published in the New York Times on Friday, July 30.
Until last week, Christian Jurinka had never heard complaints about the stenciled advertisements his agency sprays on the sidewalks of major cities. But when neon pink-and-yellow ads for a Brazilian brand of flip-flops landed on the North Side of Chicago, they immediately drew the ire of a Lincoln Park stroller.
The pedestrian, Bruce Beavis, 51, complained to the police, his alderman, Vi Daley of the 43rd Ward, the news media and Mr. Jurinka’s business partner, who promised to send a cleaning crew to remove the advertisements the next day.
“We tell all our clients that this is an activity that some communities have no problem with, and other communities frown upon,” said Mr. Jurinka, the co-founder of Attack, a provider of guerrilla marketing services, who said they would not to stencil ads on Chicago streets again. “The law is somewhat cloudy.”
But Matt Smith, a spokesman for the Department of Streets and Sanitation, said Chicago’s policy on sidewalk stenciling was not ambiguous.
“We have zero tolerance for people who would use the public way for their promotions,” Mr. Smith said, “and will go after them any way we can.”
Companies may think they are going to gain an advantage, he said, “but instead they could be drawing a lot of negative publicity and fines.”
That is what happened to IBM in 2001, when it hired an agency that spray-painted ads across walkways in Boston, Chicago, New York and San Francisco without obtaining permits. The company was fined tens of thousands of dollars.
Russ Kellogg, director of sales for ICE Factor, another marketing agency that uses unconventional strategies, said the extensive permit process in Chicago was a disincentive to marketers.
“You either ask for permission or ask for forgiveness,” Mr. Kellogg said.
RACHEL CROMIDAS
A version of this article appeared in print on July 30, 2010, on page A17A of the National edition.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Got Available Ground? Want Free Vegetables?
By RACHEL CROMIDAS for the Chicago News Cooperative
pub. July 16, 2010 in the New York Times
In return for vegetables rather than money, some Kenwood residents are letting their properties be used by community gardeners — many of them strangers — who are strapped for space.
This so-called urban sharecropping has also been growing in popularity in Austin, Tex., and Portland, Ore., thanks to networking Web sites.
Kenwood, known for its arts-and-crafts mansions and President Barack Obama’s house, is considered a natural place for the partnerships because thousands of square feet of lawns dot the blocks between 47th and 50th Streets.
“It’s an unusual relationship,” said Deborah Hammond, a gardener who tends to 300 square feet behind a three-story mansion. “I’m not a service provider, I’m not a friend of the family, but I have a key to the back gate.”
Her use of the land has involved negotiating with the homeowner over who would pay for topsoil (they do), and plants (she does), and what to grow.
pub. July 16, 2010 in the New York Times
In return for vegetables rather than money, some Kenwood residents are letting their properties be used by community gardeners — many of them strangers — who are strapped for space.
This so-called urban sharecropping has also been growing in popularity in Austin, Tex., and Portland, Ore., thanks to networking Web sites.
Kenwood, known for its arts-and-crafts mansions and President Barack Obama’s house, is considered a natural place for the partnerships because thousands of square feet of lawns dot the blocks between 47th and 50th Streets.
“It’s an unusual relationship,” said Deborah Hammond, a gardener who tends to 300 square feet behind a three-story mansion. “I’m not a service provider, I’m not a friend of the family, but I have a key to the back gate.”
Her use of the land has involved negotiating with the homeowner over who would pay for topsoil (they do), and plants (she does), and what to grow.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Jon Burge Found Guilty On All Counts (VIDEO)
For Dateline: Chicago
By KATIE FRETLAND and RACHEL CROMIDAS
June 28, 2010
Jon Burge, the former Chicago Police commander at the center of the city’s decades long police torture scandal, was convicted today on federal charges of obstruction of justice and perjury. He faces up to 45 years in prison
Burge, 62, was expressionless as the verdict was read. He was found guilty of lying under oath in a 2003 civil court case about the torture of African American police suspects in the 1970’s and ’80’s. The jury — seven men and five women, including one African American– began deliberations at 3 p.m. Thursday. Their verdict marks the first criminal conviction of a cop in the police torture scandal. A report of a suspect being tortured by Chicago police first surfaced in 1973.
