SEVEN

A City of Two Tales

HEAT, HIGH SCHOOLS, AND INEQUALITY

On Thursday, July 13, 1995, the temperature in Chicago rose to a stifling 106 degrees, but it was actually much hotter than that. Meteorologists reported that the more critical heat index, which measures the temperature a person actually feels, could reach as high as 120 degrees. Chicago’s numerous brick apartment buildings transformed into ovens, roads buckled and cracked, city workers sprayed bridges to keep them from locking up, power outages left some fifty thousand residents without electricity for days, and a number of neighborhoods lost water pressure as a result of the many fire hydrants being opened by folks desperate for relief from the heat. In the hottest hours of the day, Chicagoans crowded into air-conditioned movie theaters and department stores or headed to the lakefront to wade into the cool water. But after sundown those without air conditioners or without the power to run them faced sleepless nights in sweltering apartments. On Friday, July 14, the heat index surpassed 100 degrees for the third consecutive day, and, since the human body can withstand such temperatures for only about 48 hours, thousands of city residents began to require medical attention, and more than one hundred died of heat-related causes.

With reports of rising death tolls and complaints of power and water problems multiplying, the mayor faced reporters about the situation for the first time that afternoon. Much like his father, Richard M. Daley was famous for bungling phrases or for seeming obtuse and insensitive. And since his election in 1989, he had almost always seemed annoyed when members of the media dared to question him.1 “It’s very hot, but let’s not blow it out of proportion,” he blurted. “Yes, we go to extremes in Chicago, and that’s why people like Chicago—we go to extremes.”2 But by the end of the weekend, as the heat wave continued and stories of strained emergency services and a city morgue overwhelmed by dead bodies circulated throughout the local media, the mayor began to regret having taken such a dismissive tone and went into political damage-control mode. It was a blizzard, after all, that had sunk Mayor Bilandic not so long ago. A press conference was set up on Monday, and this time the mayor appeared alongside his health commissioner, Sheila Lyne; his human services commissioner, David Alvarez; his fire commissioner, Raymond Orozco; and his police superintendent, Matt Rodriguez. Despite the fact that Chicago newspapers had been warning of the grave dangers posed by the heat wave as early as July 12, the mayor argued that the city had been initially unaware of the gravity of the situation, but had then acted assertively and effectively. Then, in an effort to deflect blame, he railed at power company Commonwealth Edison for its inept response and threatened an investigation. Perhaps the most telling moment of the press conference came when Fire Commissioner Orozco stepped in front of the microphone and proceeded to redirect blame for heat-related fatalities onto the victims themselves. “We’re talking about people who die because they neglect themselves,” he claimed. “We did everything possible,” he added, “but some people didn’t even want to open their doors to us.”³ When temperatures finally dropped to more tolerable levels, an estimated 739 Chicagoans had died as a result of the heat wave—more than twice the number that perished in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.⁴

Like the flood of 2005 that destroyed much of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, the 1995 Chicago heat wave has been remembered as a “natural disaster,” an idea that obscures the policies and social values that left certain residents—mostly the poor and the elderly—overexposed to the deadly possibilities of the elements. Just as thousands of lives in New Orleans would likely have been spared had the federal government invested more money in the city’s levee system and had the local government made serious efforts to evacuate its less mobile residents, hundreds of those who perished in the Chicago heat would have survived had the city responded more effectively to those in need, and, perhaps even more importantly, had years of social neglect not left residents of the black West and South Sides in such precarious circumstances. In his brilliant “social autopsy” of the Chicago heat wave, sociologist Eric Klinenberg found that the much higher incidence of heat-related deaths in black ghetto areas was caused by a “dangerous ecology of abandoned buildings, open spaces, commercial depletion, violent crime, degraded infrastructure, low population density, and family dispersion,” which tended to undermine community life and to isolate elderly black residents.5 In neighborhoods like North Lawndale, for example, where in 1995 there was about one violent crime for every ten residents, many old people remained in their overheated homes out of fear of being victimized on the streets. And such fears were far from groundless. Even though the heat wave produced a moderate drop in crime around the city, the Chicago Police Department nonetheless recorded 134 narcotics arrests, 50 assaults, and 2 homicides in the North Lawndale district for just that week.⁶

As the preceding chapters have shown, such conditions were shaped by a series of policies implemented between the 1950s and 1980s that tenaciously directed investment capital towards the Loop, reinforced the segregated spatial order of the city, and turned away from the critical challenge of stemming the flight of people and jobs out of Chicago’s expanding ghetto. The consequences of such policies were clear in the North Lawndale neighborhood, where the population dropped from over 120,000 in 1960 to just over 40,000 in 2000, a decline that was hastened in the late 1960s and 1970s in particular, when International Harvester closed its factory there (in 1969) and Sears moved its headquarters out of the neighborhood and into the Sears Tower downtown. Back in those years, as Daley Sr. courted Sears CEO Gordon Metcalf, little thought was paid to the people of North Lawndale that Sears was leaving behind. The same had been true more than a decade earlier, when Boss Daley had rejected a proposal to build the city’s University of Illinois campus in neighboring East Garfield Park, a move that would have helped to stabilize the economy and real estate market of a large swath of the West Side.

But, if a long history of neglect had made neighborhoods like North Lawndale and Woodlawn the kinds of places that were relatively easy to die in for young and old alike, more immediate circumstances also played a large part in the tragic story of the heat wave—circumstances that revealed a great deal about the direction Chicago was heading under Mayor Richard M. Daley’s stewardship in the 1990s. While it is easy to point to the extraordinary conditions brought about by the heat wave—”Let’s be realistic, no one realized the deaths of that high occurrence would take place,” Daley had told the press—Klinenberg’s “social autopsy” reveals that it was, above all, the city’s approach to urban service provision that had made it unable to respond to the situation at hand. Under Daley, Chicago city government had become what Klinenberg refers to as an “entrepreneurial state” characterized by deregulation, fiscal austerity, unprecedented outsourcing of services to private organizations in the name of cost-cutting, the promotion of market solutions to public problems, and the guiding assumption that residents should be treated as individual consumers of city services.7

In the broiling Chicago heat, such practices became life-or-death issues for those without the means or capacity to fend for themselves. Directives from City Hall to reorganize, streamline, and outsource key emergency and social services hindered the city’s capacity to locate and respond rapidly to those in need, and Daley’s celebrated Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) program, which had been launched the year before with federal funding via the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, failed miserably to deliver the kinds of services it was designed for. CAPS was intended to restructure police work so that beat officers became intimately familiar with the communities they patrolled, thus enabling them to take on roles beyond simple law enforcement—as neighborhood organizers, community leaders, and liaisons to social service providers and city agencies. As idealistic as this might have sounded, it was also a strategy for maintaining low-cost social service provision in a period when federal and state funding for welfare programs was drying up; since the end of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, Republicans had been crusading for cost-cutting welfare reform, a project that President Clinton effectively completed when he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.

The orientation of police officers towards the field of social work was symptomatic of such national trends and symbolized how degraded the very meaning of social support had become after decades of antiwelfare rhetoric. It was also emblematic of a wave of urban revanchism—a demonization, criminalization, and disciplining of the poor—that geographer Neil Smith has compared to the Parisian elite’s treatment of the laboring classes in late nineteenth-century France.⁸ The police officers themselves resented being cast as “soft services” providers, and their reluctance to fill these roles made them ineffective in doing the kind of legwork it would have taken to save the lives of the many elderly residents who died in the Chicago heat.⁹ And yet, when the time came to analyze how the system had failed the poor and elderly who had perished, the knee-jerk response by officials like Fire Commissioner Orozco was to blame the victims. This was no slip of the tongue. Orozco’s reaction reflected racially infused, neoliberal notions that had been circulating within circles of urban governing elites for years—racially infused in their manner of linking up with time-worn ideas of dysfunctional ghetto culture; neoliberal in their tendency to privatize and individualize issues that in the past had been viewed as public or social in nature.10

Scholars have described the ideas and policy approaches that had such lethal consequences during the Chicago heat wave as characteristic of a broad shift to “neoliberal” modes of urban governance in cities all over the world beginning in the 1980s.¹¹ That is to say, Richard M. Daley’s style of governing was part of a larger historical transformation that was hastened on the international level by the programs of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Helmut Kohl to restructure the state so as to promote unfettered free trade, reduce both taxes and public costs, and privatize property, services, and social support systems. However, even though Daley most likely never even uttered the word neoliberalism, it would be mistaken to overlook the role he played in encouraging the hegemony of this rationality in municipal governing circles. Chicago became the poster child for such policies during Daley’s twenty-two years as the city’s “CEO,” the title those in his entourage fittingly bestowed on him, when he guided the transformation of Chicago from a cash-strapped Beirut on the Lake into a bustling global city and world-class tourist destination. By the end of his first full term in office, Daley had turned a $105 million budget deficit into a surplus by reducing the city payroll, reorganizing City Hall, and raising water and sewer rates. During Daley’s more than two decades in office, Chicago added more private sector jobs than Los Angeles and Boston combined; its crime rates generally dropped; its high school standardized test scores and graduation rates climbed; its population grew; its real estate market flourished; and the city became number one in the nation in green roofs, square footage of convention space, and annual domestic business-travel visitors.

The list of such successes goes on and on, and, when taken alongside the remarkable feat of being reelected five times without ever breaking a sweat, it is hard not to conclude that Richard M. Daley was, in many respects, the “greatest” mayor of his generation. Edward Rendell, a two-term mayor of Philadelphia in the 1990s before becoming governor of Pennsylvania in 2003, went so far as to call Daley “the best mayor in the history of the country.”¹² One can thus be sure that Daley’s policies were the buzz among municipal officials at both the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the National League of Cities. Although there is perhaps no better sign of the truly national scope of Daley’s influence than the number of officials and advisors he appointed who went on to walk the carpeted halls of President Barack Obama’s White House. Arne Duncan, who was Daley’s CEO of Chicago Public Schools between 2001 and 2009 served as the United States secretary of education; Valerie Jarrett, Daley’s chief of staff, became one of President Obama’s closest advisors; David Axelrod, Daley’s chief campaign strategist and advisor for nearly twenty years, served as the White House senior advisor for Obama’s critical first three years in office; Rahm Emanuel, who headed Daley’s fund-raising efforts for his first successful mayoral run, was Obama’s White House chief of staff before becoming the mayor of Chicago in 2011; even First Lady Michelle Obama, worked for two years in Daley’s City Hall as an assistant to the mayor and as a planning official. Moreover, while never formally a member of Daley’s administration, William Daley, the mayor’s youngest brother, took over the role of White House chief of staff when Emanuel left to run his mayoral campaign. In view of all the links between Daley’s City Hall and Obama’s White House, it would be hard to argue that the political sensibilities that suffused the Chicago success story of the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century did not shape the Obama administration in significant ways.

And yet Obama was never comfortable with this idea. For example, when asked during a 2003 interview with Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendell if he thought it would have been a better idea to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods rather than on the construction of Millennium Park in the Loop, Obama, at the time an Illinois state senator planning a U.S. Senate run, responded, “If I told you how I really felt, I’d be committing political suicide right here in front of you.”13 Whether due to sheer political expediency or to Obama’s increasingly pragmatic orientation, such ambivalence about Daley’s policies seemed to resolve itself by the time he set his sights on the White House. But Obama’s reluctance to embrace the Daley mystique in 2003 reflected perhaps his rather privileged glimpse into the underside of the Chicago success story. In 2002, for example, Chicago’s 647 homicides made it the murder capital of the country, and two of its highest-profile murders that year occurred in the North Kenwood–Oakland area of Obama’s own Thirteenth Senate District, where a brick-wielding mob of youths had beaten two men to death after their van had lost control and struck a group of young women sitting on a porch.¹⁴

This was merely one in a series of brutal murders perpetrated in Chicago’s black ghetto neighborhoods that received national exposure in the first decade of the twenty-first century, each incident reminding white Chicagoans of the other world they sped through in the sealed safety of their automobiles on the Dan Ryan, the Skyway, and the Congress Expressway, or else in an “L” train rattling westward or southward from the Loop. During Congressman Bobby Rush’s highly ineffective 1999 mayoral primary run, which culminated in his crushing defeat by Daley by a 73–27 margin, the former Black Panther had tried to arouse the ire of blacks and liberals alike by evoking the idea that there were, in fact, two Chicagos: “One Chicago is symbolized by flower pots and Ferris wheels and good jobs and communities where police respect the citizens,” Rush had claimed, making reference to Daley’s massive program to beautify the city’s tourist areas and his $250 million renovation of the Navy Pier lakefront recreation and entertainment area, with its 150-foot-high Ferris wheel. “The second Chicago is still plagued by a lack of jobs, poor schools and police less tolerant of youths who dress and talk differently than they do.”15 If this message posed little threat to the seemingly invincible Daley and his Chicago success story on the citywide stage, it no doubt played a role in Rush’s reelection to the House of Representatives the following year, when he collected twice as many votes as his challenger in the Democratic Primary—an ambitious state senator named Barack Obama.

When the figures from the 2000 census appeared, few could take issue with the veracity of Rush’s claim. According to the new census data, Chicago had managed to retain its middle class during the 1990s; its median household income had grown at a rate that was twice the national average; and overall poverty had modestly declined—all of which seemed to confirm the triumphant image of Chicago as a leading global city and tourist destination, up there in the top tier with the likes of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston. But the data from the “second Chicago” offered a very different vision. The census readings related to black Chicago and to its astonishing disparity from white Chicago showed a city more statistically akin to the nation’s most distressed urban centers: Baltimore, Newark, St. Louis, New Orleans, and Detroit. While the median household income for whites and Latinos in Chicago was $49,000 and $37,000, respectively, it was just $29,000 for blacks, and only 13 percent of black adults held bachelor’s degrees, compared to 42 percent of whites.¹⁶ Such disparities helped to explain why Chicago’s 50.2 percent employment rate for black males over the age of sixteen put it just barely above New Orleans and St. Louis and well behind Baltimore (54.4) and Newark (54.2). Moreover, Chicago topped all other major metropolitan areas for its percentage of black residents having no access to telephone service (7.2), with Detroit a somewhat distant second. Perhaps most tellingly, African Americans were just 19 percent of the overall population of the Chicago metropolitan area but 43 percent of the population living below the poverty line, figures that placed the city ahead of every one of the fifteen largest metropolitan areas except for St. Louis in this statistical measure.17

FIGURE 17. The other Chicago: view north along S. Dearborn Street towards the Robert Taylor Homes on E. 54th St. in 1998. Photo by Camilo José Vergara. Reprinted with permission.

