Most notably, the razing of Cabrini-Green, which lay on the Near North Side, just to the west of the luxurious Gold Coast area, forced the displacement of as many as 15,000 African American residents, and, while the CHA, under the terms of its out-of-court settlement with former tenants, agreed to set aside 1,200 units of public housing in the new developments, fewer than 400 of these had been constructed as of March 2011.105 Regardless, blacks in this area were destined to become a relatively small minority in the future neighborhood. While Cabrini-Green was certainly riddled with problems—gangs, drug trafficking, sniper attacks—the black residents living there nonetheless were the only significant concentration of African Americans on Chicago’s Near North Side. Their removal cleared the way for a two-kilometer-long stretch of uninterrupted, overwhelmingly white middle-class affluence that began at the Lake Michigan shoreline and ended at the banks of the North Branch of the Chicago River, where a large cluster of upscale condominiums had been growing rapidly since the late 1990s. Touring the so-called River North area today, one would be hard-pressed to find diversity of any meaningful kind.
Launched in early 2000, the CHA’s Plan for Transformation was initially conceived of as a response to decades of public housing mismanagement—more specifically, to the fact that in 1998 19,000 of the CHA’s units had failed “viability inspection” and thus, according to federal law, had to be demolished within five years. This was the latest chapter in a horror story of Chicago public housing that began back in the 1940s and 1950s.106 The situation had reached a low point in the mid-1980s, when the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) cut the city’s funding by 76 percent, causing the CHA to run a $1 billion maintenance backlog that included more than 30,000 unfulfilled work orders. If all this was not serious enough, the CHA had also been dragging its feet on complying with the 1969 Gautreaux order, which mandated that any new public housing had be located outside predominantly low-income black ghetto neighborhoods. At the time of the lawsuit, the CHA managed sixty-four projects containing some 30,000 units; sixty of the projects were 99.5 percent black, and the other four were 95 percent white.107 By 1987, a federal court had placed the CHA in receivership, assigning the Habitat Company to control its operations. Habitat’s subsequent performance drew some sharp criticism—one study, for example, found that over half of the units created under its control were located in census tracts that were at least 60 percent Latino—and the city regained control of the CHA in 1999, winning HUD’s approval for its massive plan to rehabilitate or rebuild 25,000 public housing units, most within mixed-income developments.108
Much of the funding for this project came from the federal government’s Hope IV program, whose main objective was to promote the replacement of “ghettos in the sky” with low-rise, pedestrian-friendly, mixed-income communities. This new mixed-income approach was obviously destined to pave the way for gentrification and for the kind of dramatic racial conversion of urban space that usually accompanies it. Baldwin’s notion of “negro removal” comes quickly to mind when one considers that the demolitions of Chicago’s three largest housing projects—the Robert Taylor Homes, ABLA, and Cabrini-Green—displaced nearly 50,000 African Americans from areas bordering some very desirable real estate.109 While various groups of tenants pressed their claims in court for adequate numbers of replacement units and for their “right to return,” the Plan for Transformation called for a net loss of some 6,000 units, and with uncertainties surrounding occupancy dates for some of the new developments, most former tenants had little choice but to take their Section 8 vouchers and move elsewhere.110 And “elsewhere,” according to scholars examining relocation patterns, usually meant either other low-income ghetto neighborhoods or economically depressed black suburbs like Harvey, Illinois, around the city’s southern border.111 Moreover, according to sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh, the CHA lost track of some 40 percent of the families displaced by the demolitions.112
In theory, the mixed-income communities envisioned by the plan would bring together a roughly equal mix of low-, middle-, and even high-income residents, an arrangement that would ideally serve to lift up the poor, who would acquire the kind of social and cultural capital that sociologists like William Julius Wilson had been arguing was lacking in black ghetto neighborhoods. But such objectives began to appear farfetched from the outset, when a number of incidents in some of the first mixed-income communities began to suggest that rather than creating functional communities of rich and poor, tenant and homeowner, black and white, the CHA’s mixed-income solution was setting up a war of attrition between homeowners and renters in which the latter were sure to lose. The scenario resembled that which unraveled in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. According to Adolph Reed Jr., the many poor African Americans stranded on rooftops and then callously disregarded by the city’s postflood reconstruction program revealed that in the “ownership society” so valorized by President George W. Bush, class and property ownership had become the most important determinants of political interest and power. “Property owners,” Reed claimed, “are able to assert their interests in the polity, while non-owners are nearly as invisible in civic life now as in the early eighteenth century.”113
