The University of Chicago proudly points to how its Office of Community Affairs has forged a new relationship with surrounding neighborhoods. Gone are the days of the University wielding the tools of urban renewal and eminent domain to "build out" elements of Hyde Park the university, its faculty, high-end staff or students found undesirable. The university now speaks of forming partnerships and collaborating with communities and neighborhood groups on issues of education, public safety, urban planning and economic development. To the extent that the university now mainly builds charter schools instead of condominium towers, the relationship between the university and local neighborhoods appears different. But beneath the surface of grins, handshakes and photo ops lies the reality of an unchanged vision. The university still largely sees neighborhood groups in Hyde Park and across the Mid-South Side as impediments and roadblocks on the path to accomplishing its underlying community relations goal: a stable, staid, homogenous and easily categorizable upper middle class Hyde Park.
Hyde Park is a diverse community that confounds easy categorization. Racial and socioeconomic patterns change block to block and sometimes lot to lot. It is the whitest neighborhood for miles and yet only around 44 percent of its residents are white. It is a neighborhood of renters and condo-owners, of the wealthy living in huge mansions and the poor living in Section 8 buildings. It is full of liberal activists and economics professors, frat boys and math nerds, dusty bookstores and rib joints.
The university has long desired a homogenous, predictable neighborhood to sell to prospective students and faculty, and seems to believe that through bricks and mortar construction and the expansion of the university police force, it can accomplish its vision of Hyde Park. The tragedy of Amadou Cisse's murder, steps from the sparkling new undergraduate dorm under construction, lays bare the failure of this strategy. But the university continues to pursue this strategy and fundamentally unchanged relationship with its surrounding community.
Two recent dust-ups between the university and the community exemplify this essentially unchanged relationship. The first issue is the university's push to convert the Doctor's Hospital on Stony Island into a hotel. Most of us who live in Hyde Park would heartily support a non-shady hotel closer than the expensive Loop hotels that currently "serve" our neighborhood. Had the university chosen to engage in a dialogue or consult important community actors (such as the residents of apartment and co-op buildings on Stony Island), they would have found a questioning, yet overwhelmingly supportive community.
Instead, the university chose to attempt to ram through a plan based on the needs of an important donor, the White family of White Lodging Company. They held their first public meeting on the plan in the small conference room of a neighboring cooperative and all non-Vista Homes residents were shut out. When the Office of Community Affairs finally presented the plan to the public, it was clear that the presentation was a clumsily orchestrated attempt to equate opposition to this particular plan and hotel operator with opposition to a hotel in Hyde Park, economic development and, most heinously, the needs of the families of cancer patients at the University of Chicago Hospitals. The University's hand-picked "preservation expert," who droned on endlessly about how the Doctor's Hospital building really isn't all that historic, finished his speech before getting to a point the university deemed important. So Hank Webber, vice-president for community affairs at the university, yelled a reminder to him from the front row.
The second example is the recent demise of the Hyde Park Cooperative Society. The coverage in the Sun-Times, Chicagoist and other media outlets paints a picture of the university coming to the aid of a failing grocery store by letting it die a dignified death. The reality is that the university has cynically manipulated the process from the start. The Co-Op's flagship store at 55th street is a highly profitable full-service grocery store that has suffered from the attempted expansion to stores at 53rd and 47th Streets. Service quality and prices fluctuated over the last three years as the Co-Op sought a way out of its obligations at the 47th Street store, to the frustration of many residents. Some sort of solution was needed to restore high quality, decently priced grocery service to the neighborhood.
Again, most residents of the neighborhood recognized the need for change at the Co-Op. Again, the university, as lease-holder to the 55th Street Co-Op, could have engaged in a dialogue with the Co-Op society, its members and the wider community about the future of the Co-Op. Instead, the university pushed through a vote requiring the Co-Op Society to decide on its future. Again, instead of letting the process play out naturally, the university hired a consultant to create a shell community organization called Hungry for Change that took out full page ads in the student newspaper, the Maroon, encouraging a vote for the Co-op's demise, to be replaced by a Treasure Island or Dominick's at 55th Street. To make sure their message was clear, Hank Webber sent out a mass email to all those with an uchicago.edu email address claiming that "Option A" was the only viable option for Hyde Park, presumably to avoid mass starvation.
The problem with the university's approach to the community is not merely the attempt to ram through a hotel operator that has a federal EEOC complaint against it for religious discrimination, disobeys city laws on housekeeper breaks or is relentlessly anti-union. It is not with pushing through the demise of a 75-year-old institution in favor of a union-busting grocer (Treasure Island) or a faceless corporation (Dominick's). The problem is that the university, having lost its blunt tools of eminent domain and bulldozers, now uses cynical manipulation to impose its vision of a healthy urban community on Hyde Park. It is a similar strategy to the Daley administration, which uses its power and resources to buy off opposition and force community groups to play the game in return for whatever scraps the city (or university) deems appropriate to bestow in return.
The counter-vision of Hyde Park is that it is and has the potential to be the premier example of a diverse urban community that works, a neighborhood that resists the homogenization of late stage capitalism, a neighborhood where the poor and well heeled bump into each other on the street. That counter-vision is not upheld by the sycophantic student newspaper or by the new wealthier condo owners, but by the group that the university has criticized as against progress and development in Hyde Park: the long time "white liberal" residents who man the community organizations, churches and synagogues. It is not the university or the compromised commentariat — its key collaborators in bemoaning that "things don't get done in Hyde Park" — who saved the neighborhood from the twin specters of blight and flight in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite the fact that the bulldozers of urban renewal often receive credit for saving Hyde Park from the fate of other South Side neighborhoods, the real "saviors" of Hyde Park are those now graying men and women who stayed through the decline in the '60s through the '80s. They maintained the vision of an economically and racially diverse neighborhood by not relocating to the North Side or down the Metra Electric Line to the south suburbs. It is because of them that there remains a strong core of religious, social and other organizations that serve the community so well.
The question of who owns Hyde Park remains a contested one. On the one side are the members of the Older Women's League, the lay leaders of the churches and synagogues, and the members of the community council whose vision is of a diverse, heterogeneous community, and on the other stands the vision of those within the gray fortress of the university and their developer allies. It is a battle between Valois and Wendy's, 57th Street Books and Borders, Dr. Wax and Coconuts. It is between those who see Hyde Park as nothing more than a template for Anywhere, USA and those for whom Hyde Park is home and history. For the university to truly have a new relationship with Hyde Park, it must recognize this vision. It must recognize that it is not Hyde Park, and despite the fact that it holds legal title to much of its real estate, it does not own it. Until then, its new relationship will be nothing more than consultant-driven manipulation and propaganda.
Mateus / December 19, 2007 4:26 AM
I was somewhat involved in the Co-Op debacle, and I have to say that I think it was completely the fault of the Co-Op. Having perused its books, it became clear that its governing council was completely incompetent in accounting for its profits and losses and using data to make sound decisions. So ironic, given that so much of the membership came from U of C, which is globally recognized as a place that teaches reasoned decision making using hard facts. If the Co-Op had voted to try to hang on, it would surely have failed as no one in their right mind would extend credit to the group after having seen their books. It would be a loss for any creditor. Indeed, HP would have become a food desert, as the liquidation process is a lengthy one. This on top of the Cisse slaying and fairly regular flow of robberies committed against students is completely untenable for the University if it is going to continue attracting terrific academic minds. Why deal with no groceries, little night life, bad public transportation and perceived safety problems when you could just go to Harvard or Columbia, where these issues are of little concern?