I raised so many children here. Now
it’s like a graveyard.”
When
Robinson learned that Overton was closing, she thought her family’s world was
coming to an end. She confronted the mayor at public meetings. She was arrested
for protesting outside his City Hall office. The school was shuttered and sold
to developers who plan to repurpose it as a business incubator. But six years
on, Overton remains empty, boards covering its windows, graffiti climbing its
walls, the words “Anthony Overton” visible only as ghost lettering above the
front door. Robinson’s grandchildren were scattered to elementary schools
throughout the South Side. Robinson, who for 15 years lived cater-cornered from
the school, moved out of the neighborhood. One of Robinson’s daughters took her
children to Iowa partly for a more stable educational environment.
Emanuel
believes political capital is worthless unless spent on difficult decisions. In
his first term, he spent a lot of capital on the school closings, and he never
recovered it. Some of that was a result of the policies themselves, and some
was a result of a perception that the prickly Emanuel was an autocrat and a
bully who did not truly understand the city he governed.
Perhaps
it made demographic and financial sense to close Overton. Since the school was
built, in 1963, the surrounding Grand Boulevard community area has lost 75
percent of its residents, falling from a population of roughly 80,000 to
22,000. Public housing has been demolished (most of the Robert Taylor Homes
were in Grand Boulevard). The blue-collar jobs that supported the black middle
class have left Chicago. Families are trying to escape gangs and crime.
Changing racial attitudes mean that blacks can now live in suburbs that once
discouraged them from moving in, and Chicago’s Manhattanization means housing
is often less expensive outside its borders. When Overton was slated for
closing, its enrollment of 431 pupils was only half its capacity.
“We’ve
lost thousands of kids,” says Chicago Public Schools CEO Janice Jackson,
pointing out that enrollment has dropped to 361,000 from its all-time high of
500,000. “What people don’t understand is that when a school is underenrolled,
it’s harder to attract teachers. We should not be making decisions on schools
based on one factor, or politics, or optics.” Jackson believes CPS students are
learning more than they were when Emanuel took over. Emanuel lengthened the
school day and instituted full-day kindergarten. The district’s graduation rate
increased from 57 percent to 78 percent during his tenure.
“The question of whether 50 school closings
are ‘necessary’ is, in my view, a little bit beside the point,” says University
of Chicago sociology professor Eve Ewing, author of Ghosts in the Schoolyard, a 2018 book about the school
closings. “It was one possible policy solution in an array of many possible
solutions, but the point is that the people most harmed had no meaningful
opportunity to shape that policy decision.”
Chicago
was the birthplace of community organizing, and Emanuel was seen as stiffing
the neighborhoods where that tradition was born. Emanuel’s decisions to close
schools and six mental health clinics were blamed for accelerating the decline
and disarray of already struggling communities. In a poor neighborhood, a
school is one of the few stable institutions.
“What
Emanuel did goes beyond just ignoring parts of the city; it actively worked to
destabilize those communities,” says Jawanza Malone. Even more people wanted to
leave. And between 2014 and 2016, shootings increased among those who stayed,
as young people from rival gangs were thrown together in new classrooms.
“It
wasn’t about what was right for the children; it was about what was right for
Rahm and his friends: the rich and elite people,” Robinson says.
“Neoliberal”
is the term most often employed by Emanuel’s detractors to describe his outlook
on governing. As used by left-wing critics of moderate Democrats, “neoliberal”
refers to a post–New Deal philosophy of government that emphasizes free-market
capitalism, deregulation of the financial sector, privatization of public
services, and cuts in government spending.
Emanuel
was, according to Ewing, “the precise archetype of a neoliberal mayor.”
Fiscally, it might have made sense to put resources into the growing areas of
town and withdraw them from the shrinking neighborhoods. And Emanuel was always
a fiscally responsible mayor, unafraid to raise property taxes, hike water
rates, or impose unpopular fees such as speed camera tickets to balance the
city’s budget. Joe Moore was a critic of Daley’s shortsighted use of funds from
the Skyway and parking meter leases in order to close budget gaps, but the
alderman became an ally and admirer of Emanuel (which helps explain how Moore
lost his reelection bid in February in independent-minded Rogers Park). “Rahm
confronted the challenges,” Moore says. “He convinced the City Council to vote
for significant property tax increases. He exhibited a willingness that Daley
never exhibited to spend political capital.”
Emanuel
was elected mayor in 2011 with strong support in the black community. By 2015,
that support was eroding. Between 2011 and the first round of voting in 2015,
his share of the vote dropped from 63 percent to 49 percent in the 27th Ward,
which includes East Garfield Park, and from 60 percent to 45 percent in the 4th
Ward, which covers part of Douglas. (Emanuel saw little or no drop-off in the
downtown wards in which he had so assiduously invested.) That loss of support
from black voters was the difference between an outright win and a humiliating
runoff against no-name Jesús “Chuy” Garcia, which he may have won because
African Americans were reluctant to vote for a Latino mayor.
