PHOTO/KATHY POWERS
CHICAGO, IL — In the Chicago neighborhood of Uptown, under the viaducts of Lake Shore Drive, there are encampments, “Tent City” or “Uptown Tent City”, they are called. The homeless always deal with bigotry and bigoted hatred from the not homeless whereever they are, but in Uptown we are a symbol and political football, emblematic in a much larger struggle taking place in Uptown and many other neighborhoods in the city and in many cities in the U.S. That is the struggle of the poor and working classes to survive in the face of gentrification.
That struggle may be more intense and more charged with meaning in Uptown than anywhere else. Uptown has a long tradition of such struggles as previous mayors have seen the neighborhood as a repository for “undesirables” in their racist, bigoted view of the city and of the world, and declared war on it by various means, sometimes in the most literal sense.
Uptown offered defiant resistance in this war from City Hall and created a tradition for itself of tolerance and welcoming of all types of people and acceptance, accommodation and of aid and service to the poor.
There is, however, a growing element of residents in Uptown that is not native to the neighborhood but much more moneyed than the original residents and seeking to personally exploit and profit from the neighborhood by buying property extremely cheaply and driving those already living in the area out through the raising of property prices, and thus all prices, in what is gentrification. This new element is not at all appreciative of the local traditions of tolerance, acceptance and service. They have, in fact, a great disdain for them and are extremely intolerant of anyone who is not of their privileged background and status and have not only a profit motive but a great personal animosity toward such persons in an almost blatant, bigoted hatred.
This newer, invasive, and would be successive, element puts tremendous pressure on the local alderman and mayor (both of whom are of similar ilk and whose sympathies are decidedly with this group and who actively and vigorously work to serve them and to the neglect and often willful harm of other groups of people not in this “in clique”) to have us and all homeless and poorer people removed from the neighborhood in their frank “urban cleansing” campaigns.
Thus the pressure is always on and the almost Nazi like intolerance and wish to eradicate the less fortunate and less well off like so many insect pests in near open class war is ever present always looking for an opportunity to advance its purpose and ultimate goals with one malicious act or other against its declared “enemies”, the less fortunate who are only trying to make it and survive.
Intolerance, however, is only a symptom, a tool of the exploiters against the exploited. The real cause of homelessness is its profitability to real estate firms, developers and property owners in the economics of exclusivity. Until we as a society, through democratic government, genuinely address the problem and change the conditions that cause homelessness it will not go away but will ever increase.
