Black and Unhoused: How Black Chicago’s Fight for Affordable Housing Echoes Through Generations

This collage details how Black segregation from the past has fueled the homegrown crises of Black homelessness and affordable housing scarcity (Credit: Christa Carter-Williams). This is Part One of the Chicago Defender’s series Black and Unhoused: How Segregation Fueled a Homegrown Crisis, which is part of the “Healing Illinois” initiative.& Two of the greatest works of literature have documented Black people’s struggle to attain stable, affordable housing in Chicago. Poet Gwendolyn Brooks’ seminal poem “Kitchenette Building” chronicles how the dreams of its residents, products of the Great Migration, lived in a subdivided dwelling constricted to a section of the South Side by law and conspiracy. Their aspirations compete with the grim realities of their existence, where aspirations must contend with “… yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall.” Richard Wright’s “Native Son” opens with the gruesome scene of a giant black rat infiltrating a family’s one-room kitchenette, forcing the protagonist, Bigger Thomas, to kill it with an iron skillet. While the animal is symbolic in that its death will foretell the fate of Bigger, it also speaks to the conditions Black families had to contend with in Chicago’s Black Belt.& Yet, when it comes to the Black struggle to attain stable...