I consider, next, the historical circumstances that led to the conditions that exist in communities like Woodlawn. Many authors attribute neighborhood decline to factors external to the boundaries, as opposed to those that are purely self-contained. In addition, the role of race is always explicitly or implicitly a factor. Hirsch’s (1998) striking examination of further concentration of urban renewal in Chicago highlights the extent of segregated housing markets in the 1950-1960s, which subjected rural black Southerners often to higher-cost, sub-divided housing in Chicago and white residents to block-busting and social and economic pressures to move to the suburbs. Hirsch’s work stops decade before the start of this research, but conditions he described in his work continued into the 1980s as described by Taub (1988) in the case of South Shore. Gangs took over Woodlawn, as they did in several neighborhoods, putting further pressure on middle-class residents to move.

Further, as many home-owning and middle-class (and white) families left inner-city communities, so did the commercial retailer on whom all families depended (Bright, 2000). The disappearance of employment opportunities in the city and the movement of many households away from inner black neighborhoods left black communities racially and economically isolated (Wilson, 1996). Beyond these social and economic pressures, public policy had a significant role in causing neighborhood decline: FHA and VA codification of racial bias. locational bias in mortgage lenders, federal tax deductions that privileged homeowners rather than renters, and highway construction that fueled the suburbanization of job opportunities (Massey & Denton, 1993).

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