Dispatches from the mixed-income gentrification frontier in Chicago offered compelling evidence for this view. For example, in the Roosevelt Square development, one of the first of several developments to be constructed to replace ABLA near Little Italy, homeowners revolted in opposition to a plan to build more rental units. According to reporters observing a meeting in late May 2010, a vocal group of largely white homeowners expressed great fears about a drop in property values, complaining about the drug-dealing, violence, and the increasing number of security cameras they felt would come with the addition of rental units. “The real question,” Second Ward alderman Bob Fioretti countered, “is whether you are afraid to cross the street because there is a black guy on the other side.”114
Such conflicts suggest that white homeowners living in these communities were continuing to oppose racial integration, as they had in Chicago since the late nineteenth century. As in the past, city authorities appeared ready to provide vital assistance towards this end. In the case of Chicago’s new mixed-income communities, this aid came in the form of a draconian Admissions and Continued Occupancy Policy designed to discipline and punish low-income black residents, ultimately providing fodder for those aiming to argue for increased owner-occupied units. For example, CHA compliancy rules required public housing residents to prove that they were employed at least twenty hours per week or face eviction, and tenants faced removal if convicted of a single felony or even if a relative or guest was arrested on the premises for drug use or violent behavior.115 In the spring of 2011 the CHA demonstrated how far it was willing to take this policy when its CEO Lewis Jordan announced a proposal to subject subsidized housing residents to annual drug testing—a requirement that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) claimed violated the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protection against police searches without probable cause. To return to a point made earlier in this chapter, that Jordan, an African American, was the face of this controversial policy helped to defuse charges of racism.
It was through such tactics that City Hall under Richard M. Daley’s stewardship wielded great power over the production of space in Chicago, and the power it wielded was invariably turned towards the goal of producing the kind of space that created conditions for further development, higher tax yields, and kickbacks in the form of political contributions. While this was not exactly a new development in Chicago’s history, it is important to note how the interface of power became more diffuse during the high era of neoliberalization, extending far beyond the downtown business district and into the furthest reaches of the city, where local elites of all colors served as “brokers” or “middlemen” for gentrification policies.116 The state, moreover, added new forms of power to its arsenal in the 1990s—not merely those involving the
flexible allocation of funds and modification of zoning regulations but also intrusive policing powers over the conduct of low-income residents. To be sure, public housing residents faced such regulations in the past, but in the quasi-private context of mixed-income neighborhoods, such powers took on new meaning. In the housing projects of old, residents stood on relatively equal footing; in Chicago’s emerging mixed-income developments, subsidized housing tenants were forced to deal with the stigmatization created by being subjected to a different set of rules from their homeowning neighbors—specifically those regarding barbecuing, pets, and the proper use of balconies. One low-income resident described the situation:
They watch you come in and they watch you go out. The cameras. The cameras. And if anything goes wrong and they pull you in the office, they’re going to tell you every detail . . . ‘Cause the [property manager] told us, she said there’s some other people in here paying some good, tall money for staying here, and they ain’t gonna let nobody just, you know, mess up the deal. They’ll throw you out and put somebody else in here.117
Although it would be misleading to understate the impact of policies emanating from City Hall in the making of Chicago’s neighborhoods and communities, it would also be misleading to give the local state the final word in the story. Some scholars have called Chicago the “immigrant capital of the heartland,” and the nearly 700,000 immigrants (1.4 million in the six-county Chicago metropolitan area) that had settled there by 2000 had a major impact in reshaping its social geography.118 By 2010, more than one in five Chicagoans was foreign-born, and many of these immigrants had, as a result of their propensity to settle among those with whom they shared linguistic and cultural affinities, served as active agents in the process of inscribing these affinities within neighborhood spaces throughout the city. Immigrants arriving in Chicago beginning in the 1970s—after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act overhauled the country’s exclusionary national-origins quotas and ushered in a system based on family reunification and occupational skills—reinforced existing ethnoracial communities and created new ones throughout much of the city. Generally speaking, by the late 1990s the only areas of the city not bearing the physical markings of the immigrant population—countless foreign-language signs fronting businesses, restaurants, community associations, churches, and mosques—were the solidly black neighborhoods of the West and South Sides and the overwhelmingly white ones stretching along the lakefront from the Loop up through the Lakeview area.
