In July of 1994, I published a lengthy piece in the Lumpen Times, on the newly contentious topic of gentrification. At that time, Lumpen was a fledgling little magazine that had a large readership in a rather small geographical area, in and around Wicker Park. I called my journalistic style at that time dada-surrealist, with cut-and-paste as one organizing principle. "Cops and Robber Barons" largely focuses on the redlining practices of the banks, which helped pave the way for the resettling of Wicker Park in the '70s and '80s. I am not a statistician, and wading through hundreds, thousands of pages of microforms - microforms! at the library downtown, strained my math muscles to the limit. I found a lot of information startling, not for its content, we all know that banks are not ethical beacons, but for the clarity and stark picture of reality that emerged from this search through records made public through the Community Reinvestment Act and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. A large red line had been drawn around Westtown and Wicker Park, and hardly a dime was lent to any poor person or person of color, even for the most minimal of home improvement loans, for a few decades. And then, Wicker Park exploded, and it's as if a huge can of white paint was tipped over onto the intersection of North, Milwaukee, and Damen, with banks suddenly dumping tens of millions of dollars into the area.
Interspersed with that story, the text sadly overburdened with statistics presented by someone who loves numbers but was barely able to stay above water through thousands of pages of them, are vignettes about the wide variety of police abuses and instances of brutality that continue to pollute our communities today, particularly our poorer ones, as in Wicker Park in the '80s and '90s. There's a bit here and there about graffiti and its importance; at that time, I'd met quite a few writers, artists, and activists who used graffiti as their medium.
Some attention is paid to the psychology and public persona of the gentry. And, ultimately the question of the role of artists and writers in siding with the forces of oppression, or in creating a richer, more equitable world by siding with our neighbors, is the most important and where I ended my story, back then.
A week after publication, I was brutally assaulted by police in front of several hundred people (probably unrelated to the article, but who knows, that's a tale for another day), who had come outside to see what the commotion was all about as a bunch of us were violently arrested for making music at the six-corners in the new arts district. I'm not yet sure if that was a work of art, or not.
Cops
and Robber Barons
The
Truth in Lending Practices of Corrupt and Racist Chicago Banks
[we
wanna turn away from disturbing events, disturbing thoughts]
Last
summer I met a Puerto Rican man who gave me a quick literacy lesson
at the corner of North Avenue and California. He told me there's a cop in
Humboldt Park named Arceo who went into a Puerto Rican family's front
yard and started feeling the daughter's breasts while her mother
looked on in shock. The young woman resisted; the cop pushed her to
the ground, pinned her to the ground, face down. He then pulled her
shirt up over her head, held her hands behind her back …
Channel
26 and other Latino media reported on the event; it never made it
into white media. No public outcry from the Puerto Rican community
led to the dismissal of the cop.
The
man I talked with had a thousand stories like this one. He wrote
about it in the only media available to him: graffiti. He wrote the
cop's name upside down, repeatedly. This is a dis that cops
recognize.
[I
walk through Wicker Park looking for art this vital, this social. I
don't usually find it.]
Graffiti
is a vital form of communication in Chicago's ghettos. Although
Wicker Park and the larger West Town area are still a ghetto, with an
overall 32% poverty rate, the wealthier white settlers and the
settler mentality are taking over. The large FDS (“Fuck Da System”) that used to get
sprayed on the big brown Mussolini wall at Walgreens on Milwaukee got
replaced by the corporate-inspired, ominous-sounding “Follow Da
Leader” mural on the el ramp, cleansed of content and adrenalin.
I
use the term “settler” to define people who move into an area,
take over larger and larger spaces, and attempt to dominate that
area. Settlers view the natives, the preceding inhabitants, with
condescension, bigotry, hatred, brutality. Like Columbus, settlers
even try to blame the natives for the destruction of the indigenous
community. The recent spate of media attention from Spin,
Billboard, New York Times, and
Newsweek reinforce the
settler mentality in Wicker Park / West Town, consistently ignoring
the pre-existing communities.
