Gentrification, Integration and Income in Chicago
In a recent piece for the Washington Post, University of Chicago grad student Daniel Hertz raised a provocative question - are the people who are opposing gentrification essentially arguing that neighborhoods should remain segregated?
It's not that he's arguing that people who oppose gentrification are entirely in the wrong. He readily acknowledges that gentrification usually does result in minority residents getting pushed out. He notes that integration is a complex thing to achieve, and that it's not something many people (of all races) would necessarily want. At the same time, Hertz makes a compelling case the segregation puts minorities (especially African-Americans) at serious disadvantage.
Ultimately, Hertz doesn't claim he has any answers - he's just trying to ask questions he feels are very much worth addressing.
A thoughtful essay deserves a thoughtful response.
I can't speak for Portland, or New York, or some of the other cities Hertz mentioned. But I can speak for Chicago.
Integration
Interracial couple watches a performance at Rogers Park 2009 World Music Festival
The Windy City has a reputation for being starkly segregated - and there's a more than a bit of truth to that. Bill Rankin's Radical Cartography map illustrates it quite well. But it also shows that, in many neighborhoods, the situation is more complex than that. Those neighborhoods are exceptions to the major patterns, but it's worth considering why they managed to integrate and stay integrated, while other neighborhoods didn't.
In Hyde Park, the integration was part of a very deliberate, painstaking effort planned out and implemented by the University of Chicago and several community grops. in the mid-20th century, traditional legal barriers that kept African-Americans isolated within increasingly crowded ghettos came down, white residents either resisted or fled. And many businesses and other local institutions fled with them.
U of C and Hyde Parkers were determined not to let it happen. So what they set out to do was to turn Hyde Park into an integrated, middle-class neighborhood. And the big part of making it happen was to do everything in their power to kick the poor people (of all races) out. Which is why the entire thing inspires such mixed emotions. But the plan worked more or less as expected, and Hyde Park remains almost evenly divided between whites and African-Americans to this day (with a small, but larger than average Asian-American population).
In Morgan Park, the integration was largely due to historic circumstances. This South Side neighborhood had African-Americans for over a hundred years - but during the first half of the 20th century, there was an implicit understanding that they had to stay on the east side of the Rock Island Railroad tracks. Once the housing restrictions came down, the area a few blocks from both sides tracks became more mixed, but as the Radical Cartorgraphy map clearly shows, the west part of the neighborhood is still more white than black, and east side is still more black than white.
The Ashburn community area is in a similar position. As I mentioned before, the community area is made up of the majority-white Scottsdale (which has recently become more of white/Hispanic), the majority-black Wrightwood and Ashburn, which lies between the two and has the mix of white, black and Hispanic residents. According to the Encyclopedia of Chicago, this was at least partially due to the efforts of local community groups. While the local white residents didn't take to African-American arrivals at first, by 1970s, things reached the point where both worked together to resist blockbusting, steering and white flight.
Since the 1940s, Uptown, Edgewater, Rogers Park and West Ridge community areas have been ports of entry for immigrants and migrants. In Uptown, homeowners were the first to essentially drop race-based restrictions in effort to attract tenants (any tenants), creating a fairly diverse community of all races without quite meaning to. Situation was a bit more complicated in Edgewater and Rogers Park, but the end results were similar - even now, no racial group in those neighborhood accounts for more than 50 percent of the population. In Edgewater and Rogers Park, much of the black population are immigrants from African countries, while in Uptown, the majority of African-Americans trace their roots to migrants who came from the Deep South after World War II, looking for work. West Ridge has a smaller black population than the other three, but otherwise, its population is fairly mixed ethnically and racially.
Bridgeport, the heart of Chicago's Democratic Machine, has a very small black population. Until about 1980s, the local residents were quite keen on keeping the neighborhood majority-white, and they especially didn't want any black people coming in from the other side of Dan Ryan Expressway. But over the last four decades, the resistance eased as Chinese-Americans moved from the increasingly overcrowded nearby Chinatown, and Mexican-Americans moved from nearby Pilsen. So while the number of black residents is still fairly low, it's a fairly mixed neighborhood.
