Notes on women in the global city: Chicago

As the organizers of an event on women in the global city, we wanted to create a forum exploring the intersections of class, gender and other forms of inequality that fracture ‘global Chicago’. In the panelists' discussion of the intersections of struggles relating to housing, education and environmental justice in Chicago's particular version of the global city, we found evidence of lives disrupted by neoliberal trends, as well as possible sites to contest these disruptions. These struggles reverberate to shape a new urban vision, as the academics and activists assembled for our panel aim not just to work on the local issues of specific women, but to create a city in which work is well compensated, housing is affordable for everyone, schools educate all children well, all neighborhoods are safe both from crime and environmental pollutants, and everyone has the time to fully engage as active citizens of the city.     

Chicago goes global: redevelopment,culture, and fear

Chicago's remarkably flexible growth machine, like their brethren across Rust Belt America, continues to aggressively press forward to build an internationally competitive city. This paper deepens our understanding of Chicago's recently changed growth machine. It focuses on its current redevelopment narrative as it is used on the South Side and chronicles two new features about it: its revamped use of fear and its re-fashioned notion of culture. I flesh out these two elements as they circulate through a now dominant redevelopment program: historic preservation. I chronicle three points in this paper. First, programs like historic preservation, like so many current city programs, have now fully shifted to being a neoliberal economic development tool to promote the “go-global Chicago” project. Second, two dominant fears recently nuanced anchor the narrative: fear of a city-destroying globalization and fear of city-subverting poor African-Americans. Third, a revamped notion of culture is used that helps provide resonance and dark appeal to the two offered fears. The culture notion is put into play as two dominant things, as the idealized and timeless glue that unifies Chicago's mainstream and as problematic values and meanings carried by black bodies which renders them civic tainting “ocular trash”.     

Economic Interdependence Within the Chicago Metropolitan Area: A Miyazawa Analysis

The present study explores the nature and strength of economic interdependence between inner-city communities and suburbs within the Chicago metropolitan area. Employing Miyazawa's extended input-output framework, a multiregional model is used to investigate the interdependence of income formation and output generation. The metropolitan area is divided into four regions and particular attention is directed to predominantly minority areas on the south and west sides of the city of Chicago. The region-to-region impacts of trade flows and their associated multipliers proved to be far less important in determining the strength of interregional interdependence in contrast to income flows derived from journey-to-work movements. The interrelational income multiplier revealed considerable interdependence between regions although the strength of this interdependence was asymmetric.     

Capital's Metropolis: Chicago and the Transformation of American Housing Policy

The US economic recovery of the 1990s accelerated amidst privatization, selective devolution and the reinvention of the public sector itself. Simultaneously, mortgage finance and assisted housing policy were recast in terms of market processes, individual responsibility and private home-ownership, even as gentrification enjoyed a dramatic resurgence. The intersection of these seemingly unrelated processes signifies an important transformation of the American inner city. Nowhere are these connections more explicit than in Chicago, where newly devolved and flexible policy infrastructures are built on the ashes of prominent experiments of previous generations. In this paper we use Chicago as a context to explore the linkages between reinvestment, housing finance and the reinvention of assisted housing. We analyse local and federal developments in assisted housing policy and develop a multivariate analysis of mortgage loans in Chicago's neighbourhoods during the 1990s expansion. New constructions of scale in assisted housing, exemplifed by Chicago's Lake Parc Place and the federal HOPE VI programme, constitute a centripetal devolution mediated by the relationship between public policy and local private market forces. National changes in housing finance have altered historical processes of redlining, disinvestment, and gentrification. Mortgage capital, traditionally responsible for the creation or exacerbation of rent gaps, now lubricates the flow of capital into the gentrifying frontier of the inner city. The intensified market discipline of housing policy, based partly on theories incubated in Chicago, suggests a new regime of neighbourhood change in the American inner city.     

Neighborhood house price indexes in Chicago: a Fourier repeat sales approach

House price indexes are estimated for 851 census tracts in theCity of Chicago using a Fourier repeat sales estimator. Locallyweighted regression allows price indexes to be estimated forsubmarkets with small numbers of sales. Annual appreciationrates are higher between 1990 and 1996 in neighborhoods closeto the city center with large minority populations, high concentrationsof poverty, and many vacant homes in 1990.