No single thing can make a neighborhood stronger and healthier. Effective community development – comprehensive development – takes many hundreds of things, and many people and organizations.
The three Southwest neighborhoods in Chicago's Smart Communities program launched their portals yesterday, creating a wide new avenue for interaction among residents, businesses and organizations.
They are works in progress, with some empty spaces yet to fill, but already the portals offer new stories and photos highlighting activities not easily found elsewhere on the web.
The three sites have automatic cross-links to each other to build connections among the communities, but each is likely to develop its own personality over time. Give them a visit and, if you live or work in one of those areas, submit some information to make the portals better.
Syndicated state and local government columnist Neal Peirce's recent summary of Mayor Daley's legacy on the Citistates site will seem fawning to Daley's critics. There is only a brief mention at the end about patronage and corruption, and no mention at all about the privatization controversies that have plagued the latter part of the mayor's tenure, most particularly the parking meter fiasco. Still, Peirce lends his expertise and a nice balanced account of our city's achievements -- and what's yet to be achieved -- in areas like ties to the global economy, school reform and public housing.
It's still a work in progress, according to the team that made it happen, but the Humboldt Park Portal, a day after its "soft" launch, looks pretty good to me. It features a nice selection of stories from various contributors and organizations, a packed calendar (Movies in the Park, Jens Jensen birthday bus tour, CeaseFire Late Night Run), and plenty of photos, directory listings and links to community information sources.
The portal is an early step in Humboldt Park's rollout as one of five Chicago Smart Communities, and it will be a key tool in building digital skills among local residents. Give it a look, and if you're from the neighborhood, submit some news or directory listings of your own.
We've written here before about how neighborhoods are using multimedia tools to promote their work and their neighborhoods, but couldn't have imagined, even six months ago, how far the groups would come, and how fast.
Audio slideshows are now available for 10 neighborhoods as part of the Chicago Community Showcase project, funded by the 2016 Fund for Chicago Neighborhoods and Boeing Company. The photos, maps and background info provide vivid introductions to neighborhoods that usually don't make it onto tourists' agendas.
A virtual walking tour of Pilsen by TuMultimedia (below) captures many of the colors, sounds and flavors that make that neighborhood so interesting and vibrant.
New mobile-device tours of five neighborhoods provide photos and audio narration via smart phones. If you've got your phone handy, just go to tours.lisc-chicago.org.
It's great stuff. Kudos to all the neighborhood people who put the tours together; Sally Duros and Amadi Jordan-Walker, who managed the program and saw to thousands of tiny details; and Sarahmaria Gomez and Alex Fledderjohn for their video tours.
Southwest Organizing Project (SWOP) is "naming names" of banks that are foreclosing on properties on Chicago's Southwest Side, where 7,300 foreclosures have been filed over two years in four area ZIP Codes. The bank names are prominently featured on yard signs that say "Deutsch Bank (or Citibank or JP Morgan Chase or Bank of America) failed this neighborhood through foreclosures."
The music video below looks like something from a record-label's studio, but it was created and produced by 12 students at Crane Tech Prep High School in Chicago's West Haven neighborhood. The project was a joint effort between the students; their teacher "Gravity," owner of OOO Multimedium; After School Matters; and the Near West Side Community Development Corp.
"The idea was to do everything super high quality so that these kids could see themselves in a different light," said Gravity in an interview with Near West outreach coordinator Darvolis Robinson.
"We recorded the song, got a mix on the song, shot the video and got the edit all in just under TWO WEEKS! Amazing! We are talking about 12 kids (3 singers & 8 lyricists) who had very minimal or no prior studio experience and nailed all of the vocals in one session! I have been in the entertainment business for quite some time and trust me when I tell you that is nothing short of amazing!"
The video shows what can be accomplished when expectations are set high rather than low.
