Chicago Slums: Segregation, Public Housing, and the Legacy Today

The slums of Chicago are not an accident of poverty. They are the product of a century of decisions — racial covenants, redlining, contract selling, slum-clearance demolitions, expressway routes drawn as color lines, and public housing built tall and cheap on the same segregated ground it was meant to replace. The buildings changed. The map did not. The neighborhoods carrying the heaviest weight of Chicago’s housing crisis today are largely the same ones that carried it in 1920.

How the Slums Began

Chicago’s first slum districts grew in the decades after the 1871 fire, when European immigrants crowded into wood-frame and brick tenements near the factories and stockyards. Most had no indoor plumbing. Diphtheria, typhoid, cholera, smallpox, and yellow fever moved through the density.¹ The Chicago Board of Health’s 1878 reports documented overcrowding and sanitation failures affecting roughly half the city’s population.²

An 1880 city ordinance and an 1881 state Tenement and Factory Ordinance put sanitation under the Health Department and let inspectors enter buildings without a warrant during daylight hours.¹ A City Homes Association report in 1901 found conditions “growing steadily worse,” with “dumb-bell” tenements packing 100 to 150 people into a single five-story building and setback laws “entirely ignored by builders.”³ The 1902 “New Tenement law” set minimum standards for new construction but was weakly enforced and did nothing about existing housing.²

That is the ordinary immigrant-tenement story, and it played out in most large American cities. What made Chicago’s version different, and durable, was what came next.

How Segregation Locked Them In

Restrictive Covenants and the Black Belt

After the Supreme Court’s 1917 ruling in Buchanan v. Warley struck down explicit residential segregation laws, developers and homeowner associations turned to racially restrictive covenants — clauses written into deeds barring sale, lease, or occupancy by non-white residents. The Chicago Real Estate Board supplied model language and paid legal fees.⁴⁵

The result was the “Black Belt,” a narrow strip running south from the Loop along State Street, where African Americans were confined to the worst housing and paid higher rents than white tenants because they had nowhere else to go.²

The covenants unraveled slowly. In Hansberry v. Lee (1940), Carl Hansberry bought a home in Woodlawn covered by a covenant that supposedly bore signatures from owners of 95 percent of the area’s land frontage. Neighbors sued to stop the family from moving in. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed the state courts, finding that only 54 percent of owners had actually signed and that the Hansberrys could not be bound by a prior class-action decision in which their interests were never represented.⁶ The family’s ordeal later shaped their daughter Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun.⁷

Hansberry did not outlaw the covenants. That took Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), which barred courts from enforcing them, and then the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Some Chicago covenants remained on the books into the 1980s.⁸

Redlining and the Contract Loan Trap

Beginning in the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration graded Chicago neighborhoods on color-coded maps. Any area with ten percent or more Black residents was graded “Hazardous” — redlined — disqualifying its residents from government-backed 30-year mortgages. More than 99 percent of Black neighborhoods were redlined regardless of income.⁵

Locked out of conventional loans, Black buyers were funneled into “contract” sales. A speculator would buy a house cheaply in a transitioning neighborhood and resell it at a marked-up price on an installment plan under which the buyer earned no equity and the seller kept the deed. One missed payment meant losing the house and every dollar paid into it. Clyde Ross bought a home in North Lawndale in 1961 for $24,000; it had been appraised at $12,000.⁹ Contract buying stripped an estimated $3 to $4 billion in wealth from Black Chicago residents over two decades.⁵

In the late 1960s a Jesuit seminarian named Jack Macnamara and a group of homeowners organized the Contract Buyers League. After two federal class actions failed — the last appeal exhausted in 1983 — the league ran a payment strike, with roughly 500 families withholding installments into escrow. By July 1971, 155 contracts had been renegotiated at an average savings of $14,000 per household. About 70 families lost their homes when police and sheriffs sided with sellers. The movement also pressured the FHA to begin extending mortgage insurance to Black communities.¹⁰

Clearance and Scatter: Urban Renewal and the Expressways

Between 1950 and 1966, federally funded urban renewal demolished entire blocks in the name of “slum clearance.” Chicago had the second-highest number of family displacements in the country, after New York. The Lake Meadows project on the near South Side, initiated in 1947 by Mayor Martin Kennelly with New York Life Insurance, displaced roughly 3,400 families; critics said it demolished well-maintained owner-occupied homes to improve lake views. Hyde Park–Kenwood displaced another 4,000 families. Those two areas alone accounted for roughly a third of all Chicago urban-renewal displacements.¹¹ The demolished housing was rarely replaced in adequate quantity, and displaced residents were pushed into new neighborhoods that then became the next round’s target. In total, urban renewal displaced over 80,000 Black residents in Chicago.⁵

