Learning to Live with the Slums
Learning to Live with the Slums
This chapter describes the development of Dearborn Park, a new housing development built in the South Loop during the 1970s and early 1980s. Dearborn Park, sponsored and financed by a group of downtown business leaders associated with the Chicago Central Area Committee, was an effort to initiate the transformation of the near-downtown area into middle-class residential communities. The project was intended to increase the presence of middle-class whites in the downtown area, an objective viewed as central to the protection of downtown property values. Yet the project’s sponsors also sought to achieve some racial diversity in the new development. Concerned that the city’s growing black population would intensify white flight, the sponsors of Dearborn Park viewed the development as a model community that would disrupt rigid patterns of thinking about race and housing and persuade whites that integrated neighborhoods could work.
Keywords: Dearborn Park, Chicago Central Area Committee, Thomas Ayers, Ferd Kramer, Philip Klutznik, Richard J. Daley, gentrification, neoliberalism
Chicago Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
