DRAFT May 20, 2023
Increasing Youth Opportunities To Reduce Urban Violence by Promulgating Street Markets
by Steve Balkin, Professor Emeritus, Roosevelt University, Email: sbalkin@roosevelt.edu
Introduction
Hearing repeatedly that public safety improvement for Chicago should be the first, second and third priorities of public policy in the new Johnson Administration, it seems obvious to this long time resident of Chicago that improvement of the New Maxwell Street Market (NMSM) and its replication in the West and South Sides is what’s needed to reduce youth violence in Chicago, increasing income earning opportunities for youth as well as improving human relations. It is switching youth to relationships that are based more on business and less based on personal or gang grudges.
Background
The NMSM is a continuation of the Old Maxwell Street Market (OMSM) which is known world wide for its creation of urban electric Blues, the root of Rock N’ Roll; the forerunner of the shopping mall, the creation of the retail strategy known as shoppertainment, the place of the creation of the zoot suit and one of Chicago’s signature foods, the Maxwell Street Polish Sausage Sandwich; and the home neighborhood of many famous Chicagoans including community organizer Saul Alinsky, Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, CBS founder William Paley, and Bluesman Little Walter Jacobs. But rather than respect this great amenity of Chicago, the City has treated it poorly. In the 1990s, to promote scorched-earth gentrification, it tried to completely destroy the Market and the neighborhood that generated it. In 1980s, it removed the City’s Market Master supervision. In the 1990s, it engaged in a process called “planned blight” stopping garbage pickup and refusing to approve building permits from businesses that wanted to improve them. It influenced the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) to promote the lie that the land was needed by the University for research labs. It used the threat of eminent domain to coerce property owners to sell the land to the City which then transferred the land to the University, which then transferred the land to real estate developers that aldermen friends of Mayor Richard M. Daley were connected to. This is the same Mayor that gave us the parking meter deal which will continue to choke Chicago for 50 more years.
In 1993, I did some formal research about the OMSM with Sociologist Alfonso Morales and UIC Economist Joe Persky. That research resulted in reports which we presented to the City Council and the media and got published as an article titled: The Value of Benefits of a Public Street Market: The Case of Maxwell Street, in a refereed journal (Economic Development Quarterly, November 1995). See: https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.roosevelt.edu/dist/9/56/files/2020/08/Value-Benefits-Street-Market-1995.pdf
We were attacked in the Chicago City Council for using data to present arguments for keeping the OMSM. On the day, in City Council chambers, for voting whether to convey the City land at the Market to UIC, a fist fight broke out between Aldermen, with Alderman Dexter Watson coming to the defense of the Market. Out of 50 City Council votes, 13 alderpersons voted to keep the Market in its present location and NOT convey the land to UIC.
One prominent Black alderman came up to me afterwards and thanked me for trying to save the Market and its neighborhood. He said I was doing the right thing but he also said he voted against saving the Market because he had several million dollars of prospective projects in his ward and he needed Mayor Daley to sign-off on them.
Benefits of the Market
In our research we tried to enumerate and place a dollar value on some of the benefits of the Maxwell Street Market. Some were too difficult to measure for our time-constrained report but we wanted to list them anyway.
Benefits of Market included income to vendors, consumer surplus to shoppers (buying merchandise below the maximum price they were willing to pay), incubated businesses started outside of the Market, continuing an immigrant and minority culture over a 100 years old (e.g. the creation and teaching of urban blues and its projections into the future), reduced interactions with the criminal justice system (e.g. lower harm to people and property), reduced criminal justice expenditures (from fewer arrests and lower incidence of incarceration), role models for youth (e,g, vendors would often work with their children where their children, learned to sell and operate a business), learning opportunities for university students (e.g. UIC students being able to interview people at the Market to learn about the Great Migration; Northwestern University sociology students writing Ph.D. dissertations about microenterprise development: see: Making Money at the Market: The social and economic logic of informal markets . (Morales, Alfonso. Northwestern University ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1993.), increased income to other people in the Chicago economy via the multiplier effect — from increased income of vendors going to buy more business inventory and personal consumer goods, creation of jobs from new businesses created by the vendors, additional spending in the city from additional tourist visits to Chicago to experience the Market.
