Are slums disappearing from US cities?

[James Bond Agent 007]

OK, so I've been wanting to start this topic for a while.

I spend A LOT of time looking around at different cities on Google street view. One thing I'm always interested in is, what's going on in the most downtrodden parts of US cities, just out of a kind-of morbid curiosity. When I don't know offhand which are the worst parts of a given city, I look online for a crime map of that city to see which areas have the highest crime rates. I figure those must be the areas with the poorest people and thus, the "slums." I then go to Google street view to check 'em out.

And with the exception of a relative handful of cities, what I find is, most of those neighborhoods don't really look bad. Don't get me wrong, they aren't what I would call fancy, but still, most of them I wouldn't call "slums" either.

Take Chicago, which is one of my most obvious examples. You can browse through some of the pics from the 1940's in the Charles Cushman collection and find out that, yes indeed, there used to be genuine slums in Chicago. Like this, or this, or this or this (which might be abandoned) or this (which was actually inhabited).

No doubt about that, those are slums.

Can I find anything like that on Google street view in Chicago anymore?

Not that I can find.

So I looked at a crime map of Chicago, and picked the shootings map. Looks like an area to the west of Garfield Park is the worst. Surely those are crime-infested slums - right?

Well ... crime-infested, yes. Slums? Not so sure about that.

Let's go to the area around the intersection of about West Chicago Ave, and Laramie Ave.

So I click on a random spot in that neighborhood and this is what I get:
8920 S Bishop St, Chicago, IL.

It's not that bad at all. For the most part I see relatively well-maintained yards, no paint peeling off the houses, there's some boarded-up houses on the street but they don't appear to be in bad condition, there's kids on their bikes and these people here are busy fixing up their yard. By my reckoning, people keeping their yards in good condition indicates a certain pride of place, which is a positive thing. Not something you'd expect from slum-dwellers. But of course that's because they aren't slums!

I'll go south a bit to an area near the Washington and Cicero intersection, which is also in an area with lots of shootings on my map. So I randomly click here.

Again, not fancy, and on the street there's a few lots where it looks like houses have been torn down. But really, it's not in bad condition. People maintain their yards (for the most part), the houses aren't in horrible condition, the trees look in decent condition, and so on.

That area was on the West Side, but as everyone knows, "the South Side of Chicago; is the baddest part of town." Let's see if we can find Leroy Brown!

If my information is correct, the area around the University of Chicago is one of the worst areas. Let's check it out:

On the aerial I can see that west of the campus there appears to be a lot of abandoned lots. Let's go here at random. I see a few boarded-up houses, but they've got nice architecture and don't appear to be in particularly bad condition - at least from what I can tell by this picture. I then find a really empty-looking area and click on it, and this is what I get.

Well, if there once were slums there, they're gone by now! The houses that are remaining, for the most part, don't look too bad, and the ones that are boarded up, the boarding-up process looks about as neat and orderly a boarding-up as one could hope for. It's like a kind-of neat-and-tidy abandonment, really.

I decide to go south a bit still in search of Leroy Brown (metaphorically speaking), and in another neighborhood which appears to have lots of torn-down buildings, I get this.

No slums there, either.

Another area that looks bad on my crime map is an area around W 71st and S Halsted. Let's go there.

So I pick a random residential street here. Again, the abandoned lots are simply reverting to nature, and what's remaining isn't in terribly bad condition. I don't see anything resembling what I saw in the Charles Cushman photos above.

Anyway, I'm dwelling a lot on Chicago, but I've noticed this in most other cities I've checked out. There isn't ANYTHING in NYC I'd call a "slum" anymore (not even close, frankly), and nothing anywhere on the West Coast I'd call a slum, either. The houses in Watts and East LA aren't fancy, but they're not falling apart, either.

The only cities I've seen that have what might still be called "slums" have been in Detroit, Camden, and East St Louis. Even most of the neighborhoods in Gary, IN didn't look horrible (though downtown is certainly abandoned). Maybe there are some others I haven't checked yet, but if there are I'd like to hear from people here what I might have missed.

[10023]

Depends on your definition of "slum".

I would hope that in the year 2014, few American cities have favela-like sections of makeshift tin shelters and the like. But there is still plenty of substandard housing combined with poverty and high crime.

[oshkeoto]

I think you're right that unlike in earlier eras, the amount of dangerous or substandard housing is tiny. I think that's pretty well established.

But I don't know that that's the best definition of a "slum." In terms of concentrated poverty, the number of neighborhoods with *that* problem has been growing for over a decade, I believe, after a brief period in the 90s when it shrank.

