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In April of this year we
posted an animated map showing Chicago's vanishing middle-class. It was from the
City Notes website who's author - Daniel Kay Hertz - wrote a
recent op-ed to Crain's Chicago Business. That earlier map was interesting as it tracked the income of the many census tracts that make up the City of Chicago.
Now with the map you see above we show a different tact:
Where does Chicago's Black middle-class live?
To be sure, the Black middle-class lives throughout the city. They no longer just live in Chatham or Pill Hill although perhaps they were never the exclusive home of the Black middle-class. The maps shown in the Crain's op-ed seems to show the Black-led middle-class households but mainly measures them as a percentage or as numbers. Also they show maps of Asian, Latino, or white middle-class households in Chicago.
Even Mr. Hertz will admit that the maps provided are misleading and it's hard for me to believe that in some of the community areas there are Black middle-class people in those areas that aren't largely Black. The map you see above I would consider much more accurate.
Hertz offer these brief notes:
A FEW NOTES ON THE WHOLE THING
1. The black
middle class exists in Chicago. In large numbers. This shouldn't really
be news, but speaking in my capacity as a white person who knows a lot
of white people and other people of various ethnic backgrounds from the
North Side and suburbs and other parts of the country/world, it really
is.
2. Perhaps even more important, the vast majority of
Chicagoans who are both black and middle-class live on the South Side
and, to a lesser extent, the West Side.
3. The concentration of middle-class households varies dramatically from one black neighborhood to another.
4.
Still, the majority of Chicagoans who are middle-class and black live
in neighborhoods that are mostly not middle-class — as opposed to
Chicagoans who are middle-class and white, for whom the opposite is
true. In this way, Chicago is pretty similar to the rest of the country.
The
takeaway for me is that these maps contradict two of the biggest lies —
or, if we're being kind, misconceptions — about the social geography of
Chicago. The first is that the black neighborhoods of the South and
West sides are an undifferentiated landscape of economic hardship. This
is false in a couple of ways. For one, though there are many people who
are suffering for want of a decent wage in these areas, there are also
many thousands of households that are not (though they are likely still
disadvantaged by other consequences of segregation, including poor
access to jobs and basic amenities, higher crime, lower-performing
schools, etc.).
And here's another good point:
From a governance perspective, there are lots of reasons you'd want the
people in charge of a city to have an accurate impression of the
communities they're governing before they start making up policies for
them. But also, from a purely social point of view, the fact that most
non-black Chicagoans — and the vast majority of non-Chicagoans — can't
distinguish between the poorest pockets of the city and places like
Calumet Heights or Park Manor means that they won't ever visit, spend
money and certainly won't consider living in neighborhoods that they
likely would find generally pleasant. In short, it's hard to build much
of a local economy in a place that 75 percent of the population shuns
without even thinking about it.
Something to think about. Even then, what could residents of these "shunned" communities do to attract people to their neighborhoods even to just visit?
You should
read the whole thing when you get an opportunity.
