An analysis of diverse gentrification processes and their relationship to historic preservation activity in Chicago

ABSTRACT

This article explores the unintended impacts of an immensely popular and far-reaching preservation program, the National Register of Historic Places, which was established to instill a sense of stewardship for heritage at a time when suburbanization and urban disinvestment threatened its existence. Anointing neighborhoods as “historic” has helped preserve them, but it has also increased market demand and facilitated gentrification. Drawing on census and preservation data, we use principal component and cluster analyses to identify neighborhoods in Chicago experiencing physical upgrading and the displacement of groups of lower socioeconomic status. Particular interest is placed on exploring neighborhoods characterized by gentrification and intensive preservation activity. The diversity in heritage-driven redevelopment processes and gentrification is then examined within three neighborhoods. The study reveals that preservation has not kept pace with changing demographic, housing, and consumption patterns within cities: a counterproductive policy lag exists, facilitating large-scale residential displacement of traditional urban populations, ranging from the most marginalized to the wealthier.

KEYWORDS:

• Heritage
• gentrification
• National Register of Historic Places

Acknowledgement

We are very grateful to Dr. Anne Bonds, Ms. Anisia Le Khak, and the anonymous reviewers whose support and insightful suggestions were critical to improving the quality of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The dataset used in this research is currently in use in forthcoming publications and therefore unavailable. Source data, both digital and analogue, for population, housing, and historic preservation, are publicly available through the United States Census Bureau, City of Chicago, Illinois State Historic Preservation Office, and National Park Service.

Notes

1 The regulation of historic buildings occurs at the municipal level primarily through landmarks ordinances and the commissions that oversee them. Local commissions are empowered to prohibit the alteration or demolition of private property through a process of design review and compliance. The use of this power varies by city and reflects a community’s willingness to embrace preservation as a planning tool and policy goal.

2 Our research aims to provide a broad understanding of historic preservation activity in the US as it relates to neighborhood change, and the National Register of Historic Places program allows for this. As a federal program it functions the same in each of the fifty US states, the District of Columbia, various territories, and even overseas possessions of the US Government. It often serves as an entry point for preservation activity; listing in the National Register is typically a prerequisite for preservation tax subsidies, for example, and commonly serves as a trickle-down model for local landmarking efforts. By contrast, local landmarking varies significantly by jurisdiction, ranging from regulatory programs to those predicated on voluntary compliance. Local landmarks ordinances reflect the unique political, social, and economic character of a particular community and are less suitable here for comparative or wide-reaching studies. Finally, it should be noted that economic impact studies of preservation incentives like federal and state rehabilitation tax credits, and their effects on communities, often ignore the administrative step that necessarily proceeds the availability of these subsidies – that is, the National Register designation process.

3 As the Census Bureau and others have noted, methodological differences between the traditional decennial censuses and post-2000 American Community Survey (ACS) render some comparison of data impossible. In 2010, the American Community Survey (ACS) replaced the long form of the decennial census as the primary national source of demographic and economic data for small areas. However, due to changes in sampling strategy and design, the ACS yields imprecise estimates of small areas with large margins of error (Citro & Kalton, 2007; Jung et al., 2019; Spielman & Singleton, 2015; Wei et al., 2017). To provide an example, an analysis by Starsinic (2005) at the census tract level recognized sampling errors of ACS estimates that are 75% larger than those of the decennial long form. The Census Bureau recommends “extreme caution” in making comparisons across long form decennial census and ACS datasets. Changes in method include the frequency of data collection, the time frame involved, the wording of survey questions, and the sample size. It is because of the much smaller sample size and the larger sampling errors of the ACS estimates, and the general lack of compatibility with the 2000 and earlier data, that we focus our quantitative analysis on the 1970–2000 decennial long form census. Nevertheless, our mixed methods approach allows us to extend the qualitative portion of our analysis through 2020.

4 We use “neighborhood” loosely here to describe both our case study census tracts and the broader areas that they represent. They do not coincide with the city’s official Chicago Community Areas or the informal neighborhoods as identified by residents, newspapers, and other local sources. Nor are they contiguous with National Register historic districts, the boundaries of which are defined by the presence and absence of historic resources and thus appear as geographically complex and seemingly gerrymandered. Each of these geographies differ in terms of the real-world they encompass and purport to describe.

