Is Chicago becoming Detroit?

IMHO, I think Chicago is a long way from that fate. That doesn't mean however that people out there still don't believe this regardless. Rich Miller of the CapFax does a good round-up today. Lately in the news we've been hearing about pensions, a court case, and a bond rating downgrade.

Today's middle-class readings...

Over the years decidedly I often posted articles that in general pertained to the middle-class with a strong interest in the Black middle-class. It's only appropriate since we wanted to be the neighborhood blog for the 6th Ward as historically that area has been home of Chicago's Black middle-class.

So recently I found two articles that hopefully you'll consider at your convenience. Although we would like to see articles about Chicago's Black middle-class, often I find articles about that same demographic from other cities. In this case one out of New York City and the other out of Detroit.

In the case of New York via the Wall Street Journal written last November:

New York City’s black upper-middle class is fading, while its populations of upper-class white singles and lower-income Hispanics are booming, according to a new report that adds to concerns about a struggling middle class and growing income divide.

Between 2000 and 2010, neighborhoods dominated by the city’s black upper-middle-class residents experienced an 18.9% population decline.

Places such as Woodlawn in the Bronx and Hollis in Queens that were once affluent enclaves of upwardly mobile African-Americans saw a growth in low-income black households at their fringes. These neighborhoods have also had high rates of foreclosure.

It seems that in some of Chicago's Black communities foreclosure has been a major issue. And this has also been a major issue apparently in the Bronx & Queens in New York.

Now here's Detroit from July 2013 via The New Yorker....strangely enough. Anyway it discusses the middle-class in general there, however, they start off with a Black couple who moved into a white neighborhood 40 years ago:

In 1973, Ron and Loretta Martin and their three sons moved into the yellow-brick Colonial across the street from my childhood home, on Detroit’s west side. My father greeted them warmly, despite the fact that most of our neighbors saw them as blockbusters, part of a nefarious conspiracy by civil-rights groups to force integration and break up tight-knit white enclaves. The Martins were one of the first black families on our block. It took a lot of courage to be pioneers, those black families who crossed the city’s racial frontier. And it also took extra money. Black pioneers, as I discovered years later when I wrote a book about Detroit, were usually better off financially than the white people they moved next to. They had to be. Brokers regularly charged blacks a premium to buy or rent in what they hoped would be a safe, secure, integrated neighborhood.

Ron and Loretta were pioneers in another way. He was a police officer, she was a school teacher, and both were at the vanguard of a new generation of black Americans who vaulted into the middle class through public employment. Today, government employment, however fragile, is the mainstay of Detroit’s economy. At the beginning of 2013, the public sector directly provided more than forty thousand jobs in the city. Among Detroit’s top five employers are the city itself, the Detroit public schools, and the federal government. By contrast, the last two automakers with substantial operations in the city, Chrysler and General Motors, employ only about four thousand workers each.

It was not always this way. For most of the city’s history, there weren’t many Ron and Loretta Martins. The traditional avenue to a life of at least modest comfort for black Detroiters—at least after the Second World War, when the factory gates opened up—was the auto industry. The jobs were unionized, and they offered generous health and pension benefits. For the refugees from Jim Crow who’d come to the city, it was a big step up from the drudgery of tenant farming or cleaning houses.

But by the time the Martins moved in, those blue-collar jobs were disappearing. Beginning in the early nineteen-fifties, Detroit steadily hemorrhaged manufacturing jobs, losing them to outlying suburbs, small towns, the Sunbelt, and, over time, to Canada, Mexico, and overseas. Today, there is only one auto-assembly plant fully within the boundaries of Detroit.

What do you all think? Could these articles relate to what's going on in Chicago?

WBEZ: Whole Foods plans to replicate Detroit success in Englewood

Midtown Detroit Whole Foods on June 5, 2013 via Huffington Post

This story shouldn't be much of a surprise. It's been two months since the news broke that Whole Foods Market is coming to Englewood. There was already talk that this store could resemble one that's open in the city of Detroit:

As the chain prepares to open a store at 63rd and Halsted, Englewood residents, movers and shakers can look to the Detroit store as an exmple of what to expect.

For example, before ground even broke on the Detroit location, residents expressed concern about jobs and transparency. In response, Whole Foods partnered with local nonprofits to hold information sessions on the hiring procecss. Today, 65 percent of the employees are native Detroiters.

Jobs weren’t the only concern. Pricing was, too. Austin says the company listened.

