Ethnic/racial shift in Englewood

Shared this Sun-Times article over the weekend. Englewood is changing one sign of that is not only Kennedy-King College that has been located at 63rd & Halsted since 2007, also the Whole Foods Market store that opened at 63rd & Halsted in September 2016.

Another sign of Englewood changing:

Now, there’s a new demographic shift in her neighborhood. African-Americans are leaving for better opportunities as a small-but-growing number of Hispanics move into Englewood and West Englewood, a community residents commonly call Greater Englewood.

Greater Englewood’s total population dropped from 71,740 in 2010 to an estimated 55,004 in 2017, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. During that time, the African-American population fell from 69,776 to 51,015 — a loss of nearly 19,000 residents. African-Americans still make up more than 90 percent of the population, but as some leave, the Hispanic population has tripled in size, from 845 people in 2010 to about 2,700 people by 2017.

What’s driving the influx? Cheap property, Williams said.
...
Overall, the bureau estimates Chicago’s African-American population dropped nearly 10 percent between 2010 and 2017, to 820,000. In that time, the Hispanic population grew nearly 5 percent, to 790,000.
...
Aysha Butler, president of Residents Association of Greater Englewood, said there has been little coalition-building between the two groups.

“It’s really hard to have the conversation when people are feeling that their Hispanic neighbors aren’t very neighborly,” Butler said. “I know a lot of my West Englewood members are very uneasy about this and I just hope eventually that we reach a common ground because unfortunately we’ve been taught to be divided and if we were working more closely together we probably would have a little more power.”

The history is interesting as noted in the above article Englewood in the 1960s & 1970s went from white to Black and now possibly Hispanic. And then couple this with the trend that Blacks are leaving Chicago.