Study Shows Chicago's Predominantly Black Neighborhoods Don't Gentrify
By Chuck Sudo in News on Aug 11, 2014 9:45PM
Chicago, as most of us know, is a hypersegregated city. The outlying neighborhoods on the far South and West sides account for most of the violence and murders that make national headlines, and these neighborhoods have been predominantly black since the “white flight” of the mid- to late-1960s. These are also the neighborhoods that have been the most resistant to gentrification. (Some might call gentrification in these neighborhoods “nonexistent.”)
Researchers at Harvard University published the results of a study on Chicago’s changing neighborhoods and found race to be a determining factor in how a neighborhood gentrifies. Before you say, “no shit, Sherlock,” let’s look at the results of the study conducted by Robert Sampson and Jackelyn Hwang.
Sampson told NPR that what used to be known as “white flight” can now be more accurately known as “white avoidance.”
[(G)entrifiers are] not moving into neighborhoods where there are lots of black people. In Chicago, the [neighborhoods] that are gentrifying are the ones where there was a white working class, or Latinos, but not many blacks."
Again: no shit. Sampson, Hwang and their team began their research looking at older Census tracts that appeared to be showing the early signs of gentrification. Using Google Street View to identify reinvestment in neighborhoods, Sampson and Hwang found that gentrification slowed as a neighborhood’s African-American population rose above 35 percent, and virtually stopped if a neighborhood’s black population was 40 percent or greater.
Sampson and Hwang focused on Chicago given its inglorious history of segregation but also cautioned that—with a couple exceptions—the city is but one example of a nationwide trend.
“I wouldn’t want this to be interpreted as saying neighborhoods need whites,” Sampson said. “It’s saying that we have a particular history in cities in the United States, and the analysis has to be interpreted within the structure of that history. So rather than saying you need whites, I think what is needed ― and this has always been the case ― is some concerted effort to rethink urban policy.”
That could mean local governments making more sincere efforts to help lift these neighborhoods up for investment or, as The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in May, coming up with some form of reparations—sort of a domestic Marshall Plan—for America’s inner city communities.