Urban Spaces and Ethnic Places: Special Service Areas in Ethnically Defined Neighborhoods

Special Service Areas (SSAs) is a local government program that promotes business activities in different zones across Chicago. City government, in coordination with neighborhood nonprofits, creates a special district to collect an extra tax on top of property taxes. The funds gathered from that extra tax are used to pay for additional services in that area. This program is meant to spur revitalization by funding maintenance and beautification activities. As used in Chicago, a portion of the work that SSAs fund also goes towards marketing and promoting the areas that they serve. This dissertation examines what happens when the SSA program is deployed in two economically viable, and ethnically defined places, Devon Avenue in the West Ridge community area and 26th Street in the South Lawndale community area. In this research, I ask: how do majority-ethnic or ethnically defined neighborhoods form, how do they sustain themselves over time, and what, if any, is the role of the SSA policy in the resiliency of these urban areas? My ethnographic study makes use of original data, including interviews with community members, local leaders, and small business owners along with primary documents including city records, SSA meeting minutes and budgetary reports. While SSAs are praised for empowering communities, decentralizing revitalization, I find that this may not always be the case. Instead, a significant portion of the activities that the SSAs on Devon Avenue and 26th Street fund are directed towards promoting the real or imagined ethnic identities of these shopping streets. These promotional activities obscure the realities of communities and their lived experiences in these spaces.