To Build A City

This article, like the one which precedes it, was excerpted from a talk given at the SCUPE congress. When this article appeared, Stan Hallett lectured at Northwestern University and Garrett Evangelical Seminary in ethics and urban affairs. He was a vice president of the South Shore National. Bank, which seeks to invest in and rebuild the surrounding community. He taught Dynamics and Development of the Modern Industrial, City for SCUPE.--The Editors

City watching these days is like looking into a kaleidoscope that is beginning to spin, the colors blurring. Too much is changing too fast, and we experience the vertigo that comes from not knowing how and where to fix our eyes and balance our inner ears.

We need to understand these changes. Our situation is analogous to the investigations into the earth's structure in the early 1950s. The Oceanographic Institute outfitted a ship with sonar to take soundings of the ocean depths. The ship discovered that the ocean isn't a big bathtub. Instead, there are huge expanses that are flatter than the Salt Flats of Utah, crevices deeper than the Grand Canyon, and mountains that rise higher than the Himalayas, all buried underneath the surface of the ocean.

During this same period, studies were going on of volcanoes, earthquakes, and the geological structures of the continental shelves. In 1956, scientists from the Institute suggested to a scientific conference that all of this information would make sense if there were floating plates that formed the structure of the earth's crust. The motion of these plates, they suggested, opened up the crevices and threw up the mountains. According to this view, Mount St. Helens is now burping as a result of the pressure building from the Pacific plate moving in under the Continental plate. When first introduced, the notion of plate tectonics was laughed at because people did not want to deal with the idea that maybe the ground underneath their feet was shifting. But the theory makes some sense out of what seemed like a whole range of disparate information.

We need a comparable theory about fundamental shifts in the basic structures that form our cities. Three groups of structural assumptions have shaped the development of the modern industrial city.

The first set of assumptions dealt with growth. We assumed that we would have virtually unending population growth that would have to be accommodated in our urban areas; that our resources would be cheap, available, and unlimited; and that the environment could withstand anything we wanted to throw into it.

The second set of assumptions dealt with production and service. We thought that the mere production of wealth would move humankind out of its slavery to necessity; that the development of technology would meet all our needs; and that technology should be labor-saving, capital- and energy-intensive, and centrally controlled; that the primary instrument for technological development was the modern corporation; and that any problems left over after we had produced enough could be solved by increasingly professionalized and bureaucratized social services, including more hospitals, schools, and police.

The final set of assumptions dealt with governance. We maintained that governance should provide the framework within which people could pursue their own interests. The government should be an impartial referee, but also the money source for the installation of the infrastructure--the roads, water, sewers, research and human capital development. It should pay for the development of a trained, educated work force and take responsibility for problems such as people who can't make it within a market system. It should provide minimum access to necessary goods and services-welfare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment, Social Security. But apart from these tasks the role of government was to be limited.

These three sets of assumptions imply that more is marvelous and that centralization is the primary goal for the social organization of technology and services.

These implications make religion a residual category. If the social order is working well, then the primary task of the church is the care and cure of souls, which means patching people up in order to throw them back into society's set of arrangements. Religion deals increasingly with the private sphere of family and leisure time, rather than questions of vocation and meaning. Furthermore, if reality is in centralized systems, then local realities are meaningless and marginal. The neighborhood is a marginal category, and the local church is a residual institution attached to a marginal social reality which is an appendage to a large-scale, centrally organized system which, thank you very much, is working quite well.

The trouble is that none of the assumptions hold. The population is not expanding, and the idea that we have to structure our system to reward growth through a set of tax incentives, and make public capital investments to transform cornfields into suburbs, is questionable. My city, Chicago, has had no net growth in this past decade; it has had a net loss of more than 600,000 people.

Furthermore, we are running into problems with resources, notably oil--and soil. We are losing eight to 10 tons of topsoil per acre planted in corn. The land can withstand only two or three tons of loss. We are stripping the vital ingredients from the soil and replacing them with fossil fuel-based fertilizers and energy. We must face the limits of natural capital of the earth.

