Is Chicago Creating the Third Ghetto?

From Dr. Jim Throgmorton

Is Chicago Creating the Third Ghetto? Current Evidence and a Reconnaissance Framework
Presented by Andrew J. Greenlee, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Urban Planning and Policy, University of Illinois at Chicago

Wednesday, October 21, 2009
7:00 – 8:30 pm
2520D University Capitol Center
The University of Iowa

This presentation will focus on the multi-state diaspora of Chicago’s public housing residents, as facilitated by the policies of mobility written into the Housing Choice Voucher Program.

To enhance understanding of this diaspora, it will first provide background about the rise of Chicago’s “first ghetto” after WW I, and the subsequent rise of what Arnold Hirsch has termed the “second ghetto” as a result of post-WW II policies that resulted in the construction of concentrated clusters of high-rise public housing projects. The presentation will then contrast the “second ghetto” with the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation (1999 to the present). This part will focus on how the Plan’s multi- pronged strategy of deconcentrating poverty through place-based improvements (mixed income communities) and people-based benefits (housing vouchers) has helped fulfill the promise of “transforming” Chicago’s most disinvested spaces of public housing, but has also created room for the retrenchment of some former public housing residents into racially- and economically-segregated communities within the region, mostly via voucher-based residential mobility. Spatially, the presentation will focus on moves made throughout the State of Illinois, especially in terms of flows in and out of Chicago/Cook County, but it will also touch on interstate flows of people from Chicago and other Illinois housing authorities to places such as Iowa City.

This presentation is free and open to the public