Juror Gary Dollinger, 31, said the testimonies of a former detective who was granted immunity and a convicted killer who died while in prison were crucial to his vote for conviction.
“I think it was first there was an overwhelming amount of evidence pointing to the fact that he was lying on his statements and there was some torture going on at Area 2 to coerce statements, between Andrew Wilson and Mike McDermott’s testimonies … those were the two biggest things that really pushed me over the top,” Dollinger, the CEO of an IT consultancy, said.
McDermott, Dollinger said, “he gets on the stand he looks a little scared when he’s up there, he’s got a lot on the line, they’re threatening to cut his pension, cut his health benefits lose his job.”
McDermott is a former police detective who testified he saw Burge point his gun in the direction of the area where a suspect was and that he saw Burge hold something to the suspect’s face. McDermott was an unhappy witness, who said he feared being charged with perjury and obstruction of justice if he did not recall details of the 1985 incident as the prosecution wanted him to.
McDermott’s testimony was inconsistent with his grand jury testimony.
“He changed his statement, but he never said no, there was no brutality,” Dollinger said. “[Burge] still pointed a gun and something plastic over his face.”
“All people who care about justice had a major victory today,” said Flint Taylor, an attorney for many of Burge’s accusers.
Burge attorney Bill Gamboney said he was “very disappointed and somewhat surprised” by the verdict.
“We’re starting to muster our resources together for a motion for a new trial and ultimately an appeal if it comes to that,” Gamboney said.
Burge supporter Jim Knightly, a retired Chicago police captain, vented his disappointment with the verdict.
“That they would take the word of convicted felons over a highly-decorated police officer,” Knightly said. “I’m sure Flint Taylor, the liberal attorney who has been hounding him for years, is happy. I hope he can sleep at night.”
“I’m glad it’s over,” said Ald. Ed Smith (28th), who sat through much of the trial. “This has been a great concern for a lot of people. It’s a case that has caused a black eye on the city.”
Smith said that the verdict should open the door for the release of Burge accusers who are currently imprisoned.
More than 100 people have accused Burge and officers under his command of torturing them during the 1970’s and 1980’s. The men said they were electroshocked, suffocated with plastic bags, subjected to mock executions, beaten and burned. The allegations contributed to the decision to place a moratorium on executions in Illinois, and Chicago agreed to a nearly $20 million settlement to four men who were pardoned.
Prosecutors never filed charges of assault or attempted murder and the statute of limitations has since run out.
Mark Clements, 45, cried in front of reporters in courthouse lobby Monday. He said detectives under Burge pulled on his genitals until he confessed to four murders and an arson. He served 28 years.
“I was 16 years old and these people stole my [expletive] life,” he sobbed. “I hate to tell you the truth. I sat in a prison cell, and I prayed for this day. Today is a victory for every poor person. I was 16 years old. This is America. Sixteen years old. What are we gonna do about other people who are sitting in those prisons.”
More than 20 people who claim they were tortured remain incarcerated in Illinois.
U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said the jury’s decision was a measure of justice, and that it was sad that it took until 2010 to reach a criminal court of law.
“What’s clear is that the jury necessarily found that torture occurred in Chicago police stations at Area 2 in the 1980’s and it’s a disgrace that in this city in the 1980’s people could be subjected to abuse and torture ranging from guns to the face, guns in mouths. Suffocating, electric shocks, radiator burns and that sort of thing.”
“We need to have it on the record that this happened,” Fitzgerald said. “We need to treat it as a fact that it was proved and recognize that it was an awful thing before we can move forward.”
During the past month’s trial, federal prosecutors called four men to the witness stand to testify they were abused in an effort to prove the perjury and obstruction charges. The jury also heard testimony from Andrew Wilson, who died serving a life sentence for the killings of two police officers.
