Structuring Inequality: How Schooling, Housing, and Tax Policies Shaped Metropolitan Development and Education - Softcover

Steffes, Tracy L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226832260 ISBN 13: 9780226832265

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2024

Synopsis

How inequality was forged, fought over, and forgotten through public policy in metropolitan Chicago.

As in many American metropolitan areas, inequality in Chicagoland is visible in its neighborhoods. These inequalities are not inevitable, however. They have been constructed and deepened by public policies around housing, schooling, taxation, and local governance, including hidden state government policies.

In Structuring Inequality, historian Tracy L. Steffes shows how metropolitan inequality in Chicagoland was structured, contested, and naturalized over time even as reformers tried to change it through school desegregation, affordable housing, and property tax reform. While these efforts had modest successes in the city and the suburbs, reformers faced significant resistance and counter-mobilization from affluent suburbanites, real estate developers, and other defenders of the status quo who defended inequality and reshaped the policy conversation about it. Grounded in comprehensive archival research and policy analysis, Structuring Inequality examines the history of Chicagoland’s established systems of inequality and provides perspective on the inequality we live with today.

About this title

About the Author

Tracy L. Steffes is associate professor of education and history at Brown University. She is the author of School, Society, & State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890–1940.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226832260
• ISBN 13: 9780226832265
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 376