1. I meant to do this a while ago, but anyone who’s interested in the kinds of things I write about here – cities, Chicago, race, humans – really ought to read “South Shore State of Mind” by The Illustrated Press, the only Chicago-based purveyor (that I know of) of comics journalism. This piece follows a man from the South Side reflecting on the changes he’s seen in that neighborhood, but you should be looking for their other stuff, too.
2. Completely unrelatedly: I’m writing this at Greenline Coffee, a new cafe that just opened at 61st and Eberhart in west Woodlawn. (For the record: it’s great. If you’re around this area – say, in Hyde Park – it’s a lovely place to sit and read or work for a few hours.)
But what’s really got me distracted from my work is this: I have ridden by this corner most days on my way to the train for the last year. In that time, I have seen exactly zero non-black people on this stretch of 61st. (This section of west Woodlawn is nearly 100% black, and has a mix of attractive, well-maintained blocks and others that are pockmarked by empty lots and abandoned buildings.)
And yet in this cafe, there are no fewer than five white people and two Latinos, along with half a dozen black people. The intersection – at least this corner of it – has suddenly been integrated by the appearance of a single retail business with appeal to a broad base of customers. (Other than this, 61st is pretty empty, retail-wise. Sixty-third has a handful of businesses around here, but mostly of the bargain clothing/drug store/hot dog stand variety.)
I know it’s not this easy, but…man. I don’t often write about this, because I don’t think I have much to say, other than ask questions, but I don’t think it’s going too far to say that the retail deserts in black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides are one of the tip-top most important issues in the city. They’re both cause and effect of so many things: health outcomes, vulnerability to crime, the fleeing of the middle class, and so on. It seems clear that one of the keys to getting people like my commenters to be happy enough to stay – and people of all races from other areas interested enough to visit – places like west Woodlawn is developing stronger retail corridors. And before you think that that’s impossible without more wealth in those neighborhoods, consider that study after study has found that Chicago’s black neighborhoods have far less retail than you would expect, even taking into account local incomes.
So do tell: where do YOUR children go to school? And if you don’t have any, do you realistically see any future children you may have going to these “integrated” schools that you champion?
I think there are two things about these emails that are really fascinating. The first is how common the “just wait till you have children!” argument is. Now, to be fair, it is true that I don’t have any kids. I have, though, recently passed from the phase of my life in which zero of my close friends had children to one in which some of my close friends have children, so I think I’m in an okay position to appreciate how significant a shift in perspective it can bring.
But even if that doesn’t count, people like the author of this email seem to have forgotten that I was once a child. I have first-hand experience! And, as a child, the schools I attended (there were four of them) were all between 35 and 70 percent non-white. I did not always enjoy school, but I can confirm that exactly none of the reasons for that were related to excessive racial integration.
Now, it’s true that I was fortunate to attend public schools that either had special academic requirements or in which the majority of students came from solidly middle-class families. But that’s sort of the point (especially the latter): there’s no reason an “integrated” school has to be mostly poor, or have low academic standards. In fact, by far the most troubled American schools aren’t the integrated ones, but the segregated ones.
The second thing I think is fascinating about these emails is how they reveal the worldview of a particular kind of racism: that of white people who hate/fear black people so much that they can’t conceive of other white people who don’t hate/fear black people as much as they do. It’s as if attending school with non-whites was some sort of obviously absurd dare that can be neutralized by turning it around on the dare-er, who will surely reveal themselves to be unwilling to perform the ridiculous act they proposed for you.
We tried busing, and it didn’t work, they say.
I don’t know what else to say about this, except that if you are inclined to send me an email along these lines, please don’t. I have enough.
* I should note that the other issue that I get “just wait till you have children!” emails about is living in apartments. “Wait till you have kids, and see if you don’t want a single family home in the suburbs!” The problem with this, again, is that I was once a child, and as a child I had the opportunity to experience both living in an apartment in a large city and living in a single family home in the suburbs. To the extent that I had a preference, it leaned strongly towards the apartment, where I could go play with my friends without bugging my parents to drive me.
