Today, on the way to my visit the grave of my wife's grandfather, my wife, her father, and I got into a conversation about economics that rolled into Chicago and emperor Daley. I'll spare you all the details of the convo, but I will say that it became pretty heated when we got on the topic of crime in the city and gentrification of certain historically black neighborhoods. In brief, gentrification of Chicago's poor neighborhoods has escalated similarly to the scenario New York is seeing with Harlem. Many poor, minority families are being pushed out of their neighborhoods to make way for trendy shopping centers, pricey condo developments, and just general yuppie fuckery. This is the basis for my argument.
My wife's father is of the belief that "cleaning up" these neighborhoods and making life all nice and pretty for young, snotty inhabitants to move into is a great thing that should be commended. He contends that making the city appear clean, glitzy, and pricey is just what it needs to improve the living standards of its inhabitants and to get Chicago recognized as a world class city on the level of New York, London, Paris, and Los Angeles. He also thinks that by doing this you eradicate crime in the area by forcing the people committing the crime out of the area. Here is where we differ.
While I agree that something should be done to lower the crime rate in the Chicago metro area, I don't think that pushing out it's current lower income inhabitants is the way to go. As I see it, the number one cause of crime anywhere in the world is economics. Rich people (or people who are living in a comfortable situation) don't kill, steal, or burden their community at nearly the rate that poor people do. By gentrification pushing low income families out of the neighborhoods that they work and live in you're, in effect, just moving a brain tumor to your throat. That is to say the problem is not being cured. The crime rate doesn't go down in the city...it just goes down in that area specifically.
The crime is going to shift. Instead of a gang-affiliated teenager living and doing his various detrimental activities in say Cabrini Green, his family is pushed into an economically viable area near the same neighborhood. So the influence and activities that this teen is involved in move to that neighborhood with him and now people who never saw it coming slowly have more and more crime creeping into their everyday lives. This area becomes the new 'problem area' with no way to deal with the influx of crime that has stormed into it. No one is addressing this situation because they are not addressing the cause of the crime.
The cause is that you have people who can't afford to live being asked to not only live and support their families, but also provide some kind of economic example for their children to grow up with and prosper from. Parents who are working two or three jobs just to keep food on the table don't have the time to keep an eye on their children who are left to gain most of their knowledge about the world from the streets; the corner hustler, the pimp, or the gangster becomes a role model of sorts. These people usually have the money and respect that the teen craves and become the guide into a life of fast money, fast women, and hard living. These people also have words of guidance and encouragement for the child that they don't get at home from their stressed-out over-worked parents. The biggest difference between a South Side child sucked into a life of crime and a Lincoln Park child with Harvard aspirations is in their parents wallets and not necessarily some cultural or genetic dissimilarity.
Until this city, and this country on a larger scale, begins to address the root of inner-city crime we're never going to lower the crime rate. The answer is clearly economic development. In times of prosperity the crime rate falls and if you think the two items are unrelated then you probably think Iraq has WMDs also. If you create decent-paying jobs that allow people to invest time in their children and care into their community, then you create an environment where the positive aspects of life can be promoted rather than seen as an unattainable dream. If we continue to attempt to gentrify these areas instead of improve them from the ground up we're going to continue to produce angry and disenfranchised youth in low income areas that see crime as the only way they can make ends meet.
2 comments:
Hello David, I just found your blog as I was browsing around and I spent quite a few minutes totally enjoying your writing rants (you might call them wrants eh?)--I agreed with so many of your thoughts, and felt myself nodding along and muttering right, right, very wise, etc. as I read. I live in Chicago and have had it up to here with crime, this year alone my husband's car was stolen right off the street, we've seen the cops in our backyard looking for a perp with their magnums drawn (that was freaky scary), a woman was assaulted down the block and a neighbor was held up at 3 in the afternoon, also on our street...you would think we live in the hood, but we don't. the hood just likes to come to us (for the very same reasons you listed here though we don't live in a "gentrified" neighborhood, actually we live in an established neighborhood but it simply means that crime is well-established as well as the rest of whatever is there...anyway, I didn't mean to write such a long comment, I just wanted to say keep writing, and thinking about these things...it is so refreshing to read someone's thoughts when they are articulated so clearly...blogging has spawned so much writing and it makes me mad sometimes when the writing starts out so promising and degenerates into well, the maudlin or worse...but this is a rant for my own blog if I had one, which I do but I don't write in it...anyway, check back with you later...
bc, thanks for the encouraging words. I'm glad you enjoy my wrants.
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