What’s important about Natalie Y. Moore‘s new book is less that it’s about Chicago’s south side, and more that it’s of the south side, deeply and lovingly, in a way journalism about the area rarely is. That’s partly due to Moore’s day job: she’s WBEZ’s south-side bureau reporter. Yet it’s also because The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation isn’t simply a work of journalism, but a combination of reporting with policy analysis and prescription and, most compellingly, memoir. Weaving her own history through discussions of educational and residential segregation, food access, and black politics in Chicago, Moore pays tribute to a place of “loveliness and contradictions and negotiation.” Moore grew up in Chatham; she owned a condo in Bronzeville; she now lives in Hyde Park and works out of an office in Greater Grand Crossing. These details aren’t incidental to the book but necessary for it.
Nowadays a different set of factors conspires to keep south-side neighborhoods in a state of disadvantage: White appraisers, Moore argues, undervalue houses in black neighborhoods, holding down home values. Retailers won’t invest in them. The mortgage companies that caused the subprime crisis targeted neighborhoods like Chatham. Here too, a personal touch: In 2008 Moore bought a condo in Bronzeville for $172,000; one Great Recession later it was valued at $55,000. With Rahm Emanuel’s 2013 school closings, Moore’s concerns were compounded: “Foreclosures and short sales had already rocked my block and Bronzeville as a whole. How could a vacant school affect property values?” That story comes in a chapter called “Notes From a Black Gentrifier,” tongue in cheek. The reality, Moore writes, is that “black Chicago neighborhoods don’t gentrify.”
By Natalie Y. Moore (St. Martin’s Press)
Moore appears in conversation with Rick Perlstein Thu 3/31, 6 PM International House, University of Chicago 1414 E. 59th 773-753-2270ihouse.uchicago.edu Free