Such figures tell only part of the story. They say little, for example, about the street culture and underground economy that so powerfully shaped the life chances of a generation of youths coming of age in the second Chicago. One of the major consequences of the festering poverty was the development in the late 1980s and 1990s of a Hobbesian world of ruthless street gangs engaged in a battle to the finish for control of the lucrative crack cocaine trade that exploded across the American urban landscape in the second half of the 1980s. By the early 1990s, several of the city’s mightiest gangs—the Gangster Disciples, Vice Lords, Saints, and Latin Kings, among others—had set up elaborate centralized, hierarchical organizations to administer crack distribution in their respective territories. The business approach they came to adopt resembled the franchise model of the fast-food restaurants that were quickly becoming the only sources of nourishment in their communities: gang leadership distributed product to a number of competing “crews” within the general organization, each of which controled its sales methods and wages so as to maximize its profits after paying “dues” and “street taxes” to the central leadership. The arrangements amounted to a neoliberalism of the streets. Researchers studying the underground drug economy of this moment even observed subcontracting schemes, in which one gang leased a building or street corner to another for the purposes of drug trafficking within its territory. Since crack was normally distributed in small quantities with low purchase costs, the business tended to be labor intensive, requiring countless hand-to-hand transactions and numerous foot soldiers to make the sales, watch for police, keep track of the money, and, when need be, engage in turf battles. Even though estimates of total drug trafficking revenues in the city of Chicago ranged from $500 million to $1 billion, investigative journalists and ethnographers alike determined that the many thousands of foot soldiers—mostly teenagers pursuing hip-hop video dreams laden with Mercedes Benzes and Cadillac Escalades, gold chain necklaces, swimming pools, and shapely women—earned wages just a bit above those offered at McDonald’s and KFC.18

Yet, despite the disadvantageous risk-reward ratio associated with entry-level work in a crew, gangs were incorporating—if not by financial inducements, then by force and intimidation—increasing numbers of young men into their ranks. In 2006, a Chicago Crime Commission study estimated that some 125,000 youths—more than a quarter of the total number of students within the entire Chicago public school system—belonged to between seventy and one hundred gangs within the city, a sharp rise from the previous count of 70,000 gang members in 2000.¹⁹ It was this trend more than anything else that accounted for Chicago’s top rankings among the nation’s ten largest cities in rates for both violent crime and homicide. Between 1992 and 2004, the share of murders within the city that were “gang-motivated” rose from 15 percent to more than 35 percent, while the average age of the victims of gang-motivated homicides dropped significantly.²⁰ During the 2008–2009 school year, a record forty-three Chicago public school students became the victims of gang-related murders, a situation that gained national attention in September 2009 after the brutal murder of sixteen-year-old Derrion Albert, a solid student who had managed to stay clear of gang activities. The Albert affair attracted national and even international coverage through a mobile-phone video of his savage beating during a wild street fight between opposing neighborhood gangs in the far South Side Roseland area—one from around Fenger High School, where Albert had been an honor student, and one from the Altgeld Gardens Housing Project, where Barack Obama had worked as a community organizer in mid-1980s.²¹ The video shows Albert, who had apparently walked into the fracas by chance, knocked to the ground by a youth swinging a long wooden board and then bludgeoned and stomped on repeatedly by several others, amidst the screams of female onlookers, who eventually tried to drag the boy to safety.

This scene of unspeakable horror belies or at least complicates the idea, heard in urban policy circles beginning in the late 1990s, that the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) under Mayor Daley’s management had become what President Clinton referred to in 1998 as “a model for the nation.” Once dubbed the “worst in the nation” by President George Bush’s secretary of education William Bennett in 1987, Chicago’s schools had been, by many accounts, transformed after 1995, when the Illinois state legislature handed complete control of the CPS over to Mayor Daley. With Gerry Chico as the president of the CPS and Paul Vallas its CEO, the Daley administration implemented a sweeping corporate-style reform that imposed centralized authority over the elected, neighborhood-based Local School Councils (LSCs) established during the Washington years, created a range of special schools and programs, and, perhaps most importantly, ushered in an unforgiving system of accountability based on student performance on annual standardized tests.22 It was precisely the kind of model that the Bush administration looked to when it designed its No Child Left Behind program, which, after being legislated by Congress in 2001, required all government-run schools receiving federal funding to administer a statewide standardized test in order to evaluate performance. Any school failing to achieve acceptable results after a number of years faced a range of “corrective actions,” from curriculum and staff changes to major restructuring measures, including subcontracting its administration to a private company. Several years after its inception, Chicago’s program appeared to show some significant results. Between 1995 and 2005, the graduation rate increased from under 42 percent to 51 percent, which moved Chicago from the lower ranks into the middle of the pack of the nation’s big cities.²³ Moreover, between 2004 and 2009, the rate of CPS graduates enrolling in college rose from 43.5 to 54.4 percent, a jump that more than tripled the 3.4 percent rise nationally.²⁴

And yet such signs of progress pointed to the creation of a multitiered educational system rather than any wholesale improvement. If the Chicago school reforms of the mid-1990s had played a role in increasing the percentage of high school graduates heading off to higher education, they had done little to diminish the city’s sizable share of the country’s most troubled high schools. According to high school rankings compiled in a 2009 study based on standardized test scores, Chicago possessed seventeen of the one hundred worst performing schools in the United States. New York, by contrast had three, and Philadelphia and San Francisco one each.25 With only 4 percent of its students proficient in math and 9 percent proficient in reading, Derrion Albert’s school, Fenger, was twenty-fourth from the bottom—a situation that helps explain the scene that Albert walked into in September that year. Indeed, while an array of “college prep” magnet schools, charter schools, and high school International Baccalaureate programs had raised the educational bar for many middle-class Chicagoans, such new opportunities remained far out of reach for the vast majority of students.²⁶ In working-class black and Latino areas of the city, access to the kind of public education that can qualify students for advanced degree programs was scarce. To take but one example, out of the total 11,915 spots available in the city’s nine selective college prep high schools in 2011, schools located in low-income black and Latino neighborhoods outside the North Side or immediate Loop vicinity provided only 2,670. And, while students were of course eligible to apply to schools outside their neighborhoods, if they could handle the long commutes, low-income students, who made up some 85 percent of the total student population in the CPS, constituted only about one-third of the enrollments in these North Side and Loop area schools that year.²⁷ In effect, then, Mayor Daley’s celebrated reforms created a system of winners and losers, with the winners living predominantly in white, middle-class, and some gentrifying neighborhoods, and the losers concentrated in low-income black and Latino neighborhoods south and west of the Loop, where according to a 2003 report by the Center for Labor Market Studies, black males were six times more likely than their white counterparts elsewhere in the city to be out of school and unemployed.²⁸

Certainly, the allure of the gangs and the absence of promising employment opportunities for young men in the ghettos and barrios loomed large in any explanation for this disparity. But there was also reason to believe that school policies implemented during Daley’s aggressive drive to boost test scores and hold schools accountable for poor performance played a role in pushing young men into the precarious place between school and work. A number of studies conducted between 2000 and 2003 revealed dramatic increases in school suspensions for minor nonviolent infractions. Between 1999 and 2000, for example, suspensions jumped from 21,000 to nearly 37,000, with students of color receiving the vast majority of them. Increasing suspensions, moreover, also meant more expulsions, with African Americans, according to a report published by the social service agency Hull House, being three times more likely than whites or Latinos to be expelled.29

These strategies of weeding out the students identified as bringing down the numbers gave way in 2006 to a new policy under Daley’s Renaissance 2010 plan to close some eighty poorly performing schools over four years and replace them with one hundred privately run charter or contract schools, whose teachers were not required to be certified by the state, received lower salaries, and were barred from joining the Chicago Teachers Union. This discovery of charter schools as the panacea for the city’s failing public education system represented the same logic of neoliberalization that was shaping the city’s approach to social services provision. Driving this scheme was none other than the Commercial Club, which constituted a committee of high-powered captains of industry and finance under the chairmanship of Exelon Corporation CEO John W. Rowe—including the chairman of the board of McDonald’s Corporation and the CEO of the Chicago Board Options Exchange—to design a private-sector answer to Chicago’s school problems. The report issued by this Education Committee of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club was aptly named Left Behind. Journalist Rick Perlstein revealed that it “deployed the word ‘data’ forty-five times, ‘score,’ ‘scored,’ or ‘scoring’ 60 times—and ‘test,’ ‘tested,’ and ‘testing,’ or ‘exam’ and ‘examination,’ some 1.47573 times per page.”³⁰ Within a year, Daley was moving on the Renaissance 2010 charter school initiative. Overseen by Arne Duncan, CEO of the CPS at the time, the implementation of Renaissance 2010 met fierce resistance from many LSCs objecting to the disruptions and violence caused by the often-precipitous school closures. In the initial phase of the plan, for example, a series of school closures on the South Side led to student transfers to neighboring areas, which, in turn, caused sharp spikes in gang violence. Community concerns like these, however, were clearly secondary to the objectives of raising scores and cutting costs. Further suggestive of the neoliberal rationality that infused the plan was a 2007 speech made by CPS president Rufus Williams in front of the Chicago City Club, a group of civic and business leaders, in which he compared the idea of LSCs running schools to a chain of hotels being managed by “those who sleep in the hotels.”³¹

Such policies—suspensions, expulsions, closures, and the dampening of local participation in the decision-making process—were components of a public relations campaign to manufacture evidence of progress resolving problems that had opened the city to widespread criticism in the 1980s and early 1990s, when a series of teachers’ strikes and parent-led community protests raised awareness about gang violence and of the lack of funding for necessary school improvements and salary increases. But they also spoke once again to the revanchist spirit of neoliberal governance that fed off the hard-edged antiwelfare, law-and-order rhetoric coming out of Washington during this same period. This was an approach and an ethos that circulated among policy makers in cities across the United States, but that saw perhaps its clearest expression in Richard M. Daley’s Chicago success story. One of the pioneering innovations brought about by Daley’s overhaul of the system in 1995 was the establishment of three military high schools as well as the dramatic expansion of military programs in numerous high schools and middle schools.32 Predominantly enrolling blacks and to a lesser extent Latinos, these military high schools, which used military-style forms of punishment for violations of school rules, achieved graduation rates and test scores that placed them in the top ranks of the schools available to working-class blacks and Latinos. But they were also living monuments to the idea that what was amiss in Chicago’s schools had more to do with the cultural shortcomings of black and Latino students than with the structural inequalities of the school system itself. All it takes is some military-style discipline, the argument went, to make things right.

A similar kind of rationale infused the move to orient the academic evaluation process around a standardized test. Yet, while Chicago school officials never missed a chance to remind people that all students in Chicago were evaluated by the same test—the “Iowa Tests”—and thus held to the same standards, the test in practice exacerbated already existing disparities between the city’s most elite schools, which were disproportionately middle class and white, and its lowest-achieving ones, which were overwhelmingly working-class black and Latino. In schools where scores were lowest, classroom time was dominated by lessons geared more towards test preparation than intellectual development. One researcher who sat in on classes in several such schools observed teachers making extensive use of materials on test-taking strategies, training students for hours on filling in multiple-choice bubbles, and having them recite slogans such as “three B’s in a row, no, no, no.”³³ Understandably, such conditions contributed to higher dropout rates and disciplinary problems in poorly performing schools, whereas in schools with little risk of failure, teachers faced fewer test-related constraints and could more effectively orient their lessons to the interests and intellectual needs of their students.

In view of such glaring inequalities, it was becoming difficult to argue that Chicago’s school system represented a model to be emulated. And yet, while fewer and fewer observers seemed willing to make this case, some of the key ingredients in its so-called success story—the replacement of failing neighborhood schools with charter schools and the emphasis on standardized testing—were incorporated into President Obama’s education policy. Such circumstances beg the question of how, considering Chicago’s disproportionate share of the worst performing schools in the nation and its high rate of student homicides, the CPS had ever stopped being seen, as George H.W. Bush’s secretary of education William Bennett once referred to it, as the nation’s worst.

And how was it that the dire situation in the vast majority of black and Latino high schools did not stir up more opposition to Mayor Daley within these communities. Even when faced with an established black politician from the South Side like Bobby Rush—someone who, as a U.S. congressman, had earned political capital both locally and nationally—Daley still managed to capture around half of the black vote. Among Latinos, moreover, Daley’s support was so strong throughout his more than two decades in office that not a single Latino politician ever dared to make a serious run against him. These are questions that must be explored on a number of levels, and though this particular study has attempted to delineate a set of experiences that were somehow specific to the inhabitants of the 234 square miles of urban space that lie in the northernmost part of the state of Illinois, it is important to recall that Daley’s Chicago was embedded within a national political context that played a critical role in shaping the meaning of the circumstances transpiring within its borders. In other words, how working-class blacks and Latinos viewed their situation related, in part, to ideological currents that blew into the city from elsewhere—through their television sets, radios and stereos, computer screens, and telephones.

And what they increasingly saw and heard beginning in the late 1980s and continuing through the 1990s were images, stories, diatribes, polemics, and anecdotes that described the problems in their schools and neighborhoods as consequences of cultural deficiencies—of dysfunctional family situations and debased moral values—rather than as the by-products of economic marginalization and racial discrimination. Moreover, these were messages purveyed not merely by the right flank of the Republican Party. The antiwelfare crusade that began during the Reagan years had gained so much momentum that by the mid-1990s it had captured the nation’s entire political center. It was a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, in fact, who signed the famous 1996 Welfare Reform Act (officially known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act), which, as he proclaimed, “end[ed] welfare as we know it,” a move that followed his active sponsorship of the largest federal crime bill (the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act) in U.S. history. With the Republicans under the leadership of Newt Gingrich regaining both houses of Congress in the 1994 midterm elections, Clinton sought to steal their fire by keeping pace with their calls for a tougher approach to law enforcement and an end to a welfare system that had destroyed values of “personal responsibility” and hard work. The two pieces of legislation amounted to a continuation of the Reagan Revolution’s dramatic shift of federal funds from social spending to law enforcement—a trend that played a leading role in increasing the kinds of racial disparities in Chicago that had been so glaringly revealed by the 2000 census.34 And yet in the national discussion about the persistence of such racial inequalities, notions of “personal responsibility” and cultural deficiencies took center stage, pushing to the margins analyses focusing on the forces of racial discrimination.

Making matters worse was the fact that some of the most prominent voices arguing for a cultural interpretation of black inner-city poverty came from a number of black intellectuals who had themselves risen out of such conditions—scholars like Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell of Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institute and the University of Chicago’s famed sociologist William Julius Wilson.³⁵ That Wilson, a self-proclaimed “social democrat” favoring aggressive Great Society–style intervention in the urban labor market, found himself grouped with strident conservatives like Steele and Sowell was a sign of just how compelling the culture-of-poverty argument was to Americans in the late 1980s and 1990s. Wilson’s primary objective in both his landmark 1978 book The Declining Significance of Race and in his 1987 study The Truly Disadvantaged was to argue for class-based social policies that were better adapted to the specific circumstances of poverty faced by a black underclass trapped in spatially and socially isolated ghettos with poor schools and scarce job opportunities.³⁶ But by making the corollary argument that fighting racial discrimination was no longer as necessary as it had been in the past, he left himself open to charges that he was minimizing racism as a cause of ghetto poverty, and in delineating the distinct conditions of black underclass poverty—single-parent families, juvenile delinquency, academic failure, the lack of positive role models, and the breakdown of community institutions—he seemed to some observers to be straying too far on to the well-worn ground of culture-of-poverty pathologies. Wilson, who served as an informal advisor to Bill Clinton during his first term and as a consultant to Mayor Daley, appeared to be telling Democrats to move past the kind of divisive race-based policies (for example, affirmative action) that had caused the defection of white middle-class moderates from the party since the late 1960s. Conservatives, for their part, were thrilled by Wilson’s apparent minimization of racism. Of course they were distorting his argument, and Wilson himself cried foul in a number of high-profile interviews, but the fact remained that a Chicago-based, black social democrat with impeccable academic credentials who had been raised by a single mother on welfare had signed his name to an award-winning book entitled The Declining Significance of Race.

MANAGING THE MARGINALIZED

The views of prominent black conservative scholars like Steele and Sowell and of somewhat misunderstood liberals like Wilson were less consequential to ordinary Chicagoans of color than the more popular ideological currents and political movements circulating through their neighborhoods. In the early 1990s, Chicago was at the center of what was then and still is the largest single mass mobilization in the black community since the era of civil rights—the Million Man March on Washington, DC, in 1995. Organized by Chicago-based Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Minister Louis Farrakhan, the march was called in an effort to “convey to the world a vastly different picture of the Black male” during a moment when law-and-order politicians and the culture industries alike were painting black youths as gangsters and drug dealers.37 The idea for the march took shape shortly after the Republican takeover of Congress, and march organizers sought to use the mobilization to register black voters for the next elections and draw attention to issues facing black communities. Yet such political projects were subsumed by the overriding messages of personal responsibility, self-help, and spiritual atonement. In effect, ordinary African Americans were being told to mobilize collectively against racism but that the real path to their salvation was not political but rather spiritual and, above all, personal.

