Chicago’s Urban Lessons
IPR Faculty analyze trends shaping the city

Fall 2006, Volume 28, Number 1

From left: Panelists Juan Onésimo Sandoval, Mary Pattillo, and Wesley G. Skogan participate in a Q-and-A session with the audience.

Having evolved over the years into a distinct mixture of classes, races, and ethnicities, the city of Chicago and its suburbs offer a unique perspective on many of today’s challenging urban problems. Three IPR scholars, who have all studied the city from various vantage points, discussed some of their latest research on the city’s crime rates, the transformation of public housing, and diversity and segregation patterns at a March 10 IPR policy briefing in Chicago.

In all, 75 people attended, including representatives from law enforcement, the city of Chicago, and foundations, in addition to academics and advocates. The policy briefing was funded by a grant from the Joyce Foundation.

Crime Declines—But Why?

IPR Faculty Fellow Wesley G. Skogan, a professor of political science, traced the plunge in Chicago’s crime rates, which mirrored a national trend, from 1991 to 2005. During that period, violent crime decreased 59 percent, property crime decreased 43 percent, and street crime decreased 55 percent.

“The decline in crime is one of the most significant social facts of the end of the 20th century,” Skogan pointed out. “It’s also one of the least understood.” He reviewed a multitude of reasons that have been proposed for the drop—many often politically motivated and without hard data to back them up.

He refuted the idea that it was due to a booming economy or a decrease in the number of young people, who are more likely to commit crime. “The age distribution didn’t change,” Skogan said, “and the economy was very disappointing in Chicago.”

Another common explanation given is an increase in rates of incarceration. Yet after 1999, rates of imprisonment dropped, and crime rates continued to decrease, he said.

Declining gun use also does not adequately explain the trend. The number of crimes committed without guns is down just as much as those committed with, he found. He also ruled out gang-related homicides because they have a different dynamic that lends itself to a cyclical pattern. Also lacking evidence for probable cause are variations in the crack cocaine market (which has not declined much in Chicago), the demolition of public housing, and violence in schools, which is actually increasing. In addition, there is not enough evidence about the impact of “smarter” policing, and community factors such as neighborhood solidarity on the city-wide decline in crime, although they have the proven ability to control crime in neighborhood-sized areas.

“A 15-year decline is almost too big for one big reason,” he concluded. It is more likely that many factors “worked together as a mix over time.”

Skogan has offered one possible scenario that includes the combined effects of prison in the early 1990s, when the hardest-core offenders were being locked up; community policing in the late 1990s; and the more recent adoption of smarter policing tactics with a proven impact on violent crime.

Public Housing and Broken Promises

In 1986, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) closed six public housing buildings of the Lakefront Properties development for renovation, relocating more than 800 families in the process.

“This story is really about the rights of public housing residents and indeed the rights of poor people generally, and how these rights are influenced by questions of legitimacy,” said IPR Faculty Associate Mary Pattillo, a sociologist who studied the transformation of the Lakefront Properties. She is Arthur Andersen Research and Teaching Professor.

The public housing families, unhappy about having to relocate and worried that the new development would prove too expensive for them to move back, created the Lakefront Community Organization (LCO). Thirty LCO members stayed behind to enforce a CHA-signed agreement that promised residents the right to return once the rehabilitation was complete. But nothing happened for five years.

In the interim, developers had set their sights on the increasingly desirable North Kenwood/Oakland area where the Lakefront Properties were located. Quickly, talk turned to demolition to make way for new, lucrative market-rate housing. Ten years later, a weakened LCO signed a revised agreement, “which doomed the fate of the Lakefront properties,” she said, “but promised displaced residents apartments in the planned mixed-income community that would replace the high-rises.”

By 1998, CHA had built only 111 of the 441 promised replacement units. The LCO appealed to a federal court to stop the demolition. “Nonetheless,” she said, “the buildings were demolished as planned.”

The story emphasizes the vast power differential between public housing residents on the one side and city officials and private investors on the other, Pattillo said.

The Multicultural Metropolis

Having examined patterns of multi-racial diversity and segregation from 1980 to 2000, Juan Onésimo Sandoval, an IPR faculty fellow and an assistant professor of sociology, has found that while racial diversity has dramatically increased in the Chicago area, segregation still remains a problem, though it has somewhat improved.

Aurie Pennick, executive director of the Field Foundation, asks a question.

In 1980, Sandoval said 83 percent of Chicago-area neighborhoods were highly segregated, and this group had dropped to 63 percent by 2000. In terms of racial diversity, however, only 1 percent of census tracts were racially integrated in 1980, and this fraction had increased to just 2 percent by 2000. These levels of integration are low compared with other large cities, such as Los Angeles with 7 percent and New York City with 3 percent in 1980, which had increased to 9 percent for both of these cities by 2000.

Most of the racial diversity increase occurred in white and Latino neighborhoods, Sandoval explained, where there is more mixing. Blacks, on the other hand, still live in the most segregated neighborhoods in the Chicago area, he said.

The overall picture for metropolitan Chicago is mixed. “Segregation is going down in the central city,” he said, “but not in the suburbs.”

As a result, the suburbs now account for a larger portion of the segregation that still exists in and around Chicago. In 1980, 14 percent of segregation was in the suburbs, and that portion had increased to 31 percent by 2000. On the other hand, 61 percent of total segregation was from central cities in 1980 compared to 51 percent in 2000.

“The presentations illuminated three of the biggest issues for Chicago over the past 20 years—crime, the decline in public housing, and residential segregation,” said Fay Lomax Cook, IPR’s director and a professor of human development and social policy. “By bringing analyses of the three together in one policy briefing, IPR was able to provide a comprehensive understanding of some of Chicago’s successes as well as some of the challenges still facing the city.”

Click here to view the video or the slide presentations.

Click here for more information about the IPR faculty presenters and their research.