Chicago 312 is a set of weekly field notes on Chicago politics, written for people who live here. Here’s what happened this week:

By the way, there’s an ad at the bottom of this newsletter (for a group that isn’t you know, fully evil). If it bothers you, let me know: this is one more way we’re trying to figure out what’s next for 312 that will make it sustainable + help us grow.

This week: a Blackstone-owned data center quietly drained 30 million gallons of Atlanta's water supply (llinois has 244 more like this), Chicago's Department of Environment returns from a 13-year Rahm-induced coma, and the Obama Center opens in five weeks but the anti-displacement ordinance that was supposed to save Woodlawn was never used. Plus, a new international conversation could redefine every job AI touches.

Politico this week: a Blackstone-owned data center campus in Fayette County, Georgia drained 29 million gallons of water through two unmetered pipes the county utility didn't know existed. Residents in the next subdivision only noticed because their water pressure dropped.

And during these same months, the county had been asking residents to conserve during a Stage 1 drought while the data center’s sprinklers ran every day. Interesting!

The Reader's data center explainer and Capitol News Illinois lay out where we are in Illinois: 244 data centers in IL, which is the fourth-most in the country, with most clustered in Chicago suburbs. Aurora alone has five, while Springfield is about to host a 600-megawatt CyrusOne campus.

State Sen. Ram Villivalam (D-Chicago) and Rep. Robyn Gabel (D-Evanston) have a bill — the POWER Act — that would force the people building these to pay for their own grid infrastructure (instead of sticking it to taxpayers), and, among other things, require cumulative impact assessments for siting near environmental justice communities, mandate community benefits agreements, and ban NDAs between data centers and local governments. It’s got three hearings in the House, one in the Senate, unclear if it will pass this spring.

Why It Matters: Is the short term gain of a data center worth the noise pollution and the strain on our power grid and potential long-term risk to our climate? The problem is right now only developers and zoning boards get to assess that question.

Once a 600-megawatt campus is sitting in a town drawing more electricity than the town, the politics get very hard. The window for changing this is right now, while the buildout is still happening. If more legislation and guardrails don't pass this spring, we’re facing the same lack of regulation problems as Georgia (edit: and in many ways, we already are…)

Illinois Answers Project published a devastating investigation this week by Binghui Huang, Sidnee King Pineda, and Andrew Adams on the 2020 Woodlawn Housing Preservation Ordinance — the one passed explicitly to protect long-term tenants from Obama Center displacement, none of the provisions worked, and most never started.

The headline program, Right of First Refusal, was supposed to let tenants match outside offers before their building sold. In five years, zero landlords filed the required notice. DOH also had authority to fine $1,000 a day and issued zero fines. Of 52 city-owned lots reserved for affordable housing, one project got built. The local hiring requirement for developers on city land produced three jobs total across the life of the program. The only piece residents praised was a $1 million home improvement grant pool — 36 grants of up to $20,000 to long-term homeowners.

Less than a third of Woodlawn housing is affordable, down from two-thirds 15 years ago. East Woodlawn has gained white residents faster than the city average and lost Black residents (per Illinois Answers' Census analysis).

Why It Matters: Ald. Jeanette Taylor (20th), who has been a public critic of the ordinance since it passed, told Illinois Answers: "What you have is a watered-down version of what the community knew would protect us. So it failed." Without funding, the programs that actually needed money — particularly Right of First Refusal, which requires bridge financing for low-income tenants to exercise the option — couldn't function.

The city passed a similar anti-displacement ordinance for South Shore and East Woodlawn in September, citing "lessons learned." The only lesson worth learning is the one Christian Diaz, who helped write the Northwest Side version, pointed out: "The city has to step in and provide real subsidies."

Block Club: as of May 1, Chicago has a functioning Department of Environment for the first time since 2012, the final phase of a three-year rebuild.

