“If anybody who is well established in this business isn’t making a hundred thousand dollars a year, he is loafing,” journalist Alfred Balk wrote in the “Saturday Evening Post” in July of 1962. Balk, quoting one of over 100 Chicago real-estate speculators to whom he had assigned the pseudonym, “Norris Vitchek,” was describing a practice that would eventually help transform the South and West sides of Chicago in the 1960’s from a group of white, middle-class and working-class neighborhoods in 1959 to one large predominantly African-American ghetto in 1970. It was a transformation of these neighborhoods from comfort to poverty, prosperity to blight, and from peaceful, separate coexistence to open racial warfare.
“If anybody who is well established in this business isn’t making a hundred thousand dollars a year, he is loafing,” journalist Alfred Balk wrote in the “Saturday Evening Post” in July of 1962. Balk, quoting one of over 100 Chicago real-estate speculators to whom he had assigned the pseudonym, “Norris Vitchek,” was describing a practice that would eventually help transform the South and West sides of Chicago in the 1960’s from a group of white, middle-class and working-class neighborhoods in 1959 to one large predominantly African-American ghetto in 1970. It was a transformation of these neighborhoods from comfort to poverty, prosperity to blight, and from peaceful, separate coexistence to open racial warfare.