WBEZ: The city’s middle class, once the backbone of Chicago, is declining so swiftly that it’s almost gone

Back to one of the subjects this blog had hoped to cover, the middle class. Chicago's middle class is shrinking according to this article from WBEZ. Increasingly Chicago is becoming home to not only higher income people, also lower income people as well.

The city’s middle class, once the backbone of Chicago, is declining so swiftly that it’s almost gone https://t.co/re8FwcZnT9 pic.twitter.com/1NB5kt8n6z

— WBEZ (@WBEZ) February 19, 2019

Chicago has long been defined by its stubborn racial segregation, but income segregation is “more extreme now” than in the past, Smith said.

Many of the neighborhoods that were middle income in 1970 are now lower income.

“But what's been more striking is a significant increase in high-income people moving into the city,” Smith said.

Just 8 percent of Chicago's census tracts were considered high or very high income in 1970. Today, more than one-fifth of the city’s census tracts are higher income.

 

Curbed: Why U.S. cities need more multi-racial, mixed-income neighborhoods

This is something you might have seen on the national Curbed site yesterday. You may have even seen this as a link on Curbed Chicago also.

Why U.S. cities need more multi-racial, mixed-income neighborhoods. https://t.co/YsRVHdAyOc pic.twitter.com/KoY8cbmQuO

— Curbed (@Curbed) August 21, 2018

The report concludes that the U.S. currently has 1,300 neighborhoods home to about 7 million Americans which qualify as diverse, mixed-income communities. Many of these neighborhoods are in three U.S. cities—New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles—but a detailed map that accompanies the study reveals that of the 52 most populous metropolitan areas, about 80 percent have at least one neighborhood which fits this description.

There is growing consensus that integration is key to promoting a wide range of positive outcomes for all residents by improving access to economic opportunity. More integrated communities give more people better connections to jobs, schools, and civic resources.

Integration is also important from a fiscal perspective as cities are adversely affected by the financial burdens of segregation. A 2017 study by the Urban Institute and the Metropolitan Policy Center of the Chicago metropolitan area found that segregation cost the city of Chicago more than $4 billion annually.

Could it be integration will be the key to changing some of Chicago's neighborhoods? Especially the most violent neighborhoods?

Just bear in mind not just ethnic/race integration, but income integration. So-called upper, middle, or low incomes.

BTW, read the whole thing! 

Decline of Black Chicago

Also known as: "How the Great Migration to Chicago became the Great Black Exodus" written by Alden Loury a senior editor for WBEZ

In its many forms — individual, institutional, structural and systemic — racism has blocked the flow of African Americans into certain communities and isolated them in others.

The restrictive covenants, redlining and white flight of yesterday have been replaced by stiff resistance to affordable housing, high-cost housing that effectively prices out some people of color, disinvestment in communities of color regardless of their economic heft, and more white flight.

Practically shunned by all others, homes and businesses in many South Side and West Side neighborhoods draw interest only from African Americans. That means a constricted market for homebuyers and business owners, resulting in lower market demand, fewer customers and lower values.

Almost a decade after the latest recession, some black neighborhoods in Chicago are still waiting on economic recovery.

Found this through the e-mails of The Daily Line! Often lots of goodies there and if you're so inclined they have subscription service also! 

Marynook 1962: "Decision at 83rd Street"

[VIDEO] 56 years ago Hugh Hill produced this documentary for CBS Chicago (or WBBM-TV) looking at racial integration in Marynook. On the other hand, what is seen here is an anatomy of "white flight". It's mentioned that realtors are "block busting" they're attempting to stir fears in white homeowners that Blacks are coming to buy homes on their blocks. Of course as we know in the 50+ years most of the south side is mostly Black today.

I can consider the many communities of the south side that since the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, or even 1980s experienced white flight. We can talk about Englewood, Woodlawn, Chatham, South Shore, Roseland, or Auburn Gresham. All of those communities experienced this "white flight".

I also want to note the example of Pill Hill - remember this was a neighborhood that at one point had a high prevalance of doctors working at a nearby hospital. I would recommend this book The South Side: The Racial Transformation of an American Neighborhood to see another angle to white flight. I had checked this book out of the library over a decade ago. The author contacted me years ago to clarify some points I made on another blog.

Crain's: Here's how to reverse the damage of segregation

Published in Crain's Chicago Business on Tuesday morning:

The [Metropolitan Planning Council] used the help of 110 advisers and experts to draw up the recommendations, all of which view the city through "the lens of racial equity," Barrett says. Among the recommendations:

• Enact a city earned income tax credit for working households, to augment state and federal earned income tax credits. This would generate $218 million in spending from working families, according to the study. 

• Reduce local control over affordable housing decisions. If a ward has less than 10 percent affordable housing, a city council member shouldn't have the ability to reject or delay proposed residential developments that have affordable housing components. 

