In 2019, the City of Chicago gifted the real estate development firm Sterling Bay $1.3 billion to build infrastructure for future residents in a postindustrial region about two miles north of its business hub downtown. The giveaway was standard fare for the city, offering up huge amounts of money to an already wealthy and powerful developer. And it stands in sharp contrast to the city’s development plans for the Southeast Side, where neighborhood activists are now trying to prevent some toxic obstacles in Sterling Bay’s North Side redevelopment area from being relocated to their backyard.

A group of hunger strikers from southeast Chicago are fighting the scrap metal company General Iron, as the company looks to relocate its toxic operations out of the North Side area where Sterling Bay is developing and into a South Side neighborhood that includes public schools. Why, the hunger strikers ask, is a company too dangerous for a wealthy white North Side neighborhood okay in a working-class Latino neighborhood?

The Southeast Side, in this case the neighborhoods of Hegewisch and South Deering, has long been subjected to serious pollution. Oscar Sanchez, a twenty-three-year-old hunger striker and the cofounder of Southeast Youth Alliance (SYA), is a lifelong resident of the area who recently went thirty days without solid food in protest of General Iron’s plan. Sanchez, along with about a dozen other monthlong hunger strikers, wants the City of Chicago to deny General Iron permission to move into the area.