FEBRUARY 24, 2022
ARTS, CULTURE, POLITICS
SOUTHSIDEWEEKLY.COM
FREE
THE SEGREGATED CITY
PHOTO: Ken Carl
STORIES OF OUR CITY:
wttw.com / firsthand #FIRSTHANDwttw
SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent non-profit newspaper by and for the South Side of Chicago. We provide high-quality, critical arts and public interest coverage, and equip and develop journalists, artists, photographers, and mediamakers of all backgrounds. Editor-in-Chief
Volume 9, Issue 11 Jacqueline Serrato
Senior Editors Christopher Good Olivia Stovicek Sam Stecklow Martha Bayne Arts Editor Education Editor Housing Editor Community Organizing Editor Immigration Editor
Isabel Nieves Madeleine Parrish Malik Jackson Chima Ikoro Alma Campos
Contributing Editors Lucia Geng Matt Moore Francisco Ramírez Pinedo Jocelyn Vega Scott Pemberton Staff Writers Kiran Misra Yiwen Lu Director of Fact Checking: Kate Gallagher Fact Checkers: Hannah Faris, Grace Del Vecchio, Yiwen Lu, Savannah Hugueley, Sky Patterson, and Caroline Kubzanky Interim Visuals Editor Jason Schumer Deputy Visuals Editors Shane Tolentino Mell Montezuma Staff Illustrators Mell Montezuma Shane Tolentino Layout Editors Haley Tweedell Colleen Hogan Shane Tolentino Tony Zralka Webmaster Pat Sier Managing Director Jason Schumer Director of Operations Brigid Maniates The Weekly is produced by a mostly all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We publish online weekly and in print every other Thursday. Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773) 234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly.com
IN CHICAGO A collaboration with WTTW This issue about segregation in Chicago was produced in collaboration with WTTW’s award-winning FIRSTHAND multiplatform, multi-year initiative focusing on the firsthand perspectives of people facing critical issues in Chicago. The Weekly partnered with WTTW and the Invisible Institute to co-publish text, maps, and visual reporting and analysis covering the impact that racial divisions have had on individuals, the city, and the region. Visit wttw.com/firsthand to explore the elements of the project. You can also find the contents of this issue at southsideweekly.com. Bravo Southeast Side After years of pushback and protests from activists and residents that included a hunger strike, on February 18 the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) denied the company formerly known as General Iron its permit application for a metal shredding facility to relocate to the Southeast Side. In a news release, CDPH announced that it “found the potential adverse changes in air quality and quality of life that would be caused by operations, and health vulnerabilities in the surrounding communities…present an unacceptable risk.” Gender inclusivity at the Mexican consulate The Mexican Consulate in Chicago can now amend birth certificates for transgender Mexican nationals living in the United States. The Mexican trans community is celebrating this gender-inclusive decision by the consulate. Prior to this decision, trans people had to travel to Mexico to request the changes to their birth certificate–a challenge for undocumented or underresourced immigrants–but now the process has been made accessible locally. People interested in amending their birth certificate can reach out to the Mexican Consulate in Chicago by emailing conchicago@sre.gob.mex or setting up an appointment by phone. LSC election season Applications to run for a Local School Council (LSC) in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) are due on March 4 at 3 p.m.! If you want to get more involved in your child’s school or neighborhood school–or if you’re a student or teacher hoping to bring change to your own school–running for its LSC is a hands-on way to do so. LSC member responsibilities include monitoring the school budget and improvement plan, as well as evaluating, hiring, and renewing the contract of the school’s principal. Members serve two-year terms, except for student representatives, who serve one year. In addition to the application, candidates must provide two forms of ID, including one with a residential address that’s within the attendance area of the school or voting district (for multi-area schools) for which they’re running. Parents and community members also have the option to present a candidate statement. Each LSC will host a candidate forum between March 21 and 25. Elections are April 20 and 21. Apply at bit.ly/35eDa2W. CORRECTION: The Weekly failed to credit the cover artist of the January 27 issue, Miranda Ploss. We apologize and regret the mistake.
Cover Illustration by Meg Studer
IN THIS ISSUE why is chicago so segregated?
Mapping Chicago’s racial segregation. jacqueline serrato...........................4 growing up in the robert taylor homes
A former public housing resident shares her experiences in the Projects. jacqueline serrato...........................8 how chicago public schools reflect the city’s segregation
A historical lens on how education decisions have perpetuated segregation. madeleine parrish and chima ikoro......................................11 the structures that divide us
A photo essay. alma campos and chima ikoro......................................14 the chicago housing authority explained
Segregation and public housing in Chicago go hand in hand. grace del vecchio...........................20 can the new aro help solve chicago’s housing inequality?
Is the revamped ARO enough to combat the city’s deeply entrenched racial and economic segregation? justin agrelo...................................22 the geography of fear
Policing the segregated city. jamie kalven, invisible institute.25
HISTORY
Why Is Chicago So Segregated?
BY JACQUELINE SERRATO
C
hicago is one of the most segregated cities in the United States. Over the last century, an array of political and cultural forces have created clear lines of division between racial groups. These demarcations were shaped by racist sentiments toward Black residents and non-whites and manifested through urban planning, housing policies, discriminatory banking, and other practices—all effectively confining people from different demographic groups to certain parts of the city. Despite the simplicity of Chicago’s famous grid system, designed for flat land and seemingly equitable on a map, residents of Chicago have never been equally dispersed or had the same freedom of movement and belonging. From the beginning, Chicago’s demographic makeup was segregated by race and ethnicity along neighborhood boundaries and the physical features of the built and natural environment. Native American tribes—the Potawatomi, Odawa, Sauk, Ojibwe, Illinois, Kickapoo, Miami, Mascouten, Wea, Delaware, Winnebago, Menominee, and Mesquakie—were forced out of what is now Chicago by early French and British settlers. After Chicago’s incorporation by Yankees in 1837, European immigrants flocked to the city through the early 1900s; Irish, Jewish, Polish, German, Italian, Czech/Bohemian, Swedish, and Lithuanian immigrants among them. At one point, Chicago boasted the largest Irish population and the second-largest Polish population of any city in the world. In the early years of the twentieth century, Chicago was the fastest-growing city in the U.S. Many immigrants were fleeing poverty and war, with many others coming to Chicago in pursuit of economic prosperity. Chicago’s position as the hub of a vast railroad system enabled a bustling industrial economy that was teeming with job opportunities in its stockyards, factories, and steel mills. Later, this hotbed of activity attracted rural migrant workers from places such as Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the southern United States—from which racist discrimination and violence drove more 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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AN APARTMENT FIRE AT STATEWAY GARDENS BEFORE IT WAS DEMOLISHED. PHOTO BY PATRICIA EVANS
than 500,000 Black Americans to Chicago. Maps of Chicago’s early ethnic composition show that immigrants and their descendants lived in clusters. A 1920s map by sociologist Frederic M. Thrasher placed the Polish and Bohemian enclaves throughout the entire West Side, including the Lower West Side near Halsted Street; Germans occupied the northern lakefront, with Jewish people settling north of Madison Street and also along the southern lakefront. A more detailed 1950s map showcases crowded clusters of Irish, Italian, and smaller ethnic groups establishing new communities across the city. Black residents did not enjoy the same geographic freedom. The first waves of Black migrants fleeing the Jim Crow South were relegated to a vertical strip of land near Lake Michigan. Up until the 1940s, Black residents were confined to this corridor, better known as the Black Belt, which ran along State Street roughly between Roosevelt Road (12th Street) and 79th Street. The growing Black population eventually formed settlements farther south and up north in isolated and undeveloped areas along the Kinzie rail lines, Roosevelt, and the North Branch of the Chicago River. These segregated communities maintained a tense coexistence until 1919, when racist white hostility bubbled over. The 1919 Race Riots, which were part of the racial violence seen across the country during a period known as the Red Summer, were provoked by an attempt to enforce segregation in the waters of Lake Michigan. At a beach near 29th Street, a white man began throwing rocks at Black boys who were swimming at a perceived whites-only beach, drowning seventeen-year-old Eugene Williams. Black communities protested, and the strife culminated in five days of violence that left thirty-eight dead—twentythree Black and fifteen white Chicagoans. Another 537 were injured, more than half of whom were Black.
HISTORY African Americans were also denied access to white areas by means less violent, but no less destructive. The discriminatory practice known as “redlining” was a colorcoded classification system implemented by the Federal Housing Administration that determined the value of housing based on the racial demographics of a neighborhood. Close to a third of Chicago neighborhoods were given a “D” grade and marked red on a map—thus, “redlined.” These areas, all of which were predominantly Black communities, were deemed undesirable, and residents from these neighborhoods were usually denied bank loans and insurance, severely limiting their housing prospects and mobility. They were simultaneously subject to predatory practices such as contract selling, in which realtors would
deceive buyers into signing contracts to buy marked-up houses on installment with high interest rates and no guarantee of title. Racially restrictive covenants were also common in the Chicago area, as in the rest of the country. These were stipulations written into deeds of sale that prohibited Black residents and non-whites from buying, leasing, or inhabiting property in a determined parcel. According to the Hyde Park Herald, since 1916, restrictive covenants kept Chicago’s neighborhoods white from “the northern gates of Hyde Park at 35th and Drexel Boulevard to Woodlawn, Park Manor, South Shore, Windsor Park, and all the far-flung white communities of the South Side.” These restrictive covenants were outlawed in 1948, allowing Black residents to begin to spread out beyond the Black
“INTERACTIVE MAP AND VISUALIZATION BY CHARMAINE RUNES AND PAT SIER
Belt and to pursue a middle-class life in better-resourced communities. The interactive map shows that by the 1950s, Black residents had started to trickle into “grade C” or “yellowlined” European immigrant neighborhoods on the West
"Residents of Chicago have never been equally dispersed or had the same freedom of movement and belonging." and Southeast sides. By the 1960s, Black residents had moved into “grade B” (blue) communities in the South Side, such as Roseland and Beverly. This meant that what was once the Black Belt saw many of their upwardly mobile residents leave public housing and the immediate area. There were approximately 813,000 Black residents in Chicago by 1960. The postwar relocation of urban whites, known as white flight, was facilitated by the new expressways that connected them to the developing suburbs west of the city limits, where Black, Latinx, and the growing Asian population were kept out. Effectively acting as sundown towns, suburbs such as Cicero utilized police and mob violence to draw a line in the concrete. Most famously, the Clarks were a middle-class Black Chicago family that in 1951 attempted to move into a Cicero apartment, but couldn’t last a day after thousands of white protesters set their belongings and the whole property on fire. There are different types of segregation beyond the Black-white binary that normally, and rightfully, comes to mind. A 2017 study by the Metropolitan Planning Council and the Urban Institute looked at Latinx/ white segregation, finding considerable disparities in educational attainment, upward mobility, and generational wealth between these groups. From the 1910s to the 1920s,
thousands of Mexicans were recruited by industrial contractors to work seasonally in the Midwest, in some cases as strikebreakers in the steel mills. By 1928, there were at least six Mexican settlements parallel to Lake Michigan that were referred to as colonias. From north to south, they were Hull House, the Stockyards, Blue Island, South Chicago, East Chicago, and as far as Gary, Indiana. Immigrants typically lived in inadequate housing near railroads and industry—in bunk houses,boxcars,and section houses. Their numbers fell off during the Depression amid intensified immigration crackdowns, according to researchers. Their early presence is not reflected in our interactive map because the U.S. Census did not accurately track the Mexican population in Chicago during this time period. But future waves of immigration in the mid-twentieth century and, later, in the 1980s and ’90s bolstered their numbers in the city. In the 1960s, then-Mayor Richard J. Daley’s administration began to address the dilapidated housing conditions of the city’s poorest and signed off on the construction of 165 high-rises managed by the Chicago Housing Authority that would house mainly Black Chicagoans. The developments were primarily clustered into six groups in addition to scattered sites with low-rise buildings and row houses. These housing projects, as they became known, are represented by orange dots on the interactive map. The Near North Side’s Cabrini-Green complex at one time had 3,606 apartments. But the largest group of projects was the Street State corridor in the former Bronzeville Black Belt, which had a total of 7,938 units. The Robert Taylor Homes, located between 39th and 54th streets, had more than half of those apartments. Public housing was intended to house a mix of working-class and poor families and was welcomed and enjoyed by new residents, according to early testimonies. But CHA maintenance began to fall off quickly, and by the 1980s the War on Drugs and mass incarceration created crises of crime
FEBRUARY 24, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5