In the continuing interest of demonstrating that reporting on public transit is not as hard as results from CBS and others might suggest, I wanted to recognize John Hilkevitch’s piece in the Tribune today, which not only covered extremely good news – on which more in a sec – but did so by simply presenting the facts of the project. Bus lanes here, restricted right turns for cars there, for this many dollars, serving this many riders. Great. And not hard! Maybe we could have some more quotes – there are no bus riders in this article either, but the only quotes are from CDOT, so it’s not that kind of piece.
Anyway: more of this, please.
As for the content of the news, it’s excellent: the most details yet about the Loop Bus Rapid Transit project, which will use bus lanes, signal priority (special green lights for buses) and enhanced stations to make the trip from Ogilvie/Union Station to Michigan Avenue, and vice versa, significantly faster. That’s a big deal mainly because it makes commuter rail stations on both ends of the Loop (and all the lines that end there) much more valuable: people whose lines end in the West Loop can now get to the eastern side much more easily, and, just as importantly, the South Side Metra Electric and South Shore lines that end at Millennium Station can make it to the western edge of the Loop – where jobs have been increasingly concentrated – without spending twenty minutes stuck in traffic to go the last mile.
It’s also just impressive policy. In a country where multi-hundred-million-dollar streetcars serving a few thousand speculative tourists are a remarkably popular genre of transit, Chicago is going to spend just $30 million – less than the cost of a single El station, or roughly 158 feet of subway* – to radically improve transportation for 25,000 riders a day.
BRT! B still my heart.
Central Loop BRT might also serve as a kind of proof-of-concept for BRT on Ashland and other streets. Buses have such a terrible reputation in Chicago, as in other American cities, that it’s hard for a lot of people to imagine them being anything other than frustratingly slow. A bus that gets to speed by traffic, that has its own rail-like stations, might change a lot of minds – or, more to the point, get them asking, “Why doesn’t my neighborhood bus do that?” It’s particularly exciting that the CTA is going to build one station with fare gates, meaning the standard CTA practice of waiting two or three light cycles for everyone to board and tap their cards at a busy stop will be completely eliminated.
On Tuesday I’m flying to Bogota, Colombia, for a quick vacation before school starts up again. I’m not planning on spending any of that time writing – in fact, I’m not even taking my computer – but I wanted to get a few things down in the few hours before I head to the airport.
First Bogota, then Ashland.
1. This is now two weeks old, and Streetsblog has already covered it well, but it’s worth heaping just a bit more scorn on CBS’ “expose” of the Central Loop Bus Rapid Transit project. One can begin, of course, by mocking the idea that CBS did any “digging,” in their words, to uncover an initiative about which CDOT, the CTA, and third party organizations have issued multiple press releases, held meetings, and created public websites. Or the scene in which the reporter gestures to an entirely empty street behind him, and then declares that “traffic has slowed to a crawl.”
But mostly I just want to point out that, yet again, a major Chicago media organization has covered a transit issue without talking to a single actual transit user. As ever, the reporter pitches the conflict, or tradeoffs, not as between people who ride the bus and people who drive, but between high-handed “city planners” and regular people who happen to drive. CBS lets Peter Skosey at the Metropolitan Planning Council and Rebecca Scheinfeld from CDOT represent the pro-BRT side, along with some rando in a bike helmet, and then talks to four people in their cars. Despite the fact that the report was shot in the Loop, where there is a bus station on virtually every corner, it did not seem to occur to anyone that if you are going to interview seven people about a bus project, maybe one or two of those seven should be someone who rides a bus. A-plus reporting, CBS.
Last week, for instance, the American Public Transportation Association reported that 74 percent of people support more mass transit spending. But only 5 percent of commuters travel by mass transit. This support, in other words, is largely for others.
