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I wrote this piece about University of Chicago President Robert Zimmer over a year ago now. It was one of the few occasions I’ve had to hear him clearly outline the underlying philosophy guiding the large expansion of the university. For some reason I always think this story was never published, but it apparently did. Figured some Hyde Parkers might like having this around to reference as I have been unsuccessful since to land a one-on-one interview with him.

My style has matured in the last year-and-a-half, so forgive the looseness of some of the syntax.

Zimmer’s philosophy allows no room for stasis

4.23.2008

University of Chicago President Robert Zimmer lifted the veil April 17 during a brown bag forum “What Matters to Me and Why” revealing a worldview that is guiding new initiatives at the university.

“When I look out into the world, what do I see?” Zimmer said. “I am constantly struck by two things: what a physicist would capture as entropy and structure.”

In terms of the university, Zimmer said, he sees it as a structure that requires an enormous input of energy — focused, imaginative energy — without which it succumbs to the omnipresent tendency towards entropy.

Zimmer said he sees no lack of energy or imagination at the university, but that energy lacks focus.

“I can get interested in any problem,” he said. “But to allow oneself to do that is a perfect example of how one allows themselves to dissipate.”

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I am again this week writing about the former Sutherland Hotel. I picked up the story early this year after our former reporter Kate Hawley left.

The historic building and ballroom has had a troubled past, caught in the last few years in a death spiral that for once did not end in the demolition of the building.

I chronicled the departure of the last 43 families of the building in a series of four stories. All appeared in the Lakefront Outlook, and several ran concurrently in the Hyde Park Herald. My series follows, appended by a January story about the troubles the building faced prior to its changing hands.

Antheus buys Sutherland

7.14.2010

Antheus Capital announced its intentions to purchase the Sutherland Apartments last week from nonprofit Heartland Housing.

Peter Cassel, director of community development for Antheus, confirmed July 2 that the developer was under contract to purchase the 154-unit apartment building at 4659 S. Drexel Blvd.

Cassel said Antheus is still working through the transfer of affordable housing contracts tied to the building.

The Sutherland was Heartland’s first residential project and tax credits the nonprofit was awarded from the city mandate 25 percent of units be kept affordable, regardless of who the owner is.

“We’re hopeful we’ll be able to close with in the next year,” said Andrew Geer, vice president and executive director of Heartland Housing.

The building was put on the market in 2007 after Heartland’s request to renew its low-income tax credits was denied. Less than a third of the building’s units are currently occupied, according to Geer.

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The Lakefront Outlook cut its teeth on covering the Harold Washington Cultural Center, winning a Polk award in 2007 for its investigation.

The round of reporters who received the well-deserved adulation have all moved on and a second wave of reporters has now also departed. So it falls to me to keep an eye on the ongoing shenanigans at the cultural center.

The drama is far from over and only recently reignited, drawing former Alderman Dorothy Tillman back to the City Council to testify on the center her daughter has allegedly run into the ground.

I’m working hard to live up to the legacy of this narrative. My two most recent stories on the Cultural Center follow.

Cultural center given 30 days to get finances in order

10.6.2010

The City Council agreed Oct. 1 to give the nonprofit managing the Harold Washington Cultural Center another 30 days to get its finances in order before authorizing a takeover by the City Colleges.

“This is a political drive-by shooting,” said former-Ald. Dorothy Tillman, who helped build the cultural center in the 3rd Ward and whose daughter Jimalita Tillman is the executive director.

Tillman said the city and the cultural center’s lender, Shorebank, now Urban Partnership Bank, conspired to push the center into foreclosure.

“Everyone was leaned on,” Tillman told the Councils’ Finance Committee, which was considering authorizing $1.6 million to buy out the mortgage. “I think it’s a political vendetta.”

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photo Bill Eppridge, Time, 1970

We all did stories on trauma care over this last week. Don Terry at the Chicago News Coop beat me to the punch on this, but I feel failed to adequately answer the question of “Why is there no trauma care on the South Side?”