(Every tie I visit the neighborhood library, which was named after Mayor Richard J. Daley (who resisted integration as much as legally possible), and see its English/Spanish/Cantonese trilingual signs, I can't help but think that Richard I must be rolling over in his grave).
Over on the Northwest Side, Albany Park also has a small black population, but, as a gateway neighborhood, it remains fairly diverse. Since the early 2000s, its Korean-American population dropped off, with some of them moving to the suburbs, and others moving to the nearby neighborhoods to the west and the north, making North Park and Mayfare more diverse in the process. Immigrant from Latin American countries, Iraq and Syria have filled in the gaps.
Pullman, on the other hand, became one of Chicago's most racially mixed neighborhoods almost by accident. Formerly a company town for the Pullman Rail Car factory, it's biggest attraction are well-preserved late 19th-century homes. The neighborhood is cut off from the rest of the city by railroad tracks, what remains of the industrial areas and the Pullman factory site. It's the kind of place that's easy to overlook, so the local residents use the neighborhood's unique housing stock and its interesting history to draw new residents in. Over the last few decades, race hasn't been much of concern - if you love the neighborhood and have enough money to buy a house (or rent any Pullman's few remaining historic apartments), you'll be welcomed with open arms.
An Asian-American woman and her hapa kids hang out at Pullman's Arcade Park
And finally, a few words about Beverly, an upper-middle class neighborhood located north of Morgan Park. While the neighborhood is majority-white, it has a larger percentage of African-Americans than most majority-white Chicago neighborhoods (34% as of the 2010 census). Unlike Pullman, this was very much deliberate, with Beverly Area Planning Association making a huge effort to fight blockbusting and inviting interested Chicagoans of all races to check out the neighborhood. There have been some racial tensions over the years, but, for the most part, black and white residents of Beverly manage to get along well.
Gentrification
Express Grill - one of the few remnants of the pre-gentriciation Maxwell Street
As I said before - and Heinz's piece readily acknowledges - when a neighborhood gentrifies, the minority population tends to drop off. Back in the 1990s, Wicker Park and Bucktown used to have a slim Puerto Rican majority. But as the recent Chicago Magazine article pointed out, 20 years later, the number of Latino residents dropped to 18% and 15%, respectively. Logan Square, which only saw significant gentrification in mid-2000s, has been the number of Latinos drop from 69% to 58% - and, as Chicago magazine notes, that number is probably even lower now. Even Humboldt Park, the heart of Chicago's Puerto Rican community since the 1960s, an neighborhood that has only seen partial gentrification, saw the number of Latinos drop from 65% to 58%.
Or consider Near South Side and Near West Side community areas. Until the early 2000s, both were majority black, but in the last 15 years, both of them saw major redevelopment as old industrial buildings got converted into lofts and much of the old housing was just plain torn down to build newer, more expensive housing. I got to see some of that first-hand back in 2006-2008, when I studied at the Near West Side's University of Illinois at Chicago. I lived on South Campus, which was built on the site of the old Maxwell Street neighborhood. and when I say "built on the site" I mean UIC basically had several blocks torn down or reduced to gutted "skin jobs." I was there when newer condos went up along Roosevelt Road and east of the enormous patch of territory that used to be railroad tracks.
When I lived there, I used to see black families play by the fountain near my building. The last couple of times I went back there, I realized that I didn't really see much of them anymore.
Like I said, those community areas used to be majority black. That wasn't really true when I lived there, and only got less true since. Most of the Near South Side, especially the part that is now known as South Loop an the Prairie Avenue District, are overwhelmingly white. Between 2000 and 2010, the community area's black population went from 64% to 28%. On the Near West Side, most of the population change occurred in the more gentrified neighborhoods southeast of of Ogden Avenue - West Loop, Fulton Market District, Little Italy and the Maxwell Street neighborhood (which UIC redubbed University Village). Only the remains of ABLA Homes public housing complex defy that pattern. But the less gentrified neighborhoods northwest of Ogden are still majority-black - though the triangle-like Tri-Taylor neighborhood is an interesting exception. According to Radical Cartography map, it's actually become fairly mixed.
