Preserving Pilsen: The Future of Green Space and Affordable Housing

The Fisk Generating Station on Cermak Road in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, IL today stands inactive. The red brick plant <a href="https://energynews.us/2012/10/15/midwest/new-bedfellows-and-also-old-tensions-in-debate-over-chicago-coal-plants-fate/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">shut down in 2012</a> after community activists won the adoption of clean coal environmental regulations. While smoke no longer billows from the factory stacks, the site remains relevant for local progressive activists. In this largely Hispanic community, the closed plant has a very mixed legacy. On the one hand, the NAACP named the Fisk Generating Station one of the two worst environmental justice offenders in its 2011 report <a href="https://www.naacp.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/CoalBlooded.pdf" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Coal Blooded</a>, which reported on pollution disproportionately impacting low-income communities of color. On the other hand, the people of this blue-collar neighborhood still very much identify with the character of the aging site, built in 1903. As in so many rapidly gentrifying communities across the country, the neighborhood feels it is losing part of itself even as it makes progress towards regulating environmentally unsafe local industries. <a href="https://medium.com/@hardlensmedia/preserving-pilsen-the-future-of-green-space-and-affordable-housing-af9d2abfbaf">Click Here</a>