Category Archives: Race

Chicago is a city obsessed with neighborhoods, neighborhood boundaries, and neighborhood character, and therefore with neighborhood change. Demographic trends, from the rapidly declining black populations on the South and West Sides to the gentrification of the Northwest Side, get a lot of play in the media and in conversation. Which is why it’s weird that we’re in the middle of a demographic transition that is already of historic importance for the city and almost no one is talking about it.

Which is: the Southwest Side, first a bastion of European immigrants and their descendants, and then of Mexican immigrants and their descendants, is now gradually filling with Chinese immigrants and their descendants.

In 1990, there was virtually no presence of Asian-Americans east of the Dan Ryan into the South Loop or Bronzeville, or south of Pershing (39th St.), except for Hyde Park. (I’m going to say “Asian-American” here, because those are the Census numbers I have, though it appears that nearly all of the Asian-Americans in this part of the city are of Chinese descent.) There was no significant (over 10% of residents) presence east of Racine (1200 W) or so, or south of 31st St. By 2010, there was a continuous band of Asian-American population down Archer Avenue, the backbone of the Southwest Side, nearly all the way to Midway*, as far south as 51st St. and as far west as Cicero (4800 W). There were continuous pockets of neighborhoods over 10% Asian-American stretching from the lake to California Ave., more than four miles away—and a nearly continuous stretch from the lake to Damen, more than three miles away, that were over 20%.

Now, to be fair, this alone isn’t especially dramatic in the context of Chicago neighborhood change. Certainly in the white flight era, a neighborhood’s racial makeup could transition much more quickly, and the gentrifying parts of Logan Square, say, may appear more unrecognizable to a decades-long resident than sections of Brighton Park that have gone from zero to eight percent Chinese-American in twenty years.

But there are several reasons, I think, that this movement is really notable.

First, Chicago has for many years been seen by many as culturally and politically divided into three major ethnic groups: Black, Hispanic, and White. In fact, the city was notable for how evenly divided the population was between those three groups, and for the extent to which their segregation allowed distinct racially-specific geographic political representation. But though Asian-Americans have been in Chicago for a long time—in 2012, Chinatown celebrated its 100th year—they are only now beginning to reach a point where the population is large enough, and geographically concentrated enough, to demand that kind of local political representation.

Already in the 2010 district remapping, neighborhood organizations were able to lobby—unsuccessfully—for a ward around Chinatown that would have been over 40% Asian-American. And in the March primary elections, one of the people asking for that remap, Theresa Mah, beat out a Hispanic candidate for the Democratic nomination for a state legislative seat. By the 2020 remap, it seems very hard to imagine that there will not be an Asian-American majority, or strong plurality, seat on the City Council, bringing a kind of ethnic representation to City Hall that that community has up to this point lacked.

Second, the growing Asian-American presence on the Southwest Side offers the city a glimmer of hope to a demographic problem that it seems to not yet realize it has: the dramatic national decline of Mexican immigration. That was a key factor in Chicago’s poor showing in recent Census population estimates, as Latin American immigration had essentially been keeping Chicago demographically afloat since at least the 1990s.

The major beneficiary of that influx was the Southwest Side, where predominantly Mexican-American families rejuvenated neighborhoods whose White ethnic occupants were either aging out or moving out to the suburbs. But now it appears that Mexican-Americans are following the Lithuanian-Americans down Archer Ave. past the city limits, and without new arrivals, it’s unclear what will happen to the gateway neighborhoods. Between 2000 and 2010, Pilsen lost a quarter of its Latino population, or 10,000 people—far more than the 850 Whites it gained, and so probably not mainly explained by gentrification. Little Village, which was certainly far from the gentrification frontier in 2010, lost 10,000 Latinos as well. As the 850 number suggests, gentrification isn’t likely to spread too far down Archer Avenue in the near future. Rather, Chinese-Americans appear to be the most likely candidate for keeping the Southwest Side demographically healthy.

Third, Asian-American residents haven’t just spread west from Chinatown; they’ve also spread east, to Bronzeville. While I’ve written about how one of Chicago’s longstanding (and, of course, deeply and transparently racist) rules of neighborhood change—non-Blacks never move in significant numbers to Black-majority neighborhoods—is being threatened by Hispanics, Whites, and Asian-Americans in spots all over the city, nowhere has a Black-to-another-ethnic-group transition gone farther than northern Bronzeville. The area bounded by the Stevenson, the lake, King Drive and 31st St. was 73% Black in 1980, and just 55% Black (and 36% Asian-American) by 2010. The Census tract just to the west has gone from 96% to 73% Black, and 1% to 13% Asian-American, over the same period; just to the south, in the Lake Meadows area, the numbers are 92% to 75%, and less than 1% to over 18%.

