This is not a particularly impressive graph, I know, but it illustrates the rather dramatic effect of urban renewal in Hyde Park. For those familiar with the area, these are the census tracts from 51st (Hyde Park Blvd.) down to 63rd and from Cottage Grove over to the lake.

In some cities we might attribute this to white flight or plain decentralization, but Arnold Hirsch in Making the Second Ghetto documents how the University of Chicago, the South East Chicago Commission, and the City of Chicago worked to get powers of eminent domain and implement urban renewal plans in order to ward off African Americans from the area to keep the university, its students, and its faculty safe from poor black people. Note the gradual increase in owner-occupied units while rental units absorb all of the reduction.

The “Black Belt” was an area of the city, basically an upside-down “L” that runs due west and south from the Loop, where African Americans were concentrated due to de facto segregation, violence from working-class whites, and discrimination by realtors. The east edge of the Black Belt runs along Cottage Grove and from the 1940s on blacks began moving to housing outside the Black Belt for a number of reasons, among them fighting housing discrimination, wanting better accommodations than the second ghetto provided, and a simple lack of capacity in the already full areas.

Much of the Hyde Park-area urban renewal focused on and resulted in a reduction of housing capacity and creation of barriers and buffers so that blacks could not populate the white liberal island as they had areas to the west. The University of Chicago was integral to this and a chapter of my dissertation will deal with the role of students and student housing in this renewal process.