Serving UIC's Great Cities Commitment: Solutions for Today's Urban Challenges

Great Cities Institute is excited to support the Community Reinvestment Fund’s project (CRF) to learn more about Chicago’s small business landscape, particularly as it is experienced by women entrepreneurs and small business owners of color. CRF is working with The Chicago Community Trust, Polk Bros. Foundation, and JPMorgan Chase to lead an exciting research effort that aims to develop a deeper understanding of the advantages, challenges, and opportunities for small and medium-sized businesses in Chicago. We know this is an issue that will be relevant for many stakeholders across the city – from practitioners, to funders, to researchers, and beyond. The Community Reinvestment Fund has put together a questionnaire to help them understand the small business landscape.  We hope that you will support this effort by either filling it out yourself if you are a small business owner, or by passing it on to small business owners that you might know.

The purpose of this Survey is to better understand the important role small and medium-sized businesses play in stimulating growth, job creation, and neighborhood revitalization across the City. This survey will target businesses operating in low- and moderate- income communities and businesses owned by people of color and women, to surface specific needs, opportunities, and challenges that these business owners face operating in their own unique contexts. Ultimately, the results from this analysis will inform how new and existing resources can be more effectively deployed to meet the needs that are identified. The survey facilitators will also use the assessment findings to create a navigation tool that will help business owners more easily connect to relevant resources for financing and business support services.

The survey, below, can be completed in 5 minutes, and participating businesses are entered to win a Samsung Galaxy 8 S2 Tablet! By participating in this survey, you will help us learn more about how to support small businesses and the important role they play as engines of economic growth in the City of Chicago.

The 48^th Annual Conference of the Urban Affairs Association was held April 4-7, 2018 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The conference opened with a plenary featuring local community development initiatives by the Thorncliffe Park Women’s Committee, Toronto Aboriginal Support Services Council and The Greenbelt Foundation.

Great Cities Institute was well represented: Teresa Córdova presented some of the Great Cities work on joblessness among young people, Matt Wilson presented on “Current Poverty in Chicago: A Refined Understanding” and Timothy Imeokparia presented on “Theorizing Possibility as a Practical, Political, and Philosophic Limit on the Radical Project.” In addition, faculty from the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs on the program included Professors Jered Carr and Michael Siciliano on “Macro Explorations of Network Composition and Change in Intergovernmental Service Agreements: An Initial Analysis and Research Agenda”; Phil Ashton and Rachel Weber on “Hordes with Cash: Real Estate Funding Platforms and the Legal-Regulatory Constitution of the Crowd”; Janet Smith on “Social Reproduction and Urban Dynamics”; and Stacey Sutton on “Cooperative Cities: Municipal Support for Worker Cooperatives and Equitable Economic Development in the United States.”

Congratulation to GCI friend, Dr. Elizabeth “Betsy” Sweet, from Temple University, for receiving Honorable Mention for the prestigious Activist Scholar Award! Applying creative qualitative methodologies and innovative planning theory, she continues to do amazing work with women in Latino and indigenous communities in the U.S. and in Latin America.

Toronto itself is interesting and incredibly diverse. Modernist architecture dominates the downtown skyline of a very dispersed region. High rates of income inequality have been documented and widely discussed in the media. Several reports produced on Toronto’s inequality includes The Unequal City 2015: Income and Health Inequities in Toronto by Toronto Public Health. In November 2017, A United Way (Toronto and York Region) and Neighborhood Change Research Partnership published a report entitled, The Opportunity Equation in the Greater Toronto Area: An Update on Neighbourhood Income Inequality and Polarization.

Researchers from The Factor-Inwentash School of Social Work at the University of Toronto, examined income inequality and polarization in Montréal, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver as points of comparison. Using Gini-Coefficients, the common measure of income and wealth distribution across geographies, the researchers examined income distribution across neighborhoods in Toronto. They conclude that the disparities they document demonstrate a growing inequality in Toronto that exceeds other regions in Canada and one that threatens what they call, the “opportunity equation,” a principle that emphasizes access to opportunity.

In a society that values fairness, the opportunity equation should mean that everyone can get ahead. However, factors like the increasing concentration of poverty, deteriorating job quality, and growing income inequality are creating an uneven playing field and compromising the promise of access to opportunity (1).

Based on their statistical calculations from census data, the researchers demonstrate the disparities among neighborhoods and assert that “as income inequality grows, the neighbourhood where you live increasingly matters in whether or not the promise of a fair chance is true for you.” In Chicago, our reports on youth joblessness have also demonstrated how the disparities are evident when comparing neighborhoods, and countless other studies, including those by Metropolitan Planning Council, The Chicago Urban League and UIC Professor Maria Krysan, demonstrate the impacts of residential segregation on an array of issues including income and wealth. The Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy (IRRPP) report on A Tale of Three Cities: The State of Racial Justice in Chicago  while not neighborhood specific, documents racial disparities in Chicago on various economic, criminal justice, health, and housing indicators. Although more documentation of neighborhood disparities in Chicago in income and wealth would be valuable, the more that policies, resources and support are directed towards current efforts to address income and wealth inequalities, the faster we can not only mitigate the impacts but also turn around the numbers.