Overall, Near West Side's black population went from 53% to 31% - a smaller drop than Near South Side's.
Even if the area I live in right now... While Uptown, Edgewater and Rogers Park continue to be gateway neighborhoods, they've all experienced gentrification to some extent or another. And they've all become more white in the process.
Now, looking at those figures, there's an obvious question that comes up. How much of that population shift has to do with income? After all, in every single case, average income went up as well. The big reason that gentrification gets a bad rep is that it tends to drive up property values, which makes housing and retail spaces more expensive for poor and working-class residents. And many Black, Puerto Rican and Mexican residents that left the neighborhood were either working-class or poor.
In Wicker Park, Puerto Rican residents left, but so did descendants of the Polish families that settled there decades earlier - families that fell in similar economic strata. Poor white residents left Near West Side neighborhoods.
But perhaps nothing demonstrates the relationship between gentrification and income clearer than the so-called "black gentrification." I don't know if this is something that occurred outside Chicago - I'm just writing what I know. Here in the Windy City, it refers to deliberate efforts by African-American middle-class professionals to revitalize black neighborhoods. Most of those efforts focused on the historic Bronzeville neighborhood (one of the areas where African-Americans were cramped into before the housing segregation restrictions came down), what became known as the Gap and Kenwood. While efforts in Bronzeville were only partially successful, it worked a lot better in the Gap and especially Kenwood.
A typical Kenwood street
In Black on the Block, author Mary Pattillo offers a pretty detailed account of how the gentrification of Kenwood went down. The African-Americans behind gentrification were sensitive to concerns that their efforts might displace poor and working-class African-Americans that already lived there. They worked to preserve some affordable housing, and tried to listen to their concerns. But once the middle-class community grew, conflicts erupted anyway, thanks to culture clashes and different priorities (the fact that middle-class African-Americans weren't too terribly keen on their lower-income counterparts grilling outdoors was just one of the many seemingly harmless disagreements that made the situation worse). In the end, many of the older residents wound up moving to other, more affordable neighborhoods, while Kenwood remained majority African-American even as it became majority middle-class.
So, clearly, income plays a bit part in how gentrification affects the population - and race isn't necessarily a factor. But this does invite another obvious question. If lower-income African-Americans or Puerto Ricans, what's to stop the more well-off minorities from moving to those neighborhoods?
As you may recall from an earlier post, we already know where Chicago middle-class African-Americans tend to live. Looking the maps Hertz complied for another one of his articles, there's a clear pattern - they live in African-American neighborhoods that have been traditionally middle-class, neighborhoods that are more poor than middle-class, black-gentrified/gentrifying neighborhoods like Bronzeville and Kenwood and communities that have been mixed for decades. They tend to make up a decent chunk of the black population in majority-white and majority-Mexican neighborhoods - neighborhoods that are closer to the city border, where gentrification either never happened or never quite panned out. In the Near South Side, they make up a slim majority of the current Black population. But what's striking about those maps is that there aren't a lot of middle-class African-Americans in most gentrified and gentrifying neighborhoods where the majority of the gentrifiers are white.
Hertz' Washington Post essay offers a hint as to why that's happening.
While a Jewish person, say, may be able to find a part of town where Jews make up enough of the
residents to create a strong community, but not so many that the area feels isolated from other kinds of people, the same is not necessarily true for Latinos, or especially for blacks. So while studies suggest that the average African American might like to live in a neighborhood that’s about half black, they’re unlikely to find that kind of middle ground.
There’s also the issue of safety. In a country where racism remains rampant, moving to an area where whites are a large majority may increase your odds of being a target of anything from petty humiliations at a convenience store to a catastrophic encounter with a frightened, and armed, neighbor. As one woman wrote to me after I published a piece on Chicago’s black middle class:
Personally, despite the great amenities the [whiter] North Side has to offer, I am very apprehensive about living there because of higher rent and racial tensions.
In his earlier Crain's Chicago Business article, Hertz also did a charts or where middle-class Latinos and middle-class Asian-Americans live.
