The History Of Chicago's Public Housing

Chicago from the1920s through the 1940s was the melting pot of America, with its multitude of vastly different people and different types of housing and living conditions. Around the early 1920s in Chicago, 80 percent of the undeveloped city were immigrants from Europe and their children. A majority of the houses in Chicago in the 1920s were set up to improve immigrants’ living conditions. These houses were often large complexes in which immigrants lived together in and were provided meals and tutoring in English. After World War I ended in 1918, many people moved from small rural communities in the Midwest to Chicago. This resulted in the construction of many large apartment buildings in place of old townhouses. In large cities like Chicago,

Before WWI, most black people had been dehumanized, effectively stripping them of the feeling to vote and were bereft from protection from police. “I am in the darkness of the south and I am trying my best to get out,” an inspirational migrant from Alabama wrote to the Chicago Defender. New opportunities for the urban part of the North blos-somed when the war reared its ugly head. The American industrial economy grew vigorously, and as existing European immigrants and white women were unable to meet demand, northern businesses leaned to black southerners to fill their place. When the word of higher wages and ameliorated working conditions spread around, northern businesses were met with positive feed-back as black men, in significant numbers came flocking, thus sprouting a social movement out of urban misery. The War, unknowingly, set the par for work for African Americans and the North became a liberating meadow for all those who sought equality and wanted to avoid the ‘racist menace’.

A large influx of colored people created many problems. First, there was a major problem in the availability in housing, of which was responded to with racism. This is the root for the hatred between the black and white communities. There wasn’t enough housing in the “black belt” community, so Negroes began to spill into white neighborhoods. The very existence of a colored person in a neighborhood would lower the property values. When a house was sold to a colored person, the rent for the house would be higher than the previous, white owner’s rent. Real Estate companies believed that “it is a matter of common knowledge that house after house…whether under white or black agents, comes to the Negro at an increased rental” (Sandburg 46). They sold housing despite the fact that “the Negro in Chicago, paid a lower wage than the white workman” (47), and that black people would have

During the mid-20th century there was much racial discrimination, specifically in home ownership. During this period there was mass immigration of Southern blacks to the north. In Lawndale Chicago, there was adverse reactions to this. As the

On the home front, the U.S. government desperately needed workers to fill newly created defense jobs and factory positions left open by soldiers who had left to fight. More than two million African Americans went to work for defense plants, and another two million joined the federal civil service. As these new opportunities drew more and more African Americans into cities, they opened the way for economic mobility.

Beginning after World War II, another major force – the mechanization of agriculture – also contributed to the northward migration.

The Great Migration was a relocation of 6-7 million African Americans from the rural south to the cities of the North, Midwest, and West from 1916 to 1930 which had a huge impact on Urban life in the United states. They were driven from their homes by unsatisfactory economic opportunities and harsh segregations laws, many blacks headed North, Where they took advantages of the need for industrial workers that first arose during the first World War. Between 1910 and 1930, The African American population decreased in the South and increased in the Northern states by about forty percent as a result of the migration. This “Great Migration” was on the largest internal movement of people in the history of the United states and it is a shift that impacted culture, politics, and economics as a new African American communities struggled

Prior to WWII, most African Americans (70-90 percent) worked as a domestic servant. The need for manufacture workers, shipyard employees and

In 1942, apartments and row houses were being built in Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast, two of Chicago’s wealthiest neighborhoods, after the court case of Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority. Being one of the first cities to implement public housing, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) was in charge of the

The development of the suburbs has been appointed to be the result of the “white flight” from the inner cities. In the 1950’s black Americans moved northward to cities to find industrial jobs that were within walking distance. Discrimination in cities worsened, crime rates increased and educational facilities’ credentials weakened or gained bad reputations. The upper-class families left the cities and mass migrated to the suburbs to escape the increasing crime rates and worsening conditions. This movement was later termed the “white flight”. Every American wanted to begin building the “ideal family”: two parents, two children and maybe a pet or two. This newly invented middle-class prospered as

Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing project is notorious in the United States for being the most impoverished and crime-ridden public housing development ever established. Originally established as inexpensive housing in the 1940’s, it soon became a vast complex of unsightly concrete low and high-rise apartment structures. Originally touted as a giant step forward in the development of public housing, it quickly changed from a racially and economically diverse housing complex to a predominantly black, extremely poor ghetto. As it was left to rot, so to speak, Cabrini-Green harbored drug dealers, gangs and prostitution. It continued its downward spiral of despair until the mid 1990’s when the Federal Government assumed control the

Chicago in the 1920s was a turning point for the development of ethnic neighborhoods. After the opening of the first rail connection from New York to Chicago in the 1840s, immigration sky rocketed from that point on. Majority of the immigrants to Chicago were Europeans. The Irish, Italians, eastern European Jews, Germans, and Mexicans were among the most common ethnicities to reside in Chicago. These groups made up the greater part of Chicago. The sudden increase in immigration to Chicago in the 1920s soon led to an even further distinguished separation of ethnicities in neighborhoods. The overall development of these neighborhoods deeply impacted how Chicago is sectioned off nowadays. Without these ethnicities immigrating to Chicago

Racial segregation has had a long history in Chicago. While separation by nationality had always been apparent in the city, with neighborhoods typically being dominated by a certain ethnicity, no group of Chicagoans experienced the degree of segregation that African Americans faced in everything from the housing districts to public services. Forced to live only in designated areas by de facto segregation, redlining, and other tactics, they had limited chances to escape the cycle of danger and discrimination of the city. Confined to only their deteriorating neighborhoods,they had little chance.

There was also a big influx of blacks to Chicago. The numbers of blacks migrating to Chicago was tremendous. Many reasons Tuttle states are the cause for this. The major one is just blacks wanting to leave the south. They wanted to leave the segregated south in hope of a better future. They were tired of the Jim Crow laws, lynching, poor school, and constant harassment. A black said, “Anywhere north will do us”(Tuttle, 79). Another reason was jobs. In the time of war, the big manufactories trying to keep up with the needs of the military were in dire needs of people to work. There were actual labor recruiters whose job was to go out and recruit blacks to work in the factories. Moreover, when the opportunity to work opened up blacks took them in full demand. It was a way out of the south.

Chicago’s history was so bad because of redlining. Redlining was so bad because it is the practice of denying key services (like home loans and insurance) or increasing their costs for residents in a geographical area. This meant that black families would buy houses for more then what the house was worth. Also they would buy houses for cheap, but the rent would be higher. Another reason the history was bad is because of racism.