Urban Violence; A complex problem created by decades of institutional racism

Why is there so much urban violence?

It is a complex issue requiring a more complex answer.  

There's myriad research about it so I will share a few resources that explain the complexity.

Urban Ghettoes and Crime; A long history

First, urban crime has a long history as does urban racism.  Sociologist Mitchell Dunier details this history in his sweeping 2016 work Ghetto, reviewed in American Journal of Sociology here.    And another resource documenting crime in early Chicago is Northwestern University's index of homicide in Chicago from 1870-1930.  These resources shed light on a widely studied phenomenon sometimes called scaling of crime; Crime multiplies exponentially in urban settings.   This 2017 PLOS One Journal article explains it.  And, Science Daily (2019) explains it here.

Chicago's History of Crime and Ghettoization

In the US, urban gangs were often dominated by low-income and low-status immigrant groups such as Irish gangs followed by Italian and Jewish gangs among others.   But the highly segregated, urban crime of today came after the first great migration and was layered with the second great migration.  As Black Americans sought jobs and to escape Jim Crow in the northern cities, they were redlined into very limited neighborhoods (in Chicago sometimes called "the black belt").   

Allan Spear details the rise of Chicago's black enclave as a neighborhood of fluid race relations and opportunity and how that beacon gave way to a segregated ghetto.   Drake and Cayton's Black Metropolis is a really important sociological study of Chicago's black neighborhood before the second great migration detailing the amazing accomplishments of Chicago's early Black residents.  When whites returned from WWI there was competition for those jobs - this resulted in the 1919 race in Chicago which Dominic Pacyga explains was a riot over class and jobs misnomered as a race riot.

After the second great migration during World War II, Chicago's black population expanded even more in the same, small, redlined area.  Historian Arnold Hirsch details that ghettoization in his book Making the Second Ghetto.  Despite amazing accomplishments within the black community, eventually, overcrowding and lack of city services led to neighborhood disintegration.  Roger Biles details the increasing ghettoization in his historical account here.  This left an overcrowded neighborhood full of poorer, less educated Americans identified as Black

At the same time, because the neighborhood was poor and Black, the city neglected the services and development of the neighborhood.

In fact, some infrastructure like the Dan Ryan (94) expressway was purposefully added to physically sequester the poor Americans who were identified as black into a limited area.  

As the Black population continued to compound, cities, especially Chicago, used dense housing to contain the poor minorities.  For example, in Chicago the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) built high-rise housing projects - these were high-density, low-income apartments.  Along State Street they were called Stateway gardens, and the largest was called Cabrini Green (good summary at that link).  These high-rise buildings concentrated people who were Black and poor into a highly dense area.  The city continued to neglect both the buildings themselves and the residents.  This resulted in a permanent underclass that relied on an underground economy.  

This combined with de-industrialization and a loss of working-class jobs as detailed by U of Chicago sociologist William Julius Wilson in Truly Disadvantaged (1987).  

That led to many middle-class black and white families moving away and creating highly segregated, low-income neighborhoods such as detailed by sociologists Massey and Denten in American Apartheid (1995).  With the loss of blue-collar jobs and middle-class residents, these urban neighborhoods were truly segregated and low-income, and void of jobs and opportunities.  

As residents turned to crime and gangs for protection and financial opportunity they faced violence from within the neighborhood (Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street, 2000), while police and laws targeted these disenfranchised communities from outside.  Read about it in the Atlantic.

Similarly, Sudhir Venkatesh details the way that public housing created a complex relationship between poor urban residents, police, city officials and street gangs in his book, American Project (2002).  

The Criminalization of Poor Urban Minorities

Sociologists like Forest Stuart and Alice Goffman make the case that police target poor communities.  And other social scientists (Sentencing Project, Marshall Project, Equal Justice Initiative, Michelle Alexander) explain that the disparity in the criminal justice system which has incarcerated nearly 1/3 of all black males has torn apart families and disenfranchised entire zipcodes (Paul Street's Vicious Circle).   

And, more recently, SHS grad Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve explains in her 2016 book, Crook County that the criminal justice system is embedded with racism that disproportionately punishes poor minorities.   All of this leads to an incredibly segregated and poor community with little economic opportunity and with families torn apart.  Street gangs fill the institutional voids of policing, economic opportunity, and family stability.  And as street gangs gain control over neighborhoods they take membership/control of the residents living there - not the other way around.  In other words, because the gang controls your neighborhood, residents are forced to align with gangs - as opposed to residents joining gangs that leads to the neighborhood being controlled by the gang.

Did contemporaries know that bad policy was creating such a poor quality of life?

One telling case of someone understanding the decline was Dorothy Gautreaux.  She was assigned a CHA apartment but after the civil rights laws of the 1960s, she sued the CHA claiming that their assignment of housing was 99% black and therefore segregationist and illegal. She won the right to move to an area outside of this segregated ghetto of highly concentrated poverty.  Her move became a test case eventually called moving to opportunity which showed that black residents who were allowed to move to middle-class areas benefitted greatly from the move.  They were surrounded by people who went to college and had connections and good jobs.  This showed the enormous impact of housing segregation.  In fact, a former student of mine, Rahul Gorawara from SHS wrote a paper about Gautreaux and his paper was second in the national history fair.  Gautreaux won her case after a record decades-long lawsuit and it became an important model for housing reform.  

What is being done?

To answer your question about what is being done, Chicago has torn down all of its high rise low-income segregated housing,  but the legacy remains in the lives of those who were affected for generations by the racist segregation.  The physical buildings are gone but the legacy of poverty, lack of education, disinvestment and disenfranchisement all persist.  And these are the neighborhoods that experience high crime today.  

Another resource that traces the rise of Black metropolis followed by ghettoization and the rise and fall of high-density public housing see David Greetham's study, Chicago's Wall: Race, Segregation and the Chicago Housing Authority (2013).