Andrea Mitchell knows a dog whistle when she hears one. In the ongoing struggle against housing segregation, they come in the form of chants of “No Section 8.” The fear of a voucher holder’s “miscreant cousin, nephew, brother, son” doing damage in the community. Calls for the children of low-income housing applicants to be screened for criminal records, to rapt applause.
For Mitchell, a homeowner in the almost-suburban, majority-white Jefferson Park neighborhood in Chicago, those dog whistles were heard in early February at a neighborhood meeting regarding the proposed construction of a low-income housing development at 5150 N. Northwest Highway, and she decided she had to do something about it.
“I just didn’t want the rest of the city to see that and think that’s what my neighborhood is like,” Mitchell said. “I thought to myself, there should be another voice — we’re homeowners, too.”
Mitchell and a small group of like-minded residents launched the Neighbors for Affordable Housing in Jefferson Park, or NAHJP, Facebook page in support of the development on Valentine’s Day, just four days after the heated meeting. Leah Levinger, director of the Chicago Housing Initiative, or CHI, a coalition of low-income housing activists, reached out soon after, and within just a month a new activist group was born.
NAHJP’s primary goal has been to show Chicago’s City Council that the development’s opposition doesn’t represent a majority of the neighborhood. They’ve done that by building membership through traditional canvassing and community outreach, and then bringing their steadily growing ranks to a series of zoning committee meetings to voice their support. Mitchell cites this as the single most important factor in convincing City Council to approve the development’s zoning.
She and her fellow organizers seem at first like unlikely candidates for progressive rabble-rousing. By their own admission, the NAHJP membership are mostly white, home-owning, educated professionals. But in a…