Should Wealthy Peorians Care About the Poors?

08/13/2020

How do you convince Peorians in Districts 4 & 5 to care about poor people in Districts 1, 2, & 3?

This question may be as old as neo-liberalism in Peoria, and Marc Supreme of 90.7 FM during his Mayoral Mini-Series: A Candid Conversation with the Candidates desperately asked this question over & over of Mayoral candidate Chama St. Louis. I say desperate, because the answer seems so far-fetched as to be fatalistically impossible to answer in any concrete way. We can only respond in the typical abstract homilies about “education” & “community” we’ve heard from Mayor Jim Ardis and At-Large District Councilperson Rita Ali.

But, this question isn’t some antimony or impasse in logic itself.

Let’s try, for a moment, to get out of the neo-liberal austerity that haunts Peoria like a specter.

District 1-3 have largely been disinvested over the last several decades.¹ Minorities already have a significantly lower median wealth than people of a colonial complexion, so they’re already paying less in taxes. People who are impoverished and have been robbed of educational opportunity² are more likely to engage in alternative economies (i.e., non-taxable economies),³ which again, means less tax revenue. All of this leads to higher taxes for District 4 & 5 (especially to pay for bloated PPD budgets which enact Broken Window policing in District 1-3). As taxes in District 4 & 5 get yuuuuuuuuger, there’s more population decline which creates a declining tax revenue and a positive feedback loop of ever-increasing taxes.

Now, instead of spending tax revenue on bloated police budgets,⁴ say you put that money towards making sure poor folks in District 1-3 have their basic needs met⁵ so poor folks don’t have to engage in alternative economies to survive (cause people gotta eat); and, say we find a way to raise property values in these districts without displacing residents on fixed incomes; those yuuuuuuuge taxes on District 4 & 5 start to go from being hefty, hefty, hefty to wimpy, wimpy, wimpy.

There’s only one way to find out and the current way Peoria has been doing for four decades hasn’t been going so well, has it? Just cause you live in District 5, and you got your kids going to Dunlap schools, don’t mean crime on the Southside, the Taft, and the East Bluff doesn’t effect you. There’s just more degrees of separation between your privilege & their poverty,⁶ but you can’t have a privileged person without an impoverished person.

Is Peoria ready for this answer?

1. The reasons for this are too numerous to list in a fragment but include redlining, white flight, tax abatements and tax incentives for capitalists (the alleged job creators), de-industrialization, de-unionization, and poverty wages.
2. From segregated schools (cough, Dunlap, cough) & TIF districts that rob money from District 150 to give to bootstrapping capitalists.
3. I.e., illegal economies.
4. Let’s imagine, for a second, an idea that doesn’t give District 5 Councilmember Denis Cyr a raging erection.
5. Food, housing, education, mental health, etc
6. Let’s be honest: supporting Broken Windows policing and militarized cops is what creates these degrees of separation.