For April 9

Can we save the inner city? By David Moberg In These Times (1993)

For several decades, starting just before World War 1, the intersection of 35th and State Streets in Chicago was the heart of an African-American cultural and commercial hub known as Bronzeville. Businessmen and blueswomen alike gave vitality to a neighborhood populated by modestly paid blacks from the South who-when they had a chance-worked in the city's meatpacking plants, steel mills and railyards.

Now dreary, crime-ridden public housing highrises stretch for several miles down the west side

ml of State Street. Few stores of any type remain. Buildings that once housed historic black enterprises are boarded up and crumbling. Nearby multistory factory buildings are abandoned hulks with broken windows. Much housing is vacant; even more has been torn down.

The surrounding neighborhoods, where the population has plunged by two-thirds since 1950, are now among the poorest in the nation: as many as two out of every three residents live in poverty, and more than half are on public assistance. Through three decades of intermittent federal action on civil rights and poverty, these communities have progressively deteriorated.

Can a neighborhood like this still be saved? That question is being hotly debated among academics and even among the private foundations that have long bankrolled community-development projects. journalist Nicholas Lemann, author of The Promised Land, argues in a recent New York Times Magazine article that it is folly to imagine that such urban wastelands can be economically redeveloped. These neighborhoods never had many jobs and now cannot attract business, Lemann asserts. Economic development of poor neighborhoods hasn't worked and can't work, he writes. Sokoni Karanja disagrees. Karania, who holds a doctorate in urban planning and has received a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, is the director of the Center for New Horizons, a community organization. Over the past three years, he has helped bring together more than 80 community organizations and 3,000 people to draft a plan to restore the neighborhood. Karania believes that redevelopment can succeed only with a grass-roots strategy that has broad support and tackles education, housing, health, jobs, recreation and much more. "It's not one thing but at least 25 to 30 things, and they're all difficult," he says. "It won't happen with a quick fix."

Karan'a argues that such a development scheme has never really been tested. Mayors like the late Richard Daley of Chicago lobbied to change early poverty programs so that participation by the poor would be minimized, and development money would be funneled through political machines and government agencies. Since then, Karanja says, when federal funds have gone to poor communities, it has usually provoked futile squabbling among various agencies, politicians and community groups.

The South Side of Chicago would be a worthy candidate for one of the nine new "empowerment zones" that Presi- dent Clinton is touting as the centerpiece of his modest urban strategy. Lemann's justifiable skepticism about what these zones can do-shared even by their advocates-does not warrant the conclusion that rebuilding historic Bronzeville is a lost cause. After all, even within the area's ravaged landscape there are packets of rehabbed housing, a few lively shopping strips, some strong community organi- zations and other indications of hope for revival.

The 1993 empowerment zone legislation, an update of the long-languishing enterprise zone idea, will provide $2.5 billion in both wage credits to employers hiring empowerment zone residents and tax incentives to businesses located in the zones. There's also $1 billion in new social service grants and a grab bag of other less targeted resources.

After years of neglect, virtually any new money for poor urban neighborhoods will be better than nothing. But even though the empowerment zones are less of a tax and deregulation bonanza for business than earlier enterprise zones, they are still anemic responses to a grave situation.

By contrast to the $3.5 billion Clinton is proposing to spend on the zones, more than half of his $23 billion crime bill would go for prisons. Spending the same amount wisely in neighborhoods like Chicago's mid-South Side could eliminate much of the supposed need for those penal facilities.

Clinton also has some low-budget initiatives, such as providing incentives for community- development financial institutions (contained in a bill now awaiting Senate action) or changing the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) regulations for bank lending. Both of these pro- posed reforms are aimed at directing more private capital into poor neighborhoods. (See In These Times, June 28, 1993.) Ultimately, they may prove more beneficial than the empowerment zones.

There's a simple truth behind the complex debates on poverty: poor individuals-or comrnunities-are poor because they lack both income and capital. Yet instead of providing more money for already poor, black urban communities, our society has done just the opposite: for more than 15 years real incomes-from low- wage work or public assistance-have been plummeting. Public and private investment in poor black neighborhoods has been meager at best, as the housing stock and infrastructure have deteriorated. Even the trickle of spending designated for the poor does not in fact end up in their hands. John McKnight of Northwestern University's Center for Urban Affairs calculated that government poverty spending is equivalent to about $20,000 a year for a family of three in Chicago. Yet the poor got only about one-third of that in cash. McKnight argues that poor people, especially if they organize themselves, would be far better off simply getting the money.

Even the best conceived, most generously funded development effort would fail, given the staggering disinvestment and income losses in many urban neighborhoods. What's stunning is not that most projects have failed, but that any have worked.

If we are going to judge whether it's possible to develop a neighborhood like Bronzeville, we need to understand how it came to its present sorry state. This sets us squarely in the midst of an academic debate between two leading University of Chicago sociologists, William Julius Wilson, author of The Truly Disadvantaged, and Douglas Massey, author of American Apartheid. Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. (See In These Times, Aug. 23, 1993.)

In crude terms, the question is: what most accounts for the intense urban poverty around 35th and State Streets- race.or class? In other words, is discrimination to blame or the workings of the market? And should the solutions be race-specific or race-neutral?