Policy Prescription:Promulgating Street Markets in Chicago Villages
An expression frequently heard throughout community development efforts in Chicago is: “It Takes A Village”. There is an initiative in the Austin neighborhood called: EBV: Every Block a Village. That level of community development is appropriate. I applaud that initiative. But street markets require a larger area to serve than a single block, such as a neighborhood or a group of connected neighborhood. So a theme for me is “Every Group of Connected Neighborhoods Is A Village”.
In the early development of capitalism, a key element was the creation of institutions to foster trade rather than producing every thing one needed within their own family’s plot of land. One such institution was the village market, often set up in the central town square, where locals could trade with each other and with buyers and sellers from outside the local trading area. One name given to such places was periodic markets. A market that would regularly pop-up usually weekly, every Tuesday for example, with defined spaces that were supervised by a village administrator.
While the OMSM should be used as a model to think about how effective street markets can be used to create opportunities for employment, micro-entrepreneurial training, cultural expression, improved human relations, and an increase in discount shopping availability, replications throughout the City should be modified to be tailored to local needs. In keeping with neighborhood development priorities, the location focus for a Maxwell Market replication should be in the poorest and most undeveloped neighborhoods of Chicago which are on the South and West sides. It seems prudent to start with first improving the NMSM, which is in the Near West Side, to bring it towards its capacity of 150 to 200 vendors and bring it back to its operation year around, every Sunday.
To keep it environmental friendly and low cost, it should continue the tradition of operating mostly outside but it should now take into account greater climate variability and make extensive use of readily available weather forecasting. In accordance with weather variability, the NMSM and its replication in other neighborhoods, should have alternative indoor locations to use on bad weather days such as school hallways, empty warehouses, indoor shopping malls, abandoned shopping centers, indoor sports arenas, and newly built market centers with extended roofs but no walls, such in Detroit’s Old Eastern Market. See: https://www.awesomemitten.com/eastern-market-detroit/
While the NMSM will continue to be the periodic market that serves the whole city, the first replications will likely be serving several neighborhoods but centered in one neighborhood. The period of operation should be determined by the Market’s Local Advisory Council made up of neighborhood vendors, members of community organizations, business owners, school teachers, clergy, police, academics at nearby community colleges and universities, someone from DCASE, and someone from one of the Alderperson offices. The period of operation can be the same day of the week on a weekly basis all year or just for part of the year (e.g. May to November). It can be daytime only (e.g. 8AM to 12PM; or 9AM to 5PM) or on evenings (e.g. 6PM to 10PM). It could also be 6 days a week or 6 evenings a week. I am leaving Sundays off the list so as not to compete with the NMSM or Churches.
Types of Goods and Services Sold
The types of goods and services to be sold should be large including new, used, and homemade goods (arts and crafts). DCASE has successfully promoted farmers’ markets. These are useful, especially for providing extra outlets to buy fresh produce in food deserts and it connects us to Chicago’s rural neighbors, but the costs of the produce are often higher than in a chain store supermarket, especially if the produce is organic. DCASE should transform some of its farmers markets to general purpose street markets selling a greater variety of food and non-food merchandise, where local people can afford to be a vendor and and can afford to shop. They can do this in the South and West sides of Chicago and keep their fancy higher priced organic farmers markets in the more bourgeois North side.
Used clothing has been a popular category of goods at periodic markets as well as new and used tools, devices used for food preparation, small furniture, new bedding, collectibles, antiques, toys, new clothing for children, flowers and plants, new and used books and magazines, jewelry, and produce and snacks, just to name a few.