The
settler mentality can't accept graffiti as legit. Graffiti's not
controllable, not in
the way that tamed and poised “art” is. It's associated with
“gangs.” And, most importantly, as Da Leader blabs in his “Mayor Daley's Graffiti Blasters”
pamphlet, “Graffiti is an ugly form of vandalism. It creates fear,
lowers property values ...” So
never fear, Wicker Park / West Town settler: Pilgrim Daley's military
sodablasting squads and graff squads are there for you, to
cover your unsightly
blemishes, your costly
devaluations. Nevermind the infant mortality, the police brutality,
the economic deprivation, the pain that lives in the Puerto Rican,
Mexican, African-American, and poor white communities that preceded
you.
Focusing
on graffiti's a joke in West Town. But the gentry's whole attack on
graffiti and young people of color makes sense – if turning a buck
through gentrification is the goal. Focusing on the physical
appearance of a neighborhood diverts attention away from root causes
of urban decay – state and institutional neglect and attack,
slumlording, and discriminatory lending practices.
[it's
hard to quantify pain and oppression: how much easier is it to cover
them up?]
I
went to another gentrification meeting at Near Northwest Arts Council
last fall. Various factions of settler society discussed
gentrification, the forced removal of people of color from Wicker
Park / West Town. The Old Milwaukee Avenue Chamber of Commerce gentry
were there, along with some white pioneers from the early Old Wicker
Park Committee days, a few artists (“It's important we be aware of
what impact we're having. This is the third neighborhood I've lived
in where gentrification is happening …” - To what end,
awareness?), small businesspeople like Gary Marx and Ken Corrigan,
and assorted anarchists and independents.
There
was no one from Wicker Park / West Town impacted most by settlerism
in the room. I couldn't get over the impression that the word
“gentrification” is overused and not understood. Overused by
settlers, understood by almost none of the low-income Latinos,
African-Americans, and poor whites I've ever talked with in this
neighborhood. Any discussion of the forced removal of the poor and
people of color that uses the “G” word is probably taking place
without our input and participation.
Ken
Corrigan suggested targeting the banks, rather than the “fronts”
of gentrification like the horrendous and distasteful Around the
Coyote and Bookseller's Row. I thought, “Man, you fuckin' do that.”
The meeting ended with a goon from Chicago Artists' Coalition calling
the now infamous and critical “Pound the Coyote” pamphlet
“fascist”; so much for dunderheaded arts organizations and
freedom of expression.
[there's
a town in England where in the old days only wealthy landowners could
live. It's called Gentry.]
When
we look into the root causes of the destruction of the West Town
Puerto Rican and Mexican communities and into the recent resettlement
by whites, it's inportant to look everywhere – macro, micro,
national, local, theoretical and practical, general and specific. As
in ghettos elsewhere, physical structures and property values in West
Town (bounded by the Chicago River on the east and Humboldt Park on
the west, Kinzie on the south and Bloomingdale on the north) decayed
when the wealthy decreed it. Loans to low-income people of color for
home improvement and purchase dwindled throughout the '70s and '80s.
In
general, West Town banks make a mocker of the idea of “fairness in
lending.” Research into local banks reveals an ugly, racist
approach to the people who lived here before the arrival of the new
settlers: this approach laid the foundation for resettlement.
I
recently stepped inside Manufacturers Bank for the first time since I
moved to West Town; the fresh graffiti on the sidewalk that read
“This Way to Gentrification” had already been scrubbed off.
Manufacturers
Bank sits in the geographical heart of Census Community Area 24, West
Town, and has no other facilities or branches outside of its 1200 N.
Ashland office. (It's also headquarters for West Town Community
Bankers. See below.) Its lending practices reflect the racist, class
and gender biases of our society, and of most area banks.
Manufacturers
Bank lent a mere 15% of its $6,671,000 total housing dollars in West
Town in 1992, the most recent year that data is available. Two-thirds
of that was lent to wealthy whites; this means that Manufacturers
Bank lent only $340,000, 5% of its total housing lending, to West
Town Latinos. Latinos make up 62% of West Town's population;
African-Americans 9%. If Manufacturers has an interest in West Town,
it's clear that it lies with the wealthier whites settling in.
