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Comment by tedivm | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of interesting stuff in here, but there's also a lot of garbage. Talking about the African American community in Chicago, but then using examples from LA to prove a point, is at best a horrible argument and at worst purposefully misleading.

I live in the Chicago South Side, in a neighborhood that is 99% black. I am not black. There are no pogroms happening here against people who aren't black, even if they do happen to own a business. This is just such a weird statement to have to make.

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I could have quoted the roadshow verbatim in support of the point, but it felt tangential. The point is not “Chicago is on the precipice of a pogrom.” It is “political elites in Chicago’s African American community believe the community is impoverished in part because of extractive practices of vice entrepreneurs, and required as a condition of their political assent that Chicago keep equity ownership of a vice business in their community.”

The point is a true one; this _really is_ what some community leaders believe. This belief _really is_ why Chicago is doing this program.

> “Tonight is about a new opportunity on how to participate, about not just being a consumer but to be an owner,” Ald. Ronnie Mosley (21st Ward) said at the pulpit in front of the crowd of a couple hundred people.

https://thetriibe.com/2025/01/chicagos-black-residents-can-i...

There is much more support for that having actually been the sales pitch and political compromise there and elsewhere on the record.

And yes, this is a belief with a long and storied history in American politics.

Do you, Patrick, believe that “Chicago’s African American community is impoverished in part because of extractive practices of vice entrepreneurs?” Phrasing it this way winks that you don’t think so, but perhaps I am misreading you.

However, the conclusion of your article seems to be that Bally’s (a vice entrepreneur) is about to further impoverish them, this time under the guise of ownership but as usual with the support of the local political elites. So for consistency I think your answer should be “yes.”

You’d make a bigger difference in your hometown by conveying this message directly to the folks being targeted, rather than the HN crowd.

Patrick has mentioned several times lately that he writes for a broad audience, in a way that’s easy for people with influence to share. He didn’t write this essay for HN; it’s incidental that this article is posted here.

There's an amusing symmetry between the lines he quotes that carefully suggest without actually claiming that e.g. the operating company will pay out all its profits in distribution, and the way everything he himself writes suggests without actually claiming.

Patrick used to be better at obfuscating his true views with absurd language but I’ve noticed him going full mask off recently.

> yes, this is a belief with a long and storied history in American politics.

I wonder if there’s another set of beliefs with a long and storied history in American politics…..

As with most Chicago critics, there are valid points to be made but it often feels too gleeful.

The story plays them up too much, but such tensions definitely exist. They just rarely erupt to the surface. Here's a story that did happen in Chicago which I don't think corroborates the narrative, but does add some color to it: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/15/business/beauty-store-rac...

I agree. That part was way off base.

> I live in the Chicago South Side, in a neighborhood that is 99% black. I am not black.

May I ask why? This seems like a deliberate choice. It is, at best, met with suspicion by other residents.

I'm pretty sure hen wasn't given a deliberate choice whether to be Black or not.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Chicago is an extremely segregated city. In segregated cities, there is a nuanced thought process one must undergo to move into an area where you are considered an outsider. In Seattle for example, the tech community is overall reviled for having gentrified the Central District, where historically black areas were bulldozed to erect overpriced cardboard apartments for tech plebes. This is a legitimate question.

The reason you're being downvoted is because "Why are you living there?" can sound suspiciously like "You shouldn't be living there." It's also a leap to assume the black people living there are going to suspicious of him. You'd be horrified if a group of white people were "suspicious" of a black man living in their neighborhood and this should be no different.

Another question is what will his answer do? How will your opinion of him change or be influence by his answer? Maybe he was born there. Maybe that's all he can afford. Maybe he found an apartment with a particular architectural style unique to that area he wants to live in. Maybe it's close to his friends, or close to his girlfriend, or not too close to his girlfriend, or close to his parents, or easy to get to work, or he often goes into central/southern IL or over to Indiana and doesn't want to drive through the city every time.

There are literally hundreds of possible reasons.

Including, it’s a nice place to live!

Let's not get crazy now /s

It’s probably worth pointing out that historically the majority of the wealthiest pockets of Chicago were on the south side. There are a lot of grand streets with magnificent homes, broad sidewalks with enough space for the tree canopies to develop nicely, etc. All that exists on the north side too, just not as frequently. And where it does it’s 2-3x more expensive.

There’s a couple streets down in Kenwood that I don’t think have any equivalent on the north side though…

I'm pretty sure the question was about choice of location

Why not? Everyone has to live somewhere. If it wasn't there, it would be somewhere else.

I lived in a south side neighborhood that was >80% black and am white for nearly 20 years.

I lived there for a variety of reasons that weren’t suspicious at all like price, location, commute, etc. my neighbors didn’t seem particularly suspicious of the decision…

All of my neighbors seem to like me. The specific area I'm in has a 14% vacancy rate, so the people around here aren't worried about gentrification. I'm walking distance to the Metra. My wife has family in Indiana, and not having to drive through the entire city to see them was also a factor.

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