For months, City Hall has busily marketed for sale prominent commercial stretches in the typically passed-over South and West sides, selecting plans that promise $365 million in project costs that otherwise wouldn’t be happening. It was a lift for neighborhoods lacking in good news, and yet there was a mystery.
What was going on with the biggest site of all dangled by Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Invest South/West initiative? That would be the nearly 21 city-owned acres at Roosevelt Road and Kostner Avenue, an old industrial stretch that became part of city lore in the 1990s when it got a starring role in the Silver Shovel scandal. Alderpersons took bribes to ignore illegal dumping, and the site got debris piled high. It was an unsightly symbol of what happens at the intersection of corruption and indifference to poor neighborhoods.
