In Humboldt Park, such efforts helped the neighborhood retain its Puerto Rican flavor but did little to prevent the departure of Puerto Rican residents. Between 1990 and 2000, forces of white gentrification spilling over from the red-hot Wicker Park real estate market to the east caused the Puerto Rican population there to decline 23 percent—leading to some creative approaches. By the summer of 2006, for example, a group of local activists calling themselves the Puerto Rican Agenda began actively recruiting Puerto Rican professionals to buy homes in the area.92 While a short-lived and ultimately unsuccessful experiment, this campaign was nonetheless suggestive of how the “third wave” of gentrification had reconfigured the struggle to produce ethnoracial community space in Chicago. Decades ago such struggles to identify community spaces were hard to separate from broader campaigns for social justice; in the Richard M. Daley era, the global-city agenda and the irrepressible push for gentrification transformed these very same identities into tools for branding, commerce, and accumulation.
There was perhaps no clearer testimony to this shift than the evolution of Danny Solis from militant activist for La Raza in the 1970s to Richard M. Daley’s handpicked alderman and architect of Pilsen’s theme-park marketing campaign in the mid-1990s. After being appointed in 1996 to fill the vacant aldermanic seat in the Twenty-Fifth Ward, which also included sections of Chinatown and Little Italy, Solis paved the way for a number of upscale housing developments, including, most notably, the controversial University Village—a massive middle- to upper-income housing development built on the land where the famous Maxwell Street flea market once stood. In addition to destroying a revered historical landmark, where blues greats like Bo Diddley, Junior Wells, and Little Walter played to admiring crowds of blacks and whites alike amidst the odors of grilling Polish sausages, University Village also spurred a wave of condominium development that caused median housing values in neighboring East Pilsen to rise as much as 548 percent in the 1990s.93 While providing the University of Illinois–Chicago with much-needed housing and another middle-class buffer zone, such changes created significant hardships for Pilsen’s low-income residents, and demands for affordable housing energized the campaigns of those who challenged Solis’s seat. Nonetheless, Solis and his supporters in Pilsen’s United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) remained unwavering in their support for new development. Founded by Solis in 1984, UNO viewed itself in its early days as modeled on the Saul Alinsky style of community organizing, but it remained somewhat silent about two of the most pressing issues for Pilsen’s working-class residents: the need for more affordable housing and the high particulate and carbon dioxide emissions from the area’s two coal plants.94 Thus, while UNO’s acronym was intended to connote its alliance with the larger Mexican community, its program inevitably advanced the interests of middle-class Mexicans at the expense of their working-class neighbors.
Appeals to ethnoracial solidarity also served those opposing the forces of gentrification in both Pilsen and Humboldt Park. For example, the Pilsen Alliance, a grassroots organization active in the fight for affordable housing and public oversight of rezoning decisions, tapped into the neighborhood’s rich tradition of community murals to spread its message of social justice. This strategy of placing the community’s Mexican identity at the center of its antigentrification campaign was revealed during Pilsen’s annual Fiesta del Sol street festival, where the Alliance sold T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Pilsen Is Not For Sale.”95 In addition, Humboldt Park’s many grassroots associations—the Latino United Community Housing Association (LUCHA), Communities United for Affordable Housing (CUFAH), the Near Northwest Neighborhood Network (NNNN), and the Puerto Rican Cultural Center’s Participatory Democracy Project—engaged in similar tactics in voicing their demands for more affordable housing. Although the crowds that gathered at their rallies were usually multiethnic, Puerto Rican flags were often as conspicuous as signs reading “We Shall Not Be Moved.”