Again, these are a far cry from the total demographic overhaul that we’re used to seeing in some areas—but nevertheless, it puts the city in completely uncharted territory. As far as I can tell, this is the first real racial desegregation of a Black neighborhood in the history of Chicago that did not involve the wholesale government-led demolition of Black housing, a la Cabrini-Green. And the implications for Bronzeville go beyond the Chinese-American community, since creating a substantial non-Black presence may open the doors to people of other ethnic backgrounds as well, especially in an area adjacent to the rapidly gentrifying South Loop.

Finally, there’s a sort of meta-point to be made here, which is that it’s very odd that all of this has flown so far under the radar. When I brought this up on Twitter, I suggested it was because most media outlets only really care about neighborhood change when white people are involved, either as colonizers (gentrification) or evacuators (white flight). A transition from one group of people of color to another group of people of color just doesn’t rank. Someone else suggested that it might simply be the invisibility of Asian-Americans in broader media in general. Another possibility is geographic, given the well-established lack of interest in non-homicidal events south of Cermak or so on the part of a lot of Chicago media.

I’m not sure what else to say about that, except that none of these are good, and all suggest some amount of course correction is needed (and I don’t exempt myself from that). I’d love to see some reporting on what these transitions look like from the ground—and if I’ve somehow missed reporting that has been done, someone please let me know!

* If it seems that I’m making a big deal out of a few percentage points in some areas, I would just point out that historically, Chicago-area segregation has led to situations in which many neighborhoods would have virtually no representation from one or more ethnic groups; that was certainly the case with Asian-Americans on most of the Southwest Side. Breaking that barrier from “none” to “a few”—especially when, nearby, those numbers grow more substantially, suggesting a broader trend—is a notable step.

So I’ve gotten some pushback on the last post in the comments. One of the main objections is that “bigot” is an inflammatory and unhelpful word. That’s probably true, and had I been at that meeting, I would not have used it. But I suppose my position is that the balance of offense here still lies with the people asking the city the disallow new rental buildings, and given how rarely – almost never – those sort of people get called out by anyone, let alone the elected official who has been asked to enact their segregatory policies, I just can’t feel that that’s the real injustice here.

But there’s also some feeling that I was not correct to perceive a racial issue, especially given that the new apartments – other than the 10% subsidized under the Affordable Requirements Ordinance – would almost certainly cater to relatively upper-income, disproportionately white people. Which is true! And yet the underlying dynamic here is that people want to control the “quality” of their neighbors, which will almost inevitably have racial implications. That’s true both because 1) people perceive blacks in particular as reducing the value of a neighborhood independent of their income, and 2) even a purely class-based bias will created disproportionately white neighborhoods, given the distribution of income.*

Now, you may say that in this case, somehow, we have found an exceptional group of American people without racial prejudice, even subconscious. Fine. But 2) is enough all on its own. The Supreme Court just ruled last month that the Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibits racial segregation by “disparate impact” – meaning exactly the kind of policy at issue here, which is on its surface race-blind but which will inevitably have a racist outcome if implemented. If Anthony Kennedy thinks there’s race involved, then I think there’s probably race involved.

I also want to highlight this, from a follow-up DNAinfo story:

But opposition to two projects doesn’t mean West Loop residents are opposed to all rental developments, Tenenbaum said.

“What we do favor is supporting the families that make the West Loop a desirable area,” he said. “What’s wrong with families and what’s wrong with homes? Who serves on the parks councils? The PTAs? The local school boards, CAPS committees? On community boards? For the most part, its people who put down roots.”

What’s wrong with families? Well, for one thing, family status is actually a protected class, too. What Tenenbaum is straightforwardly asking for is straightforwardly illegal under the Fair Housing Act. Which is just to say that this situation is wrong from all sorts of angles, I suppose.

* I’m reminded of an affordable housing fight in the North Shore suburbs a few years ago. The housing at issue would have been targeted to people at something like 120% of Area Median Income – that is, people who were actually richer than the average metropolitan Chicagoan. In practice, they were actually probably nurses and teachers. They were probably going to be almost all white. And yet the campaign against the project – which was ultimately successful in blocking it – repeatedly referenced Cabrini-Green, with obviously racial implications. Which isn’t to say that the West Loopers are quite as noxious as that, it’s just to point out that there don’t actually have to be any black people involved for anti-black racism to play a major role in decision-making.

