Disappearing Disorder with the Whole World Watching
By Mare Liam Ralph The following piece is part of Progressive City's Beyond Planning for the “Visitor Class” series, which asks authors to explore both the issues that arise from planning for the “visitor class”—economic, social, environmental, and beyond—as well as potential pathways to building cities that are not only culturally rich but also responsive to the needs of those who inhabit them. More information about this series can be found here.
Throughout history, urban planning has demanded the exclusion or disappearance of segments of society we find intolerable – often prioritizing the needs of rich residents, white people, homeowners, automobiles, and upholding a “traditional family structure.” This means that cities are not designed with some of us (most of us?) in mind. We see this in the built environment from inaccessible transit stations to restrooms based in binary gender: planning builds its conception of humanity into the world around us.
Weeks after the first Stay at Home orders of COVID-19 in Spring 2020, wildlife reclaimed our cities. Around the world, plants and animals thrived without interruption. In the midst of the suffering of a global pandemic, a spirit of mutualism and shared destiny spread among neighbors and communities. In May, when a captive audience watched the extrajudicial public execution of George Floyd, people all over the United States marched in opposition to racial terrorism. In Louisville, hundreds of Kentuckians occupied Freedom Square for over a year to demand justice for Breona Taylor. White Americans, in particular, slowly opened their eyes to see how truly linked our liberation is.
In his book Feral City: On Finding Liberation in Lockdown New York, author Jeremiah Ross recounted a unique yet familiar feeling on the streets in those days. Free from the surveillance and over-policing of 21st century urban life, Black organizers and activists, queer and trans people, immigrants, the unruly, unhoused and sex workers reclaimed public space. The people gentrification had displaced were slowly reclaiming their right to the city in a liberatory process of rewilding.
While many of us hoped the 2020 uprisings represented a generational pivot away from carceral responses, the return to “business as usual” has been a swift and violent backlash that seems to worsen every day.
In a revanchist compulsion to reclaim urban centers for the visitor class, big city mayors declared war – not on poverty but its embodied disorder: people experiencing homelessness. Disproportionately Black, queer, trans, and disabled – unhoused people confront commuters with their own complicit participation in an economic system so cold that Americans freeze to death every winter simply because they cannot afford market-rate rent.
Cities and states throughout the country have passed laws criminalizing homelessness, often while cutting funding to housing and social services. Missouri made it a crime for any person to sleep on state property. Los Angeles extended its anti-camping law to ban encampments within 500 feet of schools and daycare centers. Newly emboldened by the Supreme Court’s decision in Johnson v. Grants Pass, municipalities throughout the country are creating bans against unsheltered homelessness – punishment for this visible reminder of the horror of income inequality in the United States.
Arrests, fines, and records compound the difficulties of securing permanent housing. Arresting impoverished people does nothing to solve a shortage of affordable housing or to end homelessness. What is most frustrating is that we know how to end homelessness – but elected officials are not interested in that. There is no political will to fund permanent supportive housing, emergency rental assistance, or to fully fund housing choice vouchers for the 75% of qualifying households who don’t receive them.
In Chicago, where residents relish the notion of “Summertime Chi,” the city prioritized NASCAR and music festivals like Lollapalooza and Riot Fest over residents’ ability to navigate downtown, access public parks and even get to local hospitals. In August, Chicago hosted the Democratic National Convention at McCormick Place and the United Center. National and international media descended on the West Side area once christened The Second Ghetto by historian Arnold Hirsch while a variety of law enforcement agencies restricted neighbors’ access to their own neighborhood. Convention organizers and Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration repudiated questions about this summer’s convention resembling the violent repression of the city’s 1968 convention. It was clear too that the 2024 convention would not look much like the 1996 convention, a cotillion for neoliberalism, also held at the United Center.
Riding high on a fulfilled campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it,” Bill Clinton’s reelection coronation kicked off in a neighborhood where such neoliberal policy would have an outsized impact. At the crest of HUD’s HOPE VI grant to “reimagine” public housing, the tallest towers of the Henry Horner Homes outside the basketball stadium were boarded up – a precursor to the Chicago Housing Authority’s notoriously failed Plan for Transformation. Today those buildings are long gone, as is the city’s commitment to public housing and low-income renters. A March 2024 report by Housing Action Illinois and the National Low Income Housing Coalition estimated Chicago’s shortage of affordable housing at 126,125 units. Knocking down high rises of Horner didn’t solve the need for public housing; it just displaced these most vulnerable renters to private market apartments in other segregated neighborhoods. The towers, once visible reminders of Chicago’s Black underclass, no longer bother visitors to the neighborhood there to attend Bulls and Blackhawks games.
The grand opening of the Chicago Transit Authority’s Damen Green Line station was a showpiece for the 2024 convention. Three blocks away, the empty shell of R. Nathaniel Dett Elementary School was being demolished. One of 49 Chicago Public Schools (CPS) closed in 2013 (the largest public school closure in U.S. History), Dett sat vacant for eleven years before it caught fire in spring of 2024. Former CPS schools in other neighborhoods have been converted into market-rate and affordable housing but Dett fielded no adaptive reuse proposals.
Mayor Brandon Johnson – elected on a progressive platform of investing in all Chicago neighborhoods and a campaign promise to Bring Chicago Home with a real estate transfer tax – celebrated his arrival among Democrat heavyweights by clearing encampments and kicking residents out of shelters. Most cruelly, the city spent $814,000 on a fence/barrier at the location of one of the city’s largest encampments near the Dan Ryan Expressway, along the route delegates took from McCormick Place to the United Center – money that could have gone directly to funding supportive housing for people camping there.
Despite these attempts to disappear real Chicagoans and all their embodied disorder, in the end, the 2024 DNC was not so different from ‘68: a rewilding in our city’s streets. Protests of the Palestinian genocide were brutally broken up by Chicago Police Department. A radical coalition of Americans bravely faced cops in riot gear, hoping to disrupt an immoral war paid for with our tax dollars. Sure, our taxes could instead fund programs proven to fight poverty at home and end homelessness, like guaranteed income, the Child Tax Credit, or more affordable and permanent supportive housing.
But is anything more American than placing order before justice?
Mare Liam Ralph (they/them) is an urban planner and housing organizer. Ralph holds a Master’s Degree in Urban Planning and Policy from the University of Illinois at Chicago and was a member of the Housing and Neighborhoods Research Team for We Will Chicago, the first citywide framework plan since 1966. They practice mutual aid distributing fresh food to South Side neighbors with Market Box and live in South Shore with their partner, dog, and cats.
