Pat Dowell-Cerasoli had the stage to herself in the auditorium of Malcolm X College. Positioned at a microphone, the deputy commissioner of Chicago’s planning department was offering a strategy for designing a federal “empowerment zone” application. An EZ would be a run-down urban area that the federal government would jump-start through a package of tax incentives, waivers, and cash. Time was scarce–it was now May 7, 1994, and the city’s bid had to be received by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development by June 30.
Today, many observers doubt that this latest federal attack on the ghetto will have any more impact than its predecessors, notably the Model Cities program of the 1960s. And six months after the Chicago application was submitted, the good feelings that reigned last summer have faded, succeeded by jockeying for power. The tension that normally exists between city government and community is reasserting itself.
This analysis yielded the empowerment zone–the entree on Clinton’s urban policy menu. Where an urban enterprise zone would have entitled businesses to a break in capital gains taxes, the EZ promised firms a wage tax credit of up to $3,000 a year for any worker who lived within the zone’s perimeter. Firms in the zone would get other tax incentives as well, plus the authority to float tax-exempt bonds, and businesses and residents both would receive the freedom to seek waivers of various state, local, and federal regulations.
“Somehow there needs to be a way of doing business in which we try to create the conditions in which people can seize opportunities for themselves,” said Clinton in the White House.
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When the coordinating council invited neighborhood organizations to contribute to the EZ application, activists in poor areas got busy. When leaders of west-side neighborhood organizations came together, they excluded Austin, largely on grounds of affluence. “Which perturbed us quite a little bit,” says the Reverend Lewis Flowers, pastor of the Austin Community Baptist Church. “We demanded our neighborhood in.” The west side’s eventual proposal did include Austin, as well as the near west side, East and West Garfield Park, and North Lawndale, plus the Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green in other parts of the city. In total, the west side consortium laid claim to 17.8 square miles of Chicago containing 185,000 residents. These numbers put the west side’s proposal in line to become the entire zone, a fact that irritated other aspirants. “They’re hogs,” complained a south-side leader.
Over two days in April the coordinating council entertained these proposals in public sessions. In all, 33 proposals were submitted, many of them self-serving. Safe Haven, an obscure agency in Lakeview, argued for its antigraffiti, antidrug campaign. The Children’s Place Association, a Humboldt Park organization that aids youngsters infected with HIV, outlined plans to open a new home on the west side for wards of the state. The presentations from the umbrella groups were more affecting. “We had real people, young people, testifying, not us big shots,” says Doug Gills, whose stamp was all over the mid-south-side proposal. The west-side presentation began with a slide show, brought on Paul Ramey to detail the history of blacks in the area, and followed with Robert Steele, the son of Cook County commissioner Bobbie Steele, laying out the specifics. This piece of theater ended with a staged cheer.
As Dowell-Cerasoli spoke on, “there was deep consternation,” recollects Doug Gills, “a feeling that the community was getting shut out.” Gills, Robert Steele, Paul Ramey, Angelo Rose, and Art Vazquez, then the executive director of Pilsen’s 18th Street Development Corporation, huddled in the rear of the auditorium. Nearby was a brooding portrait of Malcolm X himself, executed in orange and purple. Whispering among themselves, the conspirators griped about what to them was the city’s hauteur in not dealing them in as equal partners. “This can’t go on,” Gills said. “We’ll be locked out. We’ve got to move.”