The Federal Highway Act of 1956 paid 90 percent of expressway construction costs, and Mayor Richard J. Daley’s administration used the program aggressively. The Dan Ryan Expressway was originally designed to run through Bridgeport, Daley’s own neighborhood; the route was shifted eight blocks east to serve as a barrier between white Bridgeport and the Black Belt.¹² The Urban League estimated in the late 1950s that 12,000 Black residents would be displaced by the Dan Ryan alone.¹³

The Eisenhower Expressway displaced 13,000 people and wiped out 400 businesses, cleaving West Garfield Park in two. The Kennedy displaced 3,306 families.¹³ The I-55/I-90 interchange cut Chinatown in half. By the late 1970s, urban renewal and highway construction had displaced 81,000 people combined. In 1960, Black residents were 23 percent of Chicago’s population but 64 percent of those displaced. White residents removed by the same projects received access to whites-only suburbs through new highways and federally subsidized mortgages. Residents of color received little to no relocation assistance and were frequently channeled into poorly constructed public housing.¹⁴

Public Housing: The High-Rises, the Failure, the Demolition

The Chicago Housing Authority, established in 1937, started with modest New Deal projects totaling about 4,000 units.² In 1950 the city council rejected proposals to build public housing on vacant land and instead directed construction to existing slums in African American neighborhoods.¹⁵ What followed was a generation of massive high-rise “superblocks,” 15 to 19 stories tall, in clusters.¹⁶

The Robert Taylor Homes, completed in 1962, became the largest public housing project in the country: 28 identical 16-story buildings, 4,415 apartments. Cabrini-Green totaled 3,607 units. By the time the federal government stopped funding high-rise family housing in 1968, the CHA had built 168 high-rises containing roughly 19,700 apartments.¹⁶

They deteriorated quickly. Design flaws, poor maintenance, and chronic underfunding combined with the intake of families displaced by urban renewal and expressway construction after the CHA stopped screening applicants. Chronic unemployment, concentrated poverty, and managerial neglect finished the job.¹⁵¹⁶ Two police officers were killed by a sniper at Cabrini-Green in 1970; in 1981 Mayor Jane Byrne lived in the complex for several weeks to draw attention to the crisis.

Gautreaux

In 1966 tenants filed Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority, the nation’s first major public-housing desegregation lawsuit, challenging the CHA’s practice of concentrating family housing in redlined, racially segregated areas.¹⁷ Plaintiffs won in 1969; a federal judge ordered the CHA to stop building in Black neighborhoods and begin scattered-site construction.¹⁶ In 1976 the Supreme Court extended the remedy in Hills v. Gautreaux, ruling that HUD bore liability for funding the discriminatory system and that federal courts could order metropolitan-area relief in the form of housing vouchers usable anywhere in the Chicago suburbs.¹⁸

The Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program ran from 1976 to 1998 and moved more than 25,000 people to over 100 communities. Research by James Rosenbaum found that children who moved to integrated suburbs were more likely to graduate from high school, attend college, and get better-paying jobs than those who stayed.¹⁹ The case reached final settlement in 2019, with a federal judge relieving the CHA of most court-ordered duties while requiring five more years of work on mixed-income housing, vouchers, and early childhood programs. Observers said the remedies “never effectively took hold” and that Chicago remains deeply segregated.²⁰

The Plan for Transformation

HUD took control of the CHA in 1995 after financial and management scandals. Mayor Richard M. Daley regained local control in 1999 and announced the Plan for Transformation, a commitment to demolish most CHA high-rises and replace or renovate 25,000 housing units.¹⁵²¹

What the plan delivered is contested. In 2022 the CHA told HUD it had reached its 25,000-unit goal, but a ProPublica analysis found the agency padded the number by counting more than 5,000 privately owned units subsidized through project-based vouchers, more than a third of which had been designated affordable before the plan began. The CHA currently holds roughly 13,000 family units — 16,000 fewer than existed before demolition and 2,000 fewer than the plan itself envisioned. At the site of the former Robert Taylor Homes, the replacement development Legends South has completed only 335 public housing units, with over 25 acres still vacant.²²