"When I told people of what I was planning to do with this class," said Gravity, "they all thought it was a fabulous idea until I told them I was doing it at Crane! I couldn’t believe that people were writing off an entire student body based on hearsay or bad press! I originally grew up in Harlem N.Y. and I remember how it felt for people to prejudge me and what I had to offer. Sadly I still deal with being prejudged today as an adult, but now I have the power and means to prove those people wrong all of the time. I decided to treat these kids the same way I so often wished and still wish to be treated, and give them the power to change people’s perspective of who they are and what they have to offer!"
Congrats to the students for a fine piece of work, and thanks to Near West for passing on the information.
Lots of communities and individuals talk about "being green," but few can show as much actual green activity as the former steel mill community of South Chicago, which in May will host 80 green-oriented events from habitat restoration and urban farming to tours, youth programs, cycling events and health activities. It's a structured month-long calendar put together by community organizations involved in the South Chicago Green Summit. That's a now-annual event that grew out of the local strategy to turn the "steel town into green town."
And so it shouldn't be a surprise that one of the leaders of all this activity, Claretian Associates Executive Director Angela Hurlock, was honored as one of Chicago Magazine's 2010 Green Awards. Hurlock lives in one of the energy-conserving and solar-electricity-generating houses that Claretian builds, and she leads a broad range of community-building programs that, alongside the green strategies, will help South Chicago reconnect to the mainstream economy after many years as a depressed post-steel neighborhood.
Congrats to Angela Hurlock and her colleagues. On the video, her segment runs from 3:20 to 6:00.
(Rendering of proposed building at 3230 W. Armitage Ave., from the Zapata Apartments web site)
The Zapata Apartments development, three buildings with 66 affordable residential units and ground-floor commercial space, seems to a lot of people like a very good idea. Filling vacant spaces on and near Armitage Avenue and providing a mix of one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments, the Zapata project is a response by two respected community groups – Logan Square Neighborhood Association and Bickerdike Redevelopment Corporation – to the heavy local demand for affordable housing.
But there's another viewpoint, a familiar one in Chicago, that there's enough "low-income" housing already and that what the neighborhood needs is more market-rate development. A local homeowner, Zach Abel, has organized neighbors against the Zapata Apartments and filed suit to stop development.
WBEZ did a radio report that attracted quite a flurry of rants and rationales in its comments section. John McCarron wrote a piece for the New Communities Program, which supports the project, about "the risk and rancor that goes with brick-and-mortar community development in these uncertain times." And backers of the project have just launched a new web site, zapataapartments.com, where they offer details of the development and encourage readers to sign and distribute petitions.
Seems to me that building affordable housing makes a lot more sense right now than adding more condos to an over-saturated market, but maybe I just don't get it. What do you think?
Leaders in Humboldt Park are serious about bringing a digital culture to their community.
One of five designated "Smart Communities" in Chicago – neighborhoods that just yesterday were awarded a $7 million federal grant for broadband adoption – Humboldt Park put together the video below to pitch for another special project, the Google Fiber initiative that will bring ultra-fast internet speeds to one or more U.S. communities.
Little Village is serious about capturing all the public money it can. With a series of interviews of local leaders, it makes the case to residents that every person counted will make a big difference in how much money is allocated locally -- the equivalent over 10 years of another top-notch facility like Little Village Lawndale High School.
The leaders repeatedly stress that Census data is completely confidential and that it is not shared with any other government agency (such as immigration, a big reason that some residents haven't filled out the forms in the past). One priest even suggests that not being counted is a "social sin, a sin of omission."
It's in Spanish with English subtitles, and was produced by Enlace Chicago's Dahriian Espinoza, with help from Jaime de Leon. Check it out.
The writers and practitioners at LISC/Chicago's New Communities Program started this blog to provide a venue for "quick hits" and commentary about community development in Chicago and elsewhere. Let us know what you think, and if you'd like to contribute as an author.
The three Southwest neighborhoods in Chicago's Smart Communities program launched their portals yesterday, creating a wide new avenue for interaction among residents, businesses and organizations.
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