Chicago Census Roundup: Why Is Chicago Shrinking?
Well, obviously we don't know, but there's a lot of basis for informed speculation.
* Last month, the Chicago Reporter's Megan Cottrell asked whether or not the Plan for Transformation--which I think will be Mayor Daley's biggest legacy, among many--played a major factor in the ongoing decline of Chicago's black population, and the numbers she found suggests it has: "About a third, or 31,702 black people who left the city between 2000 and 2009 were from public housing areas."
But of course those are the areas surrounding public housing, not exclusive to public housing. In 1997, Sudhir Venkatesh reported an official population of 12,000 in the Robert Taylor Homes alone, compared to around 25,000 in the 1970s, and that's before the Plan for Transformation began. In 1991, Alexander Polikoff reported that the CHA had a "resident population" of 145,000; while I had trouble finding statistics for the current CHA population, I did find an MIT report from last year that said "the CHA provides homes in both CHA housing and the private rental market to more than 100,000 people." Adding Section 8 recipients as reported in a 2000 Urban Institute study with non-Section 8 residents reported in the 2000 CHA annual report adds up to about 75,000 residents.
It does seem clear that the destruction of high-density public housing, not just under the Plan for Transformation but also during the Clinton administration, has played a role in the decline of Chicago's black population. And as the Tribune reported in 2008, the Plan for Transformation had fallen far behind goals, leaving many families in limbo and thus more likely to leave.
* Aside from public housing exclusively, Chicago housing policy (not to mention the general culture) has never been conducive to an economically or physically stable black population, particularly after World War II. As Beryl Satter detailed in her masterful book Family Properties, public policy and personal racism destabilized the nascent black middle class in neighborhoods like Lawndale. I can't help but think that led to a vast increase in the public housing population, which then began to decline precipitously when both local and national policymakers began to take it apart. And at the same time, Rust Belt industrial manufacturing was in decline, which had been a significant cause of the Great Migration in the first place. Steve Bogira's recent Reader cover story on segregation provides a good thumbnail history:
Sampson has been studying poverty in Chicago for much of the last two decades. He's found that in Chicago, poverty, like segregation, persists: neighborhoods that were poor and black in 1970 were generally poor and black in 2000. (From 1970 to 2000, not a single Chicago neighborhood changed from black to white.) The neighborhoods of concentrated poverty are also high in cynicism and distrust, he's written. In a longitudinal study, Sampson focused on the verbal ability of children growing up in Chicago's poor black neighborhoods and found "detrimental and long-lasting consequences for black children's cognitive ability rivaling in magnitude the effects of missing one year of schooling." Verbal ability, he noted, is a "major predictor of life outcomes."
These kinds of deep, neighborhood-based problems, linked inextricably in Chicago to racial segregation, are why desegregation advocates continue to maintain that segregation itself needs to be confronted.
Perhaps the question isn't "why is Chicago's black population in decline?" but "why wouldn't it be?"
* But black flight isn't solely a Chicago phenomenon. New York's black population declined as well, while the black populations of major Southern metropolises grew. And as Lee Bey points out, a shrinking city is difficult to manage.
* Speaking of public policy and housing, in an interview with the New York Times's David Leonhardt, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser mentions "three big anti-urban policy biases: pro-homeownership policies that push people from urban apartments into suburban homes, the subsidization of transportation infrastructure in low-density areas and our system of local schooling that pushes so many parents away from big-city school districts."
* Aaron Renn, aka the Urbanophile, has a good first reaction to the Census figures at New Geography, in which he discusses black flight not just to the south but the Chicago suburbs and far exurbs; Greg Hinz discusses similar themes.
* And just as a reminder, the city's housing prices were particularly volatile during the housing bubble.
Update: A new report from the Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement at UIC says that immigrants are increasingly going straight to the suburbs without passing through Chicago first; Progress Illinois explains.
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*sigh*
In an ideal situation, public housing residency SHOULD decline. I found it interesting that among the stories of the militant holdouts at the last standing Cabrini high rise, not one news org dived deeper into stories from residents who had been there for two to three decades. That's not the goal of public housing.
But since journos typically have guilt about such subjects, it went untouched.
Superb stuff, Whet. I'd only reverse the prominence in Chicago's case of black flight to the "suburbs" over that to the South of the U.S.
I put "suburbs" in quotes because they have basically become bantustans with awful services, infrastructure, schools, etc., neglected by Chicago and by the State -- another wretched part of the Richie Daley legacy.
When I was an editor and writer at Chicago from 1981 to 1983 I worked with the late Pierre de Vise on some of his first studies of race *and the Chicago suburbs* and we published at least one of them.
Keep up the great work!
Interesting article, Whet. Any idea why other racial/ethnic groups are leaving the city? Just doing some back-of-the-envelope math, the numbers above suggest about 90,000 blacks left Chicago since 2000. The overall population decrease was about 200,000, so that means the percentage of the out-migrants who are black is in the same ballpark as the percentage of the total city population who are black. Coupled with the idea that many of the blacks who left were leaving CHA housing, that suggests that blacks who weren't having their apartments torn down were actually less likely to leave than non-blacks. Any ideas?
In addition to the public housing demolition one cant underestimate the conversions of thousands of apartments into condos, many of which remain vacant to this day. Areas of west town, Humbolt Park and even in the Gold Coast lost residents which were heavily rental now condo. I suspect also the high foreclosure rates in low income areas leave much housing stock sitting empty. Add all that together with heavily Latio areas showing large declines like west Pilsen ( where maybe people actually just didnt answer ) and 200,000 seems reasonable possibly even too low a count of the exodus. It will be interesting to see if, and when, housing prices are allowed to fall to the true market rate, if people will repopulate.
Chicago is in decline because it practices so many liberal policies that are hostile to businesses and are unfavorable to hard-working citizens. Your precious public unions only "work" for public union members, not the rest of society, and all your idiot socialist agendas and gun control laws DONT WORK as your violent crime rates are TOO HIGH, and sales taxes are TOO HIGH. But, alas you are probably too stupid to understand this concept and that is why the city will continue to decline, like the USSR, into the socialist liberal abyss. Good day.