The defense argued that the police torture claims were fabricated by career criminals for the purpose of getting out of jail, and Burge broke years of silence to testify in his own defense, denying each allegation brought against him during the trial. His lawyers played up his dedication to police work — that he often went out on the street with his officers, looked in on interrogations and spent days working without going home on the case of the killings of two police officers. Burge, ill with cancer, broke down crying on the witness stand talking about that investigation.
Burge joined the police department in 1970 and two years later was assigned as an investigator at Area 2, where many of the alleged victims said they were brutalized by police.
A doctor who saw one man’s injuries in 1982 wrote a letter to then-police superintendent Richard Brzeczek asking for an investigation into a case of possible police brutality. Brzeczek forwarded the letter to Mayor Richard M. Daley, then Cook County State’s Attorney, but charges were never brought against any officers.
Daley’s name was not mentioned during the trial.
The Chicago Police Board fired Burge in 1993, three years after a report by the police department’s Office of Professional Standards sustained Wilson’s accusation that Burge abused him and found evidence of systemic abuse at Area Two.
Taylor said men who worked under Burge could still be prosecuted on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. As of May, a grand jury was hearing matters involving detectives who worked under Burge at Area Two in the 1970’s and 1980’s, according to documents filed in the Burge case.
Fitzgerald declined to comment on that investigation.
Judge Joan Lefkow found that eight people could take the Fifth Amendment and not testify in the Burge case. They are former assistant state’s attorney Larry Hyman and retired police officers Michael Hoke, Thomas McKenna, Ronald Boffo, James Pienta, John Paladino, Dave Dioguardi and Leonard Bajenski.
Clements said he will never get back the time he missed with his daughter.
“My daughter is 29 years old,” he said. “I missed all those years with my daughter sitting in a prison cell for a crime I did not commit. I do not feel sorry for Jon Burge. I do not feel sorry for him.”
By KATIE FRETLAND and RACHEL CROMIDAS
June 28, 2010
Jon Burge, the former Chicago Police commander at the center of the city’s decades long police torture scandal, was convicted today on federal charges of obstruction of justice and perjury. He faces up to 45 years in prison
Burge, 62, was expressionless as the verdict was read. He was found guilty of lying under oath in a 2003 civil court case about the torture of African American police suspects in the 1970’s and ’80’s. The jury — seven men and five women, including one African American– began deliberations at 3 p.m. Thursday. Their verdict marks the first criminal conviction of a cop in the police torture scandal. A report of a suspect being tortured by Chicago police first surfaced in 1973.
Juror Gary Dollinger, 31, said the testimonies of a former detective who was granted immunity and a convicted killer who died while in prison were crucial to his vote for conviction.
“I think it was first there was an overwhelming amount of evidence pointing to the fact that he was lying on his statements and there was some torture going on at Area 2 to coerce statements, between Andrew Wilson and Mike McDermott’s testimonies … those were the two biggest things that really pushed me over the top,” Dollinger, the CEO of an IT consultancy, said.
McDermott, Dollinger said, “he gets on the stand he looks a little scared when he’s up there, he’s got a lot on the line, they’re threatening to cut his pension, cut his health benefits lose his job.”
McDermott is a former police detective who testified he saw Burge point his gun in the direction of the area where a suspect was and that he saw Burge hold something to the suspect’s face. McDermott was an unhappy witness, who said he feared being charged with perjury and obstruction of justice if he did not recall details of the 1985 incident as the prosecution wanted him to.
McDermott’s testimony was inconsistent with his grand jury testimony.
“He changed his statement, but he never said no, there was no brutality,” Dollinger said. “[Burge] still pointed a gun and something plastic over his face.”
“All people who care about justice had a major victory today,” said Flint Taylor, an attorney for many of Burge’s accusers.
Burge attorney Bill Gamboney said he was “very disappointed and somewhat surprised” by the verdict.
“We’re starting to muster our resources together for a motion for a new trial and ultimately an appeal if it comes to that,” Gamboney said.
Burge supporter Jim Knightly, a retired Chicago police captain, vented his disappointment with the verdict.
