Category Archives: Housing/Zoning

Oh, the backlog of things I want to write! To work:

Other than “oy,” one of the most common reactions I got to the “vanishing middle class” maps I made several months ago was that focusing on the city proper necessarily missed the very important shifts occurring in the suburbs, where something like two-thirds of the people in the Chicago region live. In fact, it missed what was maybe one of the more important stories about the changing economic geography of the region over the last 40 years, which is a shift in the balance of economic power between the city and suburbs.

That’s true, so I’ve finally made equivalent maps for the entire Chicago metro area. (The researchers who provided my original data, Sean Riordan and Kendra Bischoff, made their own maps a little bit ago, and Whet Moser made some valuable graphs from their data. I’m going to use my own maps, though, from Brown’s Longitudinal Tract Database, so I can show the data in a way that’s most consistent with how I did the previous post.)

Here they are:

I think, on the one hand, that these regional maps show something very much like what Aaron Renn has described as a “new donut” pattern of urban wealth: a rich center, a ring of disinvestment, and then another outer ring of wealth in the outer suburbs. Importantly, though, I think these show that there’s nothing really “new” about this pattern – instead, the rings have existed since at least 1970, and have simply been moving further and further out from the center of the city.

Even in the first map, there’s a kernel of wealth around the Gold Coast, surrounded by extreme disinvestment, surrounded by middle-class neighborhoods, surrounded by relatively wealthy ones. In each succeeding decade, the general pattern is for the kernel of wealth to gentrify a bit of the surrounding disinvested neighborhoods; for middle-class areas adjacent to disinvestment to decline into disinvestment; for relatively wealthy areas adjacent to the middle-class ring to slip down a bit; and for some parts of the periphery to become more wealthy.

It’s a pattern that, if you’ve read Neil Smith on the rent gap theory of gentrification, makes a lot of sense. The idea is that waves of investment, disinvestment, and reinvestment in urban neighborhoods are driven by the semi-permanent nature of buildings themselves. In the beginning, say, someone builds a three-flat in a neighborhood near downtown. When it’s brand-new, it’s a highly desirable place to live, but over time, things deteriorate a bit, and newer construction further out steals away the high-income residents who can afford housing with better technology and more up-to-date styles. Importantly, the aging three-flat is not torn down or significantly renovated, because the difference between what the owner can actually charge, and what they could charge if it were a brand-new building, is smaller than the cost of demolishing the property and actually constructing a new property (or a gut rehab).

(That is: If you earn $10,000 from a building you own, and could make $15,000 if you rebuilt/rehabbed it, but rebuilding/rehabbing costs $10,000, you won’t do it. Because, you know, you’d lose money.)

As it ages, the building itself becomes less and less desirable, and so the people living there become poorer and poorer; if the surrounding buildings were all built around the same time, then something similar is probably happening in the neighborhood at large. But at some point, the calculation changes: the building becomes so low-rent that the extra income an owner could get if it were brand new is more than the cost of replacing it. (It might also be the case, of course, that the building’s rent hasn’t fallen that much more, but the value of a new/rehabbed building has increased a lot – if, say, the three-flat is in a neighborhood near other neighborhoods that have seen an increase in amenities and jobs.) At that point, since it’s profitable to do so, the owner will do a major rehab or reconstruction, and gentrification begins.

(That is: If, from the previous example, the $10,000 you’re earning dwindles to $4,000, all of a sudden rebuilding/rehabbing becomes profitable. Alternatively, if you’re still making $10,000, but a rebuilt/rehabbed building would give you $25,000 – again, rebuilding/rehabbing becomes profitable.)

As I said, to a large extent, I think this describes what’s going on here. But anyone familiar with Chicago’s racial geography will have already noted that there’s something else, too. (If you’re not: basically all of the deep-red areas are segregated black neighborhoods. A few are predominantly Latino.) Namely, black neighborhoods seem both to suffer much faster disinvestment than you see elsewhere, and to be less able to reach the reinvestment part of the cycle. Neither of those things are news – there have been several reports about how “black neighborhoods don’t gentrify” already this year – but I think it’s particularly striking in this context. It’s not just that black neighborhoods don’t gentrify: it’s that anti-black racism is so strong that it overcomes, and arrests, the regional pattern of disinvestment and reinvestment.

Or consider the problem from a different perspective. Some people have described gentrification as a process of “racial arbitrage.” Arbitrage, more commonly, refers to someone profiting by taking advantage of the fact that the same good has different prices in different places. (For example, you might buy cheap cigarettes in Indiana and sell them at a markup in Illinois, where taxes make cigarettes much more expensive.) In this view, some disinvested neighborhoods aren’t just cheap because their housing has deteriorated; they’re cheap because most of the people who live there are non-white, which makes white people not want to live there. Since white people make up a large number of buyers in the housing market, that means demand crashes, and so do prices.