“Why
did such a loyal support group get the short end of the stick?” asks political
consultant Don Rose. “I think his biggest failure was to deal with the Other
Chicago.”
If a Taser had arrived at the corner of 41st
Street and Pulaski Road one minute earlier, Rahm Emanuel might still be mayor.
“Someone
with a Taser?” an officer is heard asking a police dispatcher on a recording of
radio traffic on the night of October 20, 2014. “This guy’s walking away with a
knife in his hand.”
A
Taser was on its way, but Officer Jason Van Dyke beat it there and fired 16
shots into the guy with the knife in his hand, Laquan McDonald. A video of the
shooting was released more than a year later and was at odds with the official
police report, which stated that McDonald had lunged with his knife at
officers. African Americans had already begun to sour on Emanuel’s policing
because of the aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics of Garry McCarthy, the superintendent
he recruited from Newark. Now many viewed the mayor with suspicion and
mistrust.
After
the McDonald video came out, Emanuel “lost the support of the majority of the
black community,” says police reform activist William Calloway, who encouraged
journalist Brandon Smith to sue the city for the video’s release. Although
Emanuel says he did not see the video until it became public in November 2015,
some suspected that he rushed a confidential settlement with the family through
the City Council in order to preserve his reelection. By May 2016, his
disapproval rating in the black community had risen to 70 percent.
Only
then did Emanuel begin seriously directing resources to the South and West
Sides. The city announced plans to build a police and fire academy in West
Garfield Park; the Department of Fleet and Facility Management’s garage moved
from the North Branch of the Chicago River (on the site that will become
Lincoln Yards) to Englewood. The Neighborhood Opportunity Fund and Retail
Thrive Zones program, established in 2016 and 2017, respectively, distributed
rehab grants to small businesses in under-developed neighborhoods.
It
was too little, too late; both Emanuel’s friends and enemies agree that the
fallout from the Laquan McDonald shooting, including the perception that he
covered it up, was likely his primary reason for not seeking a third term. “He
was unelectable,” says Calloway, adding, “The police are the only public
servants who are not seen as members of the community. You need a mayor who can
erase that division.”
The
pertinent question is whether Emanuel could have recovered from the McDonald
scandal if he had retained more political capital in the black community. That
community may be shrinking, but it’s still big enough to swing an election, and
Emanuel may have found it impossible to contemplate another run without its
support. None of his potential successors want to repeat that mistake: Nearly
everyone who ran for mayor this time promised to invest in neighborhoods beyond
downtown.
When Emanuel talked to Howard Tullman about
1871, “he always said he didn’t want a kid in the South Side or the West Side
of the city looking at the skyscrapers downtown and not understanding in every
way, shape, and form they could aspire to being part of that opportunity as
well,” Tullman recalls. “The dream was that this enthusiasm, encouraging
entrepreneurial activities, would eventually spread, and the benefit of
technology and entrepreneurship would be distributed across the whole city.”
Tullman,
at least, can see the beginnings of a more broadly shared prosperity as the
Chicago that Emanuel’s administration has been building pushes out from
downtown in every direction. On the Near West Side, Google is in Fulton Market.
On the Near South Side, Related Midwest is building the 78, a $7 billion
residential and commercial development that will fill the gap between downtown
and Chinatown, near an area already booming with hotels and the addition of
Wintrust Arena, the new home of DePaul basketball. Farpoint is redeveloping
Bronzeville’s Michael Reese Hospital into housing and tech space. On the North
Side, the industrial corridor along the North Branch of the Chicago River is
set to become Lincoln Yards, a $6 billion housing and entertainment
development.
“I
think his latest legacy will be getting those deals financed or getting some
support for those deals,” Tullman says. “Then the next real challenge is how do
you do these other areas? Englewood. Bronzeville is getting healthy already.
The city is as well positioned as any major city.”
Rahm
Emanuel didn’t become mayor to be everybody’s best friend. He became mayor, as
he puts it, to leave the city “better prepared for the future than the day I
walked into the office.” Political consultant Don Rose acknowledges that
Chicago “is probably in better financial condition” as a result of Emanuel’s
tenure. Demographer Alden Loury believes that a lot of things that happened
when he was mayor “are certainly positive for the city overall.” But Emanuel
will not be fondly recalled as a civic father figure, like Old Man Daley, or
even a civic little brother figure, like Richie.
“I
don’t think the city ever loved him,” Rose says. “I don’t think even his
supporters loved him. Even Richie, with his bumbling, and the Old Man had
people who loved them. I don’t think the people who supported [Emanuel] warmed
to his personality.”
Love
Rahm Emanuel or not, the forces that produced him, and that he encouraged
during his administration, will continue to transform Chicago. The next mayor
will no doubt do more to redistribute the city’s resources to neighborhoods
outside the borders of the global city on the lakefront, but she won’t be able
to arrest their ultimate fates. We’ll still be living in Rahm’s Chicago.
