Book review: “The Battle of Lincoln Park: Urban Renewal and Gentrification in Chicago” by Daniel Kay Hertz

Daniel Kay Hertz’s 2018 book The Battle of Lincoln Park: Urban Renewal and Gentrification in Chicago is important because it provides the first, in-depth case study of the transformation of a Chicago neighborhood in a process that has come to be known as gentrification.

In the case of Lincoln Park, it is a story that began in the 1930s and continues today, the story of a Near North Side community that, over the decades, has gotten progressively richer and richer. Indeed, the community now is so affluent that it’s unaffordable for the sort of middle-class rehabbers who were the first gentrifiers of the area.

It’s no longer a fixer-up neighborhood with a great many old, dowdily attractive, worn-down buildings just waiting to be jazzed up. Everything there now is jazzed up to the nth degree, as jazzed up as money can buy.

It’s gone from being a hidden gem of a community of like-minded bohemian-ish, artsy nonconformists to a haven of the wealthiest of the city’s wealthy, an extension of the Gold Coast. It’s gone from being a place of used bookstores and quirky shops and idiosyncratic bars that once attracted the young and the suburban tourist looking for adventure and is now a kind of in-city version of Kenilworth.

 

The winners and the losers

As with much in modern life, as well as down the many centuries of history, the winners of the battle of Lincoln Park were and continue to be the rich — the developers who profited from the neighborhood’s transformation, the investors who got in early and were able to sell for top dollar, and, most of all, the affluent themselves who have taken as their own a community steps away from Lake Michigan and close to the flashy Near North Side and the cultural riches of the Loop and the area around it.

The losers — well, you could keep a scorecard as you read Hertz’s book.

There were the low- and middle-income people who lived in Lincoln Park at the time the rehabbers started moving in — and started moving them out. Many of the neighborhood’s homes had been subdivided into small apartments, and the goal of rehabbers was to turn them back into single-family homes. That meant clearing everyone out so that a gut rehab could be carried out.

Other losers were the low-income people, particularly Puerto Ricans and Appalachian whites, who were driven out of nearby communities by gentrification and ended up finding new quarters — temporarily — in Lincoln Park. The members of these groups hardly got a foothold into the western half of the neighborhood before they were being driven away.

 

A cautionary tale

The rehabbers and their Lincoln Park Conservation Association fought a war to keep the poor at bay despite their proclaimed belief in diversity, and then they ended up losing the battle on another front, finding themselves overwhelmed by the wealthy.

Their efforts set the community on the road to becoming as un-diverse place as you’re likely to find, lacking not just racial and ethnic diversity but, even more, lacking economic diversity. They thought themselves to be heroes in creating a vibrant neighborhood, but, with their efforts to scour poor people out of the community, they were perceived as villains.

The Battle of Lincoln Park is a compact, deeply researched study of how this series of transformations took place.

It’s likely to be helpful for people who find themselves in such a gentrification process in another Chicago neighborhood, such as the low-income people who will be worrying about being pushed out by newcomers.

But it can also function as a cautionary tale for those middle-class people who, relatively new to an area, aim to protect “their” community for themselves. Market forces, demographic change and societal shifts are likely to have more of an impact than any of their efforts. And then, of course, there’s money.  What the wealthy want, the wealthy get.

 

A constant state of flux

A final point that I’d make is that neighborhoods in Chicago are in a constant state of flux.

For instance, I live in Edgewater, and, when we moved in more than forty years ago, we were among a lot of college-educated people who were buying the homes of blue-collar families.  Those homes had become empty nests because the children raised there had, for the most part, not moved back as adults. Now, we are the empty-nesters, and new people will be taking our places.

In Edgewater, the transition was gradual and relatively tranquil. However, in Austin on the Far West Side, where I grew up, the all-white neighborhood was beset by panic-peddlers and its own racism, and it was transformed into all-Black community in the space of a couple years.

 

A messy lot

Each neighborhood in the city could be the subject of a book like Hertz’s.

Each should be. It would be helpful and insightful to look at how each community got to be what it is today. And to recognize that more change will come in future years.

The Battle of Lincoln Park, aside from the specifics about gentrification, is a reminder that a neighborhood is made up of people, and people are a messy lot.

The poor, as the Bible says, are always with us, and they almost always get the short end of the stick. Or, put the other way, wealth will win out in most cases — and always in the long-run.

Which isn’t to say that the power of the rich can’t be blunted.

Look at what Helen Shiller, as the alderman of Uptown, was able to do to keep the wealthy at bay for a quarter century. But she’s no longer in office, and Uptown shows more and more signs of encroaching affluence.

What the wealthy want, the wealthy get — eventually. And, conceivably, are happy with it.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

5.1.26