HISTORICAL GLANCE

1944 CHICAGO MATERNITY CENTER

on NEWBURY AND MAXWELL

PULLMAN COMMUNITY

CHICAGO AVENUE AND ASHLAND

FOREWARD

BLACK CHICAGO… No group of individuals is better served to describe the plight, struggle, and ambition of a people than those directly impacted by the rise and fall of the established Black community since the 1900s. Neighborhood Development Initiatives, LLC will illustrate the unity of Black Chicago excellence in this extensive illustration of our historic and educated perspective, trials, tribulations, and our corporate successes, all intertwined with promise for Chicago’s underserved Black communities.

As commercial gentrification spreads throughout Downtown, Lincoln Park, the West Loop, Bronzeville, and other Chicago communities, the reality of the imminent upheaval of Chicago’s Black culture and history is upon us. The same is unfair because everyone deserves a safe place to live, work, and exist. We can transform the quality of life by rebuilding our neighborhoods and uplifting the economics of the residents.

Today, Chicago faces a major challenge providing safe and adequate communities for all residents, especially as affordable housing options are limited. Even those who earn steady wages are unable to buy or rent “affordable housing” in newly developed downtown and surrounding areas. Rents remain alarmingly high and out of line with incomes, forcing many to spend more than 50% of their income each month on housing. Key workers such as teachers, police officers, firefighters, and nurses cannot afford to live near the communities they serve and instead have to bear the costs in time and money spent commuting.

The extent of the affordable housing challenges in Chicago, particularly in disenfranchised, segregated, and disinvested communities, is shifting every day. There is increased interest from investors and developers to claim historic West and South Side land that has been neglected for nearly half a century. Furthermore, the same corporate maneuver will displace low-income residents in historically underserved communities. It will also outprice and displace hard-working middle-class residents who are indigenous to neighborhoods like Bronzeville, Englewood, Back of the Yards, North Lawndale, and East Garfield Park.

This seemingly inevitable fate for Black Chicago can be rebuffed by a healthy functioning housing market that requires actions addressing interdependencies on the supply side and stimulates interventions on the demand side. This Pilot Vision Plan illustrates the required reforms at each stage of the housing value chain – securing land, engaging local communities, and providing homes that are safe resilient, and sustainable. Here, a multi-stakeholder approach is needed to address Mayor Lightfoot’s calls for action from all entities involved – local officials, large developers with the “Affordable Requirements Ordinance” in areas with disproportionate rental values in comparison to resident income, and key stakeholders with a vested interest in preserving Chicago’s Urban “Black Belt “ on the South and West Sides of the City. Failure to execute the same will likely result in a mass exodus of key workers and other talented individuals due to inflated residential living costs. But most of all, the loss of historic and rich cultural history for Black Chicagoans. Historic neighborhoods richly populated by other ethnicities have not faced this issue.

HISTORIC BLACK CHICAGO FROM 1908

Chicago is rich in Black cultural history. Yet, few know of the true history of the bustling and thriving “Black Belts” of Chicago’s Black urban communities on the South Side and West Side. Today’s Chicago reflects its racial and economic history spanning the last 100 years. The most significant change to the Chicago landscape occurred at the start of the 20th century. From 1915 to 1970, Chicago experienced an unprecedented surge of Black migrants from the South. This movement, called the “Great Migration,” stemmed from the political unrest, economic oppression, and political disenfranchisement Southern Blacks experienced in the Jim Crow South. Publications like the Chicago Defender promised Blacks that Northern cities, like Chicago, were safe havens. Before the Great Migration, the Black population of Chicago was less than 2%. During World War I, however, the Black population more than doubled to around 100,000. As the movement drew to a close in the 1970s, Blacks made up a third of the city’s population.

Although Blacks were promised self-determination in Chicago, they met a starkly different reality. Many Black people did improve their incomes, yet it came with the all too familiar segregated neighborhoods, job discrimination, limited political voice, and racially motivated violence. Chicago’s power brokers resisted the Black migration, mostly by enforcing housing segregation and other legislation that separated. communities. Thus, many Blacks settled in segregated communities, mostly concentrated in the Southern portion of the city, from 22nd Street down to 51st – the so-called “Bronzeville.”

Much has been written about the impact that “Redlining,” both by private lenders and government agencies such as the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), has played in the legalization and institutionalization of racism and segregation. Redlining is the practice of denying or limiting financial services to certain neighborhoods based on racial or ethnic composition without regard to the resident’s qualifications or creditworthiness. White suburban areas were considered better credit risks, and thus received access to loans. The arrival of Black people in Chicago propelled “White Flight” to the suburbs, an option not available to Blacks because of restrictive covenants and blockbusting until the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which banned such policies. Mass deindustrialization in Chicago also resulted in widespread urban poverty. The collapse of U.S. Steel’s South Works, Wisconsin Steel Plants and other large factories, which had hired most of the working-class Blacks in Chicago, left behind thousands of lower-skilled and lower-educated Black families. Today, Chicago still struggles with racial and economic segregation due to over 50 years of neglect, undercapitalization, and lack of vision to revitalize and reinvigorate these historical communities. Whether one looks to the 1950’s and 1960’s flight of White Chicagoans to suburbia, or the overnight decimation of historic communities like Englewood, Bronzeville, East Garfield Park and North Lawndale following the 1968 King riots, the painful reality is that in 2020 these South and West side communities look almost exactly as they did 50 years ago. Sadly, the history of these communities is mirrored throughout Chicago’s predominantly African American communities. The maps on pages (7 thru 12) are evidence of the migration and changes in the demographics of neighborhoods from the early 1900 to the late 2000.