Some of these same organizations were also active in the predominantly Latino Logan Square neighborhood just to the north, where gentrification advanced at a much faster pace than in Humboldt Park. Between 1996 and 2006, the median sale price for a single-family detached home in Logan Square jumped a remarkable 385 percent—a trend that was spurred more by the rehabilitation of its many beautiful Victorian greystone mansions than by new large-scale developments.96 Once home to significant communities of Poles and Russian Jews, Logan Square had become a major port of entry for Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans beginning in the late 1960s and by 2010 contained the largest population of Latinos in Chicago.97 Yet this formidable presence of working-class Mexicans and Puerto Ricans did surprisingly little to slow down the rush of middle-class whites into Logan Square, where between 2000 and 2010 the non-Latino white population grew by 7,000 and the number of Latinos dropped by 16,000. Even a seemingly endless and at times homicidal battle for turf between such high-profile gangs as the Latin Kings, Maniac Latin Disciples, and Spanish Cobras failed to stop Logan Square’s transformation. By 2010, the area boasted some of the city’s most cutting-edge bars, coffee shops, and restaurants, including the famed Lula Cafe, where young hipsters could choose from such gastronomic creations as risotto with spiced rabbit, roasted morels, spinach, parmesan, and shaved foie gras.
Logan Square thus became a gentrification success story that replayed Wicker Park’s dramatic conversion in the 1990s from a somewhat depopulated working-class Mexican enclave where the Latin Kings cultivated a lucrative drug-trafficking enterprise into a bastion of avant-garde artistic production and million-dollar Victorian mansions. Part of what made the change possible in both Logan Square and Wicker Park was the relatively unproduced nature of these neighborhoods. Without the psychologically imposing presence of the massive iron flags that marked off the Paseo Boricua, both Wicker Park and Logan Square were much easier for realtors and developers to market to white middle-class condo buyers. In other words, Wicker Park and Logan Square were more susceptible to white yuppie invasion because, unlike Humboldt Park or Pilsen, their spaces had never been produced to reflect a politicized sense of ethnoracial identity. Whites ended up moving into Logan Square rather than neighboring Humboldt Park in part because they were uncomfortable about living “between the flags” and in part because Humboldt Park’s Puerto Rican heritage gave residents there a useful tool with which to mobilize against gentrification. Whereas a sense of exclusionary ethnic pride was inscribed within the geography and history of the Paseo Boricua—the iron flags, the barrio riot of 1966, and a militant Puerto Rican independence movement in the 1980s and 1990s98—Logan Square’s brand of ethnic culture was alluring to white artists, musicians, and others looking for a lower-cost alternative to the increasingly homogeneous, high-priced North Side areas around Lakeview, Lincoln Park, Old Town, the Ukrainian Village, and Wicker Park, after it lost its “edge.”
Logan Square, like Manhattan’s Lower East Side (or “Loisaida” to the Puerto Rican residents who used to live there) in the 1980s, possessed an “edge”: here Mexican vendors peddled elotes (grilled, spiced corn on the cob with mayonnaise) and tamarind popsicles in the streets, the remnants of broken piñatas littered the sidewalks, banda and mariachi music blared out of passing cars, and bursts of gunfire could be heard, at times, piercing the night.99 Although white middle-class residents of course did not approve of the homicidal gunplay around them, gang warfare was nevertheless part of the larger package of qualities that branded the neighborhood as a place where alternative, artistic, and independently minded people lived. As Richard Lloyd’s close ethnographic study of Wicker Park in the 1990s demonstrates, Chicago’s bohemians and gentrification entrepreneurs tended to glamorize the danger of street life, often speaking nostalgically about it after gentrification had eliminated it. Their need to negotiate the dangers and cultural clashes that came with living in a largely working-class Mexican neighborhood shaped a “hipster aesthetic,” influenced by the grunge style being popularized on the natio
nal stage, that included visible tattoos, secondhand clothes, and unkempt hair.100 A similar austerity characterized Wicker Park’s two signature hipster cafés in the 1990s, Earwax and Urbis Orbis. The edginess of the neighborhood—not to mention the low rents—attracted a bohemian crowd of artists, musicians, writers, and others employed in the culture industries. The arrival of such trendsetters made it much more attractive to middle-class white condo buyers, whose presence, in turn, attracted more upscale commercial establishments, thereby completing the gentrification process. Hence, by 2002 a chic fitness club called Cheetah Gym had opened in the space where cigarette-lipped hipsters used to drink coffee in Urbis Orbis.
