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TAKING THE GOOD WITH THE BAD |
URBAN RENEWAL'S OUTCOMES
We live stacked on top of one another with no elbow room. Danger is all around. There's little privacy or peace and no quiet. And the world looks on all of us project rats living on a reservation like untouchables.79
In theory, urban renewal could have been the best thing that happened to the residents of the inner city. However,
because of the underlying motives of this governmental program that tried to keep the African-Americans separated
from the white elitist, urban renewal negatively affected the housing situation in Bronzeville. Theoretically,
it facilitated a complete transformation of slums into more productive uses.80 For the first couple of years, the newly constructed
housing did create an environment that was more productive than the previous years.
The program solved the short-term problem of housing, but it did not solve the long-term problems that continues to haunt Chicago to this day-social isolation of African-Americans, residential segregation and the cyclical pattern of a slum. Despite the programs good intentions of supplying housing to "Black Chicago", its underlying motives facilitated urban decline.
Although the residents had a hand in the deterioration of Bronzeville, the government-both federal and local¾ did not hold a clean reputation for maintaining its project. Along with the creation of a segregated Chicago, the CHA poorly managed the housing sponsored by urban renewal projects. Initially, the federal government managed all public housing in Chicago. Later, with the Housing Act of 1937, the federal government transferred the managerial powers of public housing to the local authorities of CHA. This transition created confusion displayed through the management of the buildings. Similarly, the irresponsibility of the government in handling the matters of housing negatively affected urban renewal. Because of this irresponsibility, one third of the tenants who moved into the Robert Taylor Homes were not screened, and this created an entirely new problem.81 Had the CHA maintained their screening process and continued to pull in respectable families, the housing projects would not have been considered substandard housing after thirty years of their erection.
For these reasons, it can be argued that the government became the new slumlords for many of the residents moving in under their lease. The treatment of the tenants had a negative indirect effect on urban renewal. For example, in the Robert Taylor Homes, tenants had no control over their own heat. Only a CHA employee could make the adjustments. This treatment could be a cause of CHA's autocratic way of managing certain housing complexes and this way of handling things might have benefited CHA.82 However, this had the lasting effect on the tenants. This kind of treatment created an environment of resentment amongst the residents which sheds light on the emerging attitude of indifference which Mrs. Mitchell referred to earlier.
In 1958, the Chicago Urban League released a study-"Urban Renewal and the Negro in Chicago"-- which showed how urban renewal only led to "Negro removal". At the time, the people who established this program did not see how urban renewal would affect the Bronzeville community. However, the residents of Bronzeville knew exactly how urban renewal would affect them. The Chicago Urban League and the Chicago Defender managed to continue to inform the community about the direction of urban renewal since Bronzeville--especially along the Black Belt-- had the most number of residents affected by this process. The League's survey statistics revealed that, "sixty percent of the city's renewal projects are located in [highly concentrated] Negro communities."83 For these reasons, the project became known as "Negro removal" to the residents of these communities.
The displacement of African-American residents posed the largest problem of urban renewal. Those displaced from urban renewal projects did not get relocated into satisfactory housing. Many times the residents did not get replaced at all and had to begin a new housing search. The League's study stated that, "Negroes, comprising 20 percent of the population, thus bare the brunt of displacement that goes with demolition and rebuilding programs."84 Alone, the construction of Stateway Gardens displaced 3400 families from their tenements and the project could only replace 2300 of the displaced residents.85
As stated earlier, the understanding of the implementation of the urban renewal program was to establish a slum removal program for blighted neighborhoods and to construct replacement housing for the displaced residents. However, the Chicago Urban League reported:
The emphasis which urban renewal has placed upon 'slum clearance' has resulted in no new
housing construction on predominantly vacant land, [with the exception of] for some public housing units. This
has helped to create the over-crowding and conditions of blight in areas adjoining clearance areas. Moreover, no
net gain in available housing units has resulted from this emphasis on clearance, rather than vacant land construction.86
Therefore, the replacement housing could not compensate for the amount of housing lost.
The League further addressed the issue of displacement:
In the period from 1948-56, approximately 86,000 persons were displaced by various urban
renewal projects. It is estimated that 67 per cent of these relocatees were Negro. This means that over 11 per
cent of the Chicago Negro population of 1950 were forced to relocate in an eight-year period. 87
By observing the time difference from the beginning of urban renewal projects to the opening of the replacement
housing, one can examine how urban renewal could negatively impact the neighborhood. The clearance for the construction
of the Dan Ryan Expressway began in 1945. However, the replacement housing for this project, Stateway Gardens,
did not open until 1958. Again, the displaced residents waiting for the replacement housing had to double-up in
tenements with other families until the project was completed. This process, in turn, only facilitated the slum
cycle. The evictions brought economic hardships on the displaced families. Many of the families had to move unexpectedly
and this helped to facilitate more economic stress on an already economically stressed neighborhood.88
An important secondary effect of urban renewal was to accelerate racial turnover, expand the ghetto, and shift the threat of ghetto expansion from elite white districts to working class white neighborhoods.89 An attempt to push Bronzeville to the adjacent working class white neighborhood failed because of the resistance put up by the residents of this community. Usually, the neighborhood, known to the Black Belt residents as Bridgeport, would attack African-Americans on the spot if sighted in this area.90 Furthermore, this attempt obviously failed because this could have been the creation of, yet, another famous Chicago Race Riot similar to that of 1919.
The biggest benefactors of urban renewal happened to be the private developers. The establishment of urban renewal helped these private developers gain from collaborating with the city. After the city's acquisition of the land, private developers gained for assisting the city in developing the land.91
In summary, urban renewal almost always destroyed more housing than it replaced. Urban renewal programs frequently only shifted the problems of blight, crime, and instability from areas adjacent to elite white neighborhoods to locations deeper inside the African-American ghetto. Urban renewal usually affected the poor African-American neighborhoods leading to more of this group being displaced. This displacement of residents contradicted the purpose of urban renewal. While the urban renewal bulldozers seized the homes of many of the residents in its path, the banished residents relocated to another segregated neighborhood that was en route to a blighted state.
