Fraying at the Edges

Chatham looked the same as ever, but residents were nervous. The recession seemed to be deepening that spring, and local businesses were hanging on for life. Ken Blow, who runs Bull’s Eye Barber Shop on East 79th, said that his revenues were down almost 40 percent in the first years of the downturn. He rented out his office to a tattoo artist to help pay expenses. “For a while there, we would keep the lights off until our first customer walked in, to save money,” Mr. Blow said.

Captain’s Hard Times Dining, across the street from the barbershop, also saw business dwindle. The owner, known as Mother Wade, said she has had to branch out and do catering to stay open. “Some of what’s going on here is that people are not supporting their own, not sitting down to a meal like we used to do,” Ms. Wade said. “They’d rather go eat fast food.”

Older residents, perpetually anxious that the younger generation is losing their values of tidiness and mutual respect, now had visible evidence of social erosion. They saw it in the habits of their new neighbors, many of them moving from the Robert Taylor Homes, which were torn down in the mid-2000s.

“The big change going on is that the grandparents are moving out, and some of the younger kids coming in here are picking up behaviors that you would never have seen in Chatham before,” said Worlee Glover, a salesman who runs a blog called Concerned Citizens of Chatham. “Loitering out on 79th. Walking up and down the street, eating out of a bag. Eating out on the porch. Those kinds of things.”

The numbers tell part of the story. Chatham historically had a waiting list of would-be buyers, but during the recession its foreclosure rate was 14th highest among some 80 Chicago neighborhoods, according to data gathered from all of the city’s neighborhoods to determine which local factors shape behavior.

“Chatham and neighboring Avalon Park are both working class communities, not core ghetto areas, and both were hit hard by recession, particularly Chatham, which got hit economically and with incidents of violence,” said Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard who led the Chicago study and wrote a recently released book based on it, “Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect” (University of Chicago, 2012).