“That they would take the word of convicted felons over a highly-decorated police officer,” Knightly said. “I’m sure Flint Taylor, the liberal attorney who has been hounding him for years, is happy. I hope he can sleep at night.”
“I’m glad it’s over,” said Ald. Ed Smith (28th), who sat through much of the trial. “This has been a great concern for a lot of people. It’s a case that has caused a black eye on the city.”
Smith said that the verdict should open the door for the release of Burge accusers who are currently imprisoned.
More than 100 people have accused Burge and officers under his command of torturing them during the 1970’s and 1980’s. The men said they were electroshocked, suffocated with plastic bags, subjected to mock executions, beaten and burned. The allegations contributed to the decision to place a moratorium on executions in Illinois, and Chicago agreed to a nearly $20 million settlement to four men who were pardoned.
Prosecutors never filed charges of assault or attempted murder and the statute of limitations has since run out.
Mark Clements, 45, cried in front of reporters in courthouse lobby Monday. He said detectives under Burge pulled on his genitals until he confessed to four murders and an arson. He served 28 years.
“I was 16 years old and these people stole my [expletive] life,” he sobbed. “I hate to tell you the truth. I sat in a prison cell, and I prayed for this day. Today is a victory for every poor person. I was 16 years old. This is America. Sixteen years old. What are we gonna do about other people who are sitting in those prisons.”
More than 20 people who claim they were tortured remain incarcerated in Illinois.
U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said the jury’s decision was a measure of justice, and that it was sad that it took until 2010 to reach a criminal court of law.
“What’s clear is that the jury necessarily found that torture occurred in Chicago police stations at Area 2 in the 1980’s and it’s a disgrace that in this city in the 1980’s people could be subjected to abuse and torture ranging from guns to the face, guns in mouths. Suffocating, electric shocks, radiator burns and that sort of thing.”
“We need to have it on the record that this happened,” Fitzgerald said. “We need to treat it as a fact that it was proved and recognize that it was an awful thing before we can move forward.”
During the past month’s trial, federal prosecutors called four men to the witness stand to testify they were abused in an effort to prove the perjury and obstruction charges. The jury also heard testimony from Andrew Wilson, who died serving a life sentence for the killings of two police officers.
The defense argued that the police torture claims were fabricated by career criminals for the purpose of getting out of jail, and Burge broke years of silence to testify in his own defense, denying each allegation brought against him during the trial. His lawyers played up his dedication to police work — that he often went out on the street with his officers, looked in on interrogations and spent days working without going home on the case of the killings of two police officers. Burge, ill with cancer, broke down crying on the witness stand talking about that investigation.
Burge joined the police department in 1970 and two years later was assigned as an investigator at Area 2, where many of the alleged victims said they were brutalized by police.
A doctor who saw one man’s injuries in 1982 wrote a letter to then-police superintendent Richard Brzeczek asking for an investigation into a case of possible police brutality. Brzeczek forwarded the letter to Mayor Richard M. Daley, then Cook County State’s Attorney, but charges were never brought against any officers.
Daley’s name was not mentioned during the trial.
The Chicago Police Board fired Burge in 1993, three years after a report by the police department’s Office of Professional Standards sustained Wilson’s accusation that Burge abused him and found evidence of systemic abuse at Area Two.
Taylor said men who worked under Burge could still be prosecuted on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. As of May, a grand jury was hearing matters involving detectives who worked under Burge at Area Two in the 1970’s and 1980’s, according to documents filed in the Burge case.
Fitzgerald declined to comment on that investigation.
Judge Joan Lefkow found that eight people could take the Fifth Amendment and not testify in the Burge case. They are former assistant state’s attorney Larry Hyman and retired police officers Michael Hoke, Thomas McKenna, Ronald Boffo, James Pienta, John Paladino, Dave Dioguardi and Leonard Bajenski.
Clements said he will never get back the time he missed with his daughter.
