An aquaponics farm in Hazel Crest is vowing to produce vegetables, herbs and fish products for the community and local businesses as far away as Chicago.
“It'll give small Black businesses a local direct supply of market-rate produce,” said Kevin Morrison of the Morrison Group LLC, which launched the project. “We plan on producing a fish as widely accepted as tilapia but that doesn't have some of the negative connotations that tilapia has earned. Aquaponics gives you the ability to produce better quality fish and vegetables.”
The aquaponics farm, which is part of Calumet Country Club's redevelopment plan, was designed to create jobs for local residents and emerged after Morrison and his business partners delivered a formal presentation in 2014 to School District 205 about integrating aquaponics curriculum into the STEM program.
“We made an impression that led to an engagement for this commercial aquaponics project that will incorporate the educational system within Hazel Crest in particular because farming is science, technology, engineering and math,” Morrison told Southland Marquee. “Especially with an aquaponic system, we will be utilizing technology to monitor the system.”
As previously reported in the Suburban Marquee, the farm is an eco-friendly option that can grow food year-round.
The Calumet Country Club, located in Homewood since 1901, was designed by Donald Ross to be a championship golf course and has a history of hosting championships in the Chicagoland area.
As a result, round-trip transportation to the country club from Chicago is expected to increase once the aquaponics farm is up and running, however Chicago’s ticketing policy could potentially impact the flow of available Uber drivers.
The city of Chicago's traffic violation ticketing brought in a staggering $264 million in 2016, however it’s also putting Uber drivers who can’t pay their ticket debt out of the transportation business.
The city of Chicago is the only major U.S. city that deactivates gig workers as punishment for their unpaid ticket debts.
In 2019 alone, some 15,500 Lyft and Uber drivers were suspended by the city policy, according to NPR.
“There has to be a balance,” Morrison said.
Chicago issues more than 3 million tickets per year for a wide range of parking, vehicle compliance and automated traffic camera violations, and, according to ProPublica Illinois, the average cost of these tickets ranges from $25 for broken headlights to $250 for parking in a disabled zone. In fact, some 1,000 Chapter 13 bankruptcy filings were for unpaid tickets in 2007 with an average debt to the city of Chicago of $1,500.
“If I can't pay a fine and don’t have money for insurance and gas in my car, and if I don't have insurance and gas, then that means I can't be a driver, so let's find a way to make it work for everyone,” Morrison said.
Further, Chicago's ticket debt disproportionately affects low-income, mostly Black neighborhoods. ProPublica data determined that eight of the 10 ZIP codes with the most accumulated ticket debt per adult are majority Black. In fact, Black neighborhoods account for 40% of all debt, even though they only account for 22% of all tickets issued in the city over the past decade, indicating the burden of debt on the poor.
“That's going to be important [to the redevelopment plan] because an Uber driver is a small-business owner, so it's cash flow,” Morrison said.