Digging Ourselves Out: Shoveling the Public Way
By Martha Bayne
It’s snowing in Chicago, the most we’ve gotten all year, and my landlord has sent out an email titled, “Snow removal–we’re trying!” The snowblower is broken and could we please pitch in if possible? I did my part to hack out a path early in the morning, but the accumulation soon recoated my work in a new layer of puffy white frosting.
“Thank you!” I holler out from the porch to Scott, my neighbor, as he huffs down the sidewalk with an inadequate shovel.
“Just getting my cardio in!” he calls back, taking a break to breathe.
Scenes like this play out all over the city every year, in ad hoc or more organized fashion. It’s heartwarming, right? Neighbors helping neighbors, the yin to the yang of “dibs.” Said my friend Raechel, a resident of a similarly snowy northern industrial metropolis, on Twitter, “Neighborliness after a snowstorm is prefiguration. A temporary autonomous zone of caring and sharing shovels and anti-alienation chit-chat as we dig out our cars.” Snow shoveling is mutual aid in action as residents pitch in for the public good.
But should it be?
Mutual aid networks have proliferated during the pandemic, each an expression of solidarity and community in a moment that has atomized neighbors into our solitary homes. It’s easy to see them as a net positive: who doesn’t warm to see strangers supporting strangers; who doesn’t find the extra-governmental support a liberatory balm? But the soil in which such networks of care root cannot be ignored: in its modern practice mutual aid is a response to the state’s abdication of responsibility.
“Mutual aid,” writes Dean Spade in Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), “is collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them. … They directly meet people’s survival needs, and are based on a shared understanding that the conditions in which we are made to live are unjust.”
Some 120 years before Spade, Russian anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin positioned the city as a partner in the mutual aid project. Medieval cities were, he wrote, “an attempt at organizing, on a much grander scale than in a village community a close union for mutual aid and support, for consumption and production, and for social life altogether, without imposing upon men the fetters of the State, but giving full liberty of expression to the creative genius of each separate group of individuals in art, crafts, science, commerce, and political organization.”
Not so here in Chicago. While the city’s fleet of snowplows is regularly dispatched to clear the roads, the city municipal code places the burden of clearing sidewalks on homeowners, business owners, and property management firms. Failure to clear the public way carries the threat of a $500 fine, but the code is enforced haphazardly at best, and doesn’t account for bus stops, bike lanes, or any other parcel of land for which no property owner is identifiable, or exists. It also, as another friend, on February shoveling duty for her condo, quipped to me, makes no logical sense as public policy. “I can’t build a fort or paint a mural on the sidewalk,” she pointed out, “but I have to shovel it?”
Snow is political and—like everything in Chicago—how it’s handled cuts hard along well-worn lines of race and class. After another foot of snow fell in February, actor and comedian Lisa Beasley, who lives in Chicago’s South Side Grand Crossing neighborhood, noticed a “big hole” on the city’s plow tracker website where just a few little plow icons appeared to be struggling to cover a vast swath of the perennially underserved community. Her TikTok taking the city to task for this oversight went viral. In a subsequent video skewering Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s feeble response, she passed out packets of table salt to residents and lauded a (presumably fictional) young man for displaying “personal responsibility” in helping clear the streets. “We don’t need more plows,” she growled in character as “Lory Litefoot,” “we need more individuals to get out and do their part.”
“Shoveling has given me the chance to pay more attention to exactly how badly the city is doing on even the limited amount of sidewalk shoveling it’s supposed to be handling,” said Olivia Stovicek, who volunteer-shovels as part of the 48th Ward Neighbors for Justice mutual aid initiative. “It really raised my hackles about it to shovel a completely blocked bus stop and adjacent sidewalk at a five-way intersection next to a perfectly clear road.”
Kyle Terry, an urban planner who lives in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, volunteers with the organization My Block, My Hood, My City’s “Shovel Crew” brigade. During a recent heavy snow, he observed with alarm a group of kids walking in the middle of a busy South Side street because the sidewalks were impassable. Later, he watched an older woman carrying groceries pick her way through parked cars and traffic racing by at forty miles an hour.
