Planner turns to city with a soul
Maurice Cox, the highly regarded, design-savvy urban planner who Mayor Lori Lightfoot lured away from Detroit to spread the wealth to the city’s South and West sides, could be Chicago’s most consequential urban planner in decades.
But, he admits, he’s still learning the city’s street names.
In his first in-depth Chicago interview, coming days after Lightfoot announced a $750 million plan to revitalize 10 battered business districts on the South and West sides, Cox expressed publicly what he’s been telling audiences privately: He sees Chicago as having a heart (its booming downtown) and a soul (its motley collection of neighborhoods). And the soul will be his prime focus.
Cox will oversee downtown but will delegate day-to-day responsibility to a deputy, allowing him to concentrate on the task of reversing the decades of discrimination, decay and disinvestment that have plagued minority neighborhoods.
“I think we have to first stop the bleeding,” Cox said, sitting in a conference room in the Department of Planning and Development’s 10th-floor offices at City Hall. “We have to give residents a sense of where their neighborhood is going.”
In the interview, Cox touched on a wide range of other development topics:
■ The Obama Presidential Cen
ter offers a “once in generation” chance to revitalize the South Side, he said, so he hopes Chicagoans can move past the debate over whether the center should be built in Jackson Park. “As far as I’m concerned, let’s consider that decision done and look more at the benefits and how we can assure that it doesn’t just sit as a building in a park, but that it has a catalytic role in reimagining an economic center for the South Side.”
■ A “preservationist at heart,” he’s open to the idea of saving the much-maligned James R. Thompson Center and adding a highrise that would boost its value. If Lightfoot agrees, her administration could be on a collision course with state officials who want to sell the 34-year-old Helmut Jahn-designed postmodern buildingto a developer, possibly for a tear-down.
■ Tax increment financing that subsidizes the cost of roads and other infrastructure is well-suited for the planned redevelopment of the former Michael Reese Hospital site at 31st Street and Lake Shore Drive, Cox said, because new housing and public spaces there would benefit the nearby Bronzeville neighborhood. In contrast, he indirectly criticized the $1.3 billion TIF deal for the massive Lincoln Yards project on the North Side, which the City Council approved and Lightfoot signed off on before she took office. “I would like to see TIF used to advance a more equitable distribution throughout the city,” Cox said. “It’s a very different model than ‘Let’s cluster everything at the heart and then — the soul, we can forget about it.’”
The stakes associated with his efforts are enormous. Lightfoot campaigned on a platform that called for devoting more political and financial capital to the economically struggling, violenceplagued areas of the South and West sides. If Cox can’t deliver signs of progress, Lightfoot will likely get flak from residents and aldermen — and could be a oneterm mayor.
Yet if anyone has a chance to marshal the forces of urban planning and architecture in favor of more equitable growth, Cox, 60, is probably the guy.
He knows the world of politics, having been mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, from 2002 to 2004. He’s also at home in the realm of ideas, having been an associate dean for community engagement at Tulane
University in New Orleans. And during his four years as Detroit’s planning chief, he planted seeds of revival in that city’s devastated neighborhoods. Indeed, the “Invest South/West” plan that Lightfoot announced Monday, with its emphasis on 10 business districts, is straight out of Cox’s Detroit playbook.
In Chicago, the 10 areas targeted for revival are Auburn Gresham, North Lawndale, Austin, Englewood, Humboldt Park, New City, Roseland, South Chicago, South Shore and an area that city officials identified as the Quad Communities, which includes North Kenwood, Oakland, and portions of Douglas and Grand Boulevard.
Why 10? And why these 10?
“Each one of these neighborhoods has unique assets, and they require a tailored strategy to leverage their assets,” Cox said.
Some, he explained, have iconic historic buildings that might be converted into theaters or some other cultural use. Other have lots of publicly owned vacant land that presents a chance for building apartments and shops. The 10 will be a kind of laboratory that could offer lessons for as many as 25 more business districts on the South and West sides. Cox calls such districts the “front door” of neighborhoods.
“My first thought,” he said, “is how can people come in to the front door of their neighborhood and see revitalization playing out.”
His vision of revitalization is very different from the modernist housing projects that tore through the urban fabric in the 1960s with their isolated clusters of residential towers. It’s more in keeping with the principles of New Urbanism, which stresses walkable streets and mixing uses like shops and housing. In line with such thinking, Cox is a proponent of “20-minute neighborhoods,” in which everything residents need, from schools to shopping, is within a 20-minute walk or bike ride. Such principles, he said, can contribute to public safety, creating the self-policing role that the urbanologist Jane Jacobs memorably labeled “eyes on the street.”
“I think there’s a direct correlation between the physical design of a community and the ability for it to be safe,” Cox said when I pressed him on whether design solutions could overcome the gun violence that has wracked the city.
To help lure investors to shrinking neighborhoods, he plans to use forecasts which show that the number of residents will grow if the city allows developers to build new clusters of apartments. That technique worked in Detroit’s east riverfront district, he said, where a national grocery chain opened a store even though the planned housing had yet to be built.
The key, Cox said, was to “project what the future would look like.”
One measure of the challenge he faces in Chicago came the day before our interview when I visited the Englewood business district and come upon a barbecue place named Taylor Made Que at 6717 S. Halsted St. The owner, Channel Taylor, spoke to me from behind bulletproof glass. She said a pet project of former Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the much-hyped Whole Foods Market at 63rd and Halsted streets, had little impact on her business. Her observation didn’t surprise Cox.
The Whole Foods, which sits behind a sea of parking lots, follows a suburban model that emphasizes getting around by car rather than on foot or by bike. The store is isolated from the sidewalks and pedestrian activity around it. Cox said he would not have recommended that the City Council approve the project in its current form had he been planning commissioner.
“My assumption is that people will come by car to shop, but they will also come by foot,” he said. “And I think that the model you’re describing assumed that no one was coming by foot.”
He also criticized what he called a lack of coordination among city departments and related agencies, saying that public investments on the South and West sides are not achieving their full “catalytic effect.”
How long will it take before his vision starts to bear fruit? New and rehabbed buildings cannot appear instantly, of course. But there may be “pop-up events” next summer, Cox said, that draw attention to the South and West side business districts targeted for revival.
Asked whether it will require a generation, rather than just one or two mayoral terms, to achieve his and Lightfoot’s goals, Cox replied with a mix of realism and self-confidence.
“I think it is going to take a generation,” he said, “but, quite frankly, we are the generation that will set it in motion.”