There are lots of ways to minimize the significance of the Chicago heat wave of July 14-20, 1995, and none of them work.We’d like to believe that the death toll wasn’t really in the hundreds, but it was. Depending on how you count, between 485 and 739 people died of the heat, making it the second deadliest week in city history.
That’s a one-sentence summary of his slim, fact-packed book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. Klinenberg isn’t saying that Chicago is in a state of social breakdown, which would be silly. But he is saying that the heat-wave deaths are a sign that bad things have been happening under the surface, things that signify worse to come if we don’t fix them. Despite its title, his book isn’t really about the heat wave. It’s about what the heat wave tells us about long-standing conditions in the city.
Part of the “something more” is great social inequality–in direct contradiction of the conventional wisdom expressed in the Tribune’s front-page headline on July 18, 1995, which falsely claimed that the heat victims were “just like us.” The heat wave was no leveler. Comparing people of the same age, 11 per 100,000 whites died in it, compared to 17 per 100,000 blacks. (Public health researchers calculate death rates as “age-adjusted” deaths per 100,000 people, so that they can compare groups of different sizes and with different age distributions.) Five of the six most lethal neighborhoods during the heat wave were largely black. The match isn’t perfect, but most of the places with high heat-death rates were also among the city’s poorest and most violent.
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But the fire bell has a crack in it. Not all of the vulnerable people are the usual suspects, and not all of the usual suspects are vulnerable. Yes, blacks died half again as often as whites. But Latinos–comparably poor and downtrodden–died much less often than either: while making up almost a quarter of the city’s population, they accounted for only 2 percent of the heat-wave deaths. Most surprisingly, men died at almost three times the rate of women–19 men per 100,000, compared to just 7 women per 100,000. This is a dramatically greater difference than that between racial and ethnic groups. Klinenberg reports that 44 of the 56 unclaimed bodies buried at public expense after the heat wave were men.
People who lived alone, the researchers found, were more than twice as likely to die in the heat wave as those who lived with others. Klinenberg doesn’t spend much time trying to explain why one in three Chicagoans over 65 live by themselves today, compared to just one in ten in 1950. This is a pretty dramatic change, and a significant one; at the very least, one would expect that an old person living with a child or grandchild would be less likely to end up in a locked room where temperatures soar to over 100. An author of a more conservative bent might well have paused to consider what a key crack in society’s foundation this is and how it might be patched up. But, like the idea that men as a group might be victims of society, this apparently isn’t something we know how to think about. Klinenberg contents himself with calling it a “demographic shift.”
Klinenberg describes a catastrophic decision made by the Chicago Housing Authority in the early 1990s. The agency opened its senior housing units to disabled individuals, often drug users, who then preyed on their elderly neighbors. Unlike their more affluent counterparts elsewhere, these old people had nowhere to go except into their barricaded (and rarely air-conditioned) rooms. This is not a problem that the well-off elderly, no matter how terrified, have to deal with.
Zeroing in on a matched pair of communities, public health-style, Klinenberg describes in detail the contrast between the adjacent west-side neighborhoods of South Lawndale (aka Little Village), which is predominantly Latino, and North Lawndale, which is predominantly black. Both are poor, but otherwise they’re two different worlds. “In North Lawndale, the dangerous ecology of abandoned buildings, open spaces, commercial depletion, violent crime, degraded infrastructure, low population density, and family dispersion undermines the viability of public life and the strength of local support systems,” he writes. “In Little Village, though, the busy streets, heavy commercial activity, residential concentration, and relatively low crime promote social contact, collective life, and public engagement in general and provide particular benefits for the elderly, who are more likely to leave home when they are drawn out by nearby amenities.”