Not to be rude to Eric Jaffe, who I generally like a lot, but this seems like a pretty silly question to me. People don’t ride mass transit because riding mass transit doesn’t make any sense for them. Lots of people also “support” getting in shape – they even spend their own money on diet apps and gym memberships – but very few actually do it, because eating whatever you want and then not going to the gym is much, much more convenient than the alternative. By the same token, a person who must walk fifteen minutes along a street without sidewalks to a bus stop on a line that comes every twenty minutes and would take twice as long to get to work may “support” mass transit, but would have to be kind of insane to actually use it. (Money is a constraint, of course, but even the vast majority of the poor, faced with those conditions, just buy a car as cheaply as possible.) Nor are those kinds of tradeoffs limited to people who live in postwar sprawl: From where I live, in a highly walkable neighborhood with two relatively high-frequency bus lines and a subway stop within a five minute walk, getting to most jobs in the Chicago metropolitan area by public transit is simply not a plausible choice for someone who has other options. And that’s not just true of jobs out in the burbs, far from transit themselves: even getting to, say, Evanston – which by car is maybe 45 minutes – would be pushing an hour and 20 minutes by public transit, simply because the lines aren’t oriented to serve that trip.
Jaffe claims that relatively low ridership on new transit services created by popular referendum is another data point on the “support-usage gap,” but really all it shows is that transit is drastically inconvenient for the vast majority of people in a way that one or two new lines can’t fix.
Anyway, I think the only way this can seem like a hard question is if you’re not thinking of the issue from the point of view of current or potential transit users. Instead, as with CBS, it’s a philosophical question. But for the vast majority of people, transportation isn’t a philosophical issue. It’s a convenience issue. It would be nice if both sides would approach it that way.
With one caveat: this is not meant to be remotely comprehensive, because I don’t know enough to give a comprehensive overview of Chicago’s population trends since 1930. 1930s. Population at the end of the decade: 3,397,000. Up 20,000.
By the 1930s, the trends that we think of as beginning in the post-WWII era are actually already quite visible: depopulation of the older neighborhoods, and relatively rapid growth in outlying neighborhoods that resemble car-oriented suburbs. The trends are muted, though, because the economic situation means there isn’t much construction. To be honest, I’m not quite sure what’s going on in the Loop and South Loop, which both lost well over 30% of their populations. Comments would be appreciated.
1940s. Population at the end of the decade: 3,621,000. Up 224,000.
As the economy comes back, those greenfield suburban-type neighborhoods explode, largely with single-family owner-occupied homes subsidized by the newly created federal mortgage system. Many inner neighborhoods continue to lose population, although interestingly the older lakefront neighborhoods appear to be generally stable. By far the most interesting, and ominous, part of this picture is the Black Belt, or what’s now called greater Bronzeville: the stretch of lakefront neighborhoods just south of downtown, whose populations boomed between 40 and 75% during this decade. That’s because in the 1940s, the Second Great Migration began, and hundreds of thousands of black people arrived in Chicago from the South, only to find that racial segregation – which only a generation or two before had existed in a much milder form – had calcified to the point that their only option was to live in the ghetto. Since the white people around the ghetto weren’t letting it expand at this point – people who tested the boundaries were liable to have their homes bombed – the Black Belt simply became horrifically overcrowded.
Another way of putting that, of course, was that there was an extreme housing shortage for black people, since there wasn’t much new building within the ghetto, either. Those of you who read this blog may guess what comes next: unlike the current dynamic, in which housing in black communities is usually very under-priced thanks to a lack of demand, because non-black people refuse to live there, black housing in the 1940s was radically over-priced. Black families would routinely pay significantly more than white families for smaller, older, less sanitary, and more dangerous apartments.
1950s. Population at the end of the decade: 3,550,000. Down 171,000.
The ghetto breaks. In part, this is by design: the late 1940s and 1950s begin the era of large-scale urban renewal, which is largely focused on the areas near the Loop occupied by people that City Hall and downtown business leaders consider undesirable. Mostly, this is black people. Massive displacement on the northern end of the Black Belt is actually opposed by whites on the far South Side, who anticipate – correctly – that there’s simply nowhere for those black people to go within the existing ghetto.