The Toronto report has several recommendations on how to mitigate the impacts of income and wealth inequality that suggest a relevance of this report to our work here in Chicago. In the report, three areas for “collective action” include: “Providing young people with the opportunities they need to build a good future; Working toward a labour market that offers job opportunities as real pathways to stability and security; and Working together to ensure that background and circumstances are never barriers to opportunity.” In Toronto, the United Way initiated the following actions:

1. We established a new Anchor Agency investment strategy with a targeted focus on helping people who live in poverty, and those at risk of falling into poverty. This new way of working ensures people have access to a broad range of programs and services close to home. It also allows us to collaborate more closely with our community partners, better positioning us to respond to emerging needs in our changing neighbourhoods.
2. We launched our Youth Success Strategy, designed to connect youth facing multiple barriers to meaningful career opportunities. This strategy works with the business, labour, community, and education sectors to provide support and tools to bridge the opportunity gap and improve young people’s social and economic futures. By 2025, we will have connected 10,000 young people to education, skills, and professional networks and experiences that will put them on the path to long-term economic stability.
3. Over 2017/18, building on the past 10-year’s work of our Building Strong Neighbourhoods Strategy, we are leading a multi-sector social innovation lab to tackle the lack of economic opportunities faced by many neighbourhoods across our region. This work will build on our neighbourhood-focused supports to individuals and communities to make the connections and foster the relationships needed to develop solutions to the issues that affect residents (37).

Often, the value of attending these research conferences is to learn about research being conducted in other cities. Next year’s Urban Affairs conference will be held in Los Angeles on the UCLA campus, hosted by the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles, April 24-27, 2019. In the meantime, we’ll keep working on issues here at home.

Thank you again, for your attendance at and/or support of our series of events commemorating the February 29, 1968 release of the report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Report. The CANTV taping of the March 1, 2018 event, The Kerner Report: 50 Years Later with Senator Fred Harris and panelists Timuel Black, Eugene “Gus” Newport, Gail Christopher, José Lopez, JR Fleming, and Anthony Lowery and moderator, GCI Director, Teresa Córdova, is available here. You can also see some of the photos from the March 1 panel in the album below.

We appreciate the contributions that these incredible people made to the panel, leading to some deep insights and profound words of wisdom, especially from our elders:  Timuel Black (99), Fred Harris (87), and Gus Newport (83) and of course, José López. One such phrase from Fred Harris and added to by Gail Christopher was “We all do better when we all do better – and we all deserve to do better.”  Here are the full and highlight videos from the event, as well as individual interviews of the panelists.

Dr. Harris shared stories of how the Commission came about, the details of the phone call from President Johnson asking him to sit on the commission, and details of the Commission’s fact finding missions and decision making process.  Speaking also about the seeming sabotage of the Report’s release, he remarked that through one-to-one conversations like that with his father, he could explain the report’s contents, but the premature leak to the press undermined how the report was received.  Nonetheless, as Senator Harris described, the Kerner Report was significant both in its findings that social conditions caused by racist policies were the precipitating factors that gave rise to the urban unrest and the detailed recommendations to remedy conditions related to jobs, housing, segregation, education, social welfare, police reform and media depictions.  As both he and the other distinguished panelists stated, the issues that the Kerner report raised continue to plague many of these same neighborhoods today and that strategies to address these issues can be found in both the Kerner report and its update.

On March 1, 2018, the New York Times published an op ed. by Fred Harris and Alan Curtis titled, “The Unmet Promise of Equality.”

During this week of commemorations, Temple University Press released the book, co-edited by Harris and Eisenhower Foundation CEO, Alan Curtis, titled Healing our Divided Society: Investing in America Fifty Years after the Kerner Report.  Thanks to the UIC bookstore for having the book on hand for folks to purchase.  Here is a description from the Press,

In Healing Our Divided Society, Fred Harris, the last surviving member of the Kerner Commission, along with Eisenhower Foundation CEO Alan Curtis, re-examine fifty years later the work still necessary towards the goals set forth in The Kerner Report. This timely volume unites the interests of minorities and white working- and middle-class Americans to propose a strategy to reduce poverty, inequality, and racial injustice. Reflecting on America’s urban climate today, this new report sets forth evidence-based policies concerning employment, education, housing, neighborhood development, and criminal justice based on what has been proven to work-and not work.

At Great Cities Institute, we will continue to highlight in this blog, an array of evidence-based strategies, including those described in the new volume that we know works and continue the conversations about the various strategies to move from Poverty to Prosperity. We need now, the political will.

• • WGN: “Report finds race relations in US are almost unchanged after 50 years,” Lourdes Duarte, published February 27 2018.
  • WGN Radio:  “The Opening Bell 2/14/2018: The 50th Anniversary of the Kerner Commission Report – Relevant More  Than Ever.” Bennet Wakenight, published February 14 2018.
  • New York Times column by Dr. Fred Harris and Alan Curtis: “The Unmet Promise of Equality,” published February 28 2018.
  • Chicago Sun-Times: “Last surviving member of famed Kerner Commission coming to town,” Mary Mitchell,  published February 19 2018.
  • The Chicago Reporter: “Fifty years later, what the Kerner Report tells us about race in Chicago today.” William Scarborough, Kasey Henricks and Amanda E. Lewis. Published February 26 2018.
  • Chicago Tribune: “50 years after landmark report on riots, Kerner Commission’s last survivor still worries about racism.” Mary Schmich, published March 4 2018.
  • Newswise: “Black History Month at UIC,” highlights Kerner Report events. No author listed, published 14 February 2018.