Southside Together releases statement following Saturday’s “Community over Quantum” Event:
For the past two years, we have been fighting to stop JB Pritzker and PsiQuantum’s $9 billion quantum facility and data center being built on the former South Works site due to its harmful impacts on our community. Saturday, Mayor Johnson made the public aware that the Quantum developers have now committed that an additional data center will not be located on the Quantum campus. That is a meaningful development and would not happen without the sustained community organizing of this campaign and the Mayors asserting his values of protecting the community through his Executive Order on Data Centers. We will continue to organize to stop the entire development and ensure that the community has the ability to determine what happens on the site. This is good news and the work is not done yet.
We also recognize the anger expressed during the meeting. That anger is real and justified. It comes from communities that have spent generations fighting environmental injustice and development decisions made without us, and from the very real and present concerns surrounding a project that PsiQuantum and Governor Pritzker have aggressively advanced.
Instead of running from or ignoring the community, Mayor Johnson committed to the meeting, attended, listened, answered and sat in the tension. We appreciate Mayor Johnson’s reassertion of his values & public commitment to continue working directly with Southside Together and other community members to address the concerns surrounding Quantum and identify concrete paths forward.
That is more than can be said of PsiQuantum and Governor Pritzker, who have continued to ignore the true desire of the community and instead have invested significant public resources and political support in bringing Quantum to the South Side. We will continue to organize until this harmful development is fully stopped.
