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Chicago, Illinois
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Harold Washington was Chicago's first African American mayor (1983-87) and as a reform mayor who presided over the death of "the machine as we knew it" in the face of massive city council resistance -- a period called "council wars" that occupied the first two years of his mayoralty.
Washington's innovative, neighborhood-oriented economic policy, is less well known. A set of local activists tied to University of Illinois-Chicago professor and city planner Robert Mier had created the Rehab Network and the Community Workshop on Economic Development (CWED), and their ideas infused Washington's campaign and administration.
Washington and Mier -- who became Commissioner of Economic Development -- combined a neighborhood focus with an overtly redistributive approach to economic policy, promoting industrial retention in response to the epidemic of plant closures and job losses that had affected Chicago and the Midwest in the period before and after the 1983 election. Administrators adopted principles like "jobs not real estate" as economic development policy, and that city neighborhood development programs should be delegated to neighborhood organizations, rather than administered from city hall.
Washington died at his desk in City Hall in November 1987. His successor as acting Mayor, City Council member Eugene Sawyer, continued Mier and other administrators from the Washington administration until a special election in April 1989. Richard M. Daley, who won that election, had campaigned against the neighborhood oriented development policies but he now faced an already organized constituency of neighborhood groups and small factory operators and eventually supported at least some of Washington's initiatives through a mayoralty that lasted 22 more years.
Recent Submissions
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Steel and Southeast Chicago: Reasons and Opportunities for Industrial Renewal, A Research Report to the Mayor's Task Force on Steel and Southeast Chicago
(Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research, Northwestern University, 1985-11)Reports the research effort by Chicago’s Task Force on Steel and Southeast Chicago (1984-86) done under the direction of Prof. Ann Markusen. The report describes the evolving structure of the U.S. and Chicago steel industry ... -
Building the Bridge to the High Road: Expanding Participation and Democracy in the Economy to Build Sustainable Communities
(Center for Labor and Community Research, 2000)Describes the evolution of the Center for Labor and Community Research from Swinney’s 1970s practice as a shop floor labor organizer and toward a realization that changes in overall business structure had destroyed the ... -
Building on the Basics: The Final Report of the Mayor’s Task Force on Steel and Southeast Chicago
(City of Chicago, Department of Economic Development, 1986)Chicago Mayor Harold Washington introduced this 44 page report as an “inventory of recommendations” coming from the city’s Task Force on Steel and Southeast Chicago (1984-1986). The scope was expansive. There was equal ... -
Harold Washington and the Neighborhoods
(1992)When Wim Wiewel and Pierre Clavel co-edited Harold Washington and the Neighborhoods (Rutgers University Press, 1991), they also began videotaping interviews with potential chapter authors, initially (in 1989) with the video ... -
Making Policy With Communities: Research and Development in the Department of Economic Development
(Rutgers University Press, 1991)Robert Giloth, who had been a community organizer in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood, returned from PhD studies at Cornell in 1985 to assume the directorship of the Research and Development (R&D) Division within Robert Mier's ... -
Planned Manufacturing Districts: How a Community Initiative Became City Policy
(Rutgers University Press, 1991)Donna Ducharme was the founder and executive director of the Local Economic and Employment Development Council of Chicago's New City YMCA at the time of writing. She later became the Deputy Commissioner of Planning for ... -
Decentralized Development: From Theory to Practice
(Rutgers University Press, 1991)Robert Mier had been Commissioner of Economic Development, Kari Moe in the Mayors Office in the Harold Washington administration. Here they draw on that experience for a well referenced and detailed account of the Department ... -
Chicago Politics and Community Development: A Social Movement Perspective
(Rutgers University Press, 1991)Doug Gills, with John Betancur, did a series of books and other pieces on community organizing in the aftermath of the Washington mayoralty in the Richard M. Daley administration in the 1990s. He had earlier done a ... -
The Washington Papers
(Committee to Elect Harold Washington Mayor of Chicago, 1983)This is a campaign document, presented as a guide to the "transition" following Washington's victory in the general election in May 1983. Reflecting the work of numerous committees, the document lays out general goals in ... -
"Chicago Works Together": 1984 Chicago Development Plan
(City of Chicago, 1984-05)Commissioned by Mayor Harold Washington and directed by Economic Development Commissioner Robert Mier, who convened key department heads in a series of retreats in the winter and spring of 1984. Mier provided them with ...
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