The city is saved.
God help the suburbs.
Or, at least, some of the suburbs.
That’s where the so-called “urban crisis” will be in the 21st Century. And the crabgrass version will make the city variety look like a minor problem.
Not that conditions in poor city neighborhoods are about to turn around overnight. Communities like Englewood, Garfield Park and North Lawndale have deep-seated economic and social deficits that will require years to fix . . . assuming we have the political will to do the fixing. There still are a half million folks in Chicago, most of them black and Hispanic, living at or below the poverty level. Unemployment rates in these neighborhoods remain stubbornly high and federal welfare reform is about to strip incomes from thousands of the poorest households.
But at least the city’s poor have a basis for hope. They are riding the caboose, it’s true, but there is an engine at the front of their train. There’s the Loop. There’s Michigan Avenue. There’s the lakefront beaches and museums and McCormick Place. There’s the housing boom taking place, reviving neighborhoods. DisneyQuest is coming and even the commercial office market is beginning to stir from its decade-long nap.
To which my neighborhood activist friends say: “So what?” Their clientele does not subscribe to the symphony or shop on Michigan Avenue. How, the activists demand, does the good fortune of the urban gentry help someone living in a roach-infested walk-up in Austin or Humboldt Park? If anything, they say, the unevenness of Chicago’s comeback frustrates the poor, or worse, displaces them altogether as poor neighborhoods get taken over by the monied class.
There is some truth to this, no question. But obsessing on short-term neighborhood dynamics obscures the far more dangerous, longer-term situation that is developing elsewhere on the metropolitan map.
Consider Harvey, a south suburb that, along with 13 others in Cook County, has a higher crime rate than Chicago. It’s a place where the tax base is so depleted that the owners of a house worth $100,000 must pay about $5,500 a year in taxes, or three times what they’d pay in Barrington Hills.
Or Bellwood, a west Cook County suburb that is now 80 percent black and that lost about 40 percent of its employment base between 1972 and 1990.
Or, for that matter, any of the more than 50 suburbs in west and south Cook County where crime is going up, whites are moving out and the per-capita tax base is already less than the city’s and falling.
By now this pattern is so familiar (It happened to Chicago from 1950 to 1980.) that there is no particular sense of urgency about its spread to the suburbs. That’s one reason the phenomenon is so pernicious. Many assume there’s an up-and-down cycle at work here, some sort of pendulum effect. They point to Chicago’s resurgence.
This isn’t just wishful thinking. It’s wrong-headed and dangerous.
The Harveys and the Bellwoods have no lakefront, no cultural treasures, no sophisticated urban cachet around which to stage a comeback. They have no rich part of town–no Gold Coast, where rising property values may one day fund the kind of school reform and community policing initiatives that are starting to show results in Chicago.
Another reason for complacency is the dumbing effect of political and racial correctness. In many circles, including media circles, it is unacceptable to connect a large and rising black or Hispanic population with a declining quality of life. Many black intellectuals sniff at the need for integration and point with pride to middle-class African-American enclaves like Chatham or Pill Hill, as though those anomalies have anything to do with the disaster brewing in south and west Cook County. They should look instead to East St. Louis, a far truer vision of what’s in store.
Fortunately a number of civic groups are moving beyond the p.c. and beginning to chart what’s going on. The Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities recently issued a report, “Black, White and Shades of Brown,” that tracks the heavying-up of minorities in some suburbs and their near-exclusion in others. So did The Chicago Reporter, a monthly published by the Community Renewal Society. Not long ago the MacArthur Foundation brought in Myron Orfield, a Minneapolis-based expert on the dynamics of metropolitan apartheid, to illustrate, with a series of dramatic maps, the gruesome dividing of northeastern Illinois.
Very little of this, however, has filtered through to the political arena. In Springfield, state lawmakers would rather play political “gotcha” games than confront how our laws grease the skids under the Harveys and the Bellwoods. It’s Illinois’ winner-take-all taxation and annexation systems that force Harvey and Ford Heights (and their school districts) to tax themselves to death just to maintain basic services. Meanwhile, Schaumburg agonizes over what to do with all the revenue from Woodfield Mall, and McHenry County gets ready to double its population by 2020.
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Now that Chicago has turned the corner, there will be less political pressure to change the rules of this game. So stop worrying about the city. The worst ghettos of the next century will be in the suburbs.