HISTORY and concentrated poverty in the densely populated towers of the Robert Taylor Homes, adjacent Stateway Gardens, and Cabrini-Green. CHA high-rises were stigmatized by the city and the media, which portrayed them as vertical drug-ridden ganglands. The construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway in the ’60s further “othered” the Street State corridor. The expressway was originally designed to run
Dr. Martin Luther King’s visit to Chicago during the Freedom Movement campaign for fair housing made headlines in 1966. As he led a march through Marquette Park on the Southwest Side, he was attacked with bricks by a racist white mob. He would later say, “I have been in the Civil Rights Movement for many years all through the South, but I have never seen – not even in Alabama or Louisiana—mobs as hostile and hateful as this crowd.” The Fair Housing Act was
“INTERACTIVE MAP AND VISUALIZATION BY CHARMAINE RUNES AND PAT SIER
through Bridgeport, then Mayor Daley’s neighborhood, but the development was moved eight blocks to the east, installing a multi-lane barrier between Bridgeport and the Black Belt, literally cementing the segregation of Black and white communities. 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
passed in 1968. Puerto Rican people are the secondlargest Latinx group in Chicago. By 1960 there were 32,371 Puerto Rican residents in Chicago, a number that more than doubled within a decade. They were concentrated in the Lincoln Park
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neighborhood on the North Side and are credited for pioneering the fight against displacement due to gentrification spurred by the expanding DePaul
Jane Addams’s Hull House settlement house—today’s University Village—had a similar fate as the Puerto Ricans. Through the city’s use of eminent domain, much of
"From the beginning, Chicago’s demographic makeup was segregated by race and ethnicity along neighborhood boundaries and the physical features of the built and natural environment." University campus—a fight they lost. Two laws in 1947, the Blighted Areas Redevelopment Act and the Relocation Act, helped create the Chicago Land Clearance Commission, enabling the City to raze areas that it deemed blighted without regard for who it would displace. Despite the high-stakes campaign led by the Young Lords and the Rainbow Coalition against the City’s urban renewal plan, they were priced out and pushed to Humboldt Park and Hermosa, and in recent years they have been partially displaced again by new development. At the turn of the twenty-first century, as the City realized the projects sat on prime real estate, then-Mayor Richard M. Daley introduced a plan to transform public housing in 1999. Under the Plan for Transformation, the City began to knock down the projects one by one like dominos. The plan was ostensibly intended to decentralize Black poverty and relocate residents to mixed-income housing in integrated neighborhoods. Tenants were promised a “right to return” to soon-to-be-built housing on the sites and placed on voucher waiting lists, but many residents struggled to meet the bureaucratic requirements to be considered. CHA admitted they lost track of thousands of displaced people as they moved to other Black neighborhoods. Much of the promised housing failed to materialize, and it’s uncertain whether the CHA will ever build new housing for the 40,000 families currently on their waiting lists. Mexican residents of the area around
that neighborhood, which included Black, Italian, Greek, and Jewish residents, was razed in the 1960s for the construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway and the development of the University of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus. Many were pushed to industry-heavy Pilsen, which for almost a century was an immigrant point of entry, but is now one of the most expensive gentrifying neighborhoods on the South Side. Mexicans and Mexican Americans account for the vast majority of the 819,518 Latinx residents currently living in Chicago and continue to live in or right next to polluted industrial corridors on the Southeast, Southwest, and Northwest sides. Tens of thousands of Black residents are also leaving their traditional South and West side neighborhoods in recent years, as has been extensively reported, in what some are calling an “outmigration” or a “reverse migration.” The city’s Black population peaked in the mid-twentieth century and is now at its lowest level since then, with 787,551 Black residents as of 2020. Black communities bore the brunt of the closings of fifty-plus Chicago Public Schools that were shuttered during former Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration. Chicago’s suburbs, Indiana, and other Midwestern states are popular destinations for Black residents. But folks are also going back to the South, citing a lack of well-paying jobs and resources, as well as steady gun violence and a rising cost of living, as their main reasons for leaving the city. Housing discrimination is still
“INTERACTIVE MAP AND VISUALIZATION BY CHARMAINE RUNES AND PAT SIER
a significant problem in Chicago. A 2017 fair housing study looked into six community areas that had the most reported complaints of racial and income discrimination against renters: Jefferson Park, the Near North Side, Bridgeport, Hyde Park, Clearing, and Mount Greenwood. Sixty-three percent of the time, Black testers posing as potential renters holding CHA Housing Choice Vouchers experienced some form of discrimination. “The highest ratio of discriminatory acts to race-related tests occurred in the Near North Side neighborhood, where over half of the tests involved race discrimination,” the Chicago Commission on Human Relations and the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee found. Despite the City’s first settler, Jean-Baptiste Point DuSable, being of
Haitian descent, Chicago’s infamous segregation is still intact, and it joins a list of large cities with similar rates of racial polarization, such as Cleveland, Newark, Philadelphia, and Houston. Through a century of discriminatory strategies from the City and the real estate industry, in addition to antiquated attitudes toward Black residents and people of color, Chicago continues to be a “city of neighborhoods”—highly segregated neighborhoods. ¬ Find the interactive map online at wttw. com/firsthand and southsideweekly.com Jacqueline Serrato is South Side Weekly’s editor-in-chief.
FEBRUARY 24, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7
HOUSING
Growing Up in the Robert Taylor Homes A former public housing resident shares her experiences in the Projects and watching them fall.
BY JACQUELINE SERRATO
F
or four decades, a row of towers on the South Side competed with Chicago’s famous skyline. The Robert Taylor Homes, encompassing twenty-eight structures, each sixteen stories high, stretched for two miles along South State Street. It was the largest housing project in the city and, at one point, in the country. By 2005, all the Robert Taylor Homes had been vacated, and in 2007, the last building was demolished—the residents dispersed across the city, the south suburbs, and beyond. South Side Weekly sat down with a former Robert Taylor Homes resident, Christine Gayles, who experienced this uprooting as a young girl, along with her family. Now an adult, a Chicago Public Schools teacher, and a new mom, she continues to reflect on what was lost and gained from that pivotal event. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Check southsideweekly.com to listen to the full interview. When I first met you in school in 2006, you would talk about the Robert Taylor Homes all the time. Why was it important to talk about where you were from? Because, for me, it's my home and it's who I am. It's how I've come to be. The things and lessons that I've learned and witnessed and saw in the Robert Taylor Homes have had a lasting impact on my life, so it's like my legacy. To feel that if I could exist in a place like that and—I don't want to say “make it out”— but 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
go beyond that place, and still have this love and appreciation for it, that's what it means to me. [I lived there] from the age of four to the age of fifteen. So I remember the day that I moved into Robert Taylor, and I also remember the last day at Robert Taylor. My mother, who is recently deceased, was the last person out of our building. She just loved the Projects. She loved everything about it, she loved the people, she loved what it represented. Because it was truly a story of survival, so she took that to heart. She didn't want to part from that building because it was more than a building. Like I said, it was home. It was Halloween, I was fifteen years old—that was the last day the demolition crew had come to start stripping the building. My building was the last one of our cluster of three buildings [to come down]. So it was a really special moment in our lives, but my family lived there before me. My grandparents lived in an apartment in 2002 [until 1983], and my mom had lived there before I was born. Before that, they lived in the Stateway Gardens, and before that, they lived in the Ida B. Wells Homes. Anybody who knows anything about Chicago knows that all of those are CHA buildings. So CHA meant a lot for us, because it gave us homes. Then later on, my grandparents were able to save enough money to be able to afford a home in Englewood, and that's how I have the story of being able to grow up between the two places. We called it “the Jets” [or] we called it “the Buildings.” We wouldn't necessarily say Robert Taylor Homes, we would just say, “Oh, we goin’ down to the Projects.” If
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my family came from Minnesota to visit us, that's where they wanted to go. It was a party, it was love. Even at my mom's funeral, we had hundreds of people who were from the Robert Taylor Homes who had come to pay their respects. I don't really share this with a lot of people, but my mom struggled with addiction because she had depression, and she went through a lot of things in her life that led her down that path. But despite all of that, she found a way to shine her light on other people—her nickname was Sunshine. She was like a mother to the gangbangers, you know. We had so many different people who came through our house, living there with us… my mom was like a guardian angel to these people. Everybody was a family, even if there was no blood linking us. It was just like we had this kindred experience, even when it came down to the teachers that served us. I had teachers who grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes, and they came back and they taught us. I'm still in contact with them today…. I had these teachers showing me that “we came from this space, we are successful, we came back, and you guys can be successful, too.” So they instilled in us this love of Black history, they instilled in us this love, or idea, of respect and self respect. Do you know if [old classmates] still come together? Oh, yeah… whole communities come together every year, every summer before we go back to school, before Labor Day. Throughout the months of July and August people have reunions, and these
reunions started about twenty years ago because 3919 S. Federal was the first buildings to come down in like 1998. It's traumatizing. I never lived in 3919, but a lot of my family would live there–so I had nieces and nephews that I would go visit, family and friends. I was about ten years old; you [could] see the wrecking ball just wrecking the building down, and you see all the different paint on the wall, and you see people's lives just crumbling down to the ground. We watched that several times because, like I said, my building was one of the last, maybe the second to last building to come down. A lot of the families ended up moving to another building. I have friends who originally lived in 4022 S. Federal, but their building gets knocked down so they move over to 4037 S. Federal, the building that I live in. And then we had people whose building got knocked down on 43rd Street, they [also] ended up in our building. So in the midst of that, we can still see all the different buildings being torn down, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes dragging it out, and I remember crying. The last day that my [building came down] I just touched the brick, I took pictures on a disposable camera, but I never got them developed and I've lost it since then. But like, that was like all I had left, you know, just that memory, that feeling of touching it. My whole life, everything that I knew up until that point had been in those buildings. On gangs and gun violence in the Robert Taylor Homes: I can vividly remember my mom running to my school basically with her underwear on because she just dropped everything she was doing. She heard gunshots and she knew that I had just been in the playground about to go inside of the school building. I can remember big-time gang leaders, drug dealers, whatever you want to call them, tell us “it's not safe out here for you guys. Go upstairs—women and children go in the house.” And that's not some little cliche statement that I'm making. That actually happened. I can remember playing in the
HOUSING
COURTESY OF CHRISTINE GAYLES
back of my building, and there had been wars between different ends or different factions of gangs. [I remember] them saying… “It's war time, so y'all don't come out,” stuff like that. That also was a part of the Robert Taylor Homes, this sense of organization. I think the disconnect happened when people started going to jail for drugs—families were dismembered. A lot of kids went into systems or they had to go live with grandparents or other family members. I think the crack epidemic in the eighties had a lot to do with it, I think the mass incarceration in the nineties had a lot to do with it, I think police brutality had a lot to do with it. Police often brutalized the people who lived in my building—I witnessed police brutality firsthand. I can remember hearing the gun go off and knowing that my friend's brother was killed in the hallway by the police. The most popular gang on my end of Robert Taylor Homes was the Gangster Disciples. I can remember growing up, seeing them put on backto-school functions for our kids at the end of the summer. They would have these big concerts where people would dress up as Barney and give school supplies and provide food for all of the kids who lived in the community, and no child was left behind. And I just also really remembered them stressing the importance of education. A lot of times we hear about gang members and we don't see this positive side—and not to