Rahm Emanuel shuttered the department in 2012 to "cut costs." Inspections and citations cratered for over a decade. Cheryl Johnson, executive director of People for Community Recovery in Riverdale, told Block Club: "It's about time that we have a Department of Environment that's going to really monitor polluters in overburdened communities like the Far South Side." Cheryl's mother Hazel Johnson started doing this work out of Altgeld Gardens in the 1970s, inventing environmental justice as a movement frame from a public housing development on the Far South Side.

DOE Commissioner Angela Tovar now runs an agency with actual authority: issuing and revoking permits for any facility that pollutes air, soil, or water (recycling plants, waste handling, rock-crushers, sandblasting operations, the whole industrial-fence-line apparatus), plus taking 311 environment complaints, which sounds like nothing but is actually how most pollution enforcement happens at the neighborhood scale. CDPH is keeping Open Air Chicago, the country's largest community air monitoring network.

Worth flagging who got this done: the Illinois Environmental Council, Maria Hadden's Committee on Environmental Protection, People for Community Recovery, and the South and West Side environmental justice orgs that have been working for years to put the money back.

Why It Matters: Local organizing rebuilt an institution the Daley-Rahm regime spent decades dismantling. What happens now? There are plenty of targets.

For the past month, governments, employers, and unions have been negotiating at the 114th International Labour Conference in Geneva (Switzerland, not Illinois) over what could become the first global standard on platform work. So much of these negotiations are about a deceptively simple question: who counts as a worker?

Internationally and nationally, platform workers — Uber drivers, delivery riders, the data labelers training AI models — overwhelmingly are not classified as workers under the law, but "independent contractors.” Their access to income can be cut off by an algorithm without explanation or due process. They have no minimum wage protection, no social security, no collective bargaining, no protection against unfair dismissal. None of that is because the work is structurally different from employment, but as economist Pía Garavaglia, says in this week's Hard Reset, this is a part of the gig economy business model that doesn’t simply doesn’t work, and gets even worse with AI.

The gig economy proved you can run a giant business where an algorithm is the boss and the workers have no legal standing. If the ILO hand waves "platform workers aren't really workers" this summer, there’s more legal scaffolding for every job AI touches over the next decade.

WBEZ's In the Loop with Sasha-Ann Simons aired a segment Tuesday on what the OBBBA's SNAP changes are doing in Chicago. As of April 1, eligibility shifted for those with disabilities, immigrants and refugees, putting tens of thousands of Illinois residents at risk of losing food assistance.

Why it Matters: SNAP cuts hit families, but they also hit the small grocery stores that serve those families, which run on volume and razor-thin margins. This round of federal cuts has meant seismic changes to so many systems in the United States run on federal aid: obviously, this has saved no money or ‘efficiency,’ and now we’re seeing it upend so many parts of our national infrastructure.

Wendell Potter — the former Cigna VP of corporate communications who walked away in 2008 and has spent 17 years methodically explaining how insurance middlemen extract value from sick people — has a piece on Healthcare Un-covered this week on what it would take to start dismantling the system and how it isn’t working.

There are obvious, fundamental conflicts of interest everywhere: the companies denying your claim are the doctors you see and the pharmacy filling your prescription. UnitedHealth alone now employs or "affiliates with" about 10% of all US doctors and processes one in three Americans' medical records. It would be an antitrust case in any other industry, but somehow, not in healthcare.

Why it Matters: Even Josh Hawley and Elizabeth Warren are now co-sponsoring a Break Up Big Medicine Act to prevent insurers from owning the entire healthcare supply chain. The political coalition for cracking apart insurer vertical integration is bigger than people assume — and the Chicago hospital labor organizing this year (UChicago Med, Rush, Endeavor) is happening inside the monopoly structure Potter names here.

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Hope your week is good.

If you’re looking for more support around narrative work and are in Chicago, our first Illinois Signal Collective training is May 28, 12-1pm CT — Scripting for Vertical Video. Open to anyone, no pressure, but a low-key to connect + build out this skill, one that continues to elude me as a Milennial. Register here.

And a final personal update from me:

- H (KE9FPH)

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