This package of ideas had been assembled on Chicago’s South Side, in the Nation of Islam’s headquarters at 7351 South Stony Island Avenue, where, since the mid-1980s, Farrakhan had been drawing increasingly large audiences to his mosque to hear elaborate rants sprinkled with anti-Semitism, homophobia, and a range of conspiracy theories. Nor was this recipe unique. About twenty blocks southwest of NOI headquarters, Reverend Jeremiah Wright had been touching on some similar themes—if in less sensationalist and provocative terms—in sermons from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ. By the early 1990s Wright’s charisma had enabled him to amass a congregation of several thousand members—University of Chicago law professor Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, among them. To be sure, Obama and many of his fellow congregants at Trinity would have been loath to think of themselves as somehow associated with the NOI, but it was hard to deny that Wright and Farrakhan belonged to the same context. It was not by chance, for example, that the two South Side religious leaders shared the stage at the Million Man March. But while Wright was rapidly becoming a powerful local figure, presiding over a congregation of more than six thousand by the time he retired in 2008, Farrakhan was moving into the national spotlight. By the early 1990s, the Nation of Islam’s membership was increasing nationwide, Farrakhan’s outrageous declarations about Jews and UFOs were making tabloid headlines, and a number of enormously popular rap artists, such as Public Enemy, Ice Cube, and X-Clan were incorporating excerpts of the NOI leader’s speeches into gold- and platinum-selling albums. And yet rap and the NOI made rather strange bedfellows. If a new generation of West Coast “gangsta rappers,” like NWA (Niggas With Attitude) and Ice Cube, had offered some penetrating critiques of what the Reagan Revolution’s vision of law and order had meant for a generation of black ghetto youths, by the time of the Million Man March, the images of criminality, violence, sexism, and immorality purveyed by rap music and videos had become a big part of the problem that the movement’s organizers were seeking to address. “By the summer of 1993 gangsta rap had been reduced to ‘nihilism for nihilism’s sake,’” writes historian Robin D.G. Kelley, and this sense of nihilism—much like the message of personal responsibility that stood dialectically opposed to it—only provided further confirmation for those claiming that black inner-city poverty was a cultural rather a structural issue.38 Nihilism, dysfunction, and pathology were the terms that defined the problem of black underclass poverty throughout the 1990s and into the early years of the twenty-first century. That even the eminent radical black activist and philosopher Cornel West would peer into the heart of the black ghetto and see a world of “nihilism,” as he did in his classic 1994 Race Matters, reflected a profound loss of faith in the political system among working-class blacks and their leaders across urban America.³⁹

But in Chicago, in particular, where voter turnout was reaching new lows and mayoral elections were considered local jokes, the pessimism about the possibility of political solutions to the problems people faced in their daily lives was especially pronounced—a situation that seemed all too apparent during Bobby Rush’s uninspiring campaign of 1999. There were glimmers of hope from time to time, as when blacks turned out in 1993 to help elect the first black woman to the U.S. Senate, Carol Moseley Braun. However this was state and not local politics, and Moseley Braun was, in some sense, a gift from Daley, who not only endorsed her but also convinced many of his deep-pocketed donors to throw their financial support behind her as well. This was, in part, payback for services already rendered; in 1989, as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Moseley Braun had given her own endorsement to Daley, a deed she repeated in 1995.40

Another moment of political possibility, moreover, appeared to be developing in the months leading up to the 1995 aldermanic elections, when, out of the deepest reaches of apparent black underclass nihilism—the impoverished neighborhoods around the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago’s Third Ward—an insurgent poor people’s movement crystallized around the candidacy of former Gangster Disciple (GD) Wallace “Gator” Bradley. The financing, manpower, and guidance behind Bradley’s campaign came from a political organization called 21st Century Vote, which Gangster Disciple kingpin Larry Hoover had launched in 1990 from a high security federal prison while serving a sentence of 150 to 200 years for murder. Hoover was running with the GDs in the late 1960s, when some of Chicago’s most fearsome gangs were trying to transform into political organizations, but his own personal awakening came not on the streets of Englewood but in a number of prisons, where he earned his GED and remade the Gangster Disciples into a political organization he called Growth and Development. While critics would maintain that Hoover’s turn to politics was a cover for his continuing leadership of the GDs’ massive drug trafficking enterprise, a taped telephone conversation between Hoover and Vice Lord leader Willie Lloyd in 1992 revealed an ambitious plan to mobilize “the poor people” around the housing projects, including the “dope fiends and wineys,” in order to take the aldermanic seat from Daley-backed Dorothy Tillman. In 1993, the organization moved into a second-floor office above an abandoned storefront in Englewood and promptly organized thousands of youths to march on City Hall to prevent the closing of some neighborhood health clinics and help settle a teacher’s strike; a year later, 21st Century Vote had registered several thousand voters and had raised well over $100,000 from mostly small donations. Yet, although Bradley was able to get national attention by forcing a runoff with Tillman, African Americans in the Third Ward were not ready to believe that gangbangers could become community leaders, and the thousands of Gangster Disciples who hit the streets for Bradley only seemed to make matters worse. Bradley lost badly in the general election, and 21st Century Vote faded into insignificance.41

The story of Larry Hoover and 21st Century Vote provides some insight into how Mayor Daley could have presided over the two Chicagos while arousing so little agitation from those living in the subaltern one, the Chicago of litter-strewn vacant lots, boarded-up buildings tagged with gang symbols, impossibly high unemployment, and gunshots piercing the night. If the term machine does not do justice to the sophisticated mechanisms of social control that characterized the administration of Richard M. Daley, countersubversive tactics that resembled those from the glory days of Richard J. Daley’s machine were certainly called to service in response to Gator Bradley’s challenge. The police turned up the heat on the Gangster Disciples in the days before the election with roundups and other forms of harassment, and from the beginning the Chicago press seemed much too zealous in its demonization of Hoover. Prior to one of Hoover’s parole hearings, for example, a Tribune editorial argued, “Hoover is a leader, all right. He helped lead neighborhoods down a self-destructive road of murder, drug abuse and despair. His release would undermine the authority of law-abiding folks who lead by example, yet don’t get a parade of politicians to sing their praises.” Whether City Hall had played a role in the Tribune’s crusade against Hoover we will never know for sure, but we do know that city officials came to every parole hearing to insist that Hoover was still the gangster he had always been.⁴² However, Hoover and his ragtag band of lumpenproletariat was all too easy for Daley to contain. Harder to explain was Daley’s role in anesthetizing the injuries of the city’s other half and paralyzing any forces of political opposition amidst a series of scandals, any one of which might have been enough to bring another mayor to his knees.

In late 1995, just months after the Daley administration had displayed its callous attitude towards the poor during the heat wave, a massive FBI sting known as Operation Silver Shovel revealed a culture of rampant corruption within Daley’s City Hall, including bribes for city contracts, fraud, money laundering, drug trafficking, and organized crime activity. The more than 1,100 wiretap recordings made during this operation showed that everyone around Daley seemed to be on the take, and these were hardly victimless crimes. Chicago residents, whose property taxes were on the rise in the 1990s, had for years been paying what amounted to a “contract corruption” tax, and minority-owned contractors, which had enjoyed an affirmative action program put in place during the Washington years, were no longer seeing their rightful 24 percent share of the city’s construction business because of a range of fraudulent practices. In one of the worst cases, James M. Duff, one of the heads of a reputed organized crime family and a big financial supporter of Daley, had convinced an African American employee to pose as majority owner of one of his waste management companies in order to win a contract intended for minority-owned businesses.43

During this time, moreover, a series of investigations began to uncover a hideous pattern of police torture at the city’s South Side Area 2 police station, where, it was later determined, 137 African American men were tortured into confessions on the orders of police lieutenant Jon Burge between 1972 and 1991. Detainees had reportedly had plastic bags placed over their heads, guns shoved in their mouths, and electrical shocks and cigarette burns administered to their ears, nostrils, chests, and genitals. Daley was not mayor while most of this was going on, but as Cook County state’s attorney in the early 1980s, he had been informed of such practices by reliable sources and had refused to launch an inquiry. Based in part on the revelations of these coerced confessions, Illinois governor George Ryan halted all executions in the state of Illinois in 2000, and three years later commuted the death sentences of 167 prisoners on Illinois’s death row while pardoning four death row inmates tortured at the Area 2 station. Ryan’s bold moves, however, did little to change the killing going on in the streets. In 2001 and then again 2003, Chicago made headlines as the “murder capital” of the United States, registering more homicides than the significantly more populous cities of New York and Los Angeles.

In January 2004, City Hall was ensconced in scandal once again, when the Chicago Sun-Times discovered serious improprieties in the city’s $40-million-per-year Hired Truck Program. Trucking companies with ties to both organized crime and high-ranking city officials were being awarded lucrative contracts for doing little or no work, and while nothing could be directly pinned on Daley, there was too much circumstantial evidence to dismiss. Some 25 percent, or $47.8 million, of all Hired Truck money went to companies from Daley’s Eleventh Ward power base, companies in the program had contributed more than $100,000 combined to Daley’s campaigns, and Daley’s brother John had underwritten insurance policies for a handful of them.44 As federal prosecutors continued on with the Hired Truck scandal, evidence surfaced that Victor Reyes, a close Daley advisor and head of the powerful Hispanic Democratic Organization (HDO), had rigged hiring and promotion exams to reward city workers, including members of the HDO, for their political activities on behalf of Daley and other candidates.

All this to say that between 1995 and 2005, there was almost never a moment in Chicago when the city did not seem, at least in the eyes of its mostly black and Latino low-income residents, to be a place of monumental injustice—where big businessmen, mobsters, and people with personal ties to the Daley family and its close friends got fat, while poor blacks and Latinos were being gunned down on street corners and tortured in the back rooms of police stations. Even if one could ignore the litany of corruption scandals that appeared in the pages of the dailies and utter, “That’s just the way it is,” Chicago slapped the have-nots in the face every time they ventured near the Loop. A simple drive north on Lakeshore Drive took one through the Chicago of clean, tree-lined streets, marinas full of shiny white pleasure boats, well-manicured green park spaces, tidy beaches with volleyball nets fronting a sparkling blue Lake Michigan, rapidly rising real estate values, and neighborhoods with names befitting the class of people living there: the Gold Coast, Lincoln Park, and Lakeview. The many thousands of residents in the Cabrini-Green Homes, a quadrant of mid- and high-rise block-like structures with fenced-in balconies, where the Gangster Disciples ran a drug trafficking operation that earned them an estimated $3 million per year before its demolition in 2010 and 2011, were just a short walk away from the upscale Gold Coast neighborhood. William Julius Wilson made an important point when he emphasized the social and spatial isolation of the black poor in Chicago, but one should not take this idea too far: African Americans in the city understood quite well how the other half lived. But even though poor people of color regularly confronted such “savage inequalities,”⁴⁵ they showed little interest in addressing them by investing in the electoral process. In the mayoral election of 2007, for example, overall voter turnout was just over 30 percent, with 70 percent of blacks and 80 percent of Latinos casting their votes for Richard M. Daley. In 1989, by contrast, Daley had garnered under 10 percent of the black vote.

So what accounted for the lack of opposition to Daley among blacks and Latinos and his virtual invincibility at the polls over his more than two decades in office? Some of the explanation brings us back into the cogs of the political machine he inherited from his father. The tactics City Hall deployed against Gator Bradley, as well as the various illegal schemes that created both jobs and lucrative contracts for Daley supporters, reveal the workings of a political machine that resembled the one run by Richard J. Daley in the 1960s and 1970s. Also similar was the absolute authority Richard M. Daley wielded over his city council, which came in part from a 1978 law giving the mayor the power to fill city council vacancies. By 2002, he had appointed one-third of the members of the city council, which may help explain why he did not have to use his veto power even once between 1989 and 2005. As political scientist Dick Simpson’s research has found, two-thirds of the members of the city council voted with the mayor 90–100 percent of the time.46 These aldermen stood with Daley because, as in the old days, the mayor controlled a spigot of patronage funds for irrigating their wards. But even if the Hired Truck scandal seemed to indicate that, in spite of the Shakman decree, a system of jobs for political supporters was still in operation, what really moved things during the Richard M. Daley era was “pinstripe patronage”—contracts for lawyers, consultants, and various other service providers, as well as enormous infrastructural subsidies and preferential policies for the developers who erected the city’s office buildings and retail centers, as well as for the companies who filled them. It was in this area in particular that Richard M. Daley’s patronage machine represented something of a paradigm shift from that of his father. Pinstripe patronage, in the high times of the global-city era, was not about demanding small donations from thousands of loyalists and giving out contracts to put new toilets in City Hall but rather about attracting five- and six-figure campaign donations from multimillionaires in exchange for seven- and eight-figure contracts, new tax loopholes, and a range of lucrative subsidies. Even in his very first campaign, in 1989, Daley had amassed an unprecedented $7 million in donations, with some 30 percent coming from just 1 percent of his contributors. Moreover, in addition to traditional support from contractors and construction unions, some two-thirds of Daley’s donations came from law firms (like the famous Sidley & Austin, where Barack Obama met his wife, Michelle Robinson), banks, commodities and stock traders, businesses, and consulting firms enmeshed in the global economy.⁴⁷

Moreover, if Richard J. Daley had used some accounting tricks to veil the city’s financial situation, his son took this practice to another level of sophistication. Critical to Richard M. Daley’s pinstripe patronage juggernaut, for example, was his tax increment financing (TIF) program, a labyrinthine public financing method that he used to create a virtual “shadow budget” of over $500 million—about one-sixth of the city’s total budget—to fund large development projects, infrastructural improvements, and beautification efforts.48 The original idea behind TIFs, which began to be increasingly adopted in municipalities across the nation in the 1980s with the drying up of federal urban renewal funds and sharp reductions in federal development grants, was to create a mechanism that would channel capital towards improvements in distressed or blighted areas where development might not otherwise occur.⁴⁹ In a typical TIF program, property tax revenues in excess of the amounts determined to be needed within a certain geographical area are allocated to a special discretionary fund for “public” projects. The thinking is that these projects, in turn, will theoretically improve the area and thus lead to increased tax revenues that will replenish the TIF fund and likely add to it in following years. Yet like so many other progressive-minded policy approaches that arrived in postwar Chicago, the problem with Chicago’s TIF program was that City Hall took the money and ran away from the progressive goals attached to it, and it did so behind closed doors. In fact, TIFs, by nature, are ill-suited to socially progressive ends—the construction of affordable housing or the creation of middle-class jobs—because of their adherence to a commercial logic contingent upon sharp increases in property values.⁵⁰ Making matters worse in Chicago was the way in which Mayor Richard M. Daley incorporated the TIF system into his pinstripe patronage machine. While TIF projects involving private companies had to be approved by a city council vote and thereby made public, the large portion of funds used for neighborhood improvements—new schools, sidewalk and street repaving, and the upgrading of park and recreation facilities, for example—were not subject to public scrutiny, allowing them to be used as patronage rewards to distribute among aldermen loyal to the Daley machine.