5 The National Park Service and Internal Revenue Service jointly operate the 20% rehabilitation tax credit program that represents the primary governmental financial assistance for preservation. Simply, a tax credit reduces the amount of tax that a property owner owes. The program was created to offset the increased cost burden of rehabilitating certified historic properties, specifically retail and office buildings, apartments, and other income-producing uses. Programs at the state level, in the Chicago context the State of Illinois’ property tax assessment freeze program, similarly attempt to incentivize costly historic rehabilitation projects. Unlike the federal program, however, many states – Illinois included – support the rehabilitation of owner-occupied residential projects, not simply those that are income-producing.

6 Preservation programs at the state and local levels rely heavily on federal models. Indeed, the National Register is typically the basis for municipal designation work. States’ rehabilitation incentives, while using standards and guidelines established by the National Park Service, often address what federal programs specifically do not: the rehabilitation of homeowner-occupied residences.

7 Historic preservation data here include site locations of properties and districts listed in the National Register, as well as a partial record of properties that have used preservation tax financial incentives. Data for Chicago are maintained by the National Park Service, Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, and the City of Chicago. Like most datasets spanning a thirty-year period that straddled the transition from analog to digital data collection and storage, these datasets are inconsistent and often incomplete. Further complications arise from the honorific National Register program’s lack of a procedural requirement for periodic updates. Individual historic buildings and neighborhood change physically over time, often drastically, but the record of these places typically remains static. No other studies of preservation and gentrification have used as longitudinal a dataset as that used here.

8 Lincoln Park was often described in the local press, beginning in the 1970s, as the gold standard for revitalization – a neighborhood where the presence of old and historic buildings could drive repopulation and reinvestment and succeed where governmental urban renewal had failed. It was promoted as a model for other neighborhoods with the right physical characteristics to gentrify.

9 Local historic districts are largely absent from Uptown and Edgewater during our target period of 1970–2000. However, Lincoln Park saw several created during this time, most notably the sprawling Mid-North Historic District (established in 1977 and later expanded in 2004) and Old Town Triangle Historic District (1977).

10 To ensure consistent comparisons of preservation data spanning three decades, National Register historic districts are abstracted. All buildings within each district are counted as part of the district. This is done with the full recognition that preservation convention dictates that buildings within districts be categorized as “contributing” (historic) or “non-contributing” (non-historic). This is made more complex by preservation designations from the late-1960s through 1980s, which oftentimes include additional categories to earmark buildings as “key” or of “exceptional significance” or “intrusions”. Since data from the early part of the research period frequently omits any such distinctions, all buildings within a district are counted to allow consistent comparisons of the scale of preservation occurring within a neighborhood.

11 This includes neighborhoods near the Loop like Near West Side and Logan Square, Beverly on the far southwest side of the city, and the Kenwood and Hyde Park, in which the University of Chicago is located.

12 Chicago’s early neighborhood preservation groups lacked a single building type, like New York and its brownstones, around which to unify and rally. In the early-twenty firstst century this changed. The Historic Chicago Greystone Initiative, a diverse partnership involving the City of Chicago, community and housing organizations, and local universities, was founded in 2006 to promote the preservation and reuse of the ubiquitous limestone buildings found throughout the city, in both affluent neighborhoods and poor. As a local media outlet reported, “Greystones are to Chicago what brownstones are to Brooklyn” (https://www.wbez.org/stories/saving-greystones-with-blood-sweat-and-branding/3f8037b6-3d37-4df8-bdac-2d9696029580). The Historic Chicago Greystone Initiative was retired in 2018.

13 A third district, East Ravenswood (1991), straddles the boundary between Uptown and Lake View.

14 Edgewater is served by two elevated rail lines and Lake Shore Drive, the city’s major north-south artery along the lake, which terminates in Edgewater before reaching the neighborhood of Rogers Park at the city’s northernmost extremity. These provide access to the Loop. Moreover, like many lakefront neighborhoods, Edgewater is home to natural amenities, namely its Lake Michigan beaches.