glorify the actions that people take—but I do think that it does [show] that they were interested in their community; they did love the people who lived there. And they show that by giving us back-toschool functions… They provided a sense of structure. I lived on the eighth floor, and I could look outside my window on any given summer day, in the afternoon, and I would see the leaders leading the group of guys in [group] exercises and having them read. I can remember my sister being a tutor to some of the gang members because maybe they didn't know how to read or they were struggling in math. Tell me about the programs. To me, the Projects was just this magical place, and I'll tell you one of the reasons why. I get teased for this [by] all my cousins [who] lived in houses or they lived in Minnesota. They didn't really understand this idea of living in the Projects the way that we did, even though my family had lived there for generations. Because [the reputation is that] the Projects has roaches and it's not clean. “Why do you want to live there with all those people stacked on top of you?” But it was this safe place because even in the summertime, let's say you didn't have food, you know, you're going to get two meals that day from this breakfast and lunch program, we call it “Chokes,” where you wake up early in the morning and you can go get breakfast, and then in the
afternoon, you can get lunch, and these are free meals. In my building, there was an after school program where they transformed these two apartments and [made them into a] center, and we would go on field trips, we would have these enrichment programs, all these cool experiences that you wouldn't think this type of stuff was happening in our building. That was through CHA, but they would get people who lived in the buildings to be the facilitators and to oversee the different people coming in. So they would have one apartment, and that apartment would house all the kids who are eating, and you would wait in line and have your time to eat. And we had some of the best times there; we would have food fights in there and get kicked out but still be welcome back the next day. When my family would come to visit us, I would wake all of them up, like “it's time for Chokes, let's go!” Especially if it was the “hot week” where all the food was going to be hot. So you're going to be getting pizza or pigs in a blanket and stuff like that. And I can look back at it with all this nostalgia, but there were times I didn't have food, you know, my mom didn't have food or was not able to make me a meal. I could go there and be welcomed with open arms. How did you understand what was happening as buildings were coming down? How were you processing it? We would always say that this is prime real estate—it's right next to the expressway and it's within earshot of downtown. In about 1996, we would start driving in the South Loop, my grandma was—she's a character. We would go to all these different places in the city, and a lot of times downtown. We would be driving, and she's always giving me a history lesson or something. So she would just be like, “you know, this didn't used to look like this. This changed, that changed.” We were driving down State Street, and you know that Chicago is so segregated when you [notice when] somebody is not in the right neighborhood, like they probably took a wrong turn or something like that. I guess I'm saying all that to say that we just started seeing these new buildings coming up around 19th and State. And
at one point, this was [an area with] a lot of old warehouse buildings. These are not nice-looking buildings or this desirable place that people wanted to live in. But we start seeing these lofts appear or these condos and townhomes appear. And so we're like, “Oh, shit,” like, “something's about to change, you know, they're gonna come, they're gonna keep coming further south, you know, down.” My uncle used to say when he was a kid, “White people are coming for this.” My family came here during the Great Migration, my grandmother at the age of eleven, and they moved to the West Side, and so they had seen all these different changes happening, and somehow they ended up on the South Side. We knew that change was coming… It wasn't as apparent as it is now. Like right now, I feel like my neighborhood [Bronzeville] has changed so much in the last two years where, like, there are about twenty new white people in this neighborhood—and they're not afraid anymore. And not to say that they should be, but there was a time when they wouldn't come here. They told a lot of the families that “we're going to build all these new nice apartments in the space where these buildings were in,” near the area. But everybody wasn't as fortunate to get a voucher, and depending on who was on your lease, like if people had criminal histories, then they were sort of scrambling trying to find someplace to go. And I don't know what happened to people who didn't get a voucher, I guess they just sort of, like, trickled out into the city and kind of made it work however they could. But everybody was not placed somewhere else….From 35th Street down to 43rd Street, I see a lot of former residents from Robert Taylor and Stateway who [currently] live there… A lot of people moved out [of the city], a lot of people moved to Minnesota, Indiana, Iowa. I feel like that contributes a lot to [the Black] population declining in the city. I know violence is the [main] cause, but a lot of people, when the Projects came down… I just know a lot of people were just kind of like, “I'm going elsewhere. I'm going to try to start anew. ¬” Jacqueline Serrato is the editor-in-chief at the Weekly.
FEBRUARY 24, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9
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EDUCATION
How Chicago Public Schools Reflect the City’s Segregation BY MADELEINE PARRISH AND CHIMA IKORO
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he City of Chicago and its Board of Education have a long history of perpetuating segregation, starting with an 1863 City ordinance that required Black and White students to attend separate schools. Segregation in Chicago’s public schools only intensified when Chicago’s Black population boomed due to the influx of Black Americans from the South in the first half of the twentieth century, and it has been reinforced in the twenty-first century through strategic policy decisions, privatization, and neglect. In 2013, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed the most schools ever closed at one time in United States history to combat a deficit in the City’s budget. The fifty school closures meant that more than 11,000 students were displaced and given the option to transfer schools. Former CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett claimed that the district was able to keep track of where all but seven students landed after their schools closed, but it was later revealed that CPS and the Illinois State Board of Education were actually unsure of the whereabouts of more than 400 students—there was no record for these students of a successful transition to a new school. A large majority of the schools closed were on the South and West sides of the city where the students were majority, if not completely, Black or brown. Of the fifty schools closed in 2013, forty-two had a population that was greater than seventy-five percent Black, and eightyeight percent of the students affected by the school closures were Black. Neighborhoods such as Englewood, Austin, and Garfield Park faced the most instability, as multiple schools within a few miles of each other were shuttered or relocated. John Calhoun North
Elementary School, formerly located in East Garfield Park, was closed despite having high test scores and performance. Since the mass school closures, CPS has seen a decline in enrollment every single year, continuing to fuel what some have deemed a vicious cycle of disinvestment. This is also fueled by the ongoing exodus of Black families from Chicago: between 1980 and 2020, the Black population in Chicago dropped from 1,187,905 to 787,551, according to the census. This population loss has led to decreased funding for schools in these neighborhoods; under CPS’s Student-Based Budgeting (SBB) model introduced under Emanuel, funding is allocated to schools based on the number of enrolled students. “CPS puts these policies into place, including the expansion of charter schools, that lead to a decline in enrollment in [CPS] schools in predominantly Black and poor neighborhoods,” said Carol Caref, an education policy analyst at the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). “And then those schools, because of StudentBased Budgeting, don’t get very much money, so they can’t offer things.” Decreased funding results in fewer options for students and makes schools even less attractive to potential families, perpetuating the cycle of attrition. “Parents, if they have an alternative, their kids aren’t going to go to those totally underfunded schools,” Caref said. The 2013 closures also never translated to better offerings for those students who remained in CPS. After the closures, the district said it would flood the schools receiving the dispersed students with resources. But in the aftermath, the district switched to SBB, and though they provided temporary transitional support, “they never actually did something that would reverse the
trend in those communities,” said CTU education policy analyst Pavlyn Jankov. “Instead, they doubled down on tying enrollment changes to the ability of a school to provide things for those students.” As schools were shuttered in both the 2013 closures and through Renaissance 2010—a program under then-Mayor Richard M. Daley that involved closing eighty CPS schools and replacing them with a hundred charters. Selectiveenrollment schools, charter schools, and magnet schools—known for their competitiveness—proliferated while neighborhood schools suffered. Between 2001 and 2019, there were 169 school closures and 193 school openings—only 29.5 percent of openings were districtrun schools.
discriminatory federal and private lending, and discriminatory housing laws that clustered Black residents in the Black Belt located between 12th and 79th streets and Wentworth and Cottage Grove avenues—set the stage for segregation in CPS. Attendance lines were drawn to match these segregated residential patterns without regard for student population or overcrowding. Activists in the 1950s and ’60s produced maps that showed how the district maintained Black students in schools with more than ninety percent Black populations under Benjamin Willis, the superintendent of CPS from 1953 to 1966. These maps also showed that “doubleshift” schools—schools where students would attend school in four-hour shifts to avoid overcrowding— were overwhelmingly located in Black neighborhoods. According to a 1957 article in the NAACP magazine The Crisis, the average white elementary school in Chicago had fewer than 700 students, while the average Black school had more than 1,200. To address this issue, the Board of Education placed students in portable classroom structures made of corrugated steel deemed “Willis Wagons” in the parking lots of overcrowded Black schools instead of allowing Black students to attend majority white schools. Willis became notorious for perpetuating segregation, and many civil rights leaders led protests against him from 1963 to 1965, including hunger were schools where nt represe Red pins strikes, picketing, boycotting classes, closed in 2013. Green pins represent and burning mobile classrooms. where charter schools were opened. Public school officials proposed How Did We Get Here? The Origins plans to transport Black students to of School Segregation underutilized white schools on the North Residential segregation in and Southwest sides in order to alleviate Chicago—a product of twentieth- the overcrowding of Black schools. But century restrictive covenants, redlining, across the South Side, like many other FEBRUARY 24, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11
EDUCATION places in America at the time, white residents met these changes with anger and violence. Anti-busing movements and protests made it clear that white people would stop at nothing to ensure that Black students were not integrated into their schools. When CPS attempted to integrate schools such as Bogan High School in Ashburn in 1977, white parents protested and aggressively disrupted meetings to sabotage the efforts. In 1980, after “more than a decade of battles between the federal government and Chicago” regarding segregation in Chicago’s schools, CPS was put under a consent decree and a court-mandated desegregation plan. While the decree was in place, officials relied on voluntary approaches, which included encouraging transfers from segregated schools and establishing integrated magnet and selective-enrollment schools which used race as an admissions factor. Under these policies, schools remained segregated. In 1980, eighty-two percent of Black students in CPS attended highly segregated schools where at least 90 percent of the students were Black. In 1989, almost ten years after the consent decree was signed, seventy-five percent of Black students were still in extremely segregated schools. The decree was lifted by a federal judge in 2009. In 2012, three years after it was lifted, seventy percent of Black students still attended highly segregated schools. After the High-Rises Came Down, So Did the Schools City disinvestment in public housing—which destabilized families and neighborhoods on the South and West sides—led the City’s investment in schools in these neighborhoods to plummet, as well. After high-rise public housing developments were demolished under the Plan for Transformation and residents were relocated, adjacent schools slowly began to shutter, as well. Many schools that weren’t closed during the Renaissance 2010 project were eventually closed during the 2013 closures. “There are a number of schools that are along State Street through Bronzeville that 12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
CHILDREN PLAYING OUTSIDE THE IDA B. WELLS HOMES BEFORE THEIR DEMOLITION. PHOTO BY PATRICIA EVANS
were closed down,” Jankov said. “The district response was [that] they aligned the school policy to what they were seeing in the communities, which was this removal of housing investment in those communities.” Edward Jenner Elementary Academy for the Arts, located adjacent to the Cabrini-Green housing development on the Near North Side, was one of the schools that served children primarily in public housing. After the demolition of Cabrini-Green, the population of the school began to shrink, and soon it was the last remaining school that once served children from Cabrini-Green. The school was threatened with closure, and in 2015, a proposal was introduced by parents to merge Jenner with nearby overcrowded Ogden International School, a school on the Gold Coast whose population was mostly affluent and white. At the time, Jenner was ninety-eight percent Black and predominantly low-income. In contrast, thirty-seven percent of Ogden students were Black. The Ogden-Jenner merger was an example of a parent- and community-