On one hand, they follow a similar pattern as African-Americans, largely living in neighborhoods that have large Mexican or Puerto Rican populations, regardless of their average level of income. On the other hand, they represent a substantial portion of the Latino population in West Town community area (which includes Humboldt Park and Wicker Park) and Logan Square community area (which includes Logan Square and Bucktown). So gentrification isn't necessarily a barrier - provided the community area had a decent-sized Latino population at an earlier point.
For middle-class Asian-Americans, the pattern is a bit more different. On one hand, many of them live in community areas they have larger-than-average Asian-American populations - Bridgeport, Armour Square, Albany Park, Irving Park, North Park, West Ridge, Uptown. But at the same time, many of them live in the same gentrified and gentrifying neighborhoods as their white counterparts - Wicker Park, Bucktown, Logan Square, Lakeview, Lincoln Park, River North, Near North, etc. So gentrification is definitely not a barrier for them.
So How Can This Be Resolved?
East Garfield Park - the next gentrification frontier?
In his Washington Post essay, Hertz winds up raising a question that touches on two different, yet related questions. How can we ensure that people who live in gentrifying neighborhoods can actually benefit from gentrification (and continue to benefit from it)? And how can communities become diverse and/or remain diverse in the process?
We already know that there are ways to ensure that the older, less well-off neighborhood residents won' leave fro more affordable pastures - affordable housing, affordable commercial spaces, recreational amenities that people of all income levels can enjoy. But actually making it happen is easier said than done. Consider Uptown, where any suggestion of affordable housing invites grumbling from the newer residents that the community has enough affordable housing already, thank you very much (nevermind that the neighborhood has actually been losing affordable housing over the last ten years). Or consider Kenwood, where the middle-class residents wound up focusing on their priorities at the expence of the less well-off residents. The poorer people tend to have less resources and less clout than their more well-off counterparts, so their concerns tend to be downplayed or ignored.
As far as integration - history has shown that in Chicago, at least, it can happen in one of two ways. The gateway neighborhoods became mixed because the housing was affordable and there are plenty of opportunities for new arrivals to start their own businesses. Refugee assistance organizations tend to place their clients in areas where the housing is affordable and crime levels are relatively low. And landlords need to be open to renting housing and commercial space to people of all ethnicities. Even now, this seems to work.
The other way requires willingness to make the integration happen. Whether it's a massive urban redevelopment plan like what UIC did or something lower scale like what residents of Ashburn and Beverly did, they have to actually want it and they have to actually see it through.
Which, again, is easier said than done.
I can't help but think of Lena Dunham's Girls, and how the show's depiction of Brooklyn was pretty damn white until people started complaining. It's not that Dunham had anything against black people. It's just that she was trying to draw on her own experiences, and black people weren't part of it.
One of the dubious privileges of being a white person - especially a white person who grew up in a relatively well-off family - is that you don't have to care about people outside your in-group unless they want to. Meanwhile, whether they want to or not, minorities have to care about what white people do, because, well, white people are majority.
Heck, if my old roommate, a Kenyan immigrant, hadn't goated me into exploring the South Side beyond the neighborhoods that are implicitly labeled as "safe for white people," I might have been approaching this from a very different perspective.
I also can't help but think of a walking tour of East Garfield Park neighborhood I took last year. The tour was held as part of the Chicago Artists Month, and it was designed to showcase the neighborhood art studios. While East Garfield Park is majority-black and more poor than working-class, over the last six years, a number of artists have taken advantage of the former industrial spaces near the Union Pacific West Line tracks. There's plenty of room and the rent is low.
Some of those studio spaces, like Switching Station Artist Lofts, seem to be legitimately interested in attracting artists from the area, and they have some programs that allow them to engage with the local community. But most of the studios I saw had white artists, most of whom didn't even live in the neighborhood, and many of those studios seemed to exist in their own bubble.
Back during the halcyon days of real estate bubble, realtors tried to promote just about anything as the next Wicker Park, or the next West Loop, and East Garfield Park was definitely one of the later. Some people even bought into the hype and bought some property. Once the real estate bubble burst, gentrification in most "inflated" neighborhoods came to a screeching halt. But after the tour, I'm more convinced than ever that it's only the matter of time before gentrification starts up again.
What will happen then? And what will happen to the people who already live there? How much will the new arrivals care?
