Inequality In Chicago

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Race and class conflict have persisted throughout the history of the United States, going all the way back to the founding of our country. Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers and framers of the Constitution once characterized the nation as being made up of wolves and sheep. The wolves prey upon the sheep. Jefferson compares this relationship in the animal kingdom to that of the rich and poor in our society. Those who have the power, the wolves, using it to impose their will on others, the sheep. In more modern times, one of the most fitting examples of this conflict is in Chicago, where housing and employment opportunity are used to maintain racial and economic inequality. The persistence of race and class-based inequality through …show more content…
In 1850, "Chicago's richest 10% owned 94% of the city's wealth" (Buettinger, 1978, p. 414). From this early period, a small number of rich men owned nearly all the property in the city. The question is, how did so few come to acquire nearly all wealth in Chicago? According to Buettinger (1978): "Best advantage was taken of Chicago's opportunities by men who arrived early and with capital" (p. 417). The majority of residents who were wealthy enough to own businesses settled in Chiago before 1839 (Buettinger, 1978, p. 417). The source of their wealth varied, some owned property or buisnesses back east, others brought money from of their own or were backed by relatives (Buettinger, 1978, p. 417). By the time 1850 came, most of these men owned profitable businesses and were firmly entrenched in the city's economic structure (Buettinger, 1978, p. 417). With Chicago's distribution of wealth being decided less than two decades after the city's municipal corporation, it is easy to see why those who emigrated after this time who were economically challenged had little room for vertical …show more content…
In response to the ongoing recession of 1980, economic policies where implemented on a national level that "has shifted jobs from manufacturing to service sectors" (Hu, 2014, p. 677). Between 1979 and 1986, these policies contributed to the loss of nearly 358,000 jobs in Chicago's manufacturing sector (Peck and Doussard, 2009, p. 193). These losses eliminted job opportunities for low-skill, low-income workers in the city (Hu, 2014, p. 677). The continuing shift toward services carried into the 2000s with the technology industry's surge, which only benefited higher-income, higher-skilled workers (Peck and Doussard, 2009, p. 197). You can see the effect this has had on limiting job opportunities for lower class workers, as the manufacturing industry accounted for just 12% of jobs in the city vs the 45% it accounted for back in 1963 before deindustrialization (Peck and Doussard, 2009, p. 198). Coupled with rising inflation, stagnant wages also unevenly affected lower class workers, resulting in a 12% decrease in real earnings for the bottom 10% of the workforce (Peck and Doussard, 2009, p. 198-200). There is a direct impact here on the vertical mobility of the lower
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