Massey argues that the extremely high level of black residential segregation, especially in Northern cities over the past 80 years, is unique and unparalleled in american history. Despite 30 years of legislation, discriminatory practices by individuals, institutions (such banks and realtors) and the government persist, although sometimes in more subtle ways than in the past.

No ethnic group has experienced anything like the degree of social isolation that is commonplace for blacks. On a sociological scale in which 100 equals complete segregation, the index of segregation for most past and present new immigrants has been about 30 to 40 or less, according to Massey. But the average index of segregation for blacks in major Northern cities was nearly 80 in 1980 and 77 in 1990 (though slightly less in the South).

Despite the civil rights revolution, those indices of segregation have barely changed: in Chicago in 1920, the figure stood at around 90; in 1990 it had dropped only slightly, to 86. The record of progress elsewhere is similarly slow. Furthermore, affluent blacks are virtually as segregated residentially as poor blacks; the poorest Latinos typically live in more integrated neighborhoods than the most affluent blacks, Massey reports.

Numerous recent studies have demonstrated that blacks continue to suffer extreme discrimination in searching for homes and in obtaining mortgages, regardless of their income. The long history of urban renewal, public housing construction and other government policies at all levels has further contributed to concentrating blacks in the ghetto. As Massey explained to a Chicago Urban League conference recently: "Take a group of people, segregate them, cut off capital and guess what? The neighborhoods go downhill. There's no other outcome possible.

Lemann blithely describes the loss of population in poor ghetto areas as simply the standard upward American march out of lowly neighborhoods. Yet Massey demonstrates that on the whole blacks have not had the same opportunities as other Americans to link residential mobility with social mobility. Because of segregation, they are thus denied the options-living ci6se to better jobs, building equity in houses, pursuing safer communities or better schools-of white middle-class suburbanites. Affluent blacks move, but primarily to neighborhoods that are mainly African-American.

Residential segregation leads to an unparalleled concentration of poverty and its related social problems, intensifying the downward spiral of community destruction. Massey sees segregation as the essential creator of the underclass. Racial concentration may secure offices for a few black politicians, he argues, but in the long run it weakens blacks politically because they and their needs are isolated. The implication is that only a massive assault on this segregation, as well as discrimination by lending institutions, can undo the underclass and make it possible for Bronzeville and other such communities to be revived.

Wilson, on the other hand, has long contended that overt racial discrimination has "declining significance" in explaining black community problems. Instead, the flight of manufacturing from central cities and other economic changes has left many blacks without traditional jobs and unprepared for the new -urban service and information economy, he argues. As black men were less able to support a family, marriage and family declined. Children of those single mother families were impoverished and disadvantaged.

In a recent lecture (which was based on research for his upcoming book, The New Urban Poverty), Wilson acknowledged the importance of segregation, but argued that "to focus mainly on segregation is to miss dynamic aspects of social and economic change in Chicago." Today's hard-core urban poverty results from high and concentrated joblessness. Wilson used Bronzeville as an example: in 1950, 69 percent of neighborhood men over 14 were employed; in 1990 only 37 percent of those over 16 had jobs. The quality of jobs also declined. In 1970, 72 percent of young employed men worked in manufacturing and construction, but by 1987 only 28 percent of young employed men had jobs in those decently paid blue-collar occupations. Joblessness makes a difference. Black and white youths at age 11 are equally likely to commit violent crimes but by their late 20s blacks are four times more likely to be violent offenders, Wilson says. There's one big exception: blacks and whites who are employed differ little in violent behavior.

The ghetto today may be just as segregated as ever, but it is far less stable, Wilson argues. Moreover, rapid desegregation seems impossible as long as whites can and will flee a neighborhood when the number of blacks rises. Politically, he concludes, blacks would gain most from broad policies to create demand for more workers, to provide universal health insurance and to boost low incomes. If blacks are working, they can better organize socially and politically.

Massey’s work demonstrates that racial discrimination in housing is a unique and persistent cause of the terrible poverty of inner-city blacks. Wilson's work underscores how changes in American business have contributed to hard core joblessness. Together these forces have created the raw underclass culture that in turn is used to further legitimate racism.

Ideally, the government should both attack discrimination and stimulate job creation. Realistically, it is likely to do very little of either, although Housing and Urgban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros has embraced Massey’s work and shown interest in more aggressive fair housing legislation.

… If the federal government were willing to invest in housing and infrastructure in Bronzeville a fraction of what it spends on mortgage deduction s and highways in the suburbs, then the plan might have a chance.

Even private investment could click, especially with some government cooperation. Most bankers look upon neighborhoods like Chicago’s mid-South Side as a barren wasteland. Nonetheless, the 1976 CRA requires banks to make some effort to lend in all local communities.

Organized pressure over CRA compliance has generated more than $1000 billion in bank loans to lower-income neighborhoods across the nation. Last year, [it was revealed by a bank group] that CRA loans for single-family homes and apartment buildings in low-income neighborhoods have proven no riskier than loans in better-off communities.

Nevertheless, most banks have dragged their feet about even minimal CRA compliance.. .