Editorial: We admired Lori Lightfoot’s Invest South/West. Its apparent nixing by Brandon Johnson feels churlish.

Those at City Hall are working hard to pretend not just that they are doing a better job than former Mayor Lori Lightfoot but to make darn sure that any residual credit coming her way lands with them instead.

The latest salvo in this battle of branding is Invest South/West, a signature Lightfoot program that kicked off in 2019 and aimed to level up investment in Chicago for the benefit of 10 historically underfunded neighborhoods on the South and West sides. The focus was on helping build vibrant, walkable, transit-oriented communities and on getting oft-myopic developers to look south and west and not just fight with each other over the middle and the north.

We wrote often and approvingly about this program. In May, we noted that the effort had been to slow to roll out and was far from perfect, which is inevitable given how things work in Chicago and the complexity of fusing for-profit agendas with the political sector and an aim of reducing inequity. But we argued that the good far outweighed the problems. Here’s what we wrote about the situation after Lightfoot failed to make the mayoral runoff: “The program’s fulcrum — combining public and private sector money and resources to stoke investment and job growth in neglected South and West side communities — represents smart policymaking that should not die a slow, quiet death simply because Lightfoot will be a one-term mayor.”

Now WBEZ-FM 91.5 quotes Mayor Brandon Johnson’s deputy mayor of business and neighborhood development, Kenya Merritt, as saying the new administration “will take a very different path” toward investing in the South and West sides. Those differences include nixing the program’s name, just as those who might actually do something good for these neighborhoods were getting used to it.

Here’s what Merritt told WBEZ: “I think that there’s a perception of Invest South/West, particularly with folks that live in neighborhoods, of an unfulfilled promise. And that’s not what we want to continue to perpetuate in terms of the branding, or how we speak about investing on the South and the West side. And so because of that, we won’t be calling it Invest South/West.”

That’s mostly nonsense. First of all, all folks in Chicago live in neighborhoods, yes, even Chicago-based developers. Secondly, what really matters with Invest South/West is not just the perceptions in the “neighborhoods” (which really has become a code word), but also how the people who will do the actual investing feel about it. If you want private investment, you have to appeal to private investors. And to the “neighborhoods.” As with so much in this city, politicians have to operate on two different but interlocking tracks.

As we have noted, Invest South/West had a major commitment of $750 million in public money and, just as importantly, a sizable buy-in from the private sector actually doing the investing. During the Lightfoot administration, we lauded such investments as Englewood Connect, United Yards and several others. You can find many other projects listed on the Invest South/West city webpage, which was still alive at the time of writing, although you might want to click on it fast before the new administration confines it to the memory hole.

These big projects take time and don’t always offer politicians the chance to declare victory as quickly as they would like. And let’s not forget that for most of the history of Invest South/West, as was true for the majority of the Lightfoot administration, Chicago was in the grips of the pandemic. Nobody could have predicted that, and you could argue that the ability of Invest South/West to get anything done at all between 2020 and 2022 was a notable achievement all by itself.

Even with all the political will in world, these partnerships are dependent on broader economic forces. But as we said many times, this was not just throwing government money to try to resolve historic underinvestment but also forging actual partnerships that had the potential to be transformative. This is the only way to go, so we don’t understand this “very different path” rhetoric.

What will the Johnson administration do instead? As is often the case with those at City Hall these days, details are in short supply. They seem to know they don’t like the name because it was not their name and surely because the well-respected legacy commissioner behind the initiative, Maurice Cox, made his exit earlier this month. He is a class act, but he made it clear as he left that he was no longer needed by the new administration.

In short, members of the Johnson team have yet to come out and describe a replacement for Invest South/West in any kind of useful detail. They speak of evaluation and reconsideration. Fair enough. But only for a while. Life is short.

They surely cannot do this alone, not with a projected budget deficit over the next three years of $538 million, if we’re lucky. We’ve heard about exploratory plans for a city-owned grocery store and that canary in the coal mine might indicate how the new administration feels about partnerships with the private sector.

Let’s hope not. The South and West sides will not enjoy meaningful investment if City Hall does not make nice(r) with the private entities that care deeply about this city and its historic inequities. We know some of them, and we’ll vouch for that: One cheering recent development came from the Chicago Blackhawks, who are looking to invest significant new dollars in the Near West Side.

And, for the record, Invest South/West had a very nice ring to it. It was easy to understand too.

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