CR

The Mark Fishmans of the world — we don’t need them telling us what our communities should look like or how we should live our lives. We collectively, from the grassroots, from below, can determine our own destiny.

So any zoning change requiring my support must go through a community process where first, resident organizations that are made up of residents of the district review the zoning change and work with the developer to make recommendations. After that, it goes to a community assembly that is bilingual with free childcare and accessible to working people. We recently had a community assembly attended by over five hundred people. It was to discuss the development of a city-owned parking lot into one hundred units of 100 percent affordable housing, and the community overwhelmingly approved.

It’s an underutilized parking lot, and Rahm Emanuel’s administration wanted to sell it for $6 million to a private developer. But the community marched, canvassed, organized, and said we want the lot used for affordable housing, so I supported them. We worked with a nonprofit affordable housing developer to put together the financing necessary to make this possible. People said there’s no way you can have a meeting around bringing in affordable housing to an overwhelmingly affluent, white community and have it go well. But we showed an organized community is a powerful community.

Our community process doesn’t just impact developments like that. For instance, with a boutique hotel being built across the street. The community process led to the developers signing a community benefits agreement that required them to hire locally and every job will pay a minimum of fifteen dollars an hour, a majority paying seventeen dollars an hour. That was made possible through the community-driven zoning process. That concession the developer made to the community is a stark contrast to what happened just down Milwaukee Avenue in another ward, where an incumbent alderman, Joe Moreno, would take tens of thousands of dollars from big developers in exchange for giving them whatever zoning change they wanted. As a result we saw the election of a DSA member Daniel Espata to replace him.

Those are ways I use the powers I have as alderman to build socialism from the bottom and show we have the ability to govern ourselves.