What is happening in Humboldt Park under fringe progressive Jessie Fuentes?
The November presidential election is dominating the minds of many Chicagoans.
There is of course nothing wrong with this critical election preoccupying voters’ minds. In 2016 and 2020, turnout in Chicago for the general election exceeded 70 percent.
However, for last year's two rounds of municipal elections, turnout was below 40 percent.
A shockingly low percentage, those Chicagoans who declined to cast a vote last year who are also angry about the way Chicago is run, or if you prefer, mismanaged, can look in the mirror for someone to blame.
Besides Mayor Brandon Johnson, whose far-left political beliefs are outside of the mainstream even in deep blue Chicago, many members of the City Council are entrenched, politically speaking, deep in left field.
They include aldermen such as freshman Jessie Fuentes of the Northwest Side's 26th Ward, who won her first election for public office in the first round of municipal races last February. One of the youngest members of the City Council, Fuentes is a member of the chamber’s Progressive Caucus.
There are 55,000 residents in the 26th Ward, which includes parts of Humboldt Park, Logan Square, West Town, and Belmont Cragin — but slightly fewer than 9,000 people voted in the 26th Ward in the aldermanic contest.
Late last week, on October 11th, Block Club Chicago ran a story under the headline "Logan Square neighbors fed up with shootings, late-night rowdiness from longtime club." The club in question, LV Club, is located in the Fuentes’ 26th Ward.
Two days before Block Club Chicago published its piece on the rabble frequenting LV Club, it ran another story with the banner reading "After spike in Humboldt Park shootings, violence interrupters working to resolve gang conflicts."
Describing the uptick in violence enveloping the 26th Ward, Block Club’s inquiring Ariel Parrella-Aureli wrote:
"There have been 28 shootings, five of them fatal, in the neighborhood since July, according to city crime data. During the same time period last year, there were 16 shootings that left one person dead."
Among the violence: The were four shootings Sept. 25-Oct. 1 in the Humboldt Park neighborhood, killing two people and wounding four others, according to police and media reports. On Sept. 15, a man was shot dead and two others were stabbed during a fight in Humboldt Park, the Sun-Times reported.
Violence interrupters are often ex-street gang members. Most 26th Ward residents probably prefer that Chicago police officers take charge of investigating this gang war.
What does Fuentes think of the Chicago Police?
Last year, on the Fran Spielman Show podcast, Fuentes explained her opinion to the host with a truth-challenged meme popular among leftists: "Police officers don't prevent crime, they intervene once it has already happened."
If that was true, then police wouldn't go on street patrols, they'd comfortably sit in cubicles, awaiting calls to crime scenes, like baseball relief pitchers in a bullpen.
Fuentes endured a troubled childhood and young adulthood, which led to several brushes with the law, but she has turned her life around.
In another 2023 podcast, this one on the Ben Joravsky Show, Fuentes explained to Joravsky that when she was 17 years old and a student at Carl Schurz High School, she got into a fight. "That's where you see that battery charge on my record." The fight also resulted in her expulsion from Schurz.
Another criminal charge came from Fuentes’ time when she was employed as an usher.
"And I was working at the movie theater, and you know, as any young kid trying to be cool, I was letting all my friends into the movie theater for free. I was comping tickets, it was like, the spot to be when Jessie Fuentes was working there," she told Javorsky.
Fuentes added: "I was then arrested for that theft case.”
Fuentes’ criminal history and her time as a dean at Roberto Clemente High School was the subject of a campaign mailer, one that was funded by the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police.
Javorsky then asked Fuentes about her departure from Clemente.
"By the way," Joravsky queried, "did you get fired from Clemente?"
"No, I was never fired from Clemente," she replied, "I resigned."
Joravsky then asked Fuentes: "Were you on a do-not-hire list?"
"I was," she replied, “because I did not give any two weeks' notice or any type of transition, it was one of those situations where I submitted a resignation, and I was done the next day."
Fuentes’ bolting from a high-level school administrative job cannot be dismissed as a youthful indiscretion. Mature people simply don’t leave a job so abruptly.
Speaking last year on why she entered education while a guest on the Diaspórica El Podcast, the alderman said: "But I just didn't want to be an educator, I wanted to be political educator."
Fuentes sounds like your run-of-the-mill member of the Chicago Teachers Union. Later in the podcast she described America as a country that at "its very fabric is rooted in white supremacy."
This brings us back to her attitude toward Chicago Police when interviewed on the Joravsky podcast.
Fuentes told Javorsky:
"The problem with the police department is, you know, the very foundation of it. And we have to be able to deconstruct the very reasons why we have police in the first place, right, and it was rooted in protecting white supremacy."
The Chicago Police Department is majority-minority. And most cops simply want two things when they show up to work: To arrest criminals and protect the public.
Let's not deconstruct that.
She checks all the boxes of the far left, including favoring independence for Puerto Rico.
As an alderman, Fuentes was a chief sponsor of the Northwest Side Housing Preservation Ordinance, which has been called the anti-gentrification law. Renters now have the right of first refusal to buy their homes or apartments. Owners who raze residential properties will be forced to pay a demolition surcharge.
Humboldt Park — which forms a considerable portion of the ward she represents — is one of the neighborhoods covered by the law.
As with New York City's well-meaning but ultimately destructive rent-control laws, the Northwest Side Housing Preservation Ordinance could end up driving up housing costs and hurting the people the sponsors of the bill claim they are protecting.
Alderman Bill Conway (34) was one of just one of three aldermen to vote against the bill. He spoke forcefully against it.
“If we as a city want to be cutting red tape and encouraging investment in our neighborhoods, we should not be constricting the supply of housing, and I believe this will have the opposite effect of what we’re trying to do in terms of affordability of housing now,” Conway said.
As for the 26th Ward, the Northwest Side Housing Preservation Ordinance will likely mean less development and fewer new residents, many of whom probably would not agree with Fuentes' radical views on policing and economics.
And that will likely make reelection easier for her.
On the other hand, if more than 9,000 people bother to vote in the next 26th Ward aldermanic election, the outcome might turn out differently.