The Lake Meadows project began what would eventually be the total destruction of a contiguous mile-long section of tens of thousands of black homes and businesses. This was completed by the early 1950s.
The spread of black families, a pent-up demand for housing because of low rates of construction from 1929 through the end of the war, and the creation highways to the suburbs produced an exodus from nearly every built-up neighborhood in the city. Areas with available sites for new construction along the edges of the city still saw huge population gains.
1960s. Population at the end of the decade: 3,367,000. Down 183,000.
Basically the same as the 1950s, except black people had by now been forced into a second large ghetto on the West Side, and white people began fleeing in massive numbers there as well. The two community areas that saw modest growth in the heart of the Black Belt, surrounded by expanding waves of severe depopulation, are where the five-mile-long string of segregated, high-density public housing towers were built.
Also in the 1960s, Mayor Daley bulldozed much of the old Near West Side, including Little Italy, to build the campus for the University of Illinois at Chicago. Residents further west, in Garfield Park, had requested that the university be placed in that large park, which would have a) spared tens of thousands of people having their homes bulldozed, and b) potentially created a social and economic anchor in a neighborhood that was clearly in the path of ghettoization. But Daley declined.
1970s. Population at the end of the decade: 3,005,000. Down 362,000.
The wave of extreme depopulation following ghettoization spreads outward to places like Englewood in the middle of the South Side and West Garfield Park on the far West Side. Also notable, though, that Latino immigration is by now leading to population gains along a sliver of the Southwest Side, through Pilsen and Little Village.
1980s. Population at the end of the decade: 2,784,000. Down 221,000.
Depopulation continues on the South and West Sides, especially in and around areas where black people have moved. Latino immigration expands the area of growth on the Southwest Side. Large parts of the North Side are also stabilizing after several decades of decline, especially where there are immigrants.
1990s. Population at the end of the decade: 2,896,000. Up 112,000.
The first increase in population since WWII. There’s a huge increase in the number of Latinos, and they move into neighborhoods throughout the Southwest and Northwest Sides. Downtown and the north lakefront neighborhoods see rapid gentrification, although outside of downtown, restrictive zoning prevents that gentrification from turning into significant population gains. Hyde Park and South Kenwood – the light-blue areas along the south lakefront – have also stabilized. Meanwhile, the public housing projects built in the 50s and 60s have officially been declared failures, and the Hope VI federal initiative gives cities an incentive to redevelop those projects as mixed-income housing. The Chicago Housing Authority begins letting the projects empty out before demolishing virtually all of them in the next decade; I suspect that goes a long way to explaining the continuing rapid decline in population in greater Bronzeville. Early this decade is also the peak of the crack-era crime wave, and Bronzeville, not coincidentally, is perhaps the single most dangerous place in the city.
2000s. Population at the end of the decade: 2,696,000. Down 200,000.
Massive construction and population growth downtown is more than offset by declines virtually everywhere else in the city. The wave of Latino population growth has crested and begun to move out into the very outer neighborhoods and suburbs. Blacks leave the South and West Sides, including many who are displaced when the last of the public housing towers are torn down, and no one comes to replace them. Meanwhile, restrictive zoning on the North Side means that even as places like Lincoln Park and Lakeview reach all-time highs in prestige and median income, new construction mostly takes the form of luxury buildings replacing older buildings with roughly the same number of units. These neighborhoods remain 20% to 60% below their peak populations.
Recently I’ve been doing a bit of digging into Chicago’s population figures, with the general research question being: what parts of the city have seen their population fall the most? There are a number of reasons that population matters, beyond civic pride: tax receipts, for example, as well as a consumer base for local businesses. Because jobs generally follow people, a shrinking center city also means that a larger percentage of jobs will be out in the suburbs, far from public transit, making that transit worth less and less to people who would like to use it to commute. As a result, people either a) just don’t have access to lots of jobs, b) spend a huge amount of time commuting, which they can’t spend, say, taking night classes or caring for their kids, or c) spend a bunch of money on a car, which is money they’re not spending on, say, night classes or caring for their kids.
