Planning Office and Community Influence on Land-Use Decisions Intended to Benefit the Low-Income: Welcome to Chicago

This study explores urban planning office and community influence on land-use decision making in two poverty-stricken but redeveloping neighborhood areas in Chicago. The Department of Planning and Development in this study had marginal impact on land-use decisions due to administrative limitations. Community influence is moderated by the degree to which low-income housing advocates can act directly as developers and produce housing units. The research findings indicate that land-use decisions intended to benefit the low-income resulted not from community-based political conflict but more so from community organization cooperation with political actors. 1. Purpose of the Study Much of the literature on poverty focuses on federal level initiatives as a response to urban poverty, seeming to ignore local level political processes. Researchers have tended to accept Peterson’s [1] contention that cities will not redistribute their own resources and that actual redistribution, utilizing monies from taxes from upper income groups to support initiatives that benefit lower income groups, can only occur with federal assistance [2, 3]. As a result, scarce attention has been given to policy efforts that utilize local resources that are intended to address urban poverty. A few researchers, mainly urban planners, suggested that it is possible to address poverty at the local level but offered little substantiation of what could be done or what was done [4–7]. Urban planning researchers Mayer [4], Pierre [5], and Wong [6] suggest that planning offices and community involvement can influence local policy decisions so that they benefit low-income urban residents. The researchers also suggest political conditions which may allow for policy innovations that can be couched in technical and bureaucratic processes that may yield potential benefits for low-income residents. However, missing from the literature are examinations of instances of planning office and community influence on the use of local resources to address urban poverty. Broadly, this study explores a local policy effort that utilized land as a local resource with the stated intention to address urban and neighborhood-based poverty. Specifically, the study (1) examines to what degree and under what conditions the Chicago Department of Urban Planning and communities influenced decision making regarding land use for low-income residents through an analysis of two neighborhood areas in Chicago from 1990–1997. The hypothesis proffered is that community-based political conflict would be the factor that influenced the