The cycle of community reinvestment and displacement of low-income resi-dents is a process present in cities throughout the United States, Europe, and other developed nations. It has been well documented in numerous studies (Dreier, Mollenkopf, & Swanstrom, 2001; Nelson, 1988; Palen & London, 1984; Schill & Nathan, 1983; Smith & Williams, 1986). Also referred to as gentrification and displacement, it has been the source of considerable policy debate in Chicago at both community and citywide levels.5 Displacement—particularly when it takes place as communities are being revitalized—can move low-income populations further away from the very housing, educa-tional, and employment opportunities that could ameliorate the problems of past social and economic exclusion.Because community reinvestment was often seen as increasing racial and ethnic inequalities, the City of Chicago Commission on Human Relations approached the Loyola University Chicago Center for Urban Research and Learning to examine the impact that gentrification has on different racial, ethnic, and economic groups in Chicago. The commission routinely receives complaints from residents and elected officials about increased racial and ethnic tensions in some communities experiencing reinvestment. Because many city development policies are predicated on the assumption that com-munity investment is always a positive, the commission felt a need to look at this process more closely.5The use of the terms gentrification and reinvestment can have different meanings to different people. In a meeting with the staff of the Commission on Human Relations early in the research process, we were advised to use the term gentrifica-tion in our interview and focus group questions. Since developers and those uncrit-ical of the gentrification and displacement cycle are more likely to use the term reinvestment, it was felt that use of this term might be perceived as biased by respon-dents. However, in the report itself we use the two terms interchangeably. by SAGE Publications, Inc. 78——Public SociologyThe Center for Urban Research and LearningThe Loyola University Chicago Center for Urban Research and Learning is an innovative, nontraditional collaborative university–community research center that only completes research when community partners are involved in all or most phases of the research. Described in more detail in Chapter 2, CURL recognizes the need to combine the knowledge and perspectives of both university and community partners. Without these combined perspec-tives, we are typically missing half of the picture in understanding issues facing local communities.Exclusively discipline-driven research agendas do not always hit the tar-get in providing information and insights for current, pressing community issues. In working with community partners, CURL has been able to both pull relevant information from past discipline-driven research and add infor-mation that is relevant to the community’s imm ...

1. The cycle of community reinvestment and displacement of low-
income resi-dents is a process present in cities throughout the
United States, Europe, and other developed nations. It has been
well documented in numerous studies (Dreier, Mollenkopf, &
Swanstrom, 2001; Nelson, 1988; Palen & London, 1984; Schill
& Nathan, 1983; Smith & Williams, 1986). Also referred to as
gentrification and displacement, it has been the source of
considerable policy debate in Chicago at both community and
citywide levels.5 Displacement—particularly when it takes
place as communities are being revitalized—can move low-
income populations further away from the very housing, educa-
tional, and employment opportunities that could ameliorate the
problems of past social and economic exclusion.Because
community reinvestment was often seen as increasing racial and
ethnic inequalities, the City of Chicago Commission on Human
Relations approached the Loyola University Chicago Center for
Urban Research and Learning to examine the impact that
gentrification has on different racial, ethnic, and economic
groups in Chicago. The commission routinely receives
complaints from residents and elected officials about increased
racial and ethnic tensions in some communities experiencing
reinvestment. Because many city development policies are
predicated on the assumption that com-munity investment is
always a positive, the commission felt a need to look at this
process more closely.5The use of the terms gentrification and
reinvestment can have different meanings to different people. In
a meeting with the staff of the Commission on Human Relations
early in the research process, we were advised to use the term
gentrifica-tion in our interview and focus group questions.
Since developers and those uncrit-ical of the gentrification and
displacement cycle are more likely to use the term reinvestment,
it was felt that use of this term might be perceived as biased by
respon-dents. However, in the report itself we use the two terms
interchangeably. by SAGE Publications, Inc. 78——Public

