LO

Absolutely. There’s this real-estate developer, Mark Fishman, who’s pretty notorious in Logan Square. He’s been pushing forward an agenda of gentrifying Logan Square and the surrounding neighborhoods. He’s a pretty ruthless guy. I’ve heard stories of people who have lived here for a long time being pushed out of their restaurant business by him, or being harassed by him. Carlos himself was pushed out of his ward office by Fishman.

The thing is, he basically wrote blank checks to previous aldermen. Rey Colón, the alderman that Carlos unseated in 2015, ran on an affordable housing platform and promised that no new condo buildings would be built beyond a certain point in the neighborhood — an area that’s since been gentrified. He won on that platform because working people know gentrification when they see it, and on some level know that it’s not a foregone conclusion. It’s something we can challenge politically. But as soon as Rey Colón took office, he had a meeting with big developers and real-estate interests and immediately flipped. After that, Fishman had him in his pocket.

So when Carlos took office in 2015, Fishman expected that Carlos would also be up for sale. And Carlos made it clear to him that he was there for the community and to fight for working-class Chicagoans. Since then, Fishman and other developers have had an investment in unseating Carlos.

Our campaign to reelect Carlos was a direct fight against developer interests. Fishman recruited our opponent, Amanda Yu Dieterich, to run, and he bankrolled her campaign, contributing more than $100,000, a third of her campaign donations. And he hid those donations through numerous LLCs (he has a separate one for each building he owns) and writing hundreds of checks under $1,000. In Chicago, donations over one thousand dollars must be immediately reported, and show up publicly in the campaign’s finances, whereas his smaller donations didn’t appear until the election was already over.

During the campaign, he also pushed Carlos out of his ward office and sued him for $100,000 in back rent. Dieterich’s campaign sent out dozens of mailers, funded by real-estate lobbying groups — so many that they were piled high in residents’ front hallways and on their front steps — calling Carlos a “deadbeat” and a bad worker who deserved to be fired. And in the two weeks leading up to the election, Fishman hung banners that said “Vote Amanda Yu Dieterich” on all of the apartment buildings he owned, in empty storefronts where he had evicted local businesses, and in Carlos’s old ward office.

From the very start of the election campaign, DSAers were knocking doors connecting the fight for rent control to the fight against corporate interests in our city. As we started to talk to people and hear their stories, the narrative became really clear: Carlos had been using his office to fight for working people’s interests, and for that reason, big developers, Rahm Emanuel allies, and the 1 percent were fighting back. To us, this election wasn’t just about securing Carlos’s seat, it was about winning a mandate for our movement. We saw the rent control referendum in the ward and the election as a way to increase the confidence and expectations of the working class. We saw our role as saying that rent control and other lofty reforms aren’t just desirable, they’re achievable when we fight together.