Essay On West Chicago Area

The Chicago Metropolitan Area has an unfortunate reputation for being dangerous, particularly in certain regions of the city, such as the south side and the west side. Generally, crime rates can be explained by a number of factors, such as education, income, politics, and more; however, explaining how those factors have come to be and how they influence the safety of a city can be a bit more complex. When examining both historical and modern policies, it becomes possible to discover the correlation between these policies and the factors such as education and income that can be seen influencing crime rates in modern cities. To break this down further, the West Chicago neighborhood, West Garfield Park, will be examined to see if a correlation

41.7% of households in the neighborhood are below the poverty line, with a per capita income of only $15,957. Compared to the Chicago average of $28,202, West Garfield Park is barely above half of the average for its city. (The To & Through Project, 2020). This low income is likely partially influenced by the low education rate of the neighborhood but likely also stems from a lack of opportunity in the area. According to diversitydatakids.org, the child opportunity levels within West Garfield Park are “Very Low.” This number is calculated by examining factors such as early childhood education enrollment, third-grade reading and math proficiency, high school graduation rates, school poverty, access to green space, housing vacancy rate, employment rate, poverty rate, homeownership rate, single-headed households, and more. Among these statistics, West Garfield Park consistently rates significantly below the national average. (diversitydatakids.org, 2022). All of these factors are used to determine the opportunity for success that a child raised in the area is likely to have. Unfortunately, West Garfield Park ranks extremely low, meaning children from this neighborhood do not have easy opportunities to succeed later in life, and will likely fall victim to the cycle of poverty found in this region of

Of course, the cycle of poverty can be hard to break; violent areas such as West Garfield Park are not likely to draw in industry, meaning jobs will likely be low-paying and scarce, leading to more poverty, leading to more violence. This positive feedback loop is extremely difficult for a community to escape and often results in residents leaving an area en-masse in search of areas with more opportunities for work and for their children. This can already be seen happening in West Garfield Park, as referenced previously with the dramatic population decline seen in the last few decades. To understand how West Garfield Park was absorbed into this vicious cycle of violence and poverty, one must take a look into how the history of the region, historical policies, and practices such as redlining have affected the modern