2. SociologyThe Center for Urban Research and LearningThe
Loyola University Chicago Center for Urban Research and
Learning is an innovative, nontraditional collaborative
university–community research center that only completes
research when community partners are involved in all or most
phases of the research. Described in more detail in Chapter 2,
CURL recognizes the need to combine the knowledge and
perspectives of both university and community partners.
Without these combined perspec-tives, we are typically missing
half of the picture in understanding issues facing local
communities.Exclusively discipline-driven research agendas do
not always hit the tar-get in providing information and insights
for current, pressing community issues. In working with
community partners, CURL has been able to both pull relevant
information from past discipline-driven research and add infor-
mation that is relevant to the community’s immediate policy
concerns. In the case of research on gentrification and
displacement, much has been written within the field. However,
the specific concerns of the Human Relations Commission
around current racial and class tensions have not been the focus
of the majority of this work. Moreover, unlike academics, who
are complet-ing an end product that will be of interest to fellow
sociologists, community leaders are interested not only in the
information but how it might fit into policies and neighborhood-
level solutions. When community partners are involved in
shaping the research and typically participate as respondents in
focus groups, interviews, and surveys created by this
collaborative process, research “data” have policy ideas and
solutions imbedded in them. It is this natural link between
research and solutions that has characterized much of CURL’s
research.The Study6As is typical of CURL projects, we enlisted
a team of researchers that included faculty, graduate students,
undergraduates, and community part-ners. The primary
researchers included two sociologists (Nyden and Davis) and a
psychologist (Edlynn). Among the others involved in the
project— particularly helping in community-based interviews

3. and focus groups—were three undergraduate students
(psychology and sociology majors), three graduate students, and
a recent sociology Ph.D. recipient who was working on fair
housing issues in Chicago. Because there was a need to
establish credibility and rapport in diverse communities, the
diversity of the team was also impor-tant. The team included
African American, Latino, Asian, and White Anglo members,
which bolstered credibility both with our primary partner—the
Human Relations Commission—and with interviewees during
the research itself.Although we provided a general demographic
picture of citywide gentri-fication and displacement trends, we
focused our report and interviews on two specific areas of
Chicago—the predominantly Latino West Town and Humboldt
Park community areas northwest of Chicago’s central business
district and the primarily low-income African American mid-
South Side comprised of four Chicago community areas: Grand
Boulevard, Douglas, Oakland, and Kenwood. Both of these
areas were identified by city officials and researchers as the
city’s current gentrification “hot spots” (Zielenbach, 2005).In
particular, the study measured perceptions of community leaders
about the impact of the gentrification process. We interviewed
or included in focus groups 68 business leaders, community-
based organization executive direc-tors, social service agency
staff, religious leaders, and others who were famil-iar with daily
life in the two communities studied. These are people on the
“front line” of community activities; they are among the most
perceptive of social and economic changes in their
communities. They are also aware of how residents perceive,
interpret, and react to the changes that are going on around
them.FindingsGentrification and displacement in West
Town/Humboldt Park have taken on a distinctively Latino
versus non-Latino debate. Puerto Rican cul-ture has defined the
neighborhoods since the in-migration of Puerto Ricans in the
1960s. Residents describe a block-by-block gentrification
process that they liken to removing their community piece by
piece: “I call it erosion because that Puerto Rican character, the

4. Latino character in this area is being eroded. There are huge,
huge, huge areas of Humboldt Park that are gone, that are lost
to us through gentrification. There are whole neighbor-hoods
here” (West Town community leader). The cohesiveness of the
Latino community is viewed as threatened.In the mid-South
communities, initiatives to preserve African American historical
institutions in Bronzeville have become a focus of community
lead-ers and economic development proposals. These are not
necessarily linked FOR THE USE OF GRAND CANYON
UNIVERSITY STUDENTS AND FACULTY ONLY. NOT FOR
DISTRIBUTION, SALE, OR REPRINTING. ANY AND ALL
UNAUTHORIZED USE IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED.
Copyright © 2012 80——Public Sociologyto plans to reduce
residential displacement (which has already occurred) but rather
are connected to economic reinvestment that preserves
Chicago’s African American historical roots on the South Side.
Bronzeville emerged as one of the most visible African
American communities in the United States after the Great
Migration of African Americans from the South to northern
cities. Located 2 miles south of Chicago’s downtown,
Bronzeville served as a hotspot for African American arts,
culture, and society in the 1920s and later, claiming historical
figures such as Langston Hughes, Nat King Cole, Louis
Armstrong, and Lorraine Hansberry as residents (Diane Grams’s
case study in this same section discusses the use of
Bronzeville’s rich cultural his-tory in its current
redevelopment). Although the building of large, high-rise public
housing developments in the 1950s and 1960s provided more
afford-able housing in the area, the large number of buildings
and deterioration of tenant screening and management
ultimately contributed to economic decline in the broader
community. There were distinct differences between the
gentrification and displace-ment processes in the two
communities. In West Town/Humboldt Park those being
displaced were very much aware of those displacing them.
Current residents routinely saw the gentrifiers moving into the

