Point is that these people aren’t wards of the city. The City provided subsidized housing. Thats good. I like the idea of subsidized housing, but how much does the city need to provide?
In the context of what we are talking about, which is subsidized housing, by definition, the residents of Cabrini Green are costing the city money. From your own story, even though you were poor, you couldn’t qualify for subsidized housing nor did you qualify for financial aid from the government.
However, this doesn’t change my question. Do people have a right to live where they want even if it too expensive? I can’t afford a house in Georgetown, do I get to live there?
Tend to, but that isn’t always so. There are plenty of poor whites living in St. Paul. There are plenty of them in South Minneapolis. People DO tend - for better or for worse - to gravitate to neighborhoods where people are “like” them - race being one of the quick ways to judge (but if everyone in the neighborhood drives a minivan, has two elementary age kids, that sort of thing tends to trumps race - at least here in the Twin Cities).
In Minnesota you have “urban poor” and “rural poor.” Their is some suburban poor - but not too much of it. Rural poor is overwhelmingly white - but they’ve been living in Hibbing for six generations and aren’t moving now (and rural poor is much more Hispanic than it used to be, particularly during migrant season.) Urban poor is much more of a rainbow - with first and second generation Asian immigrants, urban Blacks, first generation African immigrants, and plenty of white people - but its Minnesota, there are plenty of white people to go around.
Your post hit the issue I have with cries of gentrification right on the head. Why is it that a city should base decisions that affect everyone in them on the needs of the bottom of the socio-economic ladder? Shouldn’t it base its decisions on what’s best for those of us who contribute by paying taxes, holding jobs in the city, etc?
The town I was born in had this exact issue. In the 60’s, a housing project was put in very close to down-town which literally killed the CBD. A few years ago talk began about redeveloping down-town and removing the project. Predictably, some cried about what would happen to those in the projects. Now I’m not saying to throw these people out on their butts, but it seems backward to base the decisions that affect a whole town on the well being of the very people who are responsible for dragging it down in the first place. Shouldn’t the needs of the people who contribute positive things to the town come first?
Most likely because most people in those suburbs derive their livelihood from businesses in the city of Chicago. Why should they be able to derive the benefits of the city but have none of the costs?
We have this same exact issue where I live. All of the big money jobs are in Hartford. Yet most who hold those jobs live in towns like Glastonbury, Farmington, West Hartford, Canton, and Avon, while Hartford’s neighborhoods rot. How is that fair?
Cities Without Suburbs, by David Rusk, makes a good case for political consolidation of cities with their suburbs. Then the suburbanites would pay taxes that might be spent on inner-city problems; of course, they would also have a political voice in making those taxing and spending decisions.
Wouldn’t that just lead to really, really big cities? As if Chicago isn’t big enough? How far out would we consolidate? Evanston, Skokie, Niles, Oak Park, Oak Lawn, sure. Worth? Naperville? Joliet? We’d have to take in everyone north of 1-80, and probably down 1-55 further than that, to incorporate areas where a lot of Chicago’s workers live. Not to mention most of north-eastern Indiana.
As Caffeine.addict said, these are not wards of the city. Their aid comes from the state no matter where they live. Why should Chicago continue to disproportionately subsidize their housing when they are residents of Illinois? Why should Chicago keep paying for extra police protection in those neighborhoods? Why should Chicago let them keep dragging down their schools? Why does Chicago have any more responsibility than anywhere else they might move?
I haven’t read that particular book, but Suburban Nation also makes a strong case for regional government. I tend to agree. The huge transportation issues we are having through much of the north east, IMHO, makes a compelling case for an agency that can tackle intermodal regional transit development.
Because they don’t live there? What about people who both live and work in the suburbs? I lived in Waltham, MA (a suburb of Boston) and worked in Wellesley, MA (another suburb). All I did was ride up and down 128 each day, never setting foot in Boston.
If cities want to encourage people to live downtown, they need to make it is desirable to live there.
It is good point though that a city, it’s suburbs and even it’s satellite cities (like Jersey City, NJ near New York or Quincy, MA near Boston) are for all intents and purposes one sprawling, integrated megacity. It might make sense to approach managing those metropolitan areas on a regional level.
It has been said for a long time that the area north of Boston, south to Richmond, VA is essentially one megalopolis.
I buy that. I’ve drive all of I-95 through that stretch of the country. There are no areas that are not either suburban or transitional from demi-rural/suburban.
Having said that, I wonder if the same dynamics apply to the 100 mile radius around Boston, as it does in New York City, Philly, Baltimore and D.C.
Yes and no. The various suburbs clearly gravitate towards specific urban centers. Then again, it’s not uncommon for someone like myself who is based out of New York to find himself working temporarily in DC, Boston or Philly.
From what I’ve experienced, New York and Boston share a similar dynamic in that the urban core (most of Manhattan in the case of NYC and the Back Bay/North End/Beacon Hill in Boston) is densely populated, highly sought out and expensive. They are surrounded by less dense residential neighborhoods that were once blue collar but have been gentrified to a certain degree. Surrounding that is a vast sea of suburban housing connected to the core by interstates and light rail. From what I can tell, the poor don’t get squeezed out to the suburbs. They get pushed to satellite cities (like Newark, NJ or Everett, MA) or neighborhoods that are either inconvienient or too close to NIMBY eyesores like the airport or chemical plants for gentrification
Washinton DC and Philly seem to have a different dynamic. It seems like less people actually live downtown. Most seem to live in the suburbs while the poor live in specific neighborhoods (depending on if they are poor student types or poor poor types)
OK, this article, from 2007 mentions 29,715 families on the CHA waiting list for space. The waiting list for Section 8 is 29,687 names long. That list, by the way is closed (see this site ) Despite this, the “transformation” plan for Chicago public housing will result in fewer rental units than before and the CHA is apparently planning to send at least 6,000 people/families from the high rises into the Section 8 program despite the fact the waiting list for this program is closed.
