Ecology of a Ghetto

Here in the ghetto

It's a bad situation;

Call it what you want to,

It's just a concrete reservation.

--Soul Song

ECOLOGY is too new a science to have examined the ghetto systematically. Yet it is clear that the country's environmental blight most severely affects the millions who are marooned in black inner cities--Hough (Cleveland), Harlem (New York), Roxbury (Boston), the Hill (Pittsburgh), the Central Ward (Newark). In Chicago, which has been called the most segregated city in America, roughly 1,100,000 blacks make up almost one-third of the population and are overwhelmingly confined to black poverty areas. According to Sociologist Pierre de Vise, research director of the city's hospital planning council, those areas have grown by 25% in the past decade. They are the loci of 220,000 substandard housing units--rotting tenements and rooming houses.

As blacks expand into Chicago's white areas, an ecological pattern emerges. White workers leave; industries are not satisfied with unskilled blacks and increasingly move to the suburbs. Since blacks have less to spend, many stores also move, abandoning their premises to store-front churches. As local jobs decline, Chicago's blacks must spend more--not only for higher rents, but also to travel farther to work (an average eight miles v. six miles for whites). Only about 15% have cars. In addition, the most available jobs for ghetto blacks are the city's worst: janitor, forklift loader, punch-press operator, hospital orderly.

One Per 10,000. Compared with metropolitan Chicago as a whole, the city's black poverty areas have ten times as much unemployment (10%), seven times as many welfare cases, four times as many one-parent families and half as much median family income ($4.800). Though Chicago has 80 hospitals, most blacks are sent to the old Cook County Hospital, where they wait an average two hours to be seen, pay $100 a day for beds or are crowded into the hospital's 50-year-old ward. In black ghettos, the infant mortality rate from influenza and pneumonia is 9.8 per 100,000, compared with 4.4 in white poverty areas and 2.6 for all whites.

Sociologist de Vise cites another dismal statistic: 5% of Chicago's black ghetto infants die before reaching their first birthday--"a higher death rate than in any of the 50 states or any civilized nation." As for doctors, he says, the ghetto has "one physician for every 10,000 blacks, compared with one physician for every 700 whites."

Island of Noise. Blacks can flee the central ghetto--by moving sideways to new ghettos. Consider Chicago's Near West Side, now 60% nonwhite. At first glance, the five-square-mile area is dominated by the striking architecture of the University of Illinois' new Circle Campus. Closer inspection reveals a streetscape of despair: low, glum buildings, boarded-up store fronts, infrequent parks, broken curbs. True to cliche, the district's neighborhoods are walled off from one another by three separate lines of railroad tracks, the eight-lane Dan Ryan Expressway and a barge canal. Looming above all are the three 15-story apartment buildings that make up the Brooks Extension public housing project.

Built in 1959, Brooks Extension is a vertical concrete reservation into which 452 families--all of them black--are packed in angry isolation from the surrounding community. To leave it is difficult, for public transportation is sporadic in the area. Cars are thus especially precious; those parked nearby wear chains around their hoods to prevent robbery of parts. The place teems with children--3,000 of them. On the upper floors, they run along railed terraces, screaming at one another. On the barren lawn, they swarm endlessly around some battered gym equipment and two working basketball hoops.

Ultimately, the environmental disaster that is Brooks can be summarized only in human terms. Brooks is jammed with people like Delores Watkins and her husband Leo, who live on the first floor surrounded by noise. Both came to Chicago from the South in the early 1950s, met and married in 1958. Since then, he has held 13 menial jobs and she has had nine children, now aged twelve years to seven months.

Slammed Doors. Mr. Watkins was unemployed for five months. The total family income for eleven people was the monthly welfare check for $300 (of which $83.50 went for rent), plus food stamps worth $178. He kept looking for work, but his lack of education always slammed doors. He recognized that his inability to read or write was his main problem. "If I could just bring the application form home with me, I could get it filled out and might get hired. I know I can do the job; that ain't no sweat. But they want you to fill out the form right there.'' Last week he finally found a job.

For nine years, they have lived in Brooks Extension and watched it decay. Says Mrs. Watkins, who compares her home with the Dan Ryan Expressway: "They haven't done one thing to this building. But you go down Dan Ryan and they're always fixing on it. We don't have a new tree here. We don't have grass. On Dan Ryan they have pulled and put down new trees two or three times."

In Mrs. Watkins' building, the floors slant and the long, drab halls stink of garbage. Roaches proliferate, disregarding poison; mice and rats skitter about at night, frightening the children. Mrs. Watkins does her best to keep the apartment neat, but the cinder-block walls are crumbling. "You can mop these floors and shine them," she explains. "And as soon as you mop, the dust rolls up on the floor. By the time you wax them, you can see the dust in the wax."

As a result of the ceaseless dust, Mrs. Watkins and four of her children often go to the hospital to be treated for asthma. Breathing can be even harder for a different reason: "We have an incinerator right by our apartment, and the cinder blocks in the wall are busted. Sometimes we have to get out of here at 2 in the morning to keep from being stifled with smoke."

Devoid of thermostats, Mrs. Watkins says, the building is an oven that never cools. "We get heat from all sides--coils in the floor and ceiling and hot-water pipes in the walls. We have to buy summer clothes for inside and then winter clothes for outside."

With eleven people in the four-bedroom apartment, it is no wonder that the Watkins children yearn to go elsewhere. But where? The older ones can walk to the movies--27 blocks away. The younger ones can attend a Head Start program or either of two nearby elementary schools. But Crane High School, with its athletic facilities, is a mile away and the round trip by bus costs 90-c-.

Mrs. Watkins would like her children to enjoy the Circle Campus, only a few minutes' walk away. "One day some boys were put in jail for walking across there while a track meet was going on for white boys. The university people said, 'Your boys will stick up our boys or beat them up.' Well, I say if you came into my neighborhood and built something I can't use, well, I'm going to stop you from using it. And this is how I think the children think."

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