Leaving Chicago for Iowa's "Fields of Opportunity": Community Dispossession, Rootlessness, and the Quest for Somewhere to "Be OK"

In recent years, urban development and public housing demolition have posed challenges to the social and geographic rootedness of low-income African Americans in urban areas. In particular, in Chicago, widespread public housing demolition, occurring in the context of rapid gentrification, has contributed to increasing shortages of affordable low-income housing. This study uses in-depth interviews and participant observation to examine the migration experiences of men and women who have left urban neighborhoods and public housing developments in Chicago searching for affordable housing and economic opportunity in eastern Iowa. This particular analysis focuses on experiences of social and geographic "rootlessness" that emerged as a major theme in these interviews. Participants describe community dispossession in Chicago that has threatened not only the ties between individuals and their social support networks, but also connections and claims to the places in which these ties are rooted. Narratives that describe leaving Chicago in this context and then trying to get by as a stigmatized outsider in "someone else's city" speak to a process of dislocation that may disrupt critical social-support resources that are known to mitigate the consequences of structural disadvantage.

[1]  J. Fitchen.  Spatial Redistribution of Poverty through Migration of Poor People to Depressed Rural Communities1 , 2010 .

[2]  P. Carr,et al.  Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America , 2009 .

[3]  D. Imbroscio.  “[U]Nited and Actuated by Some Common Impulse of Passion”1: Challenging the Dispersal Consensus in American Housing Policy Research , 2008 .

[4]  Susan D. Greenbaum.  Poverty and the Willful Destruction of Social Capital: Displacement and Dispossession in African American Communities , 2008 .

[5]  S. Popkin,et al.  Poor Health: Adding Insult to Injury for HOPE VI Families , 2007 .

[6]  K. Newman,et al.  The Right to Stay Put, Revisited: Gentrification and Resistance to Displacement in New York City , 2006 .

[7]  Lisa L. Miller.  Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do about It , 2005 .

[8]  A. Geronimus,et al.  TO DENIGRATE, IGNORE, OR DISRUPT: Racial Inequality in Health and the Impact of a Policy-induced Breakdown of African American Communities , 2004, Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race.

[9]  Lawrence F. Katz,et al.  Moving to Opportunity and Tranquility: Neighborhood Effects on Adult Economic Self-Sufficiency and Health from a Randomized Housing Voucher Experiment , 2004 .

[10]  L. Berkman,et al.  Does Housing Mobility Policy Improve Health? , 2004 .

[11]  S. Popkin,et al.  The HOPE VI Program: What about the residents? , 2004 .

[12]  E. Goetz.  Forced Relocation vs. Voluntary Mobility: The Effects of Dispersal Programmes on Households , 2002 .

[13]  L. Mullings,et al.  Stress and Resilience , 2001, Springer US.

[14]  J. Peck,et al.  Contingent Chicago: Restructuring the Spaces of Temporary Labor , 2001 .

[15]  N. Hoffart.  Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory , 2000 .

[16]  Sally Young Conrad.  Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work , 1997 .

[17]  B. Williams,et al.  Call to Home: African Americans Reclaim the Rural South , 1997 .

[18]  Lawrence J. Vale.  Empathological Places: Residents' Ambivalence toward Remaining in Public Housing , 1997 .

[19]  S. James,et al.  Racial and ethnic differences in infant mortality and low birth weight. A psychosocial critique. , 1993, Annals of epidemiology.

[20]  Christine G. T. Ho.  The Internationalization of Kinship and the Feminization of Caribbean Migration: The Case of Afro-Trinidadian Immigrants in Los Angeles , 1993 .

[21]  H. Molotch,et al.  Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place , 1987 .

[22]  L. Duhl,et al.  The urban condition : people and policy in the metropolis , 1964 .

[23]  M. Meehan,et al.  The Urban Condition; People and Policy in the Metropolis. , 1963 .

[24]  Roger Waldinger,et al.  Creating Networks for Survival and Mobility: Social Capital Among African-American and Latin-American Low-Income Mothers , 2003 .

[25]  Gina M. Pérez.  The Other "Real World": Gentrification And The Social Construction Of Place In Chicago , 2002 .

[26]  A. Geronimus,et al.  To mitigate, resist, or undo: addressing structural influences on the health of urban populations. , 2000, American journal of public health.

[27]  Anselm L. Strauss,et al.  Basics of qualitative research : techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory , 1998 .

[28]  W. Wilson,et al.  Book Review: When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor , 1997 .

[29]  B. Hooks.  Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics , 1990 .