Editorial: Soccer-loving Joe Mansueto comes through for Chicago and its Fire

We're longtime fans of The 78, the 62 long-fallow acres of former railroad-owned land bordered by Roosevelt Road to the north, Clark Street to the east, 16th Street to the south, and the South Branch of the Chicago River to the west.
It was our preferred site for the Chicago casino, given that it offered excellent existing public transportation, potential river frontage for a convenient suite of waterfront bars and restaurants that could have added to Chicago's riverwalk and would have displaced no one. Once the Lori Lightfoot administration made a different choice for gamblers over this swath of property owned by Related Midwest, we opined last year that the same plot of land would then be an excellent choice for a new stadium for the Chicago White Sox, which could have enjoyed much the same benefits.
In both of our editorials, we emphasized another attribute of The 78 that often gets overlooked: its unique geographic ability to activate the potentially symbiotic relationship between Chicago's Loop and both Bronzeville and Chinatown. Its development will remove what for too long has been dead land and thus a psychological barrier that has been a detriment to expanding the economic promise of the South Loop further into a part of the city that we see crucial to Chicago's future. Especially if it is accompanied by housing that could attract young, Black, college-educated professionals who have left the city and who we badly need to return.
Can a $650 million soccer stadium for the Chicago Fire, a privately funded plan long known to us as a work in progress but officially announced Tuesday, do all that? It may seem unlikely, but we think it can.
Soccer is the most popular sport in the world and the city's essential billionaire investor, Morningstar founder Joe Mansueto, is no fool.
He has a sense of humor too.
We had quite the chuckle over our coffee Tuesday at what he told The Wall Street Journal as he explained why he had chosen just to write a very big check, as distinct from going cap in hand, Chicago Bears-style, to City Hall or Springfield.
'It would definitely slow down the process to have to engage with political leadership to secure financing,' he told the paper.
Ya think, Joe?
Always easier to pay your own way, especially in Chicago. But huge public benefit can, and we think will, result.
Take a look at what has been happening in Nashville thanks to Geodis Park, a 30,000-seat soccer stadium that opened in 2022, is the home of Major League Soccer club Nashville SC and will later this month host three matches as part of the newly expanded 2025 FIFA World Club Cup, putting relatively small Nashville in the company of New York, Miami, Atlanta and Los Angeles, among others (not Chicago).
Geodis Park cost around $350 million, an amount almost fully funded by the team and its billionaire owner, John Ingram.
As soon as the stadium opened, development around Geodis Park exploded fast.
'Townhomes have replaced older, single residencies and a growing younger demographic has emerged,' The Tennesseean reported on the one-year anniversary of the stadium. Within a matter of months, the paper said, a local development and investment firm had bought 20 duplex rental homes next to the stadium, even as real-estate values near the stadium rose and developers started to build new housing aimed at younger people. Bars and restaurants moved in too. And they're packed whenever there is a game. Fresh infrastructure also arose for ride-shares and scooters and it was hardly lost on Nashville's city leaders that much of this new tax revenue was accruing from families who live outside city limits.
Granted, there were naysayers who wanted the neighborhood to stay the same but then that brings us back to the advantages of The 78; it's a big piece of empty land.
That's why it was marketed as Chicago's 78th neighborhood, a riff on the 77 official community areas identified by the University of Chicago in the 1920s. All of this, of course, could still fall apart. And as with any big development project in Chicago, there likely will be those who use race and politics to snag a piece of the pie but, as he well knows, Mansueto has insulated himself and his beloved soccer club against most of that.
So, as soccer fans, we congratulate Mansueto on getting to The 78 and making a firm plan before all the other players who've tried but sent the ball either wide of over the crossbar. This isn't the first time Manseuto, said by Forbes to be worth close to $7 billion, has used his formidable resources for the good of the city (remember the glory days of Manseuto's Time Out Chicago, which boosted our arts and entertainment scene?) and, of course, the University of Chicago already has myriad reasons to be thankful for one of its graduate's copious amounts of philanthropy.
Soccer needs a dedicated stadium where fans can fill the place: Once this gets cooking and FIFA continues its long-overdue efforts to grow the U.S. game, we wonder if 20,000 seats will be enough. We'd have thought The 78 would have room for another 5,000 or 10,000.
But that's up to Manseuto and the Chicago Fire, of course. Just as Evanston should be thankful to the Ryan family for the new football stadium at Northwestern University, almost all built with private funds, so Chicago should appreciate Mansueto for this investment in Chicago sport.
Frankly, we don't have that many generous and entrepreneurial billionaires left in Illinois, given how we have chased a few of them away. But here's a $650 million reminder of how important they are to a city. They can score goals and give us all something new to cheer.
Thanks, Joe.

