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Loss of Faith in City Government
Kelly Welsh, former corporation counsel for Chicago, sums up some of the challenges the city faced.
[Welsh, 00.05.47 to 00.06.30]
I mean, the idea of the Chicago schools really not working is something that voters really could relate to. Crime was an issue. Chicago was not New York City, from the ‘70s and ‘80s, but it was still a point where reducing crime was something that mattered to people.
0:06:14
And a sense of just running the city better. That the city needed—its infrastructure and the day-to-day stuff that a mayor and a city administration does just needed to be done better.
[Image of bridge/road in need of repair?]
Tim Samuelson of the Chicago Cultural Center comments on the city's infrastructure at the time.
[Samuelson, 00.07.22 to 00.08.35]
I would have to say, at the time of the election, the city had lots of problems. And yes, that idea of Beirut on the Lake—that actually had a lot of accuracy. The neighborhoods—and many of them were in really rough shape, with abandoned buildings and crime. And also the other thing that I noticed—because part of me travels all over the city in neighborhoods all—because I'm looking for different historic sites. And I do it on public transportation. I don’t know how to drive, so I do it on foot.
0:08:00
And what I would see was infrastructure in really bad shape. So I would go under a bridge viaduct and just see rust and to a point where I was alarmed by it. And then CTA facilities. So there was a lot of things that were neglected, and there were a lot of areas that were neglected. In fact, traveling all over the city, you could see that there were some areas that were reasonably maintained, and there were others that weren’t at all.
The schools had a poor reputation nationally.
sdfsfsd[United States Secretary of Education] William Bennett had called Chicago the worst public school system in the nation. Whether that was accurate or not, I don't know. But it wasn't a system that the city could be proud of.
The schools had always been a disaster really....And so, no one really thought that they could be fixed.
Chicago's public housing also suffered a number of challenges from the 1980s through the early 1990s, as Julia Stasch, former housing commissioner, explains.[Stasch, 00.21.48 to 00.23.13]
Actually, my involvement with the public housing began not when I was chief of staff but when I was the commissioner of housing. And prior to me joining Mayor Daley’s administration, with agreement from Mayor Daley, the federal government took control of the Chicago Housing Authority and its housing assets.
0:22:11
And I actually don’t know all the dynamics around that negotiation, but over the years, the stock of affordable housing—the stock of public housing—had become so decrepit, so deteriorated, that I think any objective person would say that it was in many ways uninhabitable, and definitely not supportive of positive life trajectories for the people that lived there.
And at the same time, the agency had become known as a patronage place where people—aldermen and others—could say, “Oh, I’ve got a great person,” and then they would be hired at the housing authority. There were purchasing irregularities. So anyway, it all culminated in federal takeover of the housing authority.
0:23:00
And so, I think that they sent in a series of I don’t remember what they were called, but they were people designated by the federal government to lead the housing authority.