I’m chest-deep in schoolwork this week, but I thought I’d leave a few scraps here from a 1960 issue of Ebony magazine that I’m working into a paper.

See the rest here.

A letter published last summer in the Chicago Tribune asked for a second look: “When you see us coming, you might hurry and get in your car and lock your door. Then speed through these streets at 60 mph like you’re on the highway, trying to get out of this ghetto. [But] we want you to know us.”

The authors were a class of fifth graders from the South Shore neighborhood, just a few miles down the coast of Lake Michigan from the University of Chicago. Like many Rust Belt communities, South Shore has its share of problems. But it also has ornate Jazz Age apartment blocks and large, stately homes; it has skyline views from its beaches, and the brilliant ballrooms of the Cultural Center, where Barack and Michelle Obama held their wedding reception. By express bus or commuter rail, it’s just over half an hour to downtown jobs.

If South Shore were in New York or DC, in other words, it would be exactly the type of place you’d expect to be suffering from too much attention, rather than too little.

But just a few weeks after the Tribune letter was published, two Harvard researchers confirmed statistically what many residents had known, or suspected, for a long time: in Chicago, black neighborhoods like South Shore just don’t gentrify.

In fact, it goes much farther than that: they don’t undergo any kind of ethnic change at all. Robert Sampson, one of the researchers, coined the term “white avoidance” to describe the phenomenon of whites simply refusing to move to neighborhoods where more than 40% of the residents are African-American. (Though it’s worth noting that there are actually quite few Chicago neighborhoods at that 40% level: most have either small African-American populations, or are over 90% or 95% black.) But Chicago’s rapidly growing numbers of Latino and Asian-American residents have been steering clear, too. Between 1980 and 2000, the only majority-black neighborhoods to see significant integration were Cabrini-Green – where a major public housing project began transitioning to mixed-income developments that included high-end condos – and the South Loop, whose train yards, warehouses, and convention centers presented more of a blank slate for redevelopment than a cohesive neighborhood.

At the same time, Chicago’s white neighborhoods underwent a profound racial transformation. The far Northwest Side neighborhood of Jefferson Park is typical. In 1980, it was as homogeneously white (97%) as South Shore was black. But by 2000, nearly one resident out of five was a person of color. By 2010, that was up to almost one in three.

These trends – demographically frozen black neighborhoods and rapidly integrating white ones – changed a city that had been profoundly and neatly segregated into one defined by asymmetrical segregation. While Asians, Latinos, and whites are far from perfectly mixed, there are many neighborhoods where they live together. For black households, on the other hand, ethnic isolation remains the rule.

On both counts, though, those trends may be changing.

Since 2000, for the first time in Chicago’s history, people of other ethnic backgrounds appear to be moving into black neighborhoods in nearly every region of the city except the far South Side. To be clear, in many cases the change amounts to just a few percentage points of a neighborhood’s overall population: notable only because the previous rate of change was zero. But dramatic transformations in other places began with a trickle, too. If one of the cardinal rules of residential migration in Chicago is actually weakening, it may open up the possibility of broader demographic change across the city’s South and West Sides in the medium to long term.

Moreover, the changes are much more complex than the familiar narrative of white-led gentrification. As often as not, the newcomers are Latino or Asian-American. Not surprisingly, this seems to depend on the demographics of the neighborhood next door: on the West Side, where black communities bump up against Mexican and Puerto Rican districts to the north, these new residents are mostly Latino. Northern Bronzeville, close to Chinatown, has a rapidly growing Asian-American population. And the communities around Hyde Park – a racially mixed neighborhood with a large number of white residents – are, in fact, getting slightly whiter.

But while Chicago’s black neighborhoods take a few tentative steps away from extreme segregation, some of the city’s white neighborhoods are moving in the opposite direction. Over the last 30 years, as a broad swath of the North Side has gentrified, it has also become disproportionately white. It now seems that nearly as many white North Side neighborhoods are becoming more segregated as are becoming less – a dramatic reversal from recent trends.

At first blush, this seems like a contradiction: why would some parts of the city be getting more segregated as others become somewhat more integrated? Most likely, however, they’re both part of the same broader phenomenon.