I don't know. Like Hertz, I don't claim to have all te answers. But those are questions worth consiering.
It's not that he's arguing that people who oppose gentrification are entirely in the wrong. He readily acknowledges that gentrification usually does result in minority residents getting pushed out. He notes that integration is a complex thing to achieve, and that it's not something many people (of all races) would necessarily want. At the same time, Hertz makes a compelling case the segregation puts minorities (especially African-Americans) at serious disadvantage.
Ultimately, Hertz doesn't claim he has any answers - he's just trying to ask questions he feels are very much worth addressing.
A thoughtful essay deserves a thoughtful response.
I can't speak for Portland, or New York, or some of the other cities Hertz mentioned. But I can speak for Chicago.
Integration
Interracial couple watches a performance at Rogers Park 2009 World Music Festival
The Windy City has a reputation for being starkly segregated - and there's a more than a bit of truth to that. Bill Rankin's Radical Cartography map illustrates it quite well. But it also shows that, in many neighborhoods, the situation is more complex than that. Those neighborhoods are exceptions to the major patterns, but it's worth considering why they managed to integrate and stay integrated, while other neighborhoods didn't.
In Hyde Park, the integration was part of a very deliberate, painstaking effort planned out and implemented by the University of Chicago and several community grops. in the mid-20th century, traditional legal barriers that kept African-Americans isolated within increasingly crowded ghettos came down, white residents either resisted or fled. And many businesses and other local institutions fled with them.
U of C and Hyde Parkers were determined not to let it happen. So what they set out to do was to turn Hyde Park into an integrated, middle-class neighborhood. And the big part of making it happen was to do everything in their power to kick the poor people (of all races) out. Which is why the entire thing inspires such mixed emotions. But the plan worked more or less as expected, and Hyde Park remains almost evenly divided between whites and African-Americans to this day (with a small, but larger than average Asian-American population).
In Morgan Park, the integration was largely due to historic circumstances. This South Side neighborhood had African-Americans for over a hundred years - but during the first half of the 20th century, there was an implicit understanding that they had to stay on the east side of the Rock Island Railroad tracks. Once the housing restrictions came down, the area a few blocks from both sides tracks became more mixed, but as the Radical Cartorgraphy map clearly shows, the west part of the neighborhood is still more white than black, and east side is still more black than white.
The Ashburn community area is in a similar position. As I mentioned before, the community area is made up of the majority-white Scottsdale (which has recently become more of white/Hispanic), the majority-black Wrightwood and Ashburn, which lies between the two and has the mix of white, black and Hispanic residents. According to the Encyclopedia of Chicago, this was at least partially due to the efforts of local community groups. While the local white residents didn't take to African-American arrivals at first, by 1970s, things reached the point where both worked together to resist blockbusting, steering and white flight.
Since the 1940s, Uptown, Edgewater, Rogers Park and West Ridge community areas have been ports of entry for immigrants and migrants. In Uptown, homeowners were the first to essentially drop race-based restrictions in effort to attract tenants (any tenants), creating a fairly diverse community of all races without quite meaning to. Situation was a bit more complicated in Edgewater and Rogers Park, but the end results were similar - even now, no racial group in those neighborhood accounts for more than 50 percent of the population. In Edgewater and Rogers Park, much of the black population are immigrants from African countries, while in Uptown, the majority of African-Americans trace their roots to migrants who came from the Deep South after World War II, looking for work. West Ridge has a smaller black population than the other three, but otherwise, its population is fairly mixed ethnically and racially.
Bridgeport, the heart of Chicago's Democratic Machine, has a very small black population. Until about 1980s, the local residents were quite keen on keeping the neighborhood majority-white, and they especially didn't want any black people coming in from the other side of Dan Ryan Expressway. But over the last four decades, the resistance eased as Chinese-Americans moved from the increasingly overcrowded nearby Chinatown, and Mexican-Americans moved from nearby Pilsen. So while the number of black residents is still fairly low, it's a fairly mixed neighborhood.
(Every tie I visit the neighborhood library, which was named after Mayor Richard J. Daley (who resisted integration as much as legally possible), and see its English/Spanish/Cantonese trilingual signs, I can't help but think that Richard I must be rolling over in his grave).
