Go to cspanstore. Org and check them out, see what is new for booktv and all the cspan products. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. Our next program, carlo rotella, the world is always coming to an end pulling together and apart in a chicago neighborhood in conversation with deborah harrington, ava st. Clair and Natalie Moore. I have a quick opening announcement, welcoming you to the printers relit fast presented by the near south planning board. I want to give special thanks to all our sponsors for the generous support this year especially when trust is our programming sponsor, Robert Mccormick foundation, alpha would foundation, the tribune, 3l real estate and cspan booktv. Cspan will be broadcast live on booktv. If there is time at the end of our discussion, there is a microphone in the center of the room. If we end of doing any day, if we get to that path there are four people up here with 45 minutes, we may have time for that q and a. If not we apologize in advance. Please welcome Natalie Moore from chicago. [applause] thank you for being here and thanks to the author and the panelists. I often refer to the neighborhood south shore outside chicago the most mixed Income Neighborhood in the city. Can you take a picture of the neighborhood, what it looks like, what it was like for you growing up there. I think it will take the whole 45 minutes. I start by saying any image you start with, present a contradictory one. It has the nicest, greenest, truest, most handsome bungalow blocks on the south side of chicago but has desolate commercial strips with a lot of vacant storefronts. It is a food desert without a supermarket but has an african themed food Network Growing in the neighborhood. Also more dropouts, similar to chicagos most important movers and shakers. And one third of the population on the poverty line, 60 under the any fact or image you present, it is not typical of american neighborhoods, the haves and have nots live next to each other or on adjoining blocks. It has a longstanding reputation as a really nice place to live and also has an outsized reputation where people get shot. There is a shooting including a couple Notorious Police shootings that led the protests. I think the last thing i will say is it has for a long time been a middleclass neighborhood, a first house neighborhood where the family buys the first house and moves up in the middle and where a family already in the middle aims higher. Michelle obama, larry ellison, prominent people who fit the profile. I grew up in the 1970s, moved in 1967 when it was becoming a black neighborhood. It has been since the 1970s, the world i grew up in was a middleclass world, deciding on the agenda, what are we going to do about it and pursue solutions . In the time since then the middle class has begun to age out and hollow out and become less active in the neighborhood, a neighborhood dominated by the middleclass. The haves arent that rich. A lot follow the middleclass but the have nots falling so far behind that they have become haves by default so it gets harder for neighbors to get together and say this is a problem and this is how we solve it. If you look at the 1970s the middleclass was dominant in the neighborhood. Neighbors did get together and solve big problems and forced the south shore stopped them from tearing down the country club and the beloved amenities, the most notorious they voted it dry and so south shore has a history of neighbors getting together to solve problems but the big wins tend to be in the past. That is the world i grew up in, a world of people richer than poor and poorer than rich. Most of them black and most with some confidence in moving up and some kind of confidence in the role of the state and the government in doing that, people who worked for one company and expecting a pension. Sounds like the 19th century but that middleclass is aging out. A lot of those people who bought bungalows, for 22,000 in 1967 are still in them but they retired and i they are not being replaced. Being middleclass, three jobs on the side piecing it together and you can feel the difference. I will not stop there but start there. That is the lay of the land and one of the biggest assets, the greenery, the Housing Stock but also lake michigan. You have beaches and lakefront property and because of all these assets, white people are coming to take over and the gentrification is around the corner. You talk about mythical white people that they see coming off the train but the data doesnt pan out that way. What is happening in the neighborhood. The white people are coming back has been a story since they left in the 60s. A couple things to say about that. First, statistically the last census does not back that up. There are a couple hundred more, lets see what the next hundred says. One way to look at it is to say the south shore of the haves is slowly integrating again. Young white couples are buying bungalows here and there but very slowly. The other thing that is moving below the surface. This is not about this alphabet big real estate combines are buying walk up Apartment Buildings. The software recent years has led the city in housing vouchers and even actions and big real estate combines are buying up apartments with housing vouchers and there is profit in it. The narrative you just described also contains the possible further chapter which if the neighborhood does change they would then get rid of those but if that happens we are talking pretty far out. It is not like new york, like theres intense pressure to be rushing into the neighborhood and throwing down their credit card. That is not happening so much but you do start to see, you are seeing signs of a slow trickle and i will say and i say in the book when i was a kid living in south shore i was usually misrecognized as a white person left over from what used to be a white neighborhood which i wasnt because we didnt move there when all the black family started moving in but now doing research