There’s a certain assumption that often comes with doing business on the city’s north side — whether that business is open-lot storage of old cars, junk disposal in empty lots or site preparation for a $1.75 billion federal government intelligence complex. The assumption is that you can pretty much do whatever you want on the property, regardless of what the zoning rules say because, well, who cares? Who’s going to say no?
That appears to have been the guiding principle over the past several months as developer Paul McKee worked out a deal for construction rubble to be dumped on his property across Cass Avenue from the site of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s planned new western headquarters.
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Sure, the property was barely 150 feet from the front door of a public school and surrounded on other sides by churches and residential properties. But who cares? Who’s going to say no?
The result has been a major embarrassment for the city, McKee and contractor Jeff Kolb, whose grading company has been working for months to prepare the NGA site for the city to hand over to the federal government. The demolition rubble was dumped two stories high across several acres. Its dust wafted into the Gateway school complex next door, sickening children and teachers and leading to hospitalizations, .
This is what happens when irresponsible property owners ignore local zoning and code regulations and wave off the concerns of nearby residents, while city officials look the other way.
Visit anywhere you want on the north side or wherever else high concentrations of poverty exist, and examples abound: Responsible homeowners who work hard to maintain their own properties find their neighborhoods dragged down by overgrown vacant lots, dilapidated houses and the kinds of criminal elements such conditions attract.
This is one of the big ways ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½â€™ blight problem deepens each year, discouraging new residents from considering a move into the city and pushing existing residents to give up and leave. Who wants to live anywhere near a crumbling house or an overgrown, impromptu dumpsite? Who wants to send their kids to a school next to such a site?
ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ is its own worst enemy on this score. By allowing property owners to evade rigorous code enforcement, blight spreads. An empty, crumbling house generates little if any tax revenue. When thousands of such properties go unaddressed — including those owned by the city’s Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority — blight metastasizes, sucking the life out of its host city while forcing remaining taxpayers to pick up an ever-bigger portion of the tab.
The interplay between Kolb, the NGA, McKee and the city offers a glimpse of why blight festers. McKee owns more than 1,200 properties on the north side, including scores of dangerous, crumbling houses. He used some of his properties as leverage to negotiate deals that figured heavily in NGA’s decision to stay in ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ rather than move to a cheaper and more construction-ready site near Scott Air Force Base in Illinois.
The city is contractually obligated to deliver a cleared, construction-ready site to the NGA. That meant demolishing existing buildings, trucking away rubble and grading the property to NGA specifications. Kolb received the clearance contract and wound up with a lot of rubble in the process. The company’s vice president, Jeff Kolb, described the rubble as “clean,†nontoxic and reusable as fill for other nearby projects. But he acknowledged the health problems that the dust created for the Gateway School, just across a chain-link fence from the dumpsite.
Kolb said a big, overgrown parcel across the street, where the old Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex previously existed, seemed like a convenient storage place for the rubble. He negotiated a tenancy contract with McKee, and soon the giant piles of dusty concrete began appearing.
People familiar with the tenancy contract say it was clear to all parties involved that proper permitting for use of the Pruitt-Igoe site was part of the deal. The permitting never happened.
Otis Williams, executive director of the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Development Corp., the city agency responsible for delivering the clean site to the NGA, said he had not been aware of the dumping. “We want to be responsible citizens as well as a responsible agency,†he said, adding that an investigation is in progress to find out how it happened.
²Ñ³¦°±ð±ð’s Pruitt-Igoe property is zoned as “local commercial,†which means it cannot be used for heavy industrial or landfill purposes. To follow the law, Kolb and/or McKee should have gone through a formal rezoning process or sought some kind of temporary waiver. That would have meant notifying the school, churches and residential neighbors, then conducting public hearings where any objections could be heard. But neighbors were cut out of the process.
Williams should have followed up to ask where all that demolition rubble was going. That he didn’t is an egregious government oversight failure.
As the property owner, ²Ñ³¦°±ð±ð’s 20th & Cass LLC also should have monitored the tenant’s use to ensure all laws were being followed. But that’s clearly not ²Ñ³¦°±ð±ð’s style. He has repeatedly ignored the city’s property-maintenance laws. McKee has chalked up so many code-enforcement fines that the city earlier this month formally filed to cancel its longstanding development partnership with him.
As of Thursday, the rubble piles remained untouched, even though the health problems at Gateway began surfacing months ago.
One of the most effective ways to stem blight is to reassure existing residents in affected neighborhoods that their rights will be protected and that the government is working on their behalf. Until someone takes ownership of the problem, instead of turning a blind eye to it, the city’s blight will only get worse.