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driven integration effort, but to Caref, it was a unique case for a reason. “I think that school—even though it was predominantly Black—was in the ‘acceptable’ neighborhood for white parents. And that’s not true, necessarily, of schools on the Far South Site,” she said. The Shuffling and Reshuffling of Students Many students directly affected by the 2013 school closures were forced to transfer to whatever school was nearest or able to take on more students. These mergers dramatically altered the lives of students and parents of closing schools and overcrowded the schools that absorbed them. The majority of schools that were closed in the South and West sides were in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Black and brown students were disproportionately hurt by these closings, even by those that did not take place on the South and West sides. Joseph Stockton Elementary School was merged with Mary E. Courtenay Language Arts
Center in Uptown, and although the school was one of the few closed on the North Side, Courtenay had more than ninety percent students of color, while Uptown is fifty-four percent white. The merger turned the middle school into what parents and teachers described as a “war zone,” filled with constant fighting between students. According to a 2018 report by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, “students affected by school closures experienced negative effects on test scores,” though they experienced no change in their core grade point average (GPA) immediately after closure. But test scores and GPAs alone are not adequate to measure the turmoil faced by students affected by the closure of their schools. In a commentary on the study, Dr. Eve Ewing, a sociologist, author, and poet based in Chicago, wrote that “all schools involved in the closure process were embroiled in a highly stressful, internally competitive, even antagonistic process that established their institutional futures as being threatened by the institutional
EDUCATION survival of their colleagues and neighbors. Given this context… any social cohesion that schools were able to develop whatsoever post-closure should be seen as nothing short of miraculous. “Ultimately,” she wrote, “we must ask how and why we continue to close schools in a manner that causes ‘large disruptions without clear benefits for students.’” Underutilization and Lack of Resources When a school is enrolled at less than seventy percent of its capacity, it is deemed “underutilized” by CPS, even if the school doesn’t have the same resources as better-funded schools to bolster their enrollment—making it susceptible to closure. In 2018, CPS closed Robeson High School along with three other high schools located in Englewood, citing low enrollment. However, these schools were not well resourced. Jankov called this practice “closure by attrition,” saying that “even if you’re a community that is nowhere near getting the services they need in their schools, if you’re losing students, CPS was cutting funding from those schools. So you end up with situations where even if a school didn’t close, your budget has been cut twice, thrice over a period of a decade and a half, and you’re no longer able to provide services.” In an interview with South Side Weekly, Ewing noted, “Chicago is all one property tax base and one school district. So having more expensive homes in Lincoln Park vs. Englewood doesn’t affect the tax base. “What does make a difference within Chicago is private fundraising that schools do,” she continued. “Public schools are allowed to fundraise, and since communities with higher incomes are more likely to have disposable funds to participate, this widens the gap in resources further.” Combine this with the per-pupil funding formula, and “neighborhood schools where enrollment has been dropping a ton have just less money to work with than a competitive school that is always fully enrolled.” Magnet and Selective-Enrollment Schools: A Failure of Integration 13 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
Many magnet and selectiveenrollment schools in Chicago were created under the desegregation consent decree in place until 2009. Magnet schools are public schools that have specialized classes and a focused curriculum. Most magnet schools use a lottery system to determine admission, and the consent decree called for the lottery for magnet schools to be “based on race, to ensure integration in enrollment.” CPS runs a busing program for magnet and test-in schools—which include classical, gifted, and selective enrollment schools—in an effort to attract diverse populations. But a 2019 WBEZ study showed that only twenty percent of magnet and test-in schools met the racial makeup goal of the desegregation court order. Under the consent decree, race was an admissions factor for selectiveenrollment schools, which generally accept applications from across the city and accept students based on grades or test scores. White students, who made up nine percent of the district’s enrollment in selective-enrollment schools in 2009 when the decree was lifted, were allowed up to thirty-five percent of placements. Jones College Prep, Lane Tech, Northside College Prep, Payton College Prep, and Whitney Young Magnet High School are consistently ranked as the top five public high schools in Chicago. Each of these schools is a selectiveenrollment school, and each of them has a disproportionately low percentage of Black students. While the district as a whole is 35.8 percent Black, Jones is 11.6 percent Black, Lane Tech is 6.7 percent Black, Northside College Prep is 6 percent Black, Payton is 9.7 percent Black, and Whitney Young is 17.7 percent Black. CPS is aware of this discrepancy and utilizes a socioeconomic tier system to rank students based on where they live and weigh their chances of getting into a good school. This system shows that lower-tier areas have less income and less education, while higher tiers have the opposite. In 2012, Derek Eder, a civic technology builder, partnered with Open City to compile data about the meaning of this tier system. The website they created
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points out that selective-enrollment schools are designed to increase the chances of disadvantaged students of attending better schools by reserving a certain number of seats for students from low-income neighborhoods. “The quota tries to keep wealthier students from dominating selective schools,” according to the project. The analysis concluded that “a high-achieving student from an impoverished area has a better chance of getting into a selective school than a similar student from a richer area.” Although this provision is helpful for some students, it does not dissolve the clear lines of segregation that determine the fate of a majority of low-income Black and brown students who are confined to neighborhood schools. These selectiveenrollment schools are not always nearby or physically accessible, and they have fewer seats. Even now, elementary and high school students from the South and West sides of the city have longer commute times to reach their schools than their counterparts. Privatizing Education: The Charter Movement Renaissance 2010 was a project of the Chicago Public Schools backed by business and philanthropic communities. The idea was to “launch marketplace school choice by quickly adding privatized charter schools”; the district would “manage the district like a stock portfolio—phasing out weak schools and schools that would become underenrolled due to competition,” according to a 2018 article by education advocate Jan Resseger found on the National Education Policy Center website. These charter schools are publicly funded like neighborhood schools, but they are independently run, somewhat similarly to private schools, and can receive private donations, as well. A 2017 study conducted by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research found that attending a charter high school in Chicago led to substantial improvements in test scores, high school attendance, college enrollment, and college persistence. However, critics of the charter movement have pointed to charter schools’ lack
of accountability. Unlike district-run schools, charters aren’t required to have elected local school councils. “We’ve brokered the responsibility of educating children to private operators with littleto-no accountability to the public,” said Jitu Brown, national director for the Journey for Justice Alliance and former education organizer with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization. Charter schools are also able to push out students who are not performing up to standards. In 2014, the Tribune reported that charter schools expelled sixty-one out of every 10,000 students, whereas district-run schools expelled only five out of every 10,000 students. “They come up with creative ways to kick children out,” Brown said. “They call it counseling a child out, and their language is ‘it’s not a good fit.’ But public schools don’t have that option and shouldn’t have that option. Because the school must be ready for the child.” Brown pointed out that where charter schools are built, the number of Black students decreases, citing the discomfort and alienation students of the shuttered and discarded schools may feel. Despite these schools being open enrollment and available to the public, students from the neighborhood often struggle with reacclimating, and their parents might even decide to leave the school altogether. “It is directly connected to the agenda of moving populations that are seen as undesirable out of municipalities as opposed to addressing the inequities that create the conditions in the first place,” Brown added. “In many ways, [charters] were sort of created to replace district schools that were segregated, that were underfunded, that were predominant in the South and West sides,” said Jankov. “Those charter schools were opened in those same communities where they closed schools under the pretense that they would be offering something new, something more effective with better results. The reality is those schools remain segregated, oftentimes with either segregated staff or overwhelmingly white staff.” Between 2001 and 2019, CPS opened 105 charter schools.
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Disparities in School Quality: Teachers Work with What They Have CPS data from the 2020-21 school year shows stark differences in access to quality schools and programs between Black and white students. The Greater Lincoln Park region, which is eighteen percent Black and fifty-three percent white, has triple the number of high school fine and performing art seats per hundred students as the Bronzeville/South Lakefront region, which is ninety-one percent Black (twenty-seven seats versus nine). Dyett High School is one school located in the Bronzeville/South Lakefront region explicitly focused on the arts: after hunger strikers prevented the school’s closure in 2013, it reopened in 2016 as a school for the arts, and students can choose one of five pathways to follow: digital media, music, theater, dance, or visual arts. When it reopened, CPS gave $14.6 million in funding to refurbish it, adding amenities including a dance studio and a digital media lab. Rex Peel started as a music teacher at Dyett in 2018 and taught beginner, intermediate, and advanced band and choir as well as a piano course until leaving his position earlier this year. “Dyett is special because it was a reopened school, and so they provided the funding so that it would succeed,” he said. “But I have worked for a number of other schools in CPS that did not have that.” Mollison Elementary School is located in Bronzeville, just a couple of blocks from Armstrong (Lillian Hardin) Park, named after jazz musician, composer, and bandleader Lillian Hardin Armstrong. Bronzeville itself has a long history of producing legendary musicians, including Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole. As a music teacher there, Peel described his class as “music on the cart,” where he would move from room to room with very few instruments. At both Mollison, where he worked from 2016 to 2017, and William Bishop Owen Elementary School in Ashburn, where he worked from 2017 to 2018, Peel was the only music teacher. The differences in access to elementary school art programs are stark 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
between regions located on the North and South sides. During the 2020-21 school year, there were zero seats per hundred students for fine and performing arts in the Bronzeville/South Lakefront region. In Greater Lincoln Park, there were seventy, in the North Lakefront region, there were fifty-two, and in the Central Area region, there were fifty-three. As a teacher at Dyett, Peel has felt the effects of lack of access to these programs in elementary school. “It’s very hard to develop sixty children who have never had a musical experience, even after four years, if there’s nothing laid at the beginning,” he said. Nadine Smith is the only music teacher at Dyett now that Peel left. She started five years ago and has since taught choir and band. “At the elementary level is where students should be getting those foundational skills and should be able to walk into high school and be prepared to go to the next level.” In a previous role as educational outreach coordinator for the Lyric Opera of Chicago, she visited schools on the North Side. “For some of the schools, i.e., Northside College Prep... you’ve got to be kidding me,” she said. “I thought I was walking in on a college campus when I walked into that school. Their strings department is extremely strong, and I mean just big, beautiful basses in a room designated for the arts, for music; their orchestra is just profound,” she said. “And I guess that poured kerosene on my desire to be able to see that also occur on the South Side of Chicago.” In 2009, when he lifted the desegregation consent decree, U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras stated in an opinion that within the district schools, “the vestiges of discrimination are no longer.” But more than a decade later, the district remains highly segregated. Black students in Chicago are disproportionately harmed by school closures, decreased access to quality schools, and the increasing privatization of Chicago schools. ¬ Madeleine Parrish is the South Side Weekly’s education editor. Chima Ikoro is the South Side Weekly’s community organizing editor.
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The Structures That Divide Us
Exploring the physical barriers that segregate Chicago through history, poetry, and photography BY ALMA CAMPOS, CHIMA IKORO
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hicago’s continued segregation rests not only on policy, but on the physical barriers that enforce dividing lines to this day. The idea to separate people by race or class has persisted and has seeped into this city’s built environment. Structures such as expressways, industrial corridors, railroads, and bridges are key gateways to understanding the story of segregation in Chicago’s past and present. The photos, reporting, and creative writing that follow illustrate those barriers around the South and West sides.