5. rehabbed or new houses as their neighbors left apartments
where they may have lived for more than 10 or 20 years.
Gentrifiers were typically middle-class, White Anglos, while
those displaced were usually lower-income Latinos.In contrast,
the gentrification and displacement process in the mid-South
Side communities happened over a 30-plus-year period. It was
more of a depopulation, displacement, and then gentrification
process. The opening up of suburban housing opportunities for
middle-class African Americans after federal civil rights
legislation in the 1960s led to an exodus of middle-class
families who previously had few housing choices outside the
neighborhood because of persistent discriminatory practices in
exclusive White communi-ties. In addition to this depopulation,
persistent racial segregation, lack of infrastructure investment
(e.g., schools, libraries, and streets), as well as deteriorating
housing quality and eventual teardowns of previously desirable
apartments and greystone houses, caused the community to be
even less desirable and created a further exodus of working-
class African Americans and even some low-income families.
From the 1970s until the noticeable reinvestment after 2000,
absentee landowners sat on the vacant lots left after the
teardowns. In addition to this, after 2000, the Chicago Housing
Authority (CHA) systematically tore down scores of high-rise
buildings rep-resenting thousands of low-income housing units.
However, many of those units had been vacant for as many as
10 or 15 years before the buildings were demolished.
Ultimately, in the first decades of the 21st century, the FOR
THE USE OF GRAND CANYON UNIVERSITY STUDENTS
AND FACULTY ONLY. NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, SALE,
OR REPRINTING. ANY AND ALL UNAUTHORIZED USE IS
STRICTLY PROHIBITED. Copyright © 2012 Case Studies 1
Equitable Community Development——81available empty
space, along with increased city infrastructure investment, the
transformation of CHA properties to mixed-income
developments, interest in creating an African American
historical district, and the booming real estate market combined

6. to open the doors to neighborhood redevelopment.Since 2000,
the gentrifiers, mostly middle-class African Americans, typi-
cally moved into new housing built on these long-vacant lots or
into sub-stantially rehabbed greystones that may have been
vacant for years. In this community most of the gentrifiers and
the displaced were obscured from each others’ view by time.
Those displaced in the 1960s and 1970s were long gone before
middle-class gentrifiers started moving in during the early
2000s. This time gap eliminated the possibility of
gentrifier/displacee ten-sions. Also, since both the gentrifiers
and those displaced years earlier were African American, race
was not a point of tension. If there was any tension, it revolved
around social class differences.Given these different histories of
the two communities, the gentrification process was viewed
differently by residents of both communities. In the African
American mid-South Side it was seen as more of a positive
process; many considered the revitalization process as long
overdue. Although there were significant concerns over what
was happening to displaced low-income African American
residents, the prospects of a middle-class African American
revitalization of the area’s past heyday of Black culture was
seen as a positive. In contrast, in West Town/Humboldt Park,
where the ethnic dividing lines of Latino and Anglo were
congruent with the visible gentrifier/displaced dividing line, the
revitalization process produced stronger ethnic tensions and was
perceived in a negative light by many people living in the
community.Our report raised a number of other issues. In both
communities, the dif-ficulties that communities face in
countering outside forces that are reshap-ing neighborhoods
when there is little input from current residents was apparent. In
West Town/Humboldt Park, developers converted affordable
apartments into market-rate condominiums. The process through
which developers bought up rental properties to convert into
new condominiums was largely done out of the sight of
community residents. Even community-based organizations
struggled to get information on housing sales and permit

7. applications. When they did find out, it was often too late to
seek avenues to preserve buildings as affordable rental
properties.On the mid-South Side, both the absentee landowners
and the govern-ment represented forces outside the local
community’s reach. In the 1950s, construction of massive
numbers of high-rise public housing buildings by the CHA on
Chicago’s South Side not only reinforced Chicago’s racial
divide FOR THE USE OF GRAND CANYON UNIVERSITY
STUDENTS AND FACULTY ONLY. NOT FOR
DISTRIBUTION, SALE, OR REPRINTING. ANY AND ALL
UNAUTHORIZED USE IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED.
Copyright © 2012 82——Public Sociologybut created the
concentrated poverty that ultimately set the stage for whole-sale
community deterioration. In the neighborhoods adjacent to the
CHA developments, absentee slum landlords profited from
inflated rents, build-ings were not maintained and ultimately
were torn down, and outside land speculators bought up cheap
vacant lots and sat on them for years with the plan to make
money when the neighborhood came back (Hirsch, 1998). From
the perspective of local residents, community organizations, and
non-profit community development corporations, the current-
day revitalization was seen as a positive in some ways.
However, just as outside forces had helped to determine the
community’s fate more than 50 years before, similar outside
forces were directing the community’s comeback.Outcomes and
Impact of the ResearchSince the project was developed at the
request of, and in cooperation with, the City of Chicago
Commission on Human Relations, there was a built-in user of
the research from day one. Since the commission is called in to
mediate many neighborhood disputes, particularly those with
racist or ethnocentric overtones, the research added a social
class dimension to the commission’s understanding. Our close
study of Humboldt Park helped to shed light on Latino/White
non-Latino/African American tensions. This is particularly
salient in a city where there has been a very large increase in
the Latino population (a 38% increase from 1990 to 2000). The

