[Northsider Dave Bierman standing where the City of Madison plans to locate affordable housing near the old Kraft-Heinz/Oscar Mayer factory. Photo-Wisconsin State Journal]
The picture says it all.
The city says this is about social equity and creating more affordable housing. Yes, Madison desperately needs more affordable housing. But is this a healthy place for low income people to live? Or anyone? Next to this abandoned toxic corporate behemoth, on top of its old poison spills? [1] Where high-tech military fighter jets whizz by daily, and even more dangerous and louder jets (F-35s) are coming soon? Is there really no other place to build affordable housing?
Clearly, Madison leaders do not understand what environmental justice means.
Would Madison plan housing for privileged people there? No. Would privileged people choose to live there even if they did? Ditto. And because of their privilege, they can choose to live elsewhere. Low income people have far fewer choices.
And what about the documented Indigenous burial areas there? (see maps on pgs 3-4). Some of the mounds, at the northern end of the old Oscar Mayer factory site, were covered with concrete and buildings (and a landfill) long ago, but at least one mound–at the Hartmeyer wetland near the factory, in a large documented burial area (now owned by Kraft-Heinz)–has likely not been destroyed yet.
But so far city officials have ignored community requests that this potential mound at Hartmeyer at least be formally surveyed before planning any roads and buildings, so it can be fully protected. Some of us in the community think the Hartmeyer wetland and burial areas should be given back to the Ho-Chunk.
But these proposals are far too radical for city officials. Even as the city has finally been publicly recognizing that it was built on Ho-Chunk land (in fact, violently stolen from them), it is planning more and bigger roads on the wetland and burial areas, and changing zoning to allow developers from California to build high-rise “affordable” apartments there. (The developers claim to care about affordable housing! Haha! Anyone who believes this is living in naive la-la land.)
Hypocrisy, anyone?
The bottom line? Same as always. There’s lots of money to be made in developing as many units of housing there as possible (affordable or not). There’s no money to be made in fully protecting the wetlands and burial areas by not developing any roads and/or buildings there. [2]
Sadly, things never change. As I wrote a couple years ago, Madison’s classist and racist beginnings are alive and well— nurtured by the city’s guiding values, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s giant triplets: racism, materialism, and militarism.
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[1] Read more about Oscar Mayer’s poisonous past here. Below, Oscar Mayer contamination graphic from Chris Hubbuch’s September 6, 2020 article in the Wisconsin State Journal.
[2] As everybody knows, but few will publicly state, it’s money that makes the monkey dance.
[Below, Oscar Mayer in 1947; photo from the Wisconsin State Journal]
