Chicagos Negro :: Free Essays Online

breads inkiness When studying urban life sentence spaces, one question that always comes to heading is how a particular urban space or neighborhood came into existence. I check grown up on the southeastern stead of Chicago for the bygone 19 years in a community cognise as oral contraceptive Hill. My neighborhood, a middle-class Chicago neighborhood, came to gain its pick out because of all the doctors and health-cargon professionals who resided in the neighborhood in the 1960s. In addition, I have also had the fortune to live outside of the city in a northerly suburb known as subalpine Park on the lakefront of Chicago argon some of the most affluent communities in the get together States. In both median household income and per capita income, Northbrook, Highland Park, and Wilmette and among the nations ten wealthiest communities with a population of about 25,000 or more. There are other salient characteristics of these three communities they are virtually al l smock and they have virtually no subsidized house. (Squires 117)The rigors and din of the city are all but removed from life in Highland Park. Nevertheless, Highland Park, IL has faced its own share of trouble in the past decade for the discrimination that the corrupt local government has plagued minorities with. The living conditions in Highland Park are drastically different from those of the South Side of Chicago in that the average property value of a syndicate in the year 2000 was $662,755 while the average home in Pill Hill sold for $180,323. (Citizens United for Justice) Nevertheless, Highland Park is just a single example of Chicagos many affluent northern suburbs that developed in the 1850s. Growing up in the city my perfect life and having lived in different socio-economic conditions, I have grown repellent to the extraordinary degree of racial segregation present in Chicago. As an African American, I have always felt comfortable living on the South Side of Ch icago and not until I had the opportunity to live in both Highland Park and a next suburb, Lake Forest, did I truly know what it felt like to be a minority. Nevertheless, this was not always the case for most blacks. From the early 1900s, blacks resided on the South Side of Chicago, not by choice, but because of strict discriminatory housing laws that forbade the sale of homes in certain areas to blacks.