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he City of Chicago began the construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway in 1961, a project that cost more than $282 million to build—an estimated nearly $2.6 billion in today’s dollars. Like the Eisenhower Expressway, the Dan Ryan and other highways were built to provide primarily white residents from newly built suburbs with fast and easy auto access to the Loop and back home. In the process, those expressways reinforced existing boundaries between communities. According to Jeremy Glover, transportation associate at the Metropolitan Planning Council, the Dan Ryan reinforced a dividing line between Black residents living in Bronzeville and white residents living in Bridgeport—former Mayor Richard J. Daley’s neighborhood. “It is very common all across the country—not just [using] highways...to segregate, but also siting highways just generally through low-income communities of color that didn’t have the political capital to oppose them,” he said. The Dan Ryan is a clear example; originally slated to run directly through Bridgeport, it was rerouted east of the neighborhood, displacing more Black residents instead. Though many Americans might see displacement as an inevitability, Glover points to how many European highways don’t cut through cities, but instead wind around them. Though spatial segregation exists in Europe in its own ways, “If you want to actually get into [a European] city,” Glover said, “you have to take a local road or use transit.” Black residents were more affected by property loss than their white counterparts as a result of the Dan Ryan being built in 1961–1962. The City used eminent domain— the right of the government to seize private property for public benefit—to demolish homes and businesses to make way for the new expressway. Some of the displaced residents had already been forced to move once because of the construction of housing projects such as Stateway Gardens and the Robert Taylor Homes. In order to understand the physical barriers that segregate Chicago, they must be traced back to when Black people first moved to Chicago in large numbers. The Great Migration—the mass movement of Black Americans from southern states to cities in the North, East, and West—spanned approximately 1916 through 1970. An estimated six million Black people traveled in hopes of finding work and safety from racial violence, with a half-million moving to Chicago. The city’s Black population more
DEVELOPMENT
The Bricks’ Song
A poem by Chima “Naira” Ikoro
“How could I call a neighborhood home if it always found a way to tell my skin-folk that they could play in the front yard but they are never allowed in the house?”
at times, if you listen well enough, the rhythm of the dan ryan mimics bricks being bulldozed. a parrot recalling a sound it heard enough times to recreate. development is a losing game. if I had a pair of shoes to string up on a telephone wire for every Black family that lived before the concrete was ever mixed... memorials are also a losing game. for you, we were a spark, forgotten as quickly as we came. so beautiful and so fleeting, like the red car or rattling chevy I track with my eyes as I wait on the train platform. it is too late to protest the transformation of this land; after all, I use the tombstones of family homes as a passageway daily— it zig-zags through bleeding ’hoods like a crack—a chasm—splitting a heart in half. that is the sacrifice of development built on top of sparks. beautiful and easy to forget. bricks that sing as they fall. for the final frame, I imagine them harmonizing to their demise development is a losing game.
BLACK RESIDENTS WERE MORE AFFECTED BY PROPERTY LOSS AND DISPLACEMENT THAN THEIR WHITE COUNTERPARTS WHEN THE DAN RYAN BUILT IN 1961–1962. PHOTO BY ESTHER IKORO FOR SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
than doubled, and since Black Americans were allowed to occupy only certain areas and choose from limited resources, the few neighborhoods where Black folks were welcomed were soon overcrowded. White Chicagoans on the South Side who couldn’t afford to leave these areas would incite riots, and as the Black population began to spread out from the “Black Belt,” Black families would sometimes need police escorts to ensure they were not victims of violence and provocation by irate whites.
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t least twelve percent of Chicago is made up of industrial corridors, areas designated by the City for concentrating manufacturing and other industrial activity. There are twenty-six
industrial corridors in the city, and these have boundaries that coordinate with railroads, viaducts, and highways. Crystal Vance Guerra, co-founder of Bridges//Puentes, a community group on the Southeast Side, said her community has been “targeted” by the City for industrial development; it includes the largest industrial corridor in Chicago. For her, segregation can be seen through the City’s persistence in moving industrial companies to Far South Side neighborhoods such as South Deering and Hegewisch, persistence she describes as “deliberate planning.” It isn’t just the General Iron metal scrapping company, she said. “It’s interesting to see...all the industry being literally pushed across the bridges.”
Vance Guerra’s intuition isn’t far off the mark. The paper “Race, Ethnicity, and Discriminatory Zoning,” published in the American Economic Journal in 2016, found evidence that industrial-use zoning was “disproportionately allocated to neighborhoods populated by ethnic and racial minorities.” While bridges may appear to be purely utilitarian, Vance Guerra went on to say she believes bridges around the Southeast Side act as barriers that segregate communities from one another. In fact, the reason she and others founded Bridges//Puentes was to bridge the divide between residents from all over the Southeast Side: South Chicago, East Side, Hegewisch, South Deering, and elsewhere. She points out
that these bridges form markers between neighborhoods, not reliable connections between them. Many of these bridges are at times not even in service, such as the 106th Street Bridge over the Calumet River in East Side, as well as the 100th Street Bridge in South Chicago: “People who live in South Deering can’t even get to the east side of the East Side,” she said. These difficulties are compounded by the community’s lack of access to public transit. Currently the only bus that connects people downtown from the far Southeast Side is the 30 South Chicago bus, which doesn’t go past the 69th Street Red Line stop. When members of Bridges//Puentes were working on vaccine outreach in South Deering, Vance
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Guerra said it was difficult to get around even by foot. “It is just walls of industry, and you can’t cross. The houses are overshadowed by all the industry,” she said. They had to plan around the limited bus transportation.
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A VIEW OF THE 100TH STREET BRIDGE NEAR THE CHICAGO RAIL AND PORT ABOVE THE CALUMET RIVER IN EAST SIDE. PHOTO BY LEONEL HERNANDEZ FOR SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
between the current Mexican and Black communities. Alvarado said the narrative that Latinx residents were protecting their community from Black “looters” was painful, and it was a distraction from systematic issues that create divides between people in the first place. “I think the best distraction...is to create beef between two communities or beef between, you know, ’hoods of lower-income communities.” That was when the One Lawndale movement was forged. Community leaders brought together twenty to thirty local youth from North Lawndale and La Villita who had already been involved in their communities to some capacity—such as through a school program—to start a brand-new conversation about ways to unpack the divisions. Alvarado said this was done through peace circles and a focus group. The youth group talked about the “differences,” “beauties,” and “similarities” that both neighborhoods share. They talked about why they don’t like and even feared going to each other’s neighborhoods. Last summer, One Lawndale also invited the muralist Sam Kirk to paint a mural at 27th and Lawndale—with the guidance of local youth who have been involved in the peace circles – in hopes of “breaking that segregation within the communities, at least in our pocket of the city, and [at] least in our little world, of Little Village and North Lawndale.” Other residents also painted the words “One Lawndale” close to the viaduct near Cermak and Kedzie. He said these murals are a “visual reminder 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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he Little Village neighborhood on Chicago’s Southwest Side is a historic industrial and immigrant community similar to the Southeast Side. The area is divided by the Burlington Northern railroad tracks, which have historically separated Little Village and North Lawndale, dividing one community of color from the other. North Lawndale is majority Black, and La Villita is mostly Mexican. Before World War II, Jewish residents lived in what is now North Lawndale, separated by the railroad tracks from Poles living in what is now Little Village or South Lawndale; as North Lawndale gained more Black residents, the residents of the Little Village area, then still largely Eastern European, distanced themselves. Originally, these two neighborhoods were one community area called Lawndale, but as Black residents moved into North Lawndale, South Lawndale was renamed Little Village. Racial tensions between these communities are not new, according to Ken Alvarado, who works at New Life Ministries Church in Little Village. But after the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and the racial tensions that followed, community leaders sought to make significant efforts to bridge the divide
THE CHICAGO SKYWAY TOLL BRIDGE, ALSO KNOWN AS THE “SKYWAY,” CONNECTS THE INDIANA TOLL ROAD TO THE DAN RYAN EXPRESSWAY ON THE SOUTH SIDE. PHOTO BY LEONEL HERNANDEZ FOR SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
DEVELOPMENT of what our intentions are, what our plans are, [and] what we’re fighting for.” Vance Guerra views the train tracks in South Chicago as creating a similar division between the Black and the Mexican communities. The tracks are located on her block on Baltimore Avenue, and to the west, on the other side of the tracks, are the Germano Millgate Apartments, which consist of more than 300 affordable housing units with mostly Black renters. When Vance Guerra was distributing toys from a Bridges//Puentes toy drive, she also noticed a cul-de-sac cutting through on 89th Street and Burley Avenue. The apartments are fenced in and cannot be accessed from the east via Baltimore Avenue, since train tracks pass through the area. To exit the affordable housing apartments, tenants can do so only through Burley Avenue.
THE TRACKS AND VIADUCT SEPARATING THE MAJORITY-BLACK NEIGHBORHOOD OF NORTH LAWNDALE AND THE PREDOMINANTLY MEXICAN NEIGHBORHOOD OF LITTLE VILLAGE ON 23RD STREET AND LAWNDALE AVENUE. PHOTO BY LEONEL HERNANDEZ FOR SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
TRAIN TRACKS SEPARATE BALTIMORE AVENUE IN SOUTH CHICAGO FROM THE GERMANO MILLGATE APARTMENTS. PHOTO BY LEONEL HERNANDEZ FOR SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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he University of Chicago, located in Hyde Park, was founded roughly twenty-five years before the start of the Great Migration. The university’s campus has been on the South Side ever since, close to what became the Black Belt. Although the lines of division were clear, this proximity threatened the whiteness and elitism perpetuated by the institution and its campus. Like many other inhabitants of the white communities near the borders of the Black Belt, the university consistently created and upheld racist structures and social systems to maintain barriers between itself and its Black neighbors. In 1924, the University of Chicago began major expansion efforts, and twenty new buildings were constructed between 1926 and 1931. In 1949, a university report explicitly suggested the school acquire land to “serve as a buffer” between the campus and the predominantly Black neighborhoods that surround it, framing those efforts as an attempt to combat “forces of deterioration.” The buffer? A strip between 60th and 61st streets—directly south of Midway Plaisance. The linear, milelong Midway Plaisance is connected to Washington Park at its west and Jackson Park at its east. Glover said it encourages FEBRUARY 24, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17
DEVELOPMENT
GERMANO MILLGATE APARTMENTS IN SOUTH CHICAGO, JUST A FEW FEET FROM THE TRAIN TRACKS. PHOTO BY LEONEL HERNANDEZ FOR SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
segregation: “It has a way of reinforcing the segregation between Hyde Park and Woodlawn. It’s not programmed in a way that makes people of color feel welcome in that space, you know? So in that sense, it does function as a barrier.” The park was built and designed in 1871 by Frederick Law Olmsted and used for the entertainment section of the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. The Midway creates a border between the University of Chicago and the majority-Black neighborhoods to its south, Washington Park and Woodlawn. Both historically and today, these neighborhoods are overpoliced and lack resources relative to Hyde Park to the north. The University of Chicago has continued to exert significant influence over real estate in the area. “In the early 1950s, Hyde Park, once a solidly middleclass neighborhood, began to decline,” the university stated in a brief history as told by their news office. “In response, the University became a major sponsor of an urban renewal effort for Hyde Park,” 18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
—the demolition and redevelopment of areas deemed “blighted.” That meant pushing poor, Black residents out of the neighborhood.
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rain tracks, like many others in the city, create physical barriers that are clear markers of segregation. The 51st/53rd Street Metra station that services Hyde Park sits atop a viaduct that sections off some of the aforementioned area that was the last to be annexed by integration. Even today, this viaduct and train track serve as a clear divide between the more expensive lakefront homes and the rest of the neighborhood, while Hyde Park as a whole has remained nearly fifty percent white, almost twice its Black population, in the midst of the majority Black communities surrounding the area. Despite this, Hyde Park is considered one of Chicago’s most diverse neighborhoods. “For the university, there have been natural boundaries,” said Ben Austen, author of High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing. “There’s a kind of perception.
¬ FEBRUARY 24, 2022
THE 51ST/53RD STREET METRA STATION VIADUCT. PHOTO BY LEONEL HERNANDEZ FOR SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
Don’t cross Washington Park, you know, stay above 55th Street.” The University of Chicago Police Department is not restricted to those boundaries, however. Currently, the university police patrol borders extend south from 37th to 64th streets and east from Jean-Baptiste Point DuSable Lake Shore Drive to Cottage Grove Avenue The university recently increased both campus police as well as Chicago Police Department vehicles and foot patrol.
