Housing Issues in Hyde Park

David Hays, Assistant Director of the Community Service Center at the University of Chicago welcomed Chicago Program students and gave us a tour of the campus.  The Community Service Center connects University students as they work with community organizations through internships and volunteerism.  Two thousand of the University’s 13,000 students are involved with community organizations.

Notable buildings on the tour included Rockefeller Memorial Chapel; the Robie House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Albert Pick Hall for International Studies.  A sculpture outside of Pick Hall reportedly casts a shadow of a hammer and sickle (the symbol of communism) on Pick Hall’s east wall on May 1, International Workers Day. 

Robie House

Throughout the tour, David adds notes about community activities happening on campus, and opportunities for us to volunteer and become involved. We walk along Midway Plaisance, a park where the 1893 world’s fair was held.  Only one building remains from the fair, the Museum of Science and Industry.  David tells a story of when his father lived in an apartment building facing the park.  It was at the time of Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968.  From his window, Mr. Hays watched as the Blackstone Rangers, a large and well organized street gang in the neighborhood, gathered to decide if they would riot or not.  Although riots broke out in other parts of the city, the Blackstone Rangers decided not to riot, saving their neighborhood from being ravaged. 

After the tour, we sat down with David for a discussion about the housing issues in the Hyde Park area.  From 1916 until 1948, racially restrictive covenants were used to keep Chicago's neighborhoods white.  These were legally binding covenants attached to parcels of land that prohibited African Americans from moving into certain areas.  Of course blacks contested the borders of their segregated community, particularly since the population was ever increasing and they had no where to go.  But, unfortunately, they were up against political leaders and financial institutions which funded the legal defense of restrictive covenants.  In 1948, the Supreme Court in Shelley v. Kraemer declared the enforcement of racial restrictive covenants unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Even with restrictive covenants gone, however, urban renewal programs capitalized on the expansive eminent domain powers, whereby the government can take private property for a public purpose through condemnation and payment of fair value.  So the powers that be could buy out owners who may not want to sell, and use the space for their own needs.  In the 1950s and 1960s, the "Fight Against Blight," one of the largest urban renewal plans in the nation, resulted in the demolition and redevelopment of entire blocks of decayed buildings with the goal of creating an "interracial community of high standards."  The plan forced the relocation of 20,000 residents, mostly low-income blacks and whites.  
As a result, Hyde Park's average income soared by 70 percent, but its Black population fell by 40 percent, since the substandard housing primarily occupied by low income minorities had been purchased, torn down, and replaced, with the residents not being able to afford to remain in the newly rehabilitated areas.

When residents of the Woodlawn neighborhood felt under threat from an expansion plan, they organized the Woodlawn Organization (TWO).  The Woodlawn Organization’s founding president was the Reverend Arthur Brazier of the Pentecostal Apostolic Church of God, whom community organizer Saul Alinsky helped to train to head the organization. Today, the Woodlawn Organization and University of Chicago work together on neighborhood issues. 

The idea for the Woodlawn Children's Promise Community originated in 2008. The late Bishop Brazier had heard about the Harlem Children’s Promise Zone, which provides free services for youth living in a 97-block area of that community.  The goal is to remove barriers to learning so all kids can go to college.  During his election campaign, President Obama pledged to fund similar efforts around the country, and Brazier approached the University of Chicago with the idea of launching one in Woodlawn.  Woodlawn expects to be one of several Chicago communities competing this year for a federal Promise Neighborhoods grant.   

In response to a question about asset based development in the community, Hays talked about the work of Public Allies Chicago (PAC), established by founding Executive Director Michelle Obama in 1993.  Public Allies’ trains young people from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds to emerge as community leaders.  Michelle Obama’s emphasis on indigenous leadership and her belief that all people have potential to lead became a core value of PAC’s  leadership philosophy.  The first lady was one of the original faculty members of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute at Northwestern University, led by John McKnight and Jody Kretzmann.  Jody Kretzmann is one of the founders of the ACM Urban Studies Program, and continues to speak to students each semester about asset-mapping.