African-Americans
can forget approaching Manufacturers for housing loans. The bank lent
a grand total of $7,000 to African-Americans in '92, 0.1% of its
lending; it lent $753,000 to Latinos, 11% of its housing lending.
Like
most West Town banks, Manufacturers Bank lent heavily to comfortable
and wealthy whites, most of whom live in the suburbs and other areas
that are 80% or more white. And, like most West Town banks,
Manufacturers made no FHA or VA loans.
At
another point of the “pleasantly dilapidated” Wicker Park
Bohemian Triangle (bounded by Division, Milwaukee, and Hoyne) sits
Fairfield Savings, whose lending practices show even less concern for
West Town communities. Fairfield lent over $12 million for housing in
'92; $60,000 of it, 0.5%, landed in West Town.
Fairfield
S&L (Damen Ave. and North) is a white man's bank. It lent Latinos
$196,000, 1.6% of its housing lending, in '92. Fairfield lent nothing
to African-Americans. Ninety-seven percent of its dollars went to
whites.
It's
clear that opposition to the forced removal of Puerto Ricans,
Mexicans, African-Americans, and poor whites from West Town must call
Manufacturers, Fairfield, and other banks to the carpet for their
role in ripening West Town for the invasion of the Old Wicker Park
Committee types and the gentry in general. See the accompanying chart
for further details.) By disinvesting in the community, and not
lending to low-income folks, Manufacturers and Fairfield made it
difficult for people to make repairs for code violations, or to
purchase the $10,000 home that existed here.
A
Mexican family I know applied to a West Town area bank for a loan to
purchase a house in Bucktown in the early '80s. The loan officer told
them that they needed 25% down. I don't know if that is common; I
doubt that it is. Obviously they didn't have the money. Today, they
are well aware that they'll have to move soon. If you don't have the
money and the right skin color, the banks won't give you a loan.
[the
Old Wicker Park Committee, the “fuck da poor” gang, embody the
settler mentality – condescending, arrogant, brutal.]
In
early April, Old Wicker Park Committeemen David Schabes and Robert
Gatz threw together a proposal for Clinton's Empowerment Zone Program
– the new “urban renewal.” (The original Urban Renewal led to
the destruction of many already-exploited urban communities in the
'50s and '60s.) Eager to exploit Census data indicating conditions of
extreme oppression in West Town, particularly among Latinos and
African-Americans, and no longer content with the gentrification of
the Bohemian Triangle, the gentlepeople of OWPC sought big federal
money to extend their bleached suburban dreamscape outward, westward,
Funding would likely have been used to further dislocate the very
people it purported to empower. Fortunately, it was rejected by the
City Council.
The
Bohemian Triangle acts as epicenter for the resettlement of West
Town. Census Tract 2414 lost 41% of its Latinos and 17% of its
African-Americans between 1980 and 1990; median rents increased 22%
beyond inflation; total housing unites decreased 3.7%. People in
Census Tract 2415 experienced 34% increases in rents, and a 16% drop
in Latinos. Housing stock fell 9.4%.
These
figures do not reflect general trends in West Town. West Town is
going through a period of depopulation, with a 30% drop to 1970 to
1990. The white population showed the only major change from 1980 to
1990, dropping 23% from 31,415 to 24,117. The influx of young artists
must not be keeping pace with the flight of Poles and Ukraines. As
the population of Latinos remained the same, and since the number of
housing units fell by 6.6%, people of color must be doubling up,
living in more cramped quarters.
The
Old Wicker Park Committee proposal, which gathered local gentry into
a West Town Coalition (WTC), reveals much about the settler's mindset
and worldview. It reads like an hallucinatory college textbook –
boring yet fantastic, the words seem to have no relation whatsoever
to the conditions and communities of West Town. Central to the West
Town Coalition proposal is the proposition that West Town residents
are “plagued by common and familiar urban and societal problems.”
