decree. The consent decree would have put most vacant parcels in Uptown into a land bank for future affordable housing, administered by a community development corporation, funded by the city with $100,000 over two years. The consent decree also would have made a "desirable" goal of 3,000 low-income housing units in Uptown. On November 16, 1987, the Committee on Finance of the Chicago City Council, chaired at the time by Shiller ally Alderman Timothy Evans, voted 21 to 2 to recommend the consent decree. Shiller gloated during committee hearings that, with Mayor Harold Washington's backing, the decree could not be stopped. Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator Mike Royko wrote in the Chicago Tribune: One of the most depressing sections of Chicago is the Uptown area on the North Side. Shabby apartment buildings, vacant stores, wino bars, littered vacant lots, junkies, muggers, and career down-and-outers. It also has a new alderman, Helen Shiller, and she has a vision of what that seedy old neighborhood should be in the future. And apparently her vision is that Uptown should remain a seedy old neighborhood. In 1988 Royko wrote of Shiller, "her main motive was that she was building a political power base, which included as many winos as she and Coleman could drag to the voting booth." Shiller's proposal was criticized in a series of editorials. The Chicago Tribune called the proposal "silly," editorializing: It would have enabled her [Shiller] to strangle commercial development in her Uptown ward and keep it poor. ... It was a flagrantly bad idea and deserved its defeat. It would have put Helen Shiller and her sidekick, Slim Coleman, in charge of a "community development corporation" whose avowed purpose would be to block private investment in the 46th Ward and use all available space for low-cost housing. This would consolidate their own power by ensuring a constituency of poor and dependent voters. In 2003 Shiller explained the editorials: When I first became alderman, there was a developer up here who felt very threatened by me. He hired a publicist to really go after me. Any time I talked about development without displacement, they would ream me. They went to the press and got some of the most vicious editorials published. On December 3, 1987, 16 of the parcels were sold to private bidders at Cook County's annual scavenger sale, and Langer and partnerships Langer controlled bought 13 of the parcels.