This lack of transparency enabled the creation of a public funding system that reinforced inequalities rather than ameliorating them, a situation that remained largely obscured until Ben Joravsky, a journalist for Chicago’s leading alternative newspaper, the Chicago Reader, managed to get his hands on some internal TIF documents. According to Joravsky’s investigative work, TIFs skimmed $1 billion in property taxes off the city’s revenues between 2003 and 2006.⁵¹ Indicative of how unevenly this money was spread across the city, in 2007 the downtown LaSalle/Central TIF district added some $19 million in revenues while the Roseland/Michigan TIF district—the area often referred to as “the hundreds,” where Derrion Albert was murdered—brought in a mere $707,000.⁵² Moreover, in 2009, a year in which Daley announced the need to eliminate jobs and cut back services because of a $500 million budget deficit linked to the country’s financial crisis, the city council voted in favor of allocating $35 million from the LaSalle/Central TIF district to subsidize the move of United Airlines into seven floors of the Willis Tower.53 City officials justified the offer by arguing that United’s presence in the Willis Tower, in addition to solving the embarrassing problem of vacant floors in Chicago’s most prestigious skyscraper, would bring some 2,500 jobs to the city. This was a far better deal for the city as a whole than the $56 million in public subsidies paid to Boeing in 2001, when it moved its headquarters from Seattle to Chicago, bringing some 450 jobs with it.⁵⁴

As the enormous subsidies offered to Boeing and United reveal, the maintenance of Chicago’s image as a high-flying global city was a top priority for the Daley administration. In this sense, Daley was no different from his homologue in New York City, Rudolph Giuliani, who in December 1998 offered the New York Stock Exchange a historically unprecedented $900 million in cash along with a package of tax breaks and other subsidies to prevent its move across the river to New Jersey. Next to this, the money spent on Boeing and United seemed more than reasonable, and the addition of these high-profile corporations helped to offset the psychological blows of losing Amoco, Ameritech, and Inland Steel to corporate takeovers. City officials provided further justification by repeatedly referring to the rosy estimates of certain economists about the “multiplier effects” of having all these highly paid white-collar workers around the downtown area. During the United affair, for example, Second Ward alderman Robert Fioretti, whose jurisdiction stretches from the bustling Loop westward into the depressed area around East Garfield Park, argued that the airline’s employees would spend an average of $6,700 in the downtown area—on, presumably, martinis, steaks, athletic club memberships, and a range of elite services. But the multiplier effects of this consumption stopped well short of Fioretti’s constituents on the black West Side, where the challenge was to lure low-cost food retailers in order to combat the problem of “food deserts”—large areas in which residents have little or no access to healthy food sources.

This area of the city had been devastated in 2003, when just to the west of it, in West Garfield Park, candy maker Brach’s Confections, Inc., closed a factory that provided more than a thousand jobs. With one of its signature items, Candy Corn, a nauseatingly sweet, waxy-textured corn-kernel facsimile commonly eaten by children around Halloween, Brach’s did little to boost Chicago’s global-city credentials, so Daley was unwilling to offer more than $10 million to try to retain its one thousand jobs—not nearly enough to dissuade the company from moving its operations into Mexico. Ironically, this was about the same amount City Hall would draw from the Northwest Industrial Corridor TIF five years later at the request of a developer seeking to convert the abandoned Brach’s factory into a warehouse and distribution center, which, according to the developer’s own estimate, would provide just seventy-five permanent jobs.55 The project would, however, eventually pay for itself in future income tax revenue, much of which would find its way back into the Northwest Industrial TIF, where it would be spent, of course, at the discretion of City Hall.⁵⁶

That more than $10 million was allocated to a project that promised to create just seventy-five jobs in an area whose 17.3 percent unemployment rate ranked among the highest in the city in 2007 and whose principal high schools, Marshall and Austin, reported attendance rates around 50 percent revealed that Chicago’s TIF program had become almost entirely unhinged from any reasonable notion of the public interest. And yet much of what made the city’s financing system patently unjust occurred under the radar. Unlike the machine of old, which was out on the streets taking bribes, pouring drinks, handing out turkeys, and dispatching thugs to make sure people voted “early and often,” Richard M. Daley’s well-oiled machine seemed to hum silently beneath the city. There were of course corruption scandals enough to raise eyebrows now and then, but it could be argued that these scandals, in the end, overshadowed and even legitimated the quasi-legal policies that were redistributing public capital upwards. That is to say, Operation Silver Shovel, the Hired Truck scandal, and many of the other tales of cronyism that made it into the dailies created a deeply flawed perception of Richard M. Daley’s “machine.” Mid-level city officials consorting with gangsters and taking middle-class bribes, private trucks idling in parking lots at a rate of $50 per hour, strings pulled to arrange jobs for political supporters—these scandals hardly scratched the surface of what was really going on with Chicago’s finances. They made Richard M. Daley’s administration look too much like Richard J. Daley’s machine, an idea that obscured how much the scale of injustice had changed since the early 1990s. And even if the TIF program enabled City Hall to veil some of its dealings, the details of the majority of expenditures were out there for everyone to see, provided they wanted to make the effort to do so.

But until the months before the mayoral election of 2007, when the whole country was reeling from the blow of the subprime mortgage crisis, few political organizations were willing to take on either the global city agenda or the neoliberal municipal policies that were imposing austerity on the poor and shifting so much of Chicago’s tax revenues to business interests downtown and elsewhere throughout the city. This was in part because, viewed from the perspective of its thriving downtown and surrounding areas, Chicago looked like a city that was clearly moving in the right direction. Mayor Daley had invested massively in both beautification initiatives and the upgrading of tourist attractions, especially around the downtown lakefront area, making Chicago a first-tier destination for both business travelers and tourists. In terms of beautification, City Hall pushed through a new landscape ordinance in 1999 that put more trees on sidewalks, more flower beds on the medians of avenues, more planters in commercial districts, and obligated developers and builders to incorporate aesthetically pleasing landscaping into their designs. Mayor Daley’s drive to beautify the city was so consuming that after visiting Paris, he ordered the installation of lights on the city’s bridges and skyscrapers in order to give Chicago a Paris-by-night feel.

His efforts to improve the city’s tourism infrastructure were nothing short of staggering: In 1991, a new baseball park for the White Sox opened thanks, in part, to $81 million of city financing. Between 1992 and 1994, City Hall kicked in some $35 million in infrastructural costs for the construction of the United Center, the new home for the Chicago Bulls professional basketball team. In 1995, it allocated $250 million for the renovation of Navy Pier. In 1996 it completed a $675 million expansion of McCormick Place, giving the city the most square footage of convention space in the nation. In 1998 it spent $110 million to reconfigure Lake Shore Drive in order to create a “Museum Campus” that gathered Soldier Field (the stadium of the Chicago Bears), the Shedd Aquarium, the Field Museum of Natural History, and Adler Planetarium on one massive green space by the lake. In 2003 it financed a $680 million renovation of Soldier Field. In 2004 it inaugurated the $475 million ($200 million of which came from private donations) Millennium Park, a spectacular twenty-five-acre green space bordering the Chicago Art Institute to the north and Grant Park to the west that includes the three-story polished stainless steel bean-shaped Cloud Gate sculpture, the fifty-foot-high interactive glass brick Crown Fountain, a 2.5-acre flower garden, a large outdoor ice skating rink, a 1,500-seat performing arts theater, numerous spaces for art expositions, and its centerpiece, a state-of-the-art outdoor music pavilion crowned with a spectacular stainless steel bandshell designed by Frank Gehry.57 In 2005, the Federal Aviation Administration approved an estimated $6 billion plan by the city to expand O’Hare Airport’s capacity by 60 percent. And in 2007, Chicago opened yet another addition to McCormick Place, the $850 million McCormick Place West building.58

All this was of course part of the global-city agenda laid out by the mayor’s planning advisors in the 2002 Chicago Central Area Plan, which called for a downtown district of revitalized green spaces, promenades, and waterfront attractions. “Chicago,” the plan asserted, “will retain its role as one of the world’s great crossroads cities, attracting businesses, residents, and visitors internationally. . . Its Central Area will be a preeminent international meeting place, easily accessible from major destinations around the globe via expanded O’Hare International and Midway Airports.”⁵⁹ What was taking shape so spectacularly along Chicago’s lakefront was part of a larger trend of urban revitalization that grew out of the convergence of the new economy of tourism and the global-city agenda. One result was the development of what political scientist Dennis Judd refers to as a “tourist bubble”—an upscale commercial district in which “tourist and entertainment facilities coexist in a symbiotic relationship with downtown corporate towers.”⁶⁰ All one needed to do was to take a long stroll down Michigan Avenue from the area around the John Hancock Center and the Water Tower Place shopping center all the way across the Chicago River to Millenium Park to understand Judd’s point. In this tourist-friendly swath of the city, restaurants, shopping centers, cafés, and bars catered to both tourists and daytime professionals. And yet there was much more to the overall plan than this. Chicago’s massive capital investments in its tourism and business services infrastructure during the 1990s, which helped make it the top business traveler destination and the fourth for overall domestic travel by 2002, were part of a larger strategy to assure economic growth in an era of advancing deindustrialization. According to one study, travel-generated spending increased the city’s sales tax revenues from $54 million in 1989 to $145 million in 1999. By 2007 domestic and international travelers to Chicago were spending more than $11 billion annually, a sum that contributed over $217 million in local tax revenues and generated some 130,000 jobs.⁶¹

This infusion of capital helped to offset the loss of about 100,000 jobs in the manufacturing sector between 1986 and 2000, and a good number of the new service jobs created went to the residents of the working-class black and Latino communities most affected by the forces of deindustrialization.⁶² This was a process that Daley’s school reform program promoted through its creation of several Education-to-Career Academies (ETCs), vocational high schools offering nonacademic concentrations in key areas of the tourist services sector such as secretarial sciences and hospitality management. Such structures of employment opportunity warn against taking too far the idea of an impenetrable barrier between the downtown business district and the other Chicago where low-income blacks and Latinos live. Every morning, thousands of people from these communities commuted into the Loop and its surrounding areas to work in office buildings, restaurants, hotels, bars, cafés, retail stores, and a range of tourist venues. To be sure, the service jobs they performed, on average, paid much less than the manufacturing jobs they replaced; a study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Labor in 2001, for example, found that while the average annual salary for Cook County manufacturing workers was $40,840, service-sector workers took home a significantly lower $32,251, and retail workers earned just $17,045.63 But these jobs helped to stave off the worst in the other Chicago, extending lifelines into Latino and black communities facing 20 percent unemployment rates. The political stability prevailing in Chicago between 1989 and 2006 would have been unthinkable without the fantastic growth in tourist and business-traveler spending, which dipped sharply after the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001 but then quickly rebounded after 2002.

In addition, at least some of the billions of dollars that City Hall poured into its infrastructural projects in the late 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century found its way into black and Latino communities—another reason why Daley’s electoral coalition held together so well. While African Americans and Latinos never received their rightful shares of city business, Daley was careful to spread just enough patronage into these communities to preempt charges of racism. During his first decade in office, for example, blacks, who constituted around 36 percent of the population and 40 percent of the city council membership, represented about 33 percent of the municipal labor force, and black-owned companies secured between 10 and 12 percent of city contracts. Latinos, by comparison, who constituted 28 percent of the population but held just 11 percent of the city’s jobs and procured 14 percent of its contracts, seemed to have fared rather poorly. But these numbers represented enormous gains from the Harold Washington years, when they procured a mere 4 percent of city contracts and 5 percent of city jobs.⁶⁴ And when complaints about such arrangements arose, as they did especially in some quarters of black Chicago, those responding to them were likely to be high-ranking blacks and Latinos within Daley’s cabinet.

Political scientist Larry Bennett has argued that one of the main pillars of Daley’s approach to governance was “elite social inclusivity.”⁶⁵ Unlike his father, for whom, in the oft-quoted words of his press secretary Frank Sullivan, “affirmative action was nine Irishmen and a Swede,” Richard M. Daley was the first white mayor in Chicago to appoint significant numbers of blacks, Latinos, and Asians to high-profile positions in his administration. This was an objective the mayor had pursued since his first days in office, when the Chicago Tribune declared a “rainbow cabinet” had been installed in City Hall.66 By 2006, Daley’s cabinet contained seven African Americans (17 percent), 24 whites (59 percent), 7 Latinos (17 percent) and 3 Asians (7 percent), with blacks and Latinos compensating for their relative underrepresentation by their presence in some highly visible posts. Daley’s public relations savvy dictated that minority appointments be deployed strategically to those areas of city government most liable to come under public criticism from minority groups. His appointees for president of the Chicago Board of Education, for example, were always black or Latino, as were his human resources (or personnel) commissioners, and an African American served as his press secretary—the all-important face of his public relations apparatus—throughout Daley’s twenty-two years in office.

What was being so brilliantly accomplished in all this—in the ward-level distribution of TIF funds for the benefit of local political leaders and business elites, in the parceling out of a quarter of the city’s contracts to minority-owned business, in the maintenance of appropriate levels of minority employment in the city’s workforce, and in the appointment of enough high-level minority officials to give blacks, Latinos, and even Asians the feeling of political representation—was what historian Michael Katz has termed “the management of marginalization.”⁶⁷ Katz invokes the idea to help explain why U.S. cities witnessed relatively few outbreaks of collective “civil violence” between the 1970s and the first decade of the twenty-first century. He argues that in an American urban landscape in which the geographical boundaries of race were no longer being challenged—as they were during the Second Great Migration of African Americans from the 1940s through the 1970s—municipalities managed to dampen political opposition by “selectively incorporating” middling segments of economically marginalized communities with financial rewards and limited political powers while criminalizing and controlling the unincorporated.

Critical to this story of incorporation was the role played by minority elites claiming to represent group interests while brokering policies that were actually detrimental to lower-income members of their communities.⁶⁸ Mary Pattillo’s penetrating study of the South Side North Kenwood–Oakland neighborhood in the 1990s has powerfully shown that a key dimension of the process of incorporation in Chicago was City Hall’s deployment of a range of neoliberal policies—for example, the conversion of truly “public” high schools into selective “college prep” schools—to help promote gentrification.69 The availability of high-quality educational opportunities was essential for attracting black middle-class professionals to the area and thereby boosting property values (as well as property tax revenues). Pattillo’s work highights how effective the Daley administration was at buying out the support of middle-class homeowners in black and Latino communities by convincing them that he was committed to “improving” their neighborhoods and raising their property values—whether through policing methods better adapted to community needs made possible by the CAPS program, beautification and infrastructural improvements underwritten with TIF funds, the creation of specialized charter and prep schools, or the demolition of crime-infested public housing projects that tainted the image of the neighborhood.

But there was more to the story than this. There was also a dimension that extended far beyond the city limits and that greatly surpassed City Hall’s powers of persuasion. In accounting for the depoliticization of black and Latino communities, it is of course also necessary to consider how patterns of overactive consumption made possible by easy credit tended to mask growing inequalities. Blacks and Latinos with much lower incomes than middle-class whites were able to acquire some of the same class-status symbols—from Timberland boots to Ralph Lauren shirts to flat-screen televisions and video games—a situation that ended up sucking capital out of working-class minority neighborhoods. Credit card debt across the country, Katz reminds us, nearly tripled between 1999 and 2005, when some 84 percent of African American cardholders were carrying a balance (compared with 50 percent of whites).⁷⁰

And then there was the frenzied consumption around professional sports, which in Chicago was especially pronounced at precisely the same time that Daley was restructuring the city’s economy. The Chicago Bulls won an astounding six NBA championships between 1991 and 1998 behind the magical play of superstar Michael Jordan, and while we will never have a way to truly make sense of the political implications of this, it is realistic to think that the “hoop dreams” of a generation of young Chicagoans, not unlike the gangster dreams of rap videos, deflected attention from the injustices of the here and now.⁷¹ As one sociological study of the impact of basketball on poor black youths has demonstrated, many teens clung desperately to the illusion that basketball could transport them out of the ghetto when the reality was that even winning a college scholarship was highly improbable.72 Like the other narratives of personal failure circulating through black ghetto neighborhoods at the time—failure in school, failure to advance in the service-sector labor market, failure to climb the ranks of the gang hierarchy—the shattered dreams of basketball glory mostly left individuals blaming themselves rather than the surrounding conditions that made a long shot seem like the best option.