• Increase Chicago Housing Authority vouchers to expand options for affordable housing. Expanding the vouchers to 200 percent of fair market rent in certain areas could add 3,377 more housing units to the market. 

• End criminal justice system policies that adversely affect poor people. Among these is requiring a money bond for minor offenses, as people who can't afford bond can spend months or even years in jail while awaiting trial. Eliminating unnecessary pretrial detention could save $198 million a year. The report also suggests implicit-bias training for all involved in the criminal justice system. 

...

• Use equity as a key factor, along with safety, delay reduction and ridership, when making transportation decisions in the Chicago metro area. "The South Side doesn't have the same level of rapid transit service," says Kate Lowe, assistant professor of urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, one of the 110 advisers who worked on the recommendations. "Extending the Red Line would help." Transportation, she adds, intersects with all the systems that shape residents' lives: jobs, education, health care and employment. 

Put into place over two years, the recommendations could add $4.4 billion in income for African-American communities, which would in turn generate $8 billion for the local economy. The measures would add 83,000 bachelor's degrees and reduce homicides by 30 percent. If nothing is done, and the city continues on its current trajectory of segregation, income disparity will widen: The area will see a 17 percent drop in its African-American population, a 12 percent rise in the number of households earning below $30,000 a year, and a 42 percent increase in households earning more than $125,000 a year.

 Interesting?

WBEZ: Is Notoriously Segregated Chicago Becoming More Integrated?

To really look at the point of this article, let's look at the Ashburn community of the south side. How truly integrated is this part of the city

But while the data suggests there are six more integrated communities in Chicago today than there were in the 1990s, the maps and the numbers don’t tell us if residents actually feel integrated.

That’s why we went to Ashburn, a middle-class community of 40,000 people located on Chicago’s Southwest Side. It’s almost in the suburbs, and feels like it, with row upon row of bungalow homes and manicured lawns.

Ashburn was nearly all white 27 years ago, but today it’s a mixed community of blacks, Latinos and whites. It’s also the only neighborhood in Chicago with a dominant black population to add black residents from 2000 to 2010, at a time when black people have been leaving the city in droves.

If you visited Ashburn in 1990, more than four in five Ashburn residents would have been white.

Now, it’s about half black, 38 percent Latino and 13 percent white.

Ashburn’s white population declined rapidly after black people began moving into the area in large numbers in the 1980s. Today, whites continue to leave, and blacks are still moving in, along with Latinos.
...
Like Chicago, Ashburn is divided by invisible racial lines.

It’s almost like there are two neighborhoods within the official community area, one predominantly black and segregated and the other largely Latino with most of the white population sprinkled in. On the east side of Ashburn, at Dan’s Soul Food, owner Dolph Norris says integration is happening in Ashburn, “but it’s basically still segregated.”

“Hispanics [mostly] live west of Pulaski, and then African-Americans live east of Pulaski,” says Norris, who is black. “And you can tell by just walking and going to the parks.”

Loury says that while Ashburn is a diverse community, he takes “integration” to mean a more substantial mixing of people of different groups.

“Essentially what we're seeing [in Ashburn] is that they're all in the same space defined by a border, but they're not necessarily living amongst one another,” he says.

You can see the divisions between blacks and Latinos on a map of Ashburn — and you can also see them by walking around the community, according to Fernando Serna, who is Mexican-American and owns an auto body shop in Ashburn.

Serna says there’s a vibe in the neighborhood he calls: “You do your thing and I do my thing.”

So two or more groups merely living in a community area but in different parts isn't integration. It's not many different ethnicities living on the same block.

Click on the link in the embed tweet below and read the whole thing.

Why less segregated doesn't always mean more integrated: https://t.co/FNJNKjfpaq @WBEZ

— Rachel E. Gross (@rachelegross) July 31, 2017

Tribune: Chicago area pays steep price for segregation, study finds

Another article I saw referred to Chicago as "Balkanized" i.e. divided. There's a price to this division:

The seven-county area's murder rate could be cut by 30 percent, its economy could churn out an additional $8 billion in goods and services and its African-American residents could earn another $3,000 a year if it could reduce racial and economic segregation to the median level for the nation's largest metro areas.

And 83,000 more residents could have earned bachelor's degrees, spurring another $90 billion in collective lifetime earnings.

Those were the findings of a study by the Metropolitan Planning Council, a Chicago-based public policy research group, and the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank.

The Capitol Fax has more on this and the full study.

WTTW: Segregation and Racial Barriers on Chicago's South Side

Last week WBEZ's Natalie Moore was on WTTW's Chicago Tonight to talk about her book The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation. The book is based on her experience, but it discusses how segregation on the south side shapes our city. Have you read Moore's book?

