He wheels around to see a short man in a sweat-streaked tank top and torn jeans. He warily looks him over.
“Allen?” the man yells. “You Allen, right? It’s me, man. It’s Shorty.”
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Allen languidly nods. “Hey, man.” He leans forward and taps 44-year-old William “Shorty” Strand on the shoulder. The two haven’t seen each other in about 20 years, not since they worked together at the same activist organization. Allen is thinking that this man with the hooded eyes and thin silver whiskers looks like a worn-down man at midlife.
“You know how it is, man,” Shorty says. “I could use a few dollars.”
“Don’t stretch me out, Shorty,” Allen says, reluctant to hand over any money, given how thin his own wallet has been stretched. He gives him two bucks anyway.
“I need some work,” Shorty says, explaining that he has been doing odd jobs, lawn work and landscaping mostly. He has been sleeping at the apartment of some friends. He is hanging on, but just barely. “I need a job,” he repeats, more urgently.
Allen says he’ll keep his ears open. As a grateful Shorty trudges off, Allen mutters, “Where’s the stimulus for a guy like Shorty?”
It is a frustrated reference to the Obama administration’s $800 billion stimulus package, which has awarded $11.9 billion to Illinois’s public and private sectors since early 2009, according to administration statistics, and created jobs for about 3,900 Illinoisans in the last quarter alone. But not for many South Siders, Allen says.
“We haven’t seen much of the stimulus trickle down to our people here,” he says. “Sure, you see the signs saying that some road or construction project is being done near here with stimulus funds. But when you look at the people working on them . . . you see one or two community people maybe, like the guy who holds the ‘drive slowly’ sign for the [motorists] passing by.”
It is a common complaint among local activists and community leaders. South Side critics point to road and construction crews that are overwhelmingly white and from outside their neighborhoods. This summer, Bobby L. Rush (D), a South Side congressman probably best known for having defeated an upstart Obama in a congressional primary 12 years ago, balked at a $133 million rail project, financed in substantial part by stimulus funds, after learning that the only jobs committed to local African Americans had stemmed from a $120,000 security contract. Even after Rush recently said that he had negotiated an agreement with the project’s principal contractor on employment opportunities for South Side residents, local activists were roundly skeptical, insisting nothing had been guaranteed, as Rush had yet to release a written agreement.
Meanwhile, administration defenders point out that the stimulus law was never chiefly designed as an infrastructure program. Most of the stimulus money has gone to the kinds of initiatives principally designed to stoke consumer demand, bolster the social safety net and preserve existing jobs: tax credits for lower- and middle-income families, more public education funding, additional assistance to Medicaid.
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