“My daughter is 29 years old,” he said. “I missed all those years with my daughter sitting in a prison cell for a crime I did not commit. I do not feel sorry for Jon Burge. I do not feel sorry for him.”
Fitzgerald: Burge Verdict is a 'Measure of Justice' from Chicago News Cooperative on Vimeo.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Friday, June 18, 2010
Food Vans to Aid Hungry Children
Also from Dateline: Chicago:
By RACHEL CROMIDAS
June 18, 2010
With food stamp enrollment at a record high in Illinois, the Greater Chicago Food Depository is expanding its programs to reach the children of low-income families that struggle the most with hunger in the summer months.
Starting Monday, the first day of summer break for Chicago Public Schools, the depository will send two vans with sandwiches and crackers to community gatherings and Chicago Park District day-camps at lunchtime in Chicago Heights and Little Village/Lawndale–two communities with the highest number of under-served children, according to a recently released report by the depository.
“There are these great enrichment activities in [the Park District],” said Kate Maehr, the executive director of the food depository, “and it is a tragedy that there are kids coming to learn how to dance and play sports and be better readers with empty stomachs.”
As of July 2009, more than 500,000 children in Cook County received subsidized breakfasts and lunches during the school year through federal government-sponsored programs, but the summer meal program for these children run by the United States Department of Agriculture reaches fewer than 30% of children in need, according to Diane Doherty, director of the Illinois Hunger Coalition.
Though more children are needy over summer break, Ms. Doherty is skeptical of the lasting reach of food delivery vans.
“My concern about mobile vans for children is that they pull up, provide [children] with food, and then they leave,” she said.
By RACHEL CROMIDAS
June 18, 2010
With food stamp enrollment at a record high in Illinois, the Greater Chicago Food Depository is expanding its programs to reach the children of low-income families that struggle the most with hunger in the summer months.
Starting Monday, the first day of summer break for Chicago Public Schools, the depository will send two vans with sandwiches and crackers to community gatherings and Chicago Park District day-camps at lunchtime in Chicago Heights and Little Village/Lawndale–two communities with the highest number of under-served children, according to a recently released report by the depository.
“There are these great enrichment activities in [the Park District],” said Kate Maehr, the executive director of the food depository, “and it is a tragedy that there are kids coming to learn how to dance and play sports and be better readers with empty stomachs.”
As of July 2009, more than 500,000 children in Cook County received subsidized breakfasts and lunches during the school year through federal government-sponsored programs, but the summer meal program for these children run by the United States Department of Agriculture reaches fewer than 30% of children in need, according to Diane Doherty, director of the Illinois Hunger Coalition.
Though more children are needy over summer break, Ms. Doherty is skeptical of the lasting reach of food delivery vans.
“My concern about mobile vans for children is that they pull up, provide [children] with food, and then they leave,” she said.
DuPage Struggles to Handle Increased Need for Public Aid
(My latest from the CNC, published in today's New York Times Chicago insert:
By DIRK JOHNSON and RACHEL CROMIDAS
Not far from million-dollar homes in DuPage County, a line of people spills through the doors of a public aid office in Villa Park, now the busiest branch of the Illinois Department of Human Services.
As many as 900 county residents come to the office every day looking for food stamps, emergency financial assistance and vouchers for medical care, said Phyllis Baxter, the site’s administrator.
The surge in suburban poverty reflects the economic collapse for people who had been solidly middle class, including former homeowners with college degrees. It also underscores the changing demographics in some older commuter cities, now home to more Spanish-speaking immigrants and working-class families fleeing tough city neighborhoods. The state’s second-busiest Human Services office is in Blue Island, just south of Chicago in Cook County.
Requests for help at the DuPage County office have soared by about 60 percent in the past five years, Ms. Baxter said. “They come through those doors,” she said, “and they’ll say, ‘I lost my job. I need food. I can’t pay my medical bills.’ ”
The state, which is some $13 billion in debt, has been unable to increase the size of the office’s 81-member staff, which leaves caseworkers scrambling to manage increasing workloads. “The stress level is off the charts,” Ms. Baxter said. “And, remember, plenty of our people have also got somebody in the family who has lost a job.”
