[Marxism] Chicagogo

[Craig Brozefsky <craig@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Julio Huato" <juliohuato@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> This my last reply as you seem uninterested to continue.

Nah, like most Chicagoans I know, I can talk about the city for days
and days.

> Compare to Chicago.  In the early 1990s, the poverty rate was 24%.
> In 2000, it was 19%.  It went down in the 1990s, at least in part
> due to the boom that you apparently deny.

A friend who works for affordable housing projects mentioned those
census numbers at a Critical Mass event two weeks ago.  She pointed
out that it's not that everyone's boat was raised, but that an influx
of better-off people poured into the city.  The poor did not get
richer, but have been squeezed out from the city and down northwest
and southwest corridors.  This is the gentrification push thru Wicker
Park, Bucktown, east Humboldt Park, and now Logan Square.

The same friend lent me a copy of Arnold Hirsch's "Making The Second
Ghetto -- Race & Housing in Chicago" which compellingly presents the
dynamics of neighborhood change.  The flow of technical workers into
the city can be seen in the same context as the migration of
industrial labor into the city in the 50's and 60's.  These transform
neighborhoods dramatically, and the increased income is not
distributed amongst the entirety of the population.  In response to
the gigantic increase in Chicago's black population in the 50's and
60's there was a mass exodus of whites, and the "ethnic minorities" to
the ring townships.  Something akin to the inverse of this occured in
the 90s, and continues today.  Where did all the Puerto Rican families
who lived on my street in the big 6-flats go?  Many left city limits.

> After the crash and two years of recession, poverty in Chicago is
> the exception -- not the rule.  The significant progress made in the
> mid and late 1990s is still lingering.  I was in Chicago recently --
> in the summer.  People do notice that the city's turnaround happened
> under the auspices of the Dem political machine.  And I'm talking
> here about working people.

What you are calling progress and improvement are what other people
call gentrification and "renewal".  One aspect of this renewal,
besides millions of dollars spent on gaudy patriotic bridges over
choked expressway, is the demolition of massive numbers of low-income
housing units, without replacements within the city.  They are
replaced with much less dense "mixed-income" housing, which is like
making little fenced homesteads with heavy police patrols.

An example is the remains of Cabrini Green, surrounded by a rapidly
gentrifying residential neighborhood with a booming retail corridor to
it's northwest.  The city is doing anything it can legally and
illegally, including fraud, brutality and murder, to drive the
residents from the remaining buildings so they can be torn down.  It
is in effect a prison, and if you have ever seen it's fenced over
walkways it looks the part.  Heavy patrols by the 18th district who
has their keep across the street, and plenty of cops in tactical.

> Without the 1990s boom, Chicago's neighborhoods would look like they
> did 10 years ago -- or worse.  I didn't witness the decline of
> Chicago's neighborhoods after the Civil Rights movement, but I do
> remember the ashes left, the ruins after the whites moved away.  I
> clearly remember episodes of the crack epidemics in the early 1990s
> -- when standing at Clybourn and Division at any time of the day was
> daring the devil.

My favorite bike-shop is just north of Division, on Clybourn.
Unmarked messenger shop in a beat-up building standing nearly alone,
surrounded by rubble filled lots.

I lived in Chicago during the internet boom, sat out it's peak in
Berkeley while still working for a Chicago company, and now I am back
in Chitown to stay for the forseeable future.

During the 90s I lived in Rogers Park.  It had not visibly benefitted
from the boom, yet.  But in the years I lived there, it started.  What
that meant on the street is that the rents rose, high-density
apartment buildings went condo, and many families were squeezed out.
It is amazingly different now, but I have to ask, where did those
people go?

It is obvious that we have two very different visions of what Chicago
is.

> But we can't deny the big-picture evidence or pretend it doesn't
> entail political consequences.

Yes, so I'm suggesting you expand your understanding of those census
numbers, to consider the dynamics of population flows into and out of
the city as an effect of the pull of technical workers towards the
core, pushing those urban poor outwards. I'm not suggesting that
doing so will suddenly make the south side into the hills around
Caracas, it is considerably less dense I believe 8^)

There is something else here that I am having a hard time describing
in a language suitable for this list.  It goes back to the reason I
brought up Venezuela as a model for the overthrow of a two-party
system.  I will think on it a bit more.


--
Sincerely, Craig Brozefsky <craig@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
No war! No racist scapegoating! No attacks on civil liberties!
Chicago Coalition Against War & Racism: www.chicagoantiwar.org

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