And yet ultimately what made Daley’s machine function so smoothly, despite the glaring inequalities it exacerbated, was the economic prosperity that surrounded it and the flow of cash that lubricated its gears. Between 1989 and 2007, the year the subprime mortgage crisis caused the housing market to collapse nationwide, the United States experienced only two relatively minor and short-lived recessions—one between July 1990 and March 1991 and the other between March and November 2001. With the economy of tourism booming, real estate values surging upward, and the stock indexes rising, there was enough capital flowing into the city to make the system work. Moreover, Chicago’s economy, labor market, and neighborhoods reaped enormous benefits from the massive wave of Mexican immigration in the 1990s, when Chicago’s Mexican population increased by 50 percent and the number of Mexicans residing in Cook County jumped nearly 70 percent. Chicago managed to avoid the Rust Belt story of urban crisis in large part because Mexicans and other immigrants regenerated and repopulated some of its distressed neighborhoods, working service jobs, opening up businesses where boarded-up storefronts had once been, renting and buying apartments, and spending their hard-earned dollars in the local economy. A case in point was South Lawndale’s Little Village neighborhood, whose population jumped from 62,821 in 1970 to 91,071 in 2000, with some 83 percent of the area’s residents of “Hispanic” descent by 2010.⁷³

But Chicago became a different place when faced with budget deficits in the hundreds of millions. Campaigning in the fall of 2006, Daley predicted a moderate $65 million shortfall for the fiscal year 2008, but after his election, with real estate values crashing, the actual figure came to $217 million, and the following year it rose to $470 million and then to $520 million in fiscal year 2010, when the mayor shocked everyone with the announcement that he would not be seeking a sixth full term. Daley seemed to have read the writing on the wall back in 2005, when he launched an aggressive privatization program to auction off some of the city’s major assets for short-term gains. Although Chicago was following New York’s lead in making cash grants to high-profile corporations to advance its global agenda, it was clearly leading the way in using privatization schemes to raise capital. In 2005 City Hall signed a ninety-nine-year lease that gave the toll revenues of the Chicago Skyway to the Skyway Concession Company in exchange for $1.83 billion. The next year it signed another ninety-nine-year deal with a subsidiary of Morgan Stanley that handed over the revenue derived from the 9,100 parking spaces in the four underground parking garages beneath Grant and Millennium parks for $563 million in cash. Then, in 2008, Daley announced a $1.2 billion deal that leased out the city’s 36,000 downtown parking meters for a period of seventy-five years—the first such privatized parking meter scheme in U.S. history. Finally, in 2009, the city made a bid to sell off Midway Airport for $2.5 billion, but the deal fell through when the buyers could not procure financing.

In the eyes of many economists and consumer advocacy groups, Chicago was on the bad end of all these deals, which were negotiated and concluded in a manner befitting a banana republic. Declining to issue calls for tenders, City Hall badly undersold its assets, and now Chicagoans looking to park their cars were at the mercy of private companies—and complaints about exorbitant fees and malfunctioning meters began to pile up.74 But Chicagoans parking their cars were not the only ones being asked to tighten their belts in this moment of fiscal austerity. In 2007 the mayor announced the need for service cuts and fare hikes to keep the Chicago Transit Authority afloat, a burden that would have weighed most heavily upon low-paid service sector workers whose shifts fell outside banker’s hours. In the end, Daley was able to avoid such measures by calling in a favor in the form of a $78 million bailout from Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who worked as an assistant prosecutor under Daley during his stint as state’s attorney in the mid-1980s (and who was eventually removed from office and indicted by a federal court for trying to sell Barack Obama’s vacated senate seat to the highest bidder). But this was merely a short-term fix, and for the first time in his career, Daley began to look vulnerable. After raising property taxes in 2007, he turned to scaling back services and trimming the payroll, including unionized city workers and teachers. Indicative of where the backlash against such actions was heading, alderman Patrick O’Connor of the Fortieth Ward raised eyebrows when he suggested dissolving the TIF districts and using the $1.2 billion in them to help solve the budget crisis.

This was the context within which City Hall put together its ultimately unsuccessful bid to host the 2016 Olympic Games—Daley’s last-ditch effort to save Chicago’s image in the midst of this financial distress. Apparently, the mayor was traveling in his limousine from the airport in Copenhagen when he heard the bad news, and one can only speculate about what was going through his mind at the time. This was a man who was used to getting his way; in 2003, for example, he had ordered city bulldozers to destroy the landing strip at Meigs Field, Chicago’s small waterfront airport, because he was tired of hearing opposition to his plan to convert the airport into a park.75 Making this defeat even more embarrassing was the fact that in an unprecedented move, President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama had personally traveled to Denmark to support Chicago’s bid. When Daley announced he would not run again in September 2011, many pointed to the failed Olympics bid as the reason. Yet there was likely much more to it.

Chicago’s political terrain had finally begun to shift dangerously under Daley’s feet in mid-2006, when a grassroots movement spearheaded by a coalition of labor unions and community organizations managed to convince the city council to disregard the mayor’s wishes and pass by a decisive vote of 35–14 a “big box living wage ordinance.” The ordinance required large, profitable retailers with stores larger than 90,000 square feet to pay a wage of $10 per hour plus $3 in benefits to their employees—significantly above the $6.50 per hour minimum wage in the state of Illinois. Daley opposed the measure by arguing that it would steer big retailers like Wal-Mart and Target out of the city and into the suburbs, thus hurting low-income black communities badly in need of jobs and low-cost food retailers. He had used similar reasoning to oppose a living wage ordinance in the mid-1990s but then reversed direction in 1998 when he and his supporters on the city council saw the opportunity to exchange this minimum wage increase, which excluded employees of nonprofit organizations and contractors with fewer than twenty-five employees, for a significant hike in their own salaries. But this time there was no quid pro quo on the table and Daley dug his heels in, even going so far as to attack the largely white leadership of the Chicago Federation of Labor for racism. But the call for economic justice on behalf of the lowest-paid workers in the city carried the day; Daley’s reverse race-baiting tactics were no match for the grassroots organizing activities of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and Local 880 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which had been mobilizing workers behind living wage ordinances since the mid-1990s. And even though Daley had won the battle by using the first and only veto of his mayoral career and then twisting the arms of enough aldermen to prevent an override, the marginalized began to seem much less marginal.

In 2007, for the first time in the Chicago Federation of Labor’s modern history, the organization did not endorse an incumbent Chicago mayor in the municipal elections, instead spending some $3 million to challenge Mayor Daley’s allies on the city council. Labor had been one of Daley’s bread-and-butter constituencies, and even if the Building Trades Council would never leave his side, some of the major unions were leading a populist revolt against Daley’s global agenda. Around the time the mayor was pondering another run in 2011, the Teamsters were incensed about Daley’s use of nonunion truck drivers; the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union, which had been recently taken over by the militant Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE), began stepping up its fight against privatized charter schools; and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) was challenging Daley’s plans to lay off thousands of city workers. And everyone was asking the same question: why not tap into the billions of dollars stashed away in the city’s TIF funds?

Certainly, this groundswell of opposition owed something to the “Obama effect”—to the potent feelings of political possibility the election of this black president spread through the American left and through socially and economically marginalized urban communities across the country. On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama delivered his historic victory speech at Chicago’s Grant Park, and one has to conclude that the hundreds of thousands of working-class black Chicagoans gathered there to witness the event believed him in their hearts when he told them “change has come to America.” But for many blacks in Chicago the hope instilled by this victory was not nearly audacious enough to overcome a cancerous pessimism that had been spreading for decades. Not even three months after the celebration in Grant Park, political scientist Cathy Cohen, who was completing her fine study on the political lives of young African Americans in the United States, set up a focus group of black Chicagoans between the ages of 18 and 24. What she found was that even among people within this age group, who still had most of their lives ahead of them, the euphoria surrounding Obama’s election was tempered with a strong dose of skepticism. “The young people in the room,” Cohen observed, “were . . . quick to recenter the discussion about change away from the national level to city politics, where they hold little hope for any change . . . As far as the city of Chicago is concerned,” one of her respondents told her, “most of the money and emphasis is being put on the more affluent . . . North Side neighborhoods, like the Wrigleyvilles and the Andersonvilles and Lincoln Park neighborhoods that have already been flourishing for years.”76

CITY OF NEIGHBORHOODS ON THE MAKE

Of all the nicknames for Chicago, the one that seemed to be the most visible during Richard M. Daley’s years in office was “City of Neighborhoods.” This was somewhat odd in that it was the nickname whose origins were the most difficult to pin down. Sandburg gave us “City of Big Shoulders,” Algren “City on the Make,” proud New Yorkers “Second City,” the national press corps “City that Works,” and while the source of “Windy City” is still a matter of debate, one can find references to it in the Chicago press way back in the late 1850s. When City of Neighborhoods was referenced, on the other hand, it was always in the passive voice—as in “Chicago has often been called the City of Neighborhoods.” Few, if any, scholars have attempted to establish the history of this appellation, and that is because it is a name that evolved gradually out of a number of sources. In terms of deep historical origins, it is hard to dissociate the whole City of Neighborhoods mythology from the project spearheaded by University of Chicago sociologist Ernest Burgess to divide the city into seventy-seven “community areas” in the 1920s. Then, during the reign of Richard J. Daley neighborhood gradually began to displace community in common parlance. Even as he was advancing policies that were pouring resources into the central business district and hanging many of the peripheral neighborhoods out to dry, the Boss’s campaign rhetoric was filled with declarations of loyalty to the city’s “neighborhoods.” But it was during the Harold Washington years that the notion started to gain currency and legitimacy, when, for example, historians Dominic Pacyga and Ellen Skerrett chose to entitle their book Chicago: City of Neighborhoods.⁷⁷

Chicago’s identity as a city of neighborhoods was thus fairly well established when Richard M. Daley took the mayor’s office, but it was during his reign that Chicago became the City of Neighborhoods. This was not only because Daley followed the lead of his father in lovingly employing the concept of “neighborhood” to charm working-class Chicagoans while he was betraying their interests, but also because he made Chicago’s recognition as the City of Neighborhoods a matter of public policy. Whether it was installing eighteen-meter-high steel Puerto Rican flags at each end of Humboldt Park’s “Paseo Boricua” along Division Street, or cruising in a pink Cadillac on North Halsted Street—through the heart of the city’s gay “Boystown” neighborhood—in the 1989 Gay Pride parade, or collaborating with black leaders in Bronzeville to better exploit the area’s cultural heritage, or annually sponsoring some four hundred “neighborhood festivals . . . showcasing the city’s ethnic customs, music and food,” Mayor Daley worked hard to maintain Chicago’s reputation as the City of Neighborhoods.78 Nor was this neighborhood motif merely window dressing for the larger neoliberal project. Rather, it was a core element of the global-city agenda, which hinged, in part, on the vitality of the new economy of tourism and on the city’s ability to brand itself as a unique place to visit and live.

A prime example of how the City of Neighborhoods campaign fit into this project was the Chicago Neighborhood Tours program, which the Office of Tourism and Culture began operating in 1997 out of the Chicago Cultural Center downtown. Thirteen years later the City of Chicago was running tours of over thirty neighborhoods, each of which offered, according to the program’s brochure, “a unique adventure in our exciting and diverse communities.”⁷⁹ The Daley administration played an active part in marking and defining many of the city’s different neighborhoods, dipping into ample funds made available through his $800 million “Neighborhoods Alive!” bond spending program in 1997 to put replicas of Greek temples in Greektown, twenty-three-foot-tall rainbow-striped metal pylons in the gay Lakeview neighborhood of Boystown, and, perhaps most importantly, ethnically flavored community centers throughout the city. Daley’s drive to identify space was so determined that he went forward with his Boystown streetscape project despite a barrage of thousands of angry letters to the city council and a critical column in the Tribune that decried the equation of gayness with ethnicity. In the end, the mayor yielded to the pressure by toning down the original plan, but Boystown nonetheless got its $3.2 million renovation and its unmistakably gay-friendly pylons, which, according to the city, paid “tribute to the gay and lesbian community of Chicago and to the rainbow of diversity that has historically been the great strength of the Lakeview community.”⁸⁰ Chicago thus became one of the first cities in the country to officially distinguish a gay neighborhood with such physical landmarks.

The strong role played by City Hall in advancing this kind of project seems to suggest once again the utility of Henri Lefebvre’s work on the “production of space.”⁸¹ Developed out of a neo-Marxist framework, Lefebvre’s notion of continual struggle over space between the state and capital, on the one hand, and subordinate social groups, on the other, nonetheless needs some correctives to be effectively applied to Chicago’s recent history. In the case of Boystown in the 1990s, where, as Timothy Stewart-Winter has argued, “queer clout was intertwined with pro-growth development policies,” the story was ultimately one of incorporation rather than resistance to state power.82 Moreover, as we have previously seen, efforts to identify neighborhood spaces as distinct ethnoracial communities have at times taken the form of turf battles between two different subordinate groups, and Lefebvre’s Marxist framework is not well equipped for understanding such dynamics in multiethnic cities like Chicago, where blacks, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and working-class whites on the West Side were engaged in bitter battles over schools, parks, and neighborhood spaces—conflicts that ended up sorting these groups into a number of ethnoracially defined enclaves that still exist. This was the moment that witnessed Mexicans moving eagerly into Pilsen and Puerto Ricans into the Humboldt Park area—which is not to say that the “production” of these ethnoracially marked neighborhood spaces did not in some ways signify opposition to the state in the form of the Daley machine. After the 1966 barrio riot in Humboldt Park, Puerto Ricans marched along Division Street to demonstrate their right to live in their neighborhood without fear of police harassment, and in 1973 Mexicans in Pilsen, parents and students alike, organized a militant grassroots movement to pressure the board of education to provide them with their own community high school, which, quite symbolically, would take the name of reformist Mexican president Benito Juárez. And yet, although residents in these neighborhoods were certainly demanding their “right to the city,” as Lefebvre referred to it, their demands were much more like appeals to a referee than challenges to the rules of the game. They were, in effect, objecting to the state treating them differently from some groups, or, even worse, treating them too much like others. Puerto Ricans taking to the streets against police brutality in Humboldt Park knew all too well that the police subjected mostly blacks to such abuse, and animating the Mexican uprising in Pilsen for a school of their own—for “La Raza,” as activists at the time shouted—were years of simmering tensions between black and Mexican students at nearby Harrison High School.

FIGURE 18. Richard M. Daley marching in the annual South Chicago Mexican Independence Day parade. Kim Karpeles / Alamy Stock Photo.

Hence, even when Chicagoans seemed to have been directly engaged in struggles against city authorities, their actions were about much more than resistance to the city’s drive to define and control spaces for the benefit of capital. The “right to the city” in Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s correlated closely with the politics of ethnocultural recognition, and this situation changed the story considerably from what Lefebvre was observing in Paris. Nor was City Hall particularly interested in opposing the kinds of ethnoracial boundaries being established. The machine had always made the most of Chicago’s balkanized social geography, playing groups off each other and incorporating local elites to advance its objectives; after it became clear that the identity-based movements of the 1960s were not going to pose much of a threat to the order of things, it went about its business as usual. African Americans, for example, painted black fists and revolutionary slogans on ghetto walls, managed to place black nationalists in local positions of authority, and won the right to have black teachers teach their children about black history, but this did relatively little to change the overall calculus of power or to reshape city spaces in any significant way.

