Snow Clearance

Kate Wagner will plow the world

I’ve been trying to convince my aging parents to sell their house and move to Chicago. Right now they live in a small town in North Carolina that’s entirely car-dependent and where there’s frankly not much to do. My father suffers from a bad back, and due to a recent fall has grown increasingly frail. Driving has become difficult for him, and even though my parents live in a one-story house, there are still a couple of stairs they have to traverse. Dad’s on a walker now and all the furniture in the house had to be moved so as to maximize the path of his travel. My mother is able-bodied and is coming to terms with having to navigate the cruel world of physical disability under capitalism. 

I wish my parents were in Chicago so they could live in one of those one-bedroom condos in Edgewater or the Gold Coast where there’s a grocery store on the ground floor and an elevator, and where there is plenty of social enrichment for their retirement years. I want to spend as much time as possible with my parents while they are still here. I want the burden of care to fall not just on my mother but on me and my husband who live flexible lives. My mother is increasingly convinced by this idea, but every time I bring it up, she asks me: “What about the snow?” 

This sounds like the kind of question the average, hardened Chicagoan would brush off. You get used to the snow, to living with snow. But unlike in other northern cities like Montreal where the sidewalks are plowed just like the streets, in Chicago—a city with a notoriously harsh winter climate—clearing the sidewalk in front of one’s house is the responsibility of the landowner. The result is a half-assed nightmare of snow, slush, black ice, and fear that strangles the city’s pedestrians year after year after year. Let me be blunt: I hate this shit. It is profoundly antisocial, in the sense that it is antithetical to any form of sociality whatsoever.

The lack of sidewalk snow clearance is the perfect encapsulation of American misery-making. It’s “Don’t Tread on Me” homeowner politics spread to a civic level. Many people in the city don’t drive or have access to a car, but the city always prioritizes those who do. Landlords are lazy with de-icing: they sprinkle salt on the sidewalks at the wrong time so the snow melts and then promptly refreezes. Absentee landlords and owners of abandoned buildings don’t clear the snow at all. Elderly and disabled folks who are unable to clear their sidewalks—a tiring task that, according to a peer-reviewed, 10-year study on snow shoveling incidents, caused nearly 200,000 unique injuries including heart attacks—are left stranded and isolated. 

For those of us willing and able to venture out, walking to the store (to participate in the economy) is a hazard. Walking to see your friends requires a phone flashlight to check for black ice. I’ve fallen more times than I can count. I’ve tried the dumb metal tracks that go over your shoes, I’ve tried snow boots - it doesn’t matter. It’s still easy to fall. We’re left, instead, with neatly-plowed streets so as to keep the Amazon delivery engine running smoothly. 

It’s clear that not plowing the sidewalks is outlandishly discriminatory towards the disabled, and slipping on ice absolutely has the potential to turn into a disabling event. One would think that living through another, albeit different mass-disabling event of COVID-19 would make those in power more sensitive to the need for preventative measures, but that would fly in the face of what actually happened, namely millions of preventable deaths. The sidewalks in Chicago are a mere sliver of this same impulse, a prism through which we can look and see the vast arrays of ordinary cruelty under capitalism. If I want to bring my parents here so they can age in place, so I can take care of them, imagine how guilty I would feel if my dad slipped on the ice and fell again.

Looking beyond the lens of bodily harm, the snow sucks. I don’t want to leave my house because walking is treacherous; I languish inside and suffer from cabin fever. If I see a bus pulling up, I can’t run to snag it; taxis, which I rarely use in warmer months, become naggingly tempting and insurmountably expensive. Running or biking is a nightmare. I am resigned to wearing only two pairs of shoes - snow boots and Doc Martens slowly being eaten away by salt. Entire outfits are ruined. I can’t walk the dog because much of the salt is toxic to his feet (he hates the shoes) so he’s left running around in the yard. One tug of the leash upon sight of a squirrel and I’m going down. 

These activities—being outside and accessing transit—are all things that make urban life normal and worthwhile for people of all abilities. It is not selfish to want to participate in life to its fullest during its dreariest months, whether that means rocking a pair of Air Jordans or simply taking the dog for a jaunt. An entire parasitic economy exists—GoPuff, Amazon, Uber, Grubhub, you name it —to grapple with our city’s complete inability to deal with the weather. Honestly, fuck that too. 

Snow clearance has come up during this year’s Chicago mayoral race. Progressive candidate Brandon Johnson has included potentially clearing the sidewalks in his campaign. The technology exists to plow sidewalks. There is literally not a single valid argument against clearing the sidewalks. The money could come from, I don’t know, Chicago’s ridiculously extravagant policing budget that takes up almost half of all city fund expenditures. Imagine spending money on something that brings folks together and makes their lives easier rather than terrorizing and brutalizing them. Shocking! But it’s going to take a lot of will to change Chicago’s political machinery away from punishment and carceral politics and towards civic goods. Lord knows the political support is there— everyone I know is sick of living like this. In short, the best time to have implemented full snow clearance was with the invention of the snow plow. We might be hardened Chicagoans, but now, decades after the snow plow, is the time to get a little help clearing the ice.

Kate Wagner is an architecture critic and journalist best known for her satirical blog, McMansion Hell. She lives in Chicago.

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