Parts of Chicago glisten. In my time here, I’ve seen skid-row – a place where Nelson Algren once frolicked with his lover Simone de Beauvoir – transformed into a hip strip of clubs and pricey restaurants. I’ve seen the notorious Cabrini Green public housing project, where Mayor Jane Byrne memorably resided for three weeks with police officers and bodyguards, demolished and replaced by million-dollar town homes. I’ve seen the city’s lakefront beautified, so lush and open it resembles the seaside cities of Europe.  But then there are the predominately African American neighborhoods of the city’s South and West Sides where time stands still, where, block after block, foreclosed homes lean like punch-drunk boxers, their boarded-up windows marked by giant red Xs to warn police and firemen that they are unsafe structures. These are neighborhoods where Block Clubs, gatherings of neighbors to celebrate their street, post signs that cry out in despair, listing all that’s prohibited, all that’s feared. One reads: “Absolutely No Loitering. Drug Dealing. Gambling ‘Dice or Cards’.”  Two weeks ago, under court order, the city released the video of a police officer shooting one of the city’s children, Laquan McDonald, 16 times. Equally disturbing as the shooting is that, after the officer shoots McDonald, not one of the eight other officers on the scene goes to comfort him, to hold his hand as he lies dying in the street. A metaphor, perhaps, for a city that long ago turned its back on its disenfranchised and its poor.  Related: I filed suit for the Laquan McDonald police video. Its mundanity shocked me | Brandon Smith  It would be a mistake to point all fingers at the police, to fault the force for all the city’s ills even though its current scrutiny is deserved and well overdue. Chicago has long been a tale of two cities – in Richard Wright’s words, “an open and raw beauty … that seems either to kill or endow one with the spirit of life”.  The Department of Justice investigation into the Chicago police department is unlikely to change that.  Paul Collier, an economist who worked with the World Bank and teaches at the University of Oxford, visited Chicago a few years back. In his book The Bottom Billion he writes about deeply poor countries like Chad where there is no “credible hope” among the youth that they will grow up with better opportunities than their parents.  He told me, “If you believe you’re in a society that is stagnant, there’s only one way for you to go up: it’s if somebody else goes down. And so, in that sort of stagnant environment, everything seems to be a zero-sum game. There’s no point in cooperating. It’s me against you.” It’s not surprising, he went on, to see the kind of violence we experience in Chicago’s most degraded communities.  For a large swath of the West and South Sides, over 30% live in poverty, which for a family of four is $23,283. From these neighborhoods, you can admire the city’s gleaming skyline, and know what is not within reach. It’s like a tease – a symbol for what is not yours.  Chicago is also a deeply segregated city, and there seems little movement to change that. When early last decade the city tore down its public housing high-rises, home to an estimated 200,000 – equal to the city of Des Moines, Iowa – there was much talk about re-integrating these neighborhoods by class. In other words, have the very poor live side-by-side with the middle class. But there was no conversation about how to use this opportunity to integrate by race, and indeed studies from the Urban Institute have shown that public housing residents have relocated into communities that are less poor but still highly segregated.  We have so little to do with each other. When protesters rallied on the tony Michigan Avenue to decry the shooting of Laquan McDonald, some scolded the marchers for not protesting about the street violence in their own neighborhoods. But over the summer, vigils and marches in these communities are a weekly occurrence. It’s just that no one takes notice.  In the summer, with the ubiquity of perennials, residents mark the violent deaths of neighbors with makeshift memorials of stuffed animals, notes of love and prayer, liquor bottles and, for the very young, basketballs, toys and candy. They arise on street corners and beside front stoops, as if these communities were trying to piece together the equivalent of a war memorial. The only people who have been ignoring gun violence in those communities are those who don’t live there.  Related: Rahm Emanuel urged calm with no offer to fix Chicago's underlying problems | Mikki Kendall  Last year, the state took a stretch of Cicero Avenue and renamed it Nelson Mandela Road. The major thoroughfare extends the length of the city but the renamed portion? It ends where the African-American community ends.  “Chicago,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel has said, “is the most American of American cities.”
From the city’s poorer neighborhoods, residents can admire the gleaming, affluent areas in the distance but know that they aren’t within reach