Services should be sold as well as goods. Examples of services to be sold at a street market include jewelry repair, tailoring, barbering and hairdressing, dance lessons, tutoring, auto repair, car washing, teaching computer skills, music lessons, being a cartoon character for photo taking (very popular in Times Square in NY City), being a balloon clown, self-defense fighting training, Yoga, and musical performance (singing, dancing, and playing in band). It has been the policy at the Maxwell Street Market (Old and New) that any creative performance that sells no product can perform without paying a vendor’s fee and can ask for uncoerced donations from market shoppers. In my observations of youth in the South and West sides, many have skills in singing, dancing, playing an instrument, and acting or could get those skills in their classes at school. Performance could be in the styles of hip hop, rap, Blues, gospel, folk or even classical opera You should see what the musical organization, Uniting Voices Chicago – formerly Chicago Children’s Choir does. In this video they are performing as the chorus in the Te Deum aria from the opera Tosca with Jonathon Green, an alumnus of the Chicago Children’s Choir. The children sing about halfway into the music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwJZ-FT6UP0
Eating is very popular at periodic markets. Food can be sold as packaged foods, produce, and prepared food. Selling prepared foods tends to be very lucrative but involves food vendor owners filling out a complex Maxwell Street Market Food Vendor Application, including attending a class to get a City of Chicago Summer Festival Food Vendor Sanitation Certificate, getting liability insurance, and being observed and regulated by DCASE and the City of Chicago Dept. of Public Health. See: https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/msm_application.html
There may be ways to make the requirements above easier and more streamlined.
I feel safer eating at an outdoor street vendor’s stall where I and others can easily observe the cleanliness of food preparation versus going to a fancy indoor restaurant where the kitchen is hidden from view. Some of this is covered in Anthony Bourdain’s famous book: Kitchen Confidential (Bloomsbuury Press, 2000; to read the book for free, see:
https://joeandjin.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/anthony-bourdain-kitchen-confidential.pdf
Anthony Bourdain was also a big fan of the food at the NMSM and had a couple of segments of his cable TV show about food at the Market. Foodie Rick Bayless is also a big fan of the food at the Maxwell Street Market writing an article about it in Saveur magazine. He called the style of food prepared there: Chi-Mex. See: https://www.saveur.com/article/Travels/Chi-Mex/
Entrepreneurial Training
Besides a source of income earning opportunities, the Market has the well deserved reputation as being a source for entrepreneurial training. I wrote a book called Self-Employment for Low Income People (Praeger-Greenwood 1989), dedicating it to the Peddlers of Maxwell St. I looked at the various approaches to teaching about starting a business used by government and non-profit entrepreneurial training programs and to strategies used by ethnic and religious groups that had a high propensity for initiating businesses. Academics, bankers, and government bureaucrats were the ones running formal business-plan focused entrepreneurial training programs. I observed that they seemed the least knowledgeable about the realities of actually running a business.
My conclusion was that the most effective path to starting a business is to have an expansive network of acquaintances across race and class (social capital), have opportunities to observe others operating a business including having a mentor, be frugal and have a significant other to save money for start-up expenses, have lots of opportunities to operate a business where the cost of failure is low, and to learn from those failures. This is the business incubation recipe I observed at the Maxwell St. Market.
Over a 100 years ago, my Eastern European ancestors came to Maxwell St. penniless on a Monday and they were operating a micro-business the next day on a Tuesday. A relative or a friend from the old country who had arrived earlier found them a cheap place to live and help set them up in a micro-enterprise, usually selling from a pack on their back. As they earned more income, they were able to move from a pack to selling at a push cart; then a table; then a shed on Maxwell St., then a store front on Maxwell St., then a store on Halsted St.; then a store elsewhere in the City; and then two stores in the City and so their business grew.
For my own children, I would not want them to follow that path. I would want them to go to college and major in math or biology, with a minor in Chinese and after graduation get a medical degree or a Ph.D. And then work for a large corporation that has high wages and good labor. relations. After about 10 years working for the corporation, I would like them to use their network of rich friends to fund a friendly takeover of part of the firm they worked in. Then I would like my kids to sell their stock in this new firm and devote the rest of their life to working as a philanthropic collaborator in Less Developed Countries with Bill’s Gates’s or Warren Buffet’s children. I think it is a nice dream but not every one can go to college and major in mathematics.
