As the number of jobs downtown rapidly increased in recent years, the number of people with those jobs who also live in Chicago’s vulnerable, African-American communities declined, a new study shows.
It means that even as more residents obtained well-paying downtown jobs, fewer of those workers were living in communities where their salaries could have benefited neighborhoods that are hurting economically, the study’s authors said. Some long-struggling communities like Englewood, West Englewood and Auburn Gresham haven’t benefited from Chicago’s downtown jobs boom, the study found.
“This speaks to the cost of segregation,” said Alden Loury, director of research and evaluation for the Metropolitan Planning Council and one of the lead authors of the study. “It’s not that nobody who lives on the South or West Sides works downtown. It means that as the number of jobs have grown, these neighborhoods just haven’t benefited. The basic question for us was: While there was dramatic growth and economic development downtown, what was participation for communities that have long struggled look like?”
The analysis was conducted over several months and uses census figures and data mined from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program, which is composed of federal and state data from employers and employees. The study will be released on the council’s website on Wednesday.
In many ways, the study offers a portrait of Chicago’s racial and class-based segregation by looking at where people work and where they choose to live.
Between 2010 and 2015, there were about 65,000 new jobs added downtown, the study says. The majority of those downtown workers live in the majority-white, higher-income communities like Lakeview, Near North, West Town and Lincoln Park.
According to the analysis, the neighborhoods with the biggest number of residents taking on jobs downtown were Mount Greenwood and Hegewisch. Mount Greenwood is a majority-white community on the Southwest Side where the median income is about $90,000, census figures show. Hegewisch is on the Southeast side and is about evenly divided between white and Hispanic residents. The median income there is about $50,000.
Meanwhile, nearly 600 fewer residents in West Englewood reported working downtown in 2015 compared with 2010. In Fuller Park, a South Side community that hugs the Dan Ryan Expressway, about 92 fewer residents reported working downtown. West Englewood is on the South Side, is 93 percent black and has a median income of about $27,000. Similarly, Fuller Park is 89 percent black and has a median income of $20,000.
“Job growth in and around the Loop has been great,” Loury said. “But there are parts around the city where people are not participating in that growth. These are communities that are in free fall: they are losing population and they struggle to show any economic (progress).”
The study comes as an ongoing conversation has been unfolding about how to ensure residents in Chicago’s most troubled and poverty-stricken communities benefit from the city’s booming economic growth. The city has lost more than 200,000 African-American residents in the past decade, in part, because of low wages and declining job prospects. That population loss, however, was factored into the analysis and isn’t the reason fewer residents in certain communities work downtown.
One issue raised in the study is that residents in African-American communities here tend to work in fields where the jobs are often situated outside of downtown. For example, almost 20 percent of working residents in Chicago’s majority-black communities worked in health care and the social assistance sector. An additional 13 percent worked in educational services.
In response to the report, a spokesman for the city said Chicago has added 170,000 jobs in the past eight years. Those jobs, which are spread throughout the region, have helped drive the unemployment rate down, the city official said.
“… the jobs in the central business district aren’t the only ones that count,” said Grant Klinzman, who works in the office of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, in a written statement. “While some neighborhoods may have fewer people with jobs downtown, this new report shows that there are more people working in those same neighborhoods — they’re just working at jobs outside of downtown.”
In recent years, the Metropolitan Planning Council has been using its research to encourage a broad conversation about how segregation damages the entire city of Chicago and surrounding region.
When specific communities remain isolated and impoverished, it continues a vicious cycle, the council has found: less access to healthy food, poorer health outcomes, fewer high-achieving, integrated public schools and higher rates of violence. As the divestment in those communities continues, they are less likely to see middle-class residents move in and force the economic turnaround that could stabilize those neighborhoods.
Twitter @lollybowean
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