Quote:
Originally Posted by ardecila
Fair point. Chicago is not the immigrant destination that it once was, and certainly doesn't receive New York-like levels of immigration. We have very small Caribbean, African, and Asian communities (Chinese excepted). There are various reasons for this, but the two solutions are A) increasing immigration overall via Federal policy and B) attracting new immigrants to Chicago.
As 10023 mentioned - at first it seemed naive, but I thought again - what needs to happen is a concentration of resources. The city right now is using TIF districts to fund isolated housing projects. Really, the city should be abolishing TIF and then spending funds in a concentrated way, working to revitalize neighborhoods one at a time instead of spreading resources thinly over the whole city.
The Oakwood Shores project is a perfect example. Because of the architectural goal of gaining variety, CHA broke up the site into a patchwork quilt of lots and gave sets to different developers. The result is a patchwork neighborhood that doesn't feel much more established than the ghettos that surround it. Site choices also created a massive dead space between the new buildings and older neighborhoods west of King Drive. If CHA had the ability to concentrate funding here and complete the build-out, it would really kickstart the whole area. Instead CHA's resources are being spent in hundreds of places around the city with no critical mass. I see less reason to spend money on housing in Pilsen or Little Village, where neighborhoods are still largely intact, green, and leafy. This could tie nicely into broader city goals - concentrating population along transit lines, or bringing populations within walking distance of park space.
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^ My problem with the CHA policy in general is that it has essentially become black housing.
Immigrants come to a neighborhood, pay rent in existing housing, and slowly make the neighborhood their own. This has happened all over the country as well as elsewhere in Chicago. Problem is, this process can't take place if there's
no housing to begin with.
Widespread demolition on the west and south sides has made those areas inhospitable to pretty much anybody other than the CHA, which has the resources to build housing for poor black people (and pretty much nobody else) on these sites. Hence those areas of the south and west sides are the least diverse areas of the city, while immigrants have concentrated on the southwest, far north, and northwest sides where the housing supply is mostly intact.
My solution is even more radical: relax the building code in the most troubled areas of the south and west sides, make it easier to build market-rate cheap housing, sell of CHA lots to private investors and let the private landlords build what they think the market demands. Get rid of the worthless CHA, and just let the city develop organically like it did in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Of course, that would get rid of the delusion of the "black mecca" that those people who, still stuck in their nostalgic 1950's dream world, want to revive--but lets move on. Besides, there can still be a "black mecca" of Africans or people from the Carribean, but I doubt they would want to live in CHA housing. There really is no reason why these groups should be moving to New York instead of Chicago--most immigrants care about jobs and opportunities and that's pretty much it.
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