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Chicago

The Second City Gets a Second Chance

Through the 1800s and early 1900s Chicago's factories attracted European immigrants, then African Americans from the South. The South Side of Chicago-known as Bronzeville or Black Metropolis-became a capital of black America, the place where Louis Armstrong and Howlin' Wolf helped introduce jazz and blues to the nation.

But neighborhoods on the South and West Sides were also poor and overcrowded, and between 1950 and 1965 they became the target of an ill-fated government experiment: massive housing projects, including the largest concentration of high-rise public housing in the country. A nearly continuous four-mile wall of buildings, it was cut off from the rest of the city by a wide highway.

When in the late 1960s the civil rights movement in Chicago focused on fair housing, it was met first with ferocious resistance, then white flight. Half a million white Chicagoans left the city between 1970 and 1975. Making matters worse, Chicago lost more than half of its manufacturing jobs-326,000-between 1967 and 1987. In the early 1990s the city faced new problems, as the crack epidemic and the introduction of automatic weapons led to a spike in gang violence. Chicago's public housing high-rises became notorious.

Today, though, after a lot of hard work and hard negotiation by community development professionals and organizers, Chicago is changing. On the South Side, Bronzeville is trading on its historic status to lure back a middle class. Major institutions including the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago have gone from razing neighborhoods and walling out neighbors to participating actively in the reconstruction of communities. After decades of loss Chicago gained population during the 1990s, with a wave of new, young immigrants. Median household income grew at twice the national average. And a $1.5 billion effort will bring down the high-rises and construct lower density mixed-income housing.