Lightfoot holds summit in War on Poverty
Chicago mayor says, ‘If we don’t do something now, I fear we’re going to lose another generation of kids’
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot talks with City Bureau founder Darryl Holliday during the Solutions Toward Ending Poverty Summit. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
By Ted Cox
CHICAGO — Mayor Lori Lightfoot played host to a poverty summit Thursday as she stepped up efforts to lift residents economically across the city.
“If we don’t do something now, I fear we’re going to lose another generation of kids,” the mayor said at the end of the day’s events in the Chicago Poverty Summit at the University of Illinois at Chicago Forum.
Also called the STEP Summit, for Solutions Toward Ending Poverty, the daylong series of talks, speeches, and brainstorming sessions drew hundreds of Chicago business, community, nonprofit, and philanthropic leaders, along with an array of city officials including senior department heads.
“What I hope we do is use city government as a tool to facilitate important discussions and important work and help people realize that there are real opportunities for collaboration that they might not naturally see,” Lightfoot said in a wide-ranging discussion with Chicago journalist Darry Holliday, a founder of City Bureau.
Samir Mayekar, Lightfoot’s deputy mayor for economic and neighborhood development, said the day’s discussions produced several “big ideas” to attack poverty, including year-round youth programs, protections against gentrification including rent assistance, expansion of participatory budgeting (a tool used by some aldermen with their discretionary funds), and linked developments, so that success can be shared.
But Lightfoot also pressed for small, readily achieved initiatives such as providing help for small businesses, creating community spaces, and reforming fines and fees so that people don’t lose a car or a driver’s license or even water service over the inability to make a payment. Calling those steps “low-hanging fruit,” she said they have an immediate impact on people’s lives.
Lightfoot said the issue was personal for her because as a child her family had utilities turned off and suffered other humiliations of poverty — “all the stressors that people experience where they don’t have enough money to live a decent life.”
“I know what it feels like to struggle,” she said. “So we have to do better for those kids.”
Lightfoot said one of the highlights of being mayor is seeing kids experience “unbridled joy” in meeting her, a state of mind she said should be common to all children, but “if your experience as a child is stress and worry and the absence of … the light goes out way too soon.”
Citing her 30 years as a Chicago resident, she said she’d seen many programs tried in an attempt to address poverty, “but it’s never been to scale, it’s never been as intentional as it needs to be.”
That was one of the prime goals of the poverty summit, she said, to “really focus and use government as both a convener and as a leader in this work.” Lightfoot added that too often community groups and nonprofits were set in competition for scant resources instead of working together. “This has got to be about a commitment to people and work and making a difference.”
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What I hope we do is use city government as a tool to facilitate important discussions and important work and help people realize that there are real opportunities for collaboration.”
Mayor Lori Lightfoot (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
Lightfoot touted her Invest South/West initiative targeting 10 neighborhoods or “corridors” on the city South and West sides for development. “The 10 is a start, not an ending,” she insisted. “We’re starting, not ending there.”
Sybil Madison, deputy mayor for education and human services, acknowledged that Universal Basic Income “has come up a number of times today,” and that people had said, “We need to expand UBI in Chicago,” and “everybody said let’s just do it.”
But, although she expressed support for UBI as a candidate, at the summit Lightfoot was more leery of the proposal to simply grant people money who need it. “I think it’s an interesting concept,” she said. “The concern I have is I want people to be able to stand on their own forever.
“It’s not sustainable,” Lightfoot added, “and that’s one of the concerns for me.
“No doubt about it, it’s a game-changer, but then what? I’m about teaching people to fish so they can feed themselves for a lifetime.”
Lightfoot insisted it’s a not a choice of either balancing the city budget or granting residents the services they need, but rather that they complement each other. “I have a legal mandate to balance the budget,” she said, “but think of how much easier it would be to balance the budget if everybody is dealt into the economy, if everybody has an opportunity to have a good-paying job and we expand the tax base so we’re not constantly looking at what are new sources of revenue can we hit people with because we don’t have enough to meet our basic needs.
“So for me this is about fiscal responsibility,” she added. “It’s about putting our investments in people at the earliest part in their lifecycle — kids and families.”
Lightfoot has pressed the General Assembly to clear the way for a Chicago casino, and she granted expanded gambling could threaten some of those families, but she quickly added, “It’s not just casinos. It’s alcohol. It’s marijuana. It’s pharmaceutical drugs.” She said the key was responsibility and “addiction care” for those who fall victim to excesses.
“These are tough social questions that we must wrestle with and can’t ignore,” she said. “It’s all about balance and doing it right. In public policy, there are always tensions and there are always trade-offs.”
Lightfoot committed her administration to “ending poverty as we know it in a generation in our city. It’s going to take a lot of hard work, a lot of focus. There will be a lot of skepticism and a lot of tough days when we feel like we’re not making progress, but I think we have already accomplished a tremendous amount by being here together today to say the ‘P’ word out loud over and over again.” She said the ultimate goal is “that we look into the eyes of children who are filled with unbridled joy because they know that their city loves and embraces and respects them, and that we celebrate the dignity of all lives, as we must.”