Detroit housing & gentrification...

Photo by Life Remodeled 2014/flickr

 Today we take another quick trip to the Motor City.

For years I've read about young Caucasian gentrifiers who are coming to Detroit to buy up the properties and spark a revival for the beleaguered Michigan city. Then there's a flip side, most cities that have properties that are delinquent on property taxes and you can buy them from the original owners. Sometimes that means you'd have to put the owners out.

That's what this Guardian article from last month says about these young gentrifiers in Detroit. Many of them realized that they have to put the owners out after buying their homes via an auction. In one case the new owner sold the house back although for a lot more than he paid for it while helping the original owners take care of some of their taxes.

As much as I want to own some real estate in the future, it would be difficult for me to have to consider something like this. It would be very difficult for me to want to put out the people who lived in their houses. It would be even more difficult to want to sell the property back to them.

Regardless this is a good article and I hope you give it a read.

How do I learn more about urban planning?

aerial photo of 63rd/Halsted Englewood

Last year I wrote about this "dreaded G word" over at my other blog - The Sixth Ward. It was in relation to the news that Whole Foods Market was coming into a low-income neighborhood in Chicago. That neighborhood is the south side's Englewood.

The point I was making was to address the concerns of the dreaded G word - gentrification - as it relates to Whole Foods which is basically a high-end grocer coming to a low-income neighborhood. Over the years in Chicago we've heard so much about a "food desert" where many Chicagoans don't have easy access to fresh produce and healthy foods. One means to attack this issue have been bringing in grocers in those areas were grocery stores are few and far in between.

But Whole Foods Market in Englewood of all places? Many nickname this place Whole Paychek, when I go in there the few items I have purchase could easily go up to $20 and it didn't take much for the bill to go up that high. I'm saying this recognizing that's a walk in the park compared to the bills of many other people who shop at a grocery store in general. Besides if you regularly pay $100 for groceries periodically, imagine how much the bill would be if you purchase that same amount from Whole Foods.

Either way since then I've periodically taken a look at this issue. Much more recently I showed some footage of a ceremonial ground breaking and the politicians and Whole Foods executives were saying the right things. While the issue of prices still keep coming up most of the coverage indicate that the products to be carried in this future store to open in 2016 will be affordable to residents of Englewood.

All the same the issue also is whether or not Whole Foods coming to Englewood is the start of movement. Will the many low-income residents of Englewood may in the near future find themselves forced to find another neighborhood to call home?

Not an easy answer to that question and the affordability question. To be sure, I only wish I knew more about urban planning so that there would be an better solution for everyone.

BTW, recently I learned that the west side of Chicago has a former grocery store - a former Moo & Oink -  looking for a tenant. If anyone fantasizes about another Chicago area grocer such as Mariano's come to that part of town they would be disappointed. Mariano's may not be quite right for the west side area for this former grocery store. So how is Englewood right for Whole Foods?

ALSO, another aspect of urban planning that I wish to understand is what it takes to bring certain types of retailers or businesses to a given area. Or indeed what it takes to attract these amenities to a community that certainly needs them. Will low-income people shop at a Whole Foods Market for example? If you build it will they come or will someone with the necessary income become regular shoppers?

Read more Whole Foods posts at The Sixth Ward!

A drive along 63rd - from Englewood to Woodlawn

Originally posted to The Sixth Ward on January 4, 2012 

[VIDEO] The vid above is from one of my long time YouTube favorites, artistmac. He takes a drive along 63rd Street  from Morgan Street all the way to Stony Island an sure to note how the individual neighborhoods once grew along that corridor.  63rd & Halsted was once a bustling commercial district in Englewood and then the area around 63rd & Cottage Grove was also a bustling commercial area in Woodlawn. Both areas are now mostly vacant lots although some redevelopment has occured in those areas.

In fact on East 63rd just past the Cottage Grove terminal of the CTA Green Line some single family homes have been built. Artistmac didn't want to get into the politics on the video of how the Green Line abruptly ended at Cottage Grove when it used to terminate as far east as Stony Island. Sometimes I wonder if cutting the L beyond its current terminus was a huge blunder!

On West 63rd, Kennedy-King College was built within the former 63rd/Halsted business district and is still waiting for even more development. While it seems more likely Woodlawn could be redeveloped given the fact that the University of Chicago is slowly but surely expanding south beyond the Midway Plaisance, time can only tell for Englewood.

Artistmac does provide one omnimous conclusion: "Unless those middle-class residents can be enticed to come back to Woodlawn, Bronzeville and Englewood, I doubt those neighborhoods, or any of Chicago's declining neighborhoods, can be brought back to life."

