Murderous Chicago

This is a Chicago specialty: The city has had more homicides this year than New York and Los Angeles combined. As crime rates declined elsewhere, August was Chicago’s most violent month in 20 years. The more than 500 murders this year already exceed the 2015 tally. Over the July 4 weekend, someone was shot every 2.8 hours. The Labor Day weekend total was at least 13 people killed and 52 wounded.

Nykea Aldridge, a 32-year-old mother of four, was among those fatally shot in August—while she was pushing her 3-week-old in a stroller. The suspects, two brothers, were allegedly trying to shoot someone else because he looked at them funny. They were on parole on gun convictions—one just two weeks before the shooting. Aldridge’s death got national attention, unlike most Chicago victims, because she was a cousin of basketball star Dwyane Wade.

So many are killed or wounded that Chicagoans would be hardpressed to remember the names of the last 4-, 6-, or 10-year-old to have been gunned down. In this, Chicagoans haven’t lost interest or compassion; they’re just overwhelmed by the numbers.

The volume of shootings has become so terrifying that residents themselves have pleaded for the Illinois National Guard to be called out to patrol their streets.

Clearly Chicago has something unique going for it. Polemicists, politicians, professors, and good hearts of all stripes have rolled out their favorite “root causes”: illegal guns, poverty, family disintegration, fatherlessness. Lousy schools, hopelessness, segregated housing, anomie, drugs, unemployment. All these maladies affect every American city, yet none have spawned Chicago’s level of gang violence. What makes Chicago special?

Decades of disastrously failed social engineering. It began with the post-World War II housing shortage and public acceptance of the New Deal’s canon that the government should insert itself into the housing market. The underlying—and naïve—assumption was that poor people would be transformed into productive citizens if only they were better housed.

Chicago went hog wild. The Chicago Housing Authority, headed by social reformer Elizabeth Wood, began a federally funded, massive, and years-long building program that became Chicago’s signature disaster. The resulting barracks warehoused tens of thousands of poor people in ugly megaliths, some 19 stories tall. For blocks, these sterile buildings ran in a four-mile-long wall, a dismal greeting for visitors entering the city on the Dan Ryan Expressway.

While the projects started out nice enough as waypoints for upward-bound families, they eventually became breeding grounds for crime, poverty, hopelessness, and dysfunctional families. The wide-open green spaces surrounding each building turned into rock-strewn, open-air drug markets. Groceries, barbershops, and other small service businesses so important to maintaining vital neighborhoods were either torn down to make way for the mega projects or fled the neighborhood, leaving tenants in food and service deserts. Thanks to the Democratic political machine that ran Chicago, the worst of the worst were crammed into the “Black Belt,” to appease white Chicagoans.

In reality, instead of providing decent and safe housing as the grand social experiment intended, the projects became gangland incubators for hopeless black youths and nightmares for the two, three, and more generations of broken families trapped there. While other cities were afflicted with failed public housing highrises, none could compete on Chicago’s scale.

Faced with this reality, the social engineers turned on their own creation. Their new canon insisted that the poor would become productive citizens if only they could be integrated into decent housing in decent neighborhoods, where they would learn middle-class values. Lawsuits were filed. The ACLU intervened. A federal judge ruled that new public housing had to go into white neighborhoods. Which virtually halted their construction.

The projects became such cesspools that their demolition became inevitable. As the buildings fell to the wrecker’s ball, tenants were funneled into Section 8 housing, the federal program that provides subsidized housing by paying rents to cooperating private landlords.

In other words, disperse the dysfunctional families throughout the city, along with their problems and their parasitic gangs. It should have surprised no one that the scattered families didn’t leave their troubles behind in the rubble of their former highrise homes.

Gangs in highrises operated differently. Their territories were clearly defined as each building was under the control of recognized bosses. Boundaries were respected, rules of engagement clearly defined. There was structure. There was discipline.

The destruction of the old highrises changed all that. Structure and discipline collapsed as mutually recognized boundaries were erased. The old generals no longer held sway as their soldiers were strewn hither and yon. Leadership was splintered.

Thousands of young bloods, finding themselves in new neighborhoods, ignored the old rules, made new alliances and fought territorial wars. Blocks were seized or given up, as the tide of battle turned. The scattering of the gangs turned entire neighborhoods with high concentrations of Section 8 tenancy into virtual war zones between contending factions and sub-factions. Chicago’s West and South Sides came under siege as drug dealers and gangsters fought, sometimes block-by-block, to establish control. To make matters worse, each shooting led to an escalating number of retaliatory shootings, the kind that have attracted so much national attention.

There’s no going back. Neither packing the poor into squalid highrises nor scattering them around town has worked. They’ve only demonstrated that social engineers are not exempt from the law of unintended consequences.

Now what? The usual: Tougher state and national gun laws? (Chicago already has some of the toughest in the nation.) Pour more money into schools, policing, and social programs, such as trying to teach conflict resolution to young toughs? (Even though Chicago and Illinois are virtually bankrupt and living day-to-day off risk-takers willing to gamble on city and state bonds.) It’s a puzzle with no clear answer, other than taking back the city, street by street, alley by alley, and block by block.

Longer term, the solutions are clearer but harder. Mostly it requires major cultural changes: Rebuilding families and recognizing the importance of fathers. Reversing the normalization of the drug culture. All the things of value that are popularly ridiculed today.

Mostly, though, don’t count on social engineers to get it right—whatever their next big vision is.

Dennis Byrne is a Chicago writer.