* Effective fund-raising tool for politicians

Zoning is for sale in the city of Chicago

This was In the Chicago Sun-Times, Letters to the Editor, December 8, 2005.

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Thank you for finally illuminating a problem that community activists, residents, and preservationists have known about for decades, that zoning is for sale in the city of Chicago ["Alderman has ties to 36th Ward building boom," Nov. 28].

Ostensibly enacted to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the general public, the City of Chicago has made a mockery of that ideal by turning the Zoning Ordinance into nothing more than a full employment plan for real estate developers and zoning attorneys, not to mention the most effective fund-raising tool for politicians.

While the abuses of the Hired Truck Scandal can be easily corrected by firing dozing workers and recouping the cost of a little wayward asphalt that has gone missing in the middle of the night, the messes made by bad development will linger throughout our neighborhoods for generations.

For far too long, our neighborhoods have been prostituted for the profit and gain of a few, to the detriment of many. Unfortunately, many of our city's aldermen and the Zoning Board of Appeals have been all too willing to help facilitate that process by acting as the . . . Well, perhaps we need not complete that metaphor.

They say that when the cat's away, the mice will play. Unfortunately, the cat is dead and the mice have taken complete control of the house.

The fact that the professional recommendations of the Department of Planning and Development and the Department of Zoning are often brushed aside is a matter of routine for those of us who have to bear witness to this corrupted process. Community residents are at the mercy of a system that is so completely slanted in favor of developers that it borders on criminal.

Zoning meetings are always during business hours and last for hours, making attendance by the general public difficult. The public notification process is a joke, and is seldom properly enforced anyway. Ironically, the onus is now on the community to figure out when these zoning hearings occur since the notification process was quietly amended last November, eliminating the requirement that developers notify property owners within 250 feet when a zoning hearing is scheduled to take place. Furthermore, the signs required to be posted on the property announcing a zoning change often disappear, or are never posted to begin with.

If a community resident somehow does manage to make it down to City Hall for a hearing, agenda items are regularly taken out of order, or taken off the agenda all together. A favored trick of the aldermen is to defer potentially contentious zoning issues without notifying community stakeholders beforehand, many of whom have arranged to take time off from work in order to testify. Of course, the zoning attorney and developer are always warned well in advance that their case has been deferred, so as to not waste their precious time. Those hearings are then quietly rescheduled.

Unfortunately, these techniques are a time-honored tradition in Chicago and ensure minimum public participation from the very people who will be affected most by these dubious overdevelopment proposals.

The Sun-Times has discovered the tip of the iceberg regarding the issue of exploitative zoning in Chicago. We encourage your paper to continue to delve deeper into this story, much like you did with the Hired Truck Scandal.

Jonathan Fine, president;
Michael Moran, vice president,
Preservation Chicago