Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen Read Online Free

black ghettos in 1950 were viable communities. Poverty created its share of social problems (the average income of African-American families then was only slightly more than half that of white families), and these neighborhoods were segregated racially, but, in spite of some degree of class separation within the black ghetto, neighborhoods were largely “vertically integrated.” Affluent, middle-class, working-class, and poor people all lived in relatively close proximity. Social organization was intact. Informal networks kept neighbors in touch with one another, while businesses, schools, churches, fraternal organizations, and volunteer organizations supported viable communities. Most people held jobs. Single-parent families were a distinct minority. Levels of violence were low. Education was valued.
     
    To offer a personal example, my father directed a settlement house in the ghetto of St. Louis, Missouri, from 1946 to 1950. He tells of searching frequently for kids in trouble and—as a white man—having to run up and down the dark staircases of urban tenements late at night. He remembers no feelings of fear. There wasn’t, he says, anything to be afraid of.
     
    A series of events over the next three decades, however, changed this situation radically, creating the modern black ghetto. The first of these events was the wholesale destruction of black neighborhoods by the federal Urban Renewal and the federal Interstate Highway programs. Urban renewal (then called “slum removal”) was initially meant to revive decaying inner-city neighborhoods by transforming them into new, architecturally interesting cultural, commercial, and residential centers. Again, because African Americans generally held less political power, black ghettos were often the chosen sites for slum removal. Significant parts of black ghettos were razed and rebuilt, often as magnets for business or tourism, such as the Loop in Chicago, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, or (somewhat later) the Inner Harbor in Baltimore. Not without justice were the slum renewal programs sometimes called “Negro removal.”
     
    As part of urban renewal, the federal government provided money for the construction of some new public housing for those displaced by the changes. Reasoning that limited resources should go to the poor, Congress set strict income limits on who could live in these new housing “projects.” Functionally, this meant that the poorest members of the black ghetto were moved somewhere else in the city and segregated by class as well as by race, only intensifying their isolation from the larger society. The worst of these projects were high-rise towers that housed many people in small geographic areas. In addition, such public housing provided on average only one unit for every ten units destroyed. The rest of those evicted by urban renewal had to squeeze into whatever already overcrowded ghetto areas remained. One Chicago critic pointed out that since local residents “were already living in coal-bins, out-houses, and other cubbyholes of squalor,” 4 there were few places left to squeeze into.
     
    The Interstate Highway program instituted in 1956 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower repeated the process. As a network of superhighways meant to link the country together was blasted through cities, poor black areas were, not surprisingly, the first choices for disruption. Either an area would be razed and its former inhabitants removed, or a highway would be placed so as to create a physical boundary between the black ghetto and other areas of the city, further isolating its inhabitants.
     
    The federally subsidized highway programs also facilitated the suburbanization of the North, contributing to the erosion of its cities. Increasingly affluent whites were eager to leave those cities, and the government subsidized this exodus by building roads that made daily access to urban workplaces from the suburbs far more feasible. FHA and Veterans