Over on the Northwest Side, Albany Park also has a small black population, but, as a gateway neighborhood, it remains fairly diverse. Since the early 2000s, its Korean-American population dropped off, with some of them moving to the suburbs, and others moving to the nearby neighborhoods to the west and the north, making North Park and Mayfare more diverse in the process. Immigrant from Latin American countries, Iraq and Syria have filled in the gaps.
Pullman, on the other hand, became one of Chicago's most racially mixed neighborhoods almost by accident. Formerly a company town for the Pullman Rail Car factory, it's biggest attraction are well-preserved late 19th-century homes. The neighborhood is cut off from the rest of the city by railroad tracks, what remains of the industrial areas and the Pullman factory site. It's the kind of place that's easy to overlook, so the local residents use the neighborhood's unique housing stock and its interesting history to draw new residents in. Over the last few decades, race hasn't been much of concern - if you love the neighborhood and have enough money to buy a house (or rent any Pullman's few remaining historic apartments), you'll be welcomed with open arms.
An Asian-American woman and her hapa kids hang out at Pullman's Arcade Park
And finally, a few words about Beverly, an upper-middle class neighborhood located north of Morgan Park. While the neighborhood is majority-white, it has a larger percentage of African-Americans than most majority-white Chicago neighborhoods (34% as of the 2010 census). Unlike Pullman, this was very much deliberate, with Beverly Area Planning Association making a huge effort to fight blockbusting and inviting interested Chicagoans of all races to check out the neighborhood. There have been some racial tensions over the years, but, for the most part, black and white residents of Beverly manage to get along well.
Gentrification
Express Grill - one of the few remnants of the pre-gentriciation Maxwell Street
As I said before - and Heinz's piece readily acknowledges - when a neighborhood gentrifies, the minority population tends to drop off. Back in the 1990s, Wicker Park and Bucktown used to have a slim Puerto Rican majority. But as the recent Chicago Magazine article pointed out, 20 years later, the number of Latino residents dropped to 18% and 15%, respectively. Logan Square, which only saw significant gentrification in mid-2000s, has been the number of Latinos drop from 69% to 58% - and, as Chicago magazine notes, that number is probably even lower now. Even Humboldt Park, the heart of Chicago's Puerto Rican community since the 1960s, an neighborhood that has only seen partial gentrification, saw the number of Latinos drop from 65% to 58%.
Or consider Near South Side and Near West Side community areas. Until the early 2000s, both were majority black, but in the last 15 years, both of them saw major redevelopment as old industrial buildings got converted into lofts and much of the old housing was just plain torn down to build newer, more expensive housing. I got to see some of that first-hand back in 2006-2008, when I studied at the Near West Side's University of Illinois at Chicago. I lived on South Campus, which was built on the site of the old Maxwell Street neighborhood. and when I say "built on the site" I mean UIC basically had several blocks torn down or reduced to gutted "skin jobs." I was there when newer condos went up along Roosevelt Road and east of the enormous patch of territory that used to be railroad tracks.
When I lived there, I used to see black families play by the fountain near my building. The last couple of times I went back there, I realized that I didn't really see much of them anymore.
Like I said, those community areas used to be majority black. That wasn't really true when I lived there, and only got less true since. Most of the Near South Side, especially the part that is now known as South Loop an the Prairie Avenue District, are overwhelmingly white. Between 2000 and 2010, the community area's black population went from 64% to 28%. On the Near West Side, most of the population change occurred in the more gentrified neighborhoods southeast of of Ogden Avenue - West Loop, Fulton Market District, Little Italy and the Maxwell Street neighborhood (which UIC redubbed University Village). Only the remains of ABLA Homes public housing complex defy that pattern. But the less gentrified neighborhoods northwest of Ogden are still majority-black - though the triangle-like Tri-Taylor neighborhood is an interesting exception. According to Radical Cartography map, it's actually become fairly mixed.
Overall, Near West Side's black population went from 53% to 31% - a smaller drop than Near South Side's.