The residents fared worse than the numbers. Only 56 percent of former CHA residents remained in the housing system after demolition. Just under 2,000 moved into new mixed-income developments. The other 44 percent were disqualified, entered the private market on their own, held a nominal right of return to housing that had not yet been built, or were otherwise lost to the system.²³ Former Robert Taylor residents were scattered across Chicago, the south suburbs, and neighboring states; those who could not secure vouchers, often because of criminal histories or family size, “trickled out into the city” to find housing on their own.²¹

If You Are Renting in a Bad Building

Chicago’s Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance, approved in 1986 and amended since, is the primary law governing most rental housing in the city. It requires landlords to keep units habitable, sets security-deposit rules, and lets tenants withhold a portion of rent when conditions are uninhabitable, provided they follow the ordinance’s notice and waiting-period procedures. It also bars retaliation against tenants who assert their rights, and it requires landlords to include a summary of the ordinance with every lease.²⁴

Illinois law adds that landlords must keep units fit to live in and follow health and housing codes. The Illinois Retaliatory Eviction Act bars landlords from evicting tenants for complaining to authorities. Only a sheriff can physically remove a tenant; lockouts, utility shutoffs, and other “self-help” evictions are illegal.²⁵

The rights are real. Enforcing them is hard. Retaliation lawsuits are rare and difficult to win. A 2025 Injustice Watch investigation documented a Pilsen case in which three tenants who properly withheld rent over 18 code violations, following the ordinance’s procedures, were nonetheless hit with rent increases of 26 to 55 percent and eviction filings. The case settled confidentially in April 2025; the tenants moved out.²⁶ The broader “Tenant Trap” investigation found the court system in housing cases “prioritizes landlords’ property rights over the rights of residents.”²⁷

Inspections Are Complaint-Driven

Chicago’s building inspection system has been complaint-driven for decades. The city generally does not conduct routine safety checks on residential buildings, and a 2017 code change under Mayor Rahm Emanuel removed a requirement for annual inspections of multi-family buildings. A 2018 audit by the city’s inspector general found a backlog of over 5,000 unresolved complaints going back five years and an “antiquated, disorganized” documentation system that relied on manual note-taking.²⁸

Since a 2021 investigation by the Better Government Association and the Chicago Tribune exposed the system’s flaws, at least 53 people have died in residential fires. Several of the buildings had extensive histories of failed inspections and documented violations, including missing smoke alarms and faulty wiring, that were never resolved.²⁸ A September 2022 explosion at a West Side apartment building that had failed inspections in eleven separate years injured at least eight people.²⁹

A “Healthy Homes” ordinance to require proactive rental inspections has been under debate since late 2022. In March 2026 the City Council approved an ordinance creating a working group to research and recommend health and safety inspections for rental units, with a six-month timeline and at least three public meetings required before final recommendations. A city-wide proactive inspection regime does not yet exist.³⁰

For the worst buildings, the city has relied since 2003 on the Troubled Buildings Initiative, a partnership with the nonprofit Community Investment Corporation. It targets persistently non-compliant buildings and uses court-appointed receivers to make repairs when owners refuse; the cost is recovered through priority liens that can trigger foreclosure and transfer to a new owner. By 2014 the initiative had evaluated more than 700 buildings and rehabilitated 345, covering nearly 7,000 units.³¹³²

Lead

The Chicago Department of Public Health estimates that lead hazards exist in roughly 99 percent of residences built before 1978, when lead-based paint was banned. The share of Chicago children with elevated blood lead levels fell from 70 percent in 1996 to under 2 percent in 2021, but fewer than half of children are being tested as required, and in many low-income and majority-of-color communities, 30 to 40 percent of residents in older homes have tested positive for elevated lead.³³

Chicago’s municipal code requires owners to keep buildings free of lead hazards. The city can issue abatement orders and fines of $100 to $500 per day of noncompliance, rising to $500 to $1,000 per day and up to six months’ incarceration for repeat offenders.³⁴ In 2001 three Chicago companies settled federal allegations of failing to disclose lead hazards in nearly 10,000 apartments, paying $90,000 in civil penalties and committing $177,000 to child health projects.³⁵ The city still has no proactive inspection system for at-risk units, and replacing Chicago’s roughly 400,000 lead water service lines carries an estimated cost of $10 to $15 billion.³³

What the Legacy Looks Like Today

Vacant Land Where the Housing Was

Decades of demolition, disinvestment, and depopulation have left the South and West Sides studded with empty ground. The city owns about 10,000 vacant lots, the vast majority on those sides of town.³⁶ As of 2023, over 80 percent of city-owned vacant lots sit in communities that are at least 80 percent Black; less than 1 percent are in majority-white communities. Nearly 32,000 more lots are privately owned and vacant, almost 60 percent of them in predominantly Black communities.³⁷ The city has attributed the pattern explicitly to “decades of disinvestment and structural racism,” citing urban renewal, contract buying, and highway construction as root causes.

