I left Chicago at the end of 2000... (4.00 / 4)

after spending better than half my life fighting the Daley regimes.  It's sad to see him go, not kicked out by the voters, and not under indictment, and sadder still to hear Rahm Emanuel, with endless cash to spend and White House clout, wants the fifth floor next.

Anybody who knows Chicago knows that the pink and darker areas on that map correspond pretty accurately to the locations of the city's African American population in 2000.

I can personally testify to just about everything the author says here, such as the coordinated pushing out of poor residents to the southern and western suburbs.  I was working for the county clerk's office running suburban municipal elections in '95 and it was my job to check allegations of a wave of fraudulent voter registrations in Harvey, a mostly black suburb on the southern edge of the city.  I stacked the returned registration cards, 70 or 80 of them, for quarter mile stretches of two adjacent streets into even and odd so I could check one side of the street at a time.

Driving down the streets I noted there were no vacant lots, and that what were originally single family bungalows were all divided, with first, second floor and basement apartments all rented separately, one or two "for rent" signs along with the sidewalk remains of one or two recent evictions per block.  Knocking on doors I discovered that a huge percentage of residents had been there less than three or four months.  At the neighboring elementary school the assistant principal told me they were double-shifting students in grades K through 3, just like the Chicago Public Schools did in my childhood at places like Forrestville school, formerly at 49th and Forrestville because they didn't have the classroom space for that number of kids.

There was no registration fraud, it turned out.  Local Dems had just gotten good at registering black Harvey residents, and the neighborhoods were experiencing a fantastically high rate of new move-ins, move-outs and evictions.  These were NOT people pushed out of what the author calls the "yuppie zone", either.  These were former black south siders, many from the neighborhoods I grew up in, and from the projects, pushed out when the projects were demolished, and when vast tracts of other housing on the south side were torn down.

No doubt, the black suburbs at the western edge of the city have experienced the same influx.

Also in the 1990s, when I was working in City Hall I had occasion to loiter a while in the city's Department of Planning.  Somebody showed me aerial maps of city neighborhoods taken at frequent intervals since the 1950s.  They showed an alarming pattern of multifamily housing demolition, almost exclusively confined to the city's black south and west sides over decades, beginning in the 1960s, and running rampant through the 70s and 80s and early 90s.  Another proud achievement of the Daley regimes.

"If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other people, then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding..."
Zora Neale Hurston

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by: bruce.dixon @ Thu Sep 09, 2010 at 07:21:12 AM CDT

mistake in the above comment (4.00 / 2)

My notes say that school in Harvey was only double shifting kids up to the second grade, not the third.  My bad.

"If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other people, then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding..."
Zora Neale Hurston

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by: bruce.dixon @ Thu Sep 09, 2010 at 07:24:19 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

That's fairness and accuracy in reporting... (0.00 / 0)

...that's sadly missing in the media much too often! Exemplary, Bruce, my respect. I love it when commenters and bloggers provide a good example and show how reporting SHOULD be done!  

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by: Gray @ Thu Sep 09, 2010 at 13:38:08 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

regarding your final thought (0.00 / 0)

almost every city in this nation went through the same pattern of urban demolition. Can't think of one city that escaped it, in fact. Ironically, it was in the name of modernization/progress.

Daley the elder was very much into these practices, as were many big city mayors all around the nation. Can't say that Daley the Jr. put much emphasis on demolishing structures or neighborhoods, but the sad reality is that many big cities in the Midwest still have agressive programs to tear down buildings.

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by: alex @ Thu Sep 09, 2010 at 17:17:52 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

Much like the neighborhood cleansing in New Orleans, isn't it? (4.00 / 5)

This reminds of that Rachel Maddow show recently. Clean up and improve the city for the afluent and the rich, and to hell with the poor! That's NOT progressive or liberal, that's "compassionate conservatism" at work:
"Your poverty really makes me feel sad. Would you pls get out of my sight?"

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by: Gray @ Thu Sep 09, 2010 at 13:31:15 PM CDT

All done with help from Blacks and Dems.. (4.00 / 1)

The deliberate kow-towing to the affluent by Blacks and Dems in particular at the expense of their less fortunate neighbors,  and horribly highlighted by the public actions of Obama and Jealous in the Sherrod matter, is a dangerous and growing phenomenon that I find shocking.
While I don't know what to do about it, I do know that people like Rahm Emanuel, are a greater danger to the public working in the White House than on the streets of Chicago.  
Chicagoans won't be as easy to push around as our Senate was.


Nationalism is not the same thing as terrorism, and an adversary is not the same thing as an enemy.

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by: worldlymother @ Thu Sep 09, 2010 at 16:20:59 PM CDT

[ Parent ]

like... (0.00 / 0)

most issues, there are multiple reasons why the suburb's percentage of poverty increased. 1. it's population increased at a far greater rate then the city. 2. huge spikes in 1st generation minority groups bypassing the city completely to be closer to a larger job base 3. huge spikes in minorities moving to the 'burbs to escape Chicago's crime and poor schools and (to a lesser extent), public housing residents not being provided the housing they were promised after the high-rises were leveled. Some of these residents ended up in subsidized housing in places like Rockford and Milwaukee.

Mostly, I think the city succeeded and failed in spite of Mayor Daley. Some programs he helped pass did allow for the city to buy up properties and sell them off to long-time residents at more affordable prices (higher ownership=more stability). His TIFs programs were a complete disaster, siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars to help entice corporations to relocate into the city and give developers the "incentive" to built or refurbish older Loop structures. His green initiatives were very cool, but he failed at the ones that really mattered (getting 20% of the city's energy to come from renewable sources). Instead, the city gets less then 1% of its energy from renewable energy and it continues to focus on expensive, but very beautiful roof gardens. His defeat of the "big box" ordinance was the final straw with me. That's the point where I sent from happily voting against him to outright contempt for the guy. Unfortunately, I now live in NYC and won't get the opportunity to vote for his replacement.  

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by: alex @ Thu Sep 09, 2010 at 17:01:56 PM CDT

goes to show how small Daley was thinking (0.00 / 0)

Bloomberg is working on getting that zone to encompass at least three boroughs

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by: TravisDisaster @ Thu Sep 09, 2010 at 18:08:29 PM CDT