Abstract
Four out of every five vehicles towed in Chicago for snow-related parking violations were seized on days without accumulation of snow. Either unwilling or unable to satisfy the debts required to recover their cars, hundreds were never recovered. Synthesising multiple sources of public data over a five-year span (2013–2017), the authors show how these towing practices disparately devastate segregated communities of colour through impositions of debt and dispossession. Who profits from these impositions? The same politically connected company that represents one of Chicago’s first attempts at privatisation. United Road Towing landed the exclusive city contract in 1989, only nine days after the company’s creation, and its ascendance to Chicago’s political scene stood upon a white racial imaginary that linked parking violations to threats of urban decay. Through a euphemistically named public–private partnership, United Road Towing has since become one of the largest towing companies in the world. This article is an inquiry that parses out a concept the authors label as ‘public–private predation’ by historicising Chicago’s commodification of the streetscape, theorising how racialised hardship results from the draining of neighbourhood resources and quantifying which segregated communities are subject to these new sites of extraction – all within a world of winter parking regulations.
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See Fran Spielman, “Firm Under Shadow Wins Towing Pact,” The Chicago Sun-Times , October 31, 2003, 8; Fran Spielman, “Daley Defends Towing Contract, Says He Wasn’t Involved,” The Chicago Sun-Times , November 5, 2003, 20. A year later, other dubious practices would come to light. One investigation revealed that employees of United Road Towing were buying the very vehicles they towed when the owners did not reclaim them; Tim Novak and Steve Warmbir, “City Got $49 for Land Rover,” The Chicago Sun-Times , November 17, 2004, 8. When the firm’s employees were not buying the very vehicles they towed, some were stealing personal belongings from these cars. In a sting operation conducted by the Chicago Police Department, code-named ‘Operation Tow Jam’, officers installed cameras in decoy vehicles to be impounded by United Road Towing. Tow-truck employees were caught taking property from inside the locked cars. Frank Main, “Towing Firm Fired after Drivers Accused of Looting Cars,” The Chicago Sun-Times , November 9, 2004, 8. Another newspaper investigation uncovered how numerous subcontractors were manipulating their status as female- or minority-owned businesses. Doing so allowed them to exploit Chicago’s Minority and Women-owned Business Procurement Program for their own financial gain; Tim Novak and Steve Warmbir, “Family of ‘Snow Man’ Go City OK,” The Chicago Sun-Times , March 9, 2004, 8; Tim Novak and Steve Warmbir, “Ex-Criminals behind the Wheel of City’s Police Tow Trucks,” The Chicago Sun-Times , November 11, 2004, 17; Tim Novak and Steve Warmbir, “Meet Ralph Kawar, Hispanic Businesswoman,” The Chicago Sun-Times , November 11, 2004, 19.
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Martin McNally and Jeremiah Joyce were co-investors in Aviation Partners, a company that held an exclusive, no-bid concessions contract throughout the Daley administration. The company specialised in food and drink services at O’Hare International Airport (i.e., among the most trafficked US airports). See Fran Spielman, “Clout-heavy Firm Gets Towing Contract, Again,” The Chicago Sun-Times , February 2, 2010, 9; Fran Spielman, “Clout Company Gets $60M Towing Contract to Maintain Stranglehold,” The Chicago Sun-Times , May 12, 2016. Available at: https://chicago.suntimes.com/2016/5/13/18395635/clout-company-gets-60m-towing-contract-to-maintain-stranglehold. The biographer of Mayor Daley describes Jeremiah Joyce as someone with a personality of a Doberman pincher and known for brash tactics that struck fear into even his closest allies; Koeneman, First Son , 75. Despite Joyce’s reputation, or perhaps because of it, this ‘rough-and-tumble’ political organiser was among the mayor’s most trusted confidants. More than proximity, though, Joyce had a reputation for leveraging his connections for investment opportunities; Koeneman, First Son , 129. When Mayor Daley privatised the city’s towing services to United Road Towing, and continued renewing the contract through bids with little to no competition, local journalists characterised the arrangement as ‘an inside deal’ that was neither fair nor open. Fran Spielman, “Mayor’s Ally Wins City Towing Contract,” The Chicago Sun-Times , August 1, 1997, 18; Gary Washburn, “City Rises to Defense of Towing Program,” The Chicago Tribune , November 12, 2004, 2C-1.
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Our estimate of how many cars were towed for snow-related reasons on days without snowfall is conservative. Why? Because our coding strategy gives the City of Chicago benefit of the doubt. It includes a one-day grace period that accounts for major weather events (e.g., blizzards).
29.
Elliott Ramos obtained a list of all the vehicles sold in 2017 by the City of Chicago to United Road Towing. Then, he compared these sales to trade-in values that were compiled by the National Automobile Dealers Association. Market values were determined by matching the year, make and model of each car, while assuming all vehicles were high mileage and in rough condition. See Elliott Ramos, “Chicago’s Towing Program is Broken,” WBEZ 91.5 Chicago , April 1, 2019. Available at: https://interactive.wbez.org/brokentowing/.
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The positive association between dispossession and racial representation remains robust under a multivariate framework. In addition to the findings presented here, we evaluated this relationship with a negative binomial regression model at a lower unit of analysis (i.e., the census tract). Even after accounting for neighbourhood-level factors known to impact ticketing and towing practices, the patterns remain consistent with what is presented here. The models included measures of socioeconomic differences, the built environment, proximity to mainstream institutions and exposure to regulatory risk.
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51.
The space devoted to parking, itself, is a product of theft, dispossession and land capture. Actions that were/are central to settler colonialism become foundational to the secondary enclosure of what we label public–private predation. They facilitate the regulation of common space for purposes of public and private extraction. See also Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); David Lloyd and Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonial Logics and the Neoliberal Regime,” Settler Colonial Studies 6, no. 2 (2016): 109−18.
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