[Daniel Kay Hertz] ¼ The Battle of Lincoln Park: Urban Renewal and Gentrification in Chicago [intersex Book] PDF ✓ Read Online eBook or Kindle ePUB

I was really impressed with this book. Hertz's theory of gentrification and decline as being linked really changed the way I thought about the phenomenon. I live in Cleveland and I think the lessons here are applicable to a number of midwest cities and to a lesser extent every city. English I lived in the area during some of the changes, but found the book a bit disorganized. The early chapters jump back and forth over decades. A simple map of area would have been extremely helpful. There were references to streets I never heard of, and yet lived in the area. Bottom line, I thought I was reading a well researched college term paper. The Battle of Lincoln Park: Urban Renewal and Gentrification in Chicago

In the years after World War II, a movement began to bring the middle class back from the Chicago suburbs to the Lincoln Park neighborhood on the citys North Side. In place of the old, poorly maintained apartments and dense streetscapes of taverns and butchers, rehabbers imagined a new kind of neighborhooda renovated, modern community that held on to the convenience, diversity, and character of a historic urban quarter, but also enjoyed the prosperity and privileges of a new subdivision.

But as the old buildings came down, cheap studios were combined to create ever spacious, luxurious homes. Property values rose swiftly, and the people who were evicted to make room for progress began to assert their own ideas about the future of Lincoln Park. Over the course of the 1960s, divisions within the community deepened. Letters and picket lines gave way to increasingly violent strikes and counterstrikes as each camp tried to settle the same existential questions that beguile so many cities today: Who is this neighborhood for? And who gets to decide? The Battle of Lincoln Park: Urban Renewal and Gentrification in Chicago

Good The Battle of Lincoln Park: Urban Renewal and Gentrification in Chicago Walk about in Lincoln Park today and you might never guess that the comfortable neighborhood before your eyes sprung from such a tumultuous history as divulged in this extremely well researched volume. In many ways a hyperlocal chronicle of a group of mostly well intentioned folks attempting to preserve (their own particular vision of) their community but inadvertently transforming it beyond recognition in the process in ways unforeseen and usually to the detriment of their less affluent neighbors who, yes, eventually started pushing back, The Battle of Lincoln Park also serves as an extremely relevant case study and overall consideration of the pernicious dynamics of gentrification in general and the tangle of problems and conflicts this engenders for urban living no matter the neighborhood or city then or now. Such a study could easily slog down in an alphabet soup of community organizations and governmental bodies , but the author deftly keeps these distinct in the reader's mind as he details their dramatic developments in a narrative at once thought provoking and riveting. That and the book's spare and slender format make for perfect reading on a Chicago commute. This book covers a period that began before I was born and ended before I moved to the city. Therefore, nearly every page had a revelation that was new to me. (Isn’t it a shame how local history is largely a mystery?)

I guarantee that after reading this book you’ll never look at the Magnificent Mile, the Gold Coast, Cabrini Green, or Lincoln Park in the same way. Hertz deftly writes about the history and issues that shaped each area, and the aggressive neighborhood groups that, in some cases, bullied their way into preserving (or condemning) them. Today, many commentators associate population decline with poverty, and population growth with gentrification. But this book suggests otherwise.
In particular, the author focuses on Lincoln Park, an affluent neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. In 1950, this was another of the city’s many white working class neighborhoods. But in the 1950s and 1960s, middle class people started renovating homes, and eventually made it one of the city’s richer areas. However, Lincoln Park’s gentrification actually reduced the neighborhood’s population, from 102,000 in 1950 to 67,000 today. These declines were driven partially by smaller household sizes, but Lincoln Park also lost housing stock; Lincoln Park had almost 3000 fewer houses in 2016 than 1950.
How did this happen? First, gentrifiers bought up small apartment buildings and turned them into single family houses, thus reducing the number of occupants. Second, gentrifiers urged the city to strictly enforce building codes in order to wipe out small apartment buildings full of poor people. Third, gentrifiers endorsed the city’s use of eminent domain to wipe out low income housing. Fourth, after taking over the neighborhood, the gentrifiers fought for restrictive zoning to keep out apartment buildings. Very well written history of the gentrification of Lincoln Park, ranging from the early post WWII efforts by Bohemian artists, through the pitched battles between the Poor People's Campaign (spearheaded by the Young Lords Organization, lead by Cha Cha Jimenez), the do gooder rehabers (who wanted to keep Lincoln Park diverse, but also wanted to drive out poor people), and well financed developers (who wanted to replace existing low density housing with high rises for the wealthy). For a relatively short (166 pages) history of a really complex series of events, Daniel Kay Hertz does a fine job of describing events at a level of detail which allows the reader to understand the sequence of events, without burying the narrative in details.

My only disagreement with Hertz (and the reason I didn't award fie stars), is that he gives too much credit to market forces and not enough to raw political power. He carefully draws a distinction between public redevelopment (classic urban renewal) and private actions, noting that one of the weaknesses of the resistance was underestimating the power of the private market forces. However, his own narrative establishes that those private market forces depended in large part on government activity: in the early days, the massive demolition of poor people's housing on the borders of Lincoln Park (Cabrini Green and Sandberg Village), followed by code enforcement by the City, designation of the area as a conservation area. Even without any direct government acquisition or demolition of property in Lincoln Park, each of these actions assured private landowners (and speculators) comfort that the government was going to support them, and was not going to disinvest in Lincoln Park as it did (for example) in Englewood.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in Chicago history, and particularly for anyone fighting the forces of gentrification. English