[memph]

Toronto does have a fair bit of modest housing, including a decent amount of houses with peeling paint.

Ex:
https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.64385...VQ4KYzzePQ!2e0

Which is just down the street from this house. It's not lived in (for at least 5 years according to streetview) although its two neighbours are pretty gritty too.
https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.64373...0SMNIsVbGw!2e0

The houses on Craven, Wolseley, or in Oakridge south of Danforth are pretty modest, although not slum-like like in those old Chicago pictures.

Winnipeg's North End is worse though, you have houses without proper windows like this and they look like they're inhabited:
https://www.google.ca/maps/@49.91517...XB9cdvIZ2w!2e0
Technically not "North End", this house has several other deficiencies too, and looks inhabited
https://www.google.ca/maps/place/55+...f71751b89f1fb2

And it's not even just 1 or 2 homes, there seem to be over a hundred like that.

Anyways, the really slum like homes have been illegal to build for probably over a hundred years now, and any that were built earlier have been torn down. Mostly what you have now is houses that used to be ok (modest but ok) that are starting to fall apart.

Chicago's housing stock is mostly of pretty good quality compared to other cities, it seems like in several neighbourhoods they might get abandoned before getting really run down, which would take a longer time for Chicago's higher quality housing than cheaper built homes in other cities. Detroit and maybe a few other Rust Belt cities have pretty run-down inhabited homes, but also parts of Houston and maybe other Southern cities like Memphis.

I think the worst housing is in more rural areas rather than big cities though. In parts of the South, Mississippi Delta, Appalachia, Texas border areas and native reservations for example.
https://www.google.ca/maps/@26.21778...daG0mxPeuw!2e0
Although homes like this (along with trailer homes) seems more typical of the lower end of the spectrum
https://www.google.ca/maps/@26.19679...st5Y3JyoHA!2e0

[chris08876]

The U.S. doesn't really have slums compared to other places in the world. The areas that would be considered slums are luxurious compared to those found in Africa. Just being in the U.S. puts you in an advantage over the 2.7 billion that survive on two dollars a day or less (UN Millennium Project).

[llamaorama]

I bet slums are moving to more hidden areas in suburban and rural areas outside of cities which have don't have code enforcement or anti blight programs.

There are some weird areas on the north and east sides of the Houston metro where people live in dilapidated mobile homes

[Jonboy1983]

Originally Posted by llamaorama

I bet slums are moving to more hidden areas in suburban and rural areas outside of cities which have don't have code enforcement or anti blight programs.

There are some weird areas on the north and east sides of the Houston metro where people live in dilapidated mobile homes

I was going to say that as well. Parts of Chester County (greater Philadelphia) are starting to go downhill. Exton seems to be getting a lot of riffraff. My wife and I used to live in an apartment community there, and toward the end of our time there we noticed the place really going downhill. One day, a group of thugs walked through and destroyed a swing set in a park right near our unit. Exton Square Mall, which at one point was bustling, now has a ton of empty store fronts and has nothing but loiterers.

There are parts of Philadelphia though that are still pretty bad. Strawberry Mansion and West Philadelphia are just a couple of places that come to mind.

[tech12]

Originally Posted by chris08876

The U.S. doesn't really have slums compared to other places in the world. The areas that would be considered slums are luxurious compared to those found in Africa. Just being in the U.S. puts you in an advantage over the 2.7 billion that survive on two dollars a day or less (UN Millennium Project).

Not necessarily. There are some pretty messed up places in the US (especially when comparing to other developed countries), such as some of the Indian reservations (look up Pine Ridge), some of the public housing projects (some of which look worse than public housing in some third world/developing nations), ultra poor trailer parks, homeless tent camps, etc...though there's definitely no Brazil, Africa, or India style slums, with miles upon miles of do-it-yourself buildings crammed together.

[photoLith]

The US doesnt really have slums, more like ghettos. Nothing compared to the slums of Rio and Mumbai. Although, when I lived in south Texas back in 2006 I did see some pretty slummy looking hoods with houses built out of cinder blocks and tin roofs that were all crammed together in border towns.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by photoLith

The US doesnt really have slums, more like ghettos. Nothing compared to the slums of Rio and Mumbai. Although, when I lived in south Texas back in 2006 I did see some pretty slummy looking hoods with houses built out of cinder blocks and tin roofs that were all crammed together in border towns.

Yeah, excepting some towns bordering Mexico, some Indian reservations, and some parts of the Delta region, there aren't U.S. slums in the sense of substandard housing.