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ike Hyde Park, Beverly is considered one of Chicago’s most diverse neighborhoods. However, Beverly was one of the first Chicago neighborhoods to build cul-desacs, which very clearly divided it from surrounding Black neighborhoods. In the 1990s, the City built eleven concrete culde-sacs and diverters in the area north of 95th Street with restricted car access and only three points of entry: 91st Street and Western Avenue; 95th and Leavitt; and 95th and Damen Avenue. “It was about keeping lower-income
Black people outside the neighborhood,” Austen said about the creation of culde-sacs in South Shore’s Jackson Park Highlands, one of the places where he grew up. He recalled Black people from other neighborhoods parking their cars in the community to “fix their carburetor or change their oil,” feeling safer working on them there, and white neighbors complaining. Cul-de-sacs, despite their prominence as a marker of segregation, are not the only kind of barrier in Beverly. The same Metra route that separates Auburn Gresham from Beverly curves along Longwood Drive, separating West Beverly from Morgan Park. Though Morgan Park is interconnected with Beverly in some ways, such as housing the Chicago police station that services Beverly and Mount Greenwood, its demographic varies greatly from those of its neighbors. Morgan Park is more than sixty percent Black. Its local high school is more than ninety-nine percent students of color, with ninety-seven percent of those students being Black.
Miles Apart
A short essay by Chima “Naira” Ikoro My dad says he couldn’t even sell ice cream where we live now when he first came to this country. Beverly, a fortress, guarded by race, class, economic status, nestled in the South Side. Suburbia for the city dwellers, realized. To own a home in a place you were once barred from must be an uphill battle. When I felt othered in classrooms where I was the only Black child, I remembered this fact. Some of the most expensive houses in Chicago are in Beverly. The structure of the neighborhood acts as a semi-permeable cell wall, a membrane that handpicks who is welcome. Am I supposed to believe that this is all coincidental? That maybe the Metra stations and tracks aren’t facets of division? Maybe the cul-de-sacs that round out blocks aren’t to ensure that the “others” cannot simply cross a street to reach this place. Maybe the hills the houses sit on aren’t to separate and elevate the well-off away from the scurrying of the South Side. The truth is, they are. There are places I could walk to when I was younger that I cannot reach now that I drive. There is no greater motif for the gradual realization that I was living within a hedge planted to keep the “wild things” from sneaking in. There is a
cul-de-sac of sorts that rounds out the edge of Beverly’s finest houses on Longwood as the neighborhood dissolves into the Dan Ryan Woods. A few steps shy of this curve is a Metra train stop. Another similar road curves parallel to that one in the opposite direction,bend parallels the cul-de-sac, and the space between the two pathways is so tiny it can be crossed in just a few steps. However, if you are driving, it takes ten minutes to go from one to the other; there is a tiny piece of concrete that you cannot drive over, thus you must go around. Since Beverly has mastered one-way streets and dead ends, it’s almost impossible. What is this tiny gap? Why are these two bends in the road so close and yet so far apart? The distance between the two is racial and economic. On one side is Beverly, with a roughly 58 percent white population and a median income of close to $100,000 a year, and on the other side is Auburn Gresham, a neighborhood that is more than ninety-eight percent Black with a median household income of around $34,000 a year. For some reason, the day I realized the magnitude of that tiny piece of concrete, I felt sad. How could I call a neighborhood home if it always found a way to tell my skin-folk that they could play in the front yard, but they are never allowed in the house?
VIADUCT THAT LEADS TO THE HYDE PARK METRA STATION. PHOTO BY LEONEL HERNANDEZ FOR SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
Arms Reach and Heavens Length A poem by Chima “Naira” Ikoro
From the Sun, to the Earth. From the Earth, to the moon. From the North Pole, to the South Pole. From Rosario, Argentina to Xinghua, China. From Tunisia, to South Africa. From Nigeria, to America. From Virginia, to Chicago. From Ravenswood, to Roseland. From 79th and South Shore, to 95th and Longwood. From Sox-35th Red Line stop, to 47th Street Red Line stop. From Beverly, to Morgan Park. From 111th and Pulaski, to 111th and Vincennes. From “neighbor,” to neighbor, separated by the crossing of a street. A lifetime. ¬
TWO DIVERGING ROADS SEPARATED BY A SMALL STRIP OF CONCRETE ON 91ST AND HERMITAGE. IT SEPARATES THE BEVERLY NEIGHBORHOOD FROM THE AUBURN GRESHAM NEIGHBORHOOD. PHOTO BY ESTHER IKORO FOR SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
Alma Campos is the South Side Weekly’s immigration editor. Chima Ikoro is the South Side Weekly’s community organizing editor. FEBRUARY 24, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19
TERMS TO KNOW: Area Median Income: The middle point of an area’s household income distribution. AMI’s are determined differently by the income distribution of a given city and region.
The Chicago Housing Authority Explained
Segregation and public housing in Chicago go hand in hand.
BY GRACE DEL VECCHIO
O
riginally intended to replace overcrowded, deeply impoverished neighborhoods, Chicago’s midcentury public housing developments initially offered significantly better living conditions to residents, and for a time were, as author Dawn Turner told the South Side Weekly, “bastions” of stability that “conferred dignity on the residents.” But subsequent decades of disinvestment and neglect by federal and municipal authorities, combined with entrenched racism from the political machine and a police department with a long history of brutality, led many public housing developments in Chicago to become places where generations of Black families were trapped in poverty amid violence and extreme segregation. Federal and municipal agencies both had a hand in the decline of public housing in Chicago, as well as in the more recent attempts to reverse it. And at both the federal and local level, agency oversight of public housing—or the lack thereof—has consistently reinforced the city’s segregation. 20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
EXTERIOR SCENES OF PEOPLE AT THE CABRINI GREEN HOUSING PROJECTS, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS. 1974. ST-14001621-0011, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES COLLECTION, CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM
What is the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) and what is its role?
all seventy-seven community areas. Currently, forty-four properties qualify as mixed-income.
Created in 1937, the Chicago Housing Authority is a municipal not-for-profit agency whose primary objective is to provide housing options for low-income families. It was founded under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration, which came about as part of the New Deal. As one of eighty public housing authorities to take part in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Moving to Work Program, CHA currently provides homes for more than 63,000 households in Chicago through four different types of public housing: family, senior, scattered site, and mixed-income. Currently, there are just under 7,000 family-specific units on fourteen different public housing properties. As for seniors, there are 9,000 units of housing on fortythree different properties throughout the city. CHA has 2,800 units of scattered site housing, which can be found in
An abridged history on the Chicago Housing Authority
¬ FEBRUARY 24, 2022
The CHA was created in 1937. Of the first three CHA developments whose construction began in the 1930s— Jane Addams, Julia C. Lathrop, and Trumbull Park Homes—Lathrop, on the Near North Side, and Trumbull, on the far South Side, still stand, having undergone recent renovations. By the late 1950s CHA owned over 40,000 units of housing, making it the city’s largest landlord. But even the early days of public housing were rocky. In 1937, the agency adopted the “neighborhood composition rule,” which required residents of public housing developments to be of the same race as residents in the neighborhood surrounding the development. The policy, which ostensibly was put in place so “that public housing should not disturb the pre-existing racial
Low-Income Housing: According to HUD, in order to be considered low-income and therefore qualify for public housing, households must make a gross income of eighty percent or less of the AMI for their local Housing Authority Mixed-Income Housing: Housing developments which include varying levels of affordability in the same property, including market-rate and affordable housing. Scattered Site Properties: Individual or small groups of public housing properties, rather than full developments. There are scattered site properties in all seventy-seven community areas of Chicago. The New Deal: A series of economic development programs started by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression. The New Deal was meant to stabilize the economy and offer relief to those most impacted by the Great Depression. Public Works Administration: An agency set up by President Roosevelt to oversee and carry out the New Deal. The PWA spent about $4 billion on education buildings, public health facilities, court houses, and sewage disposal, as well as roads, bridges, and subways. Housing Choice Voucher (or Section 8): Federal funding from HUD that helps families pay for rental housing on the private market. Participating families contribute thirty to forty percent of their income towards housing and HUD pays the remainder directly to the property owner.
HOUSING
composition of neighborhoods where it was placed,” further encouraged and enforced segregation. It also concentrated residents into densely populated areas. An example of this were the Robert Taylor Homes, completed in 1962, which spanned two miles along State Street, from 39th to 54th, in close proximity to other developments including Harold L. Ickes and Stateway Gardens. The three housing developments combined had nearly 7,000 units of housing. In 1966, a group of tenants led by Altgeld Gardens resident Dorothy Gautreaux sued the CHA, claiming that “by concentrating more than 10,000 public housing units in isolated African American neighborhoods,” both CHA and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) were violating desegregation laws. In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Gautreaux. From 1976 to 1998, the CHA’s Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program moved 7,100 Black households to integrated housing throughout the Chicagoland area. In 1995, the federal office of Housing and Urban Development reclaimed control of CHA, arguing that the city had mismanaged and neglected public housing. Soon after, HUD advocated that the high-rise developments, which had become areas of high crime and concentrated generational poverty, should be demolished. In 1999, former Mayor Richard M. Daley did just that, taking the agency back under city control and launching the Plan for Transformation in 2000.
What is the Plan for Transformation? The Plan for Transformation sought to demolish 25,000 units of existing public housing and renovate and replace the developments with upgraded facilities and housing. The plan also sought to further integrate public housing residents with non-public housing residents through mixed-income housing developments. The plan was set to be completed by the end of 2017. Today, according to
CHA, eighty-eight percent of the plan is complete. Its execution caused severe displacement for residents across the city. At the Cabrini-Green high rises on the city’s Near North Side, CHA demolished 1,324 units of public housing, promising to replace the towers with mixed-income developments. The neighborhood demographics have changed significantly since the towers’ demolition, becoming whiter and more affluent. The goal of mixed-income housing is to place poor residents in housing developments with more affluent residents, following the belief that placing residents of various economic backgrounds in similar housing will help provide poor residents with a higher quality of life and increased agency. However successful this theory may be, the opportunity was offered to very few public housing residents. To start, only 1,300 of the nearly 17,000 remodeled units under the Plan for Transformation were in mixed-income developments. Many residents were unable to meet the set of requirements in order to qualify for the sought-after mixed-income housing. These requirements included proof of income, good credit scores, and background checks—a challenge for many. At the start of the plan, for example, over half of Cabrini-Green residents were unemployed. In response, some residents sought to stop the plan altogether and even pursued legal action, claiming that CHA’s displacement of residents was unlawful. In two cases against CHA, the courts sided with residents on the grounds that CHA’s “abrupt and unilateral” plan to relocate residents was in violation of the Fair Housing Act.
When public housing developments were torn down, where did the former residents go? The Plan for Transformation promised not only new developments but new opportunities for public housing
residents. A major component of the plan was integration and an increased quality of life carried out through mixed-income housing, but that promise was never fully fulfilled. According to data published by WBEZ in 2017, less than eight percent of the nearly 17,000 households under the plan live in mixed-income communities. About twenty-one percent are utilizing Housing Choice Vouchers (also known as Section 8) in the private market, 15.97 percent live in traditional (non mixed-income) public housing, 11.99 percent were evicted, and therefore are not eligible for a Section 8 voucher or relocation to other housing developments, 9.59 percent have died, and 33.82 percent are living without a government subsidy or assistance. Geographically speaking, many residents stayed in Chicago and migrated to different neighborhoods. Those heading to mixed-income or scattered housing sites primarily moved to the North Side, while those using vouchers in the private market predominately relocated to the South and West Sides. Others left the city altogether, heading to the south suburbs, in a growing exodus of families hoping to to raise their children in a safer environment outside the city.