Mexicans had become, far and away, the largest immigrant group in the city by 2010, when Chicago’s nearly 600,000 people of Mexican origin gave it the third largest Mexican population in the United States after Los Angeles and Houston. Roughly half the city’s foreign-born population had arrived from Latin America, with Mexicans accounting for over 85 percent of all Latino immigrants, and this numerical strength left its mark on the city’s social geography. Over the course of the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century, the two West Side Mexican enclaves of West Town–Humboldt Park and Pilsen–Little Village (South Lawndale) spread northward and southward respectively, creating two clusters of Mexican residential concentration where people of Mexican origin came to constitute more than 35 percent of the population in each community area. This pattern of settlement strikingly revealed that Mexicans steered clear of the heart of the West Side ghetto, settling in large numbers throughout much of the rest of Chicago’s West Side, from Albany Park all the way down to the Back of the Yards area around 51st Street. The Mexican aversion to settling in and around black neighborhoods—an aversion shared by Chicago’s next largest Latino group, Puerto Ricans—was so strong that by 2000 Chicago displayed the highest degree of segregation between blacks and Latinos among the hundred largest cities in the United States, with a black-Latino dissimilarity index 30 percent higher than that of New York and nearly 40 percent higher than that of Los Angeles.119 While Mexican–Puerto Rican dissimilarity was moderate by comparison, segregation between these two groups was nonetheless higher in Chicago than in any of the other cities with significant populations of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. Moreover, according to the Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research, Chicago ranked first among the sixty most segregated metropolitan areas for Latino-Asian segregation.120 While Mexicans were more able and willing to settle among whites in Chicago (the Mumford Center ranked Chicago sixth for white-Latino segregation), communities like Pilsen–Little Village, with its nearly 90 percent concentration of Mexicans, seemed to speak volumes about the dynamics of ethnic clustering that were playing out in Chicago at the turn of the twenty-first century.
FIGURE 19. A mural of Benito Pablo Juárez García on 18th Street in Pilsen. RosaIreneBetancourt 8/Alamy Stock Photo.
Indeed, many other of the city’s largest foreign-born groups—the Chinese, Poles, and Indians—gravitated towards ethnoracial enclaves between the 1970s and 1990s, creating port-of-entry neighborhoods that still attract large numbers of immigrants today. In the case of the Chinese, whose population numbered just 7,000 in 1960, this period of accelerated immigration led to the emergence of a well-defined Chinatown neighborhood of Chinese restaurants, bakeries, travel agencies, and boutiques just south of the Loop around the intersection of Wentworth and Cermak Avenue, marked by the famous red-and-gold Chinatown Gate. While most of Chinatown, strictly defined, lay primarily within the Armour Square community area, the 15,000-member Chinese community here spread westward into the Daley family’s old Irish stronghold of Bridgeport, where by 2000 the Chinese and Mexican populations had reached 26 percent and 30 percent respectively (while blacks continued to remain virtually absent). During the late 1970s, moreover, another Chinese neighborhood developed quickly in the North Side Uptown neighborhood after Chinese businessman Jimmy Wong, a representative of the Hip Sing Tong, bought a strip of commercial real estate on Argyle Street between Broadway and Sheridan. By the 1980s, the area had received a large influx of immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos—many of them ethnic Chinese—fleeing the postwar refugee crisis across Southeast Asia. Yet, this area—referred to by some as New Chinatown and by others simply as Argyle—largely failed to develop as a rival to the old Chinatown, which by 2010 possessed more than half the Chinese population living within the Chicago city limits.
