Leadership Quote by Jane Byrne

A threat disguised as a truism, Jane Byrne's line works because it collapses the distance between "those communities" and "this city". The phrasing carries a moral ultimatum: you don't get to treat disinvested neighborhoods as someone else's problem and still expect downtown to shine. Byrne frames decay as contagious, not contained, turning what might sound like compassionate concern into a hard-edged argument for self-preservation.

The subtext is political as much as ethical. "Those communities" is deliberately unspecific, a Chicago-coded euphemism that can hold Black neighborhoods, immigrant enclaves, public housing, areas scarred by deindustrialization, or any place elites have learned to talk about in the abstract. Byrne isn't naming them because the audience already knows which places are meant - and because naming would force a direct confrontation with race, segregation, and policy choices. Vagueness becomes a rhetorical solvent: it lets listeners agree without confessing what, exactly, they've been willing to abandon.

Context matters because Byrne governed in a city where power often ran on the fiction that the machine could keep inequity managed and geographically quarantined. Her sentence rejects that bargain. It's a compact theory of urban interdependence: tax base, schools, transit, public safety, public health, legitimacy - let any one system rot in a pocket of the city and the rot will eventually surface everywhere. The line is also a warning to her own class of decision-makers: disinvestment isn't neutral. It's a decision with compounding interest, and the bill always comes due.