Natalie Y. Moore

Moore called herself a "would-be gentrifier" when she returned to Chicago as a condo buyer in the historic Chicago Black Belt. The two strikes against her were buying at the height of a real estate bubble and on the South Side, where the dearth of capital confounded me on the urbanism beat a decade earlier. As a native Moore knows that the South Side never really gentrifies. There's a lot of history to that, which the reporter views from the perspective of her own middle-class upbringing in the Chatham neighborhood. Chicago's power structure has never really come to grips with systemic barriers, nor the Black community with its power to challenge them.… (mais)