Several other leading immigrant groups in Chicago created cohesive ethnic enclaves between the 1980s and 2010s. By 2010, Chicago was home to some 25,000 South Asian Indians, for example, and roughly one quarter of them lived around the diverse West Devon Avenue on the far North Side of the city, where Indian restaurants and stores selling everything from saris to Bollywood videos dominated a commercial strip that brought together Pakistani bakeries, Islamic bookstores, and kosher restaurants. Moreover, many of the substantial number of former Indian residents who had moved into Skokie, Lincolnwood, and other of Chicago’s more affluent northern suburbs continued to frequent West Devon to buy ethnic goods and stay in touch with the community.121 Similar arrangements also characterized the “Korea Town” neighborhood (officially designated as Seoul Drive by the city council in 1993), which stretched along Lawrence Avenue, between Kedzie and Pulaski, in the Albany Park community area, a few miles southwest of West Devon. Like West Devon, the area around Seoul Drive was a place of great ethnoracial diversity—one of the most ethnically diverse in the United States. Korean restaurants, groceries, and other businesses were prominent, but they shared the street with Mexican bakeries and taquerias, as well Middle Eastern food stores and hookah bars. In fact, Koreans constituted only about 15 percent of the population of the community area surrounding Korea Town. And yet ethnic ties exerted a relatively strong gravitational pull. According to one estimate, some 35,000 Koreans (out of a total of 45,000 in the city) had settled within easy reach of Seoul Drive, in the nearby community areas of Lincoln Square, Edgewater, Uptown, West Ridge, and Rogers Park.122 Finally, during the 1980s and 1990s Arab and Assyrian immigrants, many arriving on refugee visas, ha
d grouped together in what some referred to as “Little Arabia” communities on both the Northwest and Southwest Sides. The heart of the North Side Arab and Assyrian community, which mixed Iraqis, Assyrians, Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians, and Lebanese, lay in the midst of Korea Town, at Lawrence and Kedzie, an area marked by a concentration of Middle Eastern restaurants, groceries, and hookah bars.123 An older Arab neighborhood existed around the handful of mosques and Middle Eastern restaurants around Kedzie and 63rd that served Palestinians and Jordanians living in the immediate community areas of Chicago Lawn and Gage Park and in the nearby suburbs of Bridgeview and Oak Lawn.
MAP 8. Ethnic Chicago, 2000.
However, perhaps no ethnic group in Chicago created a more cohesive port-of-entry neighborhood during this moment than the city’s Poles. Over 100,000 Poles migrated to the Chicago area between 1972 and 2000, giving metropolitan Chicago the largest concentration of Poles in the United States. With over one hundred ethnic associations, several radio and television stations, and numerous magazines and newspapers, Chicago’s Polish community (referred to as Chicago Polonia) became one of the largest and most active nodes of Polish culture in the world. Polish immigrants exhibited a strong preference for city life, even if, thanks to their whiteness, they did not have to deal with some of the racial barriers that other immigrants faced in their attempts to settle in certain suburbs. Throughout the first decade of this Polish immigration wave, the “Polish Triangle” around the intersection of Milwaukee, Division, and Ashland in Wicker Park served as the cultural center of Polonia. Anchoring the neighborhood was the powerful St. Stanislaus Kostka parish, which had been founded in 1867 and by the 1940s had grown into one of the country’s largest parishes. But in the early 1990s, with Polish immigration to Chicago peaking at a rate of some 11,000 per year, the advance of gentrification in West Town began to push working-class Poles northwest up Milwaukee Avenue to a more affordable Polish enclave in the Avondale community area.
Chicago on the Make Page 42
