Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration is negotiating with President Joe Biden’s housing officials over potential city reforms after federal investigators accused Chicago of environmental racist zoning and land-use practices.
Community and civil rights advocates said that posture was a risky gamble and that the mayor should come to the table with the feds, something that she now appears to be doing. “It would be a dumb thing if they didn’t” negotiate, said Cheryl Johnson, executive director at People for Community Recovery.
Johnson’s organization was one of the community groups that brought a complaint to HUD in 2020. The proposed move of General Iron to the Southeast Side was ultimately rejected by Lightfoot earlier this year, but the community groups that filed the civil rights complaint argued that the historical policies and practices that put that plan into motion showed the need for reform. General Iron’s owner is now going through an administrative hearings process in hopes of overturning the city’s decision to deny a final permit needed to operate. The owner was so confident it would get the permit, based on a two-page agreement with the Lightfoot administration, that it built a new shredding operation at East 116th Street along the Calumet River. Lightfoot’s denial of the permit followed many protests and even a monthlong hunger strike, events that brought a number of health care advocates into the debate. Residents of the Southeast Side argued that they couldn’t tolerate more pollution in a community surrounded by dirty industries and already suffering from poor air quality and health problems among residents. The community groups whose complaint to HUD opened the investigation, including the Southeast Environmental Task Force, said that not only should reforms be put in place by the city but the car- and metal-shredding operation built at East 116th should be dismantled. “It needs to be deconstructed and we need to make fundamental reforms to the racist systems that allowed toxic polluters to amass in neighborhoods like ours,” the groups said in a statement.
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