What does it mean to you to have a sense of ownership over your neighborhood?

  • "I’m a homeowner, so that automatically gives me some ownership."

    Jane (North)

  • "When you own a home or own a condo, you feel more rooted, because you're making a substantial financial investment to stay in one place,” she said. “We have young children. That also creates a closer sense of community because the other parents are the parents in your children's school or in your children's sports. And so that also adds to the sense of community."

    Chloe (South)

  • "After living in the neighborhood for 20 years, I feel like whenever I leave my house, I see familiar faces. I do think that one of the reasons that we love this neighborhood is because we've lived here for so long… I think that having a sense of local community is a large part of feeling ownership over your neighborhoods."

    Henry (North)

  • "For me, it's important to know the neighbors or the businesses in my neighborhood. The more people I know, the more ownership I feel over the place in which I live."

    Charlotte (North)

  • "I really feel a connection to this block. When [my husband and I] think about it, I mean, we’re not young. When we think about moving somewhere, it's like, no, I don't want to leave my block. It's that sense of ‘I know people here.’ When I release monarch butterflies all the kids come and there is a real sense of community here. That's a nice thing to have."

    Rebecca (North)

  • "Working with the people in the community about getting things done if we need improvements, complaining if things aren't going right, and the biggest thing is really getting a response back from our elected officials on things."

    Alex (North)

  • My "strong social network” impacts my sense of ownership by enhancing my “ability to know what's going on and be able to influence what's going on to a certain degree.”

    Olivia (North)

  • “It’s…feeling that you would have an ability to affect change from the plants and paving to making sure that all of the municipal streets are being plowed and bike routes are there, and garbage is picked up, to even advocating for larger improvements to neighborhood schools or anything like that.”

    William (North)

  • “I need to feel like when I say something, it gets heard. When I make a contribution, working on the street clean up or talking to the aldermen or speaking up at a community meeting about zoning, or anything that affects the neighborhood, I need to feel like I'm being heard or that somebody doesn't say, ‘Oh, that's a stupid idea’ or ‘Why would you?’ They at least write it down. And then I want to get some kind of feedback about it or see the result. When I join the neighborhood clean-up and I take a street, I look back and it's pretty clean. And then I walk around to the other areas that other people did. And it looks clean, and it's really nice…seeing results and feeling heard, I think are the two things that are measures of success for me.”

    Rebecca (North)

  • “I think ownership is just being included. There's so many levels of politicians…and so I think ownership would just be allowing residents the opportunity to sit at the table and be informed.”

    Mia (South)

Quantitative Considerations

“According to the 2023 State of Rental Housing in the city of Chicago produced by the Institute for Housing Studies at DuPaul University, about “54.2 percent of Chicago households rented in 2021,” a figure in line with the fairly consistent rental rates between 54-58 percent that have persisted since 2012 (DuPaul 2023). Examining the 2020 data from the American Community Survey (ACS) on the percentage of owner-occupied housing units in Figure 12 reveals that the concentration of this phenomenon doesn’t follow any distinct clustering in the North, West, or South; it is something characteristic across the city[1]. It is likely why even the residents who mentioned ownership over their home as a factor in their sense of ownership over the city qualified it with at least one other reason that also contributed to this sense.”

[1] There is a radial pattern that exists, but this doesn’t align with the patterns related to hardship or racial segregation noted in the previous chapter on demographic considerations.

Conclusion

“In conclusion, residents think about their sense of ownership in two intertwined ways: investment and change making abilities. Financial investment is defined by the amount of money one has committed to a property (such as buying it), while temporal investment relates to social cohesion and residents’ ability to enact change. It should be clarified that there can be a difference between residents’ perceived abilities to make change and their actual power to do so.

They are related in that perceived ability stems from witnessing the fruits of advocacy and engagement. While this perceived ability to make changes, directly or indirectly, seems to have a large part in influencing what people would call “ownership” over their neighborhood, it does not alone define ownership. This becomes more apparent when asking residents who work as planners whether they feel a sense of ownership over the communities they work in—communities where they have a large degree of influence in what happens but do not live.”