1. focus: urban renewal
By Mark Guarino / Staff writer
Chicago
I
n Ogden Park on a recent Saturday after-
noon, children were playing, parents were
chatting, food was cooking, and the music
was pumping.
This might be a typical scene in summertime
America. But it was no small matter in Greater
Englewood – a poor neighborhood on Chicago’s
South Side that has been front and center in the
city’s struggles with a soaring homicide rate.
People turned out by the hundreds for the
event, cohosted by the Chicago Park District
and the Resident Association of Greater Engle-
wood (R.A.G.E.). Many here said it is fostering
a new, more positive energy on their streets.
“It’s a good thing for Englewood,” said Ar-
lene Ray, who was at the event – one of four this
summer – with her daughter and two grandsons.
“Englewood is on the news all of the time. But
violence is not the only thing going on here.”
Long marginalized by geography – the neigh-
borhood is cut off from the rest of the city by the
eight-lane Dan Ryan Expressway and a sprawl-
ing industrial corridor – Greater Englewood has
problems familiar to many impoverished com-
munities: gang violence, population loss, a lack
of jobs, school closings, the housing bust. The
neighborhood has seen 43 homicides in the past
year, primarily due to gang violence, police say.
The horror of such violence was compounded
on Sept. 19 when a gunman shot 13 people, in-
cluding a 3-year-old boy, in the nearby neigh-
borhood of Back of the Yards.
No doubt people have tried to improve
Englewood’s fortunes before. But this year,
many have observed, things finally appear to
be moving – not only because of several outside
initiatives, but also because of effective activ-
ism among the neighborhood’s residents. One
sign of the new dynamics: the R.A.G.E. event in
Ogden Park.
A new generation of activists is “at a place
where both big outside groups and small local
groups are beginning to get a rhythm and gain
traction. I do believe they are, in a small way,
beginning to turn that corner” for the neigh-
borhood, says Susana Vasquez, executive di-
rector of Local Initiatives Support Corporation
Chicago, an organization that raises capital for
neighborhood development projects and pro-
grams, including those in Englewood.
Of course, no one doubts it will be a long,
difficult road ahead, and there’s hardly a guar-
antee that Englewood will be transformed. But
the changes that Englewood has already em-
Changestirsinatoughplace
Chicago’s Englewood lifted by
a new generation of activists.
Hangout: A basketball court built with donations from the community is filled with children and adults on a summer afternoon in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
VNEXT PAGE
18 The Christian Science Monitor Weekly | September 30, 2013

2. barked on could provide food for thought as
other neighborhoods struggling with similar
longstanding problems consider how to mount
a turnaround.
“Just as you can have vicious cycles, you can
have virtuous cycles,” says Robert Sampson, a
Harvard sociologist who studied Englewood in
his book “Great American City: Chicago and
the Enduring Neighborhood Effect.” “I don’t
see Englewood as spiraling down. What mat-
ters is what the trajectory is: Is it going down or
improving? Even though it’s still poor, I think
there’s actually signs of hope.”
Perhaps the most striking example of the
new way of doing things in Englewood can be
found in how it handled concerns about a rail-
road company’s project for an intermodal yard.
The community activism that coalesced around
the issue had not been seen in the neighbor-
hood for years.
In August, activists temporarily stopped Nor-
folk Southern Corp. from getting city approval
for a $285 million expansion of the intermodal
yard – a 10-year project that is set to enlarge the
railroad’s existing facility by 57 percent. The ac-
tivists’ prime concern: increased exhaust from
more diesel truck traffic.
The additional diesel exhaust gener-
ated from the planned expansion would
exceed federal safety limits, creating an
elevated level of soot that could lead to
numerous health problems, according to
an analysis by the Environmental Law
and Policy Center, an advocacy group that
has a Chicago office. There are already
1,250 diesel trucks passing through the
neighborhood every day, and they’re re-
sponsible for elevated asthma rates in the
neighborhood, Englewood residents say.
Pointing to the analysis, they say the
situation will only worsen with another
810 trucks expected each day as a result
of the expansion.
“This will be a deathtrap,” says activist
and resident John Ellis. “This is what they
are allowing. This will be Los Angeles in
its worst days.”
