That’s especially true of the haves. Deborah, a longtime resident of South Shore who has made a career in philanthropy aimed at helping other neighborhoods overcome racial inequality, told me that “being on the lakefront is a joy and an honor,” but she also said: “My home is my sanctuary. It breaks my heart, but I turn away. I don’t walk around.” Maurice, a cop’s son who moved up from a bungalow to a bigger house, doesn’t park in his garage anymore because he located a weakness in his defensive perimeter. He parks at the curb out front, where one of his security cameras can monitor the car.

If you want to see what our cities are going to be like when we’re done reversing the great postwar expansion of the middle class, neighborhoods like South Shore are a good place to look. The shallower wealth that makes the status of the black middle class especially precarious also tends to suit it for the role of canary in a coal mine, and the continuing fact of residential segregation means that black haves tend to live closer to have-nots than do their white counterparts.

The lovingly maintained bungalows of South Shore look just as redoubtable these days as they did when I lived in one, on the 7100 block of South Oglesby, as a child in the 1970s. Nothing much may appear to be happening on a bungalow block at any given moment, but if you stand there long enough and pay close attention — and perhaps take a stroll down to the corner where the block intersects a once-bustling shopping artery abandoned by all but the poorest and most vulnerable — you can detect the tectonic grinding of vast economic and social forces at work beneath the surface of the neighborhood.

Carlo Rotella, a professor of American studies at Boston College, is the author of “The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood.”

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