8. study of the mid-South Side, while not seeing racial tensions,
did shed light on the social class dynamics and tensions within
the African American community. This is also of interest to city
policy makers who want to strengthen the presence of the
African American middle class in the city and stem the decades-
long flow from the city to suburbs.A month before the final
report was to be completed, there was a sugges-tion from the
mayor’s office that the report should not be released, given the
volatile nature of the gentrification debate. This was in itself an
indirect measure of both the impact of the study and political
divisions within the city administration. Ultimately discussions
between the commission and the mayor’s office turned back the
suggestion that the report be held back.When it was released in
January 2006, the report was immediately dis-tributed to all of
Chicago’s aldermen, who were in the final stages of debate on
an inclusionary zoning ordinance. The ordinance would require
that a certain portion of units in new multifamily construction
be affordable in cases where the city had provided financial
support or zoning variances for the project. There had been a
multiyear battle by a coalition of community groups to pass this
ordinance, but Mayor Richard M. Daley had resisted FOR THE
USE OF GRAND CANYON UNIVERSITY STUDENTS AND
FACULTY ONLY. NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, SALE, OR
REPRINTING. ANY AND ALL UNAUTHORIZED USE IS
STRICTLY PROHIBITED. Copyright © 2012 Case Studies 1
Equitable Community Development——83passage of an
ordinance that would include a 25% set-aside for affordable
housing units. However, in the aldermanic elections that had
just taken place a few weeks earlier, it appeared that a veto-
proof city council majority sup-porting the higher set-aside
might be in place when the new city council was sworn in at the
end of the month. With a more aggressive council about to take
office, the mayor supported passage of an inclusionary zoning
ordinance with a 10% set-aside for affordable units in new
privately developed larger multi-unit buildings. Although our
report (and its linkage of gentrification/displacement issues to

9. racial and ethnic tensions) was only one of many in the
consideration of the ordinance, it made a small contribution to
the ultimate passage of the city’s first inclusionary zoning
ordinance late in January.CURL was proactive in making sure
the report got into the hands of a variety of community-based
organizations. Arranging media coverage of the report and
posting the full report on our webpage were two of the ways in
which information was distributed. CURL also made a number
of presenta-tions to community organizations around the city,
particularly in the specific communities studied. The report
stimulated additional work with commu-nity partners, including
a block-by-block analysis of apartment-to- condominium
conversions in select neighborhoods.As with other CURL
projects, undergraduate and graduate students were actively
involved in the research and writing that went into the report.
They are listed as authors and researchers on the report. Perhaps
more important, they became increasingly aware of how the
research fit into ongoing com-munity efforts to bring about
equity in Chicago’s neighborhoods. Watching the politics of the
research—from the role of the commissioners in helping to
frame the research questions, to the hesitancy of the mayor’s
office in releasing the report, to the new city council
legislation—students recognized that they were among the
players in Chicago policy making.ReferencesDreier, P.,
Mollenkopf, J., & Swanstrom, T. (2001). Place matters:
Metropolitics for the twenty-first century. Lawrence, KS:
University of Kansas Press.Hirsch, A. R. (1998). The making of
the second ghetto: Race and housing in Chicago 1940–1960.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Nelson, K. P. (1988).
Gentrification and distress cities: An assessment of trends in
intrametropolitan migration. Madison, WI: University of
Wisconsin Press.Nyden, P., Edlynn, E., & Davis, J. (2006). The
differential impact of gentrification on communities in Chicago.
Chicago, IL: Loyola University Chicago, Center for Urban
Research and Learning.Palen, J. J., & London, B. (1984).
Gentrification, displacement and neighborhood revitalization.

10. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.FOR THE
USE OF GRAND CANYON UNIVERSITY STUDENTS AND
FACULTY ONLY. NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, SALE, OR
REPRINTING. ANY AND ALL UNAUTHORIZED USE IS
STRICTLY PROHIBITED. Copyright © 2012 by SAG