A medical district for Roseland??   Not so fast
posted 12-16-2011 1:45 p.m.

 
Let's get one thing straight at the start: I want Roseland to recover from its economic black hole and be able to offer good jobs to its residents. I'd love for it not to be the armpit of poverty that it's been for a few decades on the South Side of Chicago. It would be good for the people and good for the city. That said, I have to wonder what toxic waste filtered down into the drinking water there to make the local activists think that starting a medical district down there was the answer.

Gov. Quinn gave the community false hope, if you ask me, by making the designation official. But nobody's come up with the resources and commitments to make it real, and the likelihood that they will is poor. We'll see a functioning airport in Peotone before that happens.

The activists probably look at this from a lawyer's point of view. To a lawyer, if there's even a microminuscule possibility that something is so, then you can't dismiss it as beyond the shadow of a doubt and you might as well run with it. I look at this like a quantum physicist would: just because something is possible doesn't mean it's probable. Sure, in a universe where light can be both wave and particle and Schroedinger's cat can simultaneously seem to be both dead and alive, there's a possibility that everything needed for a real medical district could come together in Roseland – but the probability wave function tells me that I'm far more likely to watch a proton decay spontaneously in front of me (which takes tens of billions of years, at least) than I am to witness a real medical district being developed. So it pains me to see the residents and activists pinning such hopes on this when they should be trying other, more realistic ways of getting business and industry back to that neighborhood.

Why am I so pessimistic? Where to start??

The designation in itself means nothing. The Illinois Medical District up near the Eisenhower Expressway is what it is because of the broad variety of medical and allied health schools, organizations, facilities, and institutions that are there – and there are a LOT of each. Does anyone seriously think that similar schools, organizations, facilities and institutions will automatically spring up in Roseland, with or without the designation? Hardly: there's no good reason for them to be there and every reason for them to be up at the IMD.

You only need one big medical district per metropolis, so what is it exactly that the activists and the governor foresee for Roseland? That anyone expects for Roseland? Spell it out for me, folks, because right now this so-called 'vision' of a medical district for Roseland is pretty vague. It's clear that neither the community activists nor anyone else has really thought this through.

Northwestern Memorial Hospital is, at this writing, in talks with Roseland Community Hospital; maybe that will result in Northwestern agreeing to use Roseland as a teaching facility, and they'll send some nurses and med students or interns and residents down there, possibly some pharmacists. But how will those nurses, students, interns and residents get there?? They'd have to drive, because public transport to Roseland stinks. Let's go so far as to assume that in this 'vision' the CTA/Metra do put in reliable public transport to Roseland Hospital. Does that mean that suddenly there will be a med school campus or a nursing school, other health care organizations and institutions, and/or a medical technology industrial park there? NO. That's not a given. And without those, what kind of a 'district' do you have? An imaginary one, on paper.

Take a good look at what the IMD includes. Within the IMD itself are:

4 major medical centers;
4 medical institutions;
5 health clinics (not including the ones that are part of the four medical centers);
2 university campuses with medical schools, nursing schools, and schools for allied health professionals, including pharmacists;
13 public service and emergency response agencies, including the Cook County Medical Examiner's office and Forensic Science Institute, Illinois State Police Forensic Science Center at Chicago, and the 311 nonemergency response center;
8 vocational and educational service agencies for the disabled;
2 youth services and two senior services agencies;
4 child care centers;
5 therapeutic day schools for children with special needs;
2 high schools (Chicago Hope Academy and UIC Prep);
2 elementary schools; and
5 agencies that are affiliated with the district itself.

The district also includes the headquarters of the American Red Cross of Greater Chicago over at 2200 W.Harrison St., down the block from the county morgue. You can verify it all here.

Then there is the Chicago Technology Park, a plot of 56 acres within the IMD that includes a research center, three enterprise buildings, and about 30 biotech firms, most of which originated in the IMD’s major medical centers and regional institutions of higher education. The Research Center is a 56,000-square-foot, state-run incubator facility with three major lab areas that houses start-up biotech firms until they can 'graduate' to either one of the three nearby enterprise facilities on campus or to other buildings within the CTP. The center has been home to spin-offs from the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, University of Illinois, Argonne National Labs, and other major research institutions. Among the more than 25 'graduate' companies are Amgen, MediChem Life Sciences, United Therapeutics, and Litholink Corp.

Other companies that have facilities within the CTP include LifeScan Chicago, CorDynamics, Inc., Creatv MicroTech, Inc., and Stat Analysis Corp. Those four firms occupy part of Tech 2000, a 70,000-square-foot building at 2242 W. Harrison St. that is owned by UIC, which also houses some of its institutional offices there. Litholink opened its own 11,000-square-foot facility within the CTP in 2001. A complete list of the companies at the CTP can be found here. The CTP is located south of Harrison Street between Damen Avenue and Oakley Avenue. You can check out those details here.

Back to my point: How are they going to duplicate even a fraction of this in Roseland? And why should any health care or medical associations, institutions, or medical/tech companies move down there when they have everything they need or want up on the Near West Side? In the IMD, there's an appropriately skilled workforce in the district, and there's housing, there's synergy; in Roseland, there's nothing. Except poor people and empty lots.

Roseland’s problems began several decades ago. Back during the 1960s, there was heavy industry in nearby Pullman: Pullman-Standard Co. over on 111th Street, which built Amtrak rail cars and commuter rail cars for the CTA and other cities’ mass transit systems, and a Sherwin-Williams paint plant at 115th Street. Both plants overlooked what was then the Calumet Expressway, now the Bishop Ford. You could see them easily when driving down the freeway. Both employed a lot of people, including some unskilled assembly-line workers who could earn good wages despite their lack of training and education – but when these plants closed, Pullman-Standard during the early 1980s and Sherwin-Williams later, there was no other major employer within either Pullman or Roseland to take up the slack. Other industry also had been leaving, and skilled workers followed the jobs to other areas of the city and to the suburbs. Unskilled workers were left behind. Roseland and Pullman became and still remain a job wasteland. To top it all off, Roseland Hospital isn't in such great shape itself and constantly teeters on bankruptcy. It would take a big investment to improve its facilities, and a lot more than that to improve its finances.

Given all this, why would any educational or medical institution, association, organization, or med-tech company come to Roseland? What would be in it for them?

Like I said: the designation of a medical district in Roseland means nothing. It's everything else that matters. And if they had everything else there already, the designation would be a mere formality – the area wouldn't really need it. So how does anyone plan to accomplish this? I'm waiting for concrete details, but I'm not hearing them. Maybe because there aren't any, this has all been wishful thinking on the part of the community, and the designation was a cheap and easy bone for the governor to throw at the clueless activists.

The activists should get less clueless and start looking for other ways to bring work back to the community. Even that will be a long haul, because the skills aren't there, and bringing new skills to those unemployed in Roseland will be a huge task in itself. I wish them the best. I just hope that believing in the myth of the medical district doesn't break their hearts.