The Record · Chapter Seven

Clear It, Wall It, Sell It

The war ended and the money came in. The city decided where it landed and whose house it landed on.

By Jason C. Wandel and Claude for Chicago Register · Monday, October 19, 2026

This is the stretch from 1945 to 1970, when the war ended, federal money poured in, and the city decided where it would land and who would have to move out of the way. Last time the line got drawn on a map, first by a covenant in a deed and then by a federal lending grade. Now there was money to build. The question was what, and where, and over whose house.

In 1949 Congress passed a housing act that sent money to cities to clear slums and build public housing. The Chicago Housing Authority came to the City Council with a map of sites spread all over the city. The Council threw out the whole map. White aldermen wouldn’t take public housing in their wards.

By 1954 the CHA and the Council had a private understanding. The CHA would only propose a site after the local alderman had already said okay. Nobody voted on that rule. It turned up years later in the agency’s own files.

A federal court later found that between 1950 and 1966 the Council rejected about 99 and a half percent of the public housing units proposed for white neighborhoods, and about 10 percent of the ones proposed for Black neighborhoods.

So the towers went up where the aldermen let them. Along State Street, in a long line. Robert Taylor Homes. Stateway Gardens. One alderman’s nod decided where tens of thousands of families would live for forty years.

At the same time, the city was clearing ground for the people it wanted to keep.

Michael Reese Hospital and the Illinois Institute of Technology sat on the near South Side, in the middle of Bronzeville, and they wanted to stay. Starting in 1949 the city’s land clearance office used eminent domain to take the land around them. New York Life Insurance built Lake Meadows on it. The people who’d been living there were moved out.

The word that did the taking was blight. Once a neighborhood was labeled a slum, it could be seized and handed to somebody else. That word cleared Bronzeville in 1949. It would clear Little Italy in 1961 and the North Loop in 1984 and Block 37 in 1989.

Call it blight, and the label does the work.

In 1955 Richard J. Daley became mayor. He’d hold the job for twenty one years. He came from Bridgeport, the neighborhood the canal diggers built on a dollar a day.

In 1961 Daley picked Harrison and Halsted for the new University of Illinois Chicago campus. The neighborhood was Italian, Greek and Mexican, around Hull House. It had already been declared an urban renewal site, partly at the neighborhood’s own request, which handed the city the power to clear it. About 800 homes and 200 businesses came down. About 5,000 people had to move.

A woman named Florence Scala fought it. She organized the neighborhood, marched, sued, and took it all the way to the Supreme Court. She lost. The campus went up.

We print her anyway, because she was right about what was happening, and the record kept her name.

The expressways came through in the same years. The Congress, later the Eisenhower. The Dan Ryan, running along the edge of Bridgeport and the Black Belt. Whole blocks came down in their path, and the people who lived on them moved.

Now the money that didn’t need the government at all.

Black families who wanted to buy a house in the 1950s and 1960s couldn’t get a regular mortgage. Remember the 1940 map. So sellers offered them contracts instead. Pay the seller every month for twenty years and you’d own the house at the end. Miss one payment and you were out, and every dollar you’d paid was gone. You built no equity along the way.

The markup averaged 84 percent. Picture a house the seller picked up for $12,000 and sold on contract for about $22,000. That’s the average deal. Somewhere between 75 and 95 percent of the homes sold to Black families in Chicago in those years were sold this way. A 2019 Duke study, The Plunder of Black Wealth in Chicago, put what was taken at $3.2 billion to $4 billion in today’s money. It also found where the sellers’ money came from. Chicago doctors, dentists, lawyers and politicians.

That’s Jefferson’s 1803 letter again, run on a bungalow in North Lawndale. Get them into a debt they can’t finish paying, then collect the asset.

In the late 1960s the families fought back. They formed the Contract Buyers League, stopped paying as a group, and took the sellers to federal court. That’s an objector move, and it worked partly. Many families got their contracts rewritten.

The same years, two other removals ran on the same calendar.

In 1953 Congress started what it called termination, ending federal recognition of tribes. In 1956 it passed the Indian Relocation Act, which paid Native families to move from reservations to cities. Chicago was one of the cities. The American Indian Center of Chicago opened in 1953, the first urban Indian center in the country. It exists because of those two laws.

Downtown, clearance moved people to free up land. On the reservations, relocation moved people to free up land. Same years, different maps.

Out on the Indiana shore, the Calumet was getting its last big mill. Starting in 1956 a Bethlehem Steel company called Lake Shore Development quietly bought more than 3,000 acres in Porter County. Bethlehem announced its plans in 1962, and the mill opened in 1964 and 1965 at Burns Harbor. It was the last big integrated steel mill built in America. Bethlehem was the company Charles Schwab built after he left U.S. Steel. Schwab had been dead since 1939. The play outlived the man. Buy through a front company so nobody knows who’s buying.

In 1966 Martin Luther King Jr. moved his family into an apartment in North Lawndale, right in contract buying country. That summer he marched for open housing into Marquette Park and Gage Park on the Southwest Side, and a crowd met him with rocks. One hit him in the head. The marches ended with the Summit Agreement, a deal with the city and the real estate board. It promised a lot on paper.

In April 1968, after King was killed, the West Side burned. Daley said he’d ordered police to shoot to kill arsonists.

And on December 4, 1969, before dawn, Chicago police working for the Cook County State’s Attorney raided an apartment on West Monroe Street and killed Fred Hampton, the 21 year old leader of the Illinois Black Panther Party, and Mark Clark. An FBI informant had given them a floor plan. In 1982 the city, the county and the federal government settled with the survivors and the families for $1.85 million.

Force showed up again where somebody was organizing.

Now the win that ran longest. In 1966 Dorothy Gautreaux, a public housing tenant, and other tenants sued the CHA over where it built. In 1969 a federal judge ruled that the agency had been placing public housing by race. The case went to the Supreme Court and the tenants won there in 1976, in Hills v. Gautreaux. The aldermen’s veto was dead in court. Thousands of families eventually got the chance to move to other neighborhoods. It took a decade. What held it was paper and a judge.

So here’s our question. The aldermen’s yes was never written down, and it took ten years of lawsuits to kill it. What’s the unwritten rule on your block right now?

Next comes the stretch when the mills went dark and the money started looking downtown.

The scoreboard

Read it yourself

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