Even if the area I live in right now... While Uptown, Edgewater and Rogers Park continue to be gateway neighborhoods, they've all experienced gentrification to some extent or another. And they've all become more white in the process.
Now, looking at those figures, there's an obvious question that comes up. How much of that population shift has to do with income? After all, in every single case, average income went up as well. The big reason that gentrification gets a bad rep is that it tends to drive up property values, which makes housing and retail spaces more expensive for poor and working-class residents. And many Black, Puerto Rican and Mexican residents that left the neighborhood were either working-class or poor.
In Wicker Park, Puerto Rican residents left, but so did descendants of the Polish families that settled there decades earlier - families that fell in similar economic strata. Poor white residents left Near West Side neighborhoods.
But perhaps nothing demonstrates the relationship between gentrification and income clearer than the so-called "black gentrification." I don't know if this is something that occurred outside Chicago - I'm just writing what I know. Here in the Windy City, it refers to deliberate efforts by African-American middle-class professionals to revitalize black neighborhoods. Most of those efforts focused on the historic Bronzeville neighborhood (one of the areas where African-Americans were cramped into before the housing segregation restrictions came down), what became known as the Gap and Kenwood. While efforts in Bronzeville were only partially successful, it worked a lot better in the Gap and especially Kenwood.
A typical Kenwood street
In Black on the Block, author Mary Pattillo offers a pretty detailed account of how the gentrification of Kenwood went down. The African-Americans behind gentrification were sensitive to concerns that their efforts might displace poor and working-class African-Americans that already lived there. They worked to preserve some affordable housing, and tried to listen to their concerns. But once the middle-class community grew, conflicts erupted anyway, thanks to culture clashes and different priorities (the fact that middle-class African-Americans weren't too terribly keen on their lower-income counterparts grilling outdoors was just one of the many seemingly harmless disagreements that made the situation worse). In the end, many of the older residents wound up moving to other, more affordable neighborhoods, while Kenwood remained majority African-American even as it became majority middle-class.
So, clearly, income plays a bit part in how gentrification affects the population - and race isn't necessarily a factor. But this does invite another obvious question. If lower-income African-Americans or Puerto Ricans, what's to stop the more well-off minorities from moving to those neighborhoods?
As you may recall from an earlier post, we already know where Chicago middle-class African-Americans tend to live. Looking the maps Hertz complied for another one of his articles, there's a clear pattern - they live in African-American neighborhoods that have been traditionally middle-class, neighborhoods that are more poor than middle-class, black-gentrified/gentrifying neighborhoods like Bronzeville and Kenwood and communities that have been mixed for decades. They tend to make up a decent chunk of the black population in majority-white and majority-Mexican neighborhoods - neighborhoods that are closer to the city border, where gentrification either never happened or never quite panned out. In the Near South Side, they make up a slim majority of the current Black population. But what's striking about those maps is that there aren't a lot of middle-class African-Americans in most gentrified and gentrifying neighborhoods where the majority of the gentrifiers are white.
Hertz' Washington Post essay offers a hint as to why that's happening.
While a Jewish person, say, may be able to find a part of town where Jews make up enough of the
residents to create a strong community, but not so many that the area feels isolated from other kinds of people, the same is not necessarily true for Latinos, or especially for blacks. So while studies suggest that the average African American might like to live in a neighborhood that’s about half black, they’re unlikely to find that kind of middle ground.
There’s also the issue of safety. In a country where racism remains rampant, moving to an area where whites are a large majority may increase your odds of being a target of anything from petty humiliations at a convenience store to a catastrophic encounter with a frightened, and armed, neighbor. As one woman wrote to me after I published a piece on Chicago’s black middle class:
Personally, despite the great amenities the [whiter] North Side has to offer, I am very apprehensive about living there because of higher rent and racial tensions.
In his earlier Crain's Chicago Business article, Hertz also did a charts or where middle-class Latinos and middle-class Asian-Americans live.
On one hand, they follow a similar pattern as African-Americans, largely living in neighborhoods that have large Mexican or Puerto Rican populations, regardless of their average level of income. On the other hand, they represent a substantial portion of the Latino population in West Town community area (which includes Humboldt Park and Wicker Park) and Logan Square community area (which includes Logan Square and Bucktown). So gentrification isn't necessarily a barrier - provided the community area had a decent-sized Latino population at an earlier point.