for the book im usually misrecognized as somebody with private property, an architect or have kids. A speculator. If i stop and take note what will this do to Property Values. That is the semi automatic of walking away. That would be a good subtitle. Can you talk about why you choose to live in south shore in the Neighborhood Work that you do . That is really interesting. Moving a lot of different circles and at my board meetings downtown, people say where do you live . The south shore, always qualify it because i want people to know this is not by accident. I came to south shore, my parents lived in the south shore. My dad owned a restaurant and my dad owned an Apartment Building, my grandmother, everybody lived in this Apartment Building in new york and my mother had this dream of having a home. We moved to south shore in 1971, a loss and a half with a car port. Always happy out there. I really enjoyed it, fireplace in the living room, wonderful community. As an aside, in many ways, white people move out, there were some whites who never moved out. In 1978 when i decided it was time to move out i had been living in dc and i identified a coop in south shore and it was beautiful, on the lake, and applied as a shareholder and was denied in the building was all white and this was 1978 and i was mortified that the board of directors said that they werent going to let me move in and for no cause which at that time south shore was 98 black, but it was an all white lakefront coop. I appealed that decision to the shareholders and they approved my application so i moved in to an all White Building in south shore which was an anomaly and filed a lawsuit for discrimination and three years later, i lived there for 13 years and it was a real education on Race Relations but my parents originally moved there and i am still there and i absolutely love it. My story, i grew up in miami, orlando, tallahassee, my childhood was in orlando. It was not developed the way it is now. When we were moving there when i was about 5 the clan was marching in sanford and my mom was like okay. That was quite a thing. My saturday morning tv was reading rainbow, those are the clouds, all these things and even the cosby show. I am thinking where are these trains people are getting on in these buses . I am looking outside and got my jump rope. I dont know, how do i get there. My entire childhood even growing up into college that is what i didnt know i was looking for but i didnt have the vocabulary for it at the time so my last year at college i took a class in urban planning, finished my degree in urban planning. He bought all these plans. This was in maybe 2003 and he said this is what is going to happen to chicago. The final exam question giving us a bunch of stuff, what should you do as soon as you graduate . The correct answer was move to the city. My husband in chicago said what do you want to do . I dont know. He was like what kind of place is it . Chicago, new york, i dont know anybody in new york so i guess chicago, back it up, lets do it. So i had my diploma air mailed to my mother and had to go to walmart to get my graduate picture taken because i didnt go to graduation and trying to get out so by the time i got here we moved, we were sort of lucky but as things started to improve we had to get out so i started looking at hyde park, no, south shore, a couple of short sales, we found one, this is good. The weeks became i am walking home off the bus, people eating on the front porch and i am like this is the thing. That is what it has been. You are here, talk about the work that you do to better the neighborhood, your community activism. For me, i am a thought partner with a lot of people. The community is disconnected and for a number of different reasons. People live in pockets. People tend to be more isolated than together. So a lot of my work is around working with allies in the community. I work with activists. I work with nonprofit leaders, advocates. And entrepreneurs. We talk about community building. My background part is in the field of philanthropy so i helped write grants and think about resource development, Strategic Planning and all those things. I really feel like there is so much rich capital in south shore and potential. Always on this precipice and i think part of the challenge is there is no, there is no coalition of people and that being in many ways by some activity, south shore work, working on a Community Development plan, trying, to have a shared vision, working with people building resident power, having a vision for the community, bringing in Economic Development to make it a more vibrant place. The last few years, extremely active, looking to a neighborhood, sort of stepped back to develop a broader view. And looks like obvious problems that became so enormously intractable and complex. The best thing for me to do is get the best education. That is what i have been working on. And in cdc you have some interest in studying the neighborhood. And it seems, with developers and residential people, there is a group of people where the people within the neighborhood slightly overvalued the neighborhood and the people outside the neighborhood didnt value the neighborhood at all and this sort of middle part, the fulcrum where they are looking, everybody is looking for a different outcome with the same input, three people on a seesaw and nobody is going there. I am going to go and be right back. Give me a second. Not that each of them dont have a point. Nobody wants to improve their neighborhood and get kicked out but why would you want to do that and every list a developer saying will my investment be returned . There are concerns and so it is a very complex primarily what i was doing and still do, a lot of marketing around the neighborhood, you guys just need a tagline. I came in with my millennial ways and started paying stuff. It really isnt working but that was primarily, digital activism. Both of you, the subtitle is putting together and apart in