Full Description
How inequality was forged, fought over, and forgotten through public policy in metropolitan Chicago.
As in many American metropolitan areas, inequality in Chicagoland is visible in its neighborhoods. These inequalities are not inevitable, however. They have been constructed and deepened by public policies around housing, schooling, taxation, and local governance, including hidden state government policies.
In Structuring Inequality, historian Tracy L. Steffes shows how metropolitan inequality in Chicagoland was structured, contested, and naturalized over time even as reformers tried to change it through school desegregation, affordable housing, and property tax reform. While these efforts had modest successes in the city and the suburbs, reformers faced significant resistance and counter-mobilization from affluent suburbanites, real estate developers, and other defenders of the status quo who defended inequality and reshaped the policy conversation about it. Grounded in comprehensive archival research and policy analysis, Structuring Inequality examines the history of Chicagoland's established systems of inequality and provides perspective on the inequality we live with today.
Contents
Introduction: Structuring Inequality in Chicagoland
Part I: Forging Metropolitan Inequality
Chapter 1: The State Policies That Define Localism, Public Schools, and Fragmentation in the Suburbs
Chapter 2: Chicago's Postwar Development Agenda: Using Schools, Land-Use Tools, and Public Subsidies to Protect White Property
Part II: Fighting over Metropolitan Inequality
Chapter 3: Fighting Chicago School Segregation: The Battles to Define Northern Segregation, Government Responsibility, and Public Priorities
Chapter 4: Varieties of School Desegregation: Defining State Responsibility and Protecting White Interests in the Fragmented Suburbs
Chapter 5: The Fight to Open the Suburbs: Fair- and Affordable-Housing Advocacy and the Suburban Defense of Metropolitan Inequality
Chapter 6: School-Finance and Property-Tax Reform: Trying to Expand State Fiscal Responsibility and Equity in Local Finance
Part III: Forgetting Metropolitan Inequality
Chapter 7: The Policy Origins and Effects of Fiscal Crisis: Taxation, Austerity, and Business-First Economic Development in Chicagoland
Chapter 8: From Equity to Measurable Standards: Reshaping Public Policy and Forgetting Inequality in a Neoliberal Age
Conclusion: What Does This History Mean for the Present and the Future?
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Source Abbreviations
Notes
Index