What are the City and CHA doing about affordable housing now? In 2017, the year the Plan for Transformation was meant to be completed, WBEZ reporter Natalie Moore published an extensive analysis of the status of public housing developments. While thousands of units were demolished at South Side developments such as Stateway Gardens, Robert Taylor, Ida B. Wells, and Harold L. Ickes, little replacement housing has been built. At Robert Taylor, where 4,321 units of housing once stood, as of 2017, CHA had constructed just 335 units of a promised 2,388. At Ida B. Wells, CHA promised to rebuild 3,000 of the 3,500 units, but as the end of the plan drew near, only 348 new units had been built. In 2018, Hyde Park native and
journalist Ben Austen published HighRisers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing. Researched over seven years, the book chronicles the lived experiences of some of those who called Cabrini-Green home. “The ongoing problem is that we didn't solve anything,” Austen said. “The Plan for Transformation’s mission was to break up concentrated poverty, and that was going to justify all of the means that were really problematic and punishing and cruel. And the truth is, we didn't break up concentrated poverty because this is the city we live in twenty years later.”
What’s next? In December of 2021, Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced the largest investment in affordable housing in Chicago’s history. As a part of the investment, twenty-four developments located on the South and West Sides will create or preserve up to 2,400 affordable rental units. Of the planned units, 684 will be family-oriented while 394 will be devoted to residents making less than thirty percent of the area median income. Five of these projects are taking place at existing CHA developments while others are in neighborhoods surrounding them. The developments are split into four different tract areas, each focusing on a specific kind development: opportunity, redevelopment, transitioning, and preservation. This investment doesn’t stray far from programs CHA has been relying on in recent years. Considering CHA’s significant decrease in staff for public housing, the agency has repeatedly relied on private-public partnerships to bring affordable housing to Chicagoans. The post-Plan for Transformation public housing landscape has shifted into one where the public is no longer in full ownership of its housing, creating more challenges for low-income residents to access the housing they need. ¬ Grace Del Vecchio is a Philadelphia-born, Chicago-based freelance journalist primarily covering movements and policing.
FEBRUARY 24, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21
HOUSING
Can The New Affordable Requirements Ordinance Help Solve Chicago’s Housing Inequality? BY JUSTIN AGRELO
T
he Affordable Requirements Ordinance (ARO), a mechanism for encouraging development of affordable housing in mixed-income communities, has been a centerpiece in debates around Chicago’s affordable housing policy for more than a decade. City officials claim the program helps combat Chicago’s deeply entrenched racial segregation by creating affordable housing in communities where the private market and housing policy have not. But the program hasn’t been without major flaws. When Mayor Lori Lightfoot took office in 2019, overhauling the policy was near the top of her housing agenda. That fall, the Department of Housing (DOH) convened an “Inclusionary Housing Task Force” composed of twenty housing experts and advocates from around the city. The group was tasked with examining the 2015 ARO through a racial equity lens ahead of a rewrite in City Council. After an eighteen-month-long review process, the task force published their findings in a fall 2020 report where they provided suggestions for how City Council should update the ordinance to be more equitable and prevent displacement of primarily Black and brown longtime residents in gentrifying communities. Building from those suggestions, City Council approved an updated version of the ARO, which took effect last October. The 2021 ARO arrives at a time when Chicago’s affordable housing stock is disappearing, Black residents are leaving the city en masse, and the combination of rising rents and wage stagnation are rendering the city unaffordable for lowincome renters. As Chicago inches its way out of a pandemic that has only compounded existing housing inequities, 22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
how effective can the revamped ARO be at reckoning with the City’s stark legacy of racial segregation? What is the ARO? First passed in 2007, the ARO created a set of rules for developers seeking City funding, City-owned land, or zoning changes for a project with ten or more units. Under the ARO, developers were required to set aside ten percent of their proposed units as affordable housing. Some of the affordable units could be built on-site or within a twomile radius of the original project. Up until 2015, developers could—and often did—opt out and choose not to build any affordable units, and instead pay in-lieu fees. These fees were then funneled into the Affordable Housing Opportunity Fund, which the City uses to support other affordable housing initiatives. Since 2007, these in-lieu fees have generated $124 million for the City. Chicago’s ARO program isn’t the first of its kind. Known more commonly as “Inclusionary Zoning,” similar housing policies are practiced in cities throughout the country. In Chicago, city leaders wanted to leverage the development boom that was already taking place in the city’s upper-housing markets in places like the West Loop so that this rapid growth also contributed to the city’s affordable housing stock. The measure wouldn’t cost the city anything and could sway private development to address public needs. In theory, Inclusionary Zones combat segregation by providing lowincome families access to an otherwise exclusive affluent neighborhood. In a city like Chicago where the majority of the government-subsidized housing is
¬ FEBRUARY 24, 2022
concentrated in communities of color on the South and West Sides, the ARO attempts to cut through the city’s strict colorlines by allowing low-income families the agency to live wherever they choose. In practice, however, the program has seemingly done little to ease Chicago’s chronic racial and economic segregation. Affordable for whom? From the onset, the ARO was an imperfect policy. One of its most glaring flaws was the stark discrepancy between what the program deemed affordable and what low-income Chicagoans could actually pay for. In September 2020, researchers at the Metropolitan Planning Council analyzed public ARO data provided by the Chicago DOH. They found that most Black and Latinx families couldn’t afford an ARO because the units were too expensive. ARO prices are set using a federal calculation called Area Median Income (AMI). The problem is that AMI ties Chicago’s housing affordability to incomes across the entire metropolitan area as opposed to just Chicago alone. So while the median income in Chicagoproper for a household of three in 2018 was $57,238, the AMI for the metropolitan region was set significantly higher at $80,200. Even when units are priced at about half of the region’s AMI—the price point for most ARO units— they’re still inaccessible to low-income families. According to MPC, a threeperson household in Chicago must earn between $40,100 and $48,120 to qualify for an “affordable” unit priced at fifty to sixty percent of the AMI. Yet the average
income for a Black household in Chicago is $28,000. But even if these units were to be priced at levels low-income families could actually afford, market trends are another barrier. Over the past decade, the majority of new units built in Chicago have been studios or one bedrooms, which are too small for many low-income families. The program has created just 107 units with two or more bedrooms since 2015. The lack of family-sized units coupled with the steep ARO prices means that many low-income Chicagoans haven’t been able to reap the benefits of the ARO program or the development happening in their communities either. This often leads to their displacement. Despite its prominence, the ARO program is not a mass generator of affordable housing. According to data provided by the DOH, the program has created 1,790 units since 2008. The DePaul Institute for Housing Studies estimates that the city currently has an affordable housing shortage of more than 100,000 units. So why has a program that’s been given such priority been so seemingly unsuccessful at its mission to “push back against long standing patterns of segregation and exclusion?” According to DOH commissioner Marisa Novara, the ARO was never meant to be a mass producer of affordable housing. In July 2021, Novara denied claims that the previous versions of the ARO failed to meet their inclusionary goals during a virtual training on the updated ordinance. “[The ARO] is a component of a bigger effort,” Novara said. “This will never result in a building being majority affordable. There’s always going to be a lesser number of [affordable] units
HOUSING than we can achieve through [other housing programs]. ” Fair housing advocates disagree. Even by its own definition, many believe the City hasn’t utilized the program to its full potential. In 2019, Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th) led a campaign for the Development For All Ordinance, a measure that would have raised the affordable housing requirements from ten to thirty percent for projects in “high-rent zones,” such as Pilsen. The ordinance would have also removed the option for developers to opt-out of building new affordable units by paying fees. While the measure hasn’t passed, the critiques remain. “The idea that the ARO doesn’t do enough is absolutely correct,” said Daniel Kay Hertz, the DOH’s policy director who helped spearhead the overhaul. “The ARO is structurally incapable of providing the amount of affordability that is needed in Chicago. By definition, it is a percentage of an already small percentage of the housing stock, which is new housing.There just isn’t enough new housing to fully address the need no matter what the [affordable requirement] percentage is.”
The idea is that if developers are receiving incentives for building in gentrifying communities, then longtime residents should also benefit from that redevelopment regardless of their income level. Still, the new ARO fails to directly address an issue that’s always been at the heart of the law’s problems: ARO units just aren’t affordable for the people who need them the most—the city’s working poor. Under the new law, the income requirement is still set at sixty percent AMI despite evidence that most Black
and Latinx Chicagoans cannot meet this standard. To create a more inclusive Chicago— one where people of color can choose to stay in their communities or live wherever they want regardless of their socioeconomic status—the City needs to both provide housing accessible to the working poor and maximize the number of available units, a tricky challenge. “The way to really get affordability at scale is to pay for it,” Hertz said. “Affordable housing does not pay for itself. We [the City] need to make investments in
subsidized affordable housing… because we’re simply not going to be able to meet the city’s affordable housing needs through inclusionary zoning programs like the ARO.” ¬ Justin Agrelo is a freelance journalist in Chicago, covering housing, race, and poverty. You can find him at @JstnAgrlo on Twitter.
