|
COPYRIGHT 2006 The Institute Inc.
Introduction
Cabrini Green is a redeveloping African-American public housing community near downtown Chicago. In 2000, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) initiated a plan to demolish existing buildings and replace them with mixed-income complexes. New upscale condominiums and town homes are appearing on the sites of old resident homes and landmarks, brandishing names such as "Old Town Square" and "North Town Village." Since the policy requires almost all residents to relocate from their neighborhood away from informal support networks and jobs, most have opposed the plan since its inception. In April 2004, the CHA dispensed more than 300 eviction notices to area tenants. Shortly after, residents began to inscribe the name "Cabrini" around the community, over new trashcans and advertising signs, and most prominently over a storefront on a busy arterial road.
In Cabrini Green, the use of language and naming is central to implementing and contesting the process of redevelopment. In what follows, I narrate the residential history of the neighborhood designated "Cabrini Green" in the 1960s. I then employ a critical discourse approach to examine how Chicago urban elites use neighborhood renaming, resident denigration, and neoliberal relocation narratives to displace public housing tenants and carry out redevelopment. Finally, I show that residents recognize the discursive constructions that enable the implementation of redevelopment and contest it in rhetorical ways. To expose their forceful displacement from their community, tenant activists reframe public housing redevelopment as a "human rights crisis." As evidenced by these tactics, redeveloping Cabrini Green is inherently a discursive site, a space market by "cultural production and political struggle" (Conquergood 1992: 97).
A Critical Discourse Approach
With its roots in critical linguistics, critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a perspective that seeks to understand how and why language affects social change. It stems from the conception that language constructions serve to reproduce power, dominance and hegemony by naturalizing social disparities. Critical discourse analysts aim to demystify the causal relationships between the production of language and broader social and political-economic processes to examine how these practices "arise out of and are ideologically shaped by relations of power and struggles over power; and to explore how the opacity of these relationships between discourse and society is itself a factor securing power and hegemony" (Fairclough 1993: 135; Fowler et al. 1979; van Dijk 1993).
The following analysis is grounded in the theory that in-equality is enacted, legitimized and sustained by discourse manipulation and control over the spaces of ideological production. Chicago housing policymakers and developers were able to disseminate discriminatory texts and displace low-income minorities from their homes because of their unequal media access. Instead of using their position to promote debate and purvey equitable solutions to the affordable housing shortage, they naturalized dominant underclass public housing discourses, which in turn stripped vulnerable race and class groups of power and resources (van Dijk 1993; Fairclough 2000; Erjavec 2001).
Although many studies have focused on top-down discourses of dominance, few have examined bottom-up discourses of resistance (van Dijk 1993). In this paper, I show the interaction between urban elites' dominant constructions and public housing residents' subversive manipulations. To document and assess the discursive factors that simultaneously enable and frustrate public housing redevelopment, I integrate textual analysis with ethnographic methodologies. I analyzed hundreds of documents, such as newspaper articles, advertisements, and policy statements, and interviewed 20 upper-income residents and 70 public housing tenants to examine how these language constructs erupted in their daily speech. In addition, during the summers of 2003 and 2004, I was in the community almost every day. I participated in a neighborhood book club and attended all community policing and redevelopment meetings, park events, and many mixed-income social gatherings. Every week, I documented CHA board and committee meetings, as well as Cabrini Green court proceedings and resident activism.
The Social Production of Cabrini Green
In his 1929 study THE GOLD COAST AND THE SLUM, Chicago school sociologist Harvey Zorbaugh describes the Lower North Side of Chicago as a place "in the process of evolution" (Zorbaugh 1929: viii). Indeed, for more than 150 years, residents have identified the land bounded by Halsted Street, Chicago Avenue, Orleans Street, and North Avenue by many names. Although a variety of ethnic and racial groups have established residence in the area, it has remained a low-income community.
Shortly after the city's incorporation in 1937, German immigrants settled in the area. After the Chicago fire devastated the district in 1871, however, they moved further north and were succeeded by newly arrived Swedish immigrants. By 1890, there were more than 10,000 people of Swedish descent, the largest concentration outside Sweden and Finland, and the neighborhood consequently became known as "Swede Town." Concurrently, a small contingent of Irish immigrants settled at the juncture of the river and its north branch in an area called "Kilgubbin" or "the Patch." Comprised of wooden homes adjacent to tanneries, lumber mills, coal yards, and a gas plant, outsiders labeled the district "Smokey Hollow" and "Little Hell." At the turn of the century, Sicilian immigration outpaced that of other ethnic groups. Many Swedes migrated further north to Lakeview and Andersonville, and Chicagoans renamed the area "Little Sicily" (Pacyga and Skerrett 1986; Grossman et al. 2004).
