1969 THROWBACK: "WHITE FLIGHT FROM CHICAGO HOUSING PROJECTS" скачать в хорошем качестве

1969 THROWBACK: "WHITE FLIGHT FROM CHICAGO HOUSING PROJECTS"

In Chicago, block busting was so visible during the 1960s that one can literally name the month a given parish ‘went black’. A neighbourhood that is ‘changing’ or ‘changed’ is no longer considered a good mortgage or loan risk by financial institutions. They do what is called ‘redlining’ - actually drawing red lines around such neighbourhoods on a map. Presumably, they would have refused Ho ward Hughes a mortgage m a redlined. neighbourhood despite his personal financial solidity. The banks claim that if the mortgagee defaults, they are left with insufficiently saleable collateral. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because as people cannot get loans to fix up their property and mortgages to buy houses, the neighbourhoods do indeed decline. Ironically, the money that the bank is refusing to loan is mostly the money deposited by people in that redlined neighbourhood. Instead of their money being used to stabilise their own homes, it is being lent to speculators in the suburb. The federal government, by the way, is insuring these financial institutions, regulating them and, until quite recently, not uttering of protest. But this is all demographics and real estate. What about housing the poor? Basically the poor have had two choices - to live in housing left behind by the less poor (called the trickle-down effect) or to live in government-provided housing. The government has been in the housing business since the Great Depression when people were actually homeless. The Works Progress Administration - one of Roosevelt’s New Deal programmes - built 51 demonstration projects across the country, three in Chicago. These were operated by the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), formed in 1937, with their own rent payments. The federal government was besieged with complaints that it was competing with private industry, so in 1937 it switched signals. Now the federal government were to offer tax-exempt bonds which would be used to pay private contractors to build public housing. During the war years again, the US found itself with insufficient housing stock in industrial centres like Chicago and the government again moved in to help. Thus far, public housing had been intended to add more housing to the market and to give people the temporary help they needed to move up and out. Basically, it was working. But after the war, things began t o change. The people in the public housing began to be more and more the hard-core poor with no upward mobility in sight even for the next generation. By 1950, 27 per cent of the families were on welfare. By 1968, 60 per cent were. By 1975, 87 per cent. More and more, the families were black, blacks who had come to the golden land of the North for jobs and a chance to better themselves and discovered worse treatment in some ways than they had left behind. By 1955, the projects (and that is what their inhabitants call them) were two-thirds black. By 1969, 99 per cent. As well, the housing it self changed. Public housing had been built like other housing-three and four-storey brick buildings with grassy courts in the thirties, row houses during the war. After the war, they were also built like private buildings but private builders were now building high-rise apartment towers. By 1948, Chicago had built its first high-rise project. Between 1957 and 1968, 15,591 units were built, all but 700 in high-rises.