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This chapter describes the development of Dearborn Park, a new housing development built in the South Loop during the 1970s and early 1980s. Dearborn Park, sponsored and financed by a group of downtown business leaders associated with the Chicago Central Area Committee, was an effort to initiate the transformation of the near-downtown area into middle-class residential communities. The project was intended to increase the presence of middle-class whites in the downtown area, an objective viewed as central to the protection of downtown property values. Yet the project’s sponsors also sought to achieve some racial diversity in the new development. Concerned that the city’s growing black population would intensify white flight, the sponsors of Dearborn Park viewed the development as a model community that would disrupt rigid patterns of thinking about race and housing and persuade whites that integrated neighborhoods could work.

This chapter describes how Chicago’s slum clearance and redevelopment program was carried out during the 1950s and 1960s. The city’s urban renewal program was informed by the new policy paradigm of using public-private partnerships to clear and redevelop blighted areas. The goal of eliminating slums wherever they existed was carried forward from the privatist period of the early twentieth century, but the involvement of private developers in the program was accompanied by an additional objective: achieving the highest and best use of land. This chapter argues that these two goals proved to be irreconcilable. Efforts to achieve the highest and best use of land had the perverse effect of extending and reproducing slums, not eliminating them. As fast as slums were cleared in one location they reappeared somewhere else, leaving policymakers and housing advocates at a loss to identify a practicable course of action.

This chapter focuses on the push for institutional change that accompanied the shift from the paradigm of privatism to that of public-private redevelopment partnerships in mid-twentieth century Chicago. The fragmentation of the city’s institutional arrangements posed an obstacle to the new slum clearance and redevelopment program, since execution of projects required centralized decision making and limited opportunities to delay and obstruct projects. The chapter describes the decade-long effort to consolidate the city’s various agencies involved with the city’s redevelopment program in one department, eliminating inefficiencies and making the obstruction of projects more difficult. The chapter findings support the argument that the prospects for new policy paradigms are determined in part by their fit with a city’s institutional arrangements.