Making the Second Ghetto by Arnold R. Hirsch

Author:Arnold R. Hirsch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Making the second ghetto

You can’t call Stateway [Gardens] a ghetto. It is beautiful.

Alvin Rose, executive director of the Chicago Housing Authority, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Hearings: Chicago (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1959), p. 726.

[The] idiocy of Rose’s remarks is quite apparent.

Typewritten notes, n.d., Leon Despres Papers, Chicago Historical Society

In May 1953, Earl Kribben, a Marshall Field and Company vice-president, asked Governor William Stratton to make the proposed Urban Community Conservation Act an administration bill. The measure was bold in asking for powers “no mayor or alderman had ever dared” to request and was designed to “establish a national pattern in dealing with urban problems.” Less than eight weeks later, Kribben again wrote the governor, this time appealing for his signature on the renewal legislation that had sailed through the General Assembly. He also implored Stratton to veto a bill that provided for local referendums before public housing could be built. The passage of the latter measure, he advised, would “only make the slum job in Chicago that much harder by effectively choking off the supply of relocation housing which must be provided if private capital is to rebuild slums.” “Furthermore,” he added, local referendums were “quite needless, as the City Council [had] the public housing site problem very well in hand.”1 The governor granted both of Kribben’s requests.

The opponents of the renewal legislation claimed that the powers it bestowed upon the city were “unprecedented” encroachments upon “property rights and individual rights.” One critic branded the new measures “undemocratic” and “paternalistic,” claiming that there would be “no need for the communists to overthrow this government by force and violence because . . . the powers given in [the Urban Community Conservation Act] will enable any group of communists to do most anything they care to do.” Perhaps amused at this placement of Marshall Field and Company in the vanguard of the revolution, and supremely confident that renewal plans were well on their way to realization, Earl Kribben, when handed a copy of the critic’s remarks, simply scrawled “Tsk! Tsk!” in the margin.2

This sequence of events clearly demonstrated the combination of forces that produced the second ghetto. First, the larger “downtown” interests and some powerful institutions situated outside the Loop found themselves confronted, after the war, with threats to their survival that were beyond even their considerable means of control. Unable to flee the city, they realized that the power of the state – not as it then existed but in greatly augmented form – would have to be enlisted in their aid. The result was that those economic and institutional interests that had the money, time, personnel, and influence to conduct surveys, make plans, draft legislation, and implement renewal did so. They exerted positive power by guiding the machinery of government. To be sure, the rhetoric of the “public interest” accompanied each new legislative proposal and the wedding of private interest and public power did serve, in some instances, a broadly defined “public interest.” And there is no question

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