A Detroit District Thrives by Building on the Past

Thanks to the NY Times we're taking another virtual trip to that great American city of Detroit. Of course depending on how you view Detroit it's not so great and it's no stretch to say that great city is struggling to find itself these days. Anyway, what about building on the past in this Detroit neighborhood:

In sharp contrast to the rest of the Detroit metropolitan area, an area known as Midtown just north of the central business district has been holding its own in the recession.

Much of the success of Midtown — as it was branded a decade ago — is a result of the strength of institutions like Wayne State University, the Detroit Medical Center, the Henry Ford Hospital and the Detroit Institute of Arts, all of which contribute students and employees as well as residents.

Another component of Midtown’s success is that its developers are refurbishing older buildings, using tax credits and public financing, as much as they are building from scratch.

“For a long time, there was a big effort to tear things down in Detroit,” said Michael Poris, a principal of the architecture firm McIntosh Poris Associates, which is restoring a former vaudeville house in Midtown for multiple uses. “But if we have all these great historic buildings here, why not take the historic tax credits and reuse them? Plus it’s a greener, more sustainable form of development.”

According to the CoStar Group, a real estate information company in Bethesda, Md., the vacancy rate for office space in Midtown — including an adjacent area called New Center, where the former headquarters of General Motors now houses state offices — stood at 8.2 percent in the second quarter of this year.
...
“We really have lost almost no businesses during the recession,” said Susan Mosey, the president of the University Cultural Center Association, an organization formed by several Midtown institutions that guides development in the area. “That isn’t to say that businesses haven’t had to reduce costs and become more efficient, but the neighborhood’s remained pretty stable.”

The housing market is thriving too, Ms. Mosey said. Many obsolete buildings in Midtown have been converted to rental housing in recent years, and the rental market has been strong. An association study found that 92 percent of the 4,295 rental units in the area were occupied last spring.

A handful of condominium projects begun right before the national housing market collapsed had to shift gears and become rental apartments. Those were leased quickly, Ms. Mosey said.
...
Preservationists had the foresight to get much of Midtown designated as historic in the 1990s, thus ensuring they would be eligible for tax credits, said Diane Van Buren, vice president of sustainable planning at Zachary & Associates, a property development and development consulting group.

Zachary & Associates, with several partners, is in the process of creating an area within Midtown called the Sugar Hill Arts District, in tribute to the traveling black jazz musicians who once played in clubs and stayed in stately homes in the neighborhood, Ms. Van Buren said.

Much of the district was destroyed in the urban renewal movement in the mid-20th century that displaced many African-American neighborhoods in Detroit and elsewhere, she said.

Several buildings and sites in Sugar Hill are being redeveloped, including 71 East Garfield Street — the former site of a hotel that was destroyed by fire — which has undergone a $6 million renovation into 22 live-work spaces for artists and eight commercial spaces.

I probably excerpted a lot more from this article than I should of, but this is an interesting article that is worth your time. Not all is bad in Detroit and there are people there - oustide of the political establishment - who are working to rebuild Detroit. Finding your groove of course takes lots of time.

Hat-tip Urbanophile which also has a post up about how Detroit can market itself.

No Longer Majority Black, Harlem Is in Transition

I've been hearing rumbles about this for years. Harlem may remain the capitol of black America, but other peoples may decide that this is the place for them. The future may be other people moving in and turning a neighborhood around.

From NY Times:

For nearly a century, Harlem has been synonymous with black urban America. Given its magnetic and growing appeal to younger black professionals and its historic residential enclaves and cultural institutions, the neighborhood’s reputation as the capital of black America seems unlikely to change soon.

But the neighborhood is in the midst of a profound and accelerating shift. In greater Harlem, which runs river to river, and from East 96th Street and West 106th Street to West 155th Street, blacks are no longer a majority of the population — a shift that actually occurred a decade ago, but was largely overlooked.

By 2008, their share had declined to 4 in 10 residents. Since 2000, central Harlem’s population has grown more than in any other decade since the 1940s, to 126,000 from 109,000, but its black population — about 77,000 in central Harlem and about twice that in greater Harlem — is smaller than at any time since the 1920s.

In 2008, 22 percent of the white households in Harlem had moved to their present homes within the previous year. By comparison, only 7 percent of the black households had.
...
Harlem, said Michael Henry Adams, a historian of the neighborhood and a resident, “is poised again at a point of pivotal transition.”

Harlem is hardly the only ethnic neighborhood to have metamorphosed because of inroads by housing pioneers seeking bargains and more space — Little Italy, for instance, has been largely gobbled up by immigrants expanding the boundaries of Chinatown and by creeping gentrification from SoHo. But Harlem has evolved uniquely.

Because so much of the community was devastated by demolition for urban renewal, arson and abandonment beginning in the 1960s, many newcomers have not so much dislodged existing residents as succeeded them. In the 1970s alone, the black population of central Harlem declined by more than 30 percent.