Hue Tran has worked as a caseworker in DuPage County for 32 years. She said she had never seen anything like the overwhelming demands of the last two years.
“I just have to work faster,” Ms. Tran said. “The phones are ringing, people are lining up, they’re demanding to know why they’re not getting benefits.”
Ms. Tran and other social workers said many suburbanites, who were living comfortably not long ago, were upset that they now had to beg for help.
“Sometimes they get angry and then they apologize,” said Ms. Tran, who said she had counseled many people who had started crying. “I just tell them: ‘I understand. It’s not your fault.’ ”
Other caseworkers say they feel guilty that they cannot spend enough time on clients. Ebony Martin, 32, said that four years ago, when she came to the DuPage County office, she had a caseload of about 900. Today she has more than 2,300 cases.
“I made a color-coded chart that tells me these are the people that I must — absolutely must — get to today,” Ms. Martin said.
Kara Murphy, the executive director of Access DuPage, a nonprofit group that helps uninsured people find health care, said enrollment in the program had jumped 55 percent in the last two years, to about 11,600.
The sharp increase in the need for services has strained the social infrastructure in suburban areas like DuPage County, which for a long time served chiefly as bedroom communities for prosperous commuters and their families. DuPage County, which has nearly one million residents, is the region’s second-most-populous county, after Cook. It has the area’s highest median household income, more than $73,000, according to a 2007 report by the Heartland Alliance. The unemployment rate has grown to nearly 9 percent in 2010, nearly triple the rate of the early 1990s, according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Services for the working poor and the jobless can be scarce in the suburbs. Candace King, executive director of the DuPage Federation on Human Services Reform, said cities provided more programs to address poverty, like health clinics and food pantries. Housing costs tend to be higher in the suburbs, Ms. King said, and it can be difficult to rely on the smaller mass transit system.
“It is far better to be poor in Chicago than poor in DuPage,” she said.
Human Services officials say the 60 percent growth in caseload in DuPage County in five years has far outpaced the statewide increase of about 20 percent.
At a time when the suburbs have an increased need for programs for the poor, Ms. King said the state was so broke it could not afford to offer new services in places like DuPage County. “We’re trying desperately to keep the ones that are here alive,” she said.
Ms. King estimated that 15 percent of the county’s families earned less than $44,000 but more than the federal poverty level of $22,000. She said it is within that earnings range where aid organizations see families struggle. These people have “too much to get help, but not enough to get by,” she said.
Despite the dearth of social programs in DuPage County, many poor people have been leaving the city for the suburbs, according to demographers like Kenneth Johnson, a former Loyola University sociologist now at the University of New Hampshire. In many cases, parents of small children say they left Chicago to flee gangs.
LaTanya Chase, 28, grew up on the South Side of Chicago, but moved to the Austin neighborhood before settling in Glendale Heights four years ago. Ms. Chase, who works 24 to 30 hours a week at a CVS drugstore, learned quickly that she could not depend on suburban mass transit and would need a car.
But it was still worth moving to the suburbs, she said, because she does not have to worry about her 8-year-old daughter being caught in gang cross-fire while playing in the front yard.
“I’m here because I was looking for a better place for a child to grow up,” said Ms. Chase, who goes to the Villa Park office for food stamps and a health-care voucher. “It’s as simple as that.”
The growing racial and ethnic diversity in DuPage County are changing the clichés about white havens for the country-club set. Census Bureau figures show particularly strong growth among Hispanics, about 12 percent of the county’s population in 2008, up from 9 percent in 2000.
Officials at the Human Services office in Villa Park say its caseload of people who speak Spanish as a primary language has doubled, to about 15,000, over the past five years.
Joshua Drucker, a professor of urban planning at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said the collapse of the home-building industry has hit Hispanics especially hard. Many Hispanic men do drywall and roofing work. Those jobs, Mr. Drucker said, which paid relatively well, have largely evaporated in the last two to three years.