But that also means that if you’re one of the few white people who doesn’t care about living around people of color, you can save a bunch of money by moving to a non-white neighborhood of roughly equal “quality” (whatever that means for you). Each additional white person who does so, however, makes the neighborhood that much whiter – and as a result, that much more comfortable for the majority of white people. At some point, the neighborhood is white enough that most white people are willing to live there, which brings up both actual and “potential” housing prices, inviting a wave of reinvestment and more gentrification.

It appears, though, that anti-black racism is so strong that there are virtually no white (or other non-black) people willing to move into black neighborhoods, even if it means saving a lot of money. In other words, regardless of whether you think this is good or bad, racial arbitrage doesn’t work in black neighborhoods. Even in places – northern Bronzeville, say – where proximity to jobs and transportation would make you think that it would be an attractive option, there is vanishingly little evidence for it. As a result, potential rents depend entirely on the purchasing power of a disproportionately poor quarter of the population, and stay relatively low.

These two concepts – the rent gap theory and the racial arbitrage theory – are both, I think, really helpful in understanding how Chicagoland’s economic geography has changed over the last 40 years, and how it’s likely to change in the future. The foundation is a tendency for an expanding donut-shaped ring of rich and poor neighborhoods as a result of cycles of investment and disinvestment in housing. On top of that – no less powerfully – are the consequences of racism, which have a number of effects. First, they accelerate disinvestment as white people and their resources flee non-whites, and as new non-white residents are discriminated against in the provision of retail outlets, public safety, functional schools, and so on. Second, they open up the possibility of racial arbitrage: that is, another way for “potential rents” to rise and attract reinvestment and gentrification. Third, for black neighborhoods in particular, they can freeze an area in the disinvestment phase by acting as a sort of ceiling on potential rents.

Finally, of course, zoning laws can act as an accelerant on the reinvestment/gentrification phase by effectively capping population in neighborhoods where lots of people would like to live, forcing some of those people to move to adjacent communities, and raising actual and potential rents there.

There’s obviously quite a bit more to say about all this; hopefully I’ll find the time to do so soon, and hopefully I’ll also hear from other people who have thought of things I haven’t. But, as I’ve said before, neighborhood change is easy to experience – and is too often talked about – as a kind of capricious, unpredictable thing. In reality, it appears that it’s heavily influenced by certain patterns and rules. To the extent that we’re unhappy with what neighborhood change looks like, understanding those rules, so that we can change them, seems important.

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 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.

 

(As a foreword: I’m very conscious, as I write this, that I’m explaining something a large number of readers already know; I want to acknowledge that what I’m doing is not unearthing some previously-undiscovered secret, but trying to demonstrate a few of the basic facts of the city’s social geography that really, truly are mysteries to a huge number of people, both in Chicago and in the rest of the country. It would be nice if we lived in a world in which the black middle class were not an exotic demographic to most non-black Chicagoans, let alone the dominant view from outside the city: but we don’t, so here we are.)

There are at least three ways one might go about answering that question.

1. If you picked a random middle-class black person, where are they most likely to live?

To answer this question, you probably just want to count up all the middle class black households and tally them by neighborhood. So that’s what I did. The tricky part, obviously, is defining “middle class.” In the end, I went with something like what I did with my Chicago income segregation maps: households making at least 75% of the metropolitan average income, which works out to about $45,000 a year. There are a million problems with this: it doesn’t account for household size, or life station (a 26-year-old with a bachelor’s making $40,000 doesn’t count, even though nearly anyone who met them would consider them middle class, while a single parent with four children making $45,000, whose economic and social position is likely much, much more precarious, does), or any number of other things. I considered using education, but in a city like Chicago – and this is especially true among African Americans, I think – a huge number of people with middle-class lives have union jobs that don’t require a college education.

Anyway, with all those caveats, here’s the map:

So the answer is mostly on the South and West Sides: that’s Austin there on the far West Side, with the largest number; Roseland, Auburn Gresham, and South Shore are the leaders on the South Side.

There are things to say about this, but I’m going to go through the next two maps before I say them.

2. If you picked a random person in a given neighborhood, what’s the likelihood that person would be black and middle-class?

In effect, what this does is control for the number of people in each community area. Austin, for example, which looked super impressive in the first map, now looks less impressive; it turns out that it has a lot of middle-class black people mostly because it has a lot of people, period.

Anyway, the standouts now are Calumet Heights, the darkest-blue trapezoidal shape on the far Southeast Side; Avalon Park just to the north; and Roseland, Washington Heights, and West Pullman on the far, far South Side.

3. Finally, if you picked a random black householder in a given neighborhood, what is the likelihood that person would be middle-class?

This is a considerably weirder, and in some ways more misleading, map. There are now standouts on the Northwest and Southwest sides, in addition to the far South Side; but, if we refer back to the first map, we see that most of those places have vanishingly few black households to begin with. In fact, it’s much worse (in the sense of the numbers are much smaller) than that map even suggests: in many of the darkest-blue areas, we’re talking about dozens of households. Many of these are areas that, up until twenty years ago or so, had literally – or almost literally – zero black residents. To the small extent that they’ve been integrated since then, they’ve been integrated with solidly middle-class people.