In our cities, that was all cleared out in the urban renewal era. I would say by 1960 there were no longer any large scale urban slums in the U.S.

Now ghettos, we have plenty. But ghettos are usually pretty good housing. The average home in Detroit is pretty nice for global standards. And housing projects are usually built better than private market rate housing.

[emathias]

There are a few parts of SoCal with housing that might be called slums, especially just on the U.S. side of the border near San Diego.

Otherwise, I think they are much more rare, mostly because slums are mostly the product of either massive immigration (of poor immigrants) or massive urbanization (by poor rural people to urban areas), neither of which are occurring in the U.S. right now. To be sure, we have poor immigrants to the U.S. now, but not the scale, and not to concentrated parts of cities such as occurred in the past.

[tech12]

Originally Posted by Crawford

projects are usually built better than private market rate housing.

This is definitely not the case in some cities. A lot of the public housing in SF for example was built in the 1940s as temporary housing for shipyard workers, but was then turned into public housing. And then neglected to some extent or other, ever since (as were most of the city's purpose-built projects). Some of them were rated several years ago as being among the worst in the nation by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, because they were so dilapidated (mold, vacant units, squatters, broken appliances, broken walls, broken stairs, broken pipes, broken/open sewers, broken lights, burnt-down playgrounds and garbage cans, bullet holes, missing smoke detectors...all problems detailed in their report). Some like that have been torn down by now, but others are still around, and aside from regularly getting repainted so they look nicer from the outside, the other problems often remain. Not to mention all the drugs and crime that often plague them too.

This is definitely not built better than market rate housing:

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7106...7ISLaw1Ggg!2e0

[ardecila]

New Orleans definitely. It's easy to write this off as the lingering effects of Katrina but the blight existed long before. Part of that is the climate, which will peel paint, rot wood , and send termites and crazy jungle vines through a structure in no time flat without constant , vigilant maintenance.

[hudkina]

I was going to say. Detroit certainly has plenty of areas that have declined, but there really aren't any slums in the strictest sense of the word. Even in neighborhoods like Brightmoor, where the housing was originally built for the lower/working class, the housing was built to relatively high standards for the time.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by tech12

This is definitely not the case in some cities. A lot of the public housing in SF for example was built in the 1940s as temporary housing for shipyard workers, but was then turned into public housing.

Ok, maybe SF is an exception.

I have some familiarity with public housing in the U.S., and it was generally built to a higher standard than the market rate housing of its time. The feds (who were funding the whole thing) generally required larger units, tougher fire code, and higher construction quality than in the private market.

Now, granted, that doesn't mean public housing didn't deteriorate in many cities, but the original construction was generally quite good. Ugly, maybe, but good. Many of the subsequent problems were due to poor maintenance, corruption, limited funding, and horrible tenant selection.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by hudkina

I was going to say. Detroit certainly has plenty of areas that have declined, but there really aren't any slums in the strictest sense of the word. Even in neighborhoods like Brightmoor, where the housing was originally built for the lower/working class, the housing was built to relatively high standards for the time.

True. Detroit had slums prior to WW2, but urban renewal wiped them out. The "bad" neighborhoods in Detroit today are actually almost all "good" in terms of original housing quality.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Crawford

True. Detroit had slums prior to WW2, but urban renewal wiped them out. The "bad" neighborhoods in Detroit today are actually almost all "good" in terms of original housing quality.

Ditto for chicago.

The old slums of the city were all wiped clean by urban renewal. Now we just have ghettos of poverty and social dysfunction that inhabit solid sturdy neighborhoods that were originally built for the white middle class. And then all the white people, and their money, simply left.

[James Bond Agent 007]

I agree about the "ghetto" thing, but of course that's not what I was talking about. What I was trying to point out was that you rarely, if ever, see stuff like this anymore. According to the caption, this was actually inhabited.

[James Bond Agent 007]

BTW, I also agree about some rural slums. That said, that's why I entitled the thread, "Are slums disappearing from US cities?"

I'd be willing to bet that even in rural areas there aren't as many slummy areas as there was, say, 60 years ago, but I guess that would be hard to demonstrate.

[ajmstilt]

"Slums" in the U.S. cities these days I suspect are far from the urban core and consist of trailer parks in the forgotten corners of inner ring suburbs. (Or more likely forgotten county land in between)

something like this:
https://www.google.com/maps/@32.6871...PpTVjU0Hrg!2e0


Although I am sure there are better examples. I guess the question is, what is a "slum"?