a chicago neighborhood. There are just as many people as ever, people of goodwill pulling together to get things done. What is pulling apart, bigger forces, transformation of class structure in the united states, economic transformation, main street on the relationship to Big Box Stores and digital shopping, huge transformations coming at a scale greater than the neighborhood so even the same amount of goodwill and entrepreneurialism in the neighborhood is up against these larger forces. The last thing i will say about that, you all know this, you stand on the street in south shore it look like nothing is happening. It is quiet except for a couple hot corners, doesnt look like much is happening but part of the deck of that and people who are happening and, it is a quiet place to see these forces at work. I interviewed a number of people in your book. I cover south shore, some of the go to organizations with efficacy that is there. One thing i havent thought about, that you eloquently point out in the book, the data is you have this vision, this cohesion but on the other hand it is not cohesive if you compare it to can you compare it to south shore, other neighborhoods and why they have a shared vision and why south shore doesnt it appears they do. It is a sector analysis, some is structural, sometimes it is a little trickier. The physical container in south shore is set up so that there will be people of different social classes. These walk up Apartment Buildings, these beautiful highrises with spectacular lake views. It is physically set up to have people with different interests. The obama president ial center in jackson park, if you want property, your Property Values are going up and if you pay rent your rent is going up. I think the cutting together to some extent if you look back it is in part the physical container, the neighborhood is set up for a class difference. As the middle shrinks you get more poor people and more people on the other side of that divide and that is a great part of it. Another part, people in the book including ava st. Clair speak only of a generational split between leaders, there are leaders who remember the big victories of the 70s and a civil rights view of how things get done and there are millennials and others saying if there is a new set of problems, the base of activism and the objectives of activism are different. Completely understandable vision but with more cohesion coming from other places and those would be internal divisions with one block and instead you get separate blocks it historically there is one block black united fund and different groups. The last thing i will say is there is a charge that compares, he did a chart for south shore and another community and he made a. For every leader in the neighborhood and a line between every two dots. It is the plumbing system of the death star. Everything leads to everything. There is a triangle, a couple over here, a couple over here and a whole lot of dots on the left side with no lines, people connect downtown working vigorously with other people in the city for good. That is a real powerful testament with all these divisions and all these splits many of which are structural. Not that there is less activity. It is our class structure, takes their energy and has Different Energy in the opposite direction. We here in some urban planning circles including chicago with the teardown of Public Housing, rebuilding makes income communities mixed income is the way to go. In south shore, already the Natural Environment makes income, and you see what different people want. 71st st. The big retail core door, hair shops a lot of workshops. Liquor stores, taking gears for the Grocery Store to come and more middleclass people wanting places to sit down, not wanting to leave their community for hyde park to do shopping and those forces with mainstreet, bigbox, who is investing in urban centers and i walked away from this book wondering can mixed income be successful . Im not in the prediction business. If you look at the history both of you have other views. If you look at the history of the neighborhood there was an interesting effort to revise the Phoenix Partnership in the 80s, 70s and 80s of that was an attempt to create a shopping strip with small black owned businesses and that was financed by the south shore bank, and 71st st. 32 stores and a bunch of others and it didnt work and it didnt work and the reason was not that they didnt try hard enough. It didnt work because especially the middleclass homeowners in the neighborhood basically said we want high Quality National brands and we will do what we can to get them. It wasnt because they were black but because they were middleclass and they said we are willing to drive to a Big Box Store and they made the decisions with the schools, taken to a charter or catholic or Something Like also school. What you are pushing, what 71st is pushing against is not just capital flight but the dominance of the car, Online Shopping and bigbox stores. The next thing is heres the perfect formula to deal with it but i dont know what that is exactly. I do think a supermarket would really help and a supermarket is a perfect example of consumers change and there are too many poor people for a high end supermarket. It has not been replaced. 50,000 people in south shore, everybody in the car and somebody else goes tomorrow. High end store too many poor people. And for our store here, there is a store that is moving in. That is sort of in the middle. That is not a south shore problem but an america problem is we are reaching the foodways and have or have not model, increasingly the model. Truly a mixed Income Neighborhood which is becoming an anomalous thing. You wrote a powerful letter to the editor talking about why i cant sell. The Grocery Store has not been announced yet but why cant we get a Grocery Store here and look at all these from the north side, tax subsidies that are 1 billion. Does government need to play a bigger rol