“This place was vacated,” said Howard Dodson, director of Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. “Gentrification is about displacement.”

Meanwhile, the influx of non-Hispanic whites has escalated. The 1990 census counted only 672 whites in central Harlem. By 2000, there were 2,200. The latest count, in 2008, recorded nearly 13,800.

“There’s a lot of new housing to allow people to come into the area without displacing people there,” said Joshua S. Bauchner, who moved to a Harlem town house in 2007 and is the only white member of Community Board 10 in central Harlem. “In Manhattan, there are only so many directions you can go. North to Harlem is one of the last options.”

Over at The Sixth Ward, we've covered the issue of not only gentrification, but also any attempt at integration. I can't say it's an issue in Chatham (largely located in Chicago's 6th Ward). There may be a decent sized group of non-blacks in that community and perhaps enough to attract the attention of the blogger at the CAPCC blog.

Another neighborhood that is an historically black neighborhood in Chicago was Bronzeville. Historically that community was also called either Black Metropolis or the Black Belt. All the same like Harlem that community was decimated with vacant lots, slums, housing projects, and the like. While it may take awhile for that neighborhood to truly turn, what's likely to happen there is that it may attract non-blacks there as well. It won't merely be a black neighborhood in the future. It could be more like Hyde Park which is nearby.

Via Newsalert!

Study: Gentrification benefits many blacks

From UPI:

The study by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Pittsburgh and Duke University found that when white, college-educated residents move into low-income neighborhoods, the resulting economic benefits did not all accrue to the newcomers as is usually assumed. Instead, black householders with high-school degrees accounted for a plurality of the total income gains in such neighborhoods, Time Magazine reported Monday.

A very short article but it's something to chew on.

There are some people my mom knows on the west side. Things are looking up that way. One man she's known for years told her once that he has no intention of giving up his home. At that he isn't going to give it up without a good price.

Surely if a neighborhood was to change for the better it might mean a safer neighborhood for the original residents. Those who aren't productive are likely to leave. And they know it because some of the least productive are going to engage in intimidation and criminal activity hoping to stem the tide of change and unsuccessfully.

Of course let's continue to stress as it was in that article that this is not to say someone won't get displaced. That is rising property values and rents might cause some to be unable to afford to stay. Hmmm, I'd like to see this study in that case.

Class conflict hits home

This is the one issue that may have cropped up in the last couple of decades or so. You might have seen hints of this on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air for example. In that episode Carlton attempted to join a fraternity only to raise the ire of the head of this fraternity. He had a chip on his shoulder because Carlton was considered a sell out to the struggle. Whatever that could entail. Well it could be more complicated than that. One could talk about being a "sellout" to the struggle, but it could just plain be jealousy as a result of laziness. Among other things of course.

I'm not going to pretend I know I just loved this second article. They talked about some neighborhoods on the near south side of Chicago. Mainly Kenwood, Oakland, and Bronzeville. These neighborhoods are being built up, however some of you wouldn't want to be caught dead in after a certain point in time. As I've stated in my other post the less well to do may wind up moving out because the rents are going to go up and/or it may be more profitable to just sell all together.

To invest in impoverished neighborhoods in Chicago may be a questionable investment, but a worthwhile one as is the case on the near south side. But some of these residents we saw didn't feel too bad about those who had to move in fact some of them are espousing somewhat conservative ideas...

Of the public housing that once dominated his neighborhood's skyline, [Rashaun] Williams says: "All of that was suppressing the value of this very valuable land. People who are on government subsidies, in general, don't have a right to any particular land because taxpayers are the ones paying for it, anyway. If I'm supporting the whole thing, should they get a better view of the lake and I get a view of a south suburban neighborhood and an hour-and-a-half commute?"

OK, maybe it wasn't all that conservative but I hope you get the drift. I don't want to tear down public housing residents but there are those who just don't want to leave and it could be because they don't have anywhere else to go. Is it our problem if they just don't want to move out of public housing on their own anyway. Well public housing in Chicago is rife with tragedy unfortunately with children dying playing in elevator shafts, falling out of windows, or shot by a gang members' bullet.

Also there are hope that these near south side neighborhoods could be like the Bronzeville of years past, which was actually an upper middle class black neighborhood and Hyde Park which is racially mixed. However in some of these neighborhoods whites are moving in being readily able to afford the real estate in ways most blacks aren't. Most of the black in the article will contend that blacks need to drive revitalization.

Even mentioned are those blacks who aren't used to the segregation in Chicago. One statistic suggests that 80% of Chicago's blacks may have to move before Chicago is integrated. Some have come from other places where the segregation isn't as stark as in Chicago. There is an idea that the more integrated a neighborhood the better prices might be. The jury may be out on that.