Fifty-seven years ago this month, my mother brought me home from Michael Reese Hospital, where I was born, to 4907 W. 43rd St. in the LeClaire Courts public housing development on Chicago’s Southwest Side.
She lived there in a two-bedroom apartment with my grandparents and her two younger sisters, who were 14 and 11 at that time. Her older brother was in the military. My grandparents stayed in one bedroom; my mother, her sisters and I stayed in the other bedroom.
It was tight quarters, for sure, but LeClaire Courts was actually a come-up for my grandparents. Before they moved there in the mid-1950s, and before my youngest aunt was born, the family lived out of one bedroom in a large first-floor apartment of a graystone two-flat they shared with other family members in Bronzeville. It was a typical story for Black folks who made their way to Chicago during the second wave of the Great Migration. Someone would make the trek and establish roots in Chicago, and other family members would follow.
When I was born, my mother worked for a printing company in the South Loop. Once she was able to afford her own place, when I was 3 years old, we moved from LeClaire Courts to a third-floor apartment of a three-flat in Auburn Gresham. I lived there until I went away to college, but I’d often visit relatives — my grandparents and later an aunt and my cousins — in LeClaire Courts.
I don’t remember my earliest years there, as an actual resident, but I have vivid memories of the many summers, spring breaks, Christmas breaks and countless weekends and holidays I spent there. I absolutely loved the place — so much so that when I drove past the development in 2011 and noticed it was being demolished, I had to stop and take pictures and videos. I even crossed over boundaries meant to keep people off the premises and walked through the apartment where my aunt and cousins once lived. I was too late to visit the building where my grandparents lived and where I’d lived as a small child. It had already been torn down.
I hadn’t walked the grounds there since the summer of 1982, just before my aunt and cousins moved away. In the three decades that followed, the development fell on hard times — and census data shows just how hard.
LeClaire Courts is part of a census tract about a mile north of Midway Airport. That census tract sits just west of Cicero Avenue and south of the Stevenson Expressway from 43rd Street to 47th Street. Within that census tract, the development sits north of 45th Street and a small community of single-family homes — an area we referred to simply as “the homes” when I was kid — sits to the south.
When my grandparents moved there, LeClaire Courts was a working-class, racially integrated community. In 1970, a year after I was born, the census tract where the development is located was still racially integrated — 64% Black and 35% white. By 1980, however, the census tract was 97% Black.
In 1970, among those 25 years or older, about 3% of residents in the census tract had at least four years of college or a bachelor’s degree. By 2011, the figure had increased to just 6%. Citywide, that figure grew from 8% to 33% during the same span.
In 1970, the unemployment rate in the census tract was 7.7%. In 1990, it was 25.8%. In 2000, it was 22.7%. The region’s loss of manufacturing jobs may have contributed to the spike in the census tract’s jobless rate. In 1970, more than 37% of its working residents worked in manufacturing. It was just under 15% in 2000.
In 1980, the citywide median household income was $15,301. It was $14,643 in the census tract where LeClaire Courts is located. However, by 2020, the citywide median household income had more than doubled to $38,625. Meanwhile, it was just $16,691 in the census tract surrounding the development.
Lack of investment, opportunity
According to The Chicago Reporter, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development praised LeClaire Courts in the early 1990s as the lowest-crime development in the Chicago Housing Authority. But an analysis of city data shows that homicides at the development increased from 11 in the 1990s to 17 in the 2000s — with five murders alone in 2002 — as the development’s population declined and it started receiving residents moving from other developments slated for closure.
Like many public housing communities, LeClaire Courts succumbed to poverty, drugs, crime and violence. In the eyes of many, that’s the story of public housing. But that’s not the LeClaire Courts my grandparents encountered in the 1950s. It’s not the development my mother grew up in during the 1960s, and it’s not the development I remember from the 1970s.
What happened to LeClaire Courts is what happens to many communities that lack investment and opportunity. As the development’s buildings decayed, so did its connections to viable sources of education and employment. And the impact was dramatic. At age 35, the median earnings of Black children born to low-income parents in the census tract surrounding LeClaire Courts from 1978 to 1983 — just a decade or so after I was born — was just $19,740, according to data from Opportunity Insights, a nonprofit think tank based at Harvard University.
This month, LeClaire Courts is being reborn as the CHA breaks ground on two residential buildings on the former development’s site. Once the project is completed by 2028, there will be more than 180 units, with about half of them reserved for low-income renters. In addition to the new construction, I hope there will be other forms of investment to help the next generation to grow up in LeClaire Courts find the economic stability that eluded the last generation to grow up there.
Alden Loury is data projects editor for WBEZ and writes a column for the Sun-Times.