UPDATE @ 11:33 AM The Tribune did an article discussing Moore's book earlier this month.

#MBMHMC I don’t live in Chi-Raq, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist

This report is via My Block My Hood My City by their head of data, Matthew Pietrus. The map above chronicles homicide hotspots throughout Chicago:

After analyzing homicides locations in conjunction with demographic data, I found that of these thousands of homicides from 2010-2015, two thirds of them occurred in neighborhoods that are two thirds or more black. Compared to just over 12% in predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods and under 2% in predominantly white neighborhoods, it is clear that violence is not equally shared.

Unfortunately, this is not news. Most Chicagoans understand the disparities that exist in the city so studies like these can seem repetitive. But the significance of this map, and other studies like it, lies not in the data displayed on its surface but in the social interactions that create it. While what is occurring is certainly of importance, only in understanding why something is occurring can change happen.

That is why the story this map tells, the story of Chi-Raq, is an important one.

With the mention of that term, many readers may have moved on from this piece, and with understandable frustration. With massive clusters of homicides isolated in the South and West sides of the city, to many Chicagoans, Chi-Raq, the city more deadly than a warzone, is not the city they know nor is it the reality they face. For this reason, there has been constant backlash to the city’s new name, dating from the term’s inception to Spike Lee’s recent film. However, is this image of Chicago really a misrepresentation? More importantly, is our outcry over the term Chi-Raq really more important than the larger socioeconomic, racial, and violent disparities that it brings up?

Conclusion:

Similarly, for city officials and community members to continue a blasé approach towards reading these stories is a form of complicity, permitting the city to continue its violent polarization. Instead of becoming numb to statistics and these stories, we instead need to mobilize when Chicagoans like Bettie Smith, Quintonio LeGrier, and Tyshawn Lee are killed. We need to call our aldermen, protest, and make our dissention known.

In the end, this map tells the story of Chicago’s segregation. This story is not just one depicting a lack of cultural integration but one telling of a social isolation which disproportionately impacts black communities. But just because this may not be the story of your Chicago does not mean it is a story you should ignore.

Now how do we change this idea of violent polarization in those violent communities?

Mahalia Jackson’s Home

Mahalia Jackson's home - 8358 S. Indiana Ave.

I missed this post from Chicago History Today posted in September talking about the history of the famed gospel singer Mahalia Jackson who purchase the house you see above in Chatham in 1956. The Chatham of the 1950s was a different community and it wasn't a Black middle-class neighborhood as it's known today.

When Ms. Jackson moved into this house there was racial tension, however, ultimately the whites in this community moved out. The fear that this community would become a ghetto proved to be incorrect.

An unknown to me tidbit shared from Chicago History Today, this house was home to a white surgeon who declared that he would be proud to sell his home to Jackson. Unfortunately many of his then neighbors disagreed.

Ward Room: Why Chicago Is America's Murder Capital

Ed McClelland writing for the Chicago politics section on the website of our local NBC affiliate talks with a retired police lieutenant to discuss the root cause of violence on our city streets:

The other day, I had a conversation with a retired police lieutenant, who explained to me that Chicago’s history of segregation reverberates to this day with street violence unparalleled in any big city.

Going back over 100 years, African-Americans were confined to a narrow strip of the South Side known as the Black Belt. As they migrated north in greater numbers, during and after World War II, the borders of the Black Belt remained the same, while the black population increased dramatically. Instead of allowing them to settle in white neighborhoods, Chicago politicians tried to cram as many as possible into their existing turf. Hence the creation of housing projects, such as the Robert Taylor Homes and the Ida B. Wells Homes. And of Chicago's reputation as the most segregated city in America.

The Vice Lords and the Gangster Disciples developed inside the projects, the lieutenant explained, and used them as strongholds to control drug sales for miles around. The projects were demolished in the 1990s and 2000s. Partly, that was because of the gang violence going on inside -- the killing of 7-year-old Dantrell Davis, accidentally gunned down in a gang crossfire, is referred to as “the shot that brought the projects down.”

When the projects disappeared, the gang culture born inside them didn’t. The gangbangers dispersed throughout the city, but without the projects, their organizing structure was gone. Gang lords operating out of the projects had controlled as many 500 members, allowing them to settle turf disputes and keep a lid on violence that might have drawn unwanted police attention to their drug enterprises.

Now, instead of a few well-organized gangs controlling entire neighborhoods, we have dozens of small gangs fighting over drug-sale territory as small as a street corner.

OK well I wish there was an easy answer for something that it appears no one has a great appetite to really fix. Well at least segregation now, but sadly it's even more difficult to cause something that's very deep.

Should Emanuel move to Englewood? Satire?

In discussing this Chicago Reader piece at Curbed Chicago it was considered satire. It does look like satire in fact and certainly unlike anything ever proposed in this city before. The writer of this piece Steve Boigra is a genius for this one!