GRAPHIC BY HALEY TWEEDELL
The new ARO The new ordinance attempts to mitigate the shortcomings of its predecessors in several ways. The 2021 law aims to increase production volume by upping the total number of units developers are required to set aside as affordable from ten percent to twenty percent. The new ARO also limits developers’ option to opt out of building new affordable units by paying fees. In the 2015 ordinance, developers could opt-out of building seventy-five percent of the required units by paying those in-lieu fees. Under the new law, developers must actually build at least half of the required units. The other half can be forfeited in exchange for fees. Developers can decrease that twenty percent requirement by building family-sized units or pricing ARO units below sixty percent AMI. The 2021 law also shrinks the twomile radius for where offsite units can be placed to one mile of the triggering project in gentrifying neighborhoods. FEBRUARY 24, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 23
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POLICE
The Geography of Fear
CHICAGO HOUSING AUTHORITY POLICE STANDING OUTSIDE THE ROBERT TAYLOR HOMES BEFORE THEY WERE DEMOLISHED. PHOTO BY PATRICIA EVANS
BY JAMIE KALVEN, INVISIBLE INSTITUTE
C
hicagoans are on edge. Two years into the pandemic and emerging from a year in which there were 836 homicides in the city, civic morale is sinking. While multiple factors are no doubt in play, fear of violent crime tops the list. According to a recent poll conducted by the Chicago Index (a collaboration between the Daily Line and Crain’s Chicago Business) at the end of last year, only thirty-two percent of those polled regard the city as safe—a sharp decline since the fall of 2021 when forty-five percent said they had a “feeling of safety” in their neighborhood. This is the fourth iteration of the
Chicago Index poll. Since the beginning of 2021, it has been conducted on a quarterly basis by Polco, a Wisconsinbased firm. I asked Michelle Kobayashi, Polco’s senior vice president of innovation, to put the Chicago figures in a broader perspective. “Over the past five years,” she said, “we’ve asked the same question about perceptions of safety in surveys conducted in more than 500 cities, towns, and counties across the country. Overall, close to eighty percent of respondents say they regard their neighborhoods as safe.” She added a caveat: big cities comparable to Chicago are underrepresented in Polco’s data. That
said, among the larger cities they have surveyed, the percentage of those who perceive their neighborhoods as safe rarely falls below fifty percent. So the Chicago figures—especially the sharp decline in residents’ sense of safety over the last few months—are significant. They make it clear that fear is now a powerful gravitational force shaping the politics and civic life of the city. That fear, it can reasonably be assumed, has been aroused by recent high-profile violent incidents in middleclass neighborhoods, among them, a spike in carjackings across the city and widely reported smash-and-grab burglaries at high-end stores. Violent crime, it appears,
is spilling over into neighborhoods where, as people sometimes say, that sort of thing doesn’t happen. The corollary to the proposition that crime doesn’t belong here is that it belongs elsewhere: it’s in the wrong place. Implicit in this logic is a geography of fear deeply grounded in Chicago history. That geography is a harsh reality in plain sight. Yet at times it can become an optical illusion in which we lose our bearings. We are currently experiencing such perceptual instability. In the post-George Floyd moment of summer 2020, there was an extraordinary flowering of moral imagination: an expansive sense of community among fellow citizens. The
FEBRUARY 24, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 25
POLICE pandemic had set the stage. By laying bare bedrock structural inequalities, it created the context in which millions experienced the Floyd atrocity and felt for a time that intolerable conditions affecting their fellow citizens could no longer be tolerated. As anxieties about crime intensify, that imaginative space is contracting. Will it collapse under the weight of fear? Or will it prove possible to more deeply engage the principle that all have an equal claim to be safe? The history of how hypersegregation and policing strategies co-evolved in Chicago does not answer these questions, but it does provide essential mooring for considering them. It is widely agreed by historians that the watershed event in the development of Chicago’s distinctive mode of hypersegregation was the 1919 Race Riot. Prior to the riot, successive waves of migration from the South had swelled the so-called Black Belt, but the city was not yet rigidly segregated. Writing in the New York Times on the centennial of the riot, historian Adam Green of the University of Chicago observed that three days of race war had the effect of boldly
delineating boundaries between Black and white Chicago—boundaries that would thereafter be fiercely defended. Modern Chicago was “baptized,” he wrote, “in blood.” The public emergency presented by the riot, Green explained in an interview, was met “by a set of very dramatic and unprecedented police decisions,” one of which was “to establish a cordon—what was called a dead zone—around the Black Belt,” Whatever the merits of that decision in the moment, it “resulted in the first citywide example of differential policing. And that differential policing is something that is going to be instituted, that’s going to be embraced, that’s going to be understood as the code of the police rather than something that’s an anomaly.” Over the century since the riot, the containment strategies the police adopted in response to the 1919 emergency became the norm. As Green puts it, “hypersegregation is normalized as public policy” and proves endlessly adaptive: “even when you strike down restrictive covenants, it’s very easy to use redlining, it’s very easy to use contract
selling, it’s very easy to use steering.” As hypersegregation evolves and matures, so do policing policies and practices. “All of this,” observes Green, “is of a piece.” The braiding of segregation and policing in Chicago over time is illuminated by a key chapter in that history: the era of high-rise public housing. In 2000, the City launched the Plan for Transformation and over the next decade demolished the high-rise developments and forcibly relocated residents. Those communities have been erased, but the questions they pose and the lessons they offer have never been more relevant. Late-stage highrise public housing was the epitome of hypersegregation, and the mode of policing practiced there is the extreme case that makes starkly visible the larger phenomenon of differential policing pervasive elsewhere in less explicit forms. In the 1950s, when the City undertook to address poor housing conditions in the Black Belt, the original plan was to disperse public housing developments throughout the city. In the face of fierce aldermanic opposition, however, the administration of thenPHOTO BY JUN FUJITA Mayor Richard J. Daley made the fateful decision to concentrate the bulk of public housing within the precise footprint of the Black Belt, thereby reinforcing rather than breaking up segregation. The result was an archipelago of public housing developments concentrated primarily on the South and West sides. By the 1990s, the so-called “South State Street corridor” of public housing was said to be the largest concentration of public housing—and poverty—in the nation. Madeleine Hamlin, a PhD candidate at Syracuse University, is writing a history of Chicago public housing from the perspective of policing. Her thesis is that the widely perceived policy failure of public housing is better understood as a reflection of “[the] failures of modern policing.” I asked her to describe the distinctive features of the policing of the high-rise developments during the final quarter-century of their existence. “One of the hallmarks of the policing of public housing,” she observed, “is the dynamic of residents feeling both Armed National Guard and African American men standing on a sidewalk during over-policed and under-policed. Both the race riots in Chicago, Illinois, 1919. Chicago History Museum, CHM-i65478 26 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
¬ FEBRUARY 24, 2022
are problematic and mean that the cops are unable to promote public safety in any meaningful way. Folks aren’t getting help when they need it. And then when the cops are there, they’re typically doing things that are detrimental or counterproductive. On top of that, you have corrupt and abusive cops who take advantage of this captive, marginalized population and in doing so, reinforce the racial and territorial stigma of the projects.” In her interviews with officers detailed to Chicago Housing Authority developments, Hamlin has found they almost invariably describe the developments as “a different world,” “a different planet,” or “a city within the city.” This sense of the CHA as a world apart was manifest in strategies of policing as containment that recall the “dead zone” cordon around the old Black Belt. The mission was to contain the population not for their own protection but in the interest of those outside the community. “There is this sense that a different set of rules apply at [the] CHA,” she said. “That because you have this marginalized population all in one place, there are things the police can get away with there that they wouldn't get away with in more affluent, whiter communities in the city.” A range of extra-constitutional measures were adopted as policy and implemented in public housing. Beginning in the late 1980s, residents were repeatedly subjected to “sweeps” by the police and other law enforcement agencies in the course of which hundreds of officers would descend on a building and conduct warrantless searches of every apartment. Portraying the raids as emergency measures required to curb gang and drug activity, the City as landlord claimed the power to invade residents’ homes without a warrant. Courts ultimately rejected that claim. The reality on the ground, however, according to Hamlin, remained that “the residents are simply not afforded the same constitutional rights to privacy and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure that other residents of the city are.”
POLICE My own experience—I spent more than a decade working in and reporting from public housing on the South Side—supports that conclusion. It was an open secret that high-rise public housing was allowed to function as a vice zone in order to keep the open sale of narcotics contained. At the same time, it was a major battlefield in the “war on drugs.” The shadow play of narcotics enforcement thus served as a tool of social control—anyone on the grounds of a public housing development could be stopped at any time, anyone’s home could be searched, any door could be broken down. There was no sanctuary. Another policy aggressively pursued by the CHA, acting in concert with the Chicago Police Department, is the One Strike eviction policy under which arrest for a drug-related crime is the basis for eviction of all those living in the unit with which the arrested individual was associated. This policy, which was unanimously upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1998, is another instance of the vulnerability of public housing families to intrusion by law enforcement. Under the One Strike policy, a leaseholder—a grandmother, say, the matriarch of a large family that lives with her—is held vicariously liable and can be evicted for the alleged criminal activity of her grandson, who has been charged but not convicted of a drug crime. The only way she can cure her situation— disposition of her grandson’s case without a conviction is not in itself sufficient—is to enter into an agreed-upon order that has the effect of barring her grandson from the grounds of the development, making him a trespasser if he comes home. As a result of her research, Hamlin has concluded that public housing wasn’t “intended to be a mechanism to police poor Black Chicagoans, but that is what it ultimately became.” Moreover, the policing practices that developed in public housing— and the official narrative justifying them—had the effect of criminalizing an entire population. Public policy thus produced a frightening Other stigmatized as dangerous, antisocial, and
ungovernable. This, in turn, facilitated the displacement of public housing residents from their homes and the destruction of their communities. It also conferred virtual impunity on abusive officers, for their victims were presumed criminal and hence not credible when they sought redress. When the City demolished the high-rise developments, it appears that it also erased their histories, for this body of experience—an invaluable resource for diagnosing the pathologies of contemporary policing—simply does not figure in the discourse about police reform. The one exception is the socalled Watts scandal: the crimes of former CPD Sergeant Ronald Watts and officers under his command, who preyed upon the residents of the Ida B. Wells and Harold Ickes developments in Bronzeville for more than a decade. Since I broke that story in 2016, there have been more than 150 exonerations of individuals framed on drug charges by Watts and his team; nineteen additional petitions for exoneration are pending. Although the case gets occasional public attention when there is a new batch of exonerations, it continues to be seen as a discreet instance of police corruption rather than as a human rights disaster that took place in vulnerable communities located in the center of the city and was enabled by policies, practices, and forms of institutional complicity that persist. If noted at all, the policing of public housing is treated as sui generis, an anomaly, rather than the prototype of differential policing. The paradox of communities simultaneously over-policed and abandoned by law enforcement; the practice of policing as containment; the “war on drugs” as a means of social control; and the vulnerability of lowincome Black communities, families, and individuals to intrusive measures that constitute a de facto apartheid system in which the Constitution means different things in different neighborhoods—these remain defining features of the prevailing model of policing in the segregated city as documented by the reports of the Police Accountability Task Force and the Department of Justice in the aftermath of
the police murder of Laquan McDonald. One of the reform measures implemented on the basis of those reports was the creation of the Public Safety Section of the Office of the Inspector General of Chicago. Its mission is to monitor the performance of the CPD, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability,
PAT EVANS AND HER SON ARTHUR, PICTURED ABOVE, WERE SOME OF THE FIRST RESIDENTS EVICTED AT STATEWAY UNDER THE ONE-STRIKE POLICY. PHOTO BY PATRICIA EVANS
and the Police Board, and to make relevant information public, which it does through its information portal. For the past four years, Inspector General Joseph Ferguson oversaw the operation of this unit until he stepped down at the end of his term in October 2021. In an interview, Ferguson noted that approximately fifty percent of CPD officers live in five wards of the City. “These neighborhoods are overwhelmingly white and have a distinctly suburban feel. They are home to multi-generational police and fire department families. To grow up in such a place is to be shaped by a particular sense of community.” Imagine, he suggested, a young person for whom this community is home—the third generation in a police family—who signs up and goes to the police academy. “Upon graduation, he gets dropped into the second watch in Englewood. It doesn't look to him like community as he knows it. It looks like
a war zone. And the mode of policing into which he is socialized reinforces the sense that the role of the police is to be, in effect, an occupying force. Those who live in this war zone are by definition devalued people.” Ferguson is quick to add that “it’s not the fault of the police alone” that we created and maintain these conditions as a society, then leave the police to contend with them. “Look,” he said, “there is one heat map of the city on which it is possible to layer every conceivable measure of abandonment and exclusion. They all align.” Our inability to acknowledge this fundamental reality and to hold it in focus has blocked us from making progress on police reform and much else, according to Ferguson. “If slavery is the original sin of the nation,” he said, “segregation is the original sin of this city.” The question now is whether we can as a city escape the gravitational pull of our history and work equitably to ensure the safety of all residents. Fear of violent crime arises from our emotional cores and is animated by our deepest concerns for the safety of those closest to us. It can also induce a sort of tunnel vision—a hyper-clarity that is the product of what is not seen. The challenge is to aggressively address the realities of violent crime while remaining aware of the dangers that arise from the fear of violence in a segregated society. It is telling that in the recent collection The 1619 Project, produced by the New York Times , the essay written by Leslie and Michelle Alexander dealing the role of law enforcement in the history of racial oppression since slavery is titled, simply, “Fear.” ¬ Jamie Kalven is a writer and human rights activist. He is the founder of the Invisible Institute. Among the awards he has received are the 2015 Polk Award for Local Reporting, the 2016 Ridenhour Courage Prize, and the 2017 Hillman Prize for Web Journalism.
FEBRUARY 24, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 27
Henrik Ibsen’s
THE LADY FROM THE ADAPTED FROM A NEW TRANSLATION BY
RICHARD NELSON
Directed by
SHANA COOPER
SEA
ON STAGE AND STREAMING THROUGH MARCH 27 Sponsored by Sidley Austin Foundation Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation Photo of Chaon Cross by Michael Brosilow.
MAY/JUNE
August Wilson’s
TWO TRAINS RUNNING directed by Ron OJ Parson
Tickets: (773) 753-4472 CourtTheatre.org 5535 S Ellis Ave, Hyde Park Free Garage Parking
