Link to Article Community leaders and residents in the Englewood neighborhood plan to march this weekend to protest the violence tearing up their community--just as they did in 1999, and in 1995, and in 1991.
For at least 20 years, Englewood and its South Side neighbor, West Englewood, have been used as symbols of urban despair, where jobs are scarce, homes are headed toward foreclosure and dreams are chased between gunfire in the streets.
President Bill Clinton visited Englewood High School in 1999 to proclaim an end to urban hopelessness, a year after the body of Ryan Harris, 11, was found raped and beaten in a vacant lot.
Mayor Richard Daley toured five blocks near 63rd and Halsted Streets after a spate of gang-related shootings in 1991, saying the solution was simple: "J-O-B-S. The people need jobs."
Daley is scheduled to return Saturday morning for a march near 68th Street and Ashland Avenue after two girls --Siretha White, 10, and Starkesia Reed, 14--were killed earlier this month by stray bullets.
There is another march scheduled for Friday, starting at the scene of Siretha's death near 70th Place and Damen Avenue, and ending at her family's home near 58th Street and Marshfield Avenue.
While organizers prepare for both events, local leaders grapple with the riddle of how to pull the community out of its relentless tailspin.
"It's just like peeling an onion," said John Ellis, a longtime Englewood resident who runs the Providence House, an organization for low-income seniors. "I can't get to the bottom of how to fix things here."
Carved up among six aldermen--which makes every revitalization effort a political minuet-- Englewood ranks among the city's worst areas for high school dropouts, crime, poverty and housing.
As older families leave, due to foreclosure or the fear of crime, new residents stream in from demolished public housing high-rises, a shifting population with loose stakes in the area.
Redevelopment efforts are under way, including a plan for 500 single-family homes and a $150 million renovation of the Kennedy King College campus. But the area remains largely isolated, just 10 miles from the Loop, with no major grocery stores for 2-mile stretches.
"We're looking at decades of economic decline in and around Englewood," said Nik Theodore, director of the University of Illinois at Chicago's Center for Economic Development. "The jobs base has been decimated there. Geographically, they're so cut off from any big employment bases. They're just so cut off from even living wage jobs."
The area started its decline in the 1960s, as a middle-class haven for German, Irish and Swedish families began to reel from the disappearance of manufacturing and stockyard jobs.
By 1970, the area's 63rd Street shopping strip was a shell of its former glory as the city's largest retail area outside the Loop during the early 20th Century. And, as African-American families arrived in search of affordable housing, many after having been displaced by the building of the Dan Ryan Expressway in the 1950s, "white flight" took off.
By the mid-1980s, with unemployment hitting South Side blacks particularly hard, Englewood and West Englewood had become packed with abandoned buildings, battlegrounds in a flourishing local drug trade. Some 35,600 residents left between 1980 and 2000, census figures show.
"Once the departure of those middle-class families took hold, you stopped having teachers, police officers and pastors living in the community in which they worked," said Henry Wilson, a neighborhood activist who has lived in Englewood since 1953.
Some enclaves of tidy brick bungalows still have block clubs and neighborhood watches.
But other blocks belong largely to absentee landlords who draw a more transient population, he said.
"What does that put in the kids' minds?" Wilson said. "That if you want to make it, you have to leave the community. And that leads to people not caring about the community."
Prolonged institutional indifference has also helped pull down Englewood, said Robert Sampson, a Harvard University sociologist who has researched Chicago's poorest neighborhoods for more than a decade.
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