Should Evanston Pay Reparations?

It was just about 40 years ago that I stood up in a town meeting in Evanston and criticized the plan for a research park, modeled on California’s Silicon Valley or Raleigh’s Research Triangle on the grounds that

1. It would uproot an established black community that dated back before the Civil War
2. It would primarily make money for a handful of developers
3. It would never work because Evanston was too expensive to live in and lacked the transportation infrastructure to make the research park practical

The plan prevailed anyway. Guess who was completely right in his criticism? The plan went ahead and the so-called research park is practically empty.

At The Free Press Adam Popescu reports on Evanston’s reparations plan. Here’s the kernel of the story:

In November 2019, Evanston, Illinois—which is mostly white and wealthy, with a black community comprising 16 percent of its population of 75,000—passed a resolution creating the Reparations Fund and the Reparations Subcommittee.

It was not until March 2021 that the city pledged that it would set aside funds for its first round of reparations, and it was a far cry from the plan favored by many Democrats in Washington, which would allocate $800,000 to every black household in the country for a total cost of at least $10 trillion. But it was the first time any jurisdiction in the United States has attempted—in any formal, financial, or legislative sense—to look back over the long, winding course of American history and to do something about the country’s often sordid treatment of African Americans. Not just with speeches or gestures or monuments. But with money.

and

Reparations in the city have done practically nothing to lay the seedbed for the “intergenerational wealth” its supporters envisioned. That’s because the city could afford only to allocate $400,000 for its first round of recipients, meaning only a tiny fraction of Evanston’s black community has received any money: out of roughly 12,000 black residents in the city, only 674 have applied for reparations, and out of those 674, only 59—total—have received them.

The story of what happened in Evanston and the first reparations law in American history—and what might soon happen in other cities considering similar measures—is the story of what the most contentious public policy issue in the country looks like when it is actually put into practice, when ideals meet reality, when vision meets bureaucracy.

Is the lesson of Evanston that reparations can’t work? Or that the city didn’t go far enough? Or that, in trying to do something—anything—it actually made things worse?

Although slavery was never practiced in Evanston, the town has a lot to make reparations over and you don’t need to go back to slavery (see above). Racially restrictive covenants were a commonplace right into the 1960s.