It was through this effort that I began to understand the difference between my job and everyone else’s. The experts on the task force could evaluate the market conditions in the various neighborhoods and identify the legal tools for addressing neglected property. The council could allocate funds for dealing with the problem. The code enforcement staff could press landlords to address the condition of the houses. But only a mayor could furnish the political capital to get the project done, by publicly committing to a goal and owning the risk of missing it. I began to realize that the job was not about how much I knew, but how much I was willing to put on the line. The application of political capital, not necessarily any kind of personal expertise, was how I would earn my paycheck as a mayor.
The scorecard went online, along with a map, updated continuously so that it was easy to know whether we were succeeding. Checking our website on Day 500, you would have seen that we were nowhere near having five hundred houses addressed. Repairs were moving slowly, and the gas utility was taking its time in disconnecting houses set to be demolished. Environmental rules required us to inspect homes for asbestos at a more rigorous level than before, and inspectors qualified to do the work were expensive, threatening to increase the cost of the program beyond our budget. But being behind was energizing, rather than demoralizing. I didn’t have to give a locker-room talk at halftime; the team saw the same numbers that I did, and knew what they meant. Facing this pressure, the staff got creative—for example, the asbestos inspector issue was resolved by getting our own code enforcement staff certified as asbestos inspectors. Creative lawyering led to a partnership with the U.S. Treasury Department to use federal dollars, originally earmarked for mortgage workouts but now at risk of being sent back unspent to Washington, to help with blight elimination instead. And numerous community forums helped take in feedback from residents in areas from LaSalle Park to the Southeast Side on how their neighborhoods could be impacted.
Two months before the deadline, on a sunny September morning in 2015, I stood with the Jara family on the porch of their newly repaired home on Clemens Street. The gray ranch-style house had been on the affirmed demolition list when they bought it, but the family was repairing it with their own hands, and we celebrated their work as the one-thousandth home to be removed from the vacant and abandoned list, a reminder that repair was as important as demolition. By the thousandth day, our community had addressed not just a thousand but over eleven hundred homes, and was finally poised to pay more attention to preventing future abandonment than to dealing with the backlog.
In some ways, it was a classic example of data-driven management paying off. But the most important impact of the effort was unquantifiable. Hitting such an ambitious goal made it easier for residents to believe we could do very difficult things as a city, at a time when civic confidence had been in short supply for decades. As meaningful achievements can do, it raised the expectations our residents had for themselves and our community. I could feel it in the changing way residents talked about our neighborhoods—and in the higher expectations for city government. More challenges, of course, loomed in the future. But by that fall, there was a palpable sense that we could take control of our toughest problems.
The city was giving itself permission to believe.
10
Talent, Purpose, and the Smartest Sewers in the World
A short bike ride from my house, yet largely in a different world from anything in the city, sits the campus of Notre Dame. Its five vast and well-kept quadrangles are familiar turf, each a different geographic locus of memory in my relationships with family and friends. At the end of the South Quad is O’Shaughnessy Hall, where I used to toddle at my father’s side to the English Department office and where the secretary, Connie, would offer gumdrops from a glass jar on her desk.
Farther south is the Mendoza College of Business, which felt like the most modern building in the world when my mother worked in its airy, newly constructed halls in the 1990s. I would accompany her there as a teenager to take advantage of the Internet connection—mostly for the purpose of downloading MP3 files of Dave Matthews songs, which could be loaded at a rate of one per ten minutes or so via the university’s state-of-the-art network. Back a bit west from there is Alumni Hall, where I would hang out with old Saint Joe classmates whenever I was home on break from college, earning a decade-long distaste for gin after consuming too much of it, mixed with Mountain Dew, from a red solo cup one weekend during sophomore year.
By the time I became mayor, my father had migrated, across the leafy precincts known as God Quad, to a place I had almost never visited in my youthful romps around campus: the resplendent Main Building, topped by the Golden Dome itself, where the president sits in an oak-paneled office suite. The offices of the Hesburgh-Yusko Scholars Program, which my father directed, sat in a ground-floor corner with an outside window from which it is said Knute Rockne himself sold football tickets in the thirties.
Almost any week school is in session, there is an occasion to visit and speak—perhaps to a lecture hall full of a couple hundred engineering or MBA students, or maybe around a seminar table to the dozen or so seniors chosen for Father Scully’s leadership class, or the twenty or so aspiring reporters in Jack Colwell’s journalism course. It might be coffee with the College Democrats or pizza with a freshman dorm council or a full-on formal dinner with the naval ROTC midshipmen, but whatever the occasion, I always try to accept when invited there or to any of the other colleges in our area. I go partly because I just enjoy engaging students, who tend to ask the most urgent and penetrating questions, but also because they represent the key to a transformation now under way in what it means to be a college town.
I did not immediately recognize the meaning of this transformation. At first I thought of the town-gown dynamic in much the same terms as everyone else, a framework we might now call College Town 1.0. In this way of thinking, a college or university has significance that derives from its size, and the fact that it represents a certain community of people who are physically part of a larger community, the city or town. The student population is considered as just that—a population. Students are of interest mainly because they are a subpopulation with different attributes than the average resident. Specifically, they are younger, more transitory, and generally from wealthier backgrounds than the average city resident. They may also be whiter, more price-sensitive, and often more politically liberal. Taking this into account, a community deals with them accordingly. As an economy, the city will furnish less expensive food and alcohol (to accommodate students’ budgets) and more expensive housing (to align with the spending power of their parents). As a municipality, the city will have a police force that must decide how much to concern itself with student drinking, an urban planning policy that pays extra attention to pedestrian mobility, and an electorate that differs in profile from a non-college town.