Introduction: The Battle over Race, Crime, and Gentrification

The first chapter gives an overview of crime and gentrification in Rogers Park and Uptown. It explains why residents largely regarded efforts to tackle these interconnected problems as mutually exclusive. It also situates the local tensions about crime and gentrification in the broader historical and structural context of racial segregation and integration in the American city. In addition, the chapter introduces the book’s methodological approach, outlines its research questions, and develops its theoretical framework. Regarding the theoretical framework, the chapter introduces two simple concepts, “racial challenges” and “racial neutralizations,” which describe the contentious work of framing social phenomena as racially problematic or racially benign.

Conclusion

The conclusion summarizes the book’s main findings and discusses them in conversation with scholarly literatures on urban change, racial inequality, and criminal justice bias. It suggests that scholars should examine the ways civic pressure encourages or produces invasive forms of social control. It highlights the importance of community organizations and local political fields in shaping urban communities and landscapes. In relation to the sociology of race and racism, the conclusion aggregates findings about the contexts and effects of racial challenges and neutralizations and calls on scholars to more systematically analyze the discursive interplay of these rhetorical practices.

“White Vigilantes?”

Positive loitering is a type of neighborhood watch practice that safety activists in Rogers Park and Uptown commonly used in order to try and suppress street crime and gang activity. In conducting positive loitering, the mostly white safety activists entered a context in which their racial category was marked, because the practice encouraged charges of racism and vigilantism. This chapter describes how two positive loitering groups positioned themselves in this contested territory. It shows how the groups embraced or avoided racially contested tactics, engaged or alienated black and Latino residents, and discussed racial challenges. Ironically, a positive loitering group in Uptown created an environment of interracial collaboration in their polarized neighborhood, while the group in Rogers Park incited racial conflict despite that neighborhood’s calmer political field.

Resisting Gentrification and Criminalization

This chapter examines the intensive efforts of Uptown’s social justice activists to resist gentrification and criminalization after an alderman whom they perceived to be progentrification took office there in 2011. Galvanized by the displacement of young, black basketball players from a local park, black and left-leaning residents formed a new organization that aimed not only to resist gentrification and racial marginalization but also to reduce violence in order to unite the local youth around the cause of social justice. Effectively deploying racial challenges, the organization succeeded in reversing the displacement of the basketball players but eventually faltered due to the activists’ exhaustion and lack of resources. Furthermore, the related community conflicts made it more difficult for CeaseFire, a violence prevention organization, to operate and remain in Uptown, because it was drawn into the battle over gentrification.

Racial Identities and Political Standpoints

On an aggregate level, the fight against street crime in Rogers Park and Uptown benefited white residents at the expense of black and minority residents, who were mostly low-income and more likely to be displaced or confronted with aggressive policing. Nevertheless, alliances and battle lines in Rogers Park and Uptown crisscrossed racial boundaries. Some middle-class whites actively opposed gentrification, while some black residents supported tough-on-crime policing. This chapter describes in detail several extreme examples of how racial identities did or did not align with the political positions one might expect whites and African Americans to take. Furthermore, it sheds light on the fact that many racial battles played out within rather than between racial groups.

Racial Displacement in Action?

With the help of Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy, Chicago’s community policing program, safety activists in Rogers Park and Uptown employed a set of powerful strategies for fighting crime—“problem building” and “problem business” interventions, increasing and directing police services by strategically calling 911, attending court hearings as “court advocates,” and reclaiming public space through “positive loitering,” a type of public neighborhood watch. All of these practices were ostensibly race-neutral, but critics could and sometimes did challenge them as tools of racial marginalization. In addition to describing grassroots public safety work, the chapter analyzes how antigentrification activists contested these practices. Furthermore, it shows how safety activists tried to inoculate their efforts against racial contestation by recruiting minority residents, deploying racially benign narratives, and carefully managing situations of conflict.

Crime and Gentrification beyond Black and White

Despite Rogers Park and Uptown’s impressive ethnoracial heterogeneity, almost all community activists who engaged with the politics of crime and gentrification were African Americans or non-Hispanic whites. This chapter examines why this was the case by portraying the social situation of largely uninvolved immigrant communities. Specifically, it discusses Rogers Park’s Latinos, Uptown’s Southeast Asians, and Sub-Saharan Africans residing in either neighborhood. All of these communities experienced crime and gentrification in different ways. Latinos and Asians could, to a certain extent, isolate themselves in their ethnic enclaves, but African immigrants could sometimes not avoid becoming entangled in neighborhood conflict.

“You’ve Got Reason to Be Afraid”

This chapter investigates aldermanic politics, especially the roles crime and race played in electoral campaigning. Since white residents in particular worried about crime, electoral contenders could try to mobilize fear by highlighting the dangers of street crime. At the same time, this strategy could backfire if it was successfully portrayed as divisive racial fearmongering. Analyzing approximately thirty years of political history in both Rogers Park and Uptown, the chapter shows that despite falling rates of crime, electoral hopefuls running against incumbents frequently centered their campaigns on the alleged threat of street crime. Incumbents pushed back by deploying racial challenges that discredited their opponents. The chapter reveals that political histories have left important local marks within the two neighborhoods and their communities.

A Brief History of Living Together

Chapter 2 establishes the urban context in which the dynamics described in subsequent chapters unfolded. The chapter begins with a description of the prevalence and quality of crime, gang activity, and violence in Rogers Park and Uptown. It then offers a historical overview of urban change from the neighborhoods’ early history through racial integration and up to the arrival of gentrification and the present moment. The chapter ends by describing the neighborhoods’ contemporary political fields, including the main actors and community organizations that formed the public safety and antigentrification camps.