POLITICS
The Dispersal of Black Chicago
A new report explores how and why Chicago, and the South Side, is losing its Black population BY JACQUELINE SERRATO
A
t one point, Chicago was the land of opportunity for millions of Black Americans who were leaving the Jim Crow South. The industrial city expanded rapidly through the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, as waves of Black Southerners sought economic opportunity in Chicago and permanently settled in the city. However, a combination of factors, including the collapse of the manufacturing sector and discriminatory policies, according to a recent report on changing Black Chicago demographics from the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Since then, Black communities in Chicago have lost about 350,000 residents. The breakdown of population by race demonstrates an inverse relationship between white and Black population changes, not just recently, but historically. According to the report, between 1990 and 2016, neighborhoods that experienced an increase in white residents saw a decrease in Black residents, and neighborhoods that experienced an increase in Black residents saw a decrease in white residents. Similarly, from the fifties through the seventies— when the Black population was at its peak—local, state, and federal governments developed pristine suburbs and incentivized white residents to move their families to greener pastures, and the white population in Chicago fell by nearly 900,000. When so many white Chicagoans left, private interests and every level of government decreased their investment in the city. “Inequity is built into the fabric of Chicago during and after the Great
Migration. [The] segregation of Black residents to the Black Belt, and the subsequent economic disinvestment from these communities, had enduring effects that would surface more prominently in the 1980s and beyond,” said report co-author Amanda Lewis, a UIC sociology professor and director of the institute, at an event held on UIC’s campus last month. Population loss coincided with the loss of manufacturing jobs. Black residents relied on employment in Chicago’s factories on the South and West Sides during the midtwentieth century, and were hit particularly hard when manufacturing companies that previously employed tens of thousands of people shut their doors. According to UIC’s Great Cities Institute, in 1947, at the peak of manufacturing employment in Chicago, there were 667,407 manufacturing jobs; by 2014, the number had dropped to 110,445. “In these same neighborhoods where the manufacturing jobs left, where there’s concentrations of segregated populations, primarily Black populations, the numbers of joblessness is extraordinarily high… and we’re still feeling the impacts of the decline in manufacturing,” said Teresa Córdova, director of the Great Cities Institute, at the same event in January. “So the real question then becomes: as the economy continues to change, how are we going to build an inclusive economy?” In particular, the report claims the destruction of the city’s public housing during the 1990s and early 2000s is “undoubtedly a factor” contributing to the displacement of Black residents in several communities: the Robert Taylor Homes, Cabrini-Green, Stateway Gardens, Ida B.
THE INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH ON RACE AND PUBLIC POLICY AT UIC
Wells Homes, Jane Addams Homes, Harold Ickes Homes, Grace Abbott Homes, Henry Horner Homes, Randolph Towers, and Loomis Courts. Dispersing these concentrations of Black residents was the first step in the Chicago Housing Authority’s $1.6 billion Plan for Transformation. “At the core was an ambitious experiment of social engineering called mixed-income housing,” said Lisa Yun Lee, director of the National Public Housing Museum, of the CHA’s sweeping plan to reshape the city’s public housing. “It is clear that by creating mixed-income developments and a voucher system for long-term rent subsidy contracts in privately owned developments, the city intentionally shifted much responsibility for housing and management to the private sector.” While previous studies have found that
Black neighborhoods in Chicago do not typically gentrify, at least not in the same way as Latinx communities, the report found that the rising cost of living is making it difficult for Black residents to remain in the city, and the report projects it will only to worsen with massive developments like the Obama Presidential Center. “It is notable that the neighborhoods with the largest increase in whites and the largest decrease in Blacks are all located near downtown (Near North Side, Near South Side, Near West Side) or with direct access to downtown through public transportation via L trains (West Town, Logan Square, Lake View, Uptown),” the report reads. The researchers cited work by the Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, which concluded that, despite Chicago’s Fair Housing Ordinance and the
FEBRUARY 19, 2020 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19