During the first wave of black migration to the north in the 1920s, African-Americans settled in the Lower North Side. To accommodate the new arrivals, the CHA razed many of the area's dilapidated tenement buildings and constructed a 586-unit row home complex in their place. The Francis Cabrini Homes opened for occupancy in 1942. (1) By 1949, African-Americans constituted 40% of the development and the majority of the surrounding neighborhood. Some current public housing residents described community life during this period as "the United Nations," since Puerto Ricans, Italian-Americans, and Chinese-Americans also occupied apartments. As blacks continued to migrate from the south throughout the 1950s, however, their need for adequate housing grew. The CHA completed the 1,896-unit Cabrini Extension in 1958 and the 1,096-unit William Green Homes in 1962. (2) The area took on yet another name, "Cabrini Green."
After the CHA changed leadership in the mid-1950s, they discouraged integration in tenant and site selection. By 1959 blacks occupied 75% of Cabrini Green apartments. (3) Conditions deteriorated because of federal and local cuts to maintenance and security and policy changes over rent payment. The 1968 Brooke Amendment to the U.S. Housing Act, for instance, required all residents to contribute 25% of their income to rent. Although policymakers wrote the amendment as a strategy to increase available funds for public housing construction and maintenance, housing authorities lost money and had to cut services when wealthier residents moved out (Hirsch 1983; Marciniak 1986; von Hoffman 1998).
When Martin Luther King was assassinated that same year, riots erupted in Cabrini Green. Residents who burned and looted stores along Oak Street were beaten by local police and the National Guard. Shortly after this event, the CHA stopped screening tenants, thus increasing the presence of ex-convicts, gang members, and drug users, which further reduced maintenance. Many Cabrini Green tenants attribute the CHA and the city's subsequent neglect of their neighborhood to this event. Wanda Hopkins recalls:
I think they gave up on us. I still believe the city ... said those people are not civilized, that's the only way that they would allow us to live in trash. It was some days that trash was so high in those buildings that I wouldn't stay in my house, 'cause I lived right at the garbage chute and it was just horrible. I think the maintenance people were told that they just didn't have to do it anymore. That's what I think (Hopkins cited in Whitaker 2000: 121).
In 1975, President Nixon placed a moratorium on public housing construction, expanding waitlists at existing, deteriorating developments. Ten years later, President Reagan reduced federal funding for public housing maintenance, rehabilitation, and construction from $35 to $7 billion annually. These decisions rendered the crumbling exteriors of Cabrini Green a permanent feature of the urban landscape (Bauman 2000; Biles 2000).
During the 1970s, the quality of public housing continued to decline as the need for low-income shelter grew. Between 1977 and 1981, the Chicago Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area experienced a 14% decrease in jobs. After the big steel industries such as Wisconsin Steel and U.S. Steelworks closed in the 1980s, more than 10,000 people became unemployed. Chicago permanently lost 150,000 manufacturing jobs by the end of the decade. Not only were public housing residents unable to achieve social mobility through adequately paid employment, but also working-class Chicagoans struggled to make mortgage and rent payments with slashed wages (Squires et al. 1987; Ranney 2003).
Rather than provide shelter for those left unemployed and inadequately housed by deindustrialization and social welfare cutbacks, many municipalities, such as Chicago, institutionalized gentrification and proactively rid their center cities of low-income minorities to increase property tax revenues. In 1968, the Chicago Department of Urban Renewal instituted "Project Chicago-Orleans," which classified the area as "a slum" and "blighted" and led to the development of an upscale 2,600-unit complex on its northeastern boundary. Sure enough, between 1980 and 1990, the median sale price of a single-family home in the area tripled from $138,000 to $700,000. The black population declined by 7,000, while the white population grew by 4,000 (Bennett and Reed 1999). Having provoked upper- and middle-class investment, city officials rendered the Cabrini Green neighborhood vulnerable to redevelopment (Marciniak 1986).
Considering the extent of public housing deterioration, politicians' reluctance to fund social welfare programs, and cities' ambitions for inner-city redevelopment, federal policy-makers forged a new public housing policy. In the fall 1992, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) laid out three main strategies to "revitalize" public housing: 1) deconcentration through scattered...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
