Advice to mayoral candidates:
Find a way to make city livable

By MANUEL GALVAN

As a born, raised and resident Chicagoan, I always look forward to the city's mayoral elections. In addition to offering some of the most colorful entertainment in politics, they also provide a one-time view of a candidate's agenda for the city and vision for the future. After the election, candidates just go about their business. Right before the next one, their selective memory will celebrate their successes and forget the failures.

Issues, however, keep getting harder to find. They're out there. It's just that candidates' advisers increasingly use commercials to go after the other guy, and most media play out the campaign as personalities and sound bites. So this election, I'm not waiting for the agendas. I'm offering my own and calling it "An Agenda for Making Chicago Livable."

My wife and I recently dined with some friends in a suburban home and found that their only annoyance about where they live is getting their leaves collected. At the time, I remembered some other friends telling us about pesky raccoons getting into their garbage cans. There was no mention of crime or altering one's lifestyle to feel safe and secure.

As the positives of the city disappear, so will Chicagoans. They'II park their cars in a suburb where taxes and insurance rates are lower and they won't see graffiti on the garage door

By contrast, some city friends who live in Lincoln Park told us about their 11-year-old son getting relieved of his money by teenagers. The boy, like several of his classmates, had been robbed walking home from grade school. When the mom called police, she found they barely cared. Because the district also handles Cabrini-Green — one of Chicago's most violent housing projects — the police ranked the robberies way below murders and drug busts. Police also seemed to determine that because the kids went to a private school, they could afford to lose a few quarters. That reminded me of an incident several years ago when my oldest son was removed from his bike in Logan Square. The police took a report and then never looked for the bike or the robbers.

Police have their priorities. But so do city residents. If the mayor does not directly address the city's livability, Chicago's population will continue to decline as it has over the last several decades. Those who can afford the move are taxpayers, and with them they take another brick in the city's dwindling tax base.

Mayors have responded to revenue loss by raising taxes, but that also cuts into a city's livability, for which Chicago residents are already paying higher costs. Chicagoans pay more in taxes and the levies are especially painful with big-ticket items like a new car. Your insurance agent tries to soften the four-digit premium by saying it would be less if you lived in the suburbs. Gasoline costs more in the city. So does food and clothing — even from chains — because as merchants may tell you privately, they have to offset their costs due to theft.

In big cities like Chicago, it's not only crime, but the anticipation of it; not only the frustration, but the feeling that it won't get better

Chicago's population loss has not been limited to residents. Companies of all sizes have long been moving out to the suburbs and beyond. They go because taxes are lower, they can buy more land at cheaper prices, more of their managers and workers live there, or will follow them, and suburban labor pools are better educated.

My pastor, several Sundays ago, gave his sermon on society's problems and quoted a newspaper article as saying that 60 percent of Chicago's public school ACT scores were in the lowest 1 percent of the country. Like many other city parishioners, I've paid to send all my children to Catholic schools, while still flushing my public education tax dollars down a system that produces growing numbers

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of illiterate students and keeps people buried in a welfare class. As parishioners move to the suburbs, more parochial schools, and options, are shut down.

City services are OK. The garbage is collected. Firefighters and police still respond when called. But the city's atmosphere is changing. There are still acres of vacant lots and blocks of burned-out buildings. But more and more graffiti appears where once there was none, and beggars with signs now dot expressway exit ramps and major intersections.

The late Mayor Harold Washington demonstrated genius when he held town hall meetings in the neighborhoods

Residents have avoided Chicago's downtown at night for decades, but now you can't even walk down Michigan Avenue south of the Chicago River without being confronted by panhandlers. Voters in November's elections gave ousted politicians the same message — "You weren't paying attention to me." In big cities like Chicago, it's not only crime, but the anticipation of it. It's not only frustration, but the belief that it won't get better.

Any mayoral agenda must include interaction between City Hall and Chicago residents. The late Mayor Harold Washington demonstrated genius when he held town hall meetings in the neighborhoods and brought along department heads to listen to the frustrations of the city. People believed someone was paying attention to them. That will still work, if the recommendations are followed up with action.

Chicagoans can come up with the pros and cons of living in the city, some more important than others. Yet, they each stay here as long as it's comfortable calling Chicago "home." But as the positives disappear, so will they. They'll still say they live in Chicago when they travel, but they'll park their cars for the night in a suburb where taxes and insurance rates are lower and they won't see graffiti on the garage door when it shuts for the night.

Manuel Galvan is a Chicago-based writer and marketing consultant.

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