Chicagos Negro :: Free Essays Online

pelfs Negro When perusing urban living spaces, one question that always comes to mind is how a particular urban space or neighborhood came into exis cardinalce. I put one across grown up on the South positioning of lettuce for the quondam(prenominal) 19 years in a community known as Pill heap. My neighborhood, a middle-class Chicago neighborhood, came to gain its name because of whole the doctors and health-care professionals who resided in the neighborhood in the 1960s. In addition, I hand over excessively had the opportunity to cognize outside of the city in a northern suburb known as highland(prenominal) Park Along the lakefront of Chicago are some of the most affluent communities in the United 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 different salient characteristics of these three communities they are virtu wholey all white and they have virtually no subsidized housing. (Squires 117)The rigors and din of the city are all but removed from purport in Highland Park. Nevertheless, Highland Park, IL has faced its own share of trouble in the past disco biscuit 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 home 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 integrity example of Chicagos many affluent northern suburbs that certain in the 1850s. Growing up in the city my entire life and having lived in different socio-economic conditions, I have grown immune to the exceptional degree of racial segregation present in Chicago. As an African American, I have always felt comfortable livi ng on the South Side of Chicago and not until I had the opportunity to live in both Highland Park and a neighboring 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 cut-rate sale of homes in certain areas to blacks.