Contrary
to West Town Coalition's assertions, ethnic groups do not share
common problems in West Town. It's hard to get a clear economic
picture from Census data, though, for this reason: in the population
figures, the number of Latinos is listed as a category separate from
the others, and people of Spanish descent are included in the other
categories. This throws of the economic data for each group.
For
example, the 1990 Census says that poverty status in West Town is as
follows: Latinos 37%, African-Americans 47%, whites 25.9%. But the
25.9% figure includes approximately 20,000 white Latinos,
bring the poverty percentage up for the category. A more realistic
figure is probably about 14%.
There's
an African-American man who often begs for change at
North/Milwaukee/Damen; often he has no place to sleep at night, and
few settlers offer to make room for him. A Puerto Rican friend of his
sometimes invites him over; he sleeps with 21 other Puerto Ricans in
a small apartment in Humboldt Park, with hammocks strung one above
another. Very few settlers face such overcrowding. Mexican immigrants
often face deportation at the hands of La Migra; settlers don't know
that fear. A few months ago, I saw a police car intentionally try to
hit a young Puerto Rican on Division St. for no reason; very few
settlers experience the police as an army of occupation. Levels of
infant mortality, AIDS, and unemployment are far lower in settler
society than in any community of color. These are not “common and
familiar” problems.
To
meet those “common problems,” the WTC proposal claims that West
Town has achieved and desires “to maintain a multiethnic community
together peaceably with mutual respect and appreciation in an
attractive and healthy environment with thriving commerce; stable
public and private investment; safety for people and property ...”
It's
impossible to “maintain” something which doesn't exist. Fear,
anger, and mute suspicion do not make for peace, respect, or
appreciation. A Puerto Rican mother packing to move knows a far
different “shared sense of the community's history” from the West
Town Coalition settler pushing her out the door, or the sheriff
tossing her belongings into the street.
Last
summer, a cop chased a young Latino through Wicker Park. He tackled
the young man, and pinned him to the ground. A lieutenant, who was
standing nearby, walked over and kicked the young man in the ribs. I
asked the Art Institute student I was talking to, and who had seen
the kick, if she wanted to go get the cop's name and badge number;
she said no, she had to go.
[our
tolerance for other people's pain increases with our distance from
the realities of their lives]
The
Old Wicker Park Committee's vision of West Town is the gentrifier's
vision: the “thriving commerce” it fawns over is the increasing
glut of settler businesses in the “already revitalizing commercial
district” at Damen, North, and Milwaukee. This vision essentially
demands the removal of low-income Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and
African-Americans – why else would the Old Wicker Park Committee
have opposed Deborah's Place, a shelter for homeless women? - and yet
the word displacement never enters into the WTC''s myopic vision or
its proposal as the overwhelming problem that it is.
Displacement
also affects low-income artists and writers, although to a far lesser
degree. Many whites in West Town think of themselves as “starving
artists,” while paying $13,000 a year for art school. Very few of
them actually live in conditions of poverty. Severty percent of the
children of single mothers in West Town live in poverty; some
actually are starving.
Last
year, I made about $7,500. I made ½ the median income for West Town
whites. I think I'm low-budget. Still, I made about $2,000 more than
the average Latino, and about $1,000 more than the average
African-American in West Town.
Within
the Bohemian Triangle, Census Tract 2414, whites made $19,552 per
capita in '90; this was almost four times the Latino per capita
income. In Census Tract 2415, bounded by Milwaukee, North, and
Ashland, Latinos had a poverty rate double that of whites, and made
about 1/3 as much per year. These trends, strongly influenced by the
new white settlement, make displacement likely, for as rents go up,
only the settlers can afford them.
The
Old Wicker Park Committee's West Town Coalition focuses heavily on
investment, service, cosmetic beautification, policing, and on bogus
notions of multiculturalism – with a smattering of liberal-sounding
concerns like housing, education, and culture thrown in.
Contradictions abound.