My story delves deeper into the specific shortcomings of the trauma care network and the incremental steps that were originally planned, but never implemented. I did get some recognition from the state that this is a problem and there are “committees” looking into it and making suggestions. It’s pretty clear that the suggestions [pdf] are aimed at addressing the problems downstate.

One of the things I chose to leave out of my story is the highly problematic state data for the trauma patients treated. It’s difficult to control for when air-lifts became widely used in the city, the general advancement of emergency care procedures, and changing social issues. At the outset, the trauma network was problematic, partially because some ambulance drivers in the 1970s often refused to go into black neighborhoods after 1 a.m., leaving gunshot victims to wait until the morning at places like St. Bernard Hospital, which has never been equipped to treat trauma patients. At some point, I also need to explore my suspicion that this past disregard could be lingering, causing some trauma victims to never seek medical attention. To say the least, the numbers are problematic.

This is an issue I hope to continue pursuing. The first of my stories, which hits newsstands today in the Lakefront Outlook and Hyde Park Herald, follows.

South Siders twice as far from trauma care

10.6.2010

At 12:08 a.m. Aug. 15, Damien Turner was shot in the back. Ten minutes later he was hurtling up South Lake Shore Drive in the back of an ambulance to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where he died 10 miles from where he was shot at the corner of East 61st Street and South Cottage Grove Avenue — less than four blocks from the University of Chicago’s hospital.

“I’m not going to bury my head and let his memory die away,” said his mother, Shelia Rush, at a rally Sept. 28 in front of the university’s hospital, vowing to work toward opening a trauma center on the South Side that could have treated her 18-year-old son.

Rush, surrounded by dozens of supporters from the community organization her son founded, Fearless Leadership by the Youth, called on the university to reopen its long-shuttered trauma center.

Since 1989 when the university and Michael Reese Hospital closed their trauma centers, residents of the South Side, including Hyde Park, live in the only neighborhoods in Chicago to be 10 miles or more from a hospital that can treat victims of gunshot wounds, stabbings or car accidents — such as the motorist who crashed a car that then burst into flames on South Lake Shore Drive at East 51st Street on Sept. 25.

All residents of the North and West sides of the city live less than five miles from a trauma center.

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via CJR

— Portrait of U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer

Mayor Daley said on Sept. 7 he’s not going to run again.

My job was to figure out what early role the South Side would play in the first competitive mayoral race in at least 21 years.

This story, which ran in the Herald and Outlook on Sept. 15, touches on the mayor’s legacy on the Southeast Side. It’s pretty obvious that the CHA’s Plan for Transformation will be a big part of it. I generally take the tack that Daley was a mover of people.

My contribution to the hundreds of people running for mayor is that Stephanie Neely, the city treasurer and a Kenwood, resident, is thinking it over.

South Side likely to sit out mayoral race

9.15.2010

South Side politicians last week said Mayor Richard M. Daley’s decision to not seek re-election came as a surprise and it was unlikely anyone among their ranks would step in to fill the seat during the coming mayoral election.

“I don’t know anyone that wasn’t astonished,” said Ald. Toni Preckwinkle (4th).

“We got a lot of support from the mayor for redevelopment — millions of dollars,” said Preckwinkle, whose 4th Ward was one of major settings for the mayor and Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation. “In terms of residential redevelopment outside of Kenwood, Hyde Park, we couldn’t have done it without the tremendous support of the mayor.”

The Plan for Transformation invested millions in a 10-year rebuilding of the country’s highest concentration of public housing. Preckwinkle and neighboring alderman, Pat Dowell (3rd), said the building project and all its attendant successes and failures would be the mayor’s largest legacy on the South Side.

For Bronzeville and Hyde Park, Daley will be remembered as a mover of people. The Plan for Transformation was one of the largest migrations of residents within the city and its surrounding suburbs in decades. Daley also reigned over large-scale road building projects, including the Dan Ryan Expressway and South Lake Shore Drive.

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I’ve been following the shifting incentives for the health care system in Chicago. The main thrust is that the hospital system is becoming slowly segregated, to put it in the bluntest terms.

