Bronzeville was once the elegant home to such American cultural luminaries as Louis Armstrong, Gwendolyn Brooks and Lou Rawls. After decades of disinvestment and ill-conceived housing projects, neighborhood developers, with LISC’s support, are working hard to nurture small homegrown businesses and lure anchor institutions, according to an article in Next City.
The below excerpt is sourced from:
"Chicago’s Bronzeville Keeps Fighting for Revitalization"
by Sandy Smith, Next City
Most urban observers can probably recite the stock gentrification script in their sleep: A rundown low-income neighborhood begins to attract new residents looking for homes they can afford. As the newcomers’ presence attracts developers, rents start to spike and property taxes start to rise, forcing the original residents out.
While a growing body of research suggests that the script isn’t quite that simple, the issue is clouded by the fact that, in most such cases, the residents being displaced are black and the newcomers are white, adding a racial element to the narrative.
For the last few years, those looking for an example avoiding that element of the narrative have pointed to Chicago’s Bronzeville — a neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side where both longtime residents and gentrifiers are black.
Between the two World Wars, Bronzeville was home to a thriving community of black entrepreneurs, professionals and creative artists. Stately stone homes housed such noted figures as civil rights activist Ida B. Wells, poet Gwendolyn Brooks, singer Lou Rawls and jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong. (A recent Chicago Advocate post notes that “Bronzeville’s recent resurgence has fostered a revived interest” in such historic attractions.) The construction of a series of massive high-rise housing projects along the neighborhood’s west side beginning in 1950 sent Bronzeville into a tailspin from which it has yet to fully recover. The razing of that public housing in the early 2000s raised hopes for revival, but revitalization without a racial component still faces daunting challenges. Continued[+]...