Cui Prodest? The Victims’ Justice Ordinance and Chicago’s Future

Under the ordinance’s definition of a gang member encompassing family relatives, caretakers, friends, and acquaintances, nearly anyone could be accused of gang affiliation, and its definition of gang activity includes mundane acts such as a teenager spraying graffiti on a wall. Due to the teenager’s graffiti, the city could seize and sell their grandmother’s home.³ Thus living in a gang-affected neighborhood would put uninvolved persons at a greater risk of losing their property. If gang activity occurred at a gas station, the owner of the gas station would be punished.

Equally troubling, guilt or innocence is irrelevant to the ordinance’s property confiscation. Even if a criminal case is dropped or a person is found innocent by a jury, the city keeps their property forever. This means that a person wrongly accused of gang-related activity and later found to be innocent would still lose their property.

The idea of a municipality confiscating the land of a U.S. constituent suspected of malfeasance and selling that land to private interests set off alarm bells. The Illinois ACLU denounced the ordinance. Undaunted by these objections, the ordinance’s defenders insisted the bill would reduce shootings via financially penalizing gang members. Experts debunked this claim by pointing to the Chicago police’s crime data. In an analysis of 34,000 shootings, police identified fewer than 3–in–10 shootings as gang-related. Such data supports the assessment of Roseanna Ander, executive director of the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, who argues the myopic focus “on gangs distracts from the sheer number of guns available in the city.”

Many journalists and commentators concur that the proliferation of illegal guns is the real issue. Today, the typical 15-year-old kid involved in a shooting isn’t part of a hierarchical gang as defined by Chicago police. They might even become a target of a gang if they cause disturbances within its territory. Hence, the concern increasingly felt every day in Chicago is the fear of falling victim to a youth roaming the neighborhood with an illegal firearm who isn’t part of a traditional gang.

Setting aside the question of whether the ordinance would significantly reduce shootings, defenders of the ordinance next argued that the bill would provide the city with much-needed land. Yet the inarguable reality is that the City of Chicago has an overabundance of land. On November 17, 2022, the city announced the sale of more than 2,000 vacant lots to private buyers. These lots are included in a broader collection of around 10,000 lots obtained by the city through demolition liens and foreclosures over the previous 70 years.

According to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal, the sheer volume of unused land in Chicago amounts to an economic crisis facing the city. Chicago is burdened with more than 10,000 vacant lots as well as another 16,634 entangled in unresolved tax obligations and dues. The county makes attempts biennially to divest these properties through a tax-lien auction dubbed the Scavenger Sale. Similarly, the Chi Block Builder program likewise attempts to sell-off empty lots to developers. However, despite these efforts, many of these vacant lots are not purchased.

In light of more than 6,650 acres of vacant land already available within the city limits of which 200 acres lie in the South Side, what purpose could be served by acquiring even more land? To answer this question, one should remember the old Latin adage “Cui prodest?” which means “Who stands to gain?” Certain land is more valuable—or, more accurately, more coveted—than others. Furthermore, certain interests wish to gentrify key swaths of the Windy City; in particular, the realtor’s promised land of the Mid South lying between The Loop and Hyde Park.

The history of this area is fraught. Between 1917 and 1921, white terrorists carried out 58 bombings targeting black residents in this very area north of the University of Chicago.⁴ By the late 1920s, this area with its black populace became a cultural epicenter rivaling New York’s Harlem, but due to racist municipal policies, the area economically declined by 1949. Unregulated pollution played a role in this decline. A 1939 study found that poorer Chicagoans diagnosed with disorders such as psychosis and depression often lived clustered in these neighborhoods – areas which were later found to be awash in toxic pollutants due to the city’s lax regulations.

As the toxic pollution attenuated, wealthier Chicagoans no longer viewed these blighted areas with askance. Undervalued areas now had great value in the eyes of realtors and speculators. Private interests sought to use gentrification instead of bombs to displace the poorer black residents north of Hyde Park, but such plans did not come to fruition. Hence, we now see proposals to seize the homes of these residents on the grounds of suspected gang activity in order to make room for wealthier residents including University of Chicago faculty and students.

In the eyes of certain realtors and speculators, the displacement of poorer black residents from the coveted Mid South and the gentrification of this particular area by corporate octopi such as Mac Properties would create an uninterrupted zone of affluence from Hyde Park to The Loop. Businesses in The Loop would enjoy the increased patronage of wealthier University of Chicago students who, consciously or unconsciously, are complicit in the gentrification of the South Side.

In sum, if a city administration with a century-long history of corruption is given carte blanche to seize and sell the real estate of Chicago’s poorest residents, private interests will lobby to misuse such powers to displace Black inhabitants in the fulfillment of a vision which they have been pursuing for decades. Reflecting upon whether the city would abuse such powers, I recall a speech given by Richard Townsell, the Executive Director of the Lawndale Christian Development Corp., at the Harris School of Public Policy. Townsell urged students to remember that Chicago is a gangster city — and that includes the gangsters at city hall.

Those familiar with the history of Chicago know that sometimes the biggest gangsters aren’t the gang members on the street corner. Sometimes it’s bureaucrats sitting innocuously behind a desk at city hall or speculators gazing covetously upon certain lands lying between The Loop and Hyde Park.  To these silk-suited gangsters, the Victims’ Justice Ordinance or similar bills would be a remarkable gift. Although the bill has been defeated, no doubt there will be similar ordinances proposed in the future. For any future Chicago administration to enact such ordinances would have dire consequences for the city’s poorest and most vulnerable residents.