Despite these differences, Lefebvre’s attention to how space is socially constructed is important for understanding some of the essential forces behind the making of Chicago’s neighborhoods, especially during the Richard M. Daley era, when the city took on a new role of actually promoting the efforts of community leaders to define the identities of their neighborhoods. In a rapidly globalizing world, in which homogenous architectural styles and the proliferation of chain retailers (such as the Gap, Banana Republic, and Whole Foods), restaurants (such as McDonalds and Buca di Beppo), and coffee shops (such as Starbucks) were increasingly making a distinct sense of place a precious commodity, Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods served as a strong selling point in attracting tourists and new residents. Support for the ethnoracial and lifestyle orientations (gay, bohemian, family, and so on) of different neighborhoods, moreover, distracted residents from bread-and-butter issues. The politics of neighborhood diversity became important in Chicago, it is important to emphasize, during the same moment when, according to Neil Smith, municipal administrations throughout the United States and much of the developed world were taking the scope and scale of gentrification to another level. Smith argues that around the mid-1980s a “third wave” of gentrification began to sweep through cities worldwide, when, in the context of deindustrialization, municipalities increasingly looked to the regeneration of urban space as a means of generating new tax-revenue streams.83 Characterizing this shift were, among other things, a far more active role for the local state, the increasing autonomy of private capital in the development game, an underlying ethos of taking back the city for the middle class, and, in response to all this, the proliferation of local antigentrification movements.⁸⁴

This last manifestation—the appearance of neighborhood movements defending the rights of low-income residents to affordable housing—seemed to signal the kind of class-based struggle over space Lefebvre described. But once again the politics of ethnoracial identity complicated the situation. In fact, despite appearing to be sensitive to the ethnoracial integrity of Chicago’s neighborhoods, City Hall’s myriad policies to promote gentrification tended, in practice, to undermine the goal of maintaining a diverse social geography. In a city in which nonwhites constituted a rather small segment of the middling class of homeowners, rising rental prices and property values invariably translated into increasing ethnoracial homogeneity. And these circumstances led at times to racially infused complaints likening gentrification to an invasion of white yuppies (or “young urban professionals”)—a notion that ultimately worked to obscure the powerful logic of class division that was emerging at the urban grassroots in the high era of gentrification.

As Mary Pattillo has convincingly revealed in her study of the South Side neighborhood of North Kenwood–Oakland, even in predominantly black neighborhoods where bonds of ethnoracial solidarity were undeniably strong and where gentrification was largely being driven by black rather than white middle-class home buyers, community revitalization occured at the expense of low-income residents. Although the promoters of gentrification offered arguments that the poor would benefit from better schools and a more congenial atmosphere, Pattillo shows that this was often not the case. Poor, uneducated black parents were frequently unable to steer their kids through newly created selective schools, and, while crime rates did indeed descend as the middle-class population rose, low-income residents commonly encountered other forms of hostility directed at them from new homeowners anxious about threats to their property values. In North Kenwood–Oakland, for example, Pattillo observed middle-class residents seeking police intervention to put an end to the local custom of weekend barbecues in highly visible park spaces. The sight of working-class folks gathered around smoking barbecues was, for many of the new white-collar residents, an unbefitting image for an aspiring black middle-class neighborhood.85

While the “right to barbecue” may appear somewhat trivial in the overall scheme of things, it touches upon a critical development in the real story of neighborhood in Chicago. This conflict, in fact, represents merely one manifestation of the struggle increasingly pitting middle-class homeowners and local merchants against low-income renters to define neighborhood space in many of the city’s ethnoracial communities. To be sure, fault lines of this nature had existed in Chicago’s ethnoracial neighborhoods in the past. There was seldom one prevailing vision of what the neighborhood was or should be. For instance, even at the peak moment of ethnocultural awakening in both African American and Puerto Rican Chicago in the late 1960s, more moderate, assimilationist voices could be heard warning against the excesses of cultural nationalism. But during the “third wave” of gentrification some two decades later, when a powerful partnership between City Hall, private developers, and real estate promoters quickened the pace and scale of spatial transformation, the politics of neighborhood became increasingly polarized around opposing class interests within such communities. This was primarily because a real estate boom throughout much of the city translated into a bonanza for property owners and merchants ready to capitalize on the new class of clients. For example, in the West Town community area, a twelve-square-kilometer parallelogram northwest of the Loop encompassing some of Chicago’s hottest real estate markets—Wicker Park, Bucktown, and the Ukrainian Village—average property prices rose by 83 percent and the median price for an apartment more than doubled in the 1990s.⁸⁶ The problem, however, was that low-income and elderly residents on fixed incomes realized few benefits from these gains. Rents rose in step with property prices, and more and more renters faced being pushed out of the neighborhood as property owners looked to convert rental units into high-yielding condominiums.

In many gentrifying neighborhoods, moreover, most of those being displaced tended to be Latinos and blacks while the vast majority of those replacing them overwhelmingly white. The case of West Town, where Latinos constituted nearly 60 percent of the population in 1990, was especially suggestive. By 1998, according to one study, white households in this area were the recipients of nearly 80 percent of the home loans granted, and Latino households received less than 10 percent.87 This apparent “yuppie invasion” not only raised concerns among working-class residents about rising rents but also provoked a broader community reaction to the potential loss of the neighborhood’s cultural identity. The response mingled feelings of ethnic pride with material concerns.

Although some businessmen had feared the negative consequences of fierce ethnoracial pride in the 1960s and 1970s, many local merchants in the West Town area, by the 1990s, had developed viable businesses providing goods and services to both an ethnic clientele as well as tourists seeking to sample local culture. Few neighborhoods exhibited this trend more than Pilsen, where Alderman Danny Solis led an aggressive campaign to market the area as a Mexican-themed tourist destination.⁸⁸ “My vision for Pilsen,” Solis told the Sun-Times in 2003, “is to become the best Mexican-American community in the Midwest, where you can come, taste the food and experience the culture.”⁸⁹ Ethnic commercial enterprises also played a role in maintaining the Puerto Rican community’s claim to West Town’s Humboldt Park district, where Puerto Rican businesses still dominated Division Street despite the fact that both African Americans and Mexicans had come to outnumber Puerto Ricans.⁹⁰ Yet even more important in preserving the Puerto Rican identity of the area were the numerous political and cultural associations clustered around the Paseo Boricua, including the vibrant Puerto Rican Cultural Center at 2739 West Division, whose work involved, according to its executive director, José E. Lopez, “recovering [the] community’s historical memory as part of a holistic vision of development.”⁹¹ Elites in both Pilsen and Humboldt Park thus looked to exploit their neighborhood’s cultural heritage, with somewhat differing results.

In Humboldt Park, such efforts helped the neighborhood retain its Puerto Rican flavor but did little to prevent the departure of Puerto Rican residents. Between 1990 and 2000, forces of white gentrification spilling over from the red-hot Wicker Park real estate market to the east caused the Puerto Rican population there to decline 23 percent—leading to some creative approaches. By the summer of 2006, for example, a group of local activists calling themselves the Puerto Rican Agenda began actively recruiting Puerto Rican professionals to buy homes in the area.92 While a short-lived and ultimately unsuccessful experiment, this campaign was nonetheless suggestive of how the “third wave” of gentrification had reconfigured the struggle to produce ethnoracial community space in Chicago. Decades ago such struggles to identify community spaces were hard to separate from broader campaigns for social justice; in the Richard M. Daley era, the global-city agenda and the irrepressible push for gentrification transformed these very same identities into tools for branding, commerce, and accumulation.

There was perhaps no clearer testimony to this shift than the evolution of Danny Solis from militant activist for La Raza in the 1970s to Richard M. Daley’s handpicked alderman and architect of Pilsen’s theme-park marketing campaign in the mid-1990s. After being appointed in 1996 to fill the vacant aldermanic seat in the Twenty-Fifth Ward, which also included sections of Chinatown and Little Italy, Solis paved the way for a number of upscale housing developments, including, most notably, the controversial University Village—a massive middle- to upper-income housing development built on the land where the famous Maxwell Street flea market once stood. In addition to destroying a revered historical landmark, where blues greats like Bo Diddley, Junior Wells, and Little Walter played to admiring crowds of blacks and whites alike amidst the odors of grilling Polish sausages, University Village also spurred a wave of condominium development that caused median housing values in neighboring East Pilsen to rise as much as 548 percent in the 1990s.⁹³ While providing the University of Illinois–Chicago with much-needed housing and another middle-class buffer zone, such changes created significant hardships for Pilsen’s low-income residents, and demands for affordable housing energized the campaigns of those who challenged Solis’s seat. Nonetheless, Solis and his supporters in Pilsen’s United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) remained unwavering in their support for new development. Founded by Solis in 1984, UNO viewed itself in its early days as modeled on the Saul Alinsky style of community organizing, but it remained somewhat silent about two of the most pressing issues for Pilsen’s working-class residents: the need for more affordable housing and the high particulate and carbon dioxide emissions from the area’s two coal plants.⁹⁴ Thus, while UNO’s acronym was intended to connote its alliance with the larger Mexican community, its program inevitably advanced the interests of middle-class Mexicans at the expense of their working-class neighbors.

Appeals to ethnoracial solidarity also served those opposing the forces of gentrification in both Pilsen and Humboldt Park. For example, the Pilsen Alliance, a grassroots organization active in the fight for affordable housing and public oversight of rezoning decisions, tapped into the neighborhood’s rich tradition of community murals to spread its message of social justice. This strategy of placing the community’s Mexican identity at the center of its antigentrification campaign was revealed during Pilsen’s annual Fiesta del Sol street festival, where the Alliance sold T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Pilsen Is Not For Sale.”95 In addition, Humboldt Park’s many grassroots associations—the Latino United Community Housing Association (LUCHA), Communities United for Affordable Housing (CUFAH), the Near Northwest Neighborhood Network (NNNN), and the Puerto Rican Cultural Center’s Participatory Democracy Project—engaged in similar tactics in voicing their demands for more affordable housing. Although the crowds that gathered at their rallies were usually multiethnic, Puerto Rican flags were often as conspicuous as signs reading “We Shall Not Be Moved.”

Some of these same organizations were also active in the predominantly Latino Logan Square neighborhood just to the north, where gentrification advanced at a much faster pace than in Humboldt Park. Between 1996 and 2006, the median sale price for a single-family detached home in Logan Square jumped a remarkable 385 percent—a trend that was spurred more by the rehabilitation of its many beautiful Victorian greystone mansions than by new large-scale developments.⁹⁶ Once home to significant communities of Poles and Russian Jews, Logan Square had become a major port of entry for Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans beginning in the late 1960s and by 2010 contained the largest population of Latinos in Chicago.⁹⁷ Yet this formidable presence of working-class Mexicans and Puerto Ricans did surprisingly little to slow down the rush of middle-class whites into Logan Square, where between 2000 and 2010 the non-Latino white population grew by 7,000 and the number of Latinos dropped by 16,000. Even a seemingly endless and at times homicidal battle for turf between such high-profile gangs as the Latin Kings, Maniac Latin Disciples, and Spanish Cobras failed to stop Logan Square’s transformation. By 2010, the area boasted some of the city’s most cutting-edge bars, coffee shops, and restaurants, including the famed Lula Cafe, where young hipsters could choose from such gastronomic creations as risotto with spiced rabbit, roasted morels, spinach, parmesan, and shaved foie gras.

Logan Square thus became a gentrification success story that replayed Wicker Park’s dramatic conversion in the 1990s from a somewhat depopulated working-class Mexican enclave where the Latin Kings cultivated a lucrative drug-trafficking enterprise into a bastion of avant-garde artistic production and million-dollar Victorian mansions. Part of what made the change possible in both Logan Square and Wicker Park was the relatively unproduced nature of these neighborhoods. Without the psychologically imposing presence of the massive iron flags that marked off the Paseo Boricua, both Wicker Park and Logan Square were much easier for realtors and developers to market to white middle-class condo buyers. In other words, Wicker Park and Logan Square were more susceptible to white yuppie invasion because, unlike Humboldt Park or Pilsen, their spaces had never been produced to reflect a politicized sense of ethnoracial identity. Whites ended up moving into Logan Square rather than neighboring Humboldt Park in part because they were uncomfortable about living “between the flags” and in part because Humboldt Park’s Puerto Rican heritage gave residents there a useful tool with which to mobilize against gentrification. Whereas a sense of exclusionary ethnic pride was inscribed within the geography and history of the Paseo Boricua—the iron flags, the barrio riot of 1966, and a militant Puerto Rican independence movement in the 1980s and 1990s98—Logan Square’s brand of ethnic culture was alluring to white artists, musicians, and others looking for a lower-cost alternative to the increasingly homogeneous, high-priced North Side areas around Lakeview, Lincoln Park, Old Town, the Ukrainian Village, and Wicker Park, after it lost its “edge.”

Logan Square, like Manhattan’s Lower East Side (or “Loisaida” to the Puerto Rican residents who used to live there) in the 1980s, possessed an “edge”: here Mexican vendors peddled elotes (grilled, spiced corn on the cob with mayonnaise) and tamarind popsicles in the streets, the remnants of broken piñatas littered the sidewalks, banda and mariachi music blared out of passing cars, and bursts of gunfire could be heard, at times, piercing the night.⁹⁹ Although white middle-class residents of course did not approve of the homicidal gunplay around them, gang warfare was nevertheless part of the larger package of qualities that branded the neighborhood as a place where alternative, artistic, and independently minded people lived. As Richard Lloyd’s close ethnographic study of Wicker Park in the 1990s demonstrates, Chicago’s bohemians and gentrification entrepreneurs tended to glamorize the danger of street life, often speaking nostalgically about it after gentrification had eliminated it. Their need to negotiate the dangers and cultural clashes that came with living in a largely working-class Mexican neighborhood shaped a “hipster aesthetic,” influenced by the grunge style being popularized on the national stage, that included visible tattoos, secondhand clothes, and unkempt hair.100 A similar austerity characterized Wicker Park’s two signature hipster cafés in the 1990s, Earwax and Urbis Orbis. The edginess of the neighborhood—not to mention the low rents—attracted a bohemian crowd of artists, musicians, writers, and others employed in the culture industries. The arrival of such trendsetters made it much more attractive to middle-class white condo buyers, whose presence, in turn, attracted more upscale commercial establishments, thereby completing the gentrification process. Hence, by 2002 a chic fitness club called Cheetah Gym had opened in the space where cigarette-lipped hipsters used to drink coffee in Urbis Orbis.