The collapse of housing jobs sent Graciela Martinez, 37, to the Human Services waiting room with her four young children to receive food stamps. Much of the talking for the family was done by her oldest child, Amel — “I’m almost 8” — who wore a University of Wisconsin T-shirt and said he wanted to be a doctor.
Ms. Martinez said her fiancé, the father of the children, was a roofer whose work hours had shrunk to almost nothing. It became impossible to pay the rent, she said, so the family moved in with her sister in suburban West Chicago, an old railroad town with perhaps the longest-standing Mexican-American community in DuPage County.
One recent day at the Human Services office, people stood at the back of the long line on an asphalt parking lot that was baking in the sun. Later, when the skies darkened and the heavens opened, some people pushed inside to keep dry; others simply stood in the rain.
Ms. Baxter, the administrator, said the sense of despair among the clients could be heartbreaking.
“We’ve got to be able to give them some hope,” said Ms. Baxter, who sat behind a beige metal desk piled high with case forms. On the bulletin board, she had pinned the phrase, “Thy will, not mine, be done.”
“You see a lot of shame and embarrassment,” she said. “You see it with people who used to have money and now they’re maybe losing everything. And you see the shame in people who have always been dirt poor, too.”
She said she told caseworkers to give people time to work through their emotions. “I know we’re in a hurry,” she said, “but we’ve got to give them time to talk it out.”
She shook her head and lifted her eyes.
“Because they’re hurting,” she said. “And they’re so scared.”
By DIRK JOHNSON and RACHEL CROMIDAS
Not far from million-dollar homes in DuPage County, a line of people spills through the doors of a public aid office in Villa Park, now the busiest branch of the Illinois Department of Human Services.
As many as 900 county residents come to the office every day looking for food stamps, emergency financial assistance and vouchers for medical care, said Phyllis Baxter, the site’s administrator.
The surge in suburban poverty reflects the economic collapse for people who had been solidly middle class, including former homeowners with college degrees. It also underscores the changing demographics in some older commuter cities, now home to more Spanish-speaking immigrants and working-class families fleeing tough city neighborhoods. The state’s second-busiest Human Services office is in Blue Island, just south of Chicago in Cook County.
Requests for help at the DuPage County office have soared by about 60 percent in the past five years, Ms. Baxter said. “They come through those doors,” she said, “and they’ll say, ‘I lost my job. I need food. I can’t pay my medical bills.’ ”
The state, which is some $13 billion in debt, has been unable to increase the size of the office’s 81-member staff, which leaves caseworkers scrambling to manage increasing workloads. “The stress level is off the charts,” Ms. Baxter said. “And, remember, plenty of our people have also got somebody in the family who has lost a job.”
Hue Tran has worked as a caseworker in DuPage County for 32 years. She said she had never seen anything like the overwhelming demands of the last two years.
“I just have to work faster,” Ms. Tran said. “The phones are ringing, people are lining up, they’re demanding to know why they’re not getting benefits.”
Ms. Tran and other social workers said many suburbanites, who were living comfortably not long ago, were upset that they now had to beg for help.
“Sometimes they get angry and then they apologize,” said Ms. Tran, who said she had counseled many people who had started crying. “I just tell them: ‘I understand. It’s not your fault.’ ”
Other caseworkers say they feel guilty that they cannot spend enough time on clients. Ebony Martin, 32, said that four years ago, when she came to the DuPage County office, she had a caseload of about 900. Today she has more than 2,300 cases.
“I made a color-coded chart that tells me these are the people that I must — absolutely must — get to today,” Ms. Martin said.
Kara Murphy, the executive director of Access DuPage, a nonprofit group that helps uninsured people find health care, said enrollment in the program had jumped 55 percent in the last two years, to about 11,600.