The Shortage and the Waitlist

In the Chicago metro area, only 28 affordable and available rental homes exist for every 100 extremely low-income renters.³⁸ Rents in Chicago have climbed nearly 50 percent since 2016.³⁹ As of 2021 the city was short 120,000 affordable housing units. Black Chicagoans made up 73 percent of the sheltered homeless population and more than half of the total population experiencing homelessness, despite being roughly 30 percent of the city.⁴⁰ The January 2025 Point-in-Time Count identified nearly 7,500 Chicago residents experiencing homelessness on a single night.

The CHA manages 47,000 Housing Choice Vouchers and owns more than 21,000 public housing units, serving over 63,000 families on a $1 billion annual budget.⁴¹ But the main voucher waitlist has been largely closed since 2014, when 282,000 people applied. Over 16,000 households remain on it, and in 2025 only 458 new households received vouchers. That same year, a Housing Rights Initiative investigation filed 176 complaints against Chicago landlords and agents for allegedly refusing to accept vouchers.⁴²

Gentrification in Pilsen

While Black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides contend with vacancy, historically Latino neighborhoods face displacement of a different kind. Pilsen’s Latino population dropped from 88.9 percent in 2000 to 71 percent in 2020 as white residents moved in and home prices surged. In East Pilsen the median sale price jumped from $220,000 in 2018 to $608,750 in 2023.⁴³ Property taxes on the Lower West Side spiked 46 percent in a single year, squeezing the small “mom-and-pop” landlords whom researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago describe as a stabilizing force because they offer rent flexibility and personal relationships with tenants.⁴⁴

In 2018, 70 percent of Pilsen voters supported a non-binding ballot question backing rent control, but Illinois maintains a statewide ban. A proposed Just Cause for Eviction ordinance, which would limit eviction grounds to lease violations or nonpayment and require relocation assistance for rent increases above 10 percent, remains under debate.⁴³²⁶

The Fight Over Where the Money Goes

Since the summer of 2022, more than 39,000 migrants and asylum seekers have arrived in Chicago, and the city has spent over $310 million on shelter, staffing, and services. In April 2024 the City Council approved another $70 million for migrant aid in a 30-18 vote. Black aldermen were particularly vocal in opposition, arguing that their neighborhoods had been “chronically divested” for decades without comparable investment. Alderwoman Emma Mitts said, “I’ll be doggone, I don’t see the Black folks getting that kind of help.”⁴⁵

Don Washington of the Chicago Housing Initiative Coalition and other organizers argued the city faces two concurrent crises — a migrant crisis driven by federal immigration policy and a housing shortage that predated the migrants’ arrival by decades — and that the $310 million was never earmarked for Black residents in the first place. Neither group, they said, has received adequate investment.⁴⁰

In the same session, the Council authorized $1.25 billion for affordable housing and economic development over five years, funded through expiring Tax Increment Financing districts and targeted at neighborhoods including Austin, Auburn Gresham, Garfield Park, Humboldt Park, and Englewood.⁴⁵ The city’s Five-Year Blueprint on Homelessness for 2026–2031 acknowledges homelessness is rooted in “decades of inequity and disinvestment,” particularly in communities of color, and commits $625 million in housing and economic development bonds as part of a pivot toward locally funded solutions amid uncertain federal support.³⁹ Whether that money reaches the neighborhoods that have carried the heaviest weight of Chicago’s slum history — the same neighborhoods redlined in the 1930s, cleared in the 1950s, warehoused in high-rises in the 1960s, and demolished again in the 2000s — is the question the next decade will answer.

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3
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4
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15
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17
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18
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19
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20
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21
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22
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24
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26
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27
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28
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29
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31
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32
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33
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34
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35
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36
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37
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38
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39
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40
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41
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42
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43
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44
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45
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