For middle-class Asian-Americans, the pattern is a bit more different. On one hand, many of them live in community areas they have larger-than-average Asian-American populations - Bridgeport, Armour Square, Albany Park, Irving Park, North Park, West Ridge, Uptown. But at the same time, many of them live in the same gentrified and gentrifying neighborhoods as their white counterparts - Wicker Park, Bucktown, Logan Square, Lakeview, Lincoln Park, River North, Near North, etc. So gentrification is definitely not a barrier for them.
So How Can This Be Resolved?
East Garfield Park - the next gentrification frontier?
In his Washington Post essay, Hertz winds up raising a question that touches on two different, yet related questions. How can we ensure that people who live in gentrifying neighborhoods can actually benefit from gentrification (and continue to benefit from it)? And how can communities become diverse and/or remain diverse in the process?
We already know that there are ways to ensure that the older, less well-off neighborhood residents won' leave fro more affordable pastures - affordable housing, affordable commercial spaces, recreational amenities that people of all income levels can enjoy. But actually making it happen is easier said than done. Consider Uptown, where any suggestion of affordable housing invites grumbling from the newer residents that the community has enough affordable housing already, thank you very much (nevermind that the neighborhood has actually been losing affordable housing over the last ten years). Or consider Kenwood, where the middle-class residents wound up focusing on their priorities at the expence of the less well-off residents. The poorer people tend to have less resources and less clout than their more well-off counterparts, so their concerns tend to be downplayed or ignored.
As far as integration - history has shown that in Chicago, at least, it can happen in one of two ways. The gateway neighborhoods became mixed because the housing was affordable and there are plenty of opportunities for new arrivals to start their own businesses. Refugee assistance organizations tend to place their clients in areas where the housing is affordable and crime levels are relatively low. And landlords need to be open to renting housing and commercial space to people of all ethnicities. Even now, this seems to work.
The other way requires willingness to make the integration happen. Whether it's a massive urban redevelopment plan like what UIC did or something lower scale like what residents of Ashburn and Beverly did, they have to actually want it and they have to actually see it through.
Which, again, is easier said than done.
I can't help but think of Lena Dunham's Girls, and how the show's depiction of Brooklyn was pretty damn white until people started complaining. It's not that Dunham had anything against black people. It's just that she was trying to draw on her own experiences, and black people weren't part of it.
One of the dubious privileges of being a white person - especially a white person who grew up in a relatively well-off family - is that you don't have to care about people outside your in-group unless they want to. Meanwhile, whether they want to or not, minorities have to care about what white people do, because, well, white people are majority.
Heck, if my old roommate, a Kenyan immigrant, hadn't goated me into exploring the South Side beyond the neighborhoods that are implicitly labeled as "safe for white people," I might have been approaching this from a very different perspective.
I also can't help but think of a walking tour of East Garfield Park neighborhood I took last year. The tour was held as part of the Chicago Artists Month, and it was designed to showcase the neighborhood art studios. While East Garfield Park is majority-black and more poor than working-class, over the last six years, a number of artists have taken advantage of the former industrial spaces near the Union Pacific West Line tracks. There's plenty of room and the rent is low.
Some of those studio spaces, like Switching Station Artist Lofts, seem to be legitimately interested in attracting artists from the area, and they have some programs that allow them to engage with the local community. But most of the studios I saw had white artists, most of whom didn't even live in the neighborhood, and many of those studios seemed to exist in their own bubble.
Back during the halcyon days of real estate bubble, realtors tried to promote just about anything as the next Wicker Park, or the next West Loop, and East Garfield Park was definitely one of the later. Some people even bought into the hype and bought some property. Once the real estate bubble burst, gentrification in most "inflated" neighborhoods came to a screeching halt. But after the tour, I'm more convinced than ever that it's only the matter of time before gentrification starts up again.
What will happen then? And what will happen to the people who already live there? How much will the new arrivals care?
I don't know. Like Hertz, I don't claim to have all te answers. But those are questions worth consiering.