Anyway, here’s a quick overview map:
A few notes:
1. The historic “black belt” – the area from roughly 26th down to Woodlawn (the neighborhood), from the Dan Ryan to the lake – got hammered. This isn’t surprising for a number of reasons. The first is that the black belt – especially the older parts in central Bronzeville – was horrifically overcrowded in the 1940s. In Making the Second Ghetto, Arnold Hirsch estimates that there were three times more people than were meant to live in the housing that existed. (Why were they so overcrowded? Because black people weren’t allowed to live anywhere else, and a huge wave of migration from the South had dramatically increased the city’s black population. Shortly thereafter, South Side whites began to flee for the suburbs, and Bronzeville began to empty of the relatively better-off black households who could afford to move further south.) Most of the others have to do with urban renewal, and the purposeful removal of people from potentially high-value land near the city center.
2. The difference between North and South Lawndale – the dark red area just above the dark blue area on the western edge of the city – is here, as in so many other ways, illustrative of the effects of public and private disinvestment and shunning on black communities, as opposed to working-class white and immigrant ones.
3. The wealthy north lakefront neighborhoods have lost significant population, contrary to popular belief. Lakeview is down over 20%; Lincoln Park, over 30; and West Town (not lakefront, but home to Wicker Park, Bucktown, and Ukrainian Village) is down over 40%. Why? A combination of a) a dramatic decline in the number of people living in any given housing unit, as large families were replaced by smaller families, childless couples, and people living alone; and b) a decline, or at best stagnation, in the number of housing units thanks to zoning restrictions.
Last week, my post on where Chicago’s black middle class lives was republished at Crain’s. From there, it received many responses making many different points, which I might take on in a separate post at some point. But for the moment I wanted to highlight two recent comments left at the original piece.
DanaC:
My friends and I are all college educated, (many with MAs) Black twenty something’s who are looking to establish roots soon. Most of us have any desire to move to Chicago from the burbs (South Holland, Olympia Fields etc). Personally, despite the great amenities the North side has to offer, I am very apprehensive about living there because of higher rent and racial tensions (and frankly ,in my experience, north siders just aren’t as friendly). However, living on a more friendly (and adorable) south side means no grocery stores, no shopping, no restaurants, no nightlife, no fun. The south burbs aren’t as bad but are still generally lacking in amenities. Here’s an experiment, on google maps, look up your favorite places (Target, Starbucks, Thai food restaurants etc) you’ll find next to none on the south side. So what many (and I mean MANY) of us would prefer is to move out of state all together. That sounds extreme, but I literally feel that I have nowhere to live in Chicago.
Naomi Davis:
I imagine some rationale for lower household incomes for African Americans living north is that a significant percentage could be early career professionals, living single, making modest incomes relative to established families and professionals in their areas. I lived the majority of my years in Chicago as one such professional, only moving to the south side to combat cultural isolation and to pursue my life’s work in a social milieu I assumed would be more supportive to dating, marriage, community-building. People of color in the neighborhoods where I lived/loved for decades – Lincoln Park, Old Town, Uptown, Edgewater, Rogers Park, Bucktown – were either just like me or low-wage immigrants or low-income families, arguably remnants of pre-gentrification, but not necessarily the “public housing/SRO” enclaves referenced in previous entries. I also appreciate this more nuanced conversation around race and household income, core to my work. I bristle at the notion that a prime way to improve life in African American neighborhoods is to import whites – a surprisingly common thought. While my org actively invites blacks with higher incomes to “move back home” to our hard-won legacy communities, I’m always surprised that few consider the complementary alternative of helping lower-wage families increase their household income – again, core to my work. Complicated, of course, by seemingly implacable structures holding poverty in place. Implacable perhaps, but not impossible to transform. Gets me out of bed in the morning, anyway. Many thanks for your thoughts. I look forward to hearing more.
Daniel Kay Hertz 