ANALYSIS: HOMICIDE OR HOUSING? by Al Swanson UPI Urban Affairs correspondent

CHICAGO, Dec. 5 (UPI) -- A leading expert on street gang violence says Chicago's murder rate would go down if the city had more affordable housing.

John Hagedorn, associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago and senior research fellow of the Great Cities Institute, developed the thesis while examining the relationship between the city's high homicide rate and a lack of affordable housing caused by rapid gentrification of poor and minority neighborhoods and the leveling of high-rise public housing.

Chicago's murder rate of 22 per 100,000 per year is about the same as in Moscow, but is three times higher than New York's. More than 560 homicides have occurred so far in 2003.

While Hagedorn is still collecting data, including street interviews with active gang-bangers as well as community leaders, he contends distressed neighborhoods would be safer places if they were saturated with affordable housing and not police patrols.

Short-term policing strategies, he said, cannot solve underlying problems of inequity and race that feed a social structure where violent behavior is an accepted part of daily life.

While he acknowledges a role for increased police presence with techniques like targeted response enforcement, surveillance and intervention to broker gang ceasefires and create so-called "safe zones" around schools and churches, Hagedorn says violence and despair have become intractable.

Hagedorn cited a combination of factors other than police work that he said helped lower homicide rates in New York City. Parts of New York were virtually destroyed by crack cocaine turf wars that left areas like the South Bronx urban abandon zones.

He praised authorities for making significant investments in affordable housing in the South Bronx in the late 1980s.
New York City invested $1 billion in affordable housing from 1988 to 1997. There was no comparable investment in housing on Chicago's West and South Sides, whose inner rings were developed by commercial real estate enterprises that displaced low-income residents.

"Really from their own direct experience you get people who talk about all the killing that they saw," Hagedorn said of interviews he conducted with South Bronx residents. "They were horrified by it. There's an exhaustion that took place. Now, what they don't say because its not their direct experience, is that the (social) conditions didn't keep stirring it up -- that there was this natural cycle that took place and a momentum -- and that police and community groups and everything helped with that momentum.

"I think that kids are also, on the whole, are more hopeful in New York," he said Friday at the University of Illinois in Chicago's Great Cities Forum.

The homicide rate in the South Bronx today is about half of Chicago's. "It's about one-tenth of what it is in Lawndale and Englewood," he said. "It's just a huge difference in homicide rates."

His two-year study to think outside the traditional social engineering box is funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

Hagedorn blames the collapse of U.S. manufacturing in the Midwest, which gave white ethnics a foot on the ladder of upward mobility, for a lack of hope in African-American communities.

Losses of good factory jobs to Mexico and China, replaced by low-paying service jobs, and entrenched racial segregation inflamed existing social problems.

Gang crime in poor African-American communities became institutionalized in a drug economy prone to high violence and exacerbated by the forced relocation of thousands of public housing residents uprooted from Chicago Housing Authority projects, many home to street gangs entrenched for more than 50 years.

Hagedorn said the crime rates in the projects actually were no worse than surrounding areas, but that relocated gang members fueled violence as they become newcomers in far South Side communities like Roseland -- which one gang member likened to "The Wild, Wild West."

"Chicago differs from New York in our history as the world's leading manufacturing center," Hagedorn wrote in an op-ed piece in the Chicago Tribune. "The black migration to the industrial Midwest was pulled by the needs of the factories and mills. African-Americans were over-concentrated in manufacturing, and de-industrialization hit black people especially hard."

Hagedorn contends government investment in housing was central to stabilizing neighborhoods by giving people a sense of empowerment and stability.

"They're just not going to go off," he said in a recent Chicago Public Radio panel on WBEZ. "They're going to restrain their friends when they're acting crazy. And they'll say, 'Look, we can't push this stuff in people's faces. This is a nice neighborhood. Let's keep it undercover. Let's keep it private.'"

Community activist Jesus Garcia, a former alderman, described how the Little Village Violence Prevention Collaborative brought more than 20 groups together in South Lawndale, a mostly Hispanic immigrant community that has the city's highest high school drop out rate (52 percent)
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The death rate from heart disease in South Lawndale is more than eight times the homicide rate per 100,000 people and the community plans to use schools as safe haven to deliver services like literary classes, healthcare information, skills training and job-finding to youth and adults.