Logan Square’s new middle-class white residents constituted this second wave of gentrifiers, and they were engaged in producing the space around them to reflect their politics and lifestyle. The innovative cafés, bars, and restaurants that opened their doors to serve them were critical to this process. If earthy vegetarian fare and no frills coffee drinks were de rigueur at Earwax and Urbis Orbis, in twenty-first century Logan Square fresh-roasted coffee beans, organic baby vegetables, and Belgian-style microbrewed beer spiced with coriander and orange peel juxtaposed with pork tacos, rice and beans, and mofongo. As Logan Square hipsters and the commercial establishments they frequented sought to redefine the neighborhood, they engaged in a process that looked somewhat like what Dick Hebdige has termed bricolage—a blending of their own tastes and styles with seemingly dissonant elements from the working-class Latino culture around them.101 Such acts of creative consumption even extended to one of the city’s renowned culinary trademarks, the hot dog. Although in Chicago nondescript hot dog joints are ubiquitous, which rendered the standard hot-dog-and-french-fries meal undesirable to many hipsters, Logan Square residents lived not far from a hot dog restaurant, Hot Doug’s, where they could find a Mexican-inflected sausage with chili-garlic mayonnaise and salsa jack cheese accompanied by fries cooked in duck fat. In Wicker Park, one of the hippest restaurants, star restauranteur Paul Kahan’s Big Star, offered its hip clientele designer lamb, pork, and fish tacos, alongside an elaborate selection of bourbons, all consumed to a studied soundtrack of retro pop, country, and funk. Mexican service workers staffed the kitchen and takeout window, but around the bustling bar, the staff was mostly white and fashionable. Yet such examples should not give the impression that hipster bricolage on the gentrification frontier was only about replacing local culture or creating a parallel community. The hipster ethos in Chicago also celebrated an ability to adapt to the local scene, and this pushed white middle-class bohemians and professionals alike into indigenous bars and restaurants. In neighborhoods like Logan Square and the Ukrainian Village during the transitional 1990s, it was not uncommon to find corner bars with jukeboxes offering a selection of Polish polkas, Mexican banda, and a range of pop and indie rock.
But in advancing this idea of gentrification as a piecemeal, market-based process driven by individuals pursuing objectives of self-identification that slot them into distinct if at times overlapping communities, we risk overlooking a critical factor. A range of policies implemented by City Hall beginning in the early 1990s fueled gentrification every step of the way: the creation of TIFs throughout the city provided capital for costly infrastructural improvements and beautification efforts; the Renaissance 2010 school reform created schools acceptable to educated, middle-class homeowners; the CAPS program cultivated a police force responsive to homeowners’ concerns about the “bad” behavior of their working-class neighbors; and perhaps most importantly, City Hall opened the floodgates to condominium development by allowing aldermen to control zoning changes within their respective wards with virtually no public oversight. While theoretically empowered to reject “upzoning” requests for the construction of large housing developments and commercial centers, the city council in practice acted as little more than a rubber stamp, vetoing a mere fifteen such petitions out of several thousand filed between 1997 and 2007. This meant enormous benefits for Chicago’s aldermen, who enthusiastically traded their signatures on upzoning petitions for campaign contributions. In his first term on the city council, for example, only one other alderman approved more upzoning petitions than Wicker Park’s (First Ward) Manuel Flores—a performance that explains why nearly a quarter of his $1.2 million in campaign donations came from contractors and developers and why Wicker Park emerged as one of the nation’s most spectacular gentrification success stories.102 Moreover, such practices ran up against little opposition because many of the local advisory bodies empowered to review rezoning requests were dominated by developers and contractors.
Chicago’s rezoning system thus stacked the cards heavily in favor of gentrification during the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century. In this Chicago differed significantly from other U.S. global cities, such as San Francisco and New York, where an emphasis on centralized planning and community participation in the rezoning process somewhat mitigated the wholesale transformation of neighborhoods in the 1980s and 1990s. New York, no less than Chicago, witnessed the rise of powerful movements for community control in the 1960s and 1970s, but, unlike in Chicago, these campaigns left a meaningful imprint on New York’s zoning process, leading to the establishment of fifty-nine community boards across the five boroughs to provide aggressive public oversight of proposed zoning changes. These boards became incubators for antigentrification campaigns in the late 1980s and 1990s, when protesters in the East Village made a habit of scrawling “Die Yuppie Scum” all over the neighborhood. Moreover, without Chicago’s tradition of “aldermanic prerogative,” New York’s council members at times found it more politically expedient to take the side of citizens protesting unwanted development—a situation that was very rare in Chicago. Chicago’s city council, by contrast, did not approve a new zoning code until 2004, revising a system that had remained virtually unchanged for almost half a century. But many of the new rules added to create greater community input in the rezoning process were largely ignored. A 2008 Tribune investigation, for example, found that aldermen seldom enforced the requirement obligating developers to post signs on the sites of proposed zoning changes.103
MAP 7. The gentrification frontier west of the Loop.