And the environment! We used to think we could simply throw things away, and now we discover that there is no longer an "away." What is away for you is in somebody else's way or, in fact, may be in your own way. The environment is not only throwing back, it is throwing up.

And in production and service, we have assumed that efficiency meant technology that worked like an open pipe--efficient, requiring very little labor, and sucking enormous resources in one end and spewing huge amounts of waste out of the other. We are treating nature as a mine on the one side and a sink on the other. That definition of efficiency is no longer adequate.

In Chicago we have a combined sewer area for four million people. When it rains, the storm drains and the sewage drains overflow into the river. To solve this problem we are building a tunnel 200 feet underground, 30 to 35 feet in diameter, big enough for three trains to pass without touching. The tunnel will channel waste to a reservoir and pump it into a treatment facility. We will have to build a nuclear power plant to provide energy to accomplish this task.

The treatment facility will take the organic sewage and form a sludge which will be mixed with industrial chemicals and toxins, so that it won't be useful for anything. It will cost $138 per ton to ship the sludge downstate and put it in abandoned strip mines. People downstate are saying that they have already taken as much of that from Chicago as they want to.

The cost of this little dream was originally estimated at $1.5 billion, then $4 to 6 billion, and the latest report is $13 billion. At the $6 billion level the deep tunnel will cost $4,000 to $5,000 per dwelling unit. That's enough to build whole new neighborhoods. In addition, if the organic waste from this city were put into anaerobic digesters and converted into methane and organic fertilizer, it would be worth a 1977 price of $250 million. We could be cooking with genuine People's Gas and also providing all the fertilizer we need for the greenhouses we are going to build.

The costs of systems like these rise as the resources get scarce. Production is moved to remote facilities which require very little labor, and the costs of city living go up while the work goes elsewhere. Then we start to develop a whole set of substitutes for work. We try to deal with the problems of workless people by expanding social services. We are learning that a whole range of illnesses are associated with the sense of the loss of purpose that goes with the loss of meaningful work. So we try to patch that up with expanded medical care, and we create an enormous industry. The largest medical complex in the world is out there by the Eisenhower Expressway in the poorest area in town.

In lower-class neighborhoods the medical problems are the result of poverty: personal attacks, malnutrition, lung ailments related to pollution. We need investment in health action--creating healthy environments and workable communities, shifting focus from remedial service to community-building action and from professional-client relations to mutual aid. Instead, we put huge resources into the care and cure system.

We expand the police force to contain the pressures generated by young people who are growing up knowing that there is no opportunity for work. Ninety-five per cent of burglaries are committed by people between the ages of 16 and 25 who live within a mile and a half of the place where the burglary occurs. The problem in the city becomes one of protecting ourselves from our own kids.

The school principals in South Shore can tell you, "Seventy per cent of the kids who were there in the fall aren't there in the spring, and another seventy per cent have taken their place and you can't educate a moving stream." We continue to pump money into the schools to solve the problem of shifting school populations caused by people who don't have enough money to pay the rent and have to run from the landlord regularly.

These problems are linked in a housing-income-work-technology cycle that ultimately comes back to issues of meaning. But they raise questions about the structures of governance as well. How do we shape the working rules in such a way that we reward the investments that we want to reward because they contribute to the city, and inhibit those which we want to stop because they destroy the city? How do we build a city?

We did some studies here in Chicago neighborhoods to find out what entitlements such as welfare, unemployment, Medicare, and Medicaid cost. We found in South Shore that entitlements might be as much as $20 million per year. When we got past the state bureaucrats to the computer programmers and got them to give us the run on the actual numbers, it turned out to be $62 million yearly going into a neighborhood of 80,000 people--to sustain them in the absence of work! And furthermore, going in a way that guarantees that they won't have work.