“If you come to Whole Foods Market and you buy artisan cheeses and artisan olive oil, then yeah, your grocery bill is going go climb," Austin said. "But if you come and shop staples, you shop our groceries, you shop produce [...] you’ll see we got bagged apples right now for $2.99 a bag.”

Bus driver Eva Turner lives in Detroit and didn’t frequent Whole Foods until this store opened. She loads her cart with pita bread, snap peas, apples, chicken gizzards and hummus.

“You can find some good bargains," she said. "For instance, they had the chicken thighs for $1.29 a pound, which is a good deal 'cause if you go to a regular store, that’s what you’re going to pay but it’s kind of fresher here.”
...
One of the players instrumental in gaining community credibility is holistic expert and Detroit native Versandra Kennebrew. Whole Foods offered free space to holistic providers, Kennebrew was one of them, and they hired her to conduct community outreach.

“The grand opening day of Whole Foods Market was a day in history for the company, said Kennebrew. "They sold more produce in one day on the grand opening day than than any store that opened in the history of Whole Foods Market."

Whole Foods officials won’t release store sales but they say the Detroit location has exceeded expectations.

Like Englewood, the city’s reputation elicited sourness when Whole Foods announced its plans.

“People outside view our community [...] think oh you come here I’m going to get mugged," said Carolyn Miller of Ser Metro Detroit, one of the agencies that helped Whole Foods recruit local employees. "[They say] we’re just despair. We’re not. We have people who want to eat organic food."

Khalilah Gaston runs a community development corporation in a neighborhood just north of the Detroit Whole Foods that aims to fight a history of disinvestment. She says Whole Foods has become a model for other projects coming to the neighborhood. The expectation of giving back is higher.

As always there is criticism:

Urban farmer Greg Willerer is one of them. He owns a city farm dubbed Brother Nature several miles away from the new Whole Foods, one of many new urban farms in the area that provide fresh food to residents.

He gives Whole Foods props for its strategic campaign, but he questions the $4.2 million in tax incentives the company received from the city.

“There’s this climate that Whole Foods is coming into where a lot of public money is being given to major corporations and all of these amazing black-owned businesses and other businesses in the city don’t get that kind of help," Willerer said. "Yet we call that development when a corporation comes in and puts up this brilliantly flashy sexy-looking store."

I suggest you read the whole thing and of course feel free to offer your thoughts here.

Chicagoist: How do we keep from becoming Detroit?

Well there are some bloggers who will claim that Chatham is becoming like Detroit. Then against we should be looking at the city as a whole and not just this neighborhood or that neighborhood. Here is an interesting conclusion from Chicagoist:

The Freep notes some potential solutions that are likely to be included in the report. And here, we can take some comfort. Chicago is already trying many of the fixes they have identified: while we don’t have the same potential, urban farming is alive and well here after some help from the City Council; we have already converted a sprawling brownfield into the nation's largest solar farm, hinting at both re-use and energy solutions for the future; the City Council and County Board have put aggressive vacant property ordinances in place that should, if they survive legal challenges, help properties change hands before they become community blights; and the City is already buying up properties to help stabilize some neighborhoods. And that stuff is all great, but unfortunately, some close to the Detroit effort concede that they do not think the projects being bandied about will be enough. If it's not going to be enough in Detroit (where demolition permits outnumber building permits 10:1), will it do the trick here (where one in 10 buildings are vacant)? Probably not.

Should this be applied to the city as a whole? Should this only be implemented on a neighborhood level?

Detroit's Hidden Gems

Courtesy of YouTuber, artistmac, we see him take a drive around Detroit's Outer Drive East and Chandler Park neighborhoods. I'll let him set this video up even further.

Decaying Detroit? The residents of Outer Drive East and Chandler Park aren't hearing that noise.

Take an 8-minute drive with me down a few streets in those two East Side Detroit communities. If those of you in the suburbs are thinking, "That looks like my neighborhood!", you're getting the idea. Some of these places are mini-castles. And the video camera doesn't do them justice.

And there are middle-class black neighborhoods like this all over the country -- Chatham in Chicago, Jefferson Park in Los Angeles, Strivers' Row in Harlem -- where the homeowners fight the good fight to keep where they live clean, green, safe and quiet.

And those of you who have written letters, gathered petitions, and faced down uncaring elected officials at community meetings know exactly what I'm talking about.

Well artistmac in that last paragraphy is only mentioning his own personal experience with officials in Chicago.