By the way - the Chicago Section 8 housing waiting list closed in 1997 - 10 years ago.
From the article:
That’s pretty dismal.
More quotes:
And this article from 2007 discusses Chicago families displace 110 miles to Elkhart, Indiana - another state entirely - including one family that had been on the Section 8 waiting list for eleven years.
But when you say “displaced”, they’re not exactly rounding them up on buses and taking them to a pogrom, are they? They’re offering them *help *- help that they can take or leave. Yes, they can wait on a waiting list for 10 years which some overloaded caseworker makes phone calls and discusses options with various caseworkers in other cities and finds subsidized housing. Or they can get a job, or another job, find some roommates to provide some income or child care, and make some phonecalls (it’s free in Unemployment offices) and find a place themselves.
Again, they’re not wards of the state. They’re not children. They’re adults who have chosen to accept state aid.
God, you’re making me come off like a Republican asshole here! Really, I’m not! I’m a fan of public service and welfare as a short-term safety net until people get back on their feet - I was on food stamps for 2 months in the Bad Old Days, and that was enough to let me catch up and switch to a private food pantry after that. But three generations on welfare is not short-term! At some point, folks have to stand on their own two feet. We should fund parenting education (which we do), we should fund job-training (which we do), we should provide decent day-care so parents can work (which we do, but not enough of), we should encourage, cajole, and beg these people to find their own means of support. And at some point, we should say, “Well, I don’t know, what *are *you going to do?” and stop treating them like children!
One last time, I’ll observe that a debate over public housing and gentrification is somewhat different that what was asked in the OP:
But, since we’ve hijacked this thread this far, I’ll offer that in my mind the individuals moving into gentrified areas are not the ones to blame for the displacement of previous low income residents.
I also repeat that effective low cost public transportation may be as or more important than subsidized housing in any particular location.
Oh, I thought we dismissed that in the first few posts as being inaccurate. The “want to turn it into a suburb instead of embracing urban living” part, anyway. Several posters who live in Chicago (including me) mentioned that it’s more likely for “them” to tear down single family homes and put in multi-unit apartments or condos, that the Home Depots going up in the city aren’t surrounded by huge parking lots, and that if that’s happening in Cabrini Green, it’s a blip on the urban-planning radar. Cabrini Green never was densely built like the areas most people think of when they think Chicago - the Loop, or Uptown, or Lincoln Park. Cabrini Green was a few cinder block square apartment building surrounded by asphalt and highways. There weren’t mom-n-pop hardware stores shoulder to shoulder with clothing stores and jewelers and video rentals and grocery stores, there was a whole lot of nothing. Building a Home Depot there is adding to the density, not subtracting from it.
I think it has meandered into some interesting territory and this might even be a good separate thread.
Back to the OP, from what I’ve seen in my area, its a developer buying an old building in disrepair and fixing it up to make condos or buying one of the very large rowhouses and turning them into condos or luxury rentals. Most of the commercial development has been in the form of chain stores but then again, that is the same pattern that seems to be happening in the suburbs. The chain stores that I’ve seen however tend to be smaller than their suburban counterparts on don’t have parking lots since the city is just to densely built for the most part.
DC is pretty well divided into neighborhoods which are all office buildings and then residential neighborhoods with some commercial activity. Very few people live in the neighborhoods with most of the office space or the government buildings. The DC suburbs in Northern VA have also developed their own large office parks. Tyson’s Corner and Reston have some rather large office buildings and a fairly good concentration of large companies. Arlington is the same with quite a few government agencies located there.
I easily qualified for subsidized housing… but even then, the waiting list was several years long. That does not help when you are facing possible eviction. My financial problems resolved years before my name came up on the list.
I said I didn’t qualify for food stamps - that is hardly the only form of government aid out there.
When I had been employed I COULD afford to live where I was - then I was laid off. I’m sorry, should I have been able to predict my job loss years in advance? Perhaps I should have moved directly to a shelter or a subway tunnel the day after I was laid off? :rolleyes:
Although there are some multi-generational impoverished families the scenario where someone is doing fine financially then has some upset - job loss, illness, flood, fire, etc. - that throws them into the “poor as dirt” pot is at least as common, if not more so. Let me tell you, it really sucked for people to automatically assume I was multi-generational welfare or an addict or drunk because I was poor rather than the real problem - I needed a JOB that paid a living wage. It took me two years to dig out of that hole. I’ve known others who went through the same shit, the bias against poor people in this country is incredible. Being less than middle class is seen as a moral failing regardless of the cause of that state, or how temporary it may be.
Seriously? You qualified for subsidized housing but not for food stamps? That’s whack, as we used to say. Here, food stamps have a much higher maximum income allowance than subsidized housing. The order of aid is roughly health insurance reimbursement, reduced price school lunches, free health insurance for children and pregnant or lactating moms, free school lunches, food stamps, childcare vouchers, cash from the state, and then way down at the end, subsidized housing. You really have to be indigent to qualify for housing aid.
Yeah, I’ve sat in the Chair of Shame a few times, can you tell?