Making the third ghetto

ABSTRACT

Chicago’s third ghetto is a cluster of “thinned out,” outlying neighborhoods that resulted from the demolition of public housing in “second ghetto” neighborhoods surrounding the central business district. The third ghetto shares some of the characteristics of the first and second ghettos—namely, the racial and economic segregation of the resident population. However, it also reveals notable, contemporary features. While the second ghetto was not deprived of public investment such as CHA developments, schools, police stations, and other public works, the third ghetto, in contrast, is a vacuum of private and public investment. It is also increasingly separated, spatially, from neighborhoods of rising prosperity. This disinvestment has created the underlying conditions for poor and working-class Black residents to feel either heavily policed or abandoned. This article traces the national and local sources of the neoliberal urban reforms of the 1990s and 2000s that ushered in a third ghetto in Chicago.

Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments, which helped us improve the article.

Notes

1. We use the terms “community area” and “neighborhood” interchangeably. Chicago is divided into 77 “community areas” whose boundaries have been relatively fixed since they were established for research and planning purposes a century ago.

2. Official census tract boundaries change over time. We use the standardized tract definitions for the 1990 through 2008–2012 periods published by Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences at http://www.s4.brown.edu/us2010/Researcher/Bridging.htm.

3. All dollar amounts inflation-adjusted to 2018 values. These and population counts are found at https://robparal.com/chicago-data/.

4. The Federal Bureau of Investigation identifies four categories of crime as “violent index crimes” used in the Uniform Crime Reporting Program. These include Murder, Criminal Sexual Assault, Robbery, and Aggravated Assault and Battery (Chicago Police Department, at http://home.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Definitions-IndexCrimeCategories.pdf). We created a comparable violent index crime by using identical crime categories reported at the City of Chicago Data Portal, with the exception of “Aggravated Assault and Battery” which is not reported as such at the portal and which we proxy with crimes of “Assault” and “Battery.” The figures in the table report crimes per 1,000 residents (Chicago Data Portal, at https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Crimes-2001-to-present/ijzp-q8t2).

5. One other Chicago community area, East Garfield Park, is without branch banks. West of the Loop, East Garfield Park’s population is heavily African-American and poor. Its housing vacancy rate approaches 20%. However, in recent years East Garfield Park’s population decline has slowed, and its white population has begun to increase. Like Oakland, it is beginning to experience gentrification, in this instance, radiating from the downtown and adjoining Near West Side.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Preston Smith

Preston Smith is Class of 1926 Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis: Housing Policy in Postwar Chicago (University of Minnesota Press) as well as a number of articles and book chapters. Professor Smith’s research interests include black politics, race and housing, and urban redevelopment.

Larry Bennett

Larry Bennett is professor emeritus of Political Science at DePaul University. His books include The Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism (University of Chicago Press) and the co-edited Neoliberal Chicago (University of Illinois Press). Professor Bennett is co-editor of the Temple University Press book series, Urban Life, Landscape, and Policy.

Rob Paral

Rob Paral is a Research Specialist with the Great Cities Institute of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a nonresident fellow in the Global Cities program of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He is a lecturer in the Latin American and Latino Studies Program of the University of Illinois at Chicago.