There goes the neighborhood
For starters, look at gentrification under another choice of words: economic development. When a community undergoes an economic transformation it prompts a voltaic charge of rehabbing and renovation. It also means but one thing: the neighborhood gets a much-needed douching - a spring cleaning long overdue.
Here's an example: on the 1900 block of Prairie Avenue, in the heart of the city's Near South Side, the former home of Marshall Field sits boarded up, deserted. The grand nineteenth-century residence, once home to Windy City retail royalty, was the first residence in Chicago to be wired for electricity. Today, it sits idle, weathered, holes in roof, plaster walls crumbling to bits as the surrounding neighborhood undergoes a frenzied metamorphosis.
Perhaps, like the other venerable mansions on Prairie Avenue, it too will one day be restored to its original grandeur. Clarke House, Chicago's oldest surviving building, and the nearby Glessner House, which boasts some of the city's first modern interiors, are beneficiaries of gentrification and the big bucks that came along with it. Like many of the spectacular mansions that have been restored in the Prairie Avenue Historic District, it is quite possible that the Field family homestead will be affected by gentrification in a positive way. Barbara Lynne hopes so.
Lynne, President and Executive Director of the Near South Planning Board, the area that includes the historic Field mansion, has watched as her beloved historic pocket of town has risen from the ashes. But Lynne isn't quite ready to label the rebirth of the area with the oft-maligned g-word. While in the same breath, Lynne asserts that - listen carefully - gentrification isn't a cuss word. "There are definitely good points to gentrification," says Lynne. "But in our area, at least from the Printers Row area to the Stevenson, it isn't something I would call 'gentrification' because there was not a large residential population there in the first place."
Lynne contends that true gentrification comes when large groups of community residents are forced to move elsewhere. "Our area has undergone a renaissance or re-development," she suggests. "Not really a gentrification."
Today, that renaissance is readily apparent. Loft condominiums dot the landscape, inhabiting once tired and torn warehouses. Joggers with dogs on outstretched leashes promenade along the rolling sidewalks in front of the Field Museum, once a parking lot, now called the Museum Campus - an area Lynne was instrumental in rejuvenating. All around the Near South Side, abandoned industrial complexes are awakening, stretching and yawning and returning to life as residences for families. Even Da Mare calls this neighborhood home. If not gentrification, then rejuvenation has done wonders for this formerly gray pocket of town.
Lynne does point out, however, that south of the Stevenson Expressway - the dreaded coffeehouse word is a lot more applicable - and, according to Lynne, that's not all bad either.
"It raises the standard for everybody," she says. "It provides services that are needed. When new people arrive in a community, they start demanding things that the people who lived there before just accepted that they weren't going to have."
Lynne cites the new, sprawling Dominick's supermarket on Canal Street as one of those new conveniences necessitated by an increasing Near South population.
For the faithful, gentrification is simply part of the natural evolution of a neighborhood. "A city, in my opinion, is like an organism, and it grows and it changes, and parts of it die and then parts of it come back, and it's not a static thing. It's always changing," Lynne says.
"Gentrification has been going on forever," says Richard Lindberg, the author of nine books on Chicago history. And while the term, according to most urban anthropologists, came into vogue during the sixties, the process of neighborhoods going from wealthy to poor and back to wealthy again is an ancient story.
"Historically in Chicago," says Lindberg. "A neighborhood is a halfway house for one group of people to live for a time. They climb the socioeconomic ladder, and they move out. Then the next group moves in. Then this whole process begins over again. There is no permanency to a neighborhood in Chicago."
Crime and Crime Again
When Cindi Anderson and her husband moved into their house in Uptown, it was just a dilapidated shell, abandoned and rundown, needing more than a little TLC. Anderson, a certified public accountant and lifelong Chicagoan, had purchased the home as a rehabbing project and an opportunity to live in a culturally-diverse neighborhood that was on a slow economic upswing. Quickly, Anderson and her husband, an Uptown fireman, found out just how diverse their new environs were. Arctic-cold days found pushers peddling drugs across the street. Gang members played O.K. Corral, blasting at each other with handguns through the Anderson's yard. There was an attempted rape of a homeless woman right behind their new home sweet home. Uptown was more than the Andersons had ever bargained for.
"These were eye-opening experiences," says Cindi, 40, who lost in an aldermanic bid in her neighborhood, the 46th ward, last February. Along with two other candidates, Anderson was hoping to dethrone Alderman Helen Schiller, who has been firmly ensconced in the ward for twelve years. "So while we want to live in a diverse community, we want to live in a safe, diverse community."
But does gentrification really affect the crime rate? Developers and yuppie-types will say "yes." Those opposed to gentrification will tell you that crime is universal, no matter what neighborhood.
"It's hard to say whether or not gentrification has played a major role in the reduction of crime," says Arlene Mays of the Chicago Police Department's news affairs division. While overall crime stats are down in the city, Mays suggests that CAPS, the city's much-touted community policing program, and declining national crime statistics have contributed to a downslide in the number of reported crimes.
In Area 14, the Shakespeare District, which includes Humboldt Park, Logan Square and Wicker Park, the numbers suggest that gentrification has yet to take a big bite-out-of-crime. While Wicker Park has seen its share of artists and professional types unloading in the 'hood like Pilgrims hustling off the Mayflower, Humboldt Park is just beginning to show the signs of gentrification. Crime stats of burglaries, batteries, homicides and rapes are nearly identical from 1995 to 1998 in the Shakespeare neighborhood.
But taking a look at Area 1, on the other hand, the police zone that encompasses downtown, Printers Row, the Near West and River West, numbers indicate that gentrification has made a sizable dent. The number of batteries in Area 1, for example, in 1995 stood at 325. In 1998, there were 184. Area 1 sex offenses in 1995 were 53; down to 41 in 1998.
"No one is going to say that gentrification is solely responsible for the reduction of crime," says Mays. "But when you clean a neighborhood up, it certainly helps."
"It does eradicate crime to a certain degree," adds Lindberg. "It gives a community a sense of stability that it may not have had in previous years. Yes, it's unfortunate that some people are uprooted and driven away, but sometimes some very undesirable people are uprooted and driven away. Drug dealers, thugs and those kinds of people."
For Anderson, as the Uptown neighborhood undergoes change, she maintains the incidence of crime right in front of her house have lessened. While gunfire is still often the equivalent of urban crickets in the Uptown night, Anderson, says, because of the gentrifying neighborhood, the chirping has quieted down to few peeps in the night.
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copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.