Norfolk Southern says it plans to use
the cleanest technology, which will meet
federal pollution standards, but residents
say that’s not enough. In late September
they succeeded in negotiating with the
railroad to come up with an improved
plan with specific details on how it would
reduce air and noise pollution: Norfolk
Southern now says it will install modern
pollution-control equipment on the ma-
jority of new trucks, install clean engines
or diesel filters on dozens of pieces of
equipment, and donate $2 million to fund
sustainability projects and job-training
programs for the neighborhood.
The railroad will also help fund the
restoration of an old rail track into a green
space and bicycle trail.
The turnaround resulted from residents suc-
cessfully persuading the Chicago Plan Com-
mission to delay a vote in August so that the
railroad had time to address their concerns.
The activists’ power came as a surprise: Most
people had expected the commission to give a
green light right away. Chicago Plan Commis-
sion member Bishop John Bryant said he was
“extremely disturbed” by the earlier environ-
mental findings that led to stopping the vote.
“It’s hard to ignore a history. All across the
country, these entities are always placed in poor
communities that do not have the financial or
political oomph to stop them,” Bishop Bryant
had said at the August meeting. “They’re never
taken to communities of strength and economic
and political clout.”
Residents now are pointing to their suc-
cess in delaying the vote as a confidence
booster. That development, along with a
small but steady stream of others, can “in-
stitute this turning point where things build
upon themselves in a positive way,” Professor
Sampson says.
Other developments are indeed taking place
in Englewood. Consider the following:
•Whole Foods Market announced this
month that it will open an 18,000-square-foot
store in the center of Englewood’s aged busi-
ness district – a remarkable prospect for an area
where buying fresh food has not been an option
for decades and where the only dining choices
have been fast-food restaurants.
The store, slated to open in 2016, is to an-
chor a 13-acre campus that is also expected
to include green space and other retail shops.
Funding from a public-private collaboration is
expected for the complex.
“This sends a positive signal to the market-
place, but more importantly, it sends a signal to
the rest of Englewood,” researcher Mari Gal-
lagher – who did a seminal study on “food des-
erts” in 2006 – told the Chicago Sun-Times.
•An independent espresso bar, the neigh-
borhood’s first, is scheduled to open before the
end of the year. Lauren Duffy, a former mission-
ary from the Washington area who settled in the
neighborhood five years ago, raised $25,000 to
refurbish a building for the cafe. The
building will be used not just for selling
coffee, but also for holding art exhibits,
community meetings, and other events.
Ms. Duffy, who’s part of a growing
wave of new entrepreneurs, acknowl-
edges that moving to Englewood from
a comfortable Washington suburb was
“an unusual choice.” But she says she
enjoys being in a place where she feels
she can make a difference. “I’m commit-
ted to doing that. It’s my neighborhood,”
she says.
•The idea of Englewood being a food
desert may be fading in more ways than
one. The neighborhood is emerging as
the center of Chicago’s urban farm ini-
tiative, with farmland coming from two
miles of abandoned railroad line and
100 acres of city-owned parcels. Three
agricultural groups are already operat-
ing farms, one of which sells produce to
high-end restaurants downtown as well
as to residents on the South Side.
This month, Whole Foods donated
$100,000 to Growing Home, one of the
farms, which could eventually sell pro-
duce to the planned Englewood store.
Of course, those trying to make En-
glewood a better place are well aware of
the daunting challenges. Englewood’s
geographical, economic, and cultural
isolation has led to demoralization, as
well as a fear that the “outside” – includ-
ing banks, police, and schools – is some-
how working against it.
“Many have seen promises made andRemembering: A memorial appeared for a shooting victim in Chicago’s
Englewood neighborhood. But violent crime rates have dropped.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
‘People [are] thinking differently
about their community.’
– Activist Asiaha Butler
VNEXT PAGE
The Christian Science Monitor Weekly | September 30, 2013 19

3. promises alluded to, which has created a real
sense that anything good that happens to our
neighborhood is not for us,” says Ms. Vasquez of
Local Initiatives Support Corporation Chicago.
One necessary component, she says, is a
commitment by city hall to “bold ideas,” in-
voking the same spirit that motivated the city
to rebuild following the 1871 fire that left it in
ruins.
Englewood has been dealing with hardships
“for a long time,” says Juandalyn Holland, ex-
ecutive director of Teamwork Englewood, an
organization that provides mentoring and com-
puter training. In the past, she notes, “when it
[came] to getting meat off the bone and [get-
ting] to the gristle, people [walked] away” – be-
cause they felt powerless.