The aides said the mayor had considered several other approaches for combating segregation. The boldest plan called for Emanuel to challenge segregation personally by moving to a poor black neighborhood.

City housing officials had chosen a vacant, foreclosed, three-bedroom home in Englewood, near the Halsted stop on the Green Line, for the mayor's consideration. Englewood is 99 percent black, 45 percent of its residents are living in poverty, and 26 percent are in extreme poverty—they're living on incomes below half of the poverty line. The neighborhood's per capita income between 2006 and 2010 was about $12,000. Twenty-nine percent of its residents age 25 and older did not have a high school diploma, and 21 percent were unemployed.

The mayor lives in the western edge of Lake View, a predominantly white neighborhood whose per capita income, $58,000, is fifth in the city and almost five times Englewood's. Less than 3 percent of its residents age 25 and older lacked a high school diploma, and less than 5 percent were unemployed.

The annual homicide rate in Englewood, adjusted for age, was 47.5 per 100,000 residents. In Lake View, it was 2.2.

The mayor's aides said he initially liked the Englewood idea because of the publicity potential. They said he voiced his willingness to live there "as long as it takes—a week, ten days." But he balked at the suggestion that he also pull his three children out of the University of Chicago Lab School and send them to the local public school, Bass elementary, at 66th and Racine. Bass's enrollment is 99 percent black and 97 percent low income, and the school is on probation for its poor academic performance. The mayor said he was confident his children would get a "first-rate" education at Bass, now that the school day is longer. But he didn't want to disrupt their Lab School friendships.

The Englewood plan ultimately was dropped because it was too reminiscent of Mayor Jane Byrne's move into the Cabrini-Green housing project in 1981. Mayor Byrne had left her high-rise condo near the Magnificent Mile for Cabrini because she was disturbed by the project's rampant crime. She'd promised to stay in the project "as long as it takes to clean it up.'' Police saturated Cabrini while she was there, and the project turned peaceful. But she returned to her condo a month later, the violence resumed, and her move was derided as a publicity stunt.

Burnside Academy history comes alive on Friday.

We blogged about him in January, as he was featured in the Chicago Suntimes about the desegregation effort that Burnside was a part of.

He will now discuss his story live with the current students of Burnside Academy. Kindergaretn - 4th grade will hear him from 8:30 ~ 9:30am.  At 9:35, the 5th - 8th graders will hear him speak.

Contact Burnside Scholastic Academy for details. Burnside is located at 650 E. 91st Place, with a phone number of (773) 535-3300;  Fax of (773) 535-3230;  Email =>  burnside650 (at) yahoo.com  ;  and the website is at http://www.burnsideacademy.net/

Tony Burroughs, outside of the Burnside School 650 E. 91st Place, where 50 years ago the first demonstration against Chicago Public Schools system of segregated and unequal education took place. Friday, January 13, 2012.
Brian Jackson~Sun-Times





Burnside Academy pivotal in School De-Segregation

The Burnside Scolastic Academy's Parent Advisory Council shared this article yesterday which highlighted Burnside's pivotal role in the civil rights struggle.

We are including the whole thing,as the Suntimes is installing a paywall which may deprive some readers of access.The link of the article is here.  they also have "online extras" here.

Tony Burroughs, outside of the Burnside School 650 E. 91st Place, where 50 years ago the first demonstration against Chicago Public Schools system of segregated and unequal education took place. Friday, January 13, 2012.
Brian Jackson~Sun-Times





It was a pivotal moment for Chicago’s racially separate and unequal Chicago Public Schools system.

But for then 12-year-old Tony Burroughs, the three-week sit-in by African-American parents and students at Burnside Elementary School — 50 years ago this month — was life-changing.

“Historians tend to look at the big picture,” says Burroughs, now 63 and a noted genealogist and author.

“You don’t hear a lot about the small sparks to the fire that ignited the Civil Rights movement. This spark ignited protests against the ‘Willis Wagons’ [portable classrooms] and eventually led to the 1963 citywide boycott of the Chicago Public Schools where 250,000 students stayed home,” he says of the incident that began on Jan. 2, 1962.

Spearheaded by the Burnside Parent Teacher Association — primarily its president Alma Coggs, member Zenia Gray, and Burroughs’ mother, Mary Ellen Burroughs — it fueled the school desegregation movement of the ’60s.

And the protests that followed, according to Chicago Urban League papers the University of Illinois Chicago Library holds in its Special Collections, in turn “focused the city’s attention on racial segregation and inequality, created a new militancy among many Chicagoans, and set the stage for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s decision to move his wing of the national civil rights movement to Chicago in 1966.”

READ THE WHOLE THING!

Anyone have any thoughts or memories?