The sharp increase in the need for services has strained the social infrastructure in suburban areas like DuPage County, which for a long time served chiefly as bedroom communities for prosperous commuters and their families. DuPage County, which has nearly one million residents, is the region’s second-most-populous county, after Cook. It has the area’s highest median household income, more than $73,000, according to a 2007 report by the Heartland Alliance. The unemployment rate has grown to nearly 9 percent in 2010, nearly triple the rate of the early 1990s, according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Services for the working poor and the jobless can be scarce in the suburbs. Candace King, executive director of the DuPage Federation on Human Services Reform, said cities provided more programs to address poverty, like health clinics and food pantries. Housing costs tend to be higher in the suburbs, Ms. King said, and it can be difficult to rely on the smaller mass transit system.
“It is far better to be poor in Chicago than poor in DuPage,” she said.
Human Services officials say the 60 percent growth in caseload in DuPage County in five years has far outpaced the statewide increase of about 20 percent.
At a time when the suburbs have an increased need for programs for the poor, Ms. King said the state was so broke it could not afford to offer new services in places like DuPage County. “We’re trying desperately to keep the ones that are here alive,” she said.
Ms. King estimated that 15 percent of the county’s families earned less than $44,000 but more than the federal poverty level of $22,000. She said it is within that earnings range where aid organizations see families struggle. These people have “too much to get help, but not enough to get by,” she said.
Despite the dearth of social programs in DuPage County, many poor people have been leaving the city for the suburbs, according to demographers like Kenneth Johnson, a former Loyola University sociologist now at the University of New Hampshire. In many cases, parents of small children say they left Chicago to flee gangs.
LaTanya Chase, 28, grew up on the South Side of Chicago, but moved to the Austin neighborhood before settling in Glendale Heights four years ago. Ms. Chase, who works 24 to 30 hours a week at a CVS drugstore, learned quickly that she could not depend on suburban mass transit and would need a car.
But it was still worth moving to the suburbs, she said, because she does not have to worry about her 8-year-old daughter being caught in gang cross-fire while playing in the front yard.
“I’m here because I was looking for a better place for a child to grow up,” said Ms. Chase, who goes to the Villa Park office for food stamps and a health-care voucher. “It’s as simple as that.”
The growing racial and ethnic diversity in DuPage County are changing the clichés about white havens for the country-club set. Census Bureau figures show particularly strong growth among Hispanics, about 12 percent of the county’s population in 2008, up from 9 percent in 2000.
Officials at the Human Services office in Villa Park say its caseload of people who speak Spanish as a primary language has doubled, to about 15,000, over the past five years.
Joshua Drucker, a professor of urban planning at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said the collapse of the home-building industry has hit Hispanics especially hard. Many Hispanic men do drywall and roofing work. Those jobs, Mr. Drucker said, which paid relatively well, have largely evaporated in the last two to three years.
The collapse of housing jobs sent Graciela Martinez, 37, to the Human Services waiting room with her four young children to receive food stamps. Much of the talking for the family was done by her oldest child, Amel — “I’m almost 8” — who wore a University of Wisconsin T-shirt and said he wanted to be a doctor.
Ms. Martinez said her fiancé, the father of the children, was a roofer whose work hours had shrunk to almost nothing. It became impossible to pay the rent, she said, so the family moved in with her sister in suburban West Chicago, an old railroad town with perhaps the longest-standing Mexican-American community in DuPage County.
One recent day at the Human Services office, people stood at the back of the long line on an asphalt parking lot that was baking in the sun. Later, when the skies darkened and the heavens opened, some people pushed inside to keep dry; others simply stood in the rain.
Ms. Baxter, the administrator, said the sense of despair among the clients could be heartbreaking.
“We’ve got to be able to give them some hope,” said Ms. Baxter, who sat behind a beige metal desk piled high with case forms. On the bulletin board, she had pinned the phrase, “Thy will, not mine, be done.”
“You see a lot of shame and embarrassment,” she said. “You see it with people who used to have money and now they’re maybe losing everything. And you see the shame in people who have always been dirt poor, too.”
She said she told caseworkers to give people time to work through their emotions. “I know we’re in a hurry,” she said, “but we’ve got to give them time to talk it out.”
She shook her head and lifted her eyes.
“Because they’re hurting,” she said. “And they’re so scared.”
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