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Chapter 4: Racial Residential Segregation and Exclusion in Illinois

Author: Maria Krysan, IGPA faculty and associate professor of sociology at UIC

Go directly to the full chapter [PDF]

Metropolitan Chicago has been deemed a “hyper-segregated” city whose residential segregation is indicative of an “American Apartheid.” Indeed, the Chicago area is one of our nation’s most racially segregated regions. But segregation also permeates other communities throughout Illinois.


 
Maria Krysan discusses her findings (transcript-PDF)
Read the complete chapter [PDF]

Levels of residential segregation in the Chicago metropolitan area are strikingly similar to those of cities outside Chicagoland. In Chicago and the surrounding region, 82% of communities can be classified as either moderately or highly segregated; in other Illinois cities, this figure is 90%. Trends of housing segregation in non-metropolitan areas of the state hold surprisingly close to the trends in the state’s larger city centers. Many of these municipalities simply do not have enough minority populations to enable accurate calculation, but in those small-town communities where some racial diversity does exist, the vast majority of neighborhoods are moderately to highly segregated.
 
The reasons for this sheer lack of any type of racial or ethnic diversity within many smaller communities throughout Illinois are up for debate. This absence of African Americans from many places in the state are not simply a matter of demography, migration, or market forces, but to the lingering legacy of formal and informal segregationist policies, created to drive out or keep out black families. While the official practices of these “Sundown Towns,” so-named because of their usual policy of “no coloreds after dark,” have faded into the past, informal policies and persistent reputations of communities as unwelcoming of African Americans mean that the consequences of these earlier policies and practices continue.

The causes of segregation are coplex and inter-related, making it difficult at best t osolve the problem with a single remedy. But some ideas are worth attention, such as support for testing and prosecuting cases of discrimination in the buying and renting of housing and in securing mortgages or property insurance, and working to create policies that provide resources for community-based organizations that work with the real estate industry to market their communities in ways that make them attractive and accessible to people of all races and ethnicities.