WTC
sees “a burgeoning arts community that acts as a magnet to public
and private investment. Actually, there's no contradiction here;
clear, concise, direct statement of the unity of settler art and
money.
It's
clear who WTC wants in their “underutilized park spaces and
facilities.” A few years ago, Old Wicker Park Committee pushed to
get Wicker Park (the actual park) changed to “passive use.”
“Passive use” is code for getting African-Americans off the
basketball courts.
WTC
calls for “community policing,” which more effectively enlists
residents as snitches. In a show of settler unity, some artists have
joined block clubs that call the cops when the “natives” get
restless. Old Wicker Park Committee and East Village Association
(EVA is a WTC partner) have evolved close relations with Chicago
Police District 13; Old Milwaukee Avenue Chamber of Commerce with
District 14.
The
specter of “gang violence” promotes settler unity; talk of “gang
elimination” sounds ominous. Yet according to 13th
District Criminal Activity Reports for April '93, published in EVA's
own newsletter, one out of 110 crimes committed that month
was “gang-related.”
WTC
sees “family-oriented systems of values” in its vision of a
healthy community; that's why they include Humboldt Christian School
in their proposal. In addition to propagating anti-choice,
anti-women views, such fundamentalist organizations are infecting
Latino children's minds with profoundly idiotic, authoritarian
tripe.
One
of the most telling contradictions in WTC's vision of West Town lies
in the participation of the West Town Community Bankers (WTCB) group.
WTCB “meets monthly to ascertain the needs of the West Town
Community and to develop the necessary services and products to meet
those needs.” With rare exception, the banks listed have shown no
interest in low- and moderate-income people of color. WTCB draws
banks like Manufacturers and Fairfield (see above) together with
other West Town banks, like 1st Security Savings on
Western Ave. In '92, 1st Security Savings lent over $34
million for housing; of this total, it lent a whopping $8,000 to
African-Americans in all Chicago; $1,887,000, or 5%, to Latinos.
Lending to whites exceeded $28 million, or 86%. Of the $7,486,000
lent in West Town, the majority went to whites.
Other
banks in West Town Community Bankers include Cole Taylor, Avondale
Federal Savings Bank, and Mid Town Bank and Trust, where Miles Berger
sits as Chairman of the Board. Mid Town made no housing loans to
African-Americans in '92 (see accompanying chart for details).
Recently,
there has been a shift in West Town lending, as indicated in WTC's
Empowerment Zone proposal. Like vultures, “several downtown banks
have expressed an interest in becoming part of the coalition.”
Drawn by the greed of speculation and resettlement of Wicker Park,
money has started to pour into West Town: Chicago banks dumped around
$10 million in Census Tract 2414 in '92 alone (other Tracts nearby
received a few hundred thousand, maybe a million or two). This money
fuels gentrification; it fuels the construction of the Candyland
pastel postmodern houses popping up all over. By inflating property
taxes in the surrounding area, this money drives poor people out.
WTC's
proposal is notable as much for who it excludes as for who it
includes. WTC identifies “existing groups with knowledgeable and
motivated individuals” as “community assets”; yet its list of
committed partners reads like a who's who of West Town gentry.
Across
the board, the WTC proposal excludes some of the most vital
organizations at work in West Town – Juan Antonio Corretjer Puerto
Rican Cultural Center and Campos Puerto Rican High School; Ruiz
Belvis Cultural Center; Autonomous Zone; and Centro Sin Fronteras.
It's no accident that all of these groups oppose the further removal
of the poor and people of color from West Town.
WTC's
proposal harks back to OWPC's successful efforts to get Wicker Park
designated in the National Registry of Historic Places in '79, and
city landmark status in '91. Although these distinctions lack the
driving force of real estate speculation and banking discrimination,
they certainly stoke the displacement machine: major renovations get
a 20% income tax credit from the feds; the state freezes property
taxes for eight years, with another four years of reductions.
As
the comprehensive anti-gentrification manual, Displacement: How to
Fight It says, “On the whole, historic preservation laws are
far more protective of buildings than of the tenants inside them ….
these efforts to conserve our historical heritage may winde up
imposing severe displacement costs on the lower-income people to whom
these buildings have 'trickled down'.”