Anyway, a few notes on the whole thing:

1. The black middle class exists in Chicago. In large numbers. This shouldn’t really be news, but speaking in my capacity as a white person who knows a lot of white people, and other people of various ethnic backgrounds from the North Side and suburbs and other parts of the country/world, it really is.

2. Perhaps even more importantly, the vast majority of Chicagoans who are both black and middle-class live on the South Side, and to a lesser extent, the West Side.

3. The concentration of middle-class households varies dramatically from one black neighborhood to another.

4. Still, the majority of Chicagoans who are middle-class and black live in neighborhoods that are mostly not middle-class – as opposed to Chicagoans who are middle-class and white, for whom the opposite is true. In this way, Chicago is pretty similar to the rest of the country.

The takeaway, for me, is that these maps contradict two of the biggest lies – or, if we’re being kind, misconceptions – about the social geography of Chicago. The first is that the black neighborhoods of the South and West Sides are an undifferentiated landscape of economic hardship. This is false in a couple of ways. For one, though there are, in fact, many people who are suffering for want of a decent wage in these areas, there are also many thousands of households that are not. (Though they are likely still disadvantaged by other consequences of segregation, including worse access to jobs and basic amenities, higher crime, lower-performing schools, etc.)

For two, just like white, Hispanic, and Asian people, black people are segregated by income. That is to say: some black neighborhoods are much wealthier than others. Of course, this kind of stratification is complicated, since it’s layered on top of – and interacts with – racial segregation. But the view of Chicago as bifurcated between the privileged North Side and deprived South Side needs to get sophisticated enough to recognize the major differences in privilege/deprivation between, say, Englewood and Calumet Heights. It also needs to recognize that even in neighborhoods that are majority low-income, there are generally a significant number of middle-class residents.

The second big lie, related to the first, is that basically everyone on the South and West Sides would get out if they could. This is sometimes stated explicitly; more often, I think, it’s the unspoken assumption that frames most outsiders’ conversations about those parts of the city. It assumes that everyone in Chicago follows roughly the same ladder of neighborhood prestige: one that tops out in Wicker Park, or Lincoln Park, or North Center, or Norwood Park, depending on your family status and subcultural preferences.

But this isn’t remotely the case. Someone who had only lived on the North Side – or outside the city – might figure that the reason there are so few black people (or Latinos! more on that in a sec) in, say, Lakeview, is that Lakeview is so expensive, black and Latino people have lower average incomes, etc., etc. And surely that is, in fact, a large part of the answer. But it’s not the entire answer, and one way to prove it is to show that, actually, the median black householder in Lakeview actually makes less money than the median black householder in Roseland, a neighborhood whose name is usually accompanied in media reports with adjectives like “struggling,” or “blighted,” and so on. It’s actually not even close: over $40,000 in Roseland, versus $33,000 in Lakeview. Those sorts of inversions of North Side/non-Chicagoan perceptions about neighborhood prestige are actually pretty common: black median household income is $24,000 in West Town, $31,000 in Lincoln Park, and $35,000 in North Center, but $39,000 in West Pullman,  $42,000 in Washington Heights, and $56,000 in Calumet Heights. And in Ashburn – a neighborhood on the very southwestern edge of the city that’s about 50% black, and which most North Siders (including me, until friends moved there a few years ago) have never even heard of – it’s over $70,000.

Why does all of this matter? Number one, it’s something that lots of people are wrong about, and I don’t like it when people are wrong about things. More generally, though, widely-held perceptions of neighborhood quality and prestige – especially when those perceptions are held by people with lots of economic and political power – play a huge role in shaping the future of any given neighborhood. From a governance perspective, there are lots of reasons you’d want the people in charge of a city to have an accurate impression of the communities they’re governing before they start making up policies for them; but also from a purely social point of view, the fact that most non-black Chicagoans – and the vast majority of non-Chicagoans – can’t distinguish between Englewood and Calumet Heights means that they won’t ever visit, spend money, and certainly won’t consider living, in neighborhoods that they would likely find generally pleasant. (I apologize for picking on Englewood: I definitely don’t mean to suggest that it doesn’t also have positive qualities, or that no one should go there. I’m making some big-picture observations about the size of its challenges relative to other neighborhoods, and common ways that people react to places with those kinds of challenges.) In short, it’s hard to build much of a local economy in a place that 75% of the population shuns without even thinking about it. (Read Robert Sampson’s Great American City for more on that.)

Anyway, this post is now long enough: I have more to say, but I will put it off to another time. I’ll leave you with two final maps: versions of map #1 above for Latinos, whites, and Asians. They’re fairly self-explanatory, but suffice it to say that most of this post could be rewritten, with only minor edits, to apply to Chicago’s Latino middle class as well.