Logan Square’s new middle-class white residents constituted this second wave of gentrifiers, and they were engaged in producing the space around them to reflect their politics and lifestyle. The innovative cafés, bars, and restaurants that opened their doors to serve them were critical to this process. If earthy vegetarian fare and no frills coffee drinks were de rigueur at Earwax and Urbis Orbis, in twenty-first century Logan Square fresh-roasted coffee beans, organic baby vegetables, and Belgian-style microbrewed beer spiced with coriander and orange peel juxtaposed with pork tacos, rice and beans, and mofongo. As Logan Square hipsters and the commercial establishments they frequented sought to redefine the neighborhood, they engaged in a process that looked somewhat like what Dick Hebdige has termed bricolage—a blending of their own tastes and styles with seemingly dissonant elements from the working-class Latino culture around them.¹⁰¹ Such acts of creative consumption even extended to one of the city’s renowned culinary trademarks, the hot dog. Although in Chicago nondescript hot dog joints are ubiquitous, which rendered the standard hot-dog-and-french-fries meal undesirable to many hipsters, Logan Square residents lived not far from a hot dog restaurant, Hot Doug’s, where they could find a Mexican-inflected sausage with chili-garlic mayonnaise and salsa jack cheese accompanied by fries cooked in duck fat. In Wicker Park, one of the hippest restaurants, star restauranteur Paul Kahan’s Big Star, offered its hip clientele designer lamb, pork, and fish tacos, alongside an elaborate selection of bourbons, all consumed to a studied soundtrack of retro pop, country, and funk. Mexican service workers staffed the kitchen and takeout window, but around the bustling bar, the staff was mostly white and fashionable. Yet such examples should not give the impression that hipster bricolage on the gentrification frontier was only about replacing local culture or creating a parallel community. The hipster ethos in Chicago also celebrated an ability to adapt to the local scene, and this pushed white middle-class bohemians and professionals alike into indigenous bars and restaurants. In neighborhoods like Logan Square and the Ukrainian Village during the transitional 1990s, it was not uncommon to find corner bars with jukeboxes offering a selection of Polish polkas, Mexican banda, and a range of pop and indie rock.

But in advancing this idea of gentrification as a piecemeal, market-based process driven by individuals pursuing objectives of self-identification that slot them into distinct if at times overlapping communities, we risk overlooking a critical factor. A range of policies implemented by City Hall beginning in the early 1990s fueled gentrification every step of the way: the creation of TIFs throughout the city provided capital for costly infrastructural improvements and beautification efforts; the Renaissance 2010 school reform created schools acceptable to educated, middle-class homeowners; the CAPS program cultivated a police force responsive to homeowners’ concerns about the “bad” behavior of their working-class neighbors; and perhaps most importantly, City Hall opened the floodgates to condominium development by allowing aldermen to control zoning changes within their respective wards with virtually no public oversight. While theoretically empowered to reject “upzoning” requests for the construction of large housing developments and commercial centers, the city council in practice acted as little more than a rubber stamp, vetoing a mere fifteen such petitions out of several thousand filed between 1997 and 2007. This meant enormous benefits for Chicago’s aldermen, who enthusiastically traded their signatures on upzoning petitions for campaign contributions. In his first term on the city council, for example, only one other alderman approved more upzoning petitions than Wicker Park’s (First Ward) Manuel Flores—a performance that explains why nearly a quarter of his $1.2 million in campaign donations came from contractors and developers and why Wicker Park emerged as one of the nation’s most spectacular gentrification success stories.102 Moreover, such practices ran up against little opposition because many of the local advisory bodies empowered to review rezoning requests were dominated by developers and contractors.

Chicago’s rezoning system thus stacked the cards heavily in favor of gentrification during the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century. In this Chicago differed significantly from other U.S. global cities, such as San Francisco and New York, where an emphasis on centralized planning and community participation in the rezoning process somewhat mitigated the wholesale transformation of neighborhoods in the 1980s and 1990s. New York, no less than Chicago, witnessed the rise of powerful movements for community control in the 1960s and 1970s, but, unlike in Chicago, these campaigns left a meaningful imprint on New York’s zoning process, leading to the establishment of fifty-nine community boards across the five boroughs to provide aggressive public oversight of proposed zoning changes. These boards became incubators for antigentrification campaigns in the late 1980s and 1990s, when protesters in the East Village made a habit of scrawling “Die Yuppie Scum” all over the neighborhood. Moreover, without Chicago’s tradition of “aldermanic prerogative,” New York’s council members at times found it more politically expedient to take the side of citizens protesting unwanted development—a situation that was very rare in Chicago. Chicago’s city council, by contrast, did not approve a new zoning code until 2004, revising a system that had remained virtually unchanged for almost half a century. But many of the new rules added to create greater community input in the rezoning process were largely ignored. A 2008 Tribune investigation, for example, found that aldermen seldom enforced the requirement obligating developers to post signs on the sites of proposed zoning changes.103

MAP 7. The gentrification frontier west of the Loop.

Hence, without New York’s well-established institutional framework for public participation in land use politics, Chicago saw relatively little grassroots mobilization around decisions reshaping its built environment, and this history of quiescence performed an important ideological function that quickened the city’s brisk pace of real estate transactions during the Richard M. Daley era. Indeed, gentrification is made possible not only by the construction of new housing and the rehabilitation of old; it also depends on a healthy supply of buyers ready to risk their personal capital on neighborhoods on the make. Many of the white middle-class families moving into Wicker Park and other parts of West Town in the 1990s and into Logan Square in more recent years were seeking not just a lifestyle but also a good investment. And their feelings about their chances in such “frontier” neighborhoods were conditioned by what they had seen happening around them. By the mid-1990s, not only had they had seen others like themselves strike it rich in Wicker Park, but they also understood all the things that City Hall would do for them—from bringing the boot down on gangbangers to enforcing noise ordinances, to building parks and new library branches, to doing whatever was necessary to facilitate the subsequent development they depended on to raise their property values. However, the confidence they had in City Hall also came from all that they had not seen or known—in particular, concerned citizens in the streets or at zoning board hearings complaining about the condominiums and shopping centers popping up around them.

During Chicago’s high years of gentrification in the 1990s residents watched neighborhoods transforming in real time before their eyes with few glitches. The typical scenario began with the construction of a multiunit condominium building—sometimes a conversion of an old factory or warehouses, at others a new structure rising up from the rubble of a teardown or a litter-strewn vacant lot. In most cases, façades were brick and balconies conspicuous; the more upscale boasted rooftop swimming pools, exercise facilities, and well-manicured gardens bounded by imposing iron fences. Then came any number of signature retail establishments catering to a middling clientele—Starbucks, for example, was the well-recognized “canary in the coal mine” for gentrification. After that, the rush was on to buy up old buildings, gut the interiors, and bedeck them with new hardwood floors, fireplaces, and spacious master bedrooms. Chicagoans living around gentrifying neighborhoods knew exactly what this process looked like, and they knew City Hall was behind it with all its might.

But in fact Richard M. Daley never had to say anything too explicit about the city’s support for gentrification; the landscape was full of visual symbols conveying this very idea. A striking example was City Hall’s makeover of the historically decrepit Seward Park, replete with a new state-of-the-art Chicago Public Library branch, at the very moment that the neighboring Cabrini-Green housing projects were in the midst of demolition to make way for a new “mixed-income” community.104 For countless Chicagoans driving by the vacated projects on Halsted or riding by them on a brown-line “L” train, the neatly landscaped Seward Park, hastily erected as the city was buzzing about the demolition of one of the nation’s most notorious housing projects, became a monument to City Hall’s commitment to taking back the city for the middle class.

THE CHALLENGES OF DIVERSITY

The story of how the city of Chicago opened the way for a bustling middle-class neighborhood where an impoverished ghetto had been had to do with much more than building a library and renovating a park. Gazing in the early 1990s upon Cabrini-Green’s ten decrepit cinder-block-like towers huddled around shabbily landscaped parks and courtyards, it was difficult to imagine that the developers eyeing the area would have their day. While white middle-class buyers had proven willing to invest in largely Latino neighborhoods around the Loop, they had largely refused to buy into black areas. Yet the city’s ambitious campaign to demolish black-occupied housing projects and replace them with “mixed-income housing” under the Chicago Housing Authority’s $1.6 billion Plan for Transformation purported, at least ostensibly, to achieve a level of neighborhood diversity that the private housing market had been incapable of bringing about.

Most notably, the razing of Cabrini-Green, which lay on the Near North Side, just to the west of the luxurious Gold Coast area, forced the displacement of as many as 15,000 African American residents, and, while the CHA, under the terms of its out-of-court settlement with former tenants, agreed to set aside 1,200 units of public housing in the new developments, fewer than 400 of these had been constructed as of March 2011.105 Regardless, blacks in this area were destined to become a relatively small minority in the future neighborhood. While Cabrini-Green was certainly riddled with problems—gangs, drug trafficking, sniper attacks—the black residents living there nonetheless were the only significant concentration of African Americans on Chicago’s Near North Side. Their removal cleared the way for a two-kilometer-long stretch of uninterrupted, overwhelmingly white middle-class affluence that began at the Lake Michigan shoreline and ended at the banks of the North Branch of the Chicago River, where a large cluster of upscale condominiums had been growing rapidly since the late 1990s. Touring the so-called River North area today, one would be hard-pressed to find diversity of any meaningful kind.

Launched in early 2000, the CHA’s Plan for Transformation was initially conceived of as a response to decades of public housing mismanagement—more specifically, to the fact that in 1998 19,000 of the CHA’s units had failed “viability inspection” and thus, according to federal law, had to be demolished within five years. This was the latest chapter in a horror story of Chicago public housing that began back in the 1940s and 1950s.¹⁰⁶ The situation had reached a low point in the mid-1980s, when the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) cut the city’s funding by 76 percent, causing the CHA to run a $1 billion maintenance backlog that included more than 30,000 unfulfilled work orders. If all this was not serious enough, the CHA had also been dragging its feet on complying with the 1969 Gautreaux order, which mandated that any new public housing had be located outside predominantly low-income black ghetto neighborhoods. At the time of the lawsuit, the CHA managed sixty-four projects containing some 30,000 units; sixty of the projects were 99.5 percent black, and the other four were 95 percent white.107 By 1987, a federal court had placed the CHA in receivership, assigning the Habitat Company to control its operations. Habitat’s subsequent performance drew some sharp criticism—one study, for example, found that over half of the units created under its control were located in census tracts that were at least 60 percent Latino—and the city regained control of the CHA in 1999, winning HUD’s approval for its massive plan to rehabilitate or rebuild 25,000 public housing units, most within mixed-income developments.¹⁰⁸

Much of the funding for this project came from the federal government’s Hope IV program, whose main objective was to promote the replacement of “ghettos in the sky” with low-rise, pedestrian-friendly, mixed-income communities. This new mixed-income approach was obviously destined to pave the way for gentrification and for the kind of dramatic racial conversion of urban space that usually accompanies it. Baldwin’s notion of “negro removal” comes quickly to mind when one considers that the demolitions of Chicago’s three largest housing projects—the Robert Taylor Homes, ABLA, and Cabrini-Green—displaced nearly 50,000 African Americans from areas bordering some very desirable real estate.¹⁰⁹ While various groups of tenants pressed their claims in court for adequate numbers of replacement units and for their “right to return,” the Plan for Transformation called for a net loss of some 6,000 units, and with uncertainties surrounding occupancy dates for some of the new developments, most former tenants had little choice but to take their Section 8 vouchers and move elsewhere.¹¹⁰ And “elsewhere,” according to scholars examining relocation patterns, usually meant either other low-income ghetto neighborhoods or economically depressed black suburbs like Harvey, Illinois, around the city’s southern border.¹¹¹ Moreover, according to sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh, the CHA lost track of some 40 percent of the families displaced by the demolitions.¹¹²

In theory, the mixed-income communities envisioned by the plan would bring together a roughly equal mix of low-, middle-, and even high-income residents, an arrangement that would ideally serve to lift up the poor, who would acquire the kind of social and cultural capital that sociologists like William Julius Wilson had been arguing was lacking in black ghetto neighborhoods. But such objectives began to appear farfetched from the outset, when a number of incidents in some of the first mixed-income communities began to suggest that rather than creating functional communities of rich and poor, tenant and homeowner, black and white, the CHA’s mixed-income solution was setting up a war of attrition between homeowners and renters in which the latter were sure to lose. The scenario resembled that which unraveled in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. According to Adolph Reed Jr., the many poor African Americans stranded on rooftops and then callously disregarded by the city’s postflood reconstruction program revealed that in the “ownership society” so valorized by President George W. Bush, class and property ownership had become the most important determinants of political interest and power. “Property owners,” Reed claimed, “are able to assert their interests in the polity, while non-owners are nearly as invisible in civic life now as in the early eighteenth century.”113

Dispatches from the mixed-income gentrification frontier in Chicago offered compelling evidence for this view. For example, in the Roosevelt Square development, one of the first of several developments to be constructed to replace ABLA near Little Italy, homeowners revolted in opposition to a plan to build more rental units. According to reporters observing a meeting in late May 2010, a vocal group of largely white homeowners expressed great fears about a drop in property values, complaining about the drug-dealing, violence, and the increasing number of security cameras they felt would come with the addition of rental units. “The real question,” Second Ward alderman Bob Fioretti countered, “is whether you are afraid to cross the street because there is a black guy on the other side.”¹¹⁴

Such conflicts suggest that white homeowners living in these communities were continuing to oppose racial integration, as they had in Chicago since the late nineteenth century. As in the past, city authorities appeared ready to provide vital assistance towards this end. In the case of Chicago’s new mixed-income communities, this aid came in the form of a draconian Admissions and Continued Occupancy Policy designed to discipline and punish low-income black residents, ultimately providing fodder for those aiming to argue for increased owner-occupied units. For example, CHA compliancy rules required public housing residents to prove that they were employed at least twenty hours per week or face eviction, and tenants faced removal if convicted of a single felony or even if a relative or guest was arrested on the premises for drug use or violent behavior.¹¹⁵ In the spring of 2011 the CHA demonstrated how far it was willing to take this policy when its CEO Lewis Jordan announced a proposal to subject subsidized housing residents to annual drug testing—a requirement that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) claimed violated the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protection against police searches without probable cause. To return to a point made earlier in this chapter, that Jordan, an African American, was the face of this controversial policy helped to defuse charges of racism.

It was through such tactics that City Hall under Richard M. Daley’s stewardship wielded great power over the production of space in Chicago, and the power it wielded was invariably turned towards the goal of producing the kind of space that created conditions for further development, higher tax yields, and kickbacks in the form of political contributions. While this was not exactly a new development in Chicago’s history, it is important to note how the interface of power became more diffuse during the high era of neoliberalization, extending far beyond the downtown business district and into the furthest reaches of the city, where local elites of all colors served as “brokers” or “middlemen” for gentrification policies.116 The state, moreover, added new forms of power to its arsenal in the 1990s—not merely those involving the flexible allocation of funds and modification of zoning regulations but also intrusive policing powers over the conduct of low-income residents. To be sure, public housing residents faced such regulations in the past, but in the quasi-private context of mixed-income neighborhoods, such powers took on new meaning. In the housing projects of old, residents stood on relatively equal footing; in Chicago’s emerging mixed-income developments, subsidized housing tenants were forced to deal with the stigmatization created by being subjected to a different set of rules from their homeowning neighbors—specifically those regarding barbecuing, pets, and the proper use of balconies. One low-income resident described the situation:

They watch you come in and they watch you go out. The cameras. The cameras. And if anything goes wrong and they pull you in the office, they’re going to tell you every detail . . . ‘Cause the [property manager] told us, she said there’s some other people in here paying some good, tall money for staying here, and they ain’t gonna let nobody just, you know, mess up the deal. They’ll throw you out and put somebody else in here.¹¹⁷

Although it would be misleading to understate the impact of policies emanating from City Hall in the making of Chicago’s neighborhoods and communities, it would also be misleading to give the local state the final word in the story. Some scholars have called Chicago the “immigrant capital of the heartland,” and the nearly 700,000 immigrants (1.4 million in the six-county Chicago metropolitan area) that had settled there by 2000 had a major impact in reshaping its social geography.118 By 2010, more than one in five Chicagoans was foreign-born, and many of these immigrants had, as a result of their propensity to settle among those with whom they shared linguistic and cultural affinities, served as active agents in the process of inscribing these affinities within neighborhood spaces throughout the city. Immigrants arriving in Chicago beginning in the 1970s—after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act overhauled the country’s exclusionary national-origins quotas and ushered in a system based on family reunification and occupational skills—reinforced existing ethnoracial communities and created new ones throughout much of the city. Generally speaking, by the late 1990s the only areas of the city not bearing the physical markings of the immigrant population—countless foreign-language signs fronting businesses, restaurants, community associations, churches, and mosques—were the solidly black neighborhoods of the West and South Sides and the overwhelmingly white ones stretching along the lakefront from the Loop up through the Lakeview area.