I
talked one afternoon in Earwaxx with an architecture student new to
the area who marvelled at the mansions of Wicker Park. I told her of
the dozens of low-income Puerto Ricans who were pushed out of just
one mansion so that one small yuppie family could remake This Old
House. She said, “Yeah, but those poor people didn't appreciate
the architecture. The rehabbers are preserving beauty.”
[the
price of European-based notions of beauty exact a high toll from
people of color – forced exclusion, eviction, and displacement.]
Rent.
A
Mexican man I know moved to the Bucktown area in 1979; his rent was
$130 a month. Now he's married and has three children. The five of
them live in a small two-bedroom apartment that costs $400. Their
family income plummeted when the father had heart transplant surgery
and lost his job.
In
West Town, from '80 to '90, median rents jumped 66% beyond inflation,
from $138 to $383, while median family incomes fell 5.6% from $21,744
to $20,532. Compare this with Lincoln Park yuppie heaven, where rents
increased 43%, while family incomes skyrocketed 82%, from $41,077 to
$75,085. Or compare with the more stable far northside North Park,
where rents increased only 17.7%, while family incomes edged up 3.5%.
Statistics for all Chicago show only a 40% increase in rent, with a
slight 2.4% drop in income.
A
$600 apartment would cost the average West Town white family with two
kids 13% of its income. The same apartment would cost the same size
latino family 32% of its income. The white family would have to rent
a $1,500 apartment to spend 32% of its income on rent. Those $1,500
apartments are starting to pop up in West Town.
Clearly,
most people in West Town face crisis economic and social conditions,
conditions which gentrification and settlerism only exacerbate. New
developments like the single-family Candyland houses along Wabansia
between Damen and Ashland affect the surrounding area and its people
in hideous ways (beyond the visually hideous). The owner of a
Bucktown 3-flat recently told me that when his property taxes tripled
in one year, he got back down to earth by passing the costs on to his
tenants, whose ropes tightened. This pattern repeats all around West
Town.
There's
a tendency among the new settlers of West Town – among speculators,
artists, even among some progressives and radicals – to look upon
poor people as colorful backdrop to our activities, whether
financial, artistic, personal, or political. I have done this.
Until
we wake up to our own collusion with powerful downtown interests, we
will at best continue to make idle proclamations against white
invasion, unable to build community for ourselves and with others.
In
the late '60s, the federal Kerner Commission Report suggested that
high concentrations of oppressed people near the cities' financial
centers caused the uprisings that shook the gentry. Since then, in
cities from Seattle to Boston to Chicago, efforts to move poor people
to the outskirts, on the model of South American cities ringed with
shantytowns, continue to wreak havoc on African-American, Chicano,
Mexican, Puerto Rican, poor white, and other communities. Like
Seattle, alternative music and art are doing the dirty work of the
gentry in West Town, making ghettos safe for the gentry to reclaim
the inner city. Like Columbus sailing the ocean blue, we explore
Milwaukee Avenue …
Recent
activity against Around the Coyote marks a turning point in the
settling of Wicker Park / West Town – many people are opening up
new avenues of creativity and expression that welcome dissent,
instead of trying to clamp down on it. It's vital that artists,
writers, and musicians work with the raw substance of life around us,
with the people around us, rather than merely or only turning inward, rather than
joining settler block clubs and neighborhood watches.
****
Some Sources
Culture
and Imperialism. Edward Said.
1994.
Displacement:
How to Fight It. Chester
Hartman, et al. Legal Services Anti-Displacement Project. 1981.
Home
Mortgage Disclosure Act microforms.
Located at Harold Washington Library, 5th
Floor, Gov't Publications Dept. 1992.
Settlers:
The Mythology of the White Proletariat: an anti-racist story of the
U.S. J. Sakai. Morningstar
Press, Chicago. 1989.
U.S.
Census. 1980 and 1990.