For the last few generations, Chicago’s economic geography has resembled a growing donut. In the center is a small, but quickly expanding, core of wealth. As the core grows, a surrounding ring of low-income neighborhoods gets pushed further out. And those neighborhoods, in turn, elbow aside a suburban ring of wealthier communities, which also move away from the core.

For various reasons, including the racial income and wealth gaps, neighborhoods that get absorbed into the rich core become much whiter, explaining the growing segregation there. But as that disproportionately white sector expands, it also helps to push the residents of neighborhoods in its path further out – and, in some cases, into black communities.

Still, that’s probably not the whole story. Ethnic communities, from Poles to Mexicans, have been moving increasingly far from the city center for many generations; only recently have some of them ventured into black neighborhoods. While research like Robert Sampson’s shows that “white avoidance” remains a powerful force, other academics have found evidence that white tolerance for black neighbors has (very slowly) inched up over the last few decades. That might also help to explain the sort of very tentative integration along the boundaries of black neighborhoods that Chicago is now experiencing.

It’s harder to guess at whether these trends – if they grow and continue – are likely to make a famously unequal city a bit more just. Of course, the increasing racial and economic segregation of the core is a huge problem. Would declining segregation in historically black neighborhoods provide a counterbalance? Maybe. But longtime residents who have grown accustomed to living in a neighborhood with a particular community and culture have every reason to be wary of losing those things. And particularly where the newcomers are white – mostly along the borders of Chicago’s growing wealthy core – gentrification may eventually become a reality, and integration may be a passing phase.

Perhaps the most promising trend, then, is the movement of Latinos and Asian-Americans into black neighborhoods – particularly ones that have been losing population as residents move to the suburbs or southern cities. For many shrinking white neighborhoods around the Rust Belt, Latino and Asian immigrants, and their American-born children and grandchildren, have brought a much-needed economic and demographic shot in the arm. If black neighborhoods in Chicago can enjoy those benefits too, it may provide a path towards community development that doesn’t require rapid gentrification.

At the moment, of course, this all remains conjecture. A few bricks may have come loose from the structure of Chicago’s segregation, but the fortress remains. It will be a very long time before it’s gone.

A bit ago, I wrote about how conversations about neighborhood change often paper over very real conflicts of interest among members of “The Community”:

A very common refrain in gentrification debates is that “the community should decide,” or that changes should “benefit the community.” But as Michael Kendricks points out, “the community” is always made up of many different people, with many different interests. Virtually any decision that’s made about a new housing development, or store, or transit project, will benefit some members of the community at the expense of others. That is politics, and anyone who has been to a neighborhood meeting about anything, large or small, has seen firsthand that neighborhoods are not above, or below, politics.

It’s far from an original observation to note that homeowners tend to benefit from gentrification, since rising property values directly increase their wealth. (Of course, they may also be squeezed if their property taxes increase much faster than their income.)

But we rarely acknowledge just how huge those stakes are. A new series from the Washington Post on the black professional class suburbs in Prince George’s County, Maryland (and Pete Saunders’ astute take on it) helps to quantify what happens to black wealth when home values don’t increase. The massive wealth gap between whites and blacks – several times larger than the income gap – is driven in large part by the difference in home values in mostly white neighborhoods compared to ones that are mostly black. And, as the Post explains, the extremity of that gap is in large part a result of the collapse of home values during the Great Recession:

The recession and tepid recovery have erased two decades of African American wealth gains. Nationally, the net worth of the typical African American family declined by one-third between 2010 and 2013….

Overall, the survey found, the typical African American family was left with about eight cents for every dollar of wealth held by whites….

Many researchers say the biggest portion of the wealth gap results from the strikingly different experiences blacks and whites typically have with homeownership. Most whites live in largely white neighborhoods, where homes often prove to be a better investment because people of all races want to live there. Predominantly black communities tend to attract a narrower group of mainly black buyers, dampening demand and prices, they say.

And the only obvious way to rebuild this wealth in the short to medium term is to raise property values in black neighborhoods. Which, whether or not that’s accompanied by racial change, is likely to price some renters and prospective buyers out.

This is not a “gentrification is clearly good, so stop complaining” argument. According to the Post story, only 43% of black Americans own their own home, so even strong gains in to property values would only go so far. But the issue of wealth deserves a more central place in the story of changing real estate values, and anyone whose knee-jerk reaction is to condemn rising home prices in non-white neighborhoods ought to have something to say about how else we can close the wealth gap.