Andrew Ferguson has a long story in the Weekly Standard on my old neigborhood, Hyde Park -- "a place that's not like any other in America," according to the story's tagline. Ferguson points out some of the place's strengths ("It is the most racially integrated neighborhood in the nation's most racially segregated city), but overall concludes it's a very strange place for a presidential candidate to reside:
Hyde Park's the neighborhood he returned to, the place he'd chosen to live, and its roots were torn out 50 years ago. A college town, it has all the churning and transience the phrase implies. Everyone seems from somewhere else. The Armours, Swifts, and the other first families of Chicago left long ago. The working men and their families, who replaced them, were driven out by the university. The poor were secured at a safe distance. Inside, harmony reigned between white and black residents, but the whites drawn by the university were often here only temporarily, and the blacks who moved here have the same sense of displacement, even if they arrived from another neighborhood nearby.
This is the perfect place for a man without an identity to make one of his own choosing.
Ferguson gets a lot right in his story -- including
the atrocious grocery store situation that persisted for decades. He also quotes one of my favorite Hyde Parkers -- Arnold Wolf -- at length.
That said, it's a bit odd to imply that Obama is either responsible for or a product of the neigborhood's odd political economy.
Furthermore, anyone who moved to Hyde Park in the past twenty years quickly figures out all of the costs, benefits, and legacies of the University of Chicago's longstanding paternalism. Indeed, it would be hard to spend time in Hyde Park and not come away with a sober view of the limitations on governments and non-profit organizations in bettering a place.
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