Mexicans had become, far and away, the largest immigrant group in the city by 2010, when Chicago’s nearly 600,000 people of Mexican origin gave it the third largest Mexican population in the United States after Los Angeles and Houston. Roughly half the city’s foreign-born population had arrived from Latin America, with Mexicans accounting for over 85 percent of all Latino immigrants, and this numerical strength left its mark on the city’s social geography. Over the course of the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century, the two West Side Mexican enclaves of West Town–Humboldt Park and Pilsen–Little Village (South Lawndale) spread northward and southward respectively, creating two clusters of Mexican residential concentration where people of Mexican origin came to constitute more than 35 percent of the population in each community area. This pattern of settlement strikingly revealed that Mexicans steered clear of the heart of the West Side ghetto, settling in large numbers throughout much of the rest of Chicago’s West Side, from Albany Park all the way down to the Back of the Yards area around 51st Street. The Mexican aversion to settling in and around black neighborhoods—an aversion shared by Chicago’s next largest Latino group, Puerto Ricans—was so strong that by 2000 Chicago displayed the highest degree of segregation between blacks and Latinos among the hundred largest cities in the United States, with a black-Latino dissimilarity index 30 percent higher than that of New York and nearly 40 percent higher than that of Los Angeles.119 While Mexican–Puerto Rican dissimilarity was moderate by comparison, segregation between these two groups was nonetheless higher in Chicago than in any of the other cities with significant populations of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. Moreover, according to the Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research, Chicago ranked first among the sixty most segregated metropolitan areas for Latino-Asian segregation.¹²⁰ While Mexicans were more able and willing to settle among whites in Chicago (the Mumford Center ranked Chicago sixth for white-Latino segregation), communities like Pilsen–Little Village, with its nearly 90 percent concentration of Mexicans, seemed to speak volumes about the dynamics of ethnic clustering that were playing out in Chicago at the turn of the twenty-first century.

FIGURE 19. A mural of Benito Pablo Juárez García on 18th Street in Pilsen. RosaIreneBetancourt 8/Alamy Stock Photo.

Indeed, many other of the city’s largest foreign-born groups—the Chinese, Poles, and Indians—gravitated towards ethnoracial enclaves between the 1970s and 1990s, creating port-of-entry neighborhoods that still attract large numbers of immigrants today. In the case of the Chinese, whose population numbered just 7,000 in 1960, this period of accelerated immigration led to the emergence of a well-defined Chinatown neighborhood of Chinese restaurants, bakeries, travel agencies, and boutiques just south of the Loop around the intersection of Wentworth and Cermak Avenue, marked by the famous red-and-gold Chinatown Gate. While most of Chinatown, strictly defined, lay primarily within the Armour Square community area, the 15,000-member Chinese community here spread westward into the Daley family’s old Irish stronghold of Bridgeport, where by 2000 the Chinese and Mexican populations had reached 26 percent and 30 percent respectively (while blacks continued to remain virtually absent). During the late 1970s, moreover, another Chinese neighborhood developed quickly in the North Side Uptown neighborhood after Chinese businessman Jimmy Wong, a representative of the Hip Sing Tong, bought a strip of commercial real estate on Argyle Street between Broadway and Sheridan. By the 1980s, the area had received a large influx of immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos—many of them ethnic Chinese—fleeing the postwar refugee crisis across Southeast Asia. Yet, this area—referred to by some as New Chinatown and by others simply as Argyle—largely failed to develop as a rival to the old Chinatown, which by 2010 possessed more than half the Chinese population living within the Chicago city limits.

Several other leading immigrant groups in Chicago created cohesive ethnic enclaves between the 1980s and 2010s. By 2010, Chicago was home to some 25,000 South Asian Indians, for example, and roughly one quarter of them lived around the diverse West Devon Avenue on the far North Side of the city, where Indian restaurants and stores selling everything from saris to Bollywood videos dominated a commercial strip that brought together Pakistani bakeries, Islamic bookstores, and kosher restaurants. Moreover, many of the substantial number of former Indian residents who had moved into Skokie, Lincolnwood, and other of Chicago’s more affluent northern suburbs continued to frequent West Devon to buy ethnic goods and stay in touch with the community.121 Similar arrangements also characterized the “Korea Town” neighborhood (officially designated as Seoul Drive by the city council in 1993), which stretched along Lawrence Avenue, between Kedzie and Pulaski, in the Albany Park community area, a few miles southwest of West Devon. Like West Devon, the area around Seoul Drive was a place of great ethnoracial diversity—one of the most ethnically diverse in the United States. Korean restaurants, groceries, and other businesses were prominent, but they shared the street with Mexican bakeries and taquerias, as well Middle Eastern food stores and hookah bars. In fact, Koreans constituted only about 15 percent of the population of the community area surrounding Korea Town. And yet ethnic ties exerted a relatively strong gravitational pull. According to one estimate, some 35,000 Koreans (out of a total of 45,000 in the city) had settled within easy reach of Seoul Drive, in the nearby community areas of Lincoln Square, Edgewater, Uptown, West Ridge, and Rogers Park.122 Finally, during the 1980s and 1990s Arab and Assyrian immigrants, many arriving on refugee visas, had grouped together in what some referred to as “Little Arabia” communities on both the Northwest and Southwest Sides. The heart of the North Side Arab and Assyrian community, which mixed Iraqis, Assyrians, Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians, and Lebanese, lay in the midst of Korea Town, at Lawrence and Kedzie, an area marked by a concentration of Middle Eastern restaurants, groceries, and hookah bars.¹²³ An older Arab neighborhood existed around the handful of mosques and Middle Eastern restaurants around Kedzie and 63rd that served Palestinians and Jordanians living in the immediate community areas of Chicago Lawn and Gage Park and in the nearby suburbs of Bridgeview and Oak Lawn.

MAP 8. Ethnic Chicago, 2000.

However, perhaps no ethnic group in Chicago created a more cohesive port-of-entry neighborhood during this moment than the city’s Poles. Over 100,000 Poles migrated to the Chicago area between 1972 and 2000, giving metropolitan Chicago the largest concentration of Poles in the United States. With over one hundred ethnic associations, several radio and television stations, and numerous magazines and newspapers, Chicago’s Polish community (referred to as Chicago Polonia) became one of the largest and most active nodes of Polish culture in the world. Polish immigrants exhibited a strong preference for city life, even if, thanks to their whiteness, they did not have to deal with some of the racial barriers that other immigrants faced in their attempts to settle in certain suburbs. Throughout the first decade of this Polish immigration wave, the “Polish Triangle” around the intersection of Milwaukee, Division, and Ashland in Wicker Park served as the cultural center of Polonia. Anchoring the neighborhood was the powerful St. Stanislaus Kostka parish, which had been founded in 1867 and by the 1940s had grown into one of the country’s largest parishes. But in the early 1990s, with Polish immigration to Chicago peaking at a rate of some 11,000 per year, the advance of gentrification in West Town began to push working-class Poles northwest up Milwaukee Avenue to a more affordable Polish enclave in the Avondale community area.

While the old Polish Triangle still retained some historical resonance, especially as it was home to the Polish Museum of America and Library, this new neighborhood, known within the Polish community as Jackowo, became the functional port of entry for Polish immigrants. Poles made up more than half of the population in the immediate area around the predominantly Polish St. Hyacinth Church, with the vast majority being foreign-born. Jackowo thus revealed a close-knit community cultivated out of shared needs for Polish-language church services, fresh pirogis, Polish ales, easy access to the latest literature out of Poland, and the kind of cutting-edge Polish rock music featured at the neighborhood’s hippest nightclub, Café Lura. But once again, while the concentration of Polish businesses on the strip of Milwaukee between Central Park and Belmont gave the area a Polish feel, Jackowo nonetheless coexisted, at times uneasily, with communities of working-class Mexicans and middle-class white professionals taking advantage of Avondale’s more moderately priced real estate market. With Polish immigration tapering off and Mexican immigration continuing apace, Jackowo was beginning to lose some of its Polish residents. This was due not only to rising rents associated with gentrification. Sociologist Mary Patrice Erdmans determined after interviewing numerous residents here that Poles seeking to move to the suburbs were also trying to put some distance between themselves and their Mexican neighbors.124

Thus, working-class immigrants and ethnic entrepreneurs continued to carve out their own ethnoracial niches in the City of Neighborhoods. Unlike the politically powerful Pilsen and Humboldt Park neighborhoods or the Disneyfied old ethnic neighborhoods such as Little Italy and Greektown, however, City Hall proved reluctant to fully embrace these more recent ethnic enclaves. Chinatown managed to become one of the city’s premier tourist destinations, but it took a fund drive led by George Cheung and the Chinese-American Civic Council to raise the $70,000 to construct the Chinatown Gate in 1975. This is why the gate’s founders decided to inscribe it with the phrase (in Chinese characters) “The world belongs to the commonwealth,” an adage, which, according to the Chicago Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, “reflect[ed] the drive, determination and spirit of the Chinese people.”¹²⁵ Likewise, Seoul Drive got its name only because Korean realtor Paul Park took the initiative to rally members of the Lawrence Avenue Korean Business Association to pressure their local alderman, Richard Mell, to propose the designation before the city council. As for West Devon, the Daley administration never embraced the district’s historic or cultural significance, a situation that many local businessmen believed was largely to blame for the area’s economic distress. Nor was Daley’s City Hall very interested in promoting Jackowo or either of the city’s rather small Arab and Assyrian districts.

Why City Hall was reluctant to place its official seal on these neighborhoods can be glimpsed in the bitter controversy that erupted over the Seoul Drive ordinance. Much to the surprise of Alderman Mell, who believed the whole affair to be a political no-brainer that would end in garnering him support from Korean merchants, non-Korean residents of Albany Park objected strongly to their neighborhood being identified as Korean. “They’re singling out one group to identify a very diverse community,” asserted the leader of an organization calling itself Citizens for a Democratic and Diverse Albany Park. “We’re establishing chunks of territory by race. What’s next: Bosnia?” The Korean merchants responded by referring to how much they had helped to raise the area’s tax revenues and evoking visions of Korea Town becoming a tourist destination on par with Chinatown, which did little to appease opponents.126

This story explains a great deal about why City Hall never figured out an effective way to brand in any coherent way the West Devon commercial strip, where a 1.7 mile section of the avenue was segmented into four honorary streets: Sheikh Mujib Way, after the founder of Bangladesh; Mohammed Ali Jinnah Way, after the founder of Pakistan; Gandhi Marg (Way); and Golda Meier Boulevard. When Debra Silverstein finally managed to unseat longtime Fiftieth Ward Alderman Bernard Stone she spoke of “Indians, Pakistanis, Jews, Muslims all working together on the street,” but this cooperation was perhaps made possible by the area’s ambiguous identity. Around the Argyle Street district as well the naming issue aroused indignation, with some referring to the neighborhood as Little Vietnam and others calling it New Chinatown, a situation most civic leaders in the area resolved by employing the more neutral Argyle. And yet these same leaders complained that their neighborhood was ignored by the city, a sentiment even more commonly heard around West Devon. While Chicago’s shifting, heterogeneous, “unmade” neighborhoods provided opportunities for multiethnic political cooperation, more vibrant local political cultures, and the kind of diversity idealized by realtors and urbanists alike, they remained largely excluded from the global-city agenda and were thus low priorities in the annual budget. Resources and power in Richard M. Daley’s Chicago flowed to the traditional ethnic strongholds that had been able to make marketable ethnoracial order out of diversity and to inscribe that order into the landscape. To fully understand this, one need only consider the counterexample par excellence: Chicago’s Filipino community. While Filipinos constituted the city’s second largest Asian population, just behind South Asian Indians, their spatial dispersal throughout the city made them political and culturally invisible.

However, in considering how “the people” continued to make the city, it would be erroneous to limit the discussion to the impact of immigrants. In fact, by 2010 Chicago’s foreign-born population of just over 21 percent paled in comparison to those of global cities like Los Angeles (39.4 percent), New York (36.4 percent), San Francisco (35 percent), and Boston (26.9 percent). But the city made up for this deficit by attracting high numbers of American migrants from outside the Chicago metropolitan area.127 The 1990s was the city’s first decade of population increase since the 1940s, and by the early years of the twenty-first century, Chicago had emerged as a leading destination for those seeking an urban home in the United States; in 2001, for example, only Los Angeles had more people move within its jurisdiction. The strong inflow of middle-class professionals seeking Chicago’s brand of urban lifestyle helped drive the gentrification of the Near West and Near South Loop areas and to push up property values throughout the predominantly middle-class North Side, many parts of which experienced a more mild form of gentrification. The Lakeview area, for example, was a largely white middle-class community in 1990, but it was nonetheless textured by the hardly insignificant presence of Latinos (14.2 percent) and blacks (6.5 percent); ten years later, the Latino population had decreased by over 60 percent and the black population by more than 30 percent. This was a period that witnessed Lakeview’s arrival as a younger, more swinging real estate rival of the more affluent Lincoln Park area to its south. But many of the young middle-class professionals moving there were not only attracted to its proximity to the lake, its tree-lined streets, and its vibrant commercial strips of eclectic restaurants, bars, cafés, boutiques, and fitness clubs along Broadway and Halsted; by the end of the 1980s, the segment of North Halsted between Clark and Addison had become the center of gay nightlife in Chicago—and of the entire Midwest for that matter. And when Boystown’s real estate values rose too high and its bar scene became too raucous for some, those seeking the trappings of an urban gay community began moving north to Andersonville—a historically Swedish subsection of the Edgewater community area, where rainbow flags could be seen adorning bars along Clark Street by the mid-1990s.

A good many of those settling in neighborhoods like Boystown and Andersonville, gay and straight alike, belonged to what Richard Florida has called the “creative class”: people working in design, education, arts, music, entertainment, advertising, and marketing, “whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or creative content.”¹²⁸ Due to its rather large immigrant, gay, and “bohemian” populations, Florida placed Chicago in the top twenty cities possessing the kind of creative and diverse social and cultural milieus that appeal to this new class of workers. Sociologist Terry Nichols Clark has argued that Mayor Richard Daley actively helped to make this happen by incorporating the creative class into the city’s culture and politics and ultimately treating it like another ethnic group in need of space to express its identity.129 There is no doubt some truth to this contention. One could argue that Millennium Park, with its high-concept design, was an enormous gesture in this direction. Other examples can be drawn from Daley’s at times flamboyant embrace of the gay community and all his administration did to help turn Wicker Park into a national icon for hipster culture in the 1990s.¹³⁰

But this should not blind us once again to how much the people still play a role in making Chicago’s neighborhoods. Richard Sennett employs the term disorder to describe the kind of diverse environment cities must aspire to bring about in order to become places where people will acquire the tools to deal with social challenges.¹³¹ Chicago, despite some very long odds, retained some of its disorder despite the rapid advance of neoliberalization during the Richard M. Daley era, and it did so, in part, because disorder was still in relatively high demand—even as those seeking this precious commodity, bohemians and yuppies alike, were unwittingly contributing to its disappearance.