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Boston Globe

24 minutes ago

• Boston Globe

At Embrace Ideas Festival, Black Bostonians discussed politics, art, business

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Chicago Tribune

an hour ago

• Chicago Tribune

Alexander Polikoff, public-interest lawyer behind landmark CHA segregation case, dies

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Polikoff, 98, died of natural causes May 27 at his home in Keene, New Hampshire, said his son, author Daniel Joseph Polikoff. A longtime Highland Park resident, Polikoff moved to New Hampshire in 2022 to be near his daughter. Born and raised in Chicago, Polikoff was the son of attorney Julius Polikoff. After graduating from Senn High School in 1944, he briefly attended Purdue University before joining the Navy. After his discharge, he earned a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in English from the University of Chicago. He then received his law degree from the Hyde Park school in 1953, and worked for the next 17 years at the firm that became Schiff Hardin. Polikoff performed extensive pro bono legal work, representing clients alongside the American Civil Liberties Union. 'I don't remember a time when my dad wasn't doing some pro bono work with the ACLU, taking on various causes,' Polikoff's son said. 'That pro bono work was very compelling to him — it was part of his character.' In 1965, he filed a lawsuit in Lake County on behalf of four pupils to force Waukegan's elementary school board to reorganize school boundaries in order to meet integration standards. The Illinois Supreme Court in 1968 ruled favorably on Polikoff's contention that race could be taken into account to redraw school district boundary lines to achieve integration. The longest battle of Polikoff's career started in 1966, when he represented a group of Black Chicago Housing Authority residents in a federal class-action lawsuit. The case is known by the name of one of those residents, tenant activist Dorothy Gautreaux. Polikoff alleged that the CHA had practiced racial segregation by building most of its public housing complexes in Black neighborhoods and had deliberately placed Black residents in those complexes. In 1969, Judge Richard Austin concluded that the CHA had discriminated against Blacks in violation of the U.S. Constitution's equal-protection clause and Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which barred racial discrimination in any program receiving federal aid. Austin also ruled that three public housing units must be built in white areas for every similar unit built in a Black neighborhood. White aldermen refused to approve sites for new construction. The CHA also dragged its feet by simply stopping building instead of following Austin's directives. In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court, ruling on an appeal from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, unanimously concluded that the CHA had practiced segregation. Justices found that the CHA's problems were regional in nature, and that solutions could occur both in the city and the suburbs. Austin then expanded his order to include the entire metro area as an option for scattered-site housing. However, suburbs resisted new construction of lower-income scattered-site housing. A 1981 consent decree in the case placed CHA tenants in existing area housing and gave them federal Section 8 rent subsidies. 'The whole idea was to take the thinking beyond the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that ended school segregation and transfer it to the area of housing,' Polikoff told the Tribune in 1994. '(The) CHA's policy since the early 1950s worked to make each of its 168 high-rise buildings virtually 100% Black. It was illegal, immoral and socially disastrous to pile poor people on top of poor people.' The CHA eventually altered its operations and demolished numerous high-rises such as Cabrini-Green, the Henry Horner Homes and the Robert Taylor Homes in favor of scattered-site housing. The federal government ended its oversight of the CHA in 2019. At 92 years old, Polikoff was still involved in the case. 'It is well-known that the work Alex led changed public housing practices both in Chicago and nationally, and positively impacted tens of thousands of public housing residents,' said attorney Julie Brown, who worked for decades with Polikoff on the Gautreaux case. 'He was brilliant, of course, but always questioning. He had an uncanny ability to put aside extraneous issues and get to the heart of any matter he addressed. He had an innate sense that justice should prevail and insisted on doing everything he could to try to make it so.' Alex Kotlowitz, whose award-winning 1992 book, 'There Are No Children Here,' covered hardscrabble life in the Henry Horner Homes, praised Polikoff for challenging the CHA, 'which had become a kind of warehousing for the city's poor. He challenged the nation's conscience.' 'Alex was one of the first to recognize the profound effects of concentrated poverty,' Kotlowitz said. 'The Gautreaux litigation changed more than just housing policy. It forced us to reconsider how we treat the marginalized. It prodded us to consider our collective responsibilities to those who are struggling economically.' 'Gautreaux laid the foundation for the present-day national conversation about mixed-income housing, a reconsideration of how we think about community,' Kotlowitz said. Polikoff left private law practice in 1970 to join the staff of the public-interest law firm Businessmen for the Public Interest, later named Business People and Professionals for the Public Interest and now known as Impact for Equity. He became the executive director of the group, which provided a full-time platform for continued social justice advocacy, and held that post until 1999. He continued to work as the group's housing director until fully retiring in 2022. Under Polikoff, the group succesffully fought City Hall's proposal in the early 1970s to build a new airport on landfill in Lake Michigan. It also successfully fought plans for a nuclear power plant near Chesterton, Indiana, on the border of the 12,500-acre Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, winning a key court fight in 1974 when a three-judge panel of federal judges halted construction. The utility Northern Indiana Public Service Co. formally abandoned plans for a nuclear plant on the site in 1981. And pressure from Polikoff and his colleagues at BPI and from the Citizens Utility Board spurred utility Commonwealth Edison Co. to announce the settlement of 10 years of rate-case litigation in October 1993 with a record $1.34 billion refund to rate-payers. Polikoff's 'vision and passion inspired many of us,' recalled Environmental Law & Policy Center CEO Howard Learner, BPI's former general counsel and the lead consumer lawyer in ComEd settlement negotiations. 'Alex was always proud that part of his legacy in leading BPI was the multiplier impact from the number of talented public interest attorneys and vital new organizations that were developed at and grew from BPI to make a difference for the public good.' Bob Vollen, who worked alongside Polikoff at BPI from 1972 until 1982, said Polikoff had a 'way of posing a question that it allowed no possible answer other than the one he was seeking.' Polikoff authored five books, including 'Waiting for Gautreaux: A Story of Segregation, Housing and the Black Ghetto,' which was published in 2006. His most recent book, 'Cry My Beloved America,' an examination of anger and frustration in America, was published in 2024. Polikoff's wife of 71 years, author Barbara Garland Polikoff, died in 2022. A daughter, Joan, died in 2016. In addition to his son, Polikoff is survived by another daughter, Eve Kodiak; and five grandchildren. Services will be private.