“You think about these [South Side] neighborhoods like Englewood and Auburn Gresham,” he said, “where there is an abundance of vacancy and absentee landlords, and what you end up with is unclear walks. And this wasn't like a side street — I was on the opposite side of the street from her, you know, from this woman in particular. And it was Halsted and people were ripping right by her.”
“Someone’s going to get killed,” he added.
Does this sound like something that should be handed off to a bunch of volunteers with shovels? It sounds like public safety to me. Setting aside the catastrophic scenario of children getting struck by speeding traffic, uncleared snow and ice pose a bone-shattering hazard to anyone attempting to simply walk down the street. For residents with mobility challenges—people who use wheelchairs, crutches, or walkers; elderly people; blind people—it’s the end of the road. Even if ninety percent of a sidewalk is cleared, that remaining ten percent is still an insurmountable, dangerous barrier.
The city of Chicago went so far as to acknowledge its inadequate snow management strategy back in 2012, when, under Mayor Rahm Emanuel, it launched an “Adopt-a-Sidewalk” initiative. Complete with its own website, ChicagoShovels.org, it encouraged residents to—you guessed it—pitch in and clear the sidewalks, not just in front of their own homes but anywhere the ice and snow remained unclaimed. As a recruitment tool, it was a dull blade: the program was canceled in 2017 due to a dearth of volunteers.
Michael Podgers, an organizer with Better Streets Chicago, a grassroots group lobbying to get sidewalk snow clearance into the 2023 city budget, is no stranger to this “rally the block” rhetoric. “We’ve had that come up a lot,” he says. “Like, why don't we just make it a thing where we get the community together and we get this task taken care of, and it'll bring neighbors together? And while we understand the sentiment behind those kinds of comments, we think that it's a little bit of a misplaced hopefulness in how things should operate.”
For Podgers and Better Streets, the key is to reframe our understanding of the sidewalk. Rather than being treated as an extension of the adjacent private property, he argues, the sidewalk is part of the public transit infrastructure and should be treated as such. If you live in the city, whether you walk, drive, or take public transportation, you will at some point have to use a public sidewalk. “It really is the last mile,” he says. “You wouldn’t treat roadways as though they should be maintained through mutual aid.” To depend on the kindness of strangers, or neighbors, is a great idea, he “if you want to feel good about your community, but it's not a great idea if you practically need to provide services.”
It can be done: other snowy cities, from Toronto to Rochester, make snow clearance a public service. So do some of the wealthier suburbs that ring Chicago. We have the technology. From my apartment, I can see a little park district tractor trundling down the elevated Bloomingdale Trail after a snowfall, clearing the way for walkers, bikers, and runners. The city’s Lakefront Trail is regularly plowed and salted. If these transit corridors, equally used for recreation and commuting, can be cared for by the city, why not the everyday pedestrian infrastructure of the sidewalk? Why not pilot project it out? Start with a few neighborhoods—in the name of equity, how about the ones that experience the holes in the plow tracker; those with high rates of vacant lots?
The contemporary practice of mutual aid is a response to a crisis, but regular, annual snowfall is a predictable scenario, not always a natural disaster. And as residents in warmer climates like New Orleans and Puerto Rico know well, the mutual aid networks that blossomed after Hurricanes Katrina and Maria should not be simply lauded as a feel-good story of resilience, but understood as a communal response to abandonment by the institutions charged with protecting the common welfare. In that light, shoveling the walk seems like the least the city can do.
Martha Bayne is a writer based in Chicago and the senior acquisitions editor for regional trade books at the University of Illinois Press. She is the editor of three acclaimed nonfiction anthologies, all published by Belt Publishing, and her features and essays have appeared in the Chicago Reader, the Chicago Reporter, Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism, PRI/The World, The Baffler, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is also a senior editor with South Side Weekly.
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This was great. I don't know how anyone that regularly walks in this city can think the status quo is working. Maybe politicians need to do more walking in February to understand.