By Harold Henderson
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City of secrets. “In most major American cities, a complete list of [major capital] projects and their project costs is adopted by an elected body to become legally binding on a city’s administration,” according to the Neighborhood Capital Budget Group’s January report on the Chicago’s Capital Improvement Program 1990-1999. But not here. The city has a Capital Improvement Program (CIP) but no capital budget–which means that the city “1. Can alter the plan without involving or informing City Council or the public, and 2. Has no method for measuring its performance at the end of the year.” Sure enough, NCBG found that only one-third of the planned Industrial Street and Viaduct improvement projects have been or are slated to be completed on time, “while two-thirds (67%) have been cancelled, delayed, or disappeared from the CIPs.”
“Of the ten cities with the largest Latino population, seven are from the border states of California and Texas, two are major ports of entry for Puerto Ricans and Cubans, and then there is Chicago,” the nation’s third largest Latino city and the only one with large numbers of both Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, writes Pierre deVise of Roosevelt University’s Institute for Metropolitan Affairs in a paper titled “The Spread of Latino Poverty and Overcrowding in Metropolitan Chicago, 1980 to 1995.” “Why Chicago has five to twenty times the Latino drawing power of similarly endowed transport hubs and industrial centers located closer to the Caribbean, how it can match the Latino pull of the border gateway of San Diego are questions for which we have no good answers.”
“The media’s coverage of this year’s debate on affirmative action reinforced the centrifugal forces tearing at the bonds of trust and empathy–of community, solidarity, and good will–between black and white Americans,” writes Robert Entman in the Chicago Council on Urban Affairs magazine One City (Fall). In fact, “people are ambivalent….Whites have beliefs and feelings that can bolster support for affirmative action, and they have beliefs and feelings that can reinforce opposition.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Illustration/Carl Kock.
