Oh no! Gang violence in Uptown!

I am so very sick of the whining class complaining about gangs in Uptown. Like it’s new. Frikkin’ morons. Gangs are not new to Uptown.

Young, affluent, white people are new in Uptown. People of color being out-numbered by comparatively rich people of Western-European heritage is pretty new in Uptown. White people with college educations whose sense of entitlement burns hot enough to power up their videocameras and blogs—they’re new in Uptown. I moved from Bucktown years ago to get away from the Children of Privilege. Now they’re making serious inroads in whitening up and riching up Uptown, and they’re not about to put up with the signs of social decay and violence that accompanies affordable housing in a capitalist society.

Nope. They want a good deal on a two-bedroom condo and ready access to cheap weed. But they don’t want the angry young black men on the corner who ensure real estate values stay low and the weed stays accessible.

Whom exactly did you think would be roaming the streets of your new neighborhood in the middle of the night? French investment bankers?

Did you not see the fairly pervasive tags spray-painted on the dumpsters behind your building when you were looking at apartments? Or did it never occur to you to look around those alleys? Or did you think that French investment bankers were tagging your garbage too?

(A moment of clairvoyance: Next year they just might discover that Uptown has rats too! And the local news shows will scramble to get footage of the rats shot by some concerned non-rat citizen.)

No, gangs are not new in Uptown and neither is Alderman Helen Schiller. She came in on the Harold Washington wave in 1987, during that brief period when Chicago was not a feifdom ruled by the Daley family. I am not particularly fond of Helen Schiller. As I am not fond of most of what passes for elected representatives in Chicago. But I have lived in this city long enough to know her legacy. She exhibits a lot less evidence of having been bought and paid for than most of those weasels in city government. She spent the 1990's as one of the few hold-outs among the city council representatives from the Northside against gentrification. This was not easy in the 1990's. She has represented the only remaining ward on the Red Line where the poor have not been entirely pushed out in favor of new, high-end residential development.

If you make under $80,000 per annum and live someplace that isn't a complete rat-hole in or near the 46th Ward, you pretty much have Helen to thank.

And the gang violence is not her fault. It’s yours. I mean, unless you’re doing something with your money and time besides shoveling it, respectively, into Starbucks and videotaping street-fights among people who don’t look very much like you at all. If you’re not doing something to invest in a more plausible future for boys who are not born into white privilege, then the gang violence is probably way more your fault than Helen’s.

Who do you not have to thank for the housing you can afford in Uptown? You could start with not thanking James Cappleman and Sandra Reed, two individuals who have been at the fore of recent media hoopla about all that nasty Reality keeps encroaching on the dream of making Uptown another Rich White Lakefront Neighborhood. (They also both happened to have run against Helen for her seat on the city council. But I'm sure this is not about politics. Right? Of course not.)

Helen brokered a deal for a new Aldi’s to open up in a neighborhood where affordable and nutritious food was becoming scarce. What’d you do last summer?

In point of fact, the crime rate is down in Uptown this summer. It’s the White rate that’s up. Enjoy your cheap weed.