My angle tends to focus on the University of Chicago Medical Center because I’m based in Hyde Park. My recent interview with the main actors follows.

Urban Health Initiative marking slow progress

8.4.2010

The University of Chicago’s Urban Health Initiative is making incremental progress in convincing patients to find a primary care physician and not use the emergency room as a first option for health care.

The Urban Health Initiative started in 2005 as a program to set up appointments at local clinics for patients who seek treatment in emergency room for minor health concerns. Appointments are now being kept by more than a third of patients referred by the medical center, a modest rise over previous years.

“We’re trying to change social norms and that’s hard,” said Dr. Eric Whitaker, the lead on the initiative and associate dean of community-based research.

Whitaker said the no-show rates for appointments are approaching the levels at the university’s primary care and specialty clinics.

Patients referred to clinics by the university after being treated in the emergency room are still missing appointments about twice as often as those who go straight to one of partner community clinics.

Less than a third of patients are missing appointments at the Chicago Family Health Center, 9119 S. Exchange Ave., according to Warren Brodine, CEO of the clinic.

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I don’t understand this ordinance that’s being debated by City Council. I think TIFs are largely way to make sure rich neighborhoods get to keep the tax revenue they generate, while poor neighborhoods are stuck with whatever they can scrape together.

I wrote a story about the newest idea for TIFs. This ran July 21, 2010, in the Hyde Park Herald as a news analysis

Alds. support TIF cash for affordable housing

7.21.2010

Local aldermen have joined over half of their colleagues in supporting an ordinance that would mandate more tax increment financing (TIF) money get funneled into affordable housing development.

“Once every decade there’s another idea about affordable housing and how we can bring more resources to the table,” said Ald. Toni Preckwinkle (4^th), who co-sponsored the City Council’s 1993 and 1999 ordinances that increased city spending on low- and moderate-income housing.

The current idea, the Sweet Home Chicago ordinance drafted by Ald. Walter Burnett Jr. (27^th) and the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, would pump more TIF funding into affordable housing developments.

“This ordinance is quite simple in how it would work,” Julie Dworkin, director of policy for the Coalition for the Homeless, told a joint meeting of the Housing and Finance committees on July 7. Dworkin said the coalition is pursuing TIF funding to fill the gap left by dwindling state and federal funding for affordable housing.

The ordinance would require the city find affordable housing projects to fund that add up to 20 percent of the total revenue generated by the city’s TIFs the previous year.

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I submitted an idea to Slate’s “Nimble Cities” project. It’s an old idea, but hopefully enough people haven’t heard it that it’s novel.

Get rid of street grids

So few of our trips happen along straight lines that the street grid is an inefficient way to route traffic and buses.

In cities like Chicago inclement weather rules out bike riding for large portions of the year. An effective public transportation routing system is paramount and nearly impossible because all bus trips require a right-angled route along the street grid — trips that would move more efficiently across diagonal or winding routes.

An example: A butcher shop a mile directly southwest of my house takes a few minutes by bike to get to in the warm months. In winter, the same trip takes three times as long because I need to walk to a major thoroughfare that has a bus route straight south and then transfer to a second bus going directly west.

Chicago’s hub and spoke layout for its rail system also dictates a side trip downtown to the Loop as a prerequisite to travel by train between most city districts.

We should reconsider mapping bus routes along straight lines and planning straight streets through superblocks and depressed areas slated for redevelopment.

I don’t know if this is some kind of contest or something, but it says you can vote for my idea.

My main concern in all of this is that it seems dumb to lay down a bunch of new asphalt for bikers in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, etc. We’re not going to be using them during that half of the year where it is just way too hot or cold to ride safely or comfortably. I’m just gonna say, showing up to work on your bike during 90-degree weather sweating like crazy is not pleasant. I also don’t like the idea of building a bunch of new infrastructure for bikers who will only be riding during a few months of the year and still having to build parking garages for when they drive during the winter. Seems like a dumb waste of money.

The gist: There aren’t many good ideas on this problem. We’ve got a lot of half-baked ideas though, myself included.