Sociologist Derek Hyra looks at the nation’s two most important historic, urban black neighborhoods – New York’s Harlem and Chicago’s Bronzeville – and wonders “How did these formerly notorious ghettos become dotted with expensive restaurants, health spas and chic boutiques?”
The very question gives a New Yorker pause. For while many sections of Harlem plunged into decay and housing abandonment in the late ’60s through the early ’80s, Harlem retained some core strengths – not the least of which was the loyalty of a black middle-class. Harlem had been assigned far too much public housing after World War II – nearly one-third of the property in East Harlem was cleared to build the Wagner, Jefferson and Taft Houses – but it did not succumb to blanket poverty.
Enclaves like Strivers’ Row and Sylvan Terrace and avenues like Edgecombe held on through the years of violent crime, drug wars and redlining. Some buildings deteriorated, certainly, but the blocks were basically intact when good times returned in the 1990s.
Bronzeville on the South Side of Chicago was not so lucky. As the recipient of the largest concentration of public housing high rises in the county, Bronzeville found its fate sealed in the 1960s as a center of poverty, cut off from the rest of the city by poor planning and virtually no public transportation. A few handsome blocks struggled in the shadows of the towers, but Bronzeville basically became the “notorious ghetto” characterized by Hyra. Most Chicagoans – spotting the projects from the safety of Lake Shore Drive – had no reason to go there. Businesses, restaurants and services were few – many wiped out by urban renewal, others by the poverty of the residents.
Yet unlike Harlem, some 60 blocks north of Midtown, Bronzeville’s northern border of 22nd Street is walking distance from downtown Chicago. Its southern border of 55th Street heads east, right into upper-middle-class Hyde Park-Kenwood, the University of Chicago’s residential enclave. Has any other great city ever deliberately built such an immense ghetto so close to its heart?
This is worth pondering, because it goes to the question of intent, as the lawyers say. Certainly Mayor Richard J. Daley – the current mayor’s father – loved his city and tried to do right by it. So how could he have gone so wrong that his son has undertaken the demolition of most of Bronzeville’s public housing?
Hyra’s answer is partly that Chicago’s monolithic political structure consistently held on to all resources and decision-making, brooking no dissent, even when the dissenters understood better than City Hall what was good for their neighborhood and city. In contrast, New York’s political structure, he argues, is decentralized, fragmented, and diverse, allowing many voices and interests to make themselves heard.
Equally important, it’s no accident that William Julius Wilson’s seminal analysis (“The Truly Disadvantaged”) of the flight of the black middle class from poor black neighborhoods was done in Chicago – not in New York. As a student at the University of Chicago, Mike Nichols once characterized its urban renewal efforts as “black and white, shoulder to shoulder, against the poor.”
Which brings us to Hyra’s most fundamental concern: As these neighborhoods come back economically, what will happen to their poor residents? Hyra notes that both Bronzeville and Harlem are “revitalizing without drastic racial changeover.” In the last 10 years, Central Harlem’s white population increased to 2% from 1.5%, and the white proportion in Bronzeville increased to 4% from 2.5%.
Yet while Hyra is very worried about the displacement of the poor, he argues that class antagonism is actually important to the redevelopment of formerly impoverished communities. Black middle-class values translate into effective political activity and organizations, including block clubs, planning boards and religiously affiliated community development corporations. The problem, as he sees it, is that the “coming home” of the black middle class will produce a neighborhood in which poor blacks are no longer welcome.
Is he correct? Only time will tell. After all, the new, large, urban black middle class is itself꧙ a new phenomenon. How its development will affect the historic neighborhoods it treasures is an o💟pen question.
Julia Vitullo-Martin is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
The New Urban Renewal
The Economic 𝓀Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville
by Derek Hyra
University of Chicago Press