“ Instead, in the Land of Lincoln, older cities like Chicago and counties like Cook have already shown how to focus on the few. Their economic strategies have benefited those who own the businesses that cater to the tourist trade, not the workers who make the beds and chop the onions. They have created enclaves around universities and hospitals where parents can buy condos for their student-children and where private security forces patrol the streets. They have sequestered revenues generated by business and medical clusters within those districts, thus starving the larger public housing, health, transit, and educational systems in the sprawling ghettos just outside the gates. They have encouraged construction of homes and apartment towers that few local residents can afford, which are bought as investment by European and South American elites. And they have kept control of the courts, jails, and police forces —patronage for the operatives who guarantee machine incumbency, the industry of incarceration weakly buffering the loss of the steel and auto and other manufacturing industries of the past.
March 30, 2008