Being a vendor at a Maxwell St. Market is achievable and can be a start on the economic ladder. Being a vendor at a Maxwell St Market can expose you to people who know different sets of information than you. Some of that information can be about ideas for starting a business or it can be learning where businesses are hiring. If you choose to work in a business that is hiring, you should be a spy, observing how the business is run, where do the customers from, what keeps them returning to make continuous purchases, and who gives good credit terms for buying inventory. After a few years, you may then decide to, with a couple of fellow workers, start a competing business of your own and your top boss may even be willing to fund that new venture and be a partner or shareholder.
Vendor Fees
The structure of vendor fees need to be set to accomplish a strategic purpose. Vendor fees should be free for a month for people new to selling at the Market and are economically disadvantaged (e.g. are homeless or recipients of Medicaid or SNAP-food stamps). And fees need to vary by time of year: higher in the summer and lower for the rest of the year. Each Market needs to know their potential capacity and fees need to be lowered if they are operating at less than 50% capacity. Operating at capacity is good for bringing in more customers and bringing more revenue to the City for paying for expenses in running the Market and is paying for advertising and promotion.
Businesses in the neighborhood can be encouraged to partner with local youths by granting them lower vendor fees if they are engaged in such a partnership. Businesses can train local youth to be salesmen at the market and handle money while the business provides the inventory to be sold.
Social Control
The Market is for business; not for grudges. A precondition for setting up a neighborhoods-wide Market is for someone from the City (or their agent) to meet with the local gangs in a peaceful summit and make an agreement that has to be signed by everyone at the summit, that no gang identification or hand signals will be allowed in the Market area; and violence will not be permitted. No weapons can be brought inside the Market area. The Market is just people operating in an administrative infrastructure on City streets. While it can easily be created; it can also easily be removed.
It should be announced that it is hoped this Maxwell Market gang agreement can transfer to other parts of the neighborhood and at other times. And then to other parts of the City. The next steps should be monthly or bi-monthly local neighborhood gang summits where an adjudication system can be created to defuse violence interactions as well as provide operational suggestions to those running the local Maxwell Market.
Advertising and Promotion
Advertising and promotion of the NMSM needs a vast improvement. Four approaches to this needs immediate exploration. These should also be used for the Market replications.
The first is to do an intensive placement of fliers and posters into houses, stores, restaurants, and apartment buildings within a one-mile radius of the Market. The theme of the fliers should be:
This is your Market. It is free to enter and has great food, bargains, and entertainment. Be a shopper, vendor, or entertainer. Here is a link to get more information.
The second approach is to provide the same ideas but over social media. The third approach is to create special events and ask to provide entertainment samples of those events on local radio and TV shows, especially the morning show on WGN-TV.
The fourth approach is to create a weekly video podcast at the Market, produced by students, that provides (1) interviews with shoppers and vendors, focusing on what they buy or sell and on family history stories. (2) interviews with merchants in the neighborhood (3) neighborhood news (4) examples of entertainer’s performances, (5) interviews with visiting performers to the city and (6) announcements from DCASE. Free Spirit Media and the Community TV Network could be very helpful here. See: https://freespiritmedia.org/ and https://www.ctvnetwork.org/
Start With the New Maxwell Street Market and one replication.
There are other aspects of initiating and running Maxwell St. Markets in village neighborhoods throughout the City.
These efforts may, at first, may be difficult to implement. I suggest a special task force be immediately convened by DCASE involving people from different departments of the City including the Chicago Police Department, Streets and Sanitation, Business Affairs and Consumer Protection, three community organizations involved with community development, three teachers from the Chicago Public Schools, and three entrepreneurs chosen by the College of Business at the University of Chicago, and one person from the Maxwell Street Foundation. The focus of the task force is to bring the citywide New Maxwell Street Market closer to capacity and to implement one Maxwell Market replication in either the South Side or the West Side.
Ultimate Goal
It is hoped that the New Maxwell Street Market and two of its replications, one in the South Side and one in the West Side can be created and be a showcase for Chicago’s microenterprise and cultural energy, for attendees of the 2024 National Democratic Convention. These attendees, after visiting the Markets, can then take what they saw and learned and infuse a little bit of Chicago into their home towns and be a beacon for the political philosophy and administrative practices of Mayor Johnson.
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