But that has been changing as people iden-
tify inaction as a culprit. Ms. Holland says her
neighbors have become more politically active
in holding their public leaders accountable. For
example, Englewood residents marched down-
town on several occasions to protest the deci-
sion by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to close
50 public schools this fall, six of them elemen-
tary schools in their neighborhood.
The closings, the residents say, are forcing
schoolchildren to cross gang boundaries. While
this is a citywide problem, in Englewood it is
more pronounced: When researchers mapped
out where young people were killed over the
past five years in Chicago, the areas served by
two of Englewood’s schools had the highest
tallies.
“When you have the power to affect pub-
lic policy, that can affect your grandchildren,”
Teamwork Englewood’s Holland says.
Another way that some residents have be-
come more active is through online media. A
growing number of bloggers and online ac-
tivists are trying to get out the message that
their neighborhood is just like any other.
They’re calling attention to immediate needs
in the neighborhood and championing positive
developments.
They appear to be getting somewhere: When
Emanuel prepared to announce the new Whole
Foods, his team solicited input from Asiaha
Butler, a blogger who cofounded R.A.G.E. She
made a statement that was included in the of-
ficial announcement about the grocery store.
(Subsequently, however, Ms. Butler said
that “stronger community engagement strat-
egies should have been in place before the
deal was made.” She also objected to the kind
of funding practices used in this deal, saying
they lacked “transparency” and input from the
neighborhood.)
Ninth-grader Jasper Robinson, who was at
the event in Ogden Park, says the recent up-
swing in community activity gives “young black
men with at least a goal to make it” an oppor-
tunity to claim the streets for their own, rather
than fully resign them to a criminal element.
The dismantling of the Cabrini-Green hous-
ing project forced his family to move to En-
glewood. Before the move, he had heard the
neighborhood was “a bad place.”
But reality contradicts this: “I’m here, and I
rarely hear about the killing,” says Jasper, who
wants to attend college and open his own res-
taurant. “I may have heard about fights, but I
don’t hear about killings unless they’re on the
news.”
Violent crime appears to have gone down
in Greater Englewood over a 10-year period.
Through Sept. 7, there were 1,297 incidents in
the neighborhood this year. For that same time
frame in 2003, there were 2,040 incidents.
To be sure, residents saw the good in
Englewood long before the Whole Foods an-
nouncement. While others may think of the
neighborhood as dangerous and downtrodden,
the people who live there cite the large parks,
access to downtown, a state-of-the-art campus
for Kennedy-King College – plus hometown
heroes like Chicago Bulls star Derrick Rose,
singer-actress Jennifer Hudson, and Grammy
winner Chaka Khan, all of whom have main-
tained ties to their former neighborhood.
“We’re called a food desert but also a cul-
tural desert, which I think is ironic because peo-
ple here have such culture and such heart. It’s
amazing,” says Duffy, the entrepreneur. “There
should be a lot of cultural outlets here, but there
aren’t. The reason is there aren’t
enough people to take that risk.
It takes commitment.”
Perhaps the hopes for Engle-
wood can be summed up in the
dream held by Butler, the blog-
ger and R.A.G.E. cofounder.
She’d like Samaiya, her teenage
daughter, to live close to home
when she becomes an adult.
That might have seemed
unlikely a few years ago. But
already, Butler says she’s see-
ing “more spiritual changes” in
Englewood relating to “people
thinking differently about their
community.”
The community activist, who
has lived in the neighborhood
for 30 years, is working hard to
make sure Englewood is a dif-
ferent place when Samaiya is
old enough to raise her own chil-
dren and buy her own home.
“There’s always going to be
roadblocks, but there are ways
to navigate through them,” But-
ler says.
“Hopefully my daughter will
reinvest here. I have about 20
years to make that happen.” r
focus: Urban renewal
waiting: People gather at a bus stop in Englewood.The depressed area has become more active in holding public leaders accountable.
Positive changes, such as plans for a newWhole Foods in the area, signal it may be on the rise.
Vfrom previous page
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
‘[P]eople here have such culture
and such heart.’
– Lauren Duffy, an Englewood entrepreneur
20 The Christian Science Monitor Weekly | September 30, 2013

4. Change stirs in a tough place
Chicago’s Englewood lifted by a new generation of activists.