Ending Chicago’s corrupt culture of ‘Where’s mine?’

Mike Royko famously wrote that the motto of Chicago should be changed from “Urbs in horto” —”City in a Garden” — to “Ubi Est Mea.”

Why? To reflect the reality of a city in which every pol, hustler, campaign contributor, and would-be insider repeated the same refrain: “Where’s mine?”

Later, various groups tried to dress up this reality with stilted or stuffy titles — like “aldermanic privilege,” the unwritten constitution of the city’s elected officials. Yes, it means that aldermen don’t oppose the decisions of their peers, no matter how self-serving or wasteful, so long as long as they have the freedom to be as self-serving and wasteful in their own wards. But, more importantly, it means that mayors also allow aldermen to do whatever they want as long as they don’t interfere with the big-ticket real estate, insurance, and finance monopoly held by City Hall.

The prospect of mutually assured destruction — the end of all quid pro quos, of one hand washing any other hand, of grease slathered on any procedural or legislative skid — has inhibited any challenge to this formula. Bad as it is, venal as it is, often corrupt as it is, at least it “works,” or so the beneficiaries like to claim.

If the damage were limited to the political class, that would be bad enough. But various versions of aldermanic privilege have seeped into other sectors. The culture permeates the development community. Chicago has a large number of housing and development groups — some excellent, some average, some unproductive.

They operate in a city where the mayor is allowed to make mega-deals with for-profit developers, sucking up huge amounts of tax benefits and subsidies. The Sterling Bay decision on Lincoln Yards is just the latest example. Meanwhile, locally, scores of housing and development groups are left to scramble for a minuscule amount of city subsidy, often aided and abetted by foundations that operate as extensions of City Hall. As long as enough groups get an occasional small project and a narrow slice of the scarce resources remaining, a kind of frustrated and uneasy peace prevails.

The upshot of this dynamic is the creation of some excellent but limited housing efforts scattered all across the city, but no reversal of the powerful forces of gentrification and abandonment which have seen the city’s overall population continue to shrink and its African American communities, particularly, continue to hollow out.

To turn the shrinkage and decline of the city around, the next mayor would have to end both the political and housing versions of aldermanic privilege. She would need to decide to invest heavily and consistently in several strategic communities, creating the kind of critical masses of new and renovated housing that can generate chain reactions of reduced violence, improved schools, and commercial, retail, and business development.

I know whereof I speak. I have worked in East Brooklyn and the South Bronx for decades — areas once as challenged as the south and west sides of Chicago — and have helped spearhead just these kinds of critical masses of new and renovated affordable housing. The City of New York, starting under Ed Koch, invested heavily and continuously in key areas and decided not to please many other worthy groups and communities. It should be noted that this began in the early 1980’s, when New York was still mired in a fiscal crunch and when a mayoral commitment of capital funds to affordable housing was considered a very high-risk gamble. The result: the total reconstruction of those communities — now occupied by many of the same Hispanic and African American individuals and families who once rented there.

Along the way, many political figures griped. And many development groups howled. But the decision to focus led to the kind of renewal that every decent New Yorker once dreamed of but thought impossible and that every decent Chicagoan can only dream of today.

Aldermanic privilege — Where’s mine? — perpetuates a pattern of scattered and unfocused work. The whole “NEVER” becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Just the opposite: The whole shrinks. And while every group and every alderman can claim some small gain now and then, the city as a whole is the loser.

It’s time for that to stop. This will be an important and early test for the new administration.

Mike Gecan is senior advisor to the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation, which is based in New York.

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