Confronting Suburban Poverty in America

5. Fighting Today's Poverty with Yesterday's Policies

Chicago, America’s “second city,” has been getting a second look recently, with the election in 2011 of its first new mayor in more than two decades, the emergence of more of its corporations on the global stage, and the 2012 reelection of one of its own as president of the United States. For all of Chicago’s urban muscle, though, it remains a heavily suburban region. More than two-thirds (68 percent) of the Chicago metropolitan area’s residents live in the suburbs. And over two-thirds (67 percent) of the region’s jobs are located more than ten miles from the downtown Loop. Indeed, many of the country’s most iconic suburbs are found in Chicagoland—from the Frank Lloyd Wright bungalows of Oak Park, to the Northwestern University campus in Evanston, to the Highland Park settings of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Sixteen Candles. All together, more than 280 suburban municipalities surround the city of Chicago.1 CHAPTER 5 Fighting Today’s Poverty with Yesterday’s Policies South Cook County, Illinois: A former Christmas-tree garland factory located between two areas prioritized for redevelopment around transit and freight shipping in Blue Island, Illinois. (Jodi Prout) 05-2390-5 ch05_Kneebone 4/22/13 1:56 PM Page 77 But Chicago’s suburbs are a much more diverse lot than those examples suggest. To the south of Chicago, stretching into suburban Cook and Will Counties, lies a series of suburban municipalities collectively referred to as the Chicago Southland, including the likes of Blue Island, Dolton, Harvey, Lansing, Park Forest, and South Holland. The Southland thrived when heavy industry and steel mill jobs concentrated in the area to take advantage of the proximity to rail, shipping, and major interstate expressways. As manufacturing and steel jobs began to disappear in the 1970s, many of these communities experienced income declines and poverty increases more typical of the city’s South Side than of its suburbs. The recent housing crisis highlighted the fundamental misalignment between the Chicago region’s new geography of poverty and the outdated systems responsible for confronting it. By the end of the 2000s, the Southland area was home to fifty-one foreclosure filings per 1,000 mortgageable properties—the highest rate in the metropolitan area, outpacing other suburbs in the region and exceeding rates within the city of Chicago.2 But the relatively small size of many of these municipalities, years of economic restructuring, and sluggish population growth (or loss) meant that many of these suburbs did not have the capacity or resources to deal with the rapid spread of foreclosed and vacant properties threatening to destabilize their communities. Recognizing these capacity constraints, the Southland suburbs had worked together since the late 1970s on issues that evaded the narrow geographic confines of each small jurisdiction. Under the auspices of the South Suburban Mayors and Managers Association and the Chicago Southland Economic Development Corporation, the suburbs joined forces around issues such as municipal management and planning, bond issuance and purchasing, brownfield remediation, public safety, infrastructure , and transportation. As the foreclosure crisis began to strike, they turned again to this model to access the first wave of federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) funding—emergency assistance for state and local governments aimed at stabilizing home values in neighborhoods hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis. Communities in Cook County had two opportunities to apply for NSP funds—through an application to the state and to the county. Rather than compete with one another twice for critical resources, nineteen municipalities in the south suburbs banded together to submit a joint NSP application for more than $70 million in aid, based on a comprehensive strategy to link housing to public transit and broader economic development priorities. 78 FIGHTING POVERTY WITH YESTERDAY’S POLICIES 05-2390-5 ch05_Kneebone 4/22/13 1:56 PM Page 78 Ultimately, though the state did not fund the collaborative at the time, the first-round NSP application attracted more than $9 million in funding from the county. However, instead of funding the collaborative, Cook County funded eleven municipalities directly, citing concerns raised by U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) technical advisers about whether the collaborative could assume the liability of a municipality and whether it could efficiently spend time-sensitive resources. But by funding each municipality separately and failing to engage directly with the collaborative, the capacity and efficiencies created by sharing resources and...