Hence, without New York’s well-established institutional framework for public participation in land use politics, Chicago saw relatively little grassroots mobilization around decisions reshaping its built environment, and this history of quiescence performed an important ideological function that quickened the city’s brisk pace of real estate transactions during the Richard M. Daley era. Indeed, gentrification is made possible not only by the construction of new housing and the rehabilitation of old; it also depends on a healthy supply of buyers ready to risk their personal capital on neighborhoods on the make. Many of the white middle-class families moving into Wicker Park and other parts of West Town in the 1990s and into Logan Square in more recent years were seeking not just a lifestyle but also a good investment. And their feelings about their chances in such “frontier” neighborhoods were conditioned by what they had seen happening around them. By the mid-1990s, not only had they had seen others like themselves strike it rich in Wicker Park, but they also understood all the things that City Hall would do for them—from bringing the boot down on gangbangers to enforcing noise ordinances, to building parks and new library branches, to doing whatever was necessary to facilitate the subsequent development they depended on to raise their property values. However, the confidence they had in City Hall also came from all that they had not seen or known—in particular, concerned citizens in the streets or at zoning board hearings complaining about the condominiums and shopping centers popping up around them.
During Chicago’s high years of gentrification in the 1990s residents watched neighborhoods transforming in real time before their eyes with few glitches. The typical scenario began with the construction of a multiunit condominium building—sometimes a conversion of an old factory or warehouses, at others
a new structure rising up from the rubble of a teardown or a litter-strewn vacant lot. In most cases, façades were brick and balconies conspicuous; the more upscale boasted rooftop swimming pools, exercise facilities, and well-manicured gardens bounded by imposing iron fences. Then came any number of signature retail establishments catering to a middling clientele—Starbucks, for example, was the well-recognized “canary in the coal mine” for gentrification. After that, the rush was on to buy up old buildings, gut the interiors, and bedeck them with new hardwood floors, fireplaces, and spacious master bedrooms. Chicagoans living around gentrifying neighborhoods knew exactly what this process looked like, and they knew City Hall was behind it with all its might.
But in fact Richard M. Daley never had to say anything too explicit about the city’s support for gentrification; the landscape was full of visual symbols conveying this very idea. A striking example was City Hall’s makeover of the historically decrepit Seward Park, replete with a new state-of-the-art Chicago Public Library branch, at the very moment that the neighboring Cabrini-Green housing projects were in the midst of demolition to make way for a new “mixed-income” community.104 For countless Chicagoans driving by the vacated projects on Halsted or riding by them on a brown-line “L” train, the neatly landscaped Seward Park, hastily erected as the city was buzzing about the demolition of one of the nation’s most notorious housing projects, became a monument to City Hall’s commitment to taking back the city for the middle class.
THE CHALLENGES OF DIVERSITY
The story of how the city of Chicago opened the way for a bustling middle-class neighborhood where an impoverished ghetto had been had to do with much more than building a library and renovating a park. Gazing in the early 1990s upon Cabrini-Green’s ten decrepit cinder-block-like towers huddled around shabbily landscaped parks and courtyards, it was difficult to imagine that the developers eyeing the area would have their day. While white middle-class buyers had proven willing to invest in largely Latino neighborhoods around the Loop, they had largely refused to buy into black areas. Yet the city’s ambitious campaign to demolish black-occupied housing projects and replace them with “mixed-income housing” under the Chicago Housing Authority’s $1.6 billion Plan for Transformation purported, at least ostensibly, to achieve a level of neighborhood diversity that the private housing market had been incapable of bringing about.
Chicago on the Make Page 41