USA Today

an hour ago

• USA Today

We hit 79 in our Raiders countdown to kickoff. Who wore it best and who's wearing it now

We've reached 79 days until the Raiders season opener at Foxboro against the Patriots, With our countdown at 79 days we take a look at who currently dons the number in Silver & Black and who has brought it the most distinction. No. 79 Who's wearing it now: DL/OL Laki Tasi The Raiders International Player Pathway program roster exemption. Tasi is a Somoan who played Rugby in Australia. The 6-6, 348-pounder came to the Raiders this offseason as an interior defensive lineman, but has been getting some reps on the offensive line thus far as the Raiders try to find a spot where he has his best shot at eventually making a roster. I noticed him lining up at left guard in minicamp. Who wore it best: RT Harry Schuh Schuh was the Raiders full time starting right tackle from 1966-70. In that time, he was named to three Pro Bowls and was a first team All Pro in 1969. He also never missed a game, including four trips to the playoffs. He was the Raiders starting right tackle on their 1967 AFL Championship team when they lost to the Green Bay Packers in Super Bowl II. Honorable Mention: LT Bruce Davis Davis was part of the Raiders last two Super Bowl winning teams, including as their starting left tackle for Super Bowl XVIII. All told, he spent nine years in Silver & Black, appearing in 121 games with 76 starts.