That is a system of income maintenance that is destructive of investment and credit possibilities. To have credit is to believe in the future; to invest is to use power and resources to shape that future.

How do we redo the technology of the current cities? How do we make neighborhoods work again? Some of the 1920s neighborhoods are probably better adapted to the technology needed for the '80s than many of the communities built during the '50s and '60s, giving older city neighborhoods an advantage. But change requires community-forming at the neighborhood level. Technology doesn't just put itself in place. It is easy to centralize the process in urban investment development corporations, using funds from Aetna Insurance Company to build Fox Valley East between Aurora and Naperville, because you're starting with corn fields, and corn fields don't vote. But if you want to transform the South Shore or Humboldt Park, you must deal with people. What is done in the way of change has to grow out of their lives.

Action bringing change can no longer be centralized in some institution; it must take place in the neighborhoods. The local church may be the place where the neighborhood's imagination takes form, where the community starts to build. The church may be the place where people begin to ask the fundamental questions, to create new possibilities as to how they are going to organize their lives. We must make it possible for people not just to survive as neighborhoods come tumbling down around their ears, but to have the credit and the investment resources needed to build a community. And this process would cost much less than $62 million a year!

In 1977, for the first time in Illinois, the cost of Medicaid was more than 50 per cent of the total welfare budget. This year it is 61 per cent of the total welfare budget. That means that the poor get 39 per cent of the welfare funds to cover food, clothing, shelter, and everything else, and the doctors and hospitals get all the rest. The poor have become the narrow neck in the hourglass through which the tax dollars flow on their way to the middle class. One good poor neighborhood with lots of multiproblem families should be able to provide the economic base for at least three middle-class neighborhoods!

Transformation must begin at the neighborhood level. We must start by saying that we are at home; our neighborhood is the promised land. We have before us dramatic new possibilities foretelling an era of invention with a new set of assumptions.

We must invent a new technology, a new tool. And in Chicago it is happening. The Center for Neighborhood Technology is a group of organizations in Chicago which is working with old neighborhoods. Organizations like the Community Development Corporation and the Rehab Networks are clarifying new principles, shifting away from "open pipe" technology, from waste disposal to resource recovery.

An alternative schools network is setting up co-ops where people can work part of the day and study part of the day and earn enough to sustain the institution. Some neighborhood groups are exploring the possibilities of a mutual security insurance company, where, instead of beefing up the police and paying exorbitant insurance rates, at least 70 per cent of the people in a block join together to do the things that are needed in order to restore the security of the community.

Loan Committees are also a viable idea for neighborhoods. The First National Bank could not work seriously at a neighborhood level because the cost of obtaining information to arrive at a credit judgment about $70,000 loan to a private school on the South Shore would be so great that the bank would never touch it. But a Loan Committee in the neighborhood would know who was on the school's board, would understand the school's problems, would know that some people would move if their children couldn't go there. The Loan Committee would have all the information it needed to make a credit judgment.

Authority should not come from the top down. It must be given to people so that they can engage in their neighborhoods, in their communities, to forge covenants and working rules. We must create new forms of authority in the city.

For example, we need community energy authorities, where people together can make decisions about their neighborhood's energy policies. They may want to cut consumption five per cent a year for five years. They may bargain with Commonwealth Edison to make sure it won't overbuild and dump the costs on the neighborhood. They may want to recycle their waste, instead of putting so much money into a $6 billion hole in the ground. It's the only thing that will guarantee that even if Chicago goes down the drain, we'll have one big enough!

If people are simply turned loose, they will build a city. West Town, just east of Humboldt Park, is some of the roughest gang turf in town, fractured by conflict among rival gangs. But a little housing rehab corporation is working out there with kids from every one of those gangs, and they are all at work. The turf questions disappear in the process of building.